"It's fine, ask whatever you want. Uh, sorry about how my thoughts are kind of awful." He keeps getting brief mental images of people on fire and shoving them away.

Leareth closes his eyes for a moment and tries to put his thoughts in order.

”I think,” he says slowly, “that you underweight your own intelligence. Trust me - I am reading your mind.” That part is sort of sad. “In my opinion, it indicates nothing wrong with your mind that you cannot, on demand, love a being who so far as I can tell has not taken good care of His people, and who makes your entry to His realm of paradise conditional on expressing enough adoration.”

He looks past the boy, absentmindedly studying the wall of his room. “If you have any treatises on the concept of the Trinity or how God is Goodness, or better yet a person with understanding I could read from their mind, that would be valuable. They are certainly not translating currently.”

"That--I--thank you. You could try reading the Gospels directly, and I have a book on salvation for small children if you want something shorter. I'm hesitant to volunteer someone else for mind-reading without their permission but if it makes the difference between you getting saved and not it's obviously worth it."

“...I can read the treatise and I might as well read the children’s explanation as well in case it covers any cultural gaps, which I am sure exist.” Leareth frowns at Bruce. “I confess I am confused about why you so fervently wish for me to love your God when one, you do not, and two, I am not even from your world and hail from a place with entirely different gods.”

(The gods of Velgarth don’t exactly approve of Leareth. He doesn’t much care.)

"Well just because I'm damned doesn't mean I want you to be too!" Bruce exclaims, and then stares at his feet in embarrassment for several seconds.

". . . Do you figure you might get your original afterlife regardless?" He adds hopefully, and stands up to pull a couple books off his overflowing bookcase. One is a massive and very fancily bound volume embossed with "The Holy Bible: King James Edition"; the other is dug out of the back of a bottom shelf, clearly aimed at small children, and written by someone who probably could not get a job writing for people old enough to choose what they read.

Leareth reaches out to take the books.

“I have...special arrangements,” he says. It’s not like Bruce has any chance of guessing right, and he might be reassured. “If I die in my world, I am very confident I will not go to Hell. If I were foolish or unlucky enough to die here...” He shrugs. “Probably it would still work. I will plan not to. Would you like me to read these now and ask questions?”

He’s hoping the books will have some additional hints as to how magic works, so he can at least set up contingency plans to go home.

He’s less sure he wants to leave right away, though. This world is interesting, and, well, gods are always relevant to his plans.

"Not dying is an excellent plan. And yeah, reading the books now sounds good. The stuff with Adam and Eve is the very first chapter, and the part with Jesus and salvation starts on . . . this page."

Leareth takes the book, open to the page Bruce indicated, and starts reading about Jesus and salvation.

The salvation bit is a ways in. First there's a genealogy, then the fiance of someone in the genealogy gets spontaneously miraculously pregnant without her husband's involvement (which rather obscures the purpose of the genealogy), and they have the baby and have some adventures and go on the run from the law for a bit, and then Jesus grows up and does some miracles and fasts in the desert and gets tempted by Satan.

Fortunately Leareth is a fast reader; whatever magical-or-otherwise-phenomenon lets them speak, apparently also covers writing, although occasionally he hits the difficulty where he's not sure if a word he knows maps to exactly the same concept. Mostly he can guess from context, for now; if he asked Bruce about every note of confusion this would take a lot longer than their two remaining hours. 

A god literally incarnating as a human baby is...a little odd...but given his own background, he isn't shocked. Mainly he would have expected most gods to hate restricting themselves to the material realm in such a way; it doesn't seem that this 'Jesus', while in human form, has access to His full godly powers. 

"How long ago did this happen?" Leareth finally thinks to ask. "I am...actually not sure of the current level of advancement of your civilization, but the descriptions here seem rather more primitive." He frowns. Orient. "Where is this happening geographically? Are we in the same region, or far away?" 

"Jesus was born two thousand twenty years ago--we base our calendar on it. And this was all happening halfway around the world; I'll show you a map real quick." 

Bruce has and displays a world map: the US here, the Middle East over yonder.

“I...see. Thank you.” Leareth resists the urge to ask a number of questions about cross-ocean travel, and makes a note instead.

He keeps reading.

Jesus preaches repentance and charity, and calls disciples, and miraculously heals the sick, and blesses the poor and the meek and the peacemakers, and says that anyone who calls someone a fool is in danger of the fires of Hell, and that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Leareth is nodding along; most of it isn't unreasonable, exactly, the adultery part is a little excessive but there are societies like that in Velgarth and maybe even God would absorb some local prejudices from the culture where He was raised from babyhood. 

Still, Leareth thinks, if he were God incarnated in human form he would certainly be a little more ambitious about it. He says as much to Bruce. 

"What would you do?" He shouldn't've asked that; this is the sort of topic that leads to doubting God's omnipotence. Bruce is kind of a lost cause, there; he's spent too much time wondering why God needed ten entire plagues and the Pharaoh's permission to take the Israelites out of Egypt instead of just teleporting them.

Meanwhile, Jesus condemns divorce and oath-swearing and vengeance and tells everyone to love their enemies and give to charity and not be obnoxiously public about their good deeds or worry about material goods.

This is an odd mix of social change that Leareth finds straightforwardly good versus baffling, but all cultures have their baffling pieces and they generally have a good reason. Maybe this God did look through all the possible futures, as an omnipotent being outside of time before limiting Himself to the material world, and conclude that human flourishing in this particular works just was maximized by banning oath-swearing. Weird, but not impossible.

”I cannot say for sure since it depends heavily on contextual factors,” he says absently. “I would certainly consider taking over the local empire, since it seems suboptimally run. A thorough reform of the education system is another possibility - I might found a scholarly monastic order.”

(A previous incarnation of Leareth has in fact done just that.)

"I think the Church might have been the first institution to have anything like monastic orders. God did appoint some kings, in the Old Testament--that's the part before what you're looking at--or ruled through prophets, for a while."

Jesus does a bunch of miracles, mostly healings, and gathers twelve disciples, and tells them to go out and preach his word, and warns them that they will be hated and persecuted and their families will turn against them but that they will be rewarded in Heaven.

The prediction of ostracism seems unfortunately plausible. 'Jesus' sounds like a very skilled social persuader and movement-builder, which isn't at all surprising for God, but still has him nodding in approval.

"How do prophets work in your world?" he asks at one point.

"Sometimes God speaks to someone, with visions or by sending angels as messengers, and tells them to do things--lead a people, explain some part of His law, tell a city they're at risk of getting smote--and does miracles around them to prove they're not making it up. Sometimes Satan sets up false prophets and sometimes they fool people, but usually God smites the false prophets fairly quickly, so they don't fool people for very long."

“Does Satan also possess the magical abilities necessary to perform these ‘miracles’, then? How do God and Satan’s power differ?” It’s a digression but he’s curious. “Did Satan ever incarnate as a human as well?”

"Satan used to be an especially powerful angel; he can do things that look like miracles but he's not as powerful as God. God is omnipotent, so everything Satan does is something God lets him get away with and he'll eventually be defeated forever at the End of Days."

Leareth raises his eyebrows. "So the plot with the magical forbidden fruit that conveys knowledge is one that He allowed to happen?" He doesn't wait for an answer, just shrugs and keeps reading. Bruce can tell him more about the 'End of Days' later, he's probably getting out of order here and maybe he ought to check how much time they have left before he needs to conceal himself from Bruce's family members. 

"Yes, original sin was part of God's plan too." Jesus breaks the Sabbath, on which Leareth has no context, and tells people to repent, and defends himself against accusations of being the devil. And then sure enough Bruce says, "My folks will be home soon. Do you want to hole up in here or find somewhere else? . . . I have some of my allowance saved up but it's probably only enough for one night in a cheap hotel. Maybe two nights in a really cheap one."