by 
Jesus Christ this morning bemoaned the struggle facing agent-less authors after receiving yet another rejection letter regarding his manuscript for The Newer Testament.
After hundreds of years in which the original text has been wilfully misinterpreted by religious zealots, Jesus has been keen to publish clarification guidelines in his latest version for over five hundred years, but with little interest from the publishing community.
Jesus told us, “They keep telling me that the self-help genre is completely saturated; unless I want to focus on helping people losing weight or give up smoking. Or maybe something about becoming more attractive to the opposite sex.
“But anything with a central theme of ‘stop being complete shits to each other all of the bloody time’ just won’t sell, or so they tell me.
“It seems that nowadays if you want to see anything of yours in print, you need an agent – I swear to Dad the last publisher I sent it to didn’t even read the manuscript.”
Jesus went on to explain that he had brought the original text up-to-date, and had used a number of modern references to illustrate the allegories contained within it.
He said, “I’ve given it a bit of a new millennium feel, you know? There’s a great bit about honouring thy neighbour by asking permission before using their wifi.
“I really felt it was time to give you people something you might understand, just to stop you using a text written over two thousand years ago as an excuse to continue killing each other every chance you get.
“But all publishers want to know is ‘Who are you encouraging us to persecute this time?’ or ‘How little does my brother have to do to deserve stoning to death?’ – Which is not the point of the new edition, at all.
“One publisher even asked me if I had a blog, and how many Twitter followers I had. This was just before he described the Newer Testament as ‘about as interesting as a theological version of the highway code’. That one hurt.
“But you should probably know I’ve totally rethought the whole anti-gay thing, too. To be honest, we love a good show tune up in heaven, and since Freddie Mercury joined us it’s been like one big episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy up there.”
Jesus – like Santa but for grown-ups
