Suppose that you are 30 to 40 years old, the parent of a beautiful 14-year-old girl. She's the apple of your eye, a member of Mensa, the society for people who do well on I.Q. tests. Better, she's well brought up (if you do say so yourself) and has a firm grasp on what's right and wrong, moral and immoral. Even better, although she's obviously too young for much more than group dates, she's in love with the captain of her high school football team, a straight-A student himself, president of his class, the kind of boy who mows little old ladies' lawns for them for free and nurses sick puppies back to health — and he's in love with her. While you won't allow them to become engaged, you suspect that they have an understanding anyway. You are so proud of both of them you could burst.

Now suppose that this girl — just for fun, let's call her Miriam — comes to you one fine day, rather troubled. "Dad, Mom," she says. "I was hanging out at the mall after school, and this weird guy came up to me and said that I was pregnant, and my baby would change the world forever. I swear, he was a real dweeb, like a space alien or something. But I can't be pregnant, honest — Joe and I have never even gotten past first base."

She's a good kid, and you tell her to forget it, the guy was probably just some harmless crackpot who was released from St. Elizabeth's prematurely. But three months later, she visits her mother's gynecologist, and sure enough, your beautiful 14-year-old daughter is pregnant. And a virgin, according to the OB-GYN.

Well, okay, you've read that such things are possible, if extremely rare — heavy petting with unfortunate results. The problem is that you don't believe in abortion as a method of birth control, and even if you did, Miriam has a health condition that means an abortion would kill her; so it's out of the question on two counts.

What's horrible is that Joe's parents tell you that Joe has sworn to them on a stack of Bibles that he is not the father, that he and Miriam honest to Godde never got beyond first base, and they believe him. You thank Godde that motherhood out of wedlock isn't what it was even 30 years ago, but contemplate a protracted visit to California.

Stunningly, Joe announces that he's willing to marry your daughter anyway, bastard or no bastard. You, your spouse, and Joe's parents all agree that your kids are just too young to get married right away, and besides, there's college to think about; but your brother Zack's wife, Elizabeth, who's a lawyer, draws up a pre-nuptial agreement that includes fair details about child support.

A few months later, Joe is driving Miriam to school so the two of them can take their SATs, when her water breaks. There was a huge accident on the highway, and all the nearby emergency rooms are jammed. Poor Miriam ends up giving birth several hours later in one of the mechanics' bays of an Exxon station.

At roughly the same time your grandchild is being born, something amazing happens — a space alien lands on the Ellipse and announces that your grandchild is going to have a more important impact on human history than antibiotics plus the printing press plus television plus the computer plus the zipper! Then the entire sky fills up with UFOs, all glowing like Christmas tree ornaments and playing those five tones from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" over and over.

The President goes on TV to announce that it's all a hoax and we should relax. Then a few hours later, the President goes back on TV; it's not a hoax but rather an elaborate plot by some demented former Nazis to destroy the United States by infecting all babies under the age of two with a horrible killer virus. Citizens are urged to take all children under the age of two to their nearest emergency room and leave them there.

You get a phone call from Joe. "Miriam's fine, and the baby's fine," he says. "You'd be proud. We thought about names like Robin and Terry, but we've decided to go with Jesse. Anyway, listen, we don't believe this business about the Nazi death virus. We're going to beat it to Canada for a while. We just wanted to let you know."

You demand to talk to Miriam. "Mom, Dad, you're not going to believe this," she says. "Queen Elizabeth, Stephen Hawking, and the President came to the Exxon station to see the baby!"

"You're right," you say, "we don't believe it!"

"It's true!" she insists. "And what's more, they fell to their knees and worshipped the baby, and then they each gave me and Joe certified checks for ten million dollars!"

"Just what have you been smoking, young lady?" you say.

"Naw, Mom, Dad, just like you always say, no one inhales that stuff."

You still think Miriam must have some sort of temporary post-partum derangement, until she and Joe send you a fax of the checks, and there are those famous signatures, notarized to boot. Your kids and grandchild live for a few years in Canada, and they're right to — all the babies under the age of two have mysteriously disappeared, supposedly to some secret government facility out west, but none of them are ever seen again.

Eventually, Joe, Miriam, and Jesse come home again, and you get them a nice townhouse not far from you. Joe and Miriam consider Princeton on the Brooke Shields plan, but they're really too busy taking Jesse from Oprah to Geraldo to Ricki to Montel to . . . .

Now, here's the question: Does Jesse have any reasonable chance at all to grow up like a normal kid, playing baseball, dating, going to the senior prom, maybe going to Yale or Smith before heading off to divinity school?

And here's another question: Suppose you're Godde, and you decide to live on Earth for 30 years as a human being, experiencing every facet of human life before beginning your mission of love. Do you want your baby-self to be famous, the object of every eye, under a microscope every second — "Look, this baby can change water into milk!" "Look, a perfect 1600 on the SATs, and the kid is only four years old!" "Look, this teenager can rollerblade on water!" Or do you want to be anonymous, so you can find out what being a human is like for yourself?

This, in a nutshell, is why I believe that the Gospels of Mark and John are right, that Jesus just appeared on the scene at roughly the age of 30 as if out of a clear blue sky. I believe not just that Godde wanted to experience what being human is really like, but that it's a much bigger miracle if Jesus was born and grew up in anonymity, just an ordinary kid in an ordinary town in Judea.

After all, what kind of a life would the child Jesus have had if everyone in the Mediterranean was watching him like a hawk every minute, waiting for him to prove that he was "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Godde, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace"?