Chapter Seventeen

PAUL

I had never seen the Roman presence in Jerusalem in such profusion, with legionaries on every street as Passover approached. They watched keenly, even warily, while visitors spilled through the eleven gates of the city. Guards on horseback stood in the dark shadow of the Temple Mount, swords drawn for use if needed. I saw a man arrested for shouting at a huckster in the marketplace, another seized for staring at a soldier. Violence had erupted near the Zion Gate the week before, with the death of a Roman policeman, the first in a few years. This act only intensified the imperial glare.

The whole of Judea, and Palestine more broadly, had been tense for years, as Jews clashed with the occupying forces, who misunderstood and probably hated our people, our culture, our God. Outlaws and rebel groups roamed the countryside, with occasional skirmishes, some of them deadly. For the most part, the disturbances had been isolated in Galilee and the northern provinces, with their long Maccabean history of rebellion, but now Jerusalem had become a flash point and flames could easily engulf the holy city.

These walls would not stand for long, that much I foresaw. And thought of the words of Jeremiah, the prophet: O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved. How long shall your vain thoughts lodge within you?

In the past weeks, a fiery Jew from Alexandria, one Ezekiel, had entered the city under cover. This zealot had been massing rebels in the distant hills for months, and he wished to incite further trouble in Judea, calling himself “the new Maccabeus,” reminding those who gathered around him that Judas Maccabeus had overthrown the Seleucid occupation many centuries ago with far fewer men. “It’s not the size of the rebel forces,” Maccabeus famously said, “it’s the size of their fury.” He and his men shattered the pagan statuary that Antiochus Epiphanes had put in the Temple, restoring Jewish worship, making the Holy of Holies a sacred place once again. The name of Maccabeus rang of resistance, with the aura of victory.

Despite my misgivings about the directions the Jews had undertaken in recent decades, and how they had turned their backs on the Christ, I understood the wish to rid our ancient and sacred land of invaders—there had been so many over the centuries, and we as a people recalled with sorrow the long exile in Babylon. (My father never ceased to remind me of Babylonian atrocities, as if they had happened a week, and not centuries, before.) But the Roman Empire had overwhelmed us thoroughly and definitively, and it made little sense to fight against them, especially now, with the Kingdom of God at hand.

The Christ would conquer every army with the purest love.

Dear Luke often called me an “apostle of love,” and I would not contradict him on this. I tried to follow the Lord’s directive: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. There was no higher commandment.

Jesus would heal all divisions between God and man, as he had done in my own life.

I was a young boy, visiting the Holy Land with my father, when I had first seen Herod’s restoration of the Temple. I recall standing below it, peering up at the gold-clad façade, this accumulation of glory. “It is brighter than the sun,” my father had said. He told me that one day I would sit among the elders and would see for myself the high priest as he stood before the Holy of Holies, his robe glinting with emerald, onyx, beryl, jasper, and sapphire, his miter of linen tied by a blue ribbon, his golden crown in which the four letters symbolizing the name of God had been lovingly engraved. My father never tired of ceremonial details, and he had fixed them permanently in my head.

Temple life had meant so much to me, and I had, in my years under Gamaliel, often gone to pray there, mounting the fourteen steps, lifted on a chorus of the Levite choir, whose lovely music was, my father reflected with uncharacteristic grace, “so beautiful and yet a pale reflection of the choir that sings to God.”

I missed being near the Temple, with the sheen of its walls, the glow of its limestone ashlars at sunset, the mix of gold and bronze that answered the sunrise back with as good as it gave. I missed the slightly sweet smell of burnt offerings, and the noise of pigeon wings and mewling goats in the courtyard, where sacrificial animals were sold. I had returned several times to this sacred place in the past few days, as if drawn to the source, its axial power, and the hush that lay behind the colorful veil enclosing the Holy of Holies.

One morning I took Trophimus into the Court of the Gentiles. He was a friend from Ephesus, a Greek convert to the Way who often stopped by our leather shop to tell stories and listen. A cheery silversmith, he was not much younger than myself but could boast a stout belly and loose jowls, which he considered a mark of his prosperity. Blood-red ears and a purple nose distinguished his face.

“Such a colorful fellow,” said Timothy, who could never restrain himself.

Trophimus had come to Jerusalem on business, his first visit to the city where our Lord had been crucified. He heard from an acquaintance in the Way that I was here. Word traveled in our circle quickly, more so now than ever.

“Show me the Temple,” he said, as we walked in the city, arm in arm.

I knew exactly how far to take him into the Temple grounds, being well aware that the established barrier—so clearly marked—must never be crossed by gentiles under any circumstances. I had once, as a young man, witnessed a visitor from Thrace, a Greek merchant, step blithely beyond the boundaries, ignoring threats blazing out in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek: “No gentiles beyond this point!” The poor fellow lasted perhaps ten minutes before Temple Guards swooped. They led him outside the city walls that same morning and stoned him to death without needing to inform the civilian authorities.

The Romans allowed for these “religious executions,” as they called them, shrugging their shoulders at our “brutal cultic habits.” A Jewish matter, in their minds, was beyond their jurisdiction, something they preferred not to consider, dismissing Jewish rules and practices as a kind of fanaticism beneath contempt. Toleration had been the official policy of Rome for decades, and one that had benefited everyone. But now a terrible war loomed, as anyone could sense, though I hoped our Lord would return before it began.

War solves nothing. It never does. As Jesus well understood. And it would be unbearable to see this shining Temple destroyed yet again, as it certainly would be.

I told Trophimus about Solomon’s Temple, the magnificent predecessor to this one, and how it had been destroyed by the Babylonians. I explained that we had rebuilt it slowly over centuries. “Herod took all the credit for this,” I said, “but it was a project much larger than him.” That day Trophimus left the Temple grounds without incident.

The inundation of visitors to Jerusalem at this time of year added to political anxieties that shifted in the air and upset the Roman authorities, who knew how little it took for a riot to become a revolutionary surge beyond their control. Those in our circle found this disturbing, as we felt more vulnerable than even the Jews, having so many enemies.

Josephus lived here, one of the Antioch Jews who had despised and condemned every Jew who dared to call Jesus the Christ (he particularly disliked Phoebe, in part because of her wealth and influence). He and his many allies claimed that our movement had insolently rejected the Law of Moses, the heritage of Israel itself. “They eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols, they dine with gentiles, they refuse circumcision,” he complained. “The Temple means nothing to them!” Did we fornicate with pigs as well?

A rumor circulated that I, an apostle of the Lord, had burned a scroll in plain view of one congregation of Jews “somewhere in Asia.” Such nonsense. But rumors can be difficult to contain, especially when they are florid and play to the excitability of gullible listeners. It never worked simply to say: I did not do that, I burned nothing!

As Timothy exclaimed when I told him this, “You have become, Paul, a rumor in your own time.”

The sad thing is that Josephus in his fury reminded me of myself at twenty, a hater of those who followed the Way, eager to wipe out this persistent sect that threatened and made a mockery of everything I prized.

I heard that Josephus and his followers regarded me as the Adversary. He said he would do his best to see that I stood accused of the foulest crimes, including blasphemy. My skull would be crushed by Jewish stones. “We shall erase the name of Paul!” he proclaimed.

I didn’t care a whit about the name of Paul—I was nobody, nothing. I had erased myself in the name of the Christ. Josephus either didn’t understand this or had not listened closely to my words.

A pack of Jews led by Josephus now took me by surprise as I stood in the heat of the sun in the Courtyard of Gentiles with the four young Jews who had shaved their heads and gone with me into the Temple for purification. Perhaps foolishly, I had come here to satisfy James, to prove my continuing devotion to God and Temple worship. But I never expected this treachery!

The attack began with a round of jibes and hisses, followed quickly by sputtering threats. “That’s him!” someone cried. A crowd seethed around me, and a young man spat in my face.

At first I didn’t take this seriously, and wondered who these people were and what I had done to elicit their wrath. Surely they mistook me for another. It could not be a crime to bring four pious young Jews into the Temple for purification. Had I not shaved my own head in obeisance to Almighty God and his descendants through Abraham and David?

The heavy Corinthian bronze doors of the nearest gate drew shut from within, a sign that the priests wished not only to protect their sacred area but also to hear nothing and to know nothing about what transpired in the outside world. Ignorance was their self-protective gesture in every awkward circumstance.

Then Josephus himself stood before me, pointing.

“He’s the one, Paul!”

Was it pure hatred, that sharpness in his eyes, which narrowed like points of fire?

Two burly men seized me by the elbows, claiming that I had taken “an Ephesian, a filthy Greek” beyond the boundaries.

“This is a lie,” I said.

But it seemed impossible to defend myself or reassure them that I had no intention of defiling this Temple. Was I not a Pharisee? Did they imagine I didn’t understand the rules?

Escape routes caught my eye: a slight opening in the crowd. I had disappeared into the general surge and bustle many times, as one leaf in a forest becomes invisible. Yet I could not escape the invisible noose my accusers tightened around my neck that day. Temple Guards appeared in numbers, accompanied by Roman military policemen, who must have been summoned from the Antonia Fortress.

I looked up at the Temple, thinking of our Lord in the days before his crucifixion. He had said, “Destroy this Temple and I shall rebuild it, and it will take only three days.” I had often dwelled on that uncanny remark. Perhaps Jesus referred to the temple of his body, which they would soon destroy, tearing him limb from limb over the course of Passover. He would be beaten and scourged, then crucified. But in three days he would rise to new life, his temple rebuilt, transmogrified.

His body was broken for us so that we might have new life. I had uttered this phrase many times at the sacred meal, in far-flung parts of the empire. They might break my body, too. But I had been changed forever on the Damascus Road, and would rise instantly to life in him, my Lord. A strange calm settled over me as I thought about the brief time ahead of me on this earth, knowing I could not be harmed. What could they do to me, with God as my shield? I turned my eyes to heaven in thanks, and saw a brilliant circle of light above my head. An angel? I heard its wings bell-beat the air. Then a voice spoke: “Paul, my son! Say only what is true, and I will protect you. Have no fear.” The phrase “no fear” echoed and dwindled as the crowd fell silent.

Had they heard this voice as well?

I knelt on the paving stones, bowing my head. “Thy will be done,” I said, praying as our Lord had prayed in the garden before his arrest.

“This is Ezekiel!” a boy shouted.

I lifted my head, looked into his emerald eyes and saw his coppery hair: He didn’t seem more than thirteen. Was this Simon, my old dear friend? Had he come back to accuse me falsely of being a dangerous zealot?

I saw Luke now, and tried to rush toward him, but several of the mob restrained me, pulled me backward. Guards fastened my wrists with leather straps and lifted me to my feet. One of them pulled a chain around my neck, cutting the skin, and I bled. Unable to speak, dizzy, I tried to look at my accusers as the crowd lunged toward me, ripping my tunic, pulling my ears. I thought I might suffer dismemberment at their hands when a young man with appalling hatred in his eyes kicked one of my shins, drawing more blood.

I prayed to myself: Jesus, how you suffered! I know how you suffered!

The thorns dug into his scalp that day, the ignominious crown that mocked his pretense to kingship. My pain did not compare to his, but I felt strangely closer to him, to his experience on the hard but holy day of his torture. He had walked through the streets only a short distance from this spot, a rough-hewn heavy cross on his shoulders. He had stumbled and fallen, whereupon a benign passerby had assisted him, taking that instrument of death upon himself. If only I could have been there, able to help him. I would surely have carried that cross to the four corners of the earth.

I must have passed out, as I wakened within the Antonia Fortress, where Jesus had spent his last night before the crucifixion. I lay on the dirt in a filthy room where they interrogated prisoners, often torturing them, extracting false confessions before scourging and beheading them. Their shit, blood, and piss darkened the dirt, and the room swam in this stench of terror, an invisible steam of misery that lifted to the ceiling. There was no air in the cell, which had a single narrow window with an iron grate. A torch blazed in one corner, casting a pallor over the walls. And yet I felt safer here than on the streets, where I would never have survived. The thirst of a mob for vengeance cannot be contained.

One pathetic creature lay in a heap on the floor beside me, a tangle of limbs, and I thought he must already be dead. A broken thighbone pushed through a festering open wound, and I could see into his chest, where a knife had tunneled through the skin between cracked ribs. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen. His features had been severely distorted, his nose flattened, his auburn hair a sopping mat of blood. The eyes fell back in his head, and his tongue lolled to one side through a grate of shattered teeth.

He coughed now, surprising me.

“Can I help?”

“I’m thirsty,” he said.

“Give the boy water!” I called to the guard, who sat by a wall.

He laughed, asking if I were a nurse.

The cruelty of this present world crushed me. The human misery before me was sin, error, transgression—a sign of our separateness from God. The fall of man was the fall into creation, but we would be lifted out of creation into new life at last. I recalled the words of Jesus as framed in one of the books of sayings that Luke had found in Ephesus: My dear people, we are already the children of God. Only what lies in the future has not yet been revealed. All we know is that, on the proper day, we shall be like God.

Poor Luke struggled to understand this concept, which I did my best to elaborate, and I prayed for him. As a physician, he trained his eyes on the things of this world, and he could be confoundedly literal. “Look elsewhere!” I would say, puzzling him. “Lift your eyes!”

I raised a palm in the direction of the young man, who in revealing his thirst had inadvertently echoed the words of Jesus from the cross. “Heal this prisoner, Lord,” I said loudly. “Make him whole, in the name of Jesus!”

The boy’s eyes focused. He smiled faintly, sitting up by himself, breathing deeply, revived before my eyes. His bloody wounds, the broken skin and bones as well, miraculously healed, as if weeks became moments. He opened a broad smile of relief.

Our befuddled guard, in astonishment and fear, brought him a cup of water and put some bread on a plate in the dirt beside him, and we watched him drink and eat.

“You are not an ordinary prisoner,” the guard said to me.

“You’re quite wrong, sir,” I said. “I’m ordinary.”

But I seized on this opening, asking to see Lysias, his superior.

Claudius Lysias was a Greek officer of some fame who had risen through his diplomatic skills to this key outpost of empire. In the past weeks he had commanded his soldiers to search throughout Judea for Ezekiel, the zealot from Alexandria, raiding houses in Bethany, Hebron, and Ziph. The results had been unhappy for everyone. One pious community of scholars in En-Gedi had been routed thoroughly, with several arrests and one beheading, though not the head of Ezekiel. The radical Egyptian would be caught soon, I guessed, and given a peremptory trial, then crucified, much like the ruffians who hung on either side of Jesus that day at Golgotha.

The guard led me to the commander’s office at the end of a reeking dim corridor, saying, “Speak for yourself. He will listen.”

I could feel God’s hand at work that day.

It surprised me that command headquarters in the Antonia was such a stifling and narrow room, with a single desk in one corner and only a tiny window for light and ventilation. A slave took dictation from Lysias, writing on a wax tablet.

I stood before him, waiting.

Lysias paused, staring at me. “And who are you?”

I liked the look of this fellow: a tall man of perhaps thirty-five, with straight black hair, black eyes. His long nose arched at the bridge. His firm voice suggested experience and calm in the face of difficulties. One would like such an officer in charge in dangerous times, and I understood at once why the imperial army had chosen him for this job.

“You’re staring at me,” he said. “Speak! Who are you?”

“I’m Paul, an apostle of the Lord.”

This provoked a slight smile, and even his slave grinned.

“So how may I assist you, Paul the apostle?”

“Why have you arrested me? I’ve done nothing, have offended neither civil nor religious laws. I’m not a zealot, certainly not Ezekiel the Egyptian. This is a mistake!”

He put down his papers and looked at me with cool interest. “You speak Greek without an accent.”

“It’s my native tongue. I had a wonderful tutor in Tarsus. Together we read Plato and the poets, the best of the Attic playwrights.” I nearly quoted Ion of Chios but thought better of such a display of learning. Restraint is the beginning of wisdom, and it never paid off to intimidate—or try to intimidate—men like Lysias.

My response puzzled him, and he took a while to absorb it.

“You’re not a Judean?”

“I came here as a young man from Tarsus to study with Gamaliel. His school was legendary. But I’m a visitor now, an apostle of Jesus.”

“Who?”

“Jesus of Nazareth, who spoke for God, and who lives now, though he was crucified.”

This produced another smile, a wider one, and I think he saw me as yet another religious madman. Palestine teemed with them. But he was curious as well, and asked me to tell him more. Who was this Jesus, and what was our connection?

I explained that my life had never been the same after a blazing experience “of light, of God’s glory on the Damascus Road.”

“The Damascus Road?”

“God spoke to me there,” I said, “through Jesus the Christ.”

“I see,” he said, but he did not hide his confusion. It was there in his eyes. “There are so many sects. I don’t understand the Jews. We give them so much freedom, you see…”

I was about to tell him about my Roman citizenship—always the right card to play in these circumstances—when we heard shouts beyond the walls of the fortress. A band of Jews had gathered outside, demanding that the Romans release me into their hands. An underling came into the room to explain all of this to Lysias, who listened with impatience. This was not how he had planned to spend the afternoon.

“Your people seem eager to see you,” he said, with a wry smile. “You’re apparently quite a figure. I seem to have missed out on your fame.”

“They want to stone me,” I said. “But let me talk to them.”

“You’re quite sure?”

I nodded, and he gestured to a guard to untie my wrists.

I stepped through the main doorway, in the shadow of the fortress, where perhaps twenty or thirty Jews had gathered and continued to shout, while Lysias stood behind me and watched with interest. The spectacle, I think, surprised him.

I lifted my hands to silence them, and to my astonishment, it worked. “Please, friends,” I said. “You’re mistaken. I’m a Jew, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, born of the tribe of Benjamin. I came to this city as a young man from Cilicia. My father was a tentmaker.”

“You’re lying!” one of them shouted.

I didn’t answer him but continued: “I studied at the school of Gamaliel. I was, briefly, in the Temple Guard, a friend of Aryeh.”

I should never have used my friend’s name, as it might put him in jeopardy, and I regretted this false step at once. But there was a sigh of recognition, and I had their full attention. “I prayed every day in the Temple for many years,” I told them. “And persecuted those who followed the Way. I hated their fraudulent Christ, the Nazarene.”

I could have walked away then, without harm. In fact, one of them cried, “We’ve got the wrong man! Let him go!”

I said, “Please, hear my story to the end. I helped to stone Stephen, their first martyr. You remember him? I crushed his skull with my own hands! Then I was sent by the high priest to Damascus on a mission. I wanted only to kill those who caused us difficulties, who showed no respect for our tradition or the Law of Moses. We had enough to worry about, being Jews, without this. But a light in the sky overwhelmed and blinded me. A thousand times brighter than the sun it was! I fell to the ground, which shook around me, tilted in air. The Christ himself appeared, speaking in a clear voice beside me: I am Jesus. I have come to make you one of my own. And so I have labored these decades only for him. He will make us whole. Each of us, Jew and Greek, will be made whole in his name. The Kingdom of God opens before us, even within us.” A few moments later, sensing a further opening, I said, “Each of you must find your own Damascus Road.”

It was not my best speech, but I told them the truth. It remains hard to say what you mean in ways adequate to the experience before you. Words strain at the boundaries of thought and feeling, and mostly they fail us. Every word is an elegy to what lies behind it, the silence of its true meaning.

I would have liked each of these angry and puzzled men to bow before our Lord, to understand what powers lay within them, what immense possibilities might be uncovered, possessed or repossessed, in the name of the Christ.

“The end of this wretched life will arrive soon,” I said, “perhaps within days.”

I expected, awaited eagerly the coming apocalypse. I could sense its approach like a great storm that travels over the desert, gathering speed. Only a few nights before I had dreamed of pigs being born with the claws of a falcon and babies erupting from the womb with cloven hooves. Pigeons exploded in the sky, fell to earth like fireballs, setting fields of corn alight. I saw the massive walls of Jerusalem crumbling, a scrim of limestone dust where they had proudly stood. I saw pillars of fire where Herod’s Temple once rose in glory.

Was this just a nightmare? Or did the return of Jesus loom? It could not be far away, though it was impossible to imagine the texture and quality of his return, his posture, the nature of his presence. All I knew was that he would not come as so many Jews imagined the Christ would come, on a white horse in the manner of Alexander, with a sword raised high. He was not another Judas Maccabeus.

“Kill him!” one of them yelled. “This is Satan!”

“Stone him!” another shrieked.

They threw handfuls of dirt at me, and at Lysias as well, who stood openmouthed beside me. Did they not realize he was the commander of the Roman army in Judea and beyond? Had the fabled insurrection of the Jews finally begun, and all because of my visit to Jerusalem?

“Take him back to the barracks!” Lysias told the guards. “I’ve had enough of this man.”

It upset him that I was not acquiescent, not eager to save myself and, in doing so, to help him calm and disperse the crowd. I could have walked away, disappeared into the Jewish world, never to be seen again. I was clearly not Ezekiel, the dangerous zealot he sought. As a Pharisee and former student in the school of Gamaliel, an ally of the Temple Guard, this Jewish flock would simply have welcomed me into their fold. Or ignored me.

But this would not happen now, when hatred and fear hovered in the air like unhappy ravenous birds that settled and dug their claws in the dirt and fed at random.

The guards were supposed to return me to the barracks, as commanded, but they pushed me into a hot dusty yard, where they stripped me, strapped me to the pillar for scourging. Some underling had obviously decided to take matters into his own hands. But this could not have been what Lysias expected!

I hung there for what seemed like days, though it was hours, the sun licking and reddening my bare skin, raising welts on my neck and back. Mangy dogs prowled in a circle around me, baring their teeth, slavering. Did they throw human meat to these dogs? Did these starving animals finish off their victims, picking the bones clean?

A hard-looking lictor with iron forearms and blank, unfeeling eyes came toward me with his whip, the straps glinting with jags of metal and sheep bones at irregular points along strands of varied lengths. His whip would rip me to shreds. I had watched this torture unfold at first hand in prisons in Asia and Macedonia. The skin of the victim would break and tear, the sheep bones biting into layers of flesh, with the underlying skeletal tissue exposed so that it quivered and bled. Few survived a genuine scourging. I would never, at my age, outlast this tormentor.

“Dear Lord, I am coming home,” I cried softly. “Gather me into your arms, Lord. I give myself to you.”

“You will die here,” said the guard, suddenly eager to open my neck, my back, my legs, and my arms.

“This is unlawful,” I said, taking a long breath before I spoke so that the words came out with the force of will and clarity. “You may not scourge a Roman citizen. Ask Lysias, and he will explain. This is the law. I’ve not been tried, and I’ve never been condemned. This will cause you a great deal of trouble, sir. Do you want to risk everything? Is your life worth so little?”

My objections took him by surprise, and he fell back. He spoke to a comrade, and they discussed the circumstances of my scourging as I sweltered and scorched. My armpits ached, and I felt so dizzy it seemed impossible I could stay here longer, not in a living state. The earth itself spun around the post.

I begged for water, just before passing out.

And I woke to see Lysias before me. One did not dare to claim Roman citizenship without cause. Instant death would follow a false claim of this kind. My head would topple into the dust at my feet.

“You’re a citizen of Rome? Is that true? Can you hear me, Paul?”

“I am.”

Without guile, he said, “I purchased my freedom at great cost.”

I seized on this opening: “I, sir, was born into this state.”

He knew I had no reason to pretend to this status, as I spoke with confidence in his own language.

“I believe you’re telling the truth,” he said. “You’re a learned and cultivated man. I don’t know how or why you put yourself in such a position.”

He told the guards to untie my wrists.

“I must speak to the Sanhedrin,” Lysias said. “I know Daan, the high priest. Stay here while I consult. I will do my best for you.”

“I will stay,” I said, somewhat ruefully.

They put me into a cell with several other prisoners, with food and water. I waited for two days for further word, using the time for prayer. This was more like a place of temporary confinement than a proper cell, not like the horror of most prison enclosures, where light and nourishment became far and fanciful dreams, and where prisoners often preferred death over imprisonment, taking their lives at the first opportunity. The other three prisoners in this cell listened to me closely, and—here the Lord worked on my behalf, as my energies had slipped—I gathered them into the Way within hours. They were petty criminals for the most part, thieves and vagabonds without much knowledge of their heritage, although I have almost never met a man or woman who did not long for God, did not understand what it means to be taken into his arms.

I realized that Luke and the others would be frantic for knowledge of my whereabouts, and I tried to get word to them, but no guard would carry a message. One of them insolently slapped my face when I asked for this favor, and slapped me again when I said, “I forgive you, sir.”

Late in the afternoon of the next day, I had an unexpected guest. I had fallen into a granite sleep on my pallet and didn’t recognize my visitor, waking slowly to his presence.

“Paul,” he said, touching my shoulder, “are you awake?”

“I know you,” I said, “but memory fails me.”

“I’m Joshua, your nephew,” he said.

Esther was dead, but this was surely her son. I didn’t doubt this as I searched his face, even touched it with trembling fingers.

“I’m well connected at the Temple,” he said.

It moved me to see a member of my family, to encounter this physical connection to my deepest past. I could see my father in his visage, even in his slight stoop, with the head craning forward. The dimple in my father’s chin had returned here, a dark purple indentation carried from generation to generation. He had my own massive ears, my bald head, although he must have been twenty years younger than me. Already his beard had begun to gray.

He sat on the floor beside me, crossing his legs, and there was an intimacy between us that could only have been familial. The force of this connection surprised me.

“Tell me what is happening, Joshua. Should I speak to the Sanhedrin myself?”

“At least forty men lie in wait for you at the Temple. I don’t think you would survive the meeting.” He paused. “There is anger, and confusion as well. I know they despise you.”

“And why is this?”

“You have turned many away from the Law, from our traditions. That’s what they say.” He looked down at his unblemished hands, the hands of a man who had obviously never worked with them. “My knowledge of your past lacks detail, but I’ve heard terrible things about you, Uncle. I can’t trust what I hear, of course. I weigh what they say carefully.”

“You’re a good man, and must listen, dear Joshua.”

I told him my story with love, and with unusual specificity, going back to Damascus and my time in the desert with Musa. We talked as the room darkened, and I marveled at the focus of his attention. What I had to say appeared to move him.

“I want to know this man, Jesus the Christ,” he said.

“Let me baptize you,” I said. “It’s our way of bringing you to our side, into the Way of Jesus. It’s a symbol of rebirth. Like him, the Christ, you rise into fresh life.” I looked hard at him. “Do you want this?”

He nodded, a lovely moment of acceptance.

There was a clay vessel of water on a table beside my pallet, and I asked my nephew to kneel. “Joshua, blood of my blood,” I said, dribbling water on his head from a cup, “I baptize you in the name of Jesus. In him there is neither male nor female, neither slave nor free man, neither Jew nor Greek.”

How startling: my own nephew, one of our circle. I sorely wished I had known his mother better. But we had remained distant, as if afraid to get too close. This may have had something to do with our shared loss, the loss of our mother. Or my father’s reticence and hardness. I would never understand the unspoken divide between us.

I had barely finished baptizing my nephew when Lysias stepped into the room, with a torchbearer beside him.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“You are my trouble.” He explained that a squadron of soldiers would escort me to Caesarea, where I would stand before the Roman procurator, Felix. He had written to him to explain my situation, outlining the accusations against me.

“I follow Roman law to the letter,” Lysias added.

He was a decent fellow, and I could not fault him.

“God will bless you,” I said.

He ignored this. “It’s important that you leave at once. We don’t want to attract attention, which is why you must travel by night. An escort is ready.”

So I took leave of Joshua, saying that, God willing, I would meet him again, perhaps in paradise. I gave him the names of several members of the Way in Jerusalem, and told him to explain to them what had happened to me, and that everyone should pray for my welfare but understand that God directed my footsteps and that I rested happily in him. I urged him to contact Luke as soon as possible, as he would be desperate for news.

Of course Luke would follow me to Caesarea. I didn’t doubt the faithfulness of my friend.

I blessed Joshua now, drawing an invisible cross with my thumb on his forehead. “With this sign, I deliver you into the hands of Almighty God, who will protect you as he protects his own.” That was the first time I had ever used this gesture, and it felt right. God had moved my hands for me.

Outside the fortress, in a wide courtyard previously unknown to me, I was surprised by the contingent of cavalry with spears, and a squad of infantrymen, perhaps two dozen of them. I could hardly believe that Lysias had taken such trouble over me.

“Felix will receive you,” said Lysias. “Or one of his magistrates. I wash my hands of you.”

And so we left Jerusalem, descending into the night along a dirt road through a pine forest that drops onto the Plain of Sharon. We traveled some forty miles, passing through a part of country known for brigands, which is why I needed such an impressive escort. Near dawn, we came to the edge of the plain, where the threats of robbery and murder apparently dwindled. At this point, outside of Antipatras, the horsemen turned, heading back to Jerusalem. From this point, after camping by the roadside in a clearing, I marched slowly with soldiers toward Caesarea, arriving at the coast in the early morning.

As we stood above the curving sweep of the bay and the harbor, which spread its sheet of gold before us to the water’s far horizon, we saw that a large number of ships lay at anchor, and I wondered what on earth God had in store for me.

Whatever happened, it would astonish me. God knew how to do that.