Bonus Chapter: Cloning Jesus Chapter 2.

Hello again! I had some spare time so decided to finish chapter 2. Maybe I'll do that going forward; edit two chapters per week. Don't forget Monday I'll be posting the first chapter of Peasant!

I'm not going to lie- something feels a little off about this chapter. It's I'd say 99% done, but I just can't put my finger on what it's issue is. That's one thing that's nice about putting my writing up like this; at any given time I can go back and edit it if I find a way to make it better; also a plus for the reader, that means anytime you want to re-read it means that it will be of better quality.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy chapter 2!

CHAPTER 2

“I believe in God, only I spell it nature.”

-Frank Lloyd Wright

(1867-1959)

            It took us nearly five years to find an actually valid blood sample of Christ.  It would have been impossible if we had tried even a year earlier than when we had started.  However, when the Human Genome Project came to a successful close and the data was published, a number of Canadian scientists wrote a computer program that has become an important tool for genealogists ever since.  With the program, eloquently titled the Human Genome Interface or HGI (we referred to it with its nickname, ‘The Mutt’, and you’ll soon see why), a person could enter in any sequence of DNA and see exactly what that person would look like and even get a report of who they were, biologically speaking of course.  In addition, one could decide which genes they wanted or which to forego, meaning the program, slowly at first, but eventually became quite popular with parents planning pregnancy.  People love to play God.  I suppose makes them feel important.  However, I assure you our reasons for cloning God were much more scientific.

            Using the HGI we were able to determine a template, and through arduous work developed a process that would allow us to assemble the DNA using advances made in 3D printers, which were already being used to assemble organs and limbs for transplant by the time we began this daunting project. Though it was not exactly My or Dr. Goffel’s forte, we researched the Bible, page by page by page, starting with the New Testament, we created a basic picture of what Jesus would have looked like.  To be on the safe side, so to speak, and safeguard our work as a double check, we looked quite a bit into the Old Testament too for genealogical purposes since Jesus was related to David and Solomon, or so most of us had been taught by our peers and according to the Bible and various books on the subject.  From that basic picture we then used the HGI “Mutt” program, we extrapolated a DNA model that although at first appeared somewhat questionable and even dubious, we would later prove to be an almost near perfect match of Jesus’ own DNA.  You’ll soon see why it became so apparent that this was the actual DNA model of Jesus and not a mistake or incorrect analysis and guesstimation on our own part.

            Of course when doing this, we couldn’t just go with the classic look of Jesus, lying on a cross, white, very European looking.  Pretty Germanic in appearance too, if I might add.  Almost every culture throughout history had a depiction of Christ looking like their average conception of themselves. The first portraits of him that have been found were Roman, and he looked very white. In the Middle East with the first portraits of Jesus from that area, he looked Middle Eastern. Throughout history Jesus has been white, Arabic, even black, and I’m assuming somewhere, Asian. Thus, we decided to start from the beginning. 

Line by line we analyzed the texts, assembling and creating the DNA from his parents, his grandparents, their parents and so on back to David.  From his ancestors, we then traced the recorded ancestral line down numerous times, checking and rechecking, correcting and adjusting whenever we had to. This was made difficult because there are actually two separate and somewhat different family trees of Christ; the first we found located in the book of Matthew, and the latter and more detailed in the book of Luke. We did the best we could considering how much the two differed.

 In this fashion we compiled a large list of traits from which we derived what we believed the DNA of Jesus to be with The Mutt program.  Of course we had to allow room for error, but we were sure our analysis was correct, and over time we eventually proved that the DNA really was his, give or take a few matters we were wrong in.

            At this point, we pondered, where exactly could we even find Jesus’ DNA?  We couldn’t be satisfied with the DNA model we had derived using the Human Genome Interface, we still needed the actual DNA of Christ to clone him.  Our readings and analysis of the Bible made us doubt we would find any of Jesus’ sperm – the Bible was very vague on the subject of whether or not he had had sex. I’m looking at you Mary Magdalene, and whatever relationship she had with Christ.

            So we turned to the only choice left, blood.  We spent countless hours reviewing ancient texts to see how we would or if we even could find some of his blood.  We looked over three of the four supposed spear of Longinus, the spear of destiny, which most would think would be the most obvious source for Christ’s blood, as according to the Bible and history, the spear was supposedly what actually killed Jesus when it pierced his side, spilling his blood. We traveled first to Vienna, Austria to test the purported spear kept there, the very one Hitler had obtained during World War II. When that proved for naught we then schlepped to Echmiadzin, Armenia, and later to Poland for another claimant spear. Although there was blood on two of the spears, none of the DNA was intact, having deteriorated over the centuries or matched our model. Because of this we could not conclusively determine whether it was the blood of Christ or not, and thus was unusable. The Vatican never contacted us back over whether or not we could test the spear they held. So in the end the Spear of Destiny turned out to be a dud for us.

            The second place we looked was the Shroud of Turin.  We had tested the legendary shroud because many viewed it as a holy relic because something like the shape of Jesus was on it in the form of apparent blood stains.  In the end we discovered the Christ-like stain on it was caused by grease and not in fact by blood, and in any case we confirmed the Shroud was not from his time either, having been made sometime in the middle of the fourteenth century. We knew this would likely be the case when we went to it, but we believed it would be better than our last option; the cross.

            When we published our finding on the shroud, as so many before us had, it drew at least to us an unsurprising and unfortunately expected outrage from Catholics and Catholic organizations.  Amongst those was also the Catholic League.  ‘How dare we question a religious relic?’ were the words of one religious authority on the matter.  We gave no apology, and certainly did not back down or retract our finding. How could we?  This was the truth, to retract what we found would be wrong, false, and in a sense lying just to appease those upset with our findings. 

            In truth though, because the shroud had failed to provide the DNA sample we needed, we lost interest in it altogether, ignoring the religious official’s and others’ like his words and outcries. You could say we were zealous in our determination to obtain that sample. After that incident however, we vowed to keep a much lower profile and leave all our research and findings unpublished until everything was said and done. We didn’t want anything else we found to potentially interfere again with what our true intent was.

            Why though, people worship a stained cloth, you tell me.  I guarantee if there was a grilled sandwich with Jesus’ face burned into it, people would also pray to it, believing it a miracle.

            We were disheartened by these negative results because we realized that meant there was only one place else we could still plausibly as well as reliably find the DNA… and if you guessed the cross, you were right.  The only problem with using this source was that the cross had been broken into thousands of pieces over the years.  And to make matters worse, here’s the funny thing;  If you were to take every shred of wood from all the thousands of churches in the world claiming to possess a piece of the original, you could build a boat roughly a quarter the size of the Titanic or the rough equivalent of half of Noah’s arc.  You can imagine the hell we went through to find the right piece.

            We searched for three years on a surprisingly high budget. What can I say, universities will pay for anything. Apart from that, our patent on the revolutionary technique for assembling DNA could have made us rich if we weren’t so devoted to our endeavor. In fact, several companies worked together, even creating a dummy corporation with the sole purpose to fund us.  After all, this would be the first clone of any human being and they could profit from it immensely if through cloning it became an easier, cheaper and more legal source of stem cells rather than using those from aborted fetuses. And that was just one way our research pushed science forward. Cloning in the belief of many, and to a degree, myself as well, had the potential for limitless medical miracles.

            But while on this subject, and before I discuss our tribulations with the cross, let me discuss the matter of how we decided whom to clone first?  We considered Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Freud, George Washington, among many others. You name the historical figure, we in all likelihood considered them.  In the end we wanted the first person cloned to be significant, in short, somebody who mattered. Perhaps the most significant person in history. In the end, we eventually settled on Jesus Christ.  It all came from a joke; that he should be the first clone, but upon reflection realized that it could be done, especially with we had at our disposal after accumulating over the past few years, some in part due to our own previous research. The more we considered the idea the more and more we realized that it should be him.  What figure has affected history more than Christ? In essence, whether it be by his actions or his followers, what man has mattered more? Perhaps it was like trying to hit a dart board from a mile away, but we were resolved once we had made up our minds. If ever we wanted to make our own place in history, it would be there.

            The discovery that truly made our project and endeavor possible was made in late 2009 by Dr. Wakashitanamerana, a Japanese scientist when she discovered that DNA could hold a substantial amount of memory if analyzed in a certain way.  Before her pioneering work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize, all scientists could do with DNA was copy it from the beginning of that DNA’s existence – the original birth of the person from which it had come.  Scientists had to essentially regrow the entire human being from birth.  But after her work, scientists could take a strand of DNA, search it for a specific moment in time, and then clone the person from that point in their life through the memory stored in the RNA.  Unfortunately though, the clone would have no memory of who they had been because memories are stored in the mind using an entirely different and yet to be understood chemical system.  A fascinating person and genius in her own right, Dr. Wakashitanamerana eventually went insane from the pressures of her genius and the expectations placed upon her because she’d won the Nobel Prize.   It didn’t help either that she had a phobia of awards – go figure.

            Ultimately we would spend three years searching for the blood of Christ.  We went around the world twice and would have gone around again had we not stumbled upon a very small church in the hills of southern Greece, not far from Istanbul.  On display in the small cloister of the church was a tiny piece of wood, a mere inch of it, which the congregants and priests claimed was part of the true cross, as it was called by Catholics.  It turned out they were right.  There was blood on it and thankfully since the journey had dragged on for so long until that time, the DNA of the blood matched ninety percent of the DNA model we had extrapolated using the ‘Mutt’ program- thus proving we had correctly (more or less) created our model of Christ’s DNA and that the blood on the wood was indeed Christ’s.  As luck would have it, this would prove to be a good match, and the amount of blood left on the piece of the cross would prove to be more than enough for us to do what we needed to. It was amazingly intact. A religious man would call it miraculous.

            In reality and upon reflection, what we went through was like finding a needle in a haystack. One in which you had only a vague idea of what the needle looked like, it’s dimensions or if there was even a needle there in the first place. But lady luck was smiling upon us, or perhaps it was God even, and there was actual DNA of Christ, and with it we could finally begin the cloning of Jesus, the first human to ever be cloned.

            The next problem that daunted our achievements thus far (and believe me, proving that Christ existed was and is an achievement in itself, even if one doesn’t believe in God) was where we could legally clone him.  Roughly three-quarters of the world had banned cloning and the country that was foremost in its technology at the time and also one of the few nations that still legally allowed the process to be done, was Israel.  We also found the symbology behind Christ being cloned in his legendary homeland somewhat fitting if not appropriately humorous, even.  With that in mind we settled on cloning him in the heart of the holy land, Jerusalem. We set our sights on a facility that had made headlines in 2004, the Rambam hospital, which was exploring human cloning for experimentation. It sounds Frankensteinish, but it was perfect.

            Thanks to Dr. Wakashitanamerana (or Dr. Wak, as I called her because even I have trouble pronouncing her name after our years of collaborating), within three months we had a fully grown human on our hands, but only after spending over twenty million between a wing of the hospital building, not to mention the near insane amount of money on the technology to do it. It would never have been as simple as growing a slurm from a petri dish- it was an incubation tank. The whole shebang. On more than one occasion Dr. Goffell voiced his opinion that it all seemed fantastically futuristic. In the end Jesus ended up being the third Christ we attempted to clone and the only one that lived.  The others had failed early into the process, much to our expectations and to a degree, despair.

            Some may have interpreted it as the will of God that the first two attempts failed and a sign that we should stop.  We chalked it up to faults on our own part, and through stubbornness and determination prevailed.

            People have often asked me during the ordeal and after why we didn’t just simply clone Christ from the theorized model of DNA we had already assembled.  This is an admirably intelligent question, but there two problems had we wanted to.  First, we had no way of actually knowing that the DNA model we had was that of Christ; we needed his blood and DNA to match up with our own theorized model so we would know there was actually a Jesus to clone in the first place.  You can’t just go on faith in science.  I am a firm believer that faith has no place mingling with science.  You need facts to explain something and even if we had the technology to just clone him from the DNA model we had assembled we very well may have been wrong about whom we had cloned.  As it turned out though, we weren’t, but up until that point we were just theorizing about what he was like with the genetic model we had created.  We needed his blood, at the very least, as a double check for our model to prove its accuracy.

            And it was only once we had that blood we could synthesize copies from its long dead and dormant material. The second problem with doing that is there is simply no way to do it without the raw biological material. We needed more than just a template to work with, and it is far easier to replicate DNA when you have a source than to manufacture our own from scratch, which would have made the three month process into six as we assembled the various nucleotides, RNA among other components. The DNA model we had made was just an electronic guide, though an essential one. Without it, identifying the blood and DNA of Jesus would have been impossible.  We needed the real blood or some other biological material from Christ for our best chance to actually clone him.            Some of the crew, technicians, and scientists thought as he came out of the cloning chamber it would be as if God had.  They were sorely mistaken.  Out stumbled a man, nothing more and nothing less.  He shivered in the cool air and breathed like we did.  However, that didn’t stop the Christians among us from crossing themselves in his presence, some even dropping to their knees in worship.

            After his “birth,” we spent the better part of his first year teaching him as much as we could about the world he lived in.  Although he had the body of Christ, his mind was still a blank slate.  He knew nothing, barely how to walk, and hadn’t a chance in hell the ability to already speak.  He was like a child, only in the body of a man.  We had to teach him virtually everything, ranging from simple concepts such as using the bathroom to the more complex ones an individual experiences in life. You should have seen him the first time we got him to use a fork; it was priceless.

            After he had learned to walk and fully use his body, we began taking him for visits outside of the building.  It was fascinating to watch and study him, I have notebook upon journals of notes I took recording every detail concerning the development of our Christ. It was as if we had given a blind man sight.  He wanted to learn everything, and with each passing day his curiosity grew and grew.  When Dr. Goffell later referred to those moments as similar to what Frankenstein must have gone through, I would feel my cheeks flush.  The most difference was he was not at all depressed or blood thirsty.

            We soon found he was incredibly intelligent, learning everything that we taught him quickly, and even things that we didn’t teach him that he picked up on his own. We also found he had a knack for languages, as well.  We taught him basic English, which he learned quickly.  His enunciation and manner of speaking had a hint of my own New Yorker accent because I was his primary English tutor.  He picked up Hebrew from the Israeli doctors and researchers on our staff, as well as from the people he spoke with on the streets around our large building and in the open-air markets.  It only took him a few months to master that language.  By the end of his initial studies, he could fluently speak English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Italian.  We tried German with him, but after several lessons he threw a fit and refused to learn any more of the language, saying it was too guttural and ugly.

            He often did that, dividing the world into two categories.  As soon as he learned the two words; beautiful and ugly and their meanings, he began to label everything as either of the two.  White and black, light and dark. He was like that with everything.  Back then there was never an in-between, no gray area.  It was either black or white, good or bad.  We found this interesting because of the fact that he always seemed to judge things and he was good at it too.  He had a natural sense of what was right and what was wrong, a damn near flawless code of ethics, and a perfect understanding of our basic laws.

            By the end of the first year, just six months since he had stepped from our cloning chamber, we were ready to take Jesus to the next level.