3 Nephi 26

Jesus kept teaching but didn’t insist anyone take notes. He pretty much went over every thing you could think of from the first flash of daylight on earth to the present, including the biggest siege of sunset the world had seen. He even talked about the unspeakable death of the world, in which the elements that make it up (earth, air, fire, water) would all combust into a gooey mixed metaphor and get rolled up like a scroll, after which a sullen parade of everyone who ever existed would trudge to the eternal courtroom to hear the evidence against them, mostly.

If they get acquitted, an endless party. If they get convicted, God endlessly calling the cops. Oh, he’s just, but also holy, and therefore merciful. A God chasing his own tail. (Sorry, the explanatory pun was too tempting.)

Now, I’ve been doing some rough calculating and I’d say I’m only giving you 1% of what Jesus taught in this extended visit. Not just in words, of course, but manner, body language, tone of voice, pacing. It was very intricate and thus multivalent in its strength. Which makes my transcripts seem even more impoverished.

The point of this abridged version is to spark interest when the time is ripe, i.e., when no one seems to care anymore. This will be like batting the balloon back into the air.

The Gentiles will get metal documents first, as we’ve said again and again.

That’s to give them an ordeal to pass, a soul-tightrope to walk. If they accept them as valid, they’ll get more. If they don’t, good luck getting anything better. Or even this good again. Blocking prospective insight builds its own cage.

In fact, I would have written more, but God told me to give just enough rope for unbelievers to hang themselves with.

Having said that, I (Mormon) will back off from these self-reflections and stick with the program.

So, where was I? Oh yes. Jesus taught for three days and then visited at odd hours, partly to help them practice the bread-and-wine ritual. Children, when he was around, upped their skill at speaking, not to mention thinking. Many went into a kind of trance and said seemingly far-fetched and probably divine things, though with kids the difference can be hard to tell. In any case, we were forbidden—I’ll let the passive voice suggest ambivalence on this point—to write down what our children said. That was a bit cruel, since we’d taken to writing down half of the things we thought were silly or goofy just for sport, a weird sort of juvenile comparative literature. Now they finally say all these profound things and we’re not allowed to write it down.

Jesus left for heaven and his twelve began to teach (though far below the standard he’d set) and baptize in his name. The baptizees came out of the water with their bodies wet but their minds flooded with the uncanny. Not only were we not allowed to write what they saw, they weren’t even allowed to talk about it. So we’ll just have to take it on faith.

The common mind-expansion they underwent led to a deepening of socialistic practice, including sharing all their possessions, with personal ownership, not to mention hygiene, be damned. It was a ravishingly bizarre experiment that Jesus had insisted upon. And there was no doubt they were under his spell. For good, in all senses.

The new standard name for the baptized was simply “The Church of The Anointed One.”