What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? Read Online Free PDF Page A

that night, but found no room at the inn. They were forced to camp out in a stable, where the baby Jesus, the Son of God, was born. To mark the event, a new star appeared in the heavens, and it guided Wise Men from the East to the site of the miraculous birth. Strangely, it didn’t get much attention from anyone else in the neighborhood.
    The regional king, Herod, caught news of this threatening new “King of the Jews,” and he ordered the slaughter of all male children under two. But Joseph and Mary escaped to Egypt with the baby Jesus.
    They eventually returned to Nazareth, where Jesus grew up to become a simple carpenter. (I’m not sure how he could have lived in such obscurity. Apparently, everyone had forgotten that whole miracle star episode.) At around age 30 he was baptized, aptly enough, by a guy named John the Baptist, and he launched into a new career as a wandering preacher in the backwater of Galilee.
    Jesus then recruited twelve disciples to follow him and spread his philosophy of peace, love, forgiveness, and obedience to God. The disciples turned out to be slow learners, but Jesus was patient with them. He claimed the Almighty was his father and that he had been sent to deliver a Gospel of hope about the coming Kingdom of Heaven. It might’ve been easier for God to just appear in the sky and say, “I’m here! Impressive, eh? Now straighten up!” But he didn’t. Like I said, he sometimes does things the hard way.
    To prove he was the real deal, Jesus miraculously healed the sick, fed the hungry, and raised the dead. (Between him and all those other resurrected god-men, there must have been a lot of cadavers walking around in those days.) He then foretold of his own execution and declared that he had to die to take on the sins of the world and to offer man redemption. But he would finally rise from death to rejoin his father in heaven, and those who believed in him would do the same.
    He took his message to Jerusalem, where his claim that he was The Messiah, along with his controversial spin on Jewish law, got him in trouble with the authorities. He was arrested on trumped-up charges of blasphemy, and was crucified by the Romans.
    Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday and was resurrected that Sunday, just in time for Easter. He spent the next forty days with his disciples before ascending to heaven, with the promise that God’s justice was coming soon. Until then, his followers were encouraged to preach his message of love, hope, and salvation, and to not take money. Nobody pays much attention to that last part.
    In the wake of all those earlier pagan myths, we can now see how many of the ideas we often think of as uniquely Christian had actually been kicking around for centuries. The stories may have arisen independently, but different mythmakers obviously fall back on the same tried-and-true storylines. Ask any movie executive.
    Dummies for Jesus
     
    The resurrected god-man myth was so familiar to the Greeks and the Romans that the early Christian Church was hard pressed to explain why their savior’s story was so special. But they did come up with an explanation—and it’s a hoot.
    They claimed that, once the devil knew the life story of Jesus, he went back in time to plant that same storyline amongst the pagans who lived before Jesus did. The Church claimed that Satan had practiced “plagiarism by anticipation,” swiping episodes from Jesus’ life and assigning them to earlier heroes. This way, once Jesus was born, his story would already seem familiar and everyone’s reaction would be, “Been there, done that, got the toga.” It was called Diabolical Mimicry, and theologians argued this idea with a straight face. Amazingly, the Church came up with it about 1,900 years before Hollywood made Back to the Future movies, and it probably got just as many laughs.
    The Old Testament
     
    You can’t have a New Testament without having an old one first and, since the Christian religion was an