Great Stories of the Bible 4

Happy Easter everyone. I mean, everyone who is a Christian. Or Happy Pesach to you Jews out there. If you’re a Muslim, too bad you don’t have a holiday.

Because, for much of the world, today is a big-assed holiday, it’s time for another Great Story of the Bible. But this time, I’m going to take my great story from the New Testament.

In the past, I have only done Great Stories of the Bible from the Old Testament. That’s because the Old Testament is a collection of stories that don’t overlap all that much. There’s some overlap and plenty of plagiarism from other stories — Moses gets commandments from God twice in Exodus and then there’s a rerun of that episode in Deuteronomy just for good measure — but you can usually do a story from the Old Testament and not need to mention any other stories.

The New Testament is different. The New Testament is also a collection of stories but the four gospels overlap a lot. They are mainly plagiarized but inconsistent versions of the same stories. So, if I do a Great Story of the Bible from the New Testament, I need to do all the competing versions. And that sucks ass.

That said, I decided to do a New Testament story this time, lest you think I am not giving Jesus his stoogepious due.

Today’s Great Story of the Bible is the very short story of Jesus and the Fig Tree. The first version you will get is the version by the author of what we have named The Gospel According to Mark. There is no evidence that it was written by anyone named Mark. That’s just the name people gave the gospel after it was written. Let’s call the author Stanley. Assuming that Jesus was actually a historic figure, Stanley wrote his gospel at least a few decades after the death of Jesus and it’s been tampered with since then.  But Stanley’s is the earliest version of the fig story.

There is also no evidence that the Gospel According to Matthew was written by anybody named Matthew. Let’s call the author Eugene. Eugene wrote his gospel long after Stanley wrote his. In fact, Eugene’s gospel is based in part upon Stanley’s gospel, with some parts just outright plagiarized. But Eugene didn’t really understand where Stanley was going with the whole fig tree episode so Eugene kind of fucked it up.

You know, Stanley wasn’t writing about an actual miracle. Stanley’s fig tree story was a parable in which the fig tree is Israel, which will bear no more fruit due to its corruption. That’s why Stanley threw the whole temple episode into the middle of the story: it’s a literary device connecting the two stories. Well, Eugene didn’t get any of that.  Eugene may have been the first dumb-ass fundamentalist.  He took everything Stanley wrote seriously.  And, being a good Christian, he set an example for generations of future Christians by changing the facts in his Gospel to make the whole fig tree episode just a little more miraculous.

And that’s the end of the fig tree stories involving Jesus. The unknown author of the Gospel According to Luke, whom we’ll call Ethel, ignores it, even though, like Eugene, she uses Stanley’s gospel as source material. The unknown authors (it looks like there were more than one) of the Gospel According to John also never mention the fig tree story.

But Ethel does include a parable allegedly told by Jesus about a fig tree in the Gospel According to Luke. It appears in none of the other gospels.  Jesus, unfortunately, did not get a role in Ethel’s parable.  Rumor has it, Jesus fired his agent shortly thereafter.

So that’s it for stories about fig trees.

Now, what does all of this mean?

And that’s our bible lesson for today.  I hope you have all learned something valuable about Jesus on this highest of Christian holidays.

Yo, for those of you who haven’t gotten enough religion today, I have a great new website to share with you. It’s for people like you and I who would like to hedge our bets but really don’t want to waste a lot of our precious time worshipping. It’s called WorshipEngine. It harnesses the power of the internet to worship for you. Go check it out.

That’s all I have to say about Jesus and religion right now. Now be fruitful or something. But don’t multiply.

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