Ambulance Is On The Way Stories Of Men In Trouble

"All this," said Wayne the plumber, "was written down in the Bible five thousand years ago." He was out on the deck, taking a break from doing angioplasty on the pipes beneath my kitchen sink. Meanwhile, he was giving his assistant, John Pickles, a lesson. "Hey, Wayne," I yelled from an upstairs window, "you're wrong about the date. Most of the events in the Bible didn't even take place five thousand years ago. Solomon, for example, in all his glory, at best got going about three thousand years ago, and nobody wrote the diary of his activities until at least a century later." I shouldn't have gotten involved. But why not? I was desperate to get in on a theological discussion, especially with Wayne. Wayne was a plumber all right, but he was also a missionary in Ecuador. He returned to the States one year out of every five and ran the roads from North Carolina to Boston, replacing and repairing the broken and burst pipes of the bourgeoisie. After that it was back to church in the poor places outside Quito, where conversion was his calling. "Be that as it may," Wayne shouted back, "I'd have to see some evidence." Ah, evidence! I hadn't been subscribing to Biblical Archaeological Review for nothing--although it was almost nothing given the generous terms of their initial subscription rate. But evidence is a paltry thing compared to passion, and this, I knew, was where Wayne would have me by the U bolt. It, and by it I mean my desperation, had begun quietly enough on a soft summer day in the first year of the new millennium c.e. (I'm being careful here). The traffic on Route 9 outside the Chestnut Hill Mall congested and fumed, but the SUV in front of me presented a hopeful bumper sticker very much in favor of Jesus. It had been a long time since I had really thought about Jesus. In all likelihood, in the way of my people in the few but noisy and concentrated places that we occupied in the vast world, I had never given him a fair shake. So I shook. In the historical, evidentiary direction, of course. It turned out, discovered on my excursion to the Newton Public Library section 801.3, that Jesus wasn't just Jewish, he was really Jewish. Not only did he have no idea he was a Christian; he never imagined that he might become one. In addition, if I could work up the courage, I had some news to break to Wayne, and it was earth-shattering. According to the two most eminent professors of Jewish Jesus, "son of God" was an Aramaic figure of speech. Digest that! It meant nothing more and nothing less than "pious dude." It wasn't at all uncommon on the dusty streets outside Jerusalem for young studs to greet one another in the swish tongue of the day, with a friendly "Hey, son of God, how you doing?" Now, I had known for some time how dangerous inspired language could be to the literal-minded. For example, my own lot, the Jews. Who told us to strap a little black box with a prayer inside onto our heads once a day? Answer: no one. "And ye shall bind these words upon your forehead" clearly meant "remember them." But no, a hundred years pass and someone dreams up the apparatus. Soon enough he's got a business going, and the leather guy is happy, so who wants to interfere with at least two men's livelihoods? I was trying not to interfere with Wayne's, but there was no turning back. After a quick refresher read-up in The Changing Face of Jesus by Gezer Vermes, pages 12 to 25, I went down into the kitchen. "OK," I said, "how do you explain this? The Book of John says that the Last Supper took place on the day before the Passover Seder, but the Synoptic Gospels--that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke..." "Yes, I know what they are," Wayne said. He was patient with me. "Well, they date it on tWilson, Jonathan is the author of 'Ambulance Is On The Way Stories Of Men In Trouble', published 2005 under ISBN 9780375422102 and ISBN 0375422102.