Chapter Thirteen

LUKE

Although Timothy worshipped Paul, he was also wary of his mentor at times, as the apostle could be intrusive, paying too much attention to the boy’s moods. He loved Timothy, of course; this affection shone in his face whenever the young man entered the room. In his presence, Paul grew alert, even giddy at times, laughing at the slightest remark, finding cleverness and spiritual depth in what struck me as mundane remarks. I knew enough not to say anything about this, as Paul would never understand. He would regard me as excessively critical. In fact, he often said that my “logical and interrogative” manner undermined him and the movement of his thought: “I leap over the stream. There is no need to wade through it.”

He said I failed to appreciate Timothy, which was untrue.

Timothy was, now and then, something of a wit, and I admired that. But his thoughts about the Kingdom of God rarely surprised or interested anyone. At his best, he could parrot Paul’s ideas with reasonable clarity, and this was enough to make him attractive as a speaker. He assumed even Paul’s minor gestures, as when he would shake a finger at someone or fall into thoughtful silences in the middle of a sentence. He even began to stutter like Paul, which was odd. He had not stuttered when we first met him.

Silas felt pushed to one side, and he complained to me about his treatment, recalling that he had gone to jail with Paul in Philippi, had suffered a flogging with him. He had been a dedicated soldier in the Lord’s army. But Paul largely ignored him. I suspect that he disliked the crudeness that at times made Silas an embarrassing companion. For instance, in many Roman-style houses the toilet occupied a corner in the kitchen, and Silas would not uncommonly choose to evacuate himself in front of company, even while a number of us assisted the slaves in the preparation of a meal. He pulled astonishing faces and grunted, and he had unimaginable odors that prompted me, a physician, to wonder about his health.

Timothy called him “Shitting Silas,” much to the amusement of the slaves, but I refused to join this merry chorus, worried that Silas might, at any moment, abandon us. It upset me to think of the young fellow being ridiculed, and that Paul played into this derision by failing to acknowledge his dedication, his steadfast trust in God’s love.

It also worried me that Timothy might one day object to Paul’s fawning. Barnabas had hinted darkly to me that Paul, on their visit to Cyprus, had lavished unwanted attentions on John Mark. “He frightened the boy away,” Barnabas had said. The same could happen here.

It might have been wiser for Paul to marry, thus weakening his need for contact of a kind that brought discomfort to others. It might also have dampened his occasional rages about fornication.

The Pillars discouraged fornication among all who followed the Way of Jesus, and we told those who wished to join our movement that they must refrain from sexual relations outside of the bounds prescribed by the rabbis and Jewish tradition. Mosaic Law had much to say about these matters. Not myself having been trained in Jewish legal traditions, I refrained from comment. The Jews had so many rules and prohibitions!

Paul himself never tired of explaining to me their intricate and eccentric laws, especially those governing sexual behavior, as formulated by centuries of Jewish sages. It was, he said, indecent under Mosaic Law for a man to have anal intercourse with another man, as this controverted the law against wasting one’s seed. Masturbation was, likewise, a waste of this precious substance, since it clearly had nothing to do with procreation. Within marriage, according to Jewish tradition, any sexual act was permitted, but there had been commentators on the Torah who warned against “rooster-like activity” on the part of the male. The prohibition against Jews having sex with gentiles continued among Jews and, to a degree, had currency in Jerusalem among followers of the Way. But surely the New Covenant allowed for the marriage of Jew and gentile: This happened in any case, and it would have been self-destructive for the Way to ban the practice. Paul prayed for guidance on this subject, as he frequently advised young couples. (It surprised me how many came to him for counsel, given his celibate life.) He believed passionately that intermarriage caused no offense to God. “Remember that in the Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,” he would say.

Yet he often taught it was “better to marry than to burn,” which—as Timothy noted—was “not a great recommendation for marriage.”

In Paul’s way of thinking, it made no sense to marry, since the purpose of marriage was to fulfill a commandment from God: Be fruitful, and multiply. This multiplication had already been accomplished, in his view. He brought to mind what Gamaliel had taught the young men in his school about sexuality, making the traditional distinction between the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer hara: the impulse to good versus the impulse to evil. But he always made a further point that these represented two sides of the same coin, and that one must have both sides for the coin to exist. “I don’t believe we should think of good and bad in simplistic ways,” Paul said. “Every bright flower has its roots in dark soil,” he said, quoting Ion of Chios.

Paul could be wonderfully attuned to the man or woman who stood before him, asking questions, patiently seeking the truth. On the other hand, he occasionally showed very little sense of audience, and often mistook silence for assent. I don’t, for instance, believe the Thessalonians had warmed to us, not to the extent that Paul imagined. I always felt their skepticism, and it worried me that Paul was blind to this.

His anger at our expulsion from that city didn’t surprise me, but I tried to reassure him that Thessalonica was only a stopping point. We had planned to take the Good News into the wider western regions, well beyond the borders of Macedonia. And Athens remained a goal of sorts: Paul loved Plato and had studied the Dialogues as a very young man. His earliest tutor in Tarsus had been a scholar of Greek literature, and while in Jerusalem he had continued his studies in Attic philosophy. Gamaliel saw that Paul had a synthetic mind and knew this gift could prove useful one day. He never discouraged his pupil’s love of Attic writing. The Greek thought world and the Hebrew thought world had been profoundly different, conceived and birthed in unique cultural circumstances. But the Way of Jesus, as Paul argued, must draw together these separate strands. He noted that Homer and the Hebrew scriptures arose quite independently: “But there is one God who inspires the poets, Jew and Greek alike.”

Since our arrival in Macedonia, Paul’s talks and thinking had grown more passionate, speculative, and perhaps even wild. As he refined his ideas about the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, his language deepened in complexity. On one of our last evenings in Thessalonica, he addressed a gathering of perhaps two or three dozen followers in Jason’s garden while peacocks with their shimmering blue necks and combs spread their fans among the lemon trees. He stood on a small flat stone with the setting sun at his back, wearing a colorful tunic, with Timothy and Silas on either side.

I watched in amazement as he leaped from metaphor to metaphor. This was not the kind of discourse I usually preferred, but it delighted me that evening. It was not how physicians were trained to think. We moved slowly and carefully, amassing evidence, making our deductions. But Paul didn’t operate in this manner. His energies poured out freely, touched his listeners in unexpected ways, and the world around them blazed with new meaning.

And sometimes he angered those who heard him.

One young rabbi in Thessalonica had complained to me that Paul made things worse for everyone. “The Romans don’t like us,” he said, and by “us” he referred to the Jews. This expansive and ever-expanding empire could only sustain itself by the use of brutality, and he argued that one day soon the ax would fall, and Jewish heads would topple into the dirt. “I have no hopes for the survival of the Temple,” he said, hinting that all of Jerusalem would burn one day, and perhaps soon.

The retreat from Thessalonica played in my head like a nettlesome dream. I recalled the night that Paul and I sat in the garden when Aristarchus rushed toward us. “They know what happened in Philippi,” he said, “and they accuse you of treason. The penalty is death.” He tried to control himself. “If you’re here in an hour, they will seize you both, and we will never see you again.”

“We must leave at once,” I said.

Paul glared at me, and I knew he would try to remain in place.

To make my point again, I rose to my full height, towering above Paul. “I will get my things, and leave. You may choose to stay if you like.”

“But Timothy—”

“I will tell him you’ve gone,” said Aristarchus.

“And where exactly will I have gone?”

“Berea,” I said.

“I don’t want to go to Berea,” Paul said.

“Go wherever you will,” said Aristarchus, “but stay out of Thessalonica. The Bereans will welcome you. I feel sure of this.”

Paul was angry, though reality had begun to freshen his wits. “I shall go, but tell everyone my absence is temporary. When things settle…”

It was unfortunate that Timothy and Silas had traveled that week to Salumi, a nearby village, where a small gathering of the Way had established an outpost. We had no choice but to leave without them, asking Aristarchus to tell them we had gone to Berea. And to warn them to get away quickly.

We hurried off, as I insisted, taking only one of our two donkeys, and left by an unobtrusive road, heading southwest, passing through an array of villages, entering a broad plain where only sheep and goats grazed, with a few shepherds to look after them. We slept that night perhaps ten miles from Thessalonica in a tiny hut by a stream, where we filled our skins with fresh water after bathing in the morning.

Above us, hawks hung steady in a high wind, which augured a storm.

“Trouble ahead,” said Paul, seeing the blood-bright clouds.

“Trouble behind as well.”

It was miraculous that Paul had not died with Silas beside him in the Philippian jail. An earthquake shook the entire city and damaged the prison. The roof collapsed and the guard had been beside himself, sure that the Roman authorities would hold him responsible for whatever happened. He had been a simple man, without sides, and he took to Paul and, it seemed, Silas as well. He begged them not to flee, and Paul, as he would, assured him that he would speak to the magistrate before leaving Philippi. This jailor must not suffer on his account, Paul told him.

Paul told this story frequently, shifting details. In some versions they had been cast into a crowded jail, and he had preached the Good News to a substantial crowd, all of whom fell to their knees and wept, asking for the mercy of God. In another version, he and Silas had been alone with their jailor, whom Paul baptized with water from a jug. Paul had surely not been as badly beaten as he imagined, as I could tell from the wounds on his back. I applied my salve, and the cuts healed quickly. Silas had, for whatever reason, been more severely treated, and the inflamed skin of his back had taken two or three weeks to calm. His scars would, as I knew but didn’t tell him, never dissolve.

I worried that his wounds could flare up repeatedly, as this could happen, especially among travelers who moved about the countryside as we did. We slept on hay quite often. Movement and good health lived in conflict, and we all suffered an array of skin inflammations, joint pains, muscle weaknesses, and agues. Rest became important, even critical, but difficult of access.

And Paul did not rest. Quite the opposite. He leaped from chair to chair, preferred standing to sitting, sleeping only a few hours, rising early to walk into the world on his own. He rushed to meetings, summoned the company of others, and took the lead in most conversations. He moved uphill and down with the same extraordinary speed, exhausting the rest of us, although Timothy proved a fair match for him.

“Timothy is my son,” Paul said as we left for Berea without him.

“Well, he is not actually your son,” I said.

“Parentage is not only physical,” he said.

I would not have this. “Silas would feel slighted.”

“Silas is slighted. We should never have brought him. He does nothing to advance the Kingdom of God.”

“Not true!”

“Oh, please, dear Luke. You must not try to defend the boy.”

“He suffered beside you in Philippi.”

“I wiped the tears from his eyes.”

“You are impossible.”

He liked this description and smiled. Impossible Paul!

“Timothy will join us soon,” Paul said, comforting himself.

“And Silas,” I added.

We climbed a small hill before noon, with summer assuming its full-throated cry. Bees lumbered from flower to flower, giving the air a loud buzz, and gnats pulled their little nets around our heads. The sun tore a hole in the sky, heating the grass and the stones where we sat for a few moments to eat crusts of bread with the raisins, nuts, and figs that Paul had brought from Thessalonica: a gift from Aristarchus. We watered our donkey as well, letting him feed by rooting in the weeds.

“There is famine in Palestine, in Judea,” Paul said, drawing this thought from nothing that had been part of our recent conversation. Had he heard fresh news of this problem, perhaps in a dream?

“It is sad,” I said. I could not imagine why, out of nowhere, this problem in Judea began to interest Paul.

“It’s tragic. We must help them.”

“We’re in Macedonia now. What can we do?”

“Those in our circle—our people—are starving, so we must find money to pay for their supplies. Jesus fed the poor. You have heard about feeding the multitude?”

“It happened soon after the death of the Baptizer.”

I knew this story well and had been writing about it. It happened near Bethsaida. Jesus had been praying in silence, alone in the hills, as was his custom. When he came down, he met a throng of well-wishers who asked him to heal their sick, to make the blind see again, and to cast out demons. Andrew told him that the people lacked food, and that the nearest place to get supplies was miles away.

“What do we have?” Jesus asked.

“Only five loaves of bread and two fish.”

Jesus looked at the crowd, which seemed to grow before his eyes. He directed Andrew and the other disciples to gather the crowd into groups of fifty.

“Feed them all,” said Jesus.

Andrew shook his head. “We have only these few loaves and a little fish.”

“It will satisfy.”

So they walked among the people, and everyone had more than enough to eat.

“It was God’s will in the world,” said Paul, whose mind often landed on this tale. “God’s wish to feed the people. It’s the first and last miracle. And it’s how we know what God wants for us. He supplies every need. This is love multiplied beyond counting.”

Paul continued to dwell on the problem of the famine in Jerusalem, in Judea, and wondered how we could help.

In Berea, after a few days, we gathered in a synagogue with a handful of faithful Jews, who listened as Paul read from the scriptures. He focused on the passage where Moses proclaimed: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me in your midst, from your own brethren. “The prophet has already come,” he said, “and he’s with us now, although they killed him. He is not dead, I assure you. We have talked, face-to-face. Through him, God has spoken.”

Aharon, the rabbi, sat upright when he heard this. He recognized a brother in Paul, a man suffused with God’s energy and grace. Instead of hostility, we encountered openness of mind in Berea.

“You will become the seat of our Lord in Macedonia,” said Paul to the rabbi. “The light of God will shine from this small hill.”

Over the next week we sat with the leaders of his congregation and studied the scriptures with them, and everyone admired Paul’s knowledge. He could refer easily to passages that most didn’t know existed. His head teemed with verbatim quotations, in Hebrew as well as Greek. His reflections startled and informed at once.

One evening in the synagogue, as we sat in a circle, Timothy and Silas appeared at the edge of our group, as Paul had confidently predicted. He nodded toward them, offering the slightest of smiles as he kept talking. When he had finished, he introduced “our dear friends, angels of the Lord.”

Over a late dinner in the garden of Aharon’s house, where we stayed, Paul nearly shimmered with the joy of this reunion. He even put a hand on Silas’s neck and kissed him on the forehead, provoking a surprised look from him. But Timothy brought unfortunate news. “Those fools in Thessalonica will arrive soon, and they will murder us. They have not been appeased.”

“They know we’re here?”

Timothy nodded, while Silas dipped his head. I could sense guilt there, its pervasive odor like damp in an old house.

Aharon said, “You must go at once. I will deal with them.”

“Silas and I know these men,” Timothy explained. “We can talk to them. Talk sense into them.”

Paul liked Timothy’s bravura. They wanted to murder Paul, as so many did, but this plot might distract them. He trusted that Timothy, who had no wish to die, knew what he was doing. “Go back to Thessalonica with them, if you think that will work,” he said. “There is no end of need for the mercy of God. Explain to the Way there that Jesus needs their help. They must give you money for Jerusalem, a donation for our collection, a gift for the poor who are starving there. There is so much wealth in that city. As followers of Jesus, we must help each other.” And Aharon agreed to go with them.

“This is a good plan,” said Paul. “But first, I must baptize you in the name of the Christ. Do you want this?”

“I do.”

Paul asked a slave to bring a cask of water, inviting Aharon to kneel in his own garden. “I baptize you, Aharon, another child of God,” he said. “Remember that in Jesus there is neither male nor female, neither slave nor free man, neither Jew nor Greek.”

A silence followed that was happily filled by a nightingale in a lemon tree behind the house. “This is the teaching of Jesus, and you need only remember and repeat it. Tell the world!”

“I will tell everyone,” said Aharon.

“Praise to God,” said Timothy, on his knees beside Aharon.

Silas joined them, as did Paul, who fell to his knees in concert with the others and raised his arms to heaven and began to sing. At last, I joined them, although they sang a song I didn’t know.

It was memorable, the sight of this visionary company, everyone praising the Lord and singing, though I myself felt out of joint.

---

The next day, I asked Paul why he would let Silas and Timothy return to Thessalonica, but he would not give me a satisfactory answer.

“God has a plan,” he said. “Timothy will not only survive, he will prosper. This is the promise of heaven.” He did not mention Silas.

The next day Paul and I left, with a guide supplied by Aharon. He led us to a coastal village where, without difficulty, we joined a small ship traveling to Crete with a layover in Athens. “Athens is the center of the intelligent world,” said Paul, in a buoyant mood. He shook the dust from his heels again and again, rarely looking back. But I was less easy about the people we abandoned to uncertain fates in our wake. The Roman authorities, now controlling Macedonia and much of the world we traveled, feared and despised what they considered treason. They could tolerate Jews as long as this restless fringe of fanatics kept to their own habits, lived within their communities, and didn’t interfere with the life of the larger body politic. The Way of Jesus was another matter, less easy to understand and potentially a threat, as they proclaimed the kingship of their leader.

I had explained to wary Godfearers that the Way of Jesus wished only for heavenly kingship. We posed no threat to the local authorities and certainly the emperor should never worry about our movement. Disloyalty to the imperial powers never figured in our discussions; in fact, we often cited a famous line of our Lord: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”

Caesar could hardly disapprove of that sentiment!

But we occupied a highly wrought, aggressive, and intensely political world. The Pax Romana persisted, with the imperial “peace” guaranteed by the use of selective brutality. It would never be simple to follow the Way of Jesus without offending someone, and I worried about what might happen now. I lacked Paul’s massive faith in the future, though I prayed to God to sustain me despite my disbelief, my cowardice and befuddlement.

The two-day journey by ship to Athens absorbed me. We often sailed close to the shoreline, smelling the sweet grasses, the unruly banks of thyme and purslane. Sheep bleated and dogs barked in invisible notches above the hills, and in the distance I got a good view of Mount Olympus as we passed the coast of Thessaly. Without much wind, we lay by for a whole afternoon outside the port of Athens, about half a day’s journey from the city. The sea there was a green slick, with a few dead fish floating belly-up, pecked by gulls and other seabirds. The lungs of jellyfish lay open, festering.

“I don’t know if this is a good sign or a bad sign,” said Paul.

“Our lack of motion or the dead fish?”

“I hoped for better.”

That evening, just before sunset, the winds picked up, the air turned cooler, and we sailed into the ancient port.

I knew a smattering of Greek history, and it was not difficult to imagine the Persian Wars, when Darius invaded Thrace and Macedonia, then tried to overwhelm Athens, without luck. The intellectual vigor characteristic of Athens was accompanied by military prowess, and they defeated the Persians roundly at the Battle of Marathon. A great age began, when playwrights and poets flourished. Soon Plato established the Academy, where he taught for many decades, wandering with the young amid the olive groves or sitting in the shade. These scholars devoted their lives to self-perfection, imagining a virtuous world—which of course meant trying to isolate the virtues deserving of replication.

“Jesus brought the ideals of Athens to Judaism,” Paul said. “As a child, he would have encountered merchants from Greece, many of them on their way to the East.”

Ideas from Persia or even the Kush may well have arrived by travelers heading from east to west, I suggested, and this excited Paul, who had met such men in Jerusalem as a young man as well as during his time with Musa in the desert.

After docking, we made our way toward the looming Acropolis, which rose above the plain, this dazzling white outcrop, which was composed of several structures that, according to Paul, “mirrored the perfection of the soul.”

It was a sight we had longed to see, and it satisfied our longings.

The next day, we climbed to the Pantheon and the Erechtheion, where votaries of Athena gathered. “God has brought us here to reveal his entrance into the world, his interruption of history,” Paul said, to nobody in particular. “The name of Jesus will one day live on every tongue in Athens.” His plan was not merely to speak in the marketplace but to engage the wisest of Athenians. He said that philosophical thought itself emanated from this city, and so every remark had weight here. One could not proceed lightly with an argument but needed ballast, the weight of authority, and sound logic, all of this lifted by the Holy Spirit. I could see that being here had forced his concentration.

On the third day in Athens we visited the synagogue, a small limestone house at the end of a white-dust road in the Jewish quarter, although it took a while to summon any Jews, who were sparse on the ground. An elderly man led us to Enoch, a revered rabbi about whom Paul, as usual, seemed to have prior knowledge. In a low rumble, Enoch explained to us that pagans overwhelmed the city, as ever. “They imagine gods are everywhere, and yet they trust nobody. Zeus or Hera, Athena, Poseidon—one hears the names, but they carry no meaning. Philosophy reigns here, but this is not what Plato meant. They are Stoics and believe the world cannot be trusted.”

“It cannot,” said Paul.

The rabbi ignored him. “They spend much of their time reminding each other that time is short, that life is a flicker that fades in a moment.”

“And this is true.”

“But they see virtue as patience, forbearance, allowing the rational mind to adjust to circumstances.”

Paul considered this proposition. “Life,” he said, “is propositions about life.”

Enoch leaned toward him, scratching his long, grizzled beard. I doubt he had encountered anyone quite like Paul thus far in his long life.

“There are unwholesome propositions,” said Enoch. “But we, in our small circle, know the true God. We have the Law of Moses.”

“No longer,” said Paul.

This worried the rabbi, who asked Paul to elaborate. And Paul, as one might expect, told him that a New Covenant had replaced what God handed to Moses. “Not supplanted, not exactly,” said Paul, “but Rabbi Jesus has become the new Moses.”

Enoch was a simple man, with natural wisdom, as I could see. There was a sweetness about him that appealed to us both, and Paul did astonishing work now, convincing this rabbi that Jesus was the Christ whom everyone had long expected. It is never easy to change an old mind.

When the Sabbath arrived, Enoch invited Paul to read from the scrolls and talk about Jesus, which he did with renewed energy, as if discovering his ideas in the process. This was, I realized, the secret of Paul, that he could wipe his mind clean of past expressions, beginning anew each time he spoke in public to discover his thoughts, to frame them again. And so every time he stood before an audience of any size he appeared to have only just found his footing in the expressions he put forward.

I watched closely as he tested his verbal skills in the marketplace in Athens, where on any given day one could find wealthy young men who flocked here from distant parts to talk about ideas, the purpose of life, the nature of the gods, and the fate of this world. The names of Crates, the great Theban, of Epicurus, and of Zeno, the philosopher from Cyprus, circulated. Zeno had walked in the colonnade here, teaching his disciples that virtue creates peace in the soul, and that to live in accordance with nature was the most effective approach to life. He had learned from his teacher Polemon, accepting the notion that one could never know the purpose of the gods but had nevertheless to protect oneself against their whims and depredations.

It excited Paul to move among these brisk thoughtful people, and he engaged one after another, telling them about Jesus the Christ. Their skepticism was boundless, however, and one of them mocked Paul, repeating what he said in an irritating voice. But Paul waved a hand to dismiss him: “The pigeon squawks! Away, bird!”

An uncomfortable space opened between how Paul viewed his experiences with others and what I actually saw, and it worried me that he could be less than candid with himself about what occurred, even self-deceiving. But I had no inclination to make this point because it would only enrage him, and I didn’t imagine it would change anything.

We spent many of our Athenian days in the public areas, though it was hot and humid, unbearably so, with even the locusts gasping in the fields of long grass at the edges of the city. We paused for a drink by a well one afternoon, sitting in the shade of a broad plane tree. Overwhelmed by the heat, Paul trembled as we drank from a cup that a man passed to us. I thought he would swoon.

“Are you all right, Paul?”

“I wish Timothy could be here,” he said, as if Timothy might protect him from the carping of these young philosophers and the heat of the sun.

We stayed in a tiny house adjacent to the synagogue, once a stone barn, with a packed-dirt floor and no windows. Good Enoch had given us this place to sleep, however cramped and unappealing. It had a flat roof, which we climbed up to in the early evening to drink wine and look at the chalk-white glimmer of the Parthenon perched on its promontory like a prehistoric bird. The sea beyond, at sunset, upheld a thin yellow band of clouds, and the sun plunged into the horizon, turning the whole bay into a bath of blood-bright vermillion.

One morning three young men appeared at our house, a makeshift delegation, inviting Paul to the Areopagus, which the Romans called Mars Hill. It was a legendary outcrop where public trials occurred in ancient times, and where debates could be heard any day of the week. One could easily imagine Socrates in his toga here, the squat and craggy philosopher defending his unconventional approach to the instruction of Athenian youth. This moment of ancient history—it could not have lasted many years—continued to fascinate Paul, who often referred to Plato (a pupil of Socrates) as “the first follower of Jesus,” much to the confusion of many in Athens.

On that blistering day Paul seized the occasion and rose among the scholars to submit to their questions, as did anyone visiting Athens who wished to walk in the footsteps of Plato. I counted at least thirty people in the crowd, few of them more than twenty years old. And one of them appeared quite belligerent, behaving as if Paul had offended the tradition of Attic reason by suggesting that a peasant from Galilee represented God on earth, and that he had been crucified and lifted up to new life after three days.

“We can only tolerate what is absolute and true,” the man called from the back of the circle.

“Come forward,” said Paul. “What is your name?”

“Damian.”

Damian stepped to the front of the crowd, and many snickered. Cleverness seethed in him; indeed, he seemed to fizz with excitement, savoring his role as interlocutor with Paul.

“I know something about Athens,” said Paul. “I studied Plato as a young man, and I know about your Stoics. Everyone here talks about them. I’m aware of Metrodorus as well and have heard his criticism of the Stoics.”

I worried that Paul had wandered onto unstable ground here. Was his knowledge of these thinkers ample enough to sustain a lengthy and very public argument? On the other hand, it rarely paid to underestimate Paul, who had surprising byways in his learning.

But Metrodorus!

“What is your religion?” asked a tall, thin young man with a black beard, who pushed to the front and stood beside Damian.

Paul said, “I know in Athens this is a serious question. Everyone in this city is concerned with the soul, and religion is the practice of soul wisdom.”

I had never heard anything like this before, nor had they. Soul wisdom!

“As I moved among your many statues in Athens, each of them a place of veneration,” Paul said, “I discovered an inscription that worried me: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. You are intelligent, thoughtful, articulate men. So consider this proposition: An unknown God is no God whatever. Let’s reason by analogy. The poems of an unknown poet are, quite simply, not read. They make no impression on the world, as the words fail to exist. My God, let me tell you, is the only true God, himself the creator of this universe. But he was far removed from us and scarcely knowable. In an act of compassion, he decided to make himself known to his creation. He erupted into our lives in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who showed us what God is like, gave him a voice. Jesus became the human face of God.”

I saw that Paul was alert today, radiant in his manner, comfortable in himself as he spoke, or God spoke through him, shaping the words that formed on his lips.

“God made this outcrop, and—see there—Mount Olympus.” He gestured in that direction, and their eyes followed his finger. “The sea itself is his doing. The fish and fowl. You, me, all of us. We are creatures of his invention, sustained by his affection. And he dwells in every man and woman, in the rocks, wildflowers, within the far hills. When the wind surrounds with its invisible arms and seizes a forest, this is God rocking the world.”

Paul insisted on this elaborate figuration in his speech. But it was sometimes, as here, overwrought, too pretty in its frivolities of association. Nonetheless, every eye fixed upon him. And nobody wished to interrupt the flow.

“He created you and me, and every nation, and he breathes life into everything around us. He orders and appoints the faithful seasons. He determines the boundaries of our habits, the width and breadth of our being. I don’t believe he is far away, like Zeus and Hera, Aphrodite or Artemis, or Apollo. No! He’s in my breast. He’s in your breast, too. In him we live and move and prosper. Your own poet, the great Ion of Chios, once wrote: ‘Bone of their bone, we grow from the gods. / Every finger and toe extends from them.’ But there is only one God, the Almighty, the center of being.”

“What does your God want from us?” asked Damian.

“You must change,” said Paul. He touched his temples with both hands, then gestured as if lifting or releasing his skull to the sky. “Open your mind to the wider mind of God, and you will be healed, enlightened.”

“What if we prefer being as we are?” one wry fellow asked.

“You are broken, as we all are broken,” Paul answered. “Only God can heal us. You have transgressed—stepped over a line. We have all done things we should never have done. We resist doing the virtuous thing.”

“We must be virtuous?”

There was some laughter in the crowd.

Paul raised a hand to silence them. “God asks for nothing but perfection. As Jesus was perfected by God in his death upon a cross in Jerusalem, you shall be perfected. This is wholeness and health. Jesus was crucified and buried. On the third day after this atrocity, God lifted him to new life. He is here.”

One young man at the back spoke up: “So the dead come back to life? Is that what you’re telling us, old man?”

“Stone him!” someone shouted.

But of course the Greeks had no taste for the Jewish practice of stoning dissenters, and this produced only laughter.

“We should go, Paul,” I said, tugging his arm.

He looked at me as if wakened from a trance and followed me. I noticed that Damian and his friend, a woman introduced to us as Demaris, walked beside us, asking more questions.

“I want to hear more about your Galilean,” said Demaris.

Paul had an eye for loveliness in young people, and he reached out to touch her arm.

“What a good thing,” Paul said. “I will tell you everything.”

That night, leaning with his back against a wall in Enoch’s house with a large cup of wine in his hands, Paul talked about what had happened that day on Mars Hill. He understood that his afternoon in the sun had not changed anything. Not markedly. He had not been nearly as persuasive as he might have been, not as eloquent or rational as when the spirit filled him. This long-awaited moment in the Attic sun had passed without much effect.

“They were impervious to reason,” Paul said, “which seems quite ironic, in the house of intellect.”

He had clearly drunk too much, or spent too long in the sun that day, as his words slurred, even tumbled over each other. I told him not to fret about his performance, that he had planted seeds and these might take root in unexpected ways. One could never know what might follow from this or any work. I quoted the saying of our Lord about the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed—a line that Paul often used.

“Don’t humor me, Luke,” he said.

Enoch didn’t like to see Paul in this black mood and removed himself from our company.

“I will always tell you what I see,” I said. “Depend on my frankness.”

I wondered if I should end my association with Paul. Vanity had inflated him in Athens, and he had lost sight of our plan to alert everyone to God’s plan for humanity. One could not, by syllogism or analogy, conjure the spirit or explain the message of Jesus. Paul’s efforts on the Areopagus became a display of his powers of intellect, testing the force of his will. Once, I had heard him say that “in Jesus we lose ourselves, our will to shine over others.” Where had this Paul gone?

Sometimes patience is called for, I reminded myself. And I loved Paul. I must allow for him to stumble, as I must stumble as well.

“We shall go to Corinth in the morning,” Paul said.

This shift of plans came abruptly, and he rarely mentioned Athens in later years.