If I’d known then what I

If I’d known then what I know now I’d never have allowed myself to be sucked into it. You think it was my idea – but it wasn’t. All I wanted was an easy life. A little bit of study – nothing too ambitious. Help out the old man in the workshop to get a few bob together for a bit of Lebanese gold, shack up with Mary Magdalen, maybe have a few kids if the humour took me. But there wasn’t a chance. Not a fucking chance.

It all started with the bullshit about the Virgin Birth. This was a bit of a scam at the time – a bit like moving statues, I suppose. Things were dog rough in the local economy with the Romans screwing us for taxes to keep their poxy empire going. The natives were being exploited to the hilt, same as ever, and instead of rising up and taking the oppressors on, they sank into the hideous embrace of apocalyptic religious mumbo jumbo. You know the story. Everyone was on about the King of the Jews being born, the saviour who would lead the people out of the darkness and into the light of eternal salvation. Well, being born of a virgin was reckoned to be a bit of a sign – seeing as you hadn’t been conceived naturally, then you must be the son of God or something like that.

Of course there were people being born of virgins all over the shop but until I arrived I don’t think they were being marketed very well. I guess you could say that it was only a matter of time before someone would get it right and bingo, the fan club would start growing and you’d have the first dyed-in-the-wool fucking superstar (you’ve probably seen the bloody show). That was me, and god I hated every minute of it.

The old man was a bit of a Svengali alright. The way the official biography tells it, he was an ineffectual Denis Thatcher-type figure, forever hanging around on the fringes of power like a gobdaw, with no involvement in the real action. But that was a snow job. Truth is he was more like Colonel Tom Parker, doing deals without ever telling me, taking 50% off the top of all collections before expenses had been covered or any of my twelve roadies had been paid, charging crazy prices for catering on the promise that I was going to turn the water into wine and setting up a massive merchandising operation on the side – you know that shroud in Turin, well he did a print run of 10,000 of those suckers and sold them at five pieces of silver a shot. Good money if you could get it although they were top quality items alright – I mean, don’t tell me that you expect your Therapy? Fuck Woodstock T-shirt to still be in one piece in 2,000 years!

Anyway Old Joe had it all worked out. You see most of the hype merchants and hustlers who were screaming Virgin Birth at the time were doing it when the baby was still in swaddling clothes and pampers. And there was a bit of a problem with that – I mean, how could a little nipper put on an impressive show when he couldn’t even walk, for Chrissakes. So when the first few potential followers came knocking on the putative deity’s stable door, as it were, all they got was an object lesson in how to whinge and bawl – well, it can’t have been very convincing, can it? ‘Are you trying to tell me that’s God, mate?’

Well, Joe was the first to cop this and so he decided to hang fire until he had a better product to sell. And that, of course, was me. And so before most kids are even beginning to gen up on their Huggy Bear books, he had me driven half demented, drumming the history of the tribe of Israel into me morning, noon and night. And a little bit later, he’d bully me into practising conjuring tricks, going to oratory classes at the local tech and generally behaving like the kind of complete and utter prat that in my own heart of hearts I fucking hated.

It was a hell of a life I can tell you, growing up, but in the end I got pretty good at bullshitting the media and taking on the majors – you could say I modelled myself on Bob Geldof except that this was long before The Boomtown Rats or Live Aid or any of that shit. Some of the rock’n’roll bits of it I enjoyed, I have to say. Going into the temple and turning over the moneylenders’ tables – there was a touch of the old punk spirit there. You’d get arrested for that kind of stunt nowadays! And I had one of the best agents in the business. Some of the other prophets who were doing gigs at the time had a good palaver down but when we toured we made absolutely certain that we’d play only the most attractive venues, with the best acoustics and we made sure there was a good word of mouth campaign in advance, a big ad in the local alternative magazine, maybe a bit of street-postering, especially if it was an open-air gig like the famous one I did on the Mount. And Joe was the mastermind behind all that.

He also came up with the Annunciation angle. We were just beginning to build up a head of steam and Joe thought it was about time for me to lay my ‘I am the way, the truth and the light’ spiel on the punters. But it was potentially calamitous – I mean that kind of routine could land you in the clink before you even had time to say P. J. Proby. And if things really got heavy, then you might even get yourself lynched too soon – and you could be struck with a posthumous following the size of Marc Bolan’s rather than Elvis Presley’s, if you catch my drift. No, when you’re in the business of setting out to dominate the world for a couple of thousand years, and get an empire as big as the Romans up and running in the process, timing is everything. And having your ass covered. Which is why Joe fed the rumours about the Angel Gabriel coming down to have a tete-a-tete with the old dear to the tabloids when he did. They picked up on it like a shot and the ground was well and truly set for me to come out, if you’ll excuse the phrase . . .

• Jesus H. Christ