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Honestly I'm kinda surprised it took me this long to get around to Jesus XD or “Yeshua” as it would've been in his native Aramaic. Or, as he's more properly known, “my man JC”.

Normally I don't go into my own religious history because I tend to believe that's an entirely individual matter and that my life story is generally pretty boring anyways. However, like when I made my blurb on Yahweh, I feel it's important to state my neutrality here. It should be obvious by now that I'm not shy about being a Heathen, but I was actually raised Christian. I say “raised” cause that's probably the most accurate word. I grew up in a little podunk town in rural Indiana which was more cornfield than human settlement, so Christianity was just sort of an omnipresent fact like the sky being blue. It was just an unnoteworthy reality no one blinked twice at. Like a lot of snot-nosed kids though, I had annoying questions, and as I got older, I found the answers given to me by the church to be unsatisfactory. It didn't help that my mom got really into Jehovah's Witnesses for a while but that is an entirely different tangent. After moving to the big city where no one really gave a damn about what religion you practiced, I eventually decided I couldn't accurately describe myself as Christian anymore. I never really went searching for a replacement, I just sort of agnostically picked up on other ideas for a good few years until I found a world view I considered to be more philosophically sound. I hold zero ill will towards Christians or their beliefs (even if yes, there are many in the world who would just want me dead on principle), and indeed my best friend is Christian. I would trust him with my life, and we even talk theology, which I find brings out ideas which are compatible with and informative of my Heathenry. From a spiritual perspective, there were certainly times where the Christian God did indeed comfort me in my darkest hours and I won't discard that. I just think He and I definitely got off on a total misunderstanding and it was better for both of us to go our separate ways. Same goes for Jesus: I believe Jesus was a man, that he said some things I agree with, some things I don't, and I just kind of leave it at that. In that vein, I'm going to reserve this blurb for what we know of the historical Jesus and his life as described in the gospels, and save all the wackier theology of medieval Christian philosophy for a separate reference sheet which future Ava can bang her head into her desk over.

Alright, with all that yadda yadda out of the way, happy birthday Jesus! Well… sort of… kind of… not really. We really have no clue when my man JC was born. You may be tempted to say uh duh Ava you stupid bitch, December 25, 1 AD. First of all, how very rude of you, naughty naughty, but also that's inaccurate for a few reasons. Our entire Anno Domini system for marking year numbers is supposed to be based on the amount of years that have passed since Jesus was born, but this system was invented by a Byzantine monk named Dionysius Exiguus in 525 AD, and he was more so trying to calculate the proper dates for Easter rather than actually assemble a historical timeline. Either way, he made a slight error and put the birth of Jesus a few years too late, a miscalculation which could literally be called the biggest mistake in history. So okay, when was my man JC actually born then? Our only real source on this debacle is the New Testament, which… is frustratingly unhelpful. Only two gospels, Matthew and Luke, concern themselves with details on my man JC's birth, and they give two wildly different numbers from each other. Matthew sets the story in the last year of the reign of King Herod, 4 BCE (though given how the whole narrative revolves around the persecution of boys two years old and younger, it could mean Jesus was born as early as 6 BCE). Luke meanwhile claims that Jesus was born in 6 CE, when Emperor Augustus had ordered a census of the region during governor Quirinus's tenure, but most historian opinions I've looked at all give an awkward side glance at this date like “dude wtf are you talking about?”

As for the day, that's anyone's guess. The Bible itself doesn't really offer any useful information about my man JC's birthday. You've probably heard it tossed around that Jesus was actually born in the summer, but as far as I can tell the only evidence of this is that Luke mentions shepherds tending to their flocks at the same time of the event in question, and December is usually too cold for sheep to be out and about. This kind of ignores the fact that my man JC and his folks lived in the middle of the desert, but I'm not a Judean sheep herder, so what do I know? You may have also heard that Christmas was co-opted from the Roman pagan holidays of Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus. While there may well be some cultural osmosis there, Saturnalia has pretty much nothing in common with Christmas aside from getting drunk in December, and the Sol Invictus festival was an extremely minor holiday instituted by Aurelian all the way in 274 CE. Meanwhile, our earliest reference to Christmas being December 25 is in a commentary on the Book of Daniel written by Hippolytus between 202 and 211, well before Aurelian's sanction of the sun god. It seems most likely that December 25 was chosen independently by the two religions just because that was the traditional date of the Winter Solstice, a day with obvious symbolic importance regardless of your faith. This was then reinforced by early Christian historians trying to tie Jesus's death to the Spring Equinox, traditionally observed on March 25, and claiming that he must've been conceived on the same day. By that logic, add nine months to March 25 and you get December 25. This theory is even more persuasive when you consider the other popular date for Jesus's death (and therefore conception) was April 6, which plus nine months is January 6, a date still used for Christmas in certain Orthodox denominations. We'll probably never know for sure, so my man JC's birthday might as well be December 25. In that case, you know what nevermind, happy birthday Jesus!

Okay that's two paragraphs dedicated just to nailing down one specific date. I'm sure that in no way is a bad omen for how long this blurb is gonna be-

But okay, let's get into the actual biography now. What everyone agrees on is that my man JC was the son of a young Jewish woman named Mary. His father, meanwhile, is more a matter of opinion. Christians obviously claim Jesus is the son of God Himself. Non-Christians like me meanwhile are more inclined to point to Mary's much more human husband, Joseph, with whom she had at least one other much more human child, James. Again, it's not really my business to tell you which is the “real” answer, and it's not really even important for today's story anyway. My man JC was born in the town of Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph were visiting in order to register for the census. As legend has it, King Herod the Great, who ruled Judea as a client king of the Roman Empire, was falling into a delirious fit of madness as the specter of death loomed over him. In other words, it wasn't exactly the best time for a house call, but in spite of that, three Iranian magi (Zoroastrian priests) stopped by and just casually dropped the little nugget that a star guided them there to worship the new King of the Jews. Herod, already paranoid about his own sons overthrowing him, was like “ummmm motherfucker I'm King of the Jews” and to emphasize his point, he had every boy in Bethlehem under two years old put to the sword. While I'm sure that made the census-taker's job a hell of a lot easier, this was obviously bad news for my man JC. Thankfully, his folks were tipped off to the upcoming danger and they fled to Egypt, where they'd wait until Herod kicked the bucket, at which point they settled down in the little town of Nazareth in Galilee.

From there, we actually know very little about Jesus's childhood. Luke even skips right over the whole Herod debacle and jumps ahead to 40 days after Christmas, when Mary presented her baby to the Temple of Jerusalem for ritual purification. The only other story about Jesus's youth mentioned in the canonical gospels is in Luke Chapter 2. Here, a twelve year old Jesus wanders off while he and his folks are in Jerusalem for Passover, leading the parents to scramble to find their lost boy before finally finding him chatting up a storm with the Temple priests. That's pretty much the whole of the story. There is the noncanonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Library), a 2nd century text which gives us a little more slapstick. It's certainly not meant to be a comedy, but I can't help but read it as one because the juxtaposition is hilarious. It starts with a five year old Jesus making little clay birds in a shallow pool and bringing them to life, as you do. A neighborhood boy then comes along and basically does the equivalent of kicking over his sandcastle. Jesus. Is. Pissed. My man JC, with the power of God and anime on his side, proceeds to Thanos snap the boy off the face of existence. Joseph then drags Jesus away by the ear, reprimanding him and waggling a finger like “now Jesus, killing people is bad,” to which Jesus throws a temper tantrum like “shut up ur not my real dad!” and that's just the funniest fucking mental image I've pictured in a while. Like yeah, Jesus also went through the terrible twos, except he was also fully equipped with the power to smite your ass for backsassing him, and that's hilariously terrifying. And he brings back everyone he kills (yes there's plenty more) in the Infancy Gospel. The adults are all in a tizzy about it but the kids seem just fine with these circumstances. I mean let's be honest, if you're in kindergarten and one of your buddies is literally God, that's fucking awesome in your mind. Sure you may die a few times but eehh come on he'll bring you back eventually, no big deal, kids are always assholes to each other and this is no different. Kenny dies every episode and he still hangs out with those three jerks.

But okay, let's get back on track with a more historical Jesus. The canonical gospels pick the story back up much much later, specifically in the “15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar”, according to Luke. That sounds pretty straightforward on the surface, but it's unclear whether this means the 15th year of Tiberius as sole emperor (which would be 29 CE) or the 15th year starting from when Tiberius was co-emperor with Augustus (27 CE). Regardless, this is the time frame in which my man JC went to his cousin John for a baptism in Bethabara. John was a preacher of the Apocalyptic genre which was popular in Judea at the time, and may or may not have been associated with the cryptic Essenes. Baptism meanwhile is a sort of offshoot from traditional Jewish purification rituals, an immersion in water meant to represent a person dispelling all sin from their soul in preparation for God's final judgment, which they believed was coming soon because they were Jewish and frankly the entire world has always been collapsing in on the Jewish people. The gospels like to play up John's recognition of Jesus as his all-powerful successor, going so far as to claim the voice of God Himself descended during the baptism to proclaim Jesus is His son with John as his witness. The historian Josephus, meanwhile, only gives John a passing glance with no real mention of his relationship to Jesus. In fact, Josephus really only talks about how John got his head lobbed off for pissing off King Herod Antipas, which is never good for anyone's health.

After being spiritually dunktanked, like a lot of new age hippies, my man JC decided he needed some me-time to “discover himself” or whatever. So, he fucked off into the desert to fast for 40 days. According to the synoptic gospels (that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke), his only social interaction during this time was with the Devil himself, who tempted my man JC with all sorts of worldly pleasures to elevate these miserable conditions. My man JC thoroughly begone-thot-ed Satan each time, though, and emerged from the desert probably thinking “man, I am never doing that shit again”. Satisfied that he was fit for this whole Messiah shtick, Jesus returned to Galilee and started skimming some homies of his own off the top of John the Baptist’s ministry. The first of his famous Twelve Disciples are said to be the brothers Andrew and Peter (formally known as Simon), but they'd eventually be followed by James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas… another James, Judas (no not that Judas), Simon, and Judas (yes that Judas). The Gospel of John lists “Nathanael” in place of Bartholomew, while Matthew and Mark replace the Judas who's not that Judas with “Thaddeus”, presumably because that Judas kinda ruined the name for everyone, but of course I'm getting ahead of myself.

Traditionally, my man JC is thought to have been a preacher for 3 and a half years, though this stretch of time is only backed up by John, and is probably an attempt at synching Jesus's timeline up with the prophecy from the Book of Daniel. The synoptic gospels meanwhile only account for at least one year of ministry in Galilee. Following John's account, one of the first things my man JC did after slinking out of the desert was accompany his mother to a wedding in Cana. Things were going well until Mary pulled her son aside to say “yo, problem: we're out of the good shit, this party's about to die”, to which Jesus snorted like “not a problem when I'm around, ma”. Then he finger zapped a few jugs of water, turning them into wine and making sure this party went krunk all night. Honestly this, combined with his attitude in the Infancy Gospel, makes Jesus out to be a bodacious ass dude. Like in church they're always all stuffy and you expect Jesus to be this perfect godly angel, but like no, it always reads like a regular ass dude who just happens to have phenomenal cosmic powers and he just uses them in all the dumbest, most irresponsible, human ways because he's only human and that makes him the life of the party. I honestly love that as a characterization.

The synoptics meanwhile jump straight into his Galilean ministry. This is where we get most of the famous little anecdotes we all learn in Sunday school: curing a guy of leprosy, walking on water, using five loaves of bread and two fish to feed 5000 people, etc. He's also said to have encountered this weird cave goblin of a man, apparently possessed by a sort of hive mind demon named “Legion”. My man JC took the initiative to exorcize these little creeps and transfer them into a herd of dirty pigs, which then went oinking directly into the ocean to drown like a pack of lemmings. I'm sure the Roman Empire, which was by now thoroughly in charge of the region, were absolutely thrilled by this blatantly transparent metaphor, and that they would in no way develop any sort of ire towards my man JC whatsoever. Those guys are famous for being able to take a joke, right?

Towards the end of his Galilean adventures, my man JC took Peter, James, and John aside like “hey yo check this out, I got something baller to show you”. He brought them up to the top of a mountain, where he suddenly started to go all super saiyan. Moses and Elijah appeared next to him, and God Himself joined the party to say “look at my son, my son is so cool”. While this Transfiguration, as it's called, probably left the three apostles shitting themselves, it seemed as good a sign as any that it was time for my man JC to take his ministry to the next level. To do that, he packed up all his shit onto a donkey and made his way to the big city: Jerusalem, stopping briefly to bring his buddy Lazarus back from the dead, just like old times I'm sure. One of the first things my man JC was confronted with upon setting up shop in Jerusalem was a poor woman getting mobbed for committing adultery. For once, Jesus doesn't rely on his supernatural powers here to resolve the situation, instead famously stumping the accusers by announcing, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. And well, when none of them can find someone who hasn't sinned themselves, they disperse, and my man JC tells the woman to go in peace. It's a nice little proverb whose change in tone honestly kinda reflects the more earthly and morbid atmosphere of the entire rest of the story, because you see, we're about to skip ahead to Jesus's last week.

Okay, bear with me for a couple more annoying paragraphs about nailing down dates (no pun intended but I'm going to Hell anyway): we don't know when exactly Jesus died, and the clues we're given in the gospels aren't all that helpful, at least in terms of the year. Our lower limit goes back to the whole 15th year of Tiberius debacle. From what I can tell, most people are comfortable synching this to 29 CE, because this is how most Roman chroniclers count the reigns of the emperors anyway. If we take the synoptics as written and assume just 1 year of ministry starting with Jesus's baptism, then that puts us at 30 CE for the date of his death. If we wanna be pedantic assholes though, and add the wiggle room for Tiberius to count those extra two years, then 1 year of ministry only gets us to 28 CE. If we take John at his word and give Jesus 3 and a half years, then those dates are upgraded to 32 CE and 30 CE respectively. Our upper limit comes from Paul, who despite being called an apostle, never actually met Jesus, having only converted to the faith after the crucifixion. Based on Paul's letters, we know he'd been a Christian for at least 17 years before he was brought to trial before proconsul Gallio in 51 CE. That puts us at a maximum date for Jesus's death at 34 CE, though we can comfortably bump that down to 33 CE since we know Paul spent a significant amount of time between the crucifixion and his conversation persecuting Christians.

A specific day would really help us pin that down, but this is harder than it may seem. On the one hand, we know Jesus died on a Friday, everyone agrees on that. The problem is which Friday? According to the synoptic gospels, he died on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, the first day of Passover. Awesome! Except nooooo, because John had to go and be all contradictory by saying he died on the 14th day of Nisan. Now, I'm willing to disregard John here because he's clearly trying to fudge the timeline to make my man JC's death synch up with the time when lambs were being slaughtered for the Passover meal. Painfully unsubtle. Apparently I'm the asshole, though, because everyone online and their fucking grandma sticks to the 14th as their calculation hyperfocus. This is why you'll often see April 7, 30 CE, and April 3, 33 CE as the two most popular proposed dates for the death of Jesus, as those are the only two dates in range which place 14 Nisan on a Friday. To be fair, the closest dates with Friday on a 15th of Nisan here would be April 11, 27 CE and April 23, 34 CE, which seem to be way too early and way too late respectively, so I guess we're stuck with John's probably made up timeline. It isn't helped by the fact that the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar and is both constantly shifting each year and dependent on the visibility of the moon on any given day. We'll probably never know for sure beyond “around Passover”, and frankly all these numbers and literal interpretations are giving my anthropologist brain a headache-

OK, last days of Jesus, let's try to quickly summarize this final week so that I can put this blurb down and go play Minecraft. Sunday: Jesus rolls up into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. Monday: Jesus gets pissed off at a tree. Tuesday: Jesus spouts some Apocalyptic shit on the Mount of Olives. Wednesday: Judas (yes that Judas) gets his palms greased with 40 pieces of silver in exchange for turning Jesus in to the cops. And finally, Thursday: Jesus gathers all his homies together for one last supper because he feels like someone might be about to narc on him, Judas. I joke, but this is where the story starts to get really sad actually. My man JC, knowing he's about to get his shit wrecked by the Man, goes into the Garden of Gethsemane and has a mental breakdown, pleading to his God to rescue him from this situation, the mortal fear of a real human man bleeding through a heavily sanitized narrative. I like to think this is the moment when Jesus realized he had to put his money where his mouth is, where all the talk about peace, love, and forgiveness really needed to mean something now. Indeed, after Judas came in and gave him the kiss of death to single him out to the guards, one of Jesus's disciples grabbed a sword to resist the arrest, but Jesus told him to stand down because “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”. Catholic canon has it that Jesus looked upon every sin committed by human beings while in the garden, and still decided were worth saving. So yes, that means that not only did Jesus watch you blasting rope to Waluigi hentai, but he also saw me stealing this exact joke from a Twitter meme and thought “yes, this is worth it”. That right there is why he is my man JC.

And well, I'm willing to bet you know the rest of this story. Jesus was dragged before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who on the urging of an angry crowd sentenced Jesus to be executed via that age-old Roman punishment: crucifixion. Jesus was strung up on a cross bearing the inscription “King of the Jews” as a mockery. Hung between two thieves, the Romans parched him, crammed a crown of thorns on his head, and impaled him in the spleen. It wasn't pretty, evidenced by his anguished wails of “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I'm sure this hits differently for a believer, but for me, it's heart-wrenching, because I see a human man who truly believed everything he preached, that he had been doing good by his god, and yet here was his reward for it all. Still, I think more importantly is his resilient call above it all: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Again, this has a different connotation for a believer, but for me it's an incredibly powerful line made more powerful by Jesus's humanity. Here he was, betrayed, faithless, and bleeding out, yet he didn't betray his message. He did not cry for violence or revenge, because what then would that have meant for all his calls for peace and love? Violence begets violence, the sword only encourages the sword, and the only way we can escape the cycle is to break it. Christian or not, I think that's a valuable enough lesson to take away from this man's life.

Once Jesus finally went limp, Joseph of Arimathea got permission to take the body down. The disciples wrapped him in a burial shroud, placed him in a sealed tomb, and went away to grieve their losses. The following Sunday, an assortment of women from Jesus's life visited the tomb, and according to the gospels at least, found it empty save for a mysterious angelic figure, whom they were so afraid of that they fled the scene. And that is where I'll finally be capping off this biography, both because in our oldest manuscripts of Mark, that's actually where the story cuts off (with all the verses after 16:8 being later additions), and because that's where I believe the story ends. Any extended biography of Jesus is entirely a matter of your own opinion, and I'm not here to step on that. This blurb was a monster to write, and it's not even close to 100% comprehensive. I dread the day when I do a blurb on the historical development of Jesus as a spiritual figure, cause if you thought all the sorcery in this tale was a bit too much for suspension of disbelief, you ain't seen nothing yet. I'll have to cover all the Gnostic cosmology shit someday, gods help me <_>

Design notes, oh goddammit it's still not over. Okay fine, I fibbed a little, because I'm gonna briefly explain the earliest history of Jesus depictions here since those were my primary inspiration, no James Tissot this time. The oldest depiction of Jesus we have in the archaeological record, while hilarious, isn't especially useful. It's a bit of graffiti that was scratched onto a wall on Palatine Hill in Rome around 200 CE, depicting a stick figure of Jesus on the cross with a donkey head alongside an inscription saying “Alexamenos worships his god”, obviously meant by the artist to diss his Christian neighbor. Damn bro, it's one sick burn when it survives two thousand years for people to gawk at. Our oldest proper image of Jesus was found in the ruins of a church in Dura Europas (in what is today Syria). Dated to around 235 CE, this fresco pretty much just depicts Jesus as what can only be described as “some dude”. Like seriously, picture the most generic ancient Roman NPC and you've got the idea. The third oldest depiction of Jesus is where I drew the most inspiration from: a rendition in the Catacomb of Callixtus dated to about 250 CE. Here, my man JC still suffers from some-dude-itis, but I liked the shapes and colors.

We don't start to get the classic bearded hippie Jesus until 375 CE, when the earliest such image was made in the Catacombs of Commodilla. This was likely an artistic choice born out of a desire to depict my man JC more in line with how Roman society stereotypically imagined powerful manly gods and wise old philosophers. Because of this, I was in a bit of a tizzy about whether or not I should depict Jesus all hippied out. On the one hand, our oldest depictions tend to draw him short-haired and clean-shaven like any other average Roman citizen. On the other hand, he just doesn't look right to our modern eyes without his luscious locks. I've seen it argued that maybe Jesus was a Nazarite, someone who takes a special vow to God which involves letting your hair grow out like the hero Samson, but this is nowhere mentioned directly in the gospels, and it seems pretty unlikely anyway because Nazarites are supposed to abstain from wine. And my man JC loved his wine. Sure there's that verse in Mark 14 where he proclaims “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God”, but come on, that's what we all say after waking up from one hell of a night. Ultimately, I decided to just say screw it. Yeah, our earliest depictions have him beardless, but there's not exactly any physical descriptions of the man in the gospels anyone can use to disprove the hippie look anyways. So if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go hide behind my “um actually” wall supported by the mythic Armor of Technicality.

Merry Christmas everyone, and remember: Some things in life are bad, they can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse. So when you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle! And this'll help things turn out for the best~

🎶 Always look on the bright side of life 🎶

Description
Honestly I'm kinda surprised it took me this long to get around to Jesus XD or “Yeshua” as it would've been in his native Aramaic. Or, as he's more properly known, “my man JC”.

Normally I don't go into my own religious history because I tend to believe that's an entirely individual matter and that my life story is generally pretty boring anyways. However, like when I made my blurb on Yahweh, I feel it's important to state my neutrality here. It should be obvious by now that I'm not shy about being a Heathen, but I was actually raised Christian. I say “raised” cause that's probably the most accurate word. I grew up in a little podunk town in rural Indiana which was more cornfield than human settlement, so Christianity was just sort of an omnipresent fact like the sky being blue. It was just an unnoteworthy reality no one blinked twice at. Like a lot of snot-nosed kids though, I had annoying questions, and as I got older, I found the answers given to me by the church to be unsatisfactory. It didn't help that my mom got really into Jehovah's Witnesses for a while but that is an entirely different tangent. After moving to the big city where no one really gave a damn about what religion you practiced, I eventually decided I couldn't accurately describe myself as Christian anymore. I never really went searching for a replacement, I just sort of agnostically picked up on other ideas for a good few years until I found a world view I considered to be more philosophically sound. I hold zero ill will towards Christians or their beliefs (even if yes, there are many in the world who would just want me dead on principle), and indeed my best friend is Christian. I would trust him with my life, and we even talk theology, which I find brings out ideas which are compatible with and informative of my Heathenry. From a spiritual perspective, there were certainly times where the Christian God did indeed comfort me in my darkest hours and I won't discard that. I just think He and I definitely got off on a total misunderstanding and it was better for both of us to go our separate ways. Same goes for Jesus: I believe Jesus was a man, that he said some things I agree with, some things I don't, and I just kind of leave it at that. In that vein, I'm going to reserve this blurb for what we know of the historical Jesus and his life as described in the gospels, and save all the wackier theology of medieval Christian philosophy for a separate reference sheet which future Ava can bang her head into her desk over.

Alright, with all that yadda yadda out of the way, happy birthday Jesus! Well… sort of… kind of… not really. We really have no clue when my man JC was born. You may be tempted to say uh duh Ava you stupid bitch, December 25, 1 AD. First of all, how very rude of you, naughty naughty, but also that's inaccurate for a few reasons. Our entire Anno Domini system for marking year numbers is supposed to be based on the amount of years that have passed since Jesus was born, but this system was invented by a Byzantine monk named Dionysius Exiguus in 525 AD, and he was more so trying to calculate the proper dates for Easter rather than actually assemble a historical timeline. Either way, he made a slight error and put the birth of Jesus a few years too late, a miscalculation which could literally be called the biggest mistake in history. So okay, when was my man JC actually born then? Our only real source on this debacle is the New Testament, which… is frustratingly unhelpful. Only two gospels, Matthew and Luke, concern themselves with details on my man JC's birth, and they give two wildly different numbers from each other. Matthew sets the story in the last year of the reign of King Herod, 4 BCE (though given how the whole narrative revolves around the persecution of boys two years old and younger, it could mean Jesus was born as early as 6 BCE). Luke meanwhile claims that Jesus was born in 6 CE, when Emperor Augustus had ordered a census of the region during governor Quirinus's tenure, but most historian opinions I've looked at all give an awkward side glance at this date like “dude wtf are you talking about?”

As for the day, that's anyone's guess. The Bible itself doesn't really offer any useful information about my man JC's birthday. You've probably heard it tossed around that Jesus was actually born in the summer, but as far as I can tell the only evidence of this is that Luke mentions shepherds tending to their flocks at the same time of the event in question, and December is usually too cold for sheep to be out and about. This kind of ignores the fact that my man JC and his folks lived in the middle of the desert, but I'm not a Judean sheep herder, so what do I know? You may have also heard that Christmas was co-opted from the Roman pagan holidays of Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus. While there may well be some cultural osmosis there, Saturnalia has pretty much nothing in common with Christmas aside from getting drunk in December, and the Sol Invictus festival was an extremely minor holiday instituted by Aurelian all the way in 274 CE. Meanwhile, our earliest reference to Christmas being December 25 is in a commentary on the Book of Daniel written by Hippolytus between 202 and 211, well before Aurelian's sanction of the sun god. It seems most likely that December 25 was chosen independently by the two religions just because that was the traditional date of the Winter Solstice, a day with obvious symbolic importance regardless of your faith. This was then reinforced by early Christian historians trying to tie Jesus's death to the Spring Equinox, traditionally observed on March 25, and claiming that he must've been conceived on the same day. By that logic, add nine months to March 25 and you get December 25. This theory is even more persuasive when you consider the other popular date for Jesus's death (and therefore conception) was April 6, which plus nine months is January 6, a date still used for Christmas in certain Orthodox denominations. We'll probably never know for sure, so my man JC's birthday might as well be December 25. In that case, you know what nevermind, happy birthday Jesus!

Okay that's two paragraphs dedicated just to nailing down one specific date. I'm sure that in no way is a bad omen for how long this blurb is gonna be-

But okay, let's get into the actual biography now. What everyone agrees on is that my man JC was the son of a young Jewish woman named Mary. His father, meanwhile, is more a matter of opinion. Christians obviously claim Jesus is the son of God Himself. Non-Christians like me meanwhile are more inclined to point to Mary's much more human husband, Joseph, with whom she had at least one other much more human child, James. Again, it's not really my business to tell you which is the “real” answer, and it's not really even important for today's story anyway. My man JC was born in the town of Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph were visiting in order to register for the census. As legend has it, King Herod the Great, who ruled Judea as a client king of the Roman Empire, was falling into a delirious fit of madness as the specter of death loomed over him. In other words, it wasn't exactly the best time for a house call, but in spite of that, three Iranian magi (Zoroastrian priests) stopped by and just casually dropped the little nugget that a star guided them there to worship the new King of the Jews. Herod, already paranoid about his own sons overthrowing him, was like “ummmm motherfucker I'm King of the Jews” and to emphasize his point, he had every boy in Bethlehem under two years old put to the sword. While I'm sure that made the census-taker's job a hell of a lot easier, this was obviously bad news for my man JC. Thankfully, his folks were tipped off to the upcoming danger and they fled to Egypt, where they'd wait until Herod kicked the bucket, at which point they settled down in the little town of Nazareth in Galilee.

From there, we actually know very little about Jesus's childhood. Luke even skips right over the whole Herod debacle and jumps ahead to 40 days after Christmas, when Mary presented her baby to the Temple of Jerusalem for ritual purification. The only other story about Jesus's youth mentioned in the canonical gospels is in Luke Chapter 2. Here, a twelve year old Jesus wanders off while he and his folks are in Jerusalem for Passover, leading the parents to scramble to find their lost boy before finally finding him chatting up a storm with the Temple priests. That's pretty much the whole of the story. There is the noncanonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Library), a 2nd century text which gives us a little more slapstick. It's certainly not meant to be a comedy, but I can't help but read it as one because the juxtaposition is hilarious. It starts with a five year old Jesus making little clay birds in a shallow pool and bringing them to life, as you do. A neighborhood boy then comes along and basically does the equivalent of kicking over his sandcastle. Jesus. Is. Pissed. My man JC, with the power of God and anime on his side, proceeds to Thanos snap the boy off the face of existence. Joseph then drags Jesus away by the ear, reprimanding him and waggling a finger like “now Jesus, killing people is bad,” to which Jesus throws a temper tantrum like “shut up ur not my real dad!” and that's just the funniest fucking mental image I've pictured in a while. Like yeah, Jesus also went through the terrible twos, except he was also fully equipped with the power to smite your ass for backsassing him, and that's hilariously terrifying. And he brings back everyone he kills (yes there's plenty more) in the Infancy Gospel. The adults are all in a tizzy about it but the kids seem just fine with these circumstances. I mean let's be honest, if you're in kindergarten and one of your buddies is literally God, that's fucking awesome in your mind. Sure you may die a few times but eehh come on he'll bring you back eventually, no big deal, kids are always assholes to each other and this is no different. Kenny dies every episode and he still hangs out with those three jerks.

But okay, let's get back on track with a more historical Jesus. The canonical gospels pick the story back up much much later, specifically in the “15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar”, according to Luke. That sounds pretty straightforward on the surface, but it's unclear whether this means the 15th year of Tiberius as sole emperor (which would be 29 CE) or the 15th year starting from when Tiberius was co-emperor with Augustus (27 CE). Regardless, this is the time frame in which my man JC went to his cousin John for a baptism in Bethabara. John was a preacher of the Apocalyptic genre which was popular in Judea at the time, and may or may not have been associated with the cryptic Essenes. Baptism meanwhile is a sort of offshoot from traditional Jewish purification rituals, an immersion in water meant to represent a person dispelling all sin from their soul in preparation for God's final judgment, which they believed was coming soon because they were Jewish and frankly the entire world has always been collapsing in on the Jewish people. The gospels like to play up John's recognition of Jesus as his all-powerful successor, going so far as to claim the voice of God Himself descended during the baptism to proclaim Jesus is His son with John as his witness. The historian Josephus, meanwhile, only gives John a passing glance with no real mention of his relationship to Jesus. In fact, Josephus really only talks about how John got his head lobbed off for pissing off King Herod Antipas, which is never good for anyone's health.

After being spiritually dunktanked, like a lot of new age hippies, my man JC decided he needed some me-time to “discover himself” or whatever. So, he fucked off into the desert to fast for 40 days. According to the synoptic gospels (that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke), his only social interaction during this time was with the Devil himself, who tempted my man JC with all sorts of worldly pleasures to elevate these miserable conditions. My man JC thoroughly begone-thot-ed Satan each time, though, and emerged from the desert probably thinking “man, I am never doing that shit again”. Satisfied that he was fit for this whole Messiah shtick, Jesus returned to Galilee and started skimming some homies of his own off the top of John the Baptist’s ministry. The first of his famous Twelve Disciples are said to be the brothers Andrew and Peter (formally known as Simon), but they'd eventually be followed by James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas… another James, Judas (no not that Judas), Simon, and Judas (yes that Judas). The Gospel of John lists “Nathanael” in place of Bartholomew, while Matthew and Mark replace the Judas who's not that Judas with “Thaddeus”, presumably because that Judas kinda ruined the name for everyone, but of course I'm getting ahead of myself.

Traditionally, my man JC is thought to have been a preacher for 3 and a half years, though this stretch of time is only backed up by John, and is probably an attempt at synching Jesus's timeline up with the prophecy from the Book of Daniel. The synoptic gospels meanwhile only account for at least one year of ministry in Galilee. Following John's account, one of the first things my man JC did after slinking out of the desert was accompany his mother to a wedding in Cana. Things were going well until Mary pulled her son aside to say “yo, problem: we're out of the good shit, this party's about to die”, to which Jesus snorted like “not a problem when I'm around, ma”. Then he finger zapped a few jugs of water, turning them into wine and making sure this party went krunk all night. Honestly this, combined with his attitude in the Infancy Gospel, makes Jesus out to be a bodacious ass dude. Like in church they're always all stuffy and you expect Jesus to be this perfect godly angel, but like no, it always reads like a regular ass dude who just happens to have phenomenal cosmic powers and he just uses them in all the dumbest, most irresponsible, human ways because he's only human and that makes him the life of the party. I honestly love that as a characterization.

The synoptics meanwhile jump straight into his Galilean ministry. This is where we get most of the famous little anecdotes we all learn in Sunday school: curing a guy of leprosy, walking on water, using five loaves of bread and two fish to feed 5000 people, etc. He's also said to have encountered this weird cave goblin of a man, apparently possessed by a sort of hive mind demon named “Legion”. My man JC took the initiative to exorcize these little creeps and transfer them into a herd of dirty pigs, which then went oinking directly into the ocean to drown like a pack of lemmings. I'm sure the Roman Empire, which was by now thoroughly in charge of the region, were absolutely thrilled by this blatantly transparent metaphor, and that they would in no way develop any sort of ire towards my man JC whatsoever. Those guys are famous for being able to take a joke, right?

Towards the end of his Galilean adventures, my man JC took Peter, James, and John aside like “hey yo check this out, I got something baller to show you”. He brought them up to the top of a mountain, where he suddenly started to go all super saiyan. Moses and Elijah appeared next to him, and God Himself joined the party to say “look at my son, my son is so cool”. While this Transfiguration, as it's called, probably left the three apostles shitting themselves, it seemed as good a sign as any that it was time for my man JC to take his ministry to the next level. To do that, he packed up all his shit onto a donkey and made his way to the big city: Jerusalem, stopping briefly to bring his buddy Lazarus back from the dead, just like old times I'm sure. One of the first things my man JC was confronted with upon setting up shop in Jerusalem was a poor woman getting mobbed for committing adultery. For once, Jesus doesn't rely on his supernatural powers here to resolve the situation, instead famously stumping the accusers by announcing, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. And well, when none of them can find someone who hasn't sinned themselves, they disperse, and my man JC tells the woman to go in peace. It's a nice little proverb whose change in tone honestly kinda reflects the more earthly and morbid atmosphere of the entire rest of the story, because you see, we're about to skip ahead to Jesus's last week.

Okay, bear with me for a couple more annoying paragraphs about nailing down dates (no pun intended but I'm going to Hell anyway): we don't know when exactly Jesus died, and the clues we're given in the gospels aren't all that helpful, at least in terms of the year. Our lower limit goes back to the whole 15th year of Tiberius debacle. From what I can tell, most people are comfortable synching this to 29 CE, because this is how most Roman chroniclers count the reigns of the emperors anyway. If we take the synoptics as written and assume just 1 year of ministry starting with Jesus's baptism, then that puts us at 30 CE for the date of his death. If we wanna be pedantic assholes though, and add the wiggle room for Tiberius to count those extra two years, then 1 year of ministry only gets us to 28 CE. If we take John at his word and give Jesus 3 and a half years, then those dates are upgraded to 32 CE and 30 CE respectively. Our upper limit comes from Paul, who despite being called an apostle, never actually met Jesus, having only converted to the faith after the crucifixion. Based on Paul's letters, we know he'd been a Christian for at least 17 years before he was brought to trial before proconsul Gallio in 51 CE. That puts us at a maximum date for Jesus's death at 34 CE, though we can comfortably bump that down to 33 CE since we know Paul spent a significant amount of time between the crucifixion and his conversation persecuting Christians.

A specific day would really help us pin that down, but this is harder than it may seem. On the one hand, we know Jesus died on a Friday, everyone agrees on that. The problem is which Friday? According to the synoptic gospels, he died on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, the first day of Passover. Awesome! Except nooooo, because John had to go and be all contradictory by saying he died on the 14th day of Nisan. Now, I'm willing to disregard John here because he's clearly trying to fudge the timeline to make my man JC's death synch up with the time when lambs were being slaughtered for the Passover meal. Painfully unsubtle. Apparently I'm the asshole, though, because everyone online and their fucking grandma sticks to the 14th as their calculation hyperfocus. This is why you'll often see April 7, 30 CE, and April 3, 33 CE as the two most popular proposed dates for the death of Jesus, as those are the only two dates in range which place 14 Nisan on a Friday. To be fair, the closest dates with Friday on a 15th of Nisan here would be April 11, 27 CE and April 23, 34 CE, which seem to be way too early and way too late respectively, so I guess we're stuck with John's probably made up timeline. It isn't helped by the fact that the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar and is both constantly shifting each year and dependent on the visibility of the moon on any given day. We'll probably never know for sure beyond “around Passover”, and frankly all these numbers and literal interpretations are giving my anthropologist brain a headache-

OK, last days of Jesus, let's try to quickly summarize this final week so that I can put this blurb down and go play Minecraft. Sunday: Jesus rolls up into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. Monday: Jesus gets pissed off at a tree. Tuesday: Jesus spouts some Apocalyptic shit on the Mount of Olives. Wednesday: Judas (yes that Judas) gets his palms greased with 40 pieces of silver in exchange for turning Jesus in to the cops. And finally, Thursday: Jesus gathers all his homies together for one last supper because he feels like someone might be about to narc on him, Judas. I joke, but this is where the story starts to get really sad actually. My man JC, knowing he's about to get his shit wrecked by the Man, goes into the Garden of Gethsemane and has a mental breakdown, pleading to his God to rescue him from this situation, the mortal fear of a real human man bleeding through a heavily sanitized narrative. I like to think this is the moment when Jesus realized he had to put his money where his mouth is, where all the talk about peace, love, and forgiveness really needed to mean something now. Indeed, after Judas came in and gave him the kiss of death to single him out to the guards, one of Jesus's disciples grabbed a sword to resist the arrest, but Jesus told him to stand down because “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”. Catholic canon has it that Jesus looked upon every sin committed by human beings while in the garden, and still decided were worth saving. So yes, that means that not only did Jesus watch you blasting rope to Waluigi hentai, but he also saw me stealing this exact joke from a Twitter meme and thought “yes, this is worth it”. That right there is why he is my man JC.

And well, I'm willing to bet you know the rest of this story. Jesus was dragged before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who on the urging of an angry crowd sentenced Jesus to be executed via that age-old Roman punishment: crucifixion. Jesus was strung up on a cross bearing the inscription “King of the Jews” as a mockery. Hung between two thieves, the Romans parched him, crammed a crown of thorns on his head, and impaled him in the spleen. It wasn't pretty, evidenced by his anguished wails of “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I'm sure this hits differently for a believer, but for me, it's heart-wrenching, because I see a human man who truly believed everything he preached, that he had been doing good by his god, and yet here was his reward for it all. Still, I think more importantly is his resilient call above it all: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Again, this has a different connotation for a believer, but for me it's an incredibly powerful line made more powerful by Jesus's humanity. Here he was, betrayed, faithless, and bleeding out, yet he didn't betray his message. He did not cry for violence or revenge, because what then would that have meant for all his calls for peace and love? Violence begets violence, the sword only encourages the sword, and the only way we can escape the cycle is to break it. Christian or not, I think that's a valuable enough lesson to take away from this man's life.

Once Jesus finally went limp, Joseph of Arimathea got permission to take the body down. The disciples wrapped him in a burial shroud, placed him in a sealed tomb, and went away to grieve their losses. The following Sunday, an assortment of women from Jesus's life visited the tomb, and according to the gospels at least, found it empty save for a mysterious angelic figure, whom they were so afraid of that they fled the scene. And that is where I'll finally be capping off this biography, both because in our oldest manuscripts of Mark, that's actually where the story cuts off (with all the verses after 16:8 being later additions), and because that's where I believe the story ends. Any extended biography of Jesus is entirely a matter of your own opinion, and I'm not here to step on that. This blurb was a monster to write, and it's not even close to 100% comprehensive. I dread the day when I do a blurb on the historical development of Jesus as a spiritual figure, cause if you thought all the sorcery in this tale was a bit too much for suspension of disbelief, you ain't seen nothing yet. I'll have to cover all the Gnostic cosmology shit someday, gods help me <_>

Design notes, oh goddammit it's still not over. Okay fine, I fibbed a little, because I'm gonna briefly explain the earliest history of Jesus depictions here since those were my primary inspiration, no James Tissot this time. The oldest depiction of Jesus we have in the archaeological record, while hilarious, isn't especially useful. It's a bit of graffiti that was scratched onto a wall on Palatine Hill in Rome around 200 CE, depicting a stick figure of Jesus on the cross with a donkey head alongside an inscription saying “Alexamenos worships his god”, obviously meant by the artist to diss his Christian neighbor. Damn bro, it's one sick burn when it survives two thousand years for people to gawk at. Our oldest proper image of Jesus was found in the ruins of a church in Dura Europas (in what is today Syria). Dated to around 235 CE, this fresco pretty much just depicts Jesus as what can only be described as “some dude”. Like seriously, picture the most generic ancient Roman NPC and you've got the idea. The third oldest depiction of Jesus is where I drew the most inspiration from: a rendition in the Catacomb of Callixtus dated to about 250 CE. Here, my man JC still suffers from some-dude-itis, but I liked the shapes and colors.

We don't start to get the classic bearded hippie Jesus until 375 CE, when the earliest such image was made in the Catacombs of Commodilla. This was likely an artistic choice born out of a desire to depict my man JC more in line with how Roman society stereotypically imagined powerful manly gods and wise old philosophers. Because of this, I was in a bit of a tizzy about whether or not I should depict Jesus all hippied out. On the one hand, our oldest depictions tend to draw him short-haired and clean-shaven like any other average Roman citizen. On the other hand, he just doesn't look right to our modern eyes without his luscious locks. I've seen it argued that maybe Jesus was a Nazarite, someone who takes a special vow to God which involves letting your hair grow out like the hero Samson, but this is nowhere mentioned directly in the gospels, and it seems pretty unlikely anyway because Nazarites are supposed to abstain from wine. And my man JC loved his wine. Sure there's that verse in Mark 14 where he proclaims “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God”, but come on, that's what we all say after waking up from one hell of a night. Ultimately, I decided to just say screw it. Yeah, our earliest depictions have him beardless, but there's not exactly any physical descriptions of the man in the gospels anyone can use to disprove the hippie look anyways. So if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go hide behind my “um actually” wall supported by the mythic Armor of Technicality.

Merry Christmas everyone, and remember: Some things in life are bad, they can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse. So when you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle! And this'll help things turn out for the best~

🎶 Always look on the bright side of life 🎶