Artist:
"Hen House"
Medium: Mixed Media (gouache+ time travel)
There was once a group of Gnostics in the early days of Christianity who
would meet to discuss Christ's life and the meaning of his suffering,
death, and resurrection. After several years of meeting with little results,
this particular group of Gnostics began to grow more and more bothered
by the sudden end to Jesus' life. To them, Christ's death on the cross
not as an act of redemption, but was instead the tragic loss of a great
teacher, someone who still had much more to share with the poor, unenlightened
people of the world.
To this end, they closed their meetings with a prayer, asking God to bring
Jesus into his powers at an earlier age. This they hoped would allow Jesus
to begin his ministry much sooner, giving him more time to spread (and
explain) his message. In fact, in an act of wish-fulfillment, they even
wrote what would later become known as the Thomas Infancy Gospel, picking
the name of Thomas, the doubting apostle, as a symbol of their own doubt
that Christ's death had been a part of the divine plan.
And so this small group of Gnostics would have faded into history with
all the others, had not their prayers been answered in a most unlikely
fashion. One day, as they were gathered together, there was a flash of
light above them and a large metal capsule appeared. A door slowly opened
and a burned, bullet-ridden body was ejected onto the ground. The Gnostics
took the nearly dead man into their house and slowly nursed him back to
health.
Although
the man lived only a few months, he was able to give the Gnostics a demonstration
of the "time capsule" and also showed them how to use of something else
he carried with him, called a "sniper rifle". The man passed away soon
after the Gnostics had learned to use these two items, and some say that
they killed him in order to take possession of them.
Regardless of whether or not they were to blame for the death of the time
traveling hit man, the Gnostics did use his tools for a much more heinous
deed. Their plan, developed over long nights while the sick man slumbered
in the next room, was to go back in time and kill the Virgin Mary while
Jesus was still a young child. The shock of his mother's death, they hoped,
would push the young Christ to develop his powers in order to bring her
back to life. And in so doing, they hoped he would be able to begin his
ministries at a younger age as well.
Two agents were hand-picked, one to be the shooter (code-named "Angry
Mallard"), and the other to be the witness (code-named "Hen House"). And
after many practice sessions, these two finally felt they were ready for
the big hit, the "Hail Mary" shot, as they called it, for these would
be the words Jesus would utter to raise his mother back from death. Traveling
back in time to a small spot outside of Nazareth, the two agents scouted
the town and soon located the correct house, where they lay in wait for
the perfect opportunity to strike.
One sunny day while the two were hiding in some bushes near the holy family's
house, Mary came out into the yard, with the young Jesus at her breast.
To their surprise, however, Mary was nursing not only Jesus, but also
another child, whom they heard her call "Joeses", and they watched in
shock as Jesus began to beat Joeses with a small wooden toy in the shape
of a cross. This so effected "Angry Mallard" that he suffered
a stroke. He managed to lift the rifle and pull the trigger only once
before dying, leaving "Hen House" all alone watching in shocked
paralysis.
The moment before the trigger was pulled, Mary reached down to comfort
the poor Joeses, who was crying loudly at the pain inflicted by Jesus'
wooden cross. Mary lifted Joeses up to her breast just as the bullet left
the rifle, and the bullet and met the baby in mid-air, showering the holy
mother and the Christ child with the blood, brains, and skull chunks of
poor Joeses. And Jesus wept.
In this single act, the Gnostics not only failed to shock Jesus into an
early Messiah-hood, but they also created within the young boy an incredibly
strong guilt complex, consisting of physical suffering, a wooden cross,
and a bloody death, which would follow him for the rest of his days.
Hen House was so haunted by his own guilt that he went back to his own
time, destroyed the time capsule, and never spoke to anyone again. Instead,
he endlessly recreated the final scene of Joeses' life over and over,
until he died of dysentery a few years later.
This piece we have presented to you here is his only known work to have
survived up to the present day.
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