I’m not fooling anyone.  There is probably a strong suspicion that I’m going to shape things in such a way that I can come to the conclusion that Jesus is a pretty good carpenter.  A typical approach would be for me to establish the criteria—a good carpenter does A, B, C—and then examine some samples of Jesus’ carpentry, and say, look, Jesus’ carpentry shows A, B, C, and so I conclude that Jesus is a good carpenter.  Few would believe that I had actually established the criteria before I looked at the samples.  And, frankly, I don’t want to put myself in the position of being the judge of Jesus’ carpentry.  But the real rub is, and this was a little bit of a surprise, I searched the internet and didn’t find even one disputed artifact that anyone claimed was the handiwork of Jesus.

In the second century Justin Martyr claimed that Jesus made plows and yokes.  If He specialized in working tools for working people, it might not be so surprising that these necessary items were used for their intended purposes rather than preserved for posterity.  And it occurred to me that my surprise may be little more than an illusion created by looking back through the lens of Roman veneration of holy relics.  Jesus’ customers were descendants of Israel, with many centuries of cultural training in the evils of idolatry.  The owners of Jesus’ artifacts, whether they were his followers or not, may not have had the instinct for, in fact may have had a counter-instinct to, preserving those artifacts.  At any rate piety and practicality embrace each other here and demand that I infer what kind of carpenter Jesus is from other things He has made.  But where will I find these other things?

Here I have what scholars call an embarrassment of riches.  The Apostle John described Jesus like this (John 1:1-3 NET):  In the beginning was the Word (λόγος), and the Word (λόγος) was with God, and the Word (λόγος) was fully God.  The Word (οὗτος) was with God in the beginning.  All things were created by him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.  This is the Word that became flesh and took up residence among us¹ as the Lord Jesus.  So the whole world, the whole universe, the entire cosmos and everything in it is an artifact left by Jesus and fit material for my consideration.  The real question was, what shall I choose?

I let Matt Ridley, the author of GENOME, choose for me.  “In the beginning was the word,” he wrote.  “The word proselytized the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever.  The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live.  The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise.  The word blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself.”²

The word for Matt Ridley is not Jesus in this quote, but RNA, specifically the “chemical substance that links the two worlds of DNA and protein.”  So, I want to consider the interactions of RNA, DNA and proteins as an artifact of Jesus’ creation.

Now with my porridgy brain I only grasp the function of a very small percentage of the DNA molecule.  And so, obviously, I will be considering that very small percentage of the whole.  The level of detail present in that portion of DNA is such that it only allows one to distinguish between human beings and chimpanzees by a very small percentage of difference.  The far larger mass of the DNA molecule—called junk DNA, presumably because no one yet has a clue how it works or what it does—is where the level of detail that will convict a man of a crime in a court of law (while at the same time exonerating his father, his brother and his son) is found.

I assume most of us are familiar with the spiral staircase shape of the DNA molecule, its double helix structure deduced by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.  The business end of the molecule, as far as we know, the stairs, are constructed of pairs of four chemicals:  adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C).  And these chemicals comprise the four letter alphabet of the genetic code.

In his book DNA³ James Watson described how RNA makes the link from the code stored in bone marrow DNA to the production of the protein hemoglobin.  First, the hemoglobin gene, a segment of bone marrow DNA, unzips as it were.  The chemical pairs making up the stairs separate from each other.  One strand, one half of the stairs, is copied with the help of an enzyme called RNA polymerase.

Well, the process is actually called transcription.  And you don’t really get an exact copy, it’s more like a mirror image.  You see, adenine (A) and thymine (T) always pair up together, and guanine (G) and cytosine (C) always pair up together.  So in the process of transcription wherever the strand of DNA contains cytosine (C), for example, the RNA polymerase strand will contain guanine (G); wherever the DNA contains thymine (T) the RNA will have adenine (A) and so forth.  When transcription is complete the resulting messenger RNA is an exact copy, not of the strand of DNA it was paired up with, but of the other strand, the one that had unzipped from that strand where all the action seemed to take place.

And I must apologize, it’s not an exact copy of that strand either.  RNA is not entirely the same language as DNA.  In the language of RNA uracil (U) is substituted for thymine (T).  So, where adenine (A) occurs in the DNA strand, uracil (U) rather than thymine (T) occurs in the messenger RNA.  Then the messenger RNA is exported from the nucleus into the cell, and the DNA in the nucleus zips itself up again.

In the cell outside the nucleus the process of translation begins.  The recipe encoded in the messenger RNA is literally translated into an actual string of amino acids called a protein.  Now, this is not chemistry in the sense that the chemicals adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine transported as messenger RNA combine in various ways to produce the twenty amino acids that make up proteins.  It is language.  The translator, if you will, is a molecular machine called a ribosome, which is itself composed of RNA and protein.

“Amino acids are delivered to the scene,” Watson wrote, “attached to transfer RNA” (pg. 78).  The amino acid is attached to one end of yet another kind of RNA, and three letters of the genetic code (some triplet of adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine) are attached to the other end.  If the messenger RNA triplet inside the ribosome reads GUU, for instance, a transfer RNA molecule with CAA at one end and the amino acid valine at the other will lock in place.  Why?  Because guanine (G) is always paired with cytosine (C) and uracil (U) is always paired with adenine (A).  If the messenger RNA reads AAG then a transfer RNA molecule with UUC at one end and the amino acid lysine at the other will lock in place.  Remember, adenine (A) is always paired with uracil (U) and guanine (G) is always paired with cytosine (C).

The two amino acids (valine and lysine) are glued together to begin a chain.  The ribosome continues down the length of the messenger RNA, reading coded triplets.  The appropriate transfer RNA with the appropriate amino acid attached at one end is locked in place.  The new amino acid is glued to the growing amino acid chain.  This process continues 141 or 146 times and the end result is one of the four chains of protein that fold together into a complex three dimensional shape with an iron atom in the center of each twisted chain to make hemoglobin.

Pretty cool, huh?  The thing that caught my attention when I first heard about it was that the protein, hemoglobin in this particular case, was predetermined by the segment of DNA that unzipped.  So what made that particular segment of DNA unzip?