Mortals

repenting all past sins you have made and going into the water for a sign, then perhaps, he said, the Jews can summon God down by emunah.”

“Okay, good, and does Jesus continue with baptizing?”

“No, we do not see that. Only in one place in the Bible does it say so, but we think that is wrong.”

“And how would you explain what emunah is and what it meant among the Jews of that time? I know you have this in large letters on your study cards. It is important. In fact you may feel free to read off the definition anytime until you have it in your memory,” Morel said.

“Ehe, rra. Emunah is complete trusting faith, complete trusting faith, as children have it. It is becoming as a child in every way. It is to never question but only always believe. You take no thought for yourself, and in that way you show your trust in God to care for you. I remember very well what is in this book of Vermes. Emunah demands the total commitment of the soul to God. You must do away with all things in yourself that would make God hate you, were you a child, bothering him. You must wish him to be left in peace even when his eye falls on you. You do not pester him with oaths in his name, because when you take the name of God in an oath you are forcing him to become a party in some little disputes you have with your neighbors. So as well, you must avoid ill-doing because all people stand as your brothers under God, and God the father is best pleased when there is no fighting in his home. He hears everything, the God of Jesus, so we can see why these oaths pelting him like rain must be displeasing, very much. And when it comes to stories told by Jesus, we see that so many of them are about God, and are saying he is above everything a father who is greatly pleased, most pleased, when one of his lost sheep or sons who has been erring is returning home. And these he loves much more than those who have stayed in the fold and been obedient toward him for the most part. But that is the nature of a father, Jesus is saying to us…”

Morel said, “Well, but stop there because we are going to go through the proverbs and parables later, to see how they show this craze for childish devotion, for emunah, every one of them. Maybe that will be after we eat something.”

There was a sound of chair feet scraping and then of boot heels knocking on the hard floor as Morel commenced pacing back and forth in front of his audience. Morel was partial to cowboy boots. The refreshments to come included maize porridge and chicken stew. Morel wanted refreshments served at all Apostles of Reason occasions, he told the new cadres. He explained that they were a draw. They should be served not sooner than three-quarters of the way through an event.

“Emunah is what, above all, we must understand and make others, the ones trammeled and trapped and stumbling in the nets of Christianity, understand, because it is the whole heart and soul of the message of the Jew Jesus. Everything that he taught is secondary to emunah, including every rule and regulation of his religion. All the six hundred and fifteen rules and regulations of the Torah, which Jesus continues to accept with all his heart and being, are made subordinate to the one goal of building up emunah, and emunah is what? Is being as a child, becoming childlike, in absolute faith, unquestioning faith. We all remember that the chief commandment of the Torah, the one held by Jesus to be a summary of all the other commandments, the commandment that you must love God with all your mind, heart, and soul, is no more than a formulation of emunah, and the commandment that stands second to this, that you must love your neighbor as yourself, is aimed to stop all strife displeasing to a father, as Themba has just said. So with Jesus, emunah is all, namely that the trust, the emunah, of a child is the conditio sine qua non for access to the kingdom.

“Think about what this means. All of you. Think. It means that being like a child, a boy instead of a man, is the most basic condition you must meet for salvation!”

Feeling had come into Morel’s voice, true urgent feeling. His register was lower.

“So but can we not see what we have in these beliefs of Jesus the Jew, in this early branch of Judaism, which we must never forget his religion was, and remains forever, since he never changed it?

“When we tell Christians that the closer they are to the original Jesus the more they should consider themselves Jews, they jump, they want to scream, because they have been poisoned by the hatred of the Jews spoken in the Gospels. The new sect of Christian Jews defamed their rivals, the other Jews, and put their lies in the mouth of Jesus the Jew.

“No, it drives Christians crazy to be told that if they truly love Jesus, they’re Jews. So we have to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves when we blast them with this news.”

Morel was continuing. “This is what I wanted to say. We have to see that what we have before us in the religion of Jesus is as clear a crystallization or distillation of what is going on in all religions, one way or another, as we could pray for. That is, the falling back into the status of a child before some figure or idea identifiable as a version of the all-powerful lawgiving father, a patrimorph, as I proposed we call it, a patrimorph, a thing in the shape of a father.

“Go back to your notes and see that I called religion organized regression, and the falling back is to that time when we were coming to consciousness of the world during our helpless infancy and childhood, a period longer for us than for any other animal. This period is called neoteny, the scientific name for it is neoteny. I hate these names but we need them, patrimorph and neoteny… And this falling back into a time when our father was a god to us strikes us when we are in pain and suffering, with nowhere to turn, as can happen. As does happen.

“And then we fall back and become a thing like a child, a pedomorph, just to give the last of these technical names, a thing like a child, and we feel, again and again, with the help of the costumed liars of whatever church, we feel safer, happier, secure in the shadow of our father. And then they do what they like with us, of course. We fall back and we feel rejuvenated, notice the word. We are a species cursed with the shadows of fathers, and false fathers. This weakness is the abyss that is always at our heels, that we drag about with us, that follows us, dogs us. The abyss is sweet. There is real comfort there. We are made so that we wish to pitch ourselves into it. That act releases sweet chemicals that infuse us, our brains. The abyss. It is the common sand every church is built on, all churches and temples are built upon.

“Our task is to become fatherless… khutsana.”

Morel stopped for something, a glass of water, probably.

“Emunah is the whole of it, in the message of Jesus the Jew. We must make this clear to, to…”

A new voice broke in. “To the multitudes.”

This was Kerekang’s first intervention. There was more to come. Kerekang’s tone was wry, but carefully wry.

Morel continued. “Yes, the multitudes. Oh yes. Emunah… Please notice that every act that is being urged by Jesus is meant to amplify, in a believing population, the proportion of it, the part of it, that resembles a mass of distressed and neglected but trusting children. When he tells his followers not to take any thought for the morrow, for example, not to think ahead about where the next meal is coming from, he is recreating in that attitude the situation of a child unable to get its own food and depending on the goodwill of the family under the control of the sovereign father. We’ll see this over and over, clearly shown, when we come to examine, when Themba comes to examine, the parables and proverbs attributed to Jesus. But the overall picture here is unmistakable—Jesus is engaged in an experiment in collective emunah with the Jews of Palestine, conjuring or coaxing them into the shape of an enormous baby in order to bring God downstairs to tend it and change the world forever in the bargain.

“What was moving in the mind of Jesus to lead him to this we can only guess. But it seems likely that what he sought through mass emunah was to undo the sin of Adam, whose disobedience plunged humanity into death and misery and labor and pain in childbirth for women and on and on, undo it by turning disobedience into its opposite, perfect obedience, spectacular compliance with the will and whims of Yahweh.

“Emunah! We must make ourselves call things by their right names, comrades. If you were asked to come into a church so that you might join others in groveling, would you go in? No, but if they call it worship, you go.

“Now once we can see that the whole work of Jesus was this campaign to pump up eruptions of emunah, we can then see that it must follow that, correctly considered, there is no moral instruction to be gotten from his message, from his original message. Jesus tells those who would truly follow him that their