Better Than Jesus: A 19-Year-Old’s Plan

Created by Rachel Maria Kisellus

When I was nineteen, I decided I was going to study religion seriously. Not just dabble, not just skim ~ I wanted the whole thing. The Bible, cover to cover. Genesis through Revelation. I armed myself with notebooks, pens, and the kind of caffeine supply only a teenager can survive on. I wasn’t just reading; I was mapping. Tracking themes, contradictions, genealogies, prophecies fulfilled and unfulfilled. I wanted the architecture of the text, not just the poetry.

Somewhere in that frenzy of underlining and margin notes, I got an idea that now sounds laughably audacious: I was going to figure out how to do it better than Jesus. Not “better” in the sense of miracles and walking on water ~ I wasn’t aiming for loaves-and-fishes fame. What I meant, in my head at least, was that I saw Jesus’ story as a blueprint that was both brilliant and unfinished. A radical teacher who spoke in riddles, who left more questions than answers, who died too soon. I was nineteen, cocky, and convinced that if given enough time and notes, I could improve on the execution.

And part of that execution plan was simple: don’t let them fucking kill me. That was where Jesus blew it, at least from my nineteen-year-old vantage point. You can be the wisest teacher, the kindest healer, the fiercest prophet ~ but if you don’t know how to protect yourself, the whole thing gets cut short. I wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. I’d be clever, strategic, armored with foresight and loopholes. My messiah wouldn’t die on someone else’s terms.

Also ~ and this was obvious to me at the time ~ I wanted to have a baby. Duh. A messiah with no lineage? That seemed like another mistake. If I was going to outdo Jesus, it meant passing on the wisdom, not letting it vanish into legend. At nineteen, with a notebook full of plans and the arrogance of someone barely out of high school, I thought motherhood was part of the messianic strategy.

I didn’t mean to dismiss him. If anything, I admired him enough to want to run a tighter ship. Jesus wandered the desert; I would outline a strategy. He spoke in parables; I would publish a guidebook. He flipped tables; I would file bylaws. My plan wasn’t born from arrogance as much as from the naïve hunger of youth: the idea that every generation must take the raw material handed to them and refine it, sharpen it, set it on fire again.

Looking back now, I see how absurd and beautiful that impulse was. To think a nineteen-year-old with some spiral notebooks could “do it better than Jesus” is exactly the kind of foolishness that sparks new paths. The Bible gave me a labyrinth; my notes were the breadcrumbs. I didn’t become the messiah of my own invention, but I did learn what it feels like to wrestle with the impossible and come out grinning.

In a way, I think Jesus would’ve understood.

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