Mmm... Lamb. I want Moore.

Let’s see if I can stop laughing long enough to write my thoughts after reading Christopher Moore’s hilarious “Lamb”. I’m not sure every atheist would find this as funny as I did because it’s quite esoteric, in that a healthy understanding of scripture makes the book so much funnier. If you know the four gospels of the New Testament you will be reeling at in-joke after side-splitting in-joke. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of fun here even for an atheist who has assiduously avoided the “holy” texts.

One of the great points that the book made was that the bizarre beliefs of Christians are strongly related to all of the other absurd religions of the world. Intuitively, all atheists understand that you can put any label on religion and it is still the same thing – a reverently held fantasy that informs every aspect of the believer’s world view. It’s not that we, as non-believers, hold a special contempt for Christianity (although I know most Christians in America feel they are picked on by us). As atheists we simply have no use for any god hypothesis. The primary version of the god hypothesis we have thrust in our faces daily is Christianity and we rebel against it. But if we lived in India, it might be Hinduism that we would mock. This is part of the beauty of Lamb. It ties together several of the “great religions” of the world into the Christ story.

The four gospels are conspicuous in avoiding mention of the childhood life of Jesus (or Joshua, as he is called in Lamb. The name “Jesus” is from the early translations from Hebrew into Greek. My personal take on this is that since the scholars were able to more or less accurately translate the name “Joshua” (Yeshua in Hebrew) for the Joshua of the Old Testament, they probably felt that when it came to their new god, only a unique name would do – thus “Jesus”. This is only a hypothesis).

There is the famous manger story of his birth (in two of the four gospels only), mention of him impressing the Rabbis with his biblical knowledge at about age 12 and, if memory serves, one other childhood reference. We know virtually nothing else about the first 30 years of his incredibly significant life (if he lived). For instance, shortly after his birth, he and the entire family fled to Egypt to avoid the death sentence on males under the age of 2 ordered by Herod. Wouldn’t the story of what happened to god in Egypt be important? So Lamb gives us a fifth gospel! This one covers the years leading up to his ministry.

It is the Gospel of Levi (who is known as Biff). Biff is Jesus’ stalwart pal and is never far from his side from age 6 up until the crucifixion. Since we know nothing of how Jesus came to see himself as Son of God, how he prepared for his mission or why he introduced some ideas that were distinctly different from traditional Judaism, Biff happily enlightens us. How unsurprising to an atheist would it be if Jesus actually tutored for his Son of God gig under mystics, Buddhists and Hindus? Hell, why not?

After all, religion is religion. The aspects of the later Christ story are easily understandable under some elements of each of these other religious genres. There was no need to work Islam into it, because Islam came later and was also founded on the same Old Testament teachings that Christianity was.

A pinch of mysticism, a dash of Buddhism, a teaspoon of Hinduism, mix well with a half-pint of Judaism and there you have it – a cocktail that will have your head spinning for the remainder of your life.

Why not? And why not another Christopher Moore book for the Non-Believing Literati? If not, I'll just read it myself!