Easter and the Silk Road

Easter:

I hope you all had a good Easter. Easter is celebrated by Christians around the world. Here we celebrate by going to church and finding Easter Eggs that the Easter bunny hid. For Easter dinner, we might eat ham, chicken or turkey. Easter is supposed to be the most religious day of the year according to Catholics, yet in many cases, we pay less attention to it when compared to Christmas. Why is this? It might be that the activities associated with Easter are geared towards kids where with Christmas it is geared towards everyone. With Christmas, both adults and children exchange gifts, decorate the tree and house, bake cookies, and participate in singing, plays, and Christmas Carols. With Easter, the kids search for eggs and that’s often the end of it.

 
Book:

Today I read the book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. This is a satire on the gospels. Biff, Christ’s best friend, is resurrected after 2000 years to add his take on Jesus’ story. He starts out describing Jesus’ childhood, before going into the lost years.

Biff and Jesus travel across the silk road to find the three wise men in order to find how Jesus is supposed to be the messiah. He runs into one Afghanistan, one in China, and one in India. In Afganistan he learns magic, in China he learns meditation, and in India he learns of to multiply food. The only part of him that he was born with was ability to heal others and forgive their sins. Everything else he had to learn for himself.

He returns home to spread the message that we all know and love, but with a lot more cussing then what is in the bible.

The book is clever and funny, and brings a much needed human element to Jesus, that you don’t see in the bible or other media based on the gospels.

The Silk Road:

What I like most about the book the most is the travel that is seen, especially along the silk road. According to Wikipedia, the Silk Road was started around 1 BC, for trade between the Roman empire and the East, primarily to bring silk from China. Other trade happened along these routes. The timeline of the start up of this route might suggest that Jesus would have at least heard of this route. Many have speculated that Jesus must have traveled this route during the lost years where he could have picked up some of his seemingly eastern philosophies. If he had not traveled the silk route, it is entirely possible that he found inspiration from traders coming out of this region.

 

 

Work Cited:

Moore, Christopher. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Published: 2002.

“Silk Road”. Wikipedia. Retrieved: April 20, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_road