It got Him bad press from the official organs, and plenty of it, but at least He had plausible deniability. He was ministering.
At least, that's what we called it.
The problem was that His propensity for the low-life progressed. It got worse, harder to whitewash in any honest, unexpurgated gospel, such as the one I was determined to write.
First it was the Nazi tattoos and then it was the kiddie thing.
I tried to warn Him that He was pushing the envelope of this "nothing human is alien to me" thing too far. That it was going to come round and bite Him on His holy ass.
I argued that some sins were best left to the imagination, that some transgressions were bad enough when entertained in theory, that there was no good theological reason to act them out.
But, no, Jesus argued, that was the whole point of the incarnation experience. To experience this shit in the flesh.
He was quite the zealot on this particular point.
So He got Himself inked with two full sleeves of swastikas and flaming skulls and "Kill the Jew" slogans. He suffered the little children to come unto Him and then they suffered Him coming on to them.
Later on, sifting through the papers that survived, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were grimly determined to put a positive spin on anything He did and redact the rest. The effort drove at least one of them certifiably insane.
Me, I had to write my conscience, it's always been that way, which is why you've never heard of me or my gospel, which contains the only good news almost nobody wants to hear.
But I was there, remember. They weren't.
The spree killings across the Levant over those three years—I don't even want to go there.
Towards the end, Jesus was hardly making even a minimal effort to cover His bloody tracks in spite of all our desperate pleading. It seemed as if He'd gone completely off His nut, like His old man before Him in certain of the grimmer passages in the Old Testament.
We trembled in fear. Our bowels did loosen, as we put it back then. Maybe it was hereditary. If the Father could work Himself into a cosmic psychopathic homicidal rage over trifles, wipe out entire settlements for being "unclean," men, women, children, all the livestock, every chicken, etc. why not the Son? Maybe the forbidden fruit didn't roll far from the tree, after all.
We hardly dared to voice the suggestion out loud. None of us wanted to believe it.
But instead of toning it down as we gently suggested, as if out of sheer spite and contrariness, with each murder Jesus just grew more and more outrageous. Think Jack-the-Ripper, the Boston Strangler, Hannibal Lecter, and John Wayne Gacey all rolled into one and then dialed up to eleven.
Think that and you still have no idea how bad it got.
He was the Son of God, don't forget. He could do anything a man could do but He could do it better. He could do it infinitely, divinely better and everyone likes to dwell on that. What they don't want to consider is that He could also do it infinitely, infernally worse.
And He did.
"Lord," we begged, "show some care."
Jesus went right on, scattering clues behind Him like mustard seeds, all but writing His ineffable signature on each murder scene, taunting the authorities, rubbing their noses in their human fallibility.
I simply couldn't understand it at the time. It was almost as if He were trying to get caught I remember thinking, and, of course, it becomes quite clear in hindsight that's just exactly what He was trying to do.
But why?
"I have to know in My flesh, in My bones, what it is to be a human being," He once said to me. "The entire rainbow, every shade, the whole enchilada. It's easy just to be the best. But if I'm not also the worst of the worst how can I forgive the worst? You tell them the truth, Gary, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I'm depending on you."
This was before the others threw me out of the inner circle, afraid my conscience would get the better of me and I'd snitch. I was forced to follow from a distance, the thirteenth apostle like the fifth forgotten Beatle, reporting on the aftermath of Christ's grisly rampage of redemption, filing my reports in wax-sealed amphoras and leaving them with the Gnostics who in turn buried them deep below the desert sands.
I kept His secret. It weighed heavily on my soul. But I would never betray Him, I swear to you. I had faith, for what that's worth.
It was, as is commonly known, Judas who ratted him out. The cops had dirt on Judas, some unsavory misdeeds from his past, and were tightening the screws. What's more, they knew he was Christ's number one accomplice, his right hand man.
And it's true. Judas was no saint.
He was right there with the Savior, luring victims, disposing of bodies, aiding and abetting the raping and the butchering. He was Christ's tattoo artist, his partner-in-crime.
But the authorities had a hard-on for Jesus and they were willing to let Judas walk to get to Him—walk right into a noose as it happened. That "suicide" always seemed suspicious to me, but that's another story.
This gospel is about Jesus and how He loves you even if you're a serial-killing nazi child molester.
He loves you because he's been one, too.
He's been where you've been, walked a mile in your shoes. Jesus has been you, whoever you are.
He loves you because He loves Himself and there is literally nothing you could possibly have done that He hasn't done and done a helluva lot more horrifically.
He forgives you because He knows, He really knows what it's like to be human.
He gets it.
He got over it.
He rose from the dead.
And He's here to tell you: You will, too.
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