Lamb

I'm already struggling with what I should say about Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. The title alone is a hint as to why this may be a difficult entry. I wasn't sure I even wanted to read it, but I believe in learning how other people see the world and the place of religion in the world. First though, it's important to know how I see the world. I'm a member of the Baha'i Faith, and the teachings of Baha'u'llah strongly influence how I see the world. As a side note, if you are interested in knowing what some of those teachings are, I would suggest www.bahai.org as a good place to start. Being a Baha'i means that I don't follow an orthodox Christian view of Christ or the events of the Bible, even though I firmly believe that Jesus Christ did bring the word of God to humanity. Well, with that out of the way, onto the book.

Lamb tells the story of Christ through the eyes of his best friend Levi, known as Biff. Biff has been brought back to life in order to complete his gospel. He is the one who knows what happened to Jesus, known in the book as Joshua, when he was a child. That's right, Lamb is the story of Jesus before he begins preaching. Christopher Moore has taken the first 30 years of Christ's life and imagined what it could have been like. All I can say is - it was an eventful life. According to Biff, he had Jesus travelled from Galilee to Kabul to Nepal to Tamil and then back to what is now Isreal. The premise is that in order to learn how to become The Messiah, Jesus and Biff must find the three wise men who visited at the time of his birth.

Through these visits, Jesus learns the variations of the Golden Rule and how it can be used in the message of what will become Christianity. This is where I have my first problem. I didn't know how to take this idea when I first met it. My first thought was that by having Christ learn about compassion and justice from the Magi was taking away from Christ's revelation, but then, I started thinking that what this really did was show how the messages of the different religions all come from God. In the Baha'i Faith, this concept is known as Progressive Revelation. I don't agree with the idea that Christ's revelation actually came from Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, but the idea that the Christian message shares ideas with Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism is a good one.

The novel does a good job of showing Christ's human side. It shows him struggling with trying to understand his role in the world, with the guilt of not being able to help everyone, and with being gone when Joseph dies. The character of Biff is there to show the weakness of humanity and all the temptations we feel. He is a big fan of sex, and wherever Jesus goes to learn his lessons, Biff learns more about sex. Biff seems to spend a lot of time in the company of various concubines and prostitutes, and he tries to tell Jesus what he's missing, since the one instruction Jesus has received is that he is not to know women.

When I read Lamb, I thought that the author was trying to be irreverent and anti-Christian, but in reading his notes after the story, the one thing that really struck me was that he says that his perspective was that Christ was who he said he was; he was not trying to take away from Christ's message in any way. I really appreciated that. I'm still not sure what I think about using a Manifestation of God as the main character in a fictional work like this; I guess I'll have to keep thinking about it. I think that the image and idea of Jesus Christ are oven used in inappropriate ways, and if I read a book like Lamb, am I contributing to the irreverent view of Christ? I just don't know.

Any thoughts?