The Gospel of Jimmah

According to Scroll Digest, an obscure biblical archeology monthly my doctor keeps in his waiting room, there’s lots of excitement about the discovery of still one more first-century gospel to compete with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Experts have dubbed it the Gospel of Jimmah.

Jimmah is the name of the narrative’s alternative Christ-figure. Unlike most Gospels, the document was also written by the character named Jimmah.

According to the Gospel of Jimmah, the true Messiah, rather than being a Nazarene carpenter, is a Georgia peanut farmer who, Moses-like, was elevated by an utter fluke to royal prominence as president of a major western democracy. But after four years in the seat of power Jimmah had to flee into the wilderness in disgrace, after many of the ungrateful countrymen he presumed to be ruler of spied him slaying what little was left of their national honor, and trying to hide it with sand.

Jimmah remained in the wilderness thirty years, all but forgotten, helping to build Habitat for Humanity houses, and occasionally making a self-directed sojourn into enemy nations to undermine the foreign policies of his successors.

Then, he heard God’s voice speaking to him from two burning towers. Jimmah resumed his mission to free the whole world by bringing his message of peace--the central theme of which was that Jimmah had been right all along. His ministry consisted primarily of roaming from town to town explaining how, when he was in office, his views were the most enlightened, and his actions the wisest. Multitudes and whole villages fled at the sight of him.

Similar to the other Gospels, this one has a temptation story. In it, when Satan comes to Jimmah to tempt him in the wilderness, he offers to give him all the glory he was robbed of during his one term in office in exchange for every last shred of his integrity. Jimmah immediately accepts.

The Gospel of Jimmah also has a wedding story, except in Jimmah when the host runs out of wine, Jimmah denounces the man for his alleged human rights failings, refuses him any assistance, and grins idiotically as the entire wedding party is taken captive and enslaved by a tribe of wicked Persians.

Experts say the Gospel of Jimmah has stylistic similarities to the other Gospels, but lacks practically every trait of the historical Christian documents.

Jimmah’s Messianic figure, for example, lacked humility, wise sayings, and a following. Nor could Jimmah work signs, wonders, or miracles. In fact, where the traditional Gospels often describe healings of the blind and the raising of the dead, the Jimmah narrative describes nothing so inspiring.

Instead, Jimmah describes how the crowds often were murmuring amongst themselves that the Farmer from Plains not only lacked miraculous powers, but did such a lousy job helping the poor and sick through ordinary means that he left them much worse off than before he came along. And yet, to the utter astonishment of Jimmah’s contemporaries, he continued to return to the Temple day after day expecting everyone to be entranced by his wild revisionism and insipid views on improving the human condition!

As one leader of the time was quoted in the Gospel of Jimmah: “Who could have imagined such a man!”

Biblical archeologist Professor Raymond Tittle says he’s puzzled at finding so little of religious value in the Gospel of Jimmah. He finds, at best, only a single supernatural doctrine in the whole ancient text, namely, an implicit teaching that, in one historical figure--Jimmah--there subsisted miraculously both a mortal human nature, and an impermeable smugness of a scale and scope theologians calculate could not be contained in an entity any smaller than the largest and most irritating Deity.

“It is unimaginable,” said Dr. Tittle, “that any sect embracing such a gospel could have survived for very long. I can’t think of any group of persons who would find Jimmah’s character something to be emulated, let alone admired.”

Unlike the historical Gospels, explained Tittle, the Gospel of Jimmah could never be the basis for any community of love, courage, mutual respect, and service to humanity, because “it emphasizes only self-loathing, dishonor, and self-delusion on an epic scale. It’s almost as if it were written by their enemies. Maybe that’s why we discovered it hidden where we did.”

Professor Tittle explained that the Gospel of Jimmah was unearthed accidentally, in Gaza, jammed into the bottom of what was the first century equivalent of a public toilet.

Jimmy Carter lays a wreath in honor of terrorist Yassir Arafat.