Ha! Haven't seen this picture for ages.
Peter here, fisherman, apostle, 'The Rock',
and that's me, with the beard!
Well, we've all got beards,
but I'm the one next to Jesus doing the thumbs-up.
Good times.
Oh. Nice one of Jesus.
He was the Messiah, or 'the Christ',
if you want to get all posh and Greek and that.
How do I know?
Well, if you met him, you'd understand.
He was a born leader, he told a good story,
cooked a mean fish barbecue,
and then there were the miracles.
Did I mention the miracles?
None of your abrakabbalah, rabbit out of a hat nonsense,
though there was this one time he made a coin appear out of a fish's mouth.
No, this was proper power over nature stuff,
calming storms, walking on water,
and that picnic - we had fish sandwiches.
Jesus somehow made them go round 5,000 people.
Ah, now this, this is the first miracle I ever saw him do,
at a wedding over in Cana.
So, the party's in full swing, there's me dancing,
and then, the wine runs out.
Jesus' mum was going, 'How embarrassing for the family.'
So Jesus gets the staff to fill up some jars with water,
these big fellas we use for washing,
and tells the poor little waitress there to take the cup to the head-waiter.
The gent takes a sip, smacks his lips and says,
'It's the best wine I have ever tasted',
and he wasn't wrong, it was a good drop of vino all right.
Amazing.
Who on Earth's that?
Oh yeah, Jesus was famous for healing people.
Skin diseases, blindness, that bleeding woman.
I mean, a woman who was bleeding.
He even cured the mother-in-law of a fever.
Didn't cure her of nagging though.
No, she's lovely... Really.
But the healing that got everyone talking, ah here:
Word got round that Jesus was staying with me and the missus,
so we had people visiting the house,
crowding the street, peering through the doors and windows
'til you couldn't get in or out.
Suddenly, we're all showered with dust and lumps of clay,
and this bloke is lowered down through a hole in the roof.
My roof! Right in front of Jesus.
The guy was paralytic,
I mean, he was paralysed,
and he was that desperate for Jesus to heal him.
The locals used to think that if someone was ill,
it was because they must've done something wrong,
so Jesus tells the man he's forgiven, for whatever
and he mustn't blame himself,
but some people thought that Jesus was getting a size too big for his sandals.
So, he says to the fella,
'All right then, get up and walk',
and he did... and then some.
Took me ages to repair the roof.
Then, there were the exorcisms, when he got rid of demons,
you know, people who were possessed.
Like this bloke, he came at us out of the cave there,
shouting and screaming, giving it all that.
Jesus just looks the lad in the eye and asks him his name.
'Legion', he says,''Cos there's lots of us'.
You see 'cos, 'legion' means 'a lot'.
The fella was full of demons.
So Jesus orders them all out of him and into this herd of pigs,
which squeal and run off!
But the bloke was immediately better,
sane as the next man, happy as can be,
which is more than can be said for the fella who owned the pigs.
But the most impressive miracles were the resurrections,
when Jesus brought people back to life, like Lazarus.
That's him there next to Jesus.
They were old mates from back in the day,
and this guy's sisters, Martha and Mary, sent a message to say he was ill.
But we were late getting started see,
so by the time we turned up,
Lazarus had been dead and buried for 4 days,
but Jesus says to open up the tomb.
Martha tries to stop us, because of, you know, the smell,
but we open it up anyway.
Man, that stone was heavy.
And out walks Lazarus, still wrapped up in his shroud.
Must admit, it was a bit scary,
'til we realised he was back to his old self and not some sort of zombie,
see the funny side now, not so much at the time.
So, yeah, I'd say Jesus was the Messiah.
We believed it, and so did all the people he helped with his miracles,
kind of the point, really.
He was the Son of God and he was my friend.