is from one of the Nag Hammadi Library Gospels (I forget which one), where boy Jesus keeps killing frogs and bringing them back to life. The other kids start making fun of him, and Jesus playfully pushes one of his pals from the roof of a building, thus killing him. Everyone is mortified, and a crowd grows around the dead child, but Jesus just nonchalantly brings his friend back to life, like no harm no foul.

Gee, I wonder why THAT story never made it into the holy canon of the Four Gospels?

Hence the cryptic ditty:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Stole a cow and away they run

But, when you think about it, it now makes sense why we know nothing about Jesus from childhood to adulthood, and perhaps explains all the rumors about him "traveling to the East" during those early years. No wonder he had to high-tail it out of there for awhile, just to let things cool. (The first Council of Nicaea just couldn't get the story straight, apparently, so they left this part out.)

Those same "gnostic", (i.e. "heretical)" gospels also spin the fine tale that Jesus put Judas (his (half?)-brother, btw) up to betraying him for those 30 pieces of silver. The Hanged Man was in on the messianic scheme! Wow. Dan Brown ain't got nothing on that yarn.

Worthy of a R. Crumb Comic book, such tales...

As Timothy Leary once opined, "Who owns the Jesus property?"

And don't even get me started on the hoary nonsense surrounding The Prophet (but at least there is evidence that he actually existed, so... there's that, I guess?).

Circumambulate the meteor, my friends, and take a deep breath, for it's all so much wilder and weirder than any Marvel adventure.

I think that was in the Coptic gospels, hard to say, I read all this stuff so long ago.

This is what they fill in between his birth and impressing Rabbis at 12, then disappearing again until he's 30. They had to put something in there and it had to be miraculous. The reality for a Jewish man at the time would have been marriage and children, and they couldn't have that for a god on earth, women are so icky doodle.

So they stuck in all this miracle stuff, making him come off as a particularly vicious brat, just like his OT daddy.

All because they had to kick him upstairs, Roman style, to be a god.

also wrote an amazing book Making History in which someone figures out a way to make sure Hitler was never born. Turns out things are even worse without Hitler as with him.

I encounter "Xtians" who don't want to part with their CROSS necklace, get flustered and preachy at us when we ask them to remove their jewelry.
To begin with, hospitals everywhere are getting really tired of the "you lost my diamond brooch" scam and requiring patients sign "not responsible for your shit" clauses now.
Secondarily, it was a hidden "cross" necklace someone "religiously" wore into an MR scanner that nearly choked the patient to death upon entering the machine.
Recently (no mention who, where, etc... hippa) a patient who became indignant about the CROSS this Pt insisted not to be removed insisted it has NEVER been removed in XX number of years, made the neccessary notations about this, then had to laugh when obviously this person was hospitalized extensively without a trace of said necklace per images.
And these are the least annoying aspects I know of the churchy sort.

If the Devil rules over anywhere, it is Patía, where my wife was born.