Chapter 37

28 March, 2014
An Abandoned Methodist Church,
Charlottesville, Virginia

“Do you, Ted, take this woman, Sarah, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, honor, and obey, for better or worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” I asked Mayor Ted Lansing according to the rather unorthodox wedding vows that Sarah and he cooked up together.

She had always been the dominant partner in their relationship, so this just made it official. I was hardly shocked and if this made them both happy and harmonious, it wasn’t my place to judge, not even as a Prophet. Besides, there was an upside for Ted in that he was to get some more wives pretty soon to add to his domestic bliss. The chosen bride was a Prophetess in her own right, too, a daughter to an angel and a mortal woman, so he was always going to be second fiddle to her once her appointment became public knowledge. This simply soothed the potential ruffled feathers of a public official who now had to live in the shadow of a cleric.

Well, at least we Prophets weren’t like the Taliban, who overran most of Afghanistan the very moment that Western civilization fell apart. We didn’t punish and persecute half of the populace in the name of our God, our faith. Evidently, not all theocracies were created equal. That thought made me smirk, even as Sarah and Ted did for reasons of their own.

“I do,” Ted lit a cigarette just as he formally surrendered any pretense of his manly freedom to his newlywed wife.

“Do you, Sarah, take this man, Ted, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, cherish, and guide, for better or worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” I turned to the lovely bride, now knocked up by yours truly, though it was hardly visible yet.

Damn, that thought reminded me of the film Valmont, with the scene where Jeffrey Jones married Fairuza Balk (okay, their characters wed, but you get my point ... besides, how many folks would recognize the names of said characters?)! Fairuza looked quite adorable in that role, too, the young French bride pregnant to another man, namely the notorious Sebastian Valmont. It was Valmont’s last laugh in the film, of course. While there was no animosity between Ted and me, it gave me no small satisfaction to know that my half-angelic spawn grew inside Sarah’s semi-celestial womb.

Of course, the fact that Ted knowingly married a woman pregnant by me was even more exhilarating to me. Well, for him, there was the double honor of marrying a Prophetess and raising the seed of a Prophet. Not to mention the prospect of impregnating each of his wives once they were ready to conceive again held some appeal to His Honor, the Mayor of the Free City of Charlottesville. I could scarcely fault his enthusiasm for that, especially in a heavily depopulated city such as this.

“I do,” Sarah interrupted my thoughts with her easy and decisive answer.

“Then, by the power vested in me by the King of Heaven as a Prophet in His Name, I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride,” I coughed, pretending not to notice how much of my cum oozed past Sarah’s garters toward her feet.

“Fuck, yeah!” Ted became very aggressive for a cuck as he dipped his lusty bride and made out with her in public.

The smell and sight of my jizz went unmentioned, but he must have noticed it. After all, I had taken his bride not long before in the former minister’s study. I chuckled at that thought, thinking of how many ministers must have had secret liaisons with church secretaries before going on to preach and pontificate about “Christian morals” from the pulpit. I was no hypocrite like them, but I could understand why they yielded to such temptations, giving the lie to the idea that their “family values” were sustainable or realistic as a code of sexual ethics for a species of clever apes.

Once one accepted that the so-called “Fall of Man,” “original sin,” and “sinful nature” were rooted in myths or distortions of fact, whatever happened in Eden, yeah, that could be quite liberating, even for an archangel’s spawn. Lust was natural, healthy, and proper, not an abomination. It wasn’t a sin. Yeah, the new God and the new commandments were definitely a marked improvement upon the old.

“Oh, that’s easy. Adam, Eve, and Lilith ... they were real enough, but they were just people. The smartest people on Earth, due to a little slight... ‘guided mutation’ of their DNA by Jehovah. The old Boss changed his mind about a few things at times and then tried to cover it up to an extent, such as his one attempt to make a Lawgiver who was an actual demigod,” Marcy whispered in my ear while pulling me aside.

“You mean Jesus of Nazareth, don’t you?” I asked her directly as I began taking her in a rough manner in what was supposed to be a discreet corner of the sanctuary.

“Yep. Aka Jesus Christ. Yeah, that went poorly, not to mention left a bad taste in Joseph’s mouth about Jesus and Mary for the rest of his days. He ended up drinking heavily, spending a lot of time in Sepphoris, and connecting to unsavory persons. He was stoned to death for blasphemy after drunkenly speaking the truth about his firstborn’s true paternity. Jehovah took pity on him due to his own adultery with the man’s wife and let him into Heaven.

“That’s how Jesus’s career began a little early. The Gospels were way off about his age at the first sermon. He was just sixteen when he got his start. A teenage hothead who quickly got his heart set on becoming the Messiah. He never worked another day as a day laborer, which Joseph was, not a carpenter in fact. Well, Jehovah certainly had plans for Jesus, though they sorta fell through and the old Boss had to improvise a bit ... even retcon a bit, if you catch my drift. Everything was kickstarted by Joseph’s claims about Jesus.

“The Pharisees wanted to make sure that Jesus wasn’t a mamzer. That was their only real beef with him back then, other than his youthful rashness. Should he even be allowed into the synagogue if he was a bastard? Naturally, none of them believed the actual story. Who would? Some illiterate peasant in a backwater Galilean hamlet couldn’t possibly be begotten of the Most High, let alone through adultery.

“Mary was more or less forced to deny the claims of divine bastardy to save herself and her brats from death by stoning. Jesus tried to walk a fine line of ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ denial for a while, but then he was arrested by soldiers of Herod Antipas. He must have impressed the man, at least for a while, because he ended up spending a lot of time at court with the tetrarch before he was released from his custody.

“This, unfortunately, branded Jesus as a Herodian, and led to even more conflicts with the Pharisees, resulting in some fiery discourses between them. In the process, he gained respect for them and vice versa, however, leading to a phase where Antipas grew restless and feared that the Nazarene had deserted him. Jesus’s teachings were always rooted in a kind of self-righteousness and arrogance, but now they seemed to be a bit too simon-pure for the prince’s preference. A little too much John the Baptist 2.0 there for his taste.

“Rather than kill Jesus, though, Herod summoned him back to his court and offered up Salome, his beloved niece, to the rabble-rouser. Jesus took the bait, which bought him a few more years of life, but utterly ruined him in Galilee. He had zero credibility left and his good intentions had indeed left him quite the hellish road to travel.

“Desperate, Jesus traveled to Samaria, Judaea, and other parts of the Levant in search of more acolytes who wouldn’t turn on him. By now, he had turned to some major heresies by rabbinical standards, and he even developed quite the following among people despised and excluded by the synagogues. Prostitutes, publicans, anyone basically seen as ‘second-class’ Jews and quite desperate for acceptance turned to the man.