Jesus grew up under the care of a carpenter stepfather and doting mother, who remained a virgin until the conception of Janice, Jesus’s sister. The Bible doesn’t properly introduce us to Janice, owing mainly to the disappointment of its drafters, who preferred that their friend’s mother remain a virgin. They held Mary in such high esteem for her purity that early drafts of the Bible contain the first-known use of the term MILF – “Man I Love Fishing (but I love Jesus’s Virgin mom even more).” After all, the Bible was drafted in part by fishermen friends of Jesus, and that bumper-sticker adorned many fine vessels plying the Sea of Galilee.
These early friends of Jesus, later called disciples, all had a secret crush on Janice. Janice, who we’ll get to, led a typical, hard-working, un-rewarded existence in the shadow of her charismatic, boisterous older brother. How do we know Jesus was boisterous? In a word – Rumspringa.
The world’s 2.4 billion Christians hold that Jesus was a peacenik, a humble softy with hippy hair, beard, and sandals, exuding a faint whiff of frankincense. But it wasn’t always so. The hell-raiser in young Jesus first came to light when he tossed gamblers and idolaters from a local temple, angered by their profittering. When he finally went to sow his wild oats on Rumspringa (essentially a gap year, though back then it could take years given the non-motorized transportation), the Bible writers turned their eyes from his sordid activities. In another great contradiction, R-rated violence was chum to the writers of the Good Book, but when it came to their protagonist, G-rated relations were deemed more profitable. So off Jesus went to territories unknown and deeds unrelated in what the Lamb of God must have considered the best years of his life.
It’s a serious man who returns to Judea, underscoring the fact of his questionable conduct. It’s nothing like a near-death experience to bring one back from the brink, to turn one sober, and Jesus may have survived such traumas due to symptoms that match Syphilis and Gonorrhea, two conditions not mentioned in the Bible.
To prove his newfound seriousness, Jesus disappeared into the desert for forty days and forty nights. There, he’s tempted by the devil, which we all know what that’s a euphemism for. Only this time, Jesus resists the temptations and returns to town stronger in spirit than ever before. Thus begins his period of miracle-making.
But first, we must introduce Janice. There’s a wide degree of latitude in introducing Jesus’s sister since, as noted previously, the original drafters neglected to do so. Some speculate that Jesus’s buddies, especially the fishermen Peter, James, and John, had all been involved with her in one way or another. None could agree as to who would make the best suitor. They all knew only that they wanted her as a bride, and that the common denominator here was her relationship with Jesus, a poor relationship indeed.
As with many brothers and sisters, Jesus and Janice shared a bedroom but were riven by a deep sibling rivalry. Jesus, who was all thumbs in his father’s carpentry barn, resented Janice, who turned out to be a very skillful woodworker. Joseph very quickly gave up on his philosophical-minded son, letting him wander the local temples entertaining the ideas of scholars hanging out there. He favored instead his pragmatic daughter, who could make even the lamest piece of wood into something hard and satisfying. Jesus resented her for this almost as much as he resented her for fostering jealousies among his friends.
And Janice, no angel, harbored her own resentments. She resented all the attention Jesus got from the people of Judea, Galilee, and Nazareth, earning every moniker from Prince of Peace, Jesus of Nazareth, and King of Kings to Lord and Savior, Messiah, Emmanuel, Jesus H. Christ and, ultimately, Christ the King. Less well-known names included Slick (after his baptism), Wonder-boy (later recycled as Boy Wonder in the Batman mythology), and Miracle Man. So let’s discuss his miracles.
Jesus went to a wedding in Canaan, a days-long affair with music and feasting, singing and dancing, hoping to meet the love of his life. Instead, his mother (no longer a virgin) explained to him a problem the host was having with the wine.
“He’s run out.”
“Oh no. Just when my cup runneth empty.”
“Do something, Jesus. Do something. Or the host will be shamed.”
Whether or not Jesus’s sister was at the wedding is unclear; also unclear is why the wine problem was for Jesus to resolve. But he loved his mother and took on the task, turning urns of water into wine. The Bible tells us that one of the guests was so pleased with this miracle vintage that he scolded the host for saving the best for last, which is where we get the expression, “Saving the best for last.” It’s also an early example of looking a gift horse in the mouth.
From there Jesus really got into making miracles happen. He made the blind see. He healed lepers and cripples (a term not to be used today, but ok in his) with a touch of the hand. Christ, he even walked on water, for God’s sake. All this led to his gaining evermore loyalists, eventually increasing to thirteen, and with them he shared his monotheistic vision, much of which he’d developed while pondering earthly pleasures during his gap year(s).
These disciples liked the idea so much that they gave up everything, which for some was not much, and for others their means of livelihood – fishing boats, nets, tax collection – to spread the Word. And that Word boils down to this: followers of Jesus’s version of monotheism stood to benefit by no longer paying several small sums to many gods and idols, instead paying a single, consolidated rate to the one God, who remained nameless and therefore all-powerful and all-seeing, totaling less in fees than all the nicks and scratches of the former tithes.
At one point, so many people wanted to hear about this convenient new payment plan that Jesus didn’t have enough food at the picnic he was hosting, not unlike at a Grateful Dead concert where nobody thought to bring the food. But like at a Dead show, magic filled the air and someone stepped up to feed every head. In our case, this figure was Jesus.
“No prob,” the Son of God told the crowd. For in addition to being just a simple son of the once-virgin Mary and stepfather Joseph and brother of Janice, Jesus had designated himself as the firstborn son of the very God he created – an irony worth exploring. The claim that Jesus turned a dozen loaves of bread and several fishes into a cornucopia of nutritious dining ignores the fact that much of the fare was prepared by Janice in her mother’s oven.
But we can forgive Jesus, just as Janice forgave, and turn the other cheek to let the party roll on.
Thus ends the first part of the story of Jesus and Janice. Here it pivots to a more somber series of events, more blood and miracles better related in another season.
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Ben East Books 