Lo, did you see that Jesus stuff on TV?

I was basking in the ease of a brief summer morning last week when a bearded man with long hair wearing a shimmering white robe appeared in my driveway.

His presence startled me. One often runs into bearded, long-haired men in white robes wandering through Topanga, but very few of them shimmer, unless it is the morning after St. Patrick’s Day and the effects of green gin have not yet worn off.

He headed directly for our gazebo, where I was seated with my laptop waiting for a muse to flutter from the overhead oak tree and land on my keyboard. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky once said, “Every day I open the store. I’m not saying anybody comes in, but every day I open the store.” My store was open.

The bearded person walked with a floating motion into the gazebo and hovered before me, not unlike a humming bird observing a blossom, but slower, and I’m no blossom.

“Lo,” he said, “I say unto you that there is sacrilege in your mortal head, and, lo, I come to cleanse you of bleak thoughts.”

“Lo,” I replied, suddenly realizing, “it’s you, I mean You, God!”

“You don’t ‘lo,’ ” he replied in a less biblical manner, “I ‘lo,’ you just listen. You’re about to make fun of us.”

“No, no,” I said, “never!”

He settled into a chair and gestured. Two glowing martinis appeared before us, as the dial of the gazebo clock spun forward crazily from 10 a.m. to gong the happy hour at 6 p.m.

Sipping his martini, he went on to explain that he had discerned a pre-thought buzzing around my head that would lead to a column on the Jesus tomb. If you saw the recent Discovery Channel documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” you would be aware of the announcement by the filmmaker and renowned biblical scholar James Cameron. Bones found in Jerusalem 27 years ago in a set of 10 ossuaries, he proclaimed, were, lo, those of Jesus Christ and family.

Cameron is said to have added in breathless wonder at his pronouncement, “It doesn’t get much bigger than this.”

True. Not since a schoolgirl claimed to have seen Elvis Presley in a Pic ‘n’ Save shopping for pork fat and beer has the secular world been rocked with such a significant revelation. Scholars are debating the veracity of the claim in varying degrees of belief and disbelief. An Israeli anthropologist summed up the skeptical side by asking, “Would you believe a story by a guy who made ‘The Terminator’?”

Actually, Cameron’s big film, the one that won him an Oscar, was “Titanic,” a fanciful depiction of the ship’s sinking that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as a clog dancer and Kate Winslet as the ship’s figurehead prow.

“Speculation is that he’s going to make a movie even bigger than ‘Titanic,’ ” I said. “Cameron could be the 13th apostle. Just as Peter was the fisher of men, it would be Cameron, lo, the fisher of gimmicks!”

“Easy,” God said with a twinkle in his eye. “This is serious business. Do I make fun of your son?”

I had dinner with Jesus once. He was a short guy in cowboy boots who played the title role in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” His name was Ted Neeley. It was during my tenure as a television writer. We were trying to build on his success as Jesus by attempting to sell a series in which he would star. It was pathetic: Jesus wandering the networks looking for work and being rejected every time. Only in L.A.

“If anyone can answer the question,” I said, “surely you can: Are those actually the bones of your son and his family in those coffins? Mary, Joseph, etc.?”

“Let me put it in a parable,” he said.

“I don’t have space for a parable.”

God frowned. “Then let me put it this way. Do you believe that was the face of the Virgin Mary that appeared in a pepperoni pizza a few years ago?”

“It was a cheese pizza,” I said. “The face was in the stewed tomatoes.”

“Whatever.”

“Some believed it. Some didn’t. They’re still debating it at Papa Joe’s.”

“Exactly,” God said. “You believe what you need to believe. Everyone is different, some more different than others.”

I was about to ask whom he preferred to play the part of Jesus in a possible movie on the tomb findings. A friend suggested Kevin Costner, but I prefer Brad Pitt because Angelina Jolie would probably be included as Mary Magdalene, whose bones were also thought to be in the tomb. I was about to press the question but Cinelli came up the pathway toward the gazebo.

“You’re talking to yourself again,” she said. “Are you out of medication?”

“Nope,” I said, “I’m having a conversation with God ... “ and turned to him again but he was gone. Gone too were the two golden martinis, and, lo, the dials of the clock had spun backward from happy hour to morning.

“It’s just as well,” I said to a puzzled Cinelli, “martinis are best drunk indoors.”

Lo.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.