Mortals

color. He was tense. His voice was high. He was working to keep himself at the right level for his listeners. He was conforming his speech pattern to what he thought was appropriate for his English-as-a-second-language Batswana audience, speaking more slowly and formally. We all do the same thing, he thought.

“So, then, what do we say to the question, Who was this man Jesus? We accept that he was real, unlike Moses, he was real, and he walked the earth of ancient Palestine.

“A Jew. Always a Jew. Up to the end, a Jew. And is there anything about his name that might be mentioned?”

“I forgot. His name in truth was Jeshua, which is saying in Hebrew that Yahweh is soon to come back. Yahweh the God of the Jews.”

“So go on with more. How else do we know he was still a Jew?”

“Rra, because he wore the boxes on his body…”

“Yes, those are called phylacteries. It’s good to use the correct name if you can remember. And what are phylacteries?”

“Rra, they are foolish small boxes with Jewish writing on little scraps.”

“But remember, Themba, we try never to mock… as we go. We describe… And what else shows that this Jesus was a Jew?”

“He said go to the temple many times if you have done something wrong, and give taxes…”

“Let me interrupt, rra. The tax, which he agreed all Jews should pay, was one thing. It supported the temple, maintained it. But he also said that Jews should be dutiful and pay the fees for atonement for particular sins. You might purchase a dove to sacrifice, to make up for some wrong you may have done. And of course it would have to be a dove that was perfect, which we are coming to.”

“Ehe, and he wore earlocks, although we are not sure. Yet we think so.”

“These earlocks, they are called…?”

“I forget what.”

“Just a minor thing. Peyot. They are called peyot.”

“Peyot, ehe. And fringes to his sleeves.”

“Good. And they are called…?”

“Tzitzit.” But he had hesitated over the last syllable.

“Themba, if you are unsure as to pronouncing a word, a foreign word, it’s best not to try, because there may be someone who will catch you on it to destroy your greater message. But tzitzit is correct. Now, and what is it that is recorded that Jesus said, that shows him to be a faithful Jew?”

“What he said? As when he taught in synagogues? Synagogue is not the same as temple, it is smaller, but we know he went because it is set down as to his being in synagogue on a Sabbath, at which time a man presented him his withered hand to heal. As well we know he himself paid the temple tax because of a coin found in a fish caught by Peter that was the right amount for both of them. But as to what he said at those times, I am not sure.”

“No, I wasn’t asking about what he may have said inside the synagogue or temple, no. What is it reported he said generally about the Law of Moses?”

“Ehe, he says he is among them to fulfill the law and that no one must change it by a jot.”

“Tittle or jot, is the whole phrase. And do you remember he says, ‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’ Which is Matthew 15:24. And this is one chapter and verse you will need to remember. The same statement is in Mark. In Mark. Now you remember I said that when you quote scripture you can start just by being sure you have the chapter right, so you might say only Matthew 15. But then as you speak more often, the verse number will come to be fixed in your mind. But there are some statements you will want to have by both chapter and verse. This is one of them, because it shows that even when the followers, later followers of Jesus, were trying to make it seem that his message was for the gentiles across the world, they were forced to admit, because it was so well known even then, that he was speaking purely and solely to the Jews. And do we have some other proofs of this, in his own words?”

“Ehe.”

“So… well how else do we know that his message was meant solely for his fellow Jews?”

“It is because when it comes up to gentiles they are mere dogs or swine, as he calls them. And when he sends his disciples off to carry his message about, he says Oh do not go, please, among the gentiles, and never among the Samaritans. And this is strange because the Samaritans were believers in Moses and his books but not some other books and scriptures. But he said to shun even these people.”

“Good. Great, Themba.”

“And once when a Roman soldier asks to have his servant healed and Jesus does so, we believe now that the servant was in fact a Jew. Except for a Syrian woman he called a dog, all the healing and casting out demons were done for Jews, only.”

“Good. Now, so he was a Jew, and what else would we say about him?”

“As to his… his lepele…?”

There was a moment of laughter, and someone said “Ncucu,” and there was more laughter.

Finally, Morel understood. “Ah lepele—his penis, you mean. Oh you mean his circumcision. Yes, that he was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. That can be mentioned. No, I was asking a different question. When I said he was a Jew, but what else would we say to describe him… Do you see where I’m going?”

“Nyah, rra.”

“He was a special kind of Jew…?”

“Ah. Oh. Ah because he says emunah is everything we must do?”

“Nonono. Yes, in a way, but that comes later. No. He is a mad Jew, setsenwa, a mad person. We would say he is delusional, a doctor would say. And we have to be very careful when we say this. But why would we have the right to say it?”

There was no answer given.

When he was tired of waiting for it, Morel said, “All right, just think about it for a minute. I’ll come back to it. I want to stress something for us. We establish that Jesus was wholly a Jew who is stolen and refashioned by the Christians after his death. But it has to be shown that not only Jesus was stolen from the Jews but everything else, every piece of furniture in the new church. What did the Christians steal from the Jews? Oh… well… angels, devils and demons, the Devil himself—who was in the Jewish belief a character named Mastema who was a, a, forensic officer, a kind of inspector general sent out by God to see how well individual believers were holding up under temptation… Of course, those who failed the test would be condemned to eternal damnation, but it was nothing personal with Mastema. He was an employee of God, a civil servant.

“What else did the Christians steal from the people they then decided to torment for two thousand years? How about monotheism, or rather, as we talked about, henotheism, which says, okay, there may be more than one God but you only worship the best one. In this case, Yahweh. What else did the Christians steal from the Jews? Well, heaven… hell… eternal torment… virgin birth—except that in the Jewish scriptures the most God did was make barren and over-the-hill women able to conceive miraculously by their very own flesh-and-blood husbands… but it’s close, I think… The Christians improved the idea by making an actual virgin give birth. What else? Baptism, copying the conversion-baptism of the Jews. The Eucharist came from the Passover meal, probably. The resurrection of the body, women as a source of pollution, and sex as a source of pollution. The end of the world and the replacement of all human institutions by a supernatural regime of endless perfection. The Incarnation, the Ascension, the Holy Spirit, except that it was called Sophia by the Jews. The Trinity also comes from the Jews, but it would take too long to explain that right now. The Book of Life. The only thing the Christians contributed to Christianity was priestly celibacy—or so it was thought, until the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light and it turned out that they had some celibate priests, too. Faith healing, also.

“So you can see that Christianity, so called, is nothing but a heresy of Judaism, a Jewish heresy whose most striking peculiarity is that it commands its followers to hate the Jews! Hate its authors, its inventors!…”

There was something off about Morel’s intervention. It was like a striptease stuck into an opera…

He thought he knew what it was. It was Morel showing off, in all likelihood showing off for Kerekang, trying to keep his attention if the catechism was proving to be a little slow for him.

Here was Morel again. “Before we go back to our question, very important to remember about the beliefs of