Je suis Alexamenos

• All the tell-tale signs of spring are arriving here: Melting snow, robins in the yard, young Mets pitchers losing a season to Tommy John surgery. … This also means I’ll be returning to full-time “seasonal recovery” work at the Big Box. If you need mulch, I know a guy.

• We don’t know what Jesus looked like. (Although we know what he didn’t look like — he was not a white European.) Valerie Tarico takes a look at the strange history of depictions of Jesus as a hottie — depictions that tell us far more about us than about Jesus himself.

Tarico doesn’t include any discussion of one of the earliest depictions of Christ — the Alexamenos graffito. It’s a crude scrawl, probably from the early third century, depicting a crucified figure with an ass’s head.

Je suis Alexamenos.

• “I love proto-Protestant history more than anything in this great wide world,” Mallory Ortberg says, noting that the 14th-century Lollards tried to take the Protestant work ethic in a very different direction.

I have a similar fondness for the stranger apocryphal works that can sometimes shed light on the scriptures and, also, sometimes produce things like this: “Untouched by an Angel: Angelic Genitalia and Bitenosh’s Pleasure in the Genesis Apocryphon.”

• Consumerist’s Ashlee Kieler discusses an absurd and unjust law that should be on the short list of Things Millennials Will Need to Fix as they begin to displace the Boomers now in charge of everything. One approach would be to stop treating student loans differently from all other forms of debt. Another approach would be to proclaim jubilee throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

• “Perhaps the bidding never took off because the state is used, nearly 200 years old. And it went through that war in the 19th century that some people are determined to keep fighting today.” You’ve missed your chance to buy the state of Alabama on eBay.

• In order for conservative culture-warriors to convince me that the sexual revolution is the main cause of poverty, they would need to show me that poverty has gotten worse — more severe, more widespread — since the sexual revolution. As it is, they seem to be arguing that the problem predates its cause. That seems unlikely. Ma Joad’s problems were probably not caused by changes in sexual behavior that came decades after her death.

• The good news: Scientists are now learning much more about the Pliocene epoch, 5 million years ago, when the Earth looked very different, with sea levels as much as 40 meters higher than they are today.

The bad news: They’re learning this because climate change is threatening huge ice shelves in Antarctica, which could have a more dramatic effect on sea levels than previously feared. Better add that to the list of Things Millennials Will Need to Fix too. Sorry, kids.