This wasn’t because Celia didn’t have a firm theological basis in Bible study.
Celia couldn’t follow the sermon because it relied on two conflicting cultural shorthands that were presented as if they were in harmony.
Christian sermons in American life were always more about America than Christianity, and America was the ideological enemy of Christianity.
When the service was over and the Christians had stopped singing and shaking hands, Celia wondered what the hell she’d just seen.
The woman sitting beside Celia noticed the Fairy Queen’s confusion.
“You are new here?” asked the woman.
“Is this a church?” asked Celia. “I have read about churches but I have never been inside a church.”
“Yes, this is a church,” said the woman.
“My children have become Christians,” said Celia. “My son and my daughter.”
“My children,” said the woman, “they are not so good about church. You are lucky.”
“Am I?” asked Celia.
“Yes,” said the woman. “I wish my children they were thinking about Jesus.”
“My children will not stop,” said Celia.
“Beautiful,” said the woman.
“I am not certain,” said Celia. “It has been very painful.”
The woman reached into her purse. She pulled out a book. She put the book in Celia’s hands.
“Read this,” said the woman. “You will make sense of your children.”
Celia looked down at the book.
On its black cover, there were gold foil letters that said:
The pre-Internet library of Fairy Land had never included a copy of the Bible.
Not in any of its forms or translations.
This was an oversight, particularly as the Bible was one of the three most influential literary works ever published. The other two were القرآن and the seven volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.
The King James Version of the Bible was a 1611 AD English translation of the Christian Bible, which was originally put together in the Fourth Century AD, and was comprised of two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The Old Testament was a collection of documents that’d emerged from the Jewish faith.
There existed another version of the texts, used by Jewish people in a very different way than Christians, called the תַּנ"ַּךְ.
There were a lot of stories in the Old Testament, but the underlying Christian interpretation suggested that it was a book about YHWH, a divinity who had created the world and all of the living beings on the planet, and then spent thousands of years torturing his creations.
The New Testament was primarily about the life of Jesus Christ, his disciples, and the implications of his message as it carried through the world.
Despite having never read the Christian Bible, Celia was the one person on Earth who had an innate critical apparatus for comprehending the disjunction between the Old and New Testaments.
She’d spent about four hundred years reading and thinking about Tom a Lincoln, which was another book split into two parts.
Of this structure, Richard S.M. Hirsch writes: “[Richard Johnson] … had early on decided … to organize his matter in two parts, in this case showing heroic exploits in Part I, and the moral retribution for them in Part II.”
In other words, Part I of Tom a Lincoln was about a father who did some weird shit, and Part II was about the father’s son paying the price for that weird shit.
Which was the Christian Bible in a nutshell.
Celia brought the King James back to the house on the hill.
She read.
It took several weeks.
The King James wasn’t Game of Thrones long, but it was pretty close.
The Old Testament was ancient, and other than the Song of Solomon, which induced at least one meat-market visit to Tenants of Trees, reading it felt like being back in Fairy Land, like inhabiting a universe of unclear moral rules, where the brutality of magic could break your spirit on nothing more than a whim.
The New Testament was different.
Celia couldn’t grasp the epistles.
The Revelation of St. John the Divine was a bore.
Even Acts of the Apostles was difficult.
But she understood the gospels, which were four narratives about Jesus Christ and his life.
And because Celia’d developed that critical faculty, she could weed out an author’s made-up bullshit from the reality upon which he’d built his narrative.
For centuries, she’d been doing this with Tom a Lincoln, seeing where the fictional account of herself differed from the reality, and comparing the Red-Rose Knight’s pillow talk about his childhood with Richard Johnson’s early chapters.
Here was Celia’s conclusion: Jesus was weird as fuck.
This was the actual Jesus, Jesus without the Christ, not the totemic icon used as justification for a thousand awful wars and for millions of deaths.
This was not the Jesus of Fern and the Fairy Knight.
This was not Jesus of the Church or the churches.
This was not the Jesus of the mean-spirited American, the smiling face that blessed slavery and indigenous genocide, the impetus behind KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST.
This was the real Jesus.
Until his advent, the ancient world had never placed any intellectual premium on kindness or mercy.
Even good people like Diogenes of Sinope or Epicurus had the habit of talking about virtue as a thing that could be developed by the self for the self. If people wrote or thought about sacrifice, it was in the service of the state or the dominant group.
Never in service of the powerless.
And then Jesus arrived from Bumfuck Shitsville, which, despite its proximity to Sepphoris, is what Nazareth was, and he spoke Aramaic with a hick Galilean accent, and he was a carpenter’s son, and he hung around with the filth of society. Sex workers, illiterate fisherman, lepers, literary agents, and tax collectors.
He was nobody.
And he talked funny.
And what he said, the core message, delivered in that hick accent, was this: stop being a total fucking dick.
If someone hits your face, offer them the other cheek.
Forgive those who trespass against you.
Serve others before serving yourself. The poor shall inherit the Earth.
Throw away your possessions.
Mercy is the greatest good.
Don’t cast the first stone.
Worry not over money.
Embrace the sick.
These ideas have been repeated so many times that they’ve become platitudes, bumper-sticker morality for the users of Twitter and depressed women of Instagram.
They’re like anything in an era of mass production.
Reduced into meaninglessness, transformed into marketable product.
T-shirts.
Words divorced from ideas.
Sharp edges smoothed down.
Yet the intent remains. Jesus had asked his followers to follow a moral code that violated every known precept of human nature.
Consider, by contrast, the trilogy of plays by Aeschylus known as the Oresteia.
The Oresteia goes like this: Agamemnon, from the House of Atreus and King of Mycenae, returns home after being away for over a decade. He’s been in Troy, where he practiced the art of ethnic cleansing.
Before Agamemnon left for war, the goddess Artemis ordered him to sacrifice his daughter.