Editorial Statement

I heard a true war story sixth–hand, though I came close to hearing it third–hand.  This is how it came to me: A friend who had recently returned from boot camp – let’s call him Jones – had met someone who had been deployed in Iraq – let’s call him Smith.  Smith was temporarily the boss of a boy that he did not meet, but who went home early with a lost arm and a lost eye.  Smith heard what had happened to the boy when he returned home and met the friend of the boy’s girlfriend’s brother.  She told him the story, and talked about how now the boy did bar tricks with the glass eye.  I’ll bet you five dollars I can lick my eye, he’d say.  They pieced it all together and realized that this was the boy that he had temporarily been the boss of while they were together in Baghdad, and some time later he told Jones who told me.

This worries me: the distance.  This shred of a war story is what I cling to; this one story that I haven’t gotten from the media, but that has come to me in the old way, way of mouth, which seems more natural.  And I don’t think I’m unique in this situation.  As each new storyteller emerges, one step further from the experience, fiction seeps into the tale.  It seems that more weight is placed on the how – on the telling of it – than on the what – the fact that these things actually took place.  But as the story is distanced from the source, the facts recede: the how has little with which to work.  The result is a shoddy story, with some boy’s reality being used as the punch-line.  It disturbs me that pure fiction can sometimes touch me more than such true war stories.  Of course, I gaped at my friend’s story, but even as I gaped, I felt the self-conscious judgment: this is rehearsed, it’s not sincere.

What I want to know is why it can seem so easy to be sincere about what never happened, and yet so difficult to be sincere about what really did happen, what’s happening every day, somewhere in the world – about what matters?  Does fiction hold the world’s stories to a standard that they will never be able to match?  Are words and experience like schoolboys and schoolgirls, always running in different directions, and when they meet are they awkward and shy?  Do they demand two different types of sincerity?  Is it possible to have any idea what it feels like to lose an arm and an eye for your country without lying in the sand, bleeding and alone?

I hope that it is possible to have some idea, that each time we meet another person we don’t simply nod our heads in respect to that which we do not know.  Words can seem at times like trinkets – playthings, but when one gets to turning a phrase for turning a phrase’s sake, it could be worthwhile to recall the tremendous power of the words that we use every day.  They have the power – and the burden – of expressing what we would otherwise be left to experience alone.

— Bob Borek & the editors of Leland

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Draw (3)

— George Xander Morris

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The Death of the Historical Jesus

By Nick Benavides

Being a Christian in the United States today entails more than just having a set of beliefs about God and the afterlife. In many cases church membership implies holding conservative positions on a number of political and social issues including abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage, attitudes towards the government, the “war on terror,” and many others. Although there are many churches in the United States which are liberal in their social and political views, the most vocal members of the church are often the most conservative. Known as “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” Christians, this group has grown increasingly political in recent years. One need only browse the websites of groups such as the Christian Coalition of America to see that many Christians are no longer satisfied with simply teaching the gospel story and inculcating conventional moral values. Instead, their focus has grown and shifted outward: the Christian community now plays a critical activist role in debates over many social, political and economic issues. No longer voting as individuals but as a powerful collective, the Christian right has indeed become a significant political force, taking “faith based” stances on such issues as abortion, homosexual marriage, and the “war on terror.”

This Christian entrance into the political arena has inevitably engendered conflict with political groups comprised of people who do not share the Christians’ values. Every day the news is filled with reports of passionate conflict between the two groups, leading both sides to lament that the nation has grown increasingly divided both morally and politically. On the one hand, many American’s support for gay marriage and abortion makes the Evangelicals feel that the country is slipping into moral decline. The Reverend Jerry Falwell has warned the Republican Party “if the candidate running for president is not pro-life, pro-family… you’re not going to win” and that “you cannot be a sincere committed born-again believer who takes the Bible seriously and vote for a pro-choice anti-family candidate.” By anti-family, of course, the Reverend Falwell is referring to a pro-gay marriage stance. It is positions like Falwell’s, argued mostly from a commitment to the Bible, that so worry the Christians’ secular counterparts. To those outside the evangelical tradition, it does not make sense to argue for political and social issues based on faith in Jesus and the Bible. Both sides eye the other with a considerable degree of suspicion and constantly question the motivations of their political opponents.

I myself was raised as an evangelical Christian and personally believe that both groups sincerely desire to do the right thing. Unfortunately, there is very little reasonable dialogue which takes place between both parties, so it often seems like a compromise is impossible. Yet it is my conviction that if we together examine the basis for the beliefs held by Evangelicals we can clear up much of the misunderstanding between Christians and non-Christians. For the Evangelicals, what it ultimately comes down to is this: the belief that Jesus physically rose from the dead. It is this resurrection that proves to them that Jesus was God and provides the basis for their belief that the Bible is divinely inspired, clear and inerrant in all its teachings. From these teachings flow the evangelical stances on abortion, homosexuality and a host of other political issues. Everything in the evangelical view of the world rests on this one statement: “Jesus is risen.” The objection that secular liberals have to evangelical Christian politics and social mores is thus also grounded in the resurrection of Jesus. They do not believe it occurred and often view those who believe it did with disdain. However, I feel this disdain is itself rooted in a lack of understanding of the significance of the resurrection and what it originally meant. It is clear then that to really have a meaningful discussion about these topics, both sides must first have clear knowledge of what the resurrection was and was not.

I seek to demonstrate that our modern understanding of the resurrection is extremely different from how early Christians viewed the event and from how we should view it now. For them it would have been absurd to say that Jesus was alive and walked out of the tomb. They knew full well that Jesus was really, truly dead. The concept of the resurrection was initially a metaphorical affirmation of the value of the life that Jesus lived and the truth of the faith that he held. Over time, however, the metaphor was transformed into a literal belief with the effect that it is now difficult for Christians to think about the resurrection as meaning anything other than an empty tomb and a physical resurrection. The focus shifted from what happened during Jesus’ life to what happened after his death. Instead of emphasizing the radical acceptance and table fellowship necessary to bring God’s empire to life right now, Christianity today emphasizes the afterlife and adherence to the moral codes necessary to get there. It is these moral codes that form the basis of the Christian’s emphatic condemnation of homosexuality, amongst other things. For the Evangelicals, returning to a traditional understanding of the resurrection does not mean that one has to abandon the Christian faith but rather that one must re-imagine it. For the secular liberals, this view of the resurrection should lead to a greater acceptance of Christianity and respect for the person of Jesus. By positing a re-imagined Christianity which puts more emphasis on Jesus’ radical acceptance of social outcasts and the Empire of God than on Jesus’ death and how to reach heaven, we can come to a place where both parties can sit down and reason effectively with one another.

Beliefs do not spring fully formed from the ground, but rather evolve over time, becoming more and more complex as different layers of interpretation are added on. Noted scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Stephen Patterson and the men and women who participated in the Jesus Seminar have spent years attempting to peel back those layers of interpretation to get at whom Jesus was and what the resurrection really meant. This editorial is deeply indebted to their work and will undertake their task in reverse: starting from Jesus’ life I will chronologically work through the pertinent New Testament texts and demonstrate how the concept of the resurrection evolved over time. It is impossible to understand the meaning of the resurrection without understanding Jesus’ life, so it is with his life that I will begin.

Yeshua, as Jesus was actually called in his day, was a Jewish peasant who lived in the beginning of the first century. He grew up in Galilee, in the northern part of Israel in a multicultural area displaying both Greek and Roman influences. Most of his fellow Jews were poor farmers or craftsman who had had their land expropriated by the Roman Empire. Yeshua’s experience would have been shaped by two powerful social structures: the Roman Empire’s occupation of Israel and the Jewish religion’s cleanliness codes.

During Yeshua’s time, Israel was a captive state of the powerful Roman Empire. Roman control was almost total, and during his youth many of Yeshua’s friends and relatives would still have had first or second-hand memories of the Roman legions’ terrifying conquest of the land. The indignity of life in an occupied country hung over the Jews like a weight, reminding them of God’s promise to protect Israel and causing them to look forward to a Messiah who would free them from Roman rule. Roman occupation also brought with it staggering economic change. Jewish peasants had their land expropriated by Roman authorities and were forced to work fields they had once owned for a paltry subsistence wage. For these disenfranchised Jews living on the margins of survival, starvation was a serious and ever-present concern, making the sharing of food a powerful act defining who counted as one’s family.

Although the Jews were starving, the Roman Empire was enjoying the fruits of Caesar the Augustus’ conquests and was exceedingly wealthy. The economic and political structure of the empire was based on a series of pyramidal patron-client relationships radiating out from Rome. Wealthy and powerful patrons in Rome would offer wealth and political favors to their clients in return for loyalty and support for their interests from below. Those clients in turn were patrons for people lower on the social ladder. These relationships extended from Rome into the farthest reaches of the Empire with the Galilean Jews at the very bottom of this hierarchy, with little to give and nothing to gain. To maintain this structure of patron-client relationships the Roman Empire emphasized the values necessary to maintain it: fides, pietas, familia – loyalty, piety, and Roman family values. Patron-client relationships ran mostly through family groups and it was to them that you had to be loyal.

On top of this clearly oppressive economic and political structure, Yeshua and his fellow peasants also had to bear up under an intricate cleanliness code. The religious leaders of his day had expanded upon the laws of Moses, creating a dizzyingly complex system of rules dividing those who were “clean” and Godly from those who were “unclean” and not in a right relationship with God. Although following these codes may have been possible for some of the Jewish elite living in Jerusalem, it was out of the question for the Galilean Jews just barely eking out a living; they simply didn’t have time for such things. As a result, most of Yeshua’s fellows were not only being crushed under the Roman system of patronage but they were also being pushed to the margins of their own people and forced to think of themselves as unacceptable in the eyes of God.

Into this world of oppression Yeshua brought a radical anti-establishment message, proclaiming the arrival of the Empire of God through table fellowship. Yeshua wandered the length and breadth of Israel teaching that the Empire of God that the Jews were so eagerly awaiting had already arrived, if only they would just recognize and accept it. To illustrate this point Yeshua established the tradition of table fellowship, breaking bread with the lowest members of society: prostitutes, Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and others who were ritually unclean. Although today Yeshua’s table fellowships are seen as a rather innocuous act, they were actually revolutionary and seditious, directly attacking the oppressive power structures of Rome and the Jewish religious elite.

By eating with the ritually unclean, Yeshua proclaimed the end of the cleanliness code and of the separation between clean and unclean, social insiders and social outsiders. His table fellowships were a living rebuke to the religious authorities. “And you experts in the law,” Yeshua said, “woe to you, because you load the people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them” (Luke 11:46). Yeshua’s table fellowships freed the people from the burden of following the complex code and assured them that they were loved and accepted by God. Yet Yeshua did not see himself as breaking from traditional Judaism and he had no intention of founding a new religion. Rather, he saw the Empire of God he proclaimed as fulfilling the ancient promise that the traditional legal code could not deliver on. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” Yeshua told the Pharisees, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 15:17). Where the impossible demands of the law failed to bring about the Empire of God, the radical acceptance of Yeshua’s table fellowships could succeed.

If Yeshua’s message was an affront to the religious authorities, it was viewed by Roman authorities as nothing less than a direct assault on their empire. Remember that many of the Jews at this time were living on the verge of starvation; sharing food was an extremely significant act reserved for members of ones family. By sharing food with prostitutes and the ritually unclean, Yeshua redefined family and created a new community where the outcasts of society would be loved and have a place to belong. This redefinition of family disrupted the patron-client system that maintained the Roman Empire’s control over the people. As Stephen Patterson observed,

Family loyalty was the linchpin of the entire system of patronage that held the empire together. Jesus pulled that pin, creating a new family with new loyalties. Their faith was directed to another empire, another God.

Calling this redefinition of family the “Empire of God” was not merely of theoretical or theological concern. In an empire where the emperor was considered divine and religion and politics were inextricably linked, proclaiming the “Empire of God” was nothing short of proclaiming a revolution.

Yeshua’s revolutionary ministry only lasted about three years until Pontius Pilate ordered him crucified outside of Jerusalem during the Passover Festival at about 32CE. The Jewish religious leaders had accused him of blasphemy and the Romans had accused him of treason. Like many other Jews of his day, Yeshua was executed without fanfare after a meaningless trial. Yeshua ultimately died refusing to deny the same message that he had lived: the present appearance of the Empire of God.

During his life, Yeshua’s message was crystal clear. The Empire of God has arrived; it is up to you to make it a reality. Yeshua was not the point of his own message, he came to spread the Empire of God, not create a Yeshua brand religion. After his death however, things began to get muddied. While the earliest texts relating to Yeshua do not even mention his arrest, trial and execution, later books treat the subject differently. Over time, more and more emphasis gets placed on the resurrection and on achieving salvation in the afterlife. Paul speaks of Yeshua being “awakened” and “exalted” by God, introducing an apocalyptic framework, but does not mention a bodily resurrection. Mark pushes further, mentioning an empty tomb while Matthew, Luke, and John all offer stories of Yeshua’s physical body being seen after his death. If Yeshua’s message while he was alive was the faith he built his life around, why did this evolution in interpretation and emphasis occur?

The earliest known texts treating the life of Yeshua that are the most critical are the Gospel of Thomas and the Q Gospel. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Egypt in 1945 and is composed of a collection of wisdom sayings attributed to Yeshua. It is dated to around 50CE, before which time it likely circulated orally among different Christian communities. The Gospel of Thomas does not show even the faintest knowledge of the resurrection of Yeshua. Instead it is concerned with showing the way Yeshua re-imagined the world as the Empire of God. It is not apocalyptic in nature and focuses on Yeshua’s message as the point, not Yeshua himself. If the resurrection were truly a critical part of the early Christian faith, one would assume that it would appear in this gospel. Additionally, even if the resurrection occurred but was not an important part of the faith, one would expect it to be an event extraordinary enough to at least warrant passing mention. It is, however, conspicuously absent from this text, leading one to conclude that the earliest Christians did not believe that Yeshua was physically resurrected.

The Q Gospel is a hypothetical text redacted from the common parts of Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark. Although no physical text of the Q Gospel exists, there is a strong scholarly consensus that it existed as an oral tradition dating back to about the death of Yeshua. Similar to Thomas, it completely lacks any reference to the resurrection of Yeshua. Again, if the early Christians thought that the resurrection of Yeshua was the point, it is extremely odd that it is not included in this source.

The man who came to be known as the apostle Paul was an extremely zealous Pharisee, one of the Jewish religious elites, and a proponent of the cleanliness code. He was so outraged by the Jews who abandoned the cleanliness code in favor of Yeshua’s table fellowships that he traveled the ancient world persecuting the early Christians and dragging them to prison. Eventually, however, Paul was won over the by the Christians’ love for one another and embraced Yeshua’s vision for the Empire of God. Having left behind his religious tradition, Paul had to justify the validity of the movement he had joined. Paul was not merely writing to record history, but to prove a point: That Yeshua’s vision for the world was more valid than the vision of the clean-unclean divide. Additionally, Paul needed to explain why, if Yeshua was on the side of God, he was allowed to be killed by the Romans. The answer that Paul strikes upon is not that Yeshua was physically resurrected but that he was “awakened” and “exalted” by God after his death.

Paul fleshes out his answer in the texts he wrote between 50 and 60 CE by interpreting Yeshua through an apocalyptic framework and situating him in a long line of powerful prophets who had the authority to speak on behalf of God. All the powerful Jewish prophets before Yeshua exhibited a pattern of persecution and vindication in their lives. The prophet would arrive on the scene, speak on behalf of God, be persecuted by wicked men and eventually be vindicated by God. Yet God not vindicate Yeshua while he was alive. To the contrary, Yeshua died an ignominious death as a revolutionary at the hands of the Romans. Paul’s solution to the lack of vindication during Yeshua’s life was to argue that Yeshua was vindicated after his death. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul states that “God greatly exalted [Yeshua], and bestowed on him the name that is above every other name” (Philippians 2:9). If God exalted Yeshua then his life fits the familiar persecution and vindication framework making him a legitimate prophet and his vision for the world authoritative. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul states that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” and that Yeshua appeared to Peter, to the Twelve disciples, more than five hundred Christians, to James and finally to Paul. Although it may appear at first glance that Paul is describing a physical resurrection, it is important to note that the Greek word that gets translated as “raised” is egêrthai, which literally means “awakened.” Yeshua was not physically raised from the dead but was rather “awakened” by God to be “exalted” to God’s right hand. This is an expression of the importance of Yeshua. Similarly, when Paul speaks of Yeshua appearing to people he uses the Greek word apokalupsis which means “to be revealed.” Again, this does not mean that Yeshua physically appeared to Paul, but that Paul realized the truth of Yeshua’s faith.

Apocalypticism views the struggle between good and evil in terms of a cosmic battle between God and Satan. In the Jewish tradition God’s victory over evil is marked by the resurrection of the righteous slain. Paul was very familiar with this manner of thinking, which was popular in his home town of Jerusalem and interpreted Yeshua through this framework. Yeshua’s exaltation to heaven meant that Yeshua was the “first fruits” of the general resurrection anticipated in the apocalyptic framework (I Corinthians 15:20). Since Yeshua was raised to Paradise everyone else who died after him would have that same opportunity. In order to join Yeshua in Paradise and be saved, one did not need to have faith in Jesus but rather accept the faith of Jesus, a critical distinction that is lost on most Christians today due to a poor translation of Romans 3:21-26.

Indeed, Paul over and over again emphasizes the life and faith of Yeshua over and against the death of Yeshua. Later in Romans Paul states that, “if while we were still enemies [with God as a result of the cleanliness code], we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, we will be saved by his life” (Romans 5:10) Although it may have been Yeshua’s death that reconciled man to God, it was Yeshua’s life and his faith that had the power to save. For Paul, Yeshua himself was not divine, but his faith was. Accepting Yeshua’s faith and not Yeshua himself is what brings one the same exaltation that Yeshua experienced. Finally, as if to drive his point home, Paul later emphasizes that the resurrection of the dead is exclusively spiritual and not physical in nature (I Corinthians 15:42-44).

As Stephen Patterson points out, for Paul, the statement “Yeshua is alive” means that “Yeshua was right.” The faith of Yeshua is the point, not Yeshua himself or what happened to him after his death. Paul’s solution to the problem of how to justify abandoning the cleanliness codes was a brilliant one. By looking back into the Hebrew Scriptures for guidance, Paul interpreted Yeshua’s life in the prophetic and apocalyptic frameworks, theologically justifying Yeshua’s faith. Unfortunately this move opened the door to further interpretive developments that ultimately shifted the focus away from Yeshua’s life and the Empire of God to Yeshua himself, his “physical resurrection” and the afterlife.

Mark is the first Christian author to build upon Paul’s apocalyptic interpretation of Yeshua. Mark wrote his gospel soon after the failed Jewish revolt of 66-70CE that led to the deaths of over 100,000 Jews and the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. For Mark, as for Paul, the task at hand was not merely to record history, but to provide a justification for remaining faithful to Yeshua’s message in the face of lethal oppression. Mark achieves this goal by reading an apocalyptic narrative into Yeshua’s life, having Yeshua predict the destruction of the temple, and by ending his gospel with an image of Yeshua’s empty tomb: the obvious implication of which is that Yeshua physically rose from the dead (Mark 13, Mark 16).

Mark should not necessarily be condemned for his embellishment of Yeshua’s life; he merely did what he thought was necessary to hold together the young movement built on Yeshua’s faith. Believing that Yeshua had the power to read the future and predict the temple’s destruction made it easier to accept the reassuring promise of a quickly approaching apocalypse that Mark placed in Yeshua’s mouth. This apocalyptic belief that God would soon radically break into the world and right injustice likely helped many Christians maintain their faith during those trying times.

Mark was too subtle to resort to presenting Yeshua’s physically resurrected body to the reader, but his depiction of the empty tomb hinted that Yeshua was physically risen. This depiction of the tomb was originally intended to underscore Mark’s main point that Yeshua was the Messiah and that his faith was true. Later, extra material was added on to the Gospel of Mark that did have Yeshua physically appear after his death. These scenes however, were not part of Mark’s personal composition but were added to bring Mark “up to speed” with the later Gospels which did depict Yeshua as physically resurrected.

Although Mark’s version of Yeshua’s life significantly alters what likely happened, the subsequent Gospel writers are the ones who get truly carried away. When Matthew and Luke pen their Gospels between 85 and 90 CE the emphasis on Yeshua’s physical resurrection becomes almost overwhelming. Building on Mark’s account, their Gospels have Yeshua physically appearing to numerous people after his death and it is at this point that the focus of Christianity begins to seriously lose its original orientation. More and more Yeshua is being depicted as divine, with his resurrection beginning to overshadow the significance of his faith and way of life.

One story which particularly demonstrates how creative the gospel writers got in their work is an account of a mass resurrection which appears in Matthew. Matthew 27:52-53 tells us that after Yeshua’s resurrection,

“The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city [Jerusalem] and appeared to many people.”

It would be difficult for any modern observer to take this talk of people physically rising from the dead seriously. One could imagine what a stir it would create if hundreds of dead people from the cemeteries of San Francisco rose from their graves and started wandering around on Market Street. The newspapers, radio and TV would be filled with news of the extraordinary event and everyone would have some story to tell about what happened that day. The world would hold its breath and stop to ponder the significance of the resurrections; history would be forever impacted. One would expect a similarly strong reaction in Jerusalem to the resurrections depicted in Matthew, yet this is not what we observe.

If this sort of thing actually happened, it would serve as excellent proof that the faith of Yeshua was worth holding, and that Yeshua was truly something special. Because of this it would make sense for the event to appear in all Christian accounts of the time. Yet none of the other canonical gospels record this event, an extremely puzzling omission if Matthew’s story were literally true. Additionally, an event of this uniquely unusually nature would certainly make it into the Roman annals of history, but neither Flavius Josephus nor Tacitus, Roman historians who do mention Yeshua’s life and his execution, record resurrection of Jesus or the mass resurrection mentioned in Matthew. The lack of corroboration from such critical sources should lead us to believe that Matthew’s story was a fabrication. What should be taken away from this account is not the belief that people physically rose from the dead, but rather the recognition that in a pre-modern society filled with myths and a complex pantheon of gods, such resurrection stories were often told and were readily accepted by the people. The inclusion of such a story in Matthew ultimately serves to underscore the efforts the gospel writers were making to try and justify the faith of Yeshua as being legitimate.

John takes the process begun in Mark and furthered by Matthew and Luke to a whole new level. In John’s Gospel, written around 90CE, Yeshua is completely divine and existed with God before his earthly birth (John 1). The post-resurrection appearances in John are the most vivid and dramatic of all the gospel accounts; at this point they have become the centerpiece of a new faith based on the person of Yeshua and not his message. When Yeshua is arrested his voice alone has the power to cause a large group of Roman soldiers to fall trembling to their knees (John 18). On the cross, Yeshua does not so much die but willfully give up his spirit, in total control until the very end (John 19). It is in John that we truly begin to lose sight of Yeshua’s humanity in favor of a God-man who is in complete control.

Having already passed through the interpretive frameworks of Paul, Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Yeshua that remains when John is through with his Gospel bears only passing resemblance to the Yeshua depicted in Thomas and the Q Gospel. Over the course of a mere 60 years, Yeshua changed from a person just like you or I who risked his life for a vision of God’s Empire to God himself. Yeshua started out as a brave human being but wound up a supremely confident deity. He began as an empowering prophet drawing attention to the willful creation of God’s Empire, but ended as a transcendent being demanding worship and devotion. From a Yeshua who insisted that the focus of our lives should be on others and radical acceptance we get a Yeshua who insists that we focus on and radically accept him as divine and risen from the dead. At this point, one can see that the heart of Yeshua’s message was ultimately lost in the interpretation of his death.

If Yeshua was a human being just like us, we must remember that he had faith in much the same way that we do. Like us, he had no guarantee that he was correct. He believed that the old system of cleanliness codes had been abolished and that the law of love and acceptance trumped the laws of judgment and exclusion. Yeshua’s faith was a radical faith that was going places; it was attempting to include more and more people in that category we call “us,” in the hopes that eventually there would be no more “them.” But at Yeshua’s abrupt death, a transformation occurred. His followers made Christianity not about Yeshua’s faith, but about Yeshua himself. Had the focus been on the faith of Yeshua, instead of faith in Yeshua, Christianity may have continued his project of the loving inclusion of more and more social outcasts. Instead, his faith was cut off where it stopped in favor of faith in him. What was a living, vibrant, and courageously held faith of progressive social activism became one with static dogmas and a redrawn clean/unclean divide. Yeshua was taking a risk with his life, the ultimate risk. He was staking his entire existence upon the belief that God was more interested in us loving each other than in defining who was righteous and who was not, who was going to ascend to heaven and who would be left behind.

For us as it was for Paul, the meaning of “Jesus is alive” should be “Jesus was right.” Restoring the focus of Christianity from Yeshua’s physical resurrection, back to his life and practice of radical acceptance, would make at least some of the disagreements between Christianity and the culture at large disappear. When beliefs about Yeshua’s physical resurrection no longer guarantee the inerrancy of the Bible and the political views derived from it, Evangelicals would be more open to new and different political stances. Christianity could become an Empire of God where homosexuals, ex-convicts, homeless people and others who are “ritually unclean” would be welcome as equals at the table of fellowship. Yet even if modern Christians reject this view and a subsequent return to the roots of Christianity, this examination of the resurrection should draw attention to the humanly constructed nature of the Bible. Paul and his counterparts were interpreting the life of Yeshua, doing their best but ultimately making it up as they went along. Understanding this should offer Christians the freedom to reconsider the exclusionary doctrines in Christianity that reconstruct the ancient clean-unclean divide that Yeshua worked so hard to tear down. It is up to us to continue the heroic task of interpreting Yeshua’s life and faith that Paul began.

Yet lest this essay seems to be demanding compromise only from the Evangelicals, I have a hope for the secular liberals as well. Those of us who do not find religion a useful way to find meaning in our lives must learn how to dialogue respectfully with those who do. We too must understand the difference between the person of Yeshua and the message now preached in his name. There are many valuable lessons we can learn from his life and teachings, and we should not reject religion outright simply because it has at times gone astray from its noble ideals. The insensitive polemics of Richard Dawkins and others like him will not help to further the cause of human solidarity. We must learn to understand and respect Christianity, arguing our points respectfully, effectively and without derision. In the end, armed with improved knowledge about the resurrection, Christians and secular liberals alike should feel free to develop new views on divisive sociopolitical issues such as homosexuality that will further the radical acceptance Yeshua preached as the Empire of God.

Download “The Death of the Historical Jesus” as a PDF

Aubade

If you ever leave him, this room will still know him
like you did not leave him. In the gold bowl

plums hard with wanting, apples ready,
stems poised, to spring outward. As if nothing

could bear itself, objects sickened by their forms.
The wall aching where a thrown glass once

burst like a star, the mirror heavy with your
swollen face. Until he wakes, you touch yourself

and think of vomiting: you could bend over,
cheek near the carpet, coughing, sweet for hours.

— Shamala Gallagher

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Photo (8)

— Mae Ryan

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Family Photograph, Thanksgiving 2005

You, in your football sweatshirt and your hair
cropped so short that after months of having watched it flow into your eyes
our grandfather says that you look like a Buddha-monk,

gazing down at the table with your hands in your pockets,
your wide-mouthed grin holding no more traces of the
brackets gone at last from a jawbone still too large –

smirking down at the Thanksgiving turkey,
though this year at your insistence it is a turducken:
chicken inside a duck inside a turkey,

that our father and grandmother got up at six a.m. to stuff,
the pater (so you call him) shaking his head while he measured out
four cups of salt, one of sugar to brine the meat, stirred gently

and left to soak overnight for best flavor while
the mater shook her head to leave you alone.
It is your last Thanksgiving before

you are to leave behind your library book sale novels, your
collection of unlabeled CD’s, your guitar with the sour top string
that you never would tune though I cringed each time

you picked out Metallica on a failing upper note,
and the one perfect hole punched, round, in the dining room wall
from the time you leaned just an inch too far back in your chair.

When it was my turn I wanted dinner the way it always was:
standard American turkey and bubbling pots of Chinese broth,
But you, with your turducken,

declared a coup in mid-October, and our parents
could do nothing but nod, and follow along grumbling,
because after all, when you left,

who would clear our grandfather’s bowl from the table in the evenings,
turn the house upside down to find a sheet the right color
for a movie backdrop, fill the hard drive with music that nobody listened to,

or the desktop with spyware that blocked the internet for a month,
and absently swing the grocery bag containing birthday cake
around your knees so that after dinner we had to wipe the spattered icing

from the inside of the box? While the noise of guests thickens
about your skull-smooth fuzz and the steam scrolls up to the windows
behind you, you press your thoughts towards the game, and how you stood

with one hand snuggled tight to the helmet, hoping to ignore the band
that droned laboriously on behind, because you could not turn,
lest the shrill of a piccolo cased one year in dust draw you back again

into the shadow of the sister who watches you now: little brother,
grown up, smirking down at the brown-gray layers of fowl
with all the triumph in the world.

— Iris Law

Download “Family Photograph, Thanksgiving 2005” as a PDF

Illustration From the Emperor’s New Clothes

— Kellie Brownell and Killeen Hanson

Download “Illustration From the Emperor’s New Clothes” as a PDF

A Modern Guide to Pi

By Steven Tagle

     “I never planned to become a pi junkie. I never thought I’d become intimately familiar with the Holy Grail of geeks and math majors, or know that its sixty-forth digit was three. But handsome Derek made me learn it, digit by stubborn digit, as we raced up the stairwell of the psychology department each morning on our way to class.
     “Let’s go, Sammy!” he cried, leaping over the railing and onto the stairs. “3.1-4-1-5-9…”
     I hurried after him, clinging to the railing as if it were the lone cable strung over a bottomless pit. The staircase filled me with a continuous, numbing terror. The steps were made out of concrete, rectangular slabs precariously attached to a skinny white beam. As I climbed them, I could see through the stairs and through the stairs below them to the first and second floor landings. Climbing so high, so fast, activated my eczema. I scratched my arms for relief and focused on Derek’s calf muscles. They pumped up and down hypnotically, pistons beneath the skin.
      “…2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6…” We counted between breaths.
      “Faster!” he said, “faster!” He lifted his chin and swung his arms, coaxing numbers out of me like notes of music. Only Derek could make me recite sixty-four digits while running after him up a stairwell. As I trailed behind him, I thought once again that he should have pursued his master’s in drama, not psychology. The boy was almost twenty-five, but cute enough that he could still be immature and get away with it. Girls ran to him like well-trained rats, and he flirted shamelessly. I had known him for two years. The thought came to me often, flickering through my mind like some great accomplishment. Two whole years. My parents knew each other for less than a year before they got married. The first sixty-four digits of pi contained seven twos.
     “…2-6-4-3-3-8-3-2-7-9-5-0-2-8-8-4-1-9-7-1-6-9-3-9-9-3-7-5-1-0-5-8-2-0…” There were ninety steps in the stairwell, each step—each gap between the steps—a little piece of hell. I wondered what the ninetieth digit of pi was. An elevator soared past us, and I could hear its happy chiming through the walls. It chimed to the beat of pi.
     Some jerk posted a sign on the third floor landing that said “NO RUNNING.” It was shiny and new, with letters in bold caps, serious as a heart attack. I pointed it out to Derek to see what he would do. Grabbing the railing, he leapt onto the wall, tracking dirty sneaker prints across the sign. I kissed the “O” that his shoe missed, transforming it into a pair of thick, red lips.
     “You’re such a beauty,” he said.
     “Am I?” I wanted to hear him say it again.
     He cocked his head at me. “For a girl.”
     “…9-7-4-9-4-4-5-9-2-3!” I said. That was it. Sixty-four digits of pi.
     “3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5….” he replied.
     I grinned at him, and he grinned back. This guy better be worth it, I thought.

     If I concentrated hard enough, I could remember snippets of our life before pi. Taking the stairs each morning was one of our pre-pi rituals. That, too, was Derek’s doing. About a week before the quarter started, he accidentally hooked up with Blaine “Rabbit” Crawford, a guy from our lab he found adorably repressed. I had never paid too much attention to Blaine. I only knew him as the Rabbit King, a tall, pale guy who studied anger suppression in bunny rabbits and said “obviously” a lot when he got nervous. He was a six, a seven tops.
     “You should’ve seen him afterwards,” Derek moaned, nuzzling his face into the gap between my neck and shoulder. It was my first night back from a summer abroad, and we lay side by side in my bed, listening to the sounds of our new apartment. “It’s like I’m not meant to have any guy friends, like I’m unable to suppress the mildest attraction.” He hugged me tightly, and I struggled to be more present in his arms, to calm him with the simple pressure of my body against his. Boyfriends and hook-ups came and went, but friends filled beds when lovers were gone. “Why can’t they be like you, Sammy?” he said. “You’re more of a man than most of the guys I date anyway.” The guys he dated inevitably hurt him, and when he was soft and broken, he came to me. Consoling him was what I did best.
     After he hooked up with Rabbit, Derek gave up the elevator. I didn’t blame him. Throw me in an elevator with one of my ex-hook-ups, and I’d scratch my arms off before the doors closed. When the quarter started, he somehow convinced me to join him on his morning aerobics, running up and down five flights of stairs to class. “Come on,” he said, “we need the exercise.”

     After Derek crammed the sixty-fourth digit of pi into my brain, I lost the cognitive capacity for politeness or tact. The average person can fit about seven random digits into his short term memory. Sixty-four was a beast that had set up shop in my head. All this work for Mr. Pi the Pi Guy, and I still didn’t know any juicy details about him. We sat in the fifth floor conference room, waiting for Professor Owlan to arrive, when Derek prompted me to begin our twelfth repetition of pi.
     “Tell me his name or get lost,” I grumbled. Rabbit crouched at the front of the room, struggling to plug his clunky gray laptop into the projector so that he could present his research on anger suppression. He got so adorably tangled in his VGA cable that I found myself completely unwilling to help him.
     Derek swiveled his chair to face me. He didn’t seem phased by my demand, but when he opened his mouth, he broke into a smile so wide that the whole shape of his face changed. For a moment, he had difficulty forming words. “You won’t believe it,” he said finally. “Sam. His name’s Sam.”
     I’d often fantasized about Derek bringing home a guy named Sam. “We have the same name,” I’d say when I hugged him at the door. “We’re like twins, you and I. Derek’s indispensable Sams.” If I could share enough traits with him, maybe he could share the experience, the feeling of being with Derek, with me. If Sam and I were close enough, maybe I wouldn’t grow to hate him. Almost of one mind, Derek and I had very similar tastes in men. Take Rabbit, for example. He was too tall and too pale, but not altogether unattractive to the discerning eye.
     “So how’d you meet him?”
     “At the café. Monday, after you left.”
     “Monday?” On Monday afternoons, we had coffee at the Brokedown Café. We ordered Daily Dysfunctions, tripio espressos with dashes of rum. He always paid.
     “I was trying to recalculate the figures for my grant, but this guy in the booth behind me kept spouting off random numbers. So I turn around, and I’m like ‘Listen, buddy.’ And this guy’s totally hot. Like in a way that represents America and all that.”
     “Does he have good skin?”
     “Well, he scratches, but you can hardly tell.” I looked down at my arms, splotched red from our run up the stairs. Where was my hydrocortisone when I needed it? I felt an instant bond with people who scratched like I did. Maybe Sam and I could share something.
     “So when he turned to me, naturally I was like….” Derek let his jaw fall slack and his eyes glaze over.
     “That good, huh? A ten?”
     “At least a twelve.” He grinned at me. “I’m totally keeping this one.”
     Rabbit was still fussing with his laptop when Professor Owlan came in, late as usual. I watched his cursor wander across the projection screen and toggle the volume settings. You won’t get sound, I thought, without an audio cable. What a space cadet. At the end of his presentation, Rabbit started his silent video and sat down next to me, eyes closed, passing a week’s anxiety. His rabbits twitched their noses furiously on screen, demonstrating “covert anger behavior.” Derek refused to take notes in pen; he stealthily reached into my bag for a pencil, but I kicked him away. I didn’t like people fishing around in my purse. Rabbit leaned over to me. “The screaming,” he whined, “you can’t hear the screaming.” He had a deep voice, deeper than you’d expect from a man who played with rabbits. On my other side, Derek hiked up my skirt and scrawled “Sammy wants Rabbit!” across my thigh with his pen. I laid a reassuring hand on Rabbit’s arm and laughed softly in his ear.

     “Rabbit seems healthier,” I said, cleaning up after a quick lunch. The compliment screamed high school crush almost as much as the smudged-out pen marks on my thigh. Hoping that Derek would be at least a little jealous, I absorbed myself in washing plates, meticulously scrubbing each tube of macaroni down the sink.
     “He’s not your type,” Derek said. He shoved a hand down his pants, scratching himself as he handed me his plate.
     “How do you know?” I asked. People always hassled me for falling in love with gay men. They made it sound like I sought out gay guys to turn them straight. That was completely off base. It just happened that most of the guys who interested me turned out to have the hots for other men.
     Derek yanked bottles of cranberry juice and vodka out of the fridge with both hands. The cranberry juice still had a red bow tied around its neck. “You’re going to break those girls’ hearts,” I said. The undergrads in Derek’s section fell so easily for his sly, boyish smile, his hugs that were warm and cryptic. Every quarter, they invited him to dinner in their dorms, and I made him bring me back juice mixers. He’d tell them that he was a poor grad student with a weakness for cranberries, then return to our apartment with three or four bottles tucked under his arm.
     He squeezed a lime into my Cosmopolitan, licking the juice off his fingertips. “It’s just a game,” he said. “Besides, I dress way too well to be straight.” I pitied these girls, but mooching off their dorms’ cranberry juice made the drink that much sweeter. I could see what attracted them to Derek. In my opinion, he wasn’t really gay. He liked men, but everyone liked men nowadays. There were guys in our department who thought that being gay entitled them to high heels and a tiara. I liked this one guy in developmental until he asked me to help him paint his nails. He wanted to have a “girls’ night out.” After that, I avoided him like Brand X pads.
      “Oh, Sammy,” Derek said, frowning as he handed me my glass. Checking my right hand, I discovered a large, crater-shaped cut in the dry flesh between my thumb and forefinger. A shiny film of plasma or something covered it, so I figured it was fresh. I didn’t notice it this morning, I thought huffily. Even with the ointment I religiously applied, I often scratched in my sleep.
     “It’s because you never cut your nails,” Derek said. “I know they’re pretty, but guys’ll never notice them if you keep scratching like that.” He took my hand in his, and while stroking it with strong, square-tipped fingers, he held it up as proof. It looked a lot like a slab of raw meat with a French manicure. God, I thought. I hated the public nature of skin.
     “I’ll pick up some of those moisturizing gloves the next time I’m at the store,” Derek said, sipping his Cosmo. “Sam told me they’d do wonders for your skin.”
     “You told him about my skin problem?” Derek’s boyfriends entertained me like the characters on TV sitcoms. I watched them, but I didn’t know they watched me back. And even though Sam scratched as well, I planned to bring it up myself. Now we’d have one less amazing similarity to bond over when we met. My hands were getting hot. I absentmindedly rubbed my knuckles against the sides of my wrists. The noise it made was dry and comforting.
     “I thought he might have some tips,” Derek said. I hid my hands in my lap and scratched some more. I enjoyed picking at the tough, tingling scabs.
      Derek took our glasses, rinsed them once, and left them in the sink. “We need wooden hangers too,” he said. “For button-down shirts, Sam says they’re a must.”

     It had been a long time since I last derived pleasure from numbers. I first learned about pi in the fourth grade, but didn’t really understand that it was a number until the sixth grade, when Mrs. Steinberger declared March 14 official Pi Day. She insisted that we memorize the first ten digits as homework the night before, and that day in class, she threw a giant pi party. She helped us move our desks to form that funny-looking symbol, and we sang our ten digits to the tune of “Happy Birthday” while we danced between pi’s legs.
     After sixty-four, the digits came easy. Derek and I chanted them as we climbed up the stairs, rocketing to the fifth floor in a flurry of numbers. 3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-2-3-8-4-6-2-6-4-3-3-8-3-2-7-9-5-0-2-8-8-4-1-9-7-1-6-9-3-9-9-3-7-5-1-0-5-8-2-0-9-7-4-9-4-4-5-9-2-3-0-7-8-1-6-4-0-6-2-8-6-2-0-8-9-9-8-6-2-8-0-3-4-8-2-5. We reached ninety digits, then one hundred. Derek became a math department groupie. He started giving his lab presentations without notes, spouting off percentages, correlation coefficients, and standard deviations like designer brand names. Sometimes I wondered how Sam rewarded him for learning pi. Did he round a new base at every hundred digits? The possibilities were endless. Although I wasn’t as good with numbers, I too began to crave them. One hundred digits were, come to think of it, insignificant in the grand scheme of pi. I wanted to know two hundred, three hundred. Pi held the promise of mastery and possession, each number offering itself up to be my next thrilling conquest.
     The day Derek and I broke a hundred and fifty, we lay sprawled out on the fifth floor landing, struggling to catch our breaths. I now knew that the ninetieth digit of pi was a five, and could casually dangle my hand into the rectangular space between the stairs. The cold concrete tickled the back of my neck, so I inched my head up onto Derek’s stomach. It was only 9:22, the earliest we had been to class all quarter. Not bad, especially for a Monday. In two hours, Derek and I would be sitting down to our Daily Dysfunctions at the Brokedown Café.
     “Sam says that pi is like poetry,” Derek mused, smoothing the wrinkles in his rolled-up shirt sleeves. “They’re both overanalyzed to death.” I closed my eyes and listened to him talk, imagining us back in bed instead of lying awkwardly in the stairwell. My head lolled to the rhythm of his breaths, falling from ab to ab. He was the perfect headrest.
      “Sammy?”
      “Hmmm?” At the moment, it was all I could manage.
     “Is it okay if we don’t do coffee today?”
     “What?” I sat up to face him. “What do you mean?”
     Derek squirmed up against the railing. “Sam wanted to go to the Brokedown Café today.” He blurted the words out quickly, shutting his eyes in terror of me. Derek and I hardly fought, but when we did, I gave him a thrashing.
     “Take him tomorrow!” I yelled. It made me even angrier that a part of me found him cute backed up against the railing, cornered, like a rat. I realized that I had been scratching at a dry patch of skin on my arm and scattering tiny white flakes into the rectangular abyss. Derek was toast. I leaned in for the kill.
     When he sensed me near him, Derek pushed his forehead against mine and gave me the saddest puppy dog look in the history of the world. His furrowed eyebrows tickled my forehead. Though his face blocked out the light, I could see the line where his contact lenses separated the white of his eyes from the brown, and his breath hit my nose in cool, minty gusts. It was so close to a kiss. My hands flailed around wildly until I found the railing.
     “Please?” he whispered. He looked even cuter when he needed something; begging gave him an excuse to flirt with me. I wondered if he thought I smelled sweet. Derek threw his arms around me and pulled me to him. We lay roughly horizontal on the landing, and he started gnawing playfully on the collar of my shirt. When his nose nudged my neck, goosebumps broke out like bad acne. I couldn’t believe I was going to let him ditch me.
     “I love you!” he said, “I love you!” Now he was going on a real coffee date with a real guy. I felt so stupid for always pretending that our dates were real, that our traditions were sacred. We were the greatest things that ever happened to each other. Samantha and Derek. Professor Owlan even called us “The Twins.” I gazed at Derek’s strong, smiling face and inhaled his minty breath, thinking how little I had that was truly mine. He leaned in and planted a sloppy kiss on my cheek.

     He didn’t come home until late that evening. I was reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams on the couch when he rambled into our apartment, slightly buzzed, his arms lost in the sleeves of his half-buttoned shirt.
     “Hey beauty,” he said, “I got you something.” He pulled a pair of white cotton gloves out of his back pocket and thrust it at me. “Courtesy of Sam, eh? Eh?”
     I looked him over with a prudish suspicion that instantly and painfully reminded me of my mother. “What’d you guys do?”
     “Drank. Hung out. Made out.” Derek rambled towards me, but I held an arm out to stop him. He needed a shower badly. Sweat stains darkened the armpits of his favorite shirt.
     “One of your buttons is missing.”
     Derek grinned. “Sam’s fault.” Then he pushed past me to his room, slamming the door shut behind him. Minutes later, his nasal snoring filled our apartment.
     I tried to keep reading. I tried to appreciate “The Dream as Wish-Fulfillment,” but Derek’s snoring was just too loud. After shutting off all the lights and appliances, I decided to go in and check on him. He lay on his bed, outside the covers, with his soiled shirt hanging limply from his arm. He had managed to get it off, but forgot that final step of shrugging it to the floor before he conked out. His snoring was unbearable. I knelt down at his side and tugged the shirt loose from his grip. The fabric was damp with sweat, but it wasn’t all his. Holding it to my nose, I could smell the odor of another man quite distinctly. It smelled too sweet, like a lollipop melting in the sun. I didn’t like the way it mixed with the subtle fragrance of Derek’s musky cologne.
     Why hadn’t Derek introduced me to Sam yet? He talked about Sam less than he talked about any of the other guys he dated. I knew that Rabbit wore pink boxer briefs to bed. I knew that alcohol made him lithe and graceful, that I’d probably like the pale beanpole even better when he was smashed. What did I know about Sam? Zippo. So he liked pi. Big deal. He was still an abstraction, as remote to me as pi’s millionth digit, whatever it was. I hypothesized three reasons for Derek’s silence. Hypothesis 1: Maybe Sam was in the closet. I knew lots of guys who pretended to be straight while they ran around with other men. Hypothesis 2: Maybe Sam was abnormal. Maybe he was obese, or paraplegic, or a transvestite. I didn’t like Hypothesis 3: Maybe Derek and Sam are better off without you. Maybe their relationship is none of your business, so you should back off.
     Derek’s snoring died down to a low whimper, so I turned to watch him sleep. He looked even more like a boy now. Sleep relaxed the overactive muscles in his face and drew soft brown hair down over his eyes. How would it feel to be loved by this boy? How would it feel to be the one he desired? I wished that for once I could be the one he talked about, the one who gave him pleasure. I could give him the best blowjob, I thought suddenly. Right here, right now. I glanced up at his thick, heaving chest and dared to trace his ribs with my fingers. Derek likes guys, I told myself sternly. He wants blowjobs from guys. What was so great about guys anyway? If he knew, I wished he’d tell me. I wanted to know him so desperately. I wanted him to let me in on his secrets. Being straight was so ordinary.
     That night I slept alone, fleshing out Derek’s body with my blankets and sheets. By now, I instinctively assumed a sleeping position that accommodated him, turning on my side at the edge of the bed and bunching my down comforter around me to mimic his arms. It helped me cope with the enormity of my twin bed, helped me sleep.
     I watched the shadows on the ceiling flicker as people walked by the streetlight outside our apartment. Even at three in the morning, there was always a handful of rowdy undergrads roaming the streets and laughing as they passed my window. My mind wandered. 3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6. My mom bought me a red leather purse when I was six. It was a rich, Revlon Red, like the lipstick when it’s first applied. I stuffed it with jewelry, Lego men, and fake food, carrying it with me everywhere. I wouldn’t let the kids at school see what was inside. Only I knew—I carefully handpicked each toy. One day I was chasing after my friend Jeremy and left my purse hanging on the jungle gym. By the time I finally remembered and ran back for it, a group of girls in fluffy pink skirts had emptied it out into the sandbox. They buried my Lego men in sand pyramids and served my plastic fruits to each other with rocks on plates of sand. The blonde, wide-eyed girls wore my rings and my beaded necklaces, so I screamed at them and kicked sand into their faces. I sent the sand and food and girls flying everywhere. Jeremy stood by the swings, watching me. He was my first crush.
     I fell asleep without rubbing hydrocortisone on my skin. That night, I scratched passionately and woke up with blood stains on my pillow. My wrists were raw.

     Derek was getting on my nerves.
     “We need to pick up the pace on pi,” he said. “3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6-2-6-4-3-3….” We knew two hundred and forty-two digits.
     Each number landed with a thud on the stairs in front of me and tumbled through the cracks to the landings below. The thought of pi, interminable and unwieldy, made the climb that much harder. Blame it on perceived self-efficacy or low self-esteem. For some reason, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t remember whether the two hundred and twenty-third digit was a four or a five because the numbers sounded so similar, and when you recited them that fast, who could really tell anyway? It bothered me that even if I did recite the numbers wrong, no one would be able to tell. I could just make a sequence up. Who cared if it was a four or a five? It didn’t really matter. Pi stunk of infinity.
     “Sam said there’s this guy in Japan who’s memorized 42,195 digits.”
     I was so sick of Sam. Sam cuddled. Sam scratched. Sam wore sweet-smelling colognes and had a black backpack he wouldn’t let Derek into. But—news flash—so did I! I had the eerie feeling that Sam was somehow commandeering my personality to get into Derek’s pants. Our Monday afternoon coffee breaks were officially dead. I tried to be happy for Derek, I really did. But happiness was such an impotent emotion, such a lame reason to not be angry. Was Sam really that much more appealing just because he had a penis? Was this stumpy, unimpressive appendage really that important? There were differences between men and women, and then there was just silliness.
     After we reached three hundred digits, Derek began sleeping over at Sam’s apartment. I stood in the bathroom for ten minutes that morning, wondering why there was so much space on the counter. It took me a while to realize that Derek’s essentials—his gel, toothbrush, and shaving kit—were all missing. That week, I took long showers and spent whole afternoons moisturizing in my bedroom. My pillow was a mess. I scoured the apartment for band-aids, and when Rabbit saw my mummified hands, he twitched his nose with concern.
     “Rabbits,” I told him, “their rage was too great.”

     After class on Monday, I stole a piece of chalk out of the conference room and started to write out pi on the side of the railing next to each step. 3.1-4-1-5-9…. I couldn’t bear to memorize another digit. This is it, I thought. This is the last time I’m ever reciting pi. Marking up the railing offered me little comfort. The spaces between the steps seemed to widen beneath me, as if they were being stretched from both ends. Then I was vomiting pi, regurgitating all the useless numbers, and as I stumbled from slab to slab with both hands gripping the rails, I thought of Derek and Sam smiling at each other over coffee. They were there now, sharing a Daily Dysfunction at the Brokedown Café. He probably paid for Sam’s drinks too. The empty stairwell mocked me. Pi wasn’t getting me laid. My bandaged hands were so stiff and raw that the chalk kept slipping out. Eventually, I pressed so hard that the chalk snapped in my hand. One piece rolled through the concrete slabs, and I got so mad that I chucked the other piece over the railing. I watched with pleasure as the two halves raced each other down five flights of stairs to the brown, pebbled floor.
     “Everything all right?” Rabbit peered down at me from the doorway on the fifth floor landing. I didn’t even want to know how I looked to him—a crazy girl with bandaged hands crouched in the stairwell chalking pi.
     “What are you doing here?” I asked.
     “I just wanted to check on you,” he said. I was wrong; he was at least an eight. “Where’s Derek?”
     “Not here, obviously.”
     Rabbit rambled down to the step where I knelt, and I slid over to give him space. His eyes scanned the bar of white digits on the railing. “What’s that?” he asked.
     “Secret code.”
     “Secret code, huh? Do you have a decoder or something?” He was no fun.
     “It’s pi,” I said. “Three hundred digits of pi.”
     “Oh.” I could tell he had no interest in math.
     “So you and Derek, huh?”
     Rabbit stared at me, looking for all the world like one of his stressed-out bunnies.
     “Was it good?” I reached over and gently stroked his arm, forgetting for a moment that my hands were covered with band-aids. Rabbit didn’t flinch. His skin was pale and smooth.
     “Well…I mean, obviously…” He stopped and sighed. “Yeah.” Images of Derek and Rabbit hooking up flashed through my mind in graphic detail. I wondered if Rabbit knew about Sam. Suddenly, I had the most marvelous idea.
     “Look, you want to get some coffee? I know a place.”
     Rabbit nodded and took my hand as we walked down the stairs.

     The Brokedown Café was the hippest coffee house in town. Its owners bought the place from a crazy old widow and decorated it to enhance the aura of neglect. On warm days, the café extended outside to an overgrown lawn. Word on the street was that the owners were against counterculture—and everything else. People were thrown out on a regular basis for being too artsy, too emo, too sporty, too prep. Derek and I got in because one of the bartenders thought he looked hot in leather pants.
     I buried my head into Rabbit’s arm as we approached the café. Derek and Sam were probably still there, and if they saw me, I’d have to give up and play nice. I craved a Daily Dysfunction. It was a sunny afternoon, so Derek probably took Sam out to the secluded side of the house, the side with the dilapidated swing set that I absolutely refused to sit on. Flashing a smile at Brick, the bouncer, I steered Rabbit past the barbed-wire fence and into the café.
     Thankfully, the café was full enough that I didn’t have to worry too much about being seen. Wiry intellectuals sat in the booths near the windows where Derek and I used to spend our Monday afternoons. They slouched in the overstuffed seats, studying their menus so intently that they didn’t even glance up when the door creaked. Through the grimy windows, I made out two men swinging high on the swing set. When they launched themselves into the air, the rusty steel frame shook violently. Bingo. I sent Rabbit off to order two Daily Dysfunctions and chose a table in the middle of the house, facing the swing set. Two years ago, the owners of the café smashed in one of the window panes for the waitresses to use as a takeout window. It served as the perfect peeping hole.
     Sam looked nothing like the man I’d imagined. Derek described him as 6’2”, athletic but not dumb, but the Sam on the swings was a lean, delicate little fairy with ribboned blonde locks and a pink sarong wrapped around his waist. Derek usually dated effeminate guys, but Sam could easily pass as a woman. Dark eyeliner accentuated his eyes, and his lips were painted a suspiciously familiar shade of red. This wimpy half-man insulted me. I’d give him a two—maybe—without the skirt. He and Derek rode the swings so happily that I thought I was going to puke. Sam’s black backpack lay on the table by the swing set. He wouldn’t leave it in the grass, of course. Not if he was anything like me. I squinted to catch a glimpse of his hands as he swung by. They were blurred streaks that held the chain tightly, straining against the steel links. He let his feet hit the ground, and as his swinging slowed, I noticed that he did have the telltale red splotches. His hands actually weren’t much better than mine, and for a moment, I felt close to him. I started scratching as I watched Sam rub at the dips between his knuckles. Derek calmly reached over, lacing his fingers with Sam’s, and they held hands while they talked.
     “Two espressos, coming right up!” Rabbit said. I looked up at him and smiled, hoping he didn’t call them espressos at the bar. His nose was twitching, so I could tell that the bartender gave him a hard time. He was too likeable, I decided.
     “Thanks for inviting me,” Rabbit said. “This is…nice.” He squirmed around in his chair to avoid sitting on the nice metal prongs that pierced through his seat cushion. In my mind, I pored over the details that Derek told me about their hook-up. The scenes I imagined swelled goosebumps on my neck.
     “So how’s your research coming?”
     “Good, good.” He nodded amiably, as if he expected me to change the subject. “I’m trying to induce covert anger behavior with electric shocks. It’s pretty tough, actually. The rabbits enter this state of learned helplessness before they toughen up.” I knew that if I got him started on his research, he could go on forever without much prompting. While he talked, I shifted my attention back to Derek and Sam.
     They sat on the swings, chatting up a storm as they rocked back and forth. Derek waved his arms around like an idiot, and then the two of them broke into a fit of laughter. I wondered what they were giggling about. I often found myself laughing at Derek’s jokes even if they weren’t particularly funny. Did Sam do that too, or did he actually think they were funny? I wished I could be the one laughing with Derek on the swings. I’ll sit on them this time, I promised him in my head. I swear I will. They seemed annoyingly perfect for each other.
      “I’m actually starting to think that there are two types of anger behavior,” Rabbit said, “Covert anger behavior and overt anger behavior.” I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask me what I thought later. I needed my Daily Dysfunction right now. A waitress walked up to our table with two espressos. Like all the drinks at the Brokedown Café, the espressos were served on porcelain shards rumored to come from the old widow’s kitchen. The waitresses weren’t allowed to wear gloves and often cut their hands on the shattered plates. I waited until she set the drinks on the table and then sent them back. Rabbit apologized profusely for mucking up the order.
     Outside on the swing set, Derek stroked Sam’s chin and slowly leaned in to kiss him. They paused, savoring the nearness of their lips, then closed their eyes and kissed tenderly. It wasn’t making out. It was much simpler, silent and still, the way a kiss should be. I didn’t know Derek could kiss like that. They twisted to face each other, ducking under the steel chains, which crisscrossed and groaned above them. The gentle rocking of the swings brought them together, and they swayed back and forth, floating above the ground. And suddenly I didn’t want to be there anymore. I didn’t want to sit alone and watch them through a crack in the glass like some voyeur. I wanted to go home. A new waitress brought out our Daily Dysfunctions. Rabbit gulped his down, so appreciative for the experience that he even cut his pinkie on the cracked saucer. I stared down at mine, letting its steam billow into the brass café.

     I was mixing up a second-rate Cosmopolitan with the last of our precious cranberry juice when Derek came home for the first time in a week.
     “I got these for you,” he said, waving a box of wooden hangers at me. He walked straight past the kitchen and into my room. “Geez, what a mess,” I heard him say. Then I heard my closet door sliding across the carpet and the distinct chink of my wire hangers as they bounced off my side table and ricocheted around the room.
     I threw down the Cosmo and ran after him.
     “What the hell are you doing?” I screamed. Cranberry juice and vodka seeped into the cuts on my hands, stinging painfully before dripping off my fingers. Derek stood by my closet, cradling the wooden hangers in his arms. Five of my new dresses lay in a pile at his feet. They were dresses I bought at the mall a few weekends ago when he spent the day with Sam in the city. I hadn’t even told him about them yet. I planned to keep them a secret, hidden in my closet on the off chance that he might ask me to the Winter Gala in January. It’s good to be prepared, I thought when I bought the dresses. Who knows how long Derek and Sam will last? I tried them on late at night while Derek slept. They still had their tags, all except for an elegant white dress that I fell in love with that day at the mall. It was like a wedding dress. Simple satin body, form-fitting and elegantly cut. Why couldn’t anything be truly mine? Why did people keep stomping on my secrets? Seeing the gown in a pile at his feet reminded me of my red purse in the sandbox. It stirred an impulse to destroy.
     “You’ll love these hangers,” Derek said, “They maintain the shape of your clothes much better than wire ones.” I watched him dig my new white dress out of the pile and jam one of his hangers between the straps. He was about to stuff it into the closet when its label caught his eye and he pulled it back out to examine more closely. “Is this new?”
     Black wire hangers were strewn over my bed and lodged between rows of our framed pictures. I grabbed a hanger off the bed and began whipping him with it. I struck at his perfect arms and his chest, hoping to raise welts under his thin blue shirt. “Get out!” I screamed. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
     His face froze in surprise and terror as I forced him from my room. I slammed the door and locked it shut behind him.
     “I’m sorry, Sammy,” he pleaded through the door. His voice was horrible and small, but the pity he stirred in me only fueled my anger. It would take a lot more than a sloppy kiss to soothe me this time. Derek paced back and forth in front of my door like a child locked out of the house. I watched his shadow shift across the bottom of the door frame. “I saw you at the café,” he said finally. I sat on the floor with my ear pressed to the door until I heard him leave.

     Late that night, I awoke to the heaviness of Derek’s hand on mine.
     “I told you to wear the gloves,” he said.
     “I did,” I mumbled groggily. “They must’ve fallen off.” Then I remembered throwing the gloves away the day I found the bathroom empty. I held up my hands and squinted at them in the dark. They didn’t look so bad. A little puffy, but nothing a dab of hydrocortisone wouldn’t fix.
     Derek stood over me in boxers and a t-shirt that read, “Trust Me, I’m a Virgin.” I turned on my side, making room for him in bed. He slid in without a word, and I wondered if something happened between him and Sam.
     “Sammy?” In the dark, he sounded like a kid whose nightmares had gotten the best of him. His breath hit the back of my neck in warm spurts.
     “Yeah?”
     “What are all those dresses for?” he asked.
     “Rabbit,” I replied, grabbing a fistful of the sheets. I was too tired for truth. “They’re all for Rabbit. Every single one.”
     “I’m sorry,” Derek said quietly, wrapping his arms around me. “I didn’t know.” His chest was warm and sticky from a recent shower, and when he pressed against me, heat radiated through my body like sunshine. This must be how it felt on the swings, I thought. His strong arms were smooth and fresh, and I concentrated on all the tiny spots where they touched my skin.
     “His skin’s pretty,” I said.
     “Your skin’s pretty,” he said, running his hands up and down my arms, “prettier than you think.” His fingers grazed the rough, red spots on my arms, raising wave after wave of goosebumps.
     He nosed his way into the space under my chin and began to nibble and kiss my neck. Was he for real? I let myself respond to him, rolling my head up to expose my neck. I could smell no alcohol on his breath, and his stream of kisses flowed fluidly, consciously. I dug my nails into the sheets.
     Kiss me like you kiss Sam, I thought. Kiss me like you love me.
     The last time we cuddled together, I tried to memorize his skin, the feel of his muscles hard against my back. Now, the familiarity of his skin surprised me, and it pleased me to think that I retained some measure of his body, some trace memory of life in his arms. I could feel him pressing up against my back through his boxers. He was longer than I imagined, big for a boy.
     I flinched when he reached under my shirt. I’m not beautiful, I thought. It surprised me how quickly and apologetically the thought formed. His fingers traced scabs around my nipples, cuts in the most private parts of me. I tried to imagine my body as he would, struggling to accentuate the parts that felt most masculine. I held in my breath, tightening the muscles in my abs. My breasts were much bigger than a man’s, and they embarrassed me. More than anything, I longed to turn around to meet his gaze, but his tight hug kept me pressed to the wall. I began to scratch myself erratically, seeking a rhythm.
     I heard a rustle as Derek wriggled out of his boxers. Why wouldn’t he let me turn around? Why wouldn’t he let me see him? We won’t be able to kiss like this, I thought frantically. He pressed into me with quiet determination. The pain was overwhelming.
     “Sammy,” he yelped, “Oh, Sam….” His whole body was set to mine, and when he quaked, I quaked too.
     “Sammy,” I said, “Call me Sammy.” I couldn’t breathe.
     “Oh, Sam,” he insisted, “Sam! Sam!” He plunged deeper into me, taking everything. And I could only stare at the wall, digging into cuts that were mine alone.
     We fucked to a rhythm, and the rhythm was pi. His hugs and kisses were not mine, and the intimacies he whispered bloodied my fingernails. I would have struggled if struggling would have made him stop. The guy had stamina—I’d give him that. His t-shirt stuck to us both, became invisible with sweat. When he kissed me, I turned my face into the pillow, hoping I too could disappear. Pi was our mantra, our species of seduction. I mouthed it into my pillow, repeating the numbers until morning came: 3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6-2-6-4-3-3-8-3-2-7-9-5-0-2-8-8-4-1-9-7-1-6-9-3-9-9-3-7-5-1-0-5-8-2-0-9-7-4-9-4-4-5-9-2-3-0-7-8-1-6-4-0-6-2-8-6-2-0-8-9-9-8-6-2-8-0-3-4-8-2-5-3-4-2-1-1-7-0-6-7-9-8-2-1-4-8-0-8-6-5-1-3-2-8-2-3-0-6-6-4-7-0-9-3-8-4-4-6-0-9-5-5-0-5-8-2-2-3-1-7-2-5-3-5-9-4-0-8-1-2-8-4-8-1-1-1-7-4-5-0-2-8-4-1-0-2-7-0-1-9-3-8-5-2-1-1-0-5-5-5-9-6-4-4-6-2-2-9-4-8-9-5-4-9-3-0-3-8-1-9-6-4-4-2-8-8-1-0-9-7-5-6-6-5-9-3-3-4-4-6-1-2-8-4-7-5-6-4-8-2-3-3-7-8-6-7-8-3-1-6-5-2-7-1-2-0-1-9-0-9-1-4-5-6-4-8-5-6-6-9-2-3-4-6-0-3-4-8-6-1-0-4-5-4-3-2-6-6-4-8-2-1-3-3-9-3-6-0-7-2-6-0-2-4-9-1-4-1-2-7-3….

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Examining the Sea

— Kyle Haynes

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Odalisque

Some bauble, some fragment-thing—
Some ornamental—missed
The way a fog is missed:

Solemnly fucking solemnly.
Syllables (fever, listen) make up
(make-up?) a photograph

(a photograph of someone,
JFK, alive, looking sad and alive)
It can be your name, can it?

Many words sound like your name
(embedded). We know as fact
They would play chess at Troy—

Unlike Helen, bored Helen—
Minds sharp and out of focus
Like the blind throttling the blind.

— A. Jared Schaefer

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