I FIRST SAW HIM in the winter of that year at En Melakh, a town of a few hundred just north of the Salt Sea. He had come in out of the desert, people said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung from his bones, he’d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good view of him from the porch of the tavern I’d put up in across the way. Some of the townspeople, no doubt taking him for a holy man, dropped bits of food in front of him from time to time, which he accepted with a nod of his head but more often than not couldn’t seem to bring himself to stomach, letting them sit there in the dirt for the flies to collect on or the dogs to snatch away.
Though the town lay on the Roman side of the frontier, the soldiers of Herod Antipas often passed that way when they travelled up from his southern territories. At the time, I was awaiting an informant we had among Herod’s men on his way back to the court from the Macherus fortress. The holy man had appeared perhaps the third day of my wait, simply there beneath the fig tree when I awoke; from the joyless look of him I thought he might have been cast out from one of the desert cults, the way they did sometimes if some bit of food should touch your hand before you’d washed it or if you missed some pause or half-word in your prayers. His hair and beard were scraggly and short as if recently shaved for a vow—they gave him a boyish appearance but couldn’t however quite take the dignity from him, which seemed to sit on him like some mantle someone had laid over him.
He wasn’t wearing any sandals or cloak. I thought surely he’d had some cave out there to hole up in, and some brush for fire, or he would have frozen to death in the cold. Even here in the valley the nights had been bitter, the little heat the sun built up over the day through the winter haze vanishing the instant dusk fell. I waited to see if he planned to weather the night in the open or repair to some cranny when darkness set in. But the sun dropped and he didn’t move. My tavern-keeper, a mangy sort with an open sore on one of his knuckles, brought a lamp out to the porch and a bit of the gruel he passed off as food.
“He’s a quiet one, that one,” he said, with his low, vulgar laugh, trying to ingratiate himself. “Nearly dead, from the look of it.”
Not ten strides from the man some of the boys of the town, coming out after their suppers, began to get up a bit of a fire, spitting and holding their hands up to the flames and keeping their talk low lest the holy man overhear them. The orange haze their fire threw out just reached the man where he was, making him seem like someone at a threshold, someone turned away from the room of light the fire formed. Get up and warm yourself, I wanted to say to him, feeling I was out there with him in the cold, with the wind at my ankles and just a few bits of bread in my belly. But still he sat. It occurred to me that he was perhaps simply too enfeebled to rise, that his hapless look was his own hunger-dimmed wonder that he could sit there as his life ebbed away and not be able to lift a finger to save himself.
I had half-resolved to go out and offer him my cloak when I was headed off by a woman who was apparently the mother of one of the boys in the square, and who came out chastising the lot of them.
“Animals! Didn’t one of you think to give him a bit of fire?”
And she proceeded to purloin some of the precious faggots of wood the boys had no doubt scrounged for all afternoon in the brush and to build a little fire in front of the man. When she’d got a blaze going she took off her own shawl and draped it over his shoulders, then took her son by the ear and dragged him off home. Within minutes the rest of the boys, thus humiliated, had begun to disperse as well, the last two or three lingering defiantly a bit before finally quenching their own fire and shamefacedly dropping their remaining handfuls of wood into that of the holy man.
The holy man, for his part, had seemed oblivious to all of this. But when the boys had gone I detected a bit of movement in him, a slight drawing in towards the fire as if towards some secret it might whisper to him. I thought I ought to assure myself that he at least had his wits about him, and so, with the excuse of further stoking his fire, I took a few twigs from the small bundle that the tavern-keeper kept near his gate and walked out to him. It was only when I got close to him that I saw what his body had been giving in to: he had fallen asleep. I wavered a moment over tending to him—it was always my instinct then in situations of that kind to err on the side of indifference, as the way of drawing the least attention to myself. But seeing him helpless like that in his sleep, and even more hopelessly frail than he had seemed from a distance, I shored up his fire a bit and then for good measure draped my cloak over his shawl, knowing that I could beg an extra blanket off the tavern-keeper for my own lice-infested bed. What struck me as I draped the cloak over him was how peculiar this act of charity felt, how alien to my nature, as if I had now truly become a man whom I’d thought I merely feigned to be.
Like the Zealots, we worked for Rome’s overthrow though, unlike them, we did not imagine that only God was our commander or that it was profanement to know more than what was written in the Torah. So we had a few men of experience amongst us, at least, who understood how the world worked and the forces we were up against. But many of those who had joined us in the hope of imminent revolt had, over time, lost patience with our leaders’ caution and our lack of progress. It was our strategy, for instance, that we stir up unrest in the entire region before risking any action of our own. Yet the fact was that we did not have the contacts for proper embassies abroad, and that outside our borders we had won to our cause only the most minor of tribal lords. So our grand hope of a revolution that would spread across the whole of the empire, and be unquenchable, appeared increasingly the merest fantasy. In the meantime we had begun to descend into factions, and even those who ought to have been our allies often proved, over some point of doctrine, our fiercest enemies. The Zealots, for instance, considered us cowards and collaborationists because we did not protest every smallest infringement of Jewish law; yet they thus wasted in a thousand little outbursts the resources that ought to have gone to a single great conflagration.
In the face of our failures abroad we had begun to put our energies instead into infiltrating the Palestinian outposts, not only those in Judea, which the Romans controlled directly, but also those in the territories of their vassals Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, on the reasoning that in the event of revolt we would need to take the outlying fortresses at once if we were to stand any chance of holding back the Roman legions based in Syria. Most of us were kept in the dark, of course, about our actual strength, going about our little tasks with hardly any sense of the whole we formed part of, not only because our leaders so arranged it but because even amongst ourselves we did not dare to confide in one another or pool our knowledge, for fear of spies. In my own case there were two men I reported to, one a teacher and grain merchant who lived near the stadium, and the other a lawyer who worked in the city administration; outside these I spoke to no one except in the most general terms. For my work, I ran a shop just beneath the Antonia fortress where I sold phylacteries and also various foreign texts, and where I offered services as a scribe. It was in this latter office that I made myself useful to our group—the soldiers from the fortress often came to me to prepare their letters home, and so I learned the comings and goings of the procurator and the movements of the troops and so on. In the beginning, because I had been raised in Ephesus and knew something of the world, I had also a number of times been sent abroad, even once as far as Rome. But eventually it grew clear that I did not have the character for diplomacy. So I was given other duties, though from time to time was still sent on small assignments outside the city, which I increasingly welcomed as the atmosphere among us in Jerusalem grew more and more oppressive.
En Melakh was barely a day’s journey from Jerusalem but seemed much further, at the bottom of the long, bleak road that led down from the city to the Jordan plain. I had left Jerusalem under clear skies, but here a dust-filled wind had daily blown across the flats like the Almighty’s angry breath, blocking the sun and dropping grit in every nook and crevice. The morning after the holy man’s arrival, however, dawned clear. During the night I had hardly been able to sleep for the thought of him sitting out there in the cold—I did not know why my mind had so fixed on him except that he seemed an obscure sort of challenge to me, to my own smug sense of mission, sitting there half-dead yet asking for nothing.
When I awoke, just past daybreak, I did not take the trouble to so much as wash my hands before going out to check on him. My heart sank when I saw he was missing from his spot beneath the fig tree—my first thought was that he had died in the night and had already been carted away, to prevent the desecration of buzzards alighting there in the middle of the town. But then I caught sight of him amidst the early morning traffic a little ways from the square, padding along in the dim red of sunrise towards the stable that served to house the pack animals and goats of the local market. It was a shock to see him fully upright, all skin and bones the way he was, little more than a wraith against the dawn, walking with that strange light-footedness of the very thin and the very frail that makes them look almost lively and spry even when they are at death’s door.
At the stables he ducked into one of the stalls and squatted to ease himself. It was only when he had emerged and had begun to move back towards the square that I noticed he was no longer wearing my cloak, only the shawl he’d been given, which gave him a slightly comical, womanly air despite his wisps of beard; and I saw now that my cloak in fact lay neatly draped over the low mud wall of the tavern’s porch. Clearly his wits were sharper than I had imagined them, if he had known enough to track me down. But rather than being pleased that the thing had been returned to me, I felt a prick of injury at how speedily he had seemed to wish to rid himself of it, as if it were some curse that had been laid on him.
He took up his place beneath the fig tree again. There was a little more life in his eyes than there had been the day before—it seemed he had crossed back, after all, to the land of the living. From somewhere he’d got hold of a gourd that he’d filled with water and now he set about doing his ablutions, with the careful frugality of a seasoned desert-dweller, a few drops for his hands, his forearms, his face, a few more for his ankles and feet. When he had finished he leaned in low on his haunches, arms outspread, to say his prayers.
It seemed shameful to watch him while he prayed. I took my cloak up and drew it over me against the lingering cold and went into the courtyard, where the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Adah, a girl of fourteen or so, was preparing some porridge at the bit of fire there. She was a strange girl, as unblemished as her father was vile but also not quite present somehow, a bit simple perhaps. Sometimes her father would send her half-undressed to my room to bring me my meals or wine, with a conniving that chilled me.
“I never see you go out to the market like the other girls,” I said to her. “Maybe your husband’s there.”
But she misunderstood.
“I don’t have a husband,” she said with a panicked look, then hurried off to bring her father his breakfast.
I was accustomed enough to biding my time in those days but the holy man had made me restless—simply that he was there, fired by a sense of purpose different from mine, or perhaps the waste that I saw then in his sort of devotion. I went out after I’d eaten and he was still sitting beneath his tree, the sun just rising above the houses behind him to cast his shadow all along the length of the square. Without quite knowing what I intended, I walked out to where he was.
I tossed a coin on the ground in front of him.
“For your breakfast,” I said. But he didn’t pick it up. Up close I saw he still had a dulled look, his eyes sunken, the skin sagging against his bones.
“Bread would be better,” he said.
His voice was stronger than I would have imagined it, seeming to echo in the hollow places in him.
“With a coin you can buy bread.”
“All the same.”
There didn’t seem any arrogance in this, only stubborn-ness—I thought perhaps it was part of his vow, to abjure any coinage, or that he was one of those who wouldn’t touch coins on account of the images there. I bent to collect the thing and went at once into the market, where I bought a bit of stew that I brought back to him. He thanked me roughly and set into it with a barely controlled vehemence, his appetite clearly returned.
“I lent you my cloak,” I said.
He didn’t look up from his food.
“I recognized it.”
And yet did not think to thank me. So it seemed I must wrestle him for my blessing.
“And you returned it. For which I’m grateful.”
“It seemed so fine I thought you’d miss it.”
“But you haven’t returned the shawl you were given.”
“It’s less fine. I thought it would be less missed.”
He put me in mind of those barefooted Greeks I’d seen as a boy in the squares of Ephesus, who lived on air and made it their job to poke fun at the least hint of pretension.
He had finished his food.
“Should I send another bowl?” I said.
“If you like.”
I paid a boy to bring out more stew, then moved on through the market. En Melakh was one of the towns that the madman Cassius had razed when he was in Syria, for failing to pay him tribute, and it had been rebuilt in crude Greek style with an open market just inside the gates. There wasn’t much of interest to be had in it—a bit of coloured wool from the coast, a few trinkets and hair combs, some dried meat and fruits. At the back, where the concessions gave way to the narrow alleys of a bazaar, an old woman ran a shop out of her house that I’d noticed people hurrying from carrying secret parcels wrapped in sackcloth: potions and charms. A carved figurine of three wise men wrapped in fish skins stood in a niche above the woman’s lintel. These were our God-fearing Jews, I thought, hedging their bets, worshipping icons of old men dressed up as fish.
As I was coming out of the far end of the market there was a commotion near the town gates. Some sort of detachment was coming into town—Romans, I thought at first, but then I recognized the standards of Herod Antipas. I made my way through the gawkers who had already lined the street to get a better view. They were a bit of a rabble, it seemed, around a dozen in all, arranged in rough formation around their captain, a bearded colossus who was the only rider. It took me a moment to see what it was that had caused such a stir: they had a prisoner in tow. He was being pulled along, virtually dragged, by a rope attached to the captain’s saddle, though because of the soldiers and the crowd I could not get a good view of him. Then a gap opened up and I saw his face and was stopped dead, for though he was badly beaten I recognized him at once as my contact.
I did not know how to react. The truth was that nothing in my experience had prepared me for a situation of this sort, so that it seemed as if what had been merely trifling until then, playing a part, had become suddenly real. I moved to the back of the crowd to be out of the soldiers’ path, afraid some look or glance from the man might give me away. But he looked too far ruined for that. Both eyes were swelled to slits from whatever beatings he had got; one of his ears had been cut away, but crudely, so that there were still ragged bits of flesh left hanging, encrusted black with flies and dried blood. As he went past he stumbled and fell and did not get up again, so that he ended by being hauled along the street on his backside while one of the town dogs ran barking half-crazed around him and the townspeople laughed, no doubt taking him for a simple criminal.
His name was Ezekias. He was not much more than a boy, a messenger for the court in Tiberias who had been scouted out because of his position and then recruited during a visit to Jerusalem for one of the feasts. My only dealings with him had been a short encounter in the city at the time of his recruitment and a further one in Jericho some months later—he had struck me then as young, loyal, earnest, and entirely unaware of the danger he had entered into. It seemed more and more we relied on this sort, who could be easily replaced; indeed, I myself had not been so different when I had joined.
His use to us had been that he was often able to bring us news from the Macherus fortress, which was second only to Masada in impregnability, and with it formed the backbone of the southern defences of the Palestinian territories. We had been working to infiltrate the place for some time, in which task we had some reason to feel hope since, unlike at many of the other outposts, there was a large contingent of Jews among the company there. But there were also many Edomites, whose lands lay nearby and from whom Antipas’s father had descended, and who therefore could not be trusted. The Edomites held all the positions of command, and found every means of keeping the Jews subordinate. Yet there were one or two Jews who by dint of sheer perseverance and faultless service had got ahead, and these were the ones to whom we had directed ourselves and so gained a foothold.
The soldiers had come to a stop in the middle of the square. There were a couple of hitching stones there, near the well; they tied the captain’s horse to one and bound Ezekias to the other with the rope he’d been dragged by, haphazardly, as if he were a sheaf of wheat they were binding. After they’d drawn up their own fill from the well, they watered the horse but left Ezekias untended, not so much out of malice, it seemed, but more as if he were something they’d lost interest in, in the oafish way of boys who tired of some creature they’d caught. Ezekias, however, seemed aware neither that water was near nor that he was being denied it, his head drooped and his body straining against the rope that bound him so that it seemed the only thing that held him upright.
After the days of cloud and dust the clear sky now seemed an assault, the sun already beating down like a hammer. I stood there in the street but could not form a plan, felt only a general outrage as if some trick had been played on me. I could not know what Ezekias’s capture meant or who else had been implicated by it; I reasoned the soldiers knew nothing of our meeting or they would not have come into town so openly, but even that wasn’t certain. They had moved off now towards the tavern where I was staying, the tavern-keeper hurrying out to greet them, putting on his most servile of appearances, smiling and bowing and scraping and promising wine and meat, which I myself had hardly seen a trace of in my days there; and meanwhile the townspeople were still lingering uncertainly about the square, in the hope, perhaps, of some sort of violence.
I looked to Ezekias again and thought, He must be killed, for his own sake and for the sake of those he might name, when the king’s men in Tiberias put their wits to his torture. Then once the idea had entered my head, there was no putting it out, because of its logic. All of us had heard the stories of those who’d been taken and the things that were done to them, and how sometimes, for instance, to make them name their accomplices, their children or wives were brought before them and their fingers severed one by one or their eyes gouged out. So it was not simply a matter of sparing Ezekias—my own life stood at risk if I did nothing, for surely I would be among the first he would give up, if he had not already done so.
I had a dagger in my room that I always carried among my things. In all the time since my recruitment I had never had cause to use it; it seemed a great irony to me that its first victim would now be a member of my own cause. Thus, even as it grew clear that I must attempt the thing, it seemed a sort of joke, not the least part of which was that I would need to find the courage to slit my own throat if I was caught, or I would merely have put myself in the place of Ezekias. So I stood there in the street and did not know how to begin, and the sun grew hotter and the flies continued to cluster around Ezekias’s bloodied face. Twenty paces from him the holy man still sat beneath his tree—next to Ezekias he seemed diminished somehow, though I saw how he had watched the soldiers’ progress closely.
The company had been too large to fit in the tavern-keeper’s courtyard so he’d had his sons set up awnings in front of the porch and lay out carpets there. When the group had finally settled itself he sent Adah out, arms bared, to serve the wine, with the predictable result that the soldiers, lethargic and dull until then, grew suddenly animated, slipping their hands on poor Adah’s backside as she passed and laughing at her frightened retreat from them. While their attention was thus diverted I made my way past them in order to get to my room. Only the tavern-keeper showed any particular awareness of me as I went in, catching my eye dismissively as if to say he was sorry, he had more important matters than me to attend to at the moment.
I got the knife from my things. I had a scabbard for it but had never been in the habit of wearing it. Strapping it on now I felt like a child dressing up for a game of assassin. It made a bulge beneath my cloak when I had it in place that I imagined would make my intentions plain to anyone who laid eyes on me.
I went through my sack then, since I did not think I would be returning to my room. But other than a bit of cheese and stale bread from the trip down from Jerusalem there were only some underthings and a dirtied shirt, which I left there.
Stepping out to the porch from the courtyard, I ran full into Adah as she was hurrying in. The force of the collision sent the jug she was carrying smashing against the ground and sent Adah herself sprawling backwards practically into the laps of the soldiers, who at once were in an uproar, half-drunk by now and pleased beyond reckoning at the mishap.
“I’m sorry,” Adah stammered, “I’m sorry,” scrambling to collect up the broken jug before fleeing back into the courtyard.
The soldiers, meanwhile, had now decided that they must make me their good friend and pulled me down to join them at their libations, with that brutal jocularity soldiers had, that you knew could turn against you at the slightest whim. I was worried they would ask me my business—I had put it out to the tavern-keeper that I was expecting some traders from Nabatea—and would catch me out in some mistake, since I did not know very well the movements of the traders in those parts. But they did not seem to have much interest in anything outside their own crude humour. I saw now that there wasn’t a Jew among them—they were mainly Syrians, it seemed, except for the captain, who was clearly an Edomite.
Because my cloak had fallen open one of the soldiers noticed my dagger, which had a jewelled handle. He was one of the younger ones, whose provenance I could not make out, since he spoke neither Aramaic nor even Greek very well. Without asking my leave he pulled the knife from its sheath and then with a grin made as if to stab me with it, the whole company bursting into laughter when I started back. He then pulled out his own knife, which had a curved blade and a handle of tooled leather, and offered it in exchange. I was afraid this was some custom of his that I would be forced to honour.
“It was my father’s,” I said of my own, which was the truth and which seemed to satisfy him, since he returned the thing to me.
With each moment I sat there, it seemed increasingly farfetched that I should carry my plan through; and indeed there was that part of me that was happy I had been compelled to stop there. The thing was simple enough—I lacked the courage. Or perhaps for a moment I did not see the point, of Ezekias’s death or my own, the useless pile of bones we would amount to.
I asked as casually as I could manage after their prisoner.
“We always carry a Jew to draw off the dogs,” the captain said, his first words to me.
The soldiers at once broke into laughter, not bothering to restrain themselves in the least on my account, so that I felt sickened to have sat down amongst them. I started to rise but one of them held me back, clapping an aggressive arm around me, until I thought I must draw my dagger then and there. In the meanwhile, however, the captain’s attention had been drawn to the square. I looked out to see that a small crowd had gathered there near Ezekias—it seemed the holy man, while the soldiers had been busy with me, had gone to the well to get a scoop of water to bring over to him, and people had gathered around now to see if he would get away with the thing.
The captain had one of his men out there in an instant, who snatched the scoop away and sent the water spilling, in the process practically knocking the holy man over. Some of the crowd jeered him at that, for it was one thing to torture a prisoner but another to slight a Jewish holy man; and then someone, it wasn’t clear who, threw a stone at him. The soldier drew his cutlass then and it seemed for a moment that there would be a riot, which however would have suited me very well. But the captain at once roused his men and hurried them out into the square, where they stood with their hands on their swords until the crowd had backed off.
In all this I had quietly made my way back to the edge of the market, still awaiting a chance if one should present itself. But in a moment it grew clear that my plan had been truly foiled now, for the captain had apparently had enough of the place and had begun rounding up his men to resume their march. He sent one of the soldiers back to pay the tavernkeeper, lest he lodge a complaint and the Romans bar Antipas from their roads; some of the others prepared his horse. But when they went to loose Ezekias from his post, he simply slumped to the ground and did not move.
The captain squatted down to him and held a hand out to feel for his breath. After a moment he stood and kicked the slumped body over angrily, then for good measure pulled out his cutlass and stuck it into Ezekias’s side. A trickle of blood seeped up through the wound.
“Leave him,” the captain said, and abandoned him there by the hitching post.
The captain wasted no time now in taking up his march again, and in a matter of minutes he and his men were already out the gates. I stood there in the square and could not believe the way the thing had ended, nor could I say if it showed the Lord’s mercy or his spite.
The crowd around Ezekias had grown again but no one dared to touch him, fearing who knew what defilement. There were mumbles of confusion, then the question of what should be done with the body; I cut off debate by undertaking to look after it. Of the entire crowd the only one who came forward to offer to help was the holy man.
“I can manage it,” I said, given his state. But he had already moved to take Ezekias’s feet.
We carried him out through the gates. The holy man proved surprisingly agile, keeping up a brisk pace without complaint. We were silent until we were a little way beyond the town, but then we needed to discuss how best the body could be disposed of. It would take a day’s work to dig a hole in the rock-hard earth outside the town there. But I could not bear the thought of simply burying Ezekias beneath a pile of stones like a common criminal.
“There are some caves in the hills,” the holy man said. “Not far.”
But it was two miles or more of barren plain before the hills began, and the sun still climbing.
“You’ll be all right?” I said.
“If not, there are caves enough for all of us.”
It was past mid-morning before we reached the hills. The sun was relentless; beneath it the landscape looked utterly transformed from the previous days, stark and deathly and unreal. Ezekias’s body was sending up a terrible stink—from the slit in his side, mainly, though it seemed also that he had soiled himself at some point.
It took all our effort to make our way up the scree of the first hills. But the holy man knew his way around, leading us to a small promontory beneath which were sheltered a few natural caves. A bit of careful manoeuvring got us down to one of them and we set Ezekias’s body inside. The holy man pulled a waterskin from under his shirt then, and wetting his sleeve he wiped some of the grime and blood from Ezekias’s face. It was only now that I allowed myself to truly look at it, so mangled, though it had once been quite handsome. The jaw looked broken, perhaps the nose as well; the hair was matted with blood where his ear had been severed. But under the holy man’s ministrations the face began to look human again.
“You knew him?” the holy man said.
“No.” But it bothered me to lie to him, nor did he seem to believe me.
When we had laid the body out and wrapped my cloak around it as a shroud, we set about closing up the mouth of the cave, heaping rubble down from the slope above it and scrounging what rocks we could from the hillside. The work took an hour or more, in a heat that was like a wall bearing down on us. Afterwards we sat on the ledge that came out from the cave and drank what remained of the holy man’s water. From where we sat we had a view of the Jordan plain, with the palms of Jericho to the north and the intimation of the Salt Sea to the southeast. En Melakh, directly ahead of us, looked almost indistinguishable from the rubbled plain it rose out of—it was a town that defied logic, sitting nearly undefended like that at the frontier, with its houses of unbaked mud that a few good rains would wash to nothing. If it were ever abandoned, the desert would have erased every trace of it inside of a year.
“Will you spend the night in the town again?” I said.
“I think I’ll go on to Jericho.”
We sat talking, in the tired, laconic way that came of our fatigue and of the gravity of the task we had shared. His name was Yehoshua; when I asked him what had brought him to En Melakh, he told me, with surprising frankness, that he had been an acolyte of the prophet Yohanan, whose camp had been nearby. It was not two months then since Yohanan had been arrested, by Herod Antipas, though everyone knew it was the Romans who had put him up to it.
“We heard Yohanan’s acolytes had been killed,” I said.
“Not all of them.” Though he wouldn’t look at me when he said this.
Things were clearer now: he had shaved his head to hide from the soldiers, since it was a mark of Yohanan and his men that they went unshorn. So we were both of us outlaws, it seemed, joined in that way if no other. In fact our movement had followed Yohanan’s arrest closely, to see if we could find the way to turn his supporters to us; but in the end we had found them too leaderless and fanatical and dispersed. In my own view the Romans had been wrong to see in Yohanan a political threat, for all the numbers he drew—rather he had been a boon to them, by diverting to mysticism those who might otherwise have put their energies to burning Roman garrisons.
With the mention of Yohanan, Yehoshua’s mood had turned—it weighed on him, as I guessed, to have deserted him. He seemed tired to me, and embittered, like someone at the end of a road.
“If you left him it was to save your life,” I said, “so that you might put it to good use.” But the words sounded empty—I was not some wise man to tell him such a thing, nor even, it seemed, more certain of myself.
He didn’t take offence, however, but made light of the thing, saying, “He’s better off than the man in the cave, at least.”
It was Yehoshua, before we set out, who said a prayer for poor Ezekias, asking the Lord to look to him. Then, where the hills gave way to the chalky plain again, we took our leave of each other. He handed me the shawl he’d been given in En Melakh, and which he’d been using as his headgear, and asked me if I might return it to its owner. I could not say why it so moved me that he should make this request of me.
“I’ll find her,” I said.
I watched him as he melted into the barrens, not imagining I should see him again but feeling still bound to him, because he had shared with me the contamination of Ezekias’s death. I thought of the story of the priest who saw a dying man by the road and passed him by, for fear of uncleanness—at least that was not the school that Yohanan had raised him in. It was to prepare God’s way that Yohanan taught, as I’d heard it, though his acolyte seemed to have lost his own. No doubt his courage had failed when the soldiers had come and he’d run; yet I could not say I would not have done the same. He had already disappeared in the haze off the desert when I turned back towards En Melakh. A wind had come up by then and the dust was rising. By the time I reached the town it had blocked the sun again.
I myself had gone quietly back to Jerusalem after Ezekias’s death but did not dare to speak to anyone, for fear I was being watched. Then a few days after my return, I learned that the teacher in the city I had reported to had been arrested. I did not waste any time then but at once packed away all the goods I had in my shop and then collected what money remained from my inheritance and left the city. For a number of days I took refuge with a cousin I had at Joppa, though I told him nothing, of course, of my situation. But Roman battalions often passed through the town on their way from Caesarea Maritima up the coast, which the Romans had set up as their capital, so I grew afraid of bringing him into risk and moved on.
In the end I crossed the northern frontier and went on to Tyre, having heard we had a group there. I had passed through Tyre with my father several times as a child and had thought it a great city, with its grand causeway and port and its many temples. But it now seemed a vulgar and lawless place, full of beggars and scoundrels. It took me many days to track down our group, since there was much suspicion and fear even there at the time, and then what I found were half a dozen aging rebels who still hearkened back to Yihuda the Galilean and who had been so long absent from our country as to have lost all sense of the realities facing us. As a result, my relations with them were strained from the start. As others of our party began to filter into the city with more news of the reprisals against us, the members of the Tyrian group grew puffed up with the delusion that the leadership of the movement would now somehow come to rest with them. So the rest of us began to avoid them out of fear they would compromise us in some way, with the Roman authorities or with our own leadership. For my part, since I had heard of no warrant against me in Jerusalem, I began to think seriously of leaving the city, though I knew also that a few of those close to me had been arrested and shipped off into slavery.
Through all this I had hardly given another thought to Yehoshua. But one day after I’d been in the city a matter of months I came across a gathering of some twenty or so near the city gates and there he stood addressing it, though changed in appearance now, fair and well-groomed and well-fed so that he seemed almost a Greek, and changed, too, in his manner, with an air of authority I had not seen in him at En Melakh. Nonetheless he did not seem to be making much headway with the crowd, who were badgering him because he had slighted the Tyrian gods.
“You should keep your ideas for the Jews,” someone said to him.
“Is that what your teachers tell you? That there’s a truth for Tyrians and another for Jews?”
“You say so yourselves!”
Soon enough the crowd broke up. A few rough-looking attendants who had been hovering near him in stony silence huddled around him now speaking in muted Aramaic. But when I approached him his eye went to me at once.
“I saw you in the crowd,” he said. “I was happy to see a friend in it.”
It was getting on to dark and so I invited him and his men to take their supper with me at the inn where I was staying near the port, run by an old Jew sympathetic to our cause. The whole way there he grilled me in a fairly lively way on the customs of the city, in Greek, leaving his colleagues, who obviously spoke no Greek and in fact looked like the roughest sort of hirelings, entirely out of the conversation. At the time this did not strike me as remarkable, but later I saw how he sometimes consulted them for the smallest things, so that my first impression of them as mere bodyguards or servants seemed mistaken.
Then at one point, taking me by surprise, he said, “I heard the arrest of that man at En Melakh was because of a plot.”
“Ah,” I said, and didn’t pursue the matter. But in this way he made clear to me that he’d guessed the reason for my presence there in Tyre.
At supper we switched to Aramaic, though his men—there were three of them, Yaqob and Yohanan and then the apparent leader, Shimon, whom Yehoshua, however, no doubt because of his hulking frame, called Kephas, the Rock—mainly kept up their brooding silence. From their accents I’d gathered they were Galileans, which went some way towards explaining their manner, since that race was not known for wasting its words. They addressed their master by the shortened Yeshua, which made him seem common. But later I learned that that had been his given name and it was only the prophet Yohanan who had named him more formally, when he had purified him, as was his practice.
Though he had been Yohanan’s acolyte, his notions did not seem to accord much with what I knew of Yohanan’s. Yohanan had preached the imminent end of days, like the desert cults; but Yeshua did not seem in such a hurry. As he put it, Yohanan was right to make us feel each day was our last, so we might be woken up to our mortality. But in so saying he showed he didn’t agree with him. For his own part, he seemed to think more in the manner of a Greek than a Jew, finding recourse for his arguments in logic rather than scripture; thus I wasn’t surprised to learn that as a child he had lived in Alexandria.
I couldn’t quite gather what it was that had brought him to Tyre and wondered if the reason wasn’t so different from my own, having heard that the matter of Yohanan had not yet been settled. But it wasn’t entirely unknown for Jews to proselytize in that region, so he might merely have come in search of converts. Also, as I learned, he had been there only a matter of weeks, and planned to return the following day to Kefar Nahum in Galilee, where it seemed he was now based. I made some comment half in jest then of how I would gladly be rid of Tyre as well, and he said I was welcome to travel with him if I wished. But I could not tell if the invitation was made casually or in earnest.
I asked the group if they wanted to put up at the inn for the night. But Kephas, who was clearly wary of me, said, “We sleep in the open. We have no money with us.”
This seemed a point of honour with him. I remembered Yeshua’s rejection of the coin I had offered in En Melakh.
“Then how do you eat?”
“The Lord provides,” Kephas said.
I was tempted to ask if it was the Lord who was paying for his supper, but said only, “You will stay as my guests, of course,” so they could not refuse me.
Our meeting might have ended there with Yeshua and me going our separate ways the next day if not for an occurrence later that evening that considerably sharpened my interest in him. A Phoenician woman from the countryside appeared at the inn in search of him, having somehow managed to track him down; and she had along with her a daughter whom she held literally leashed to her by a cord tied around the girl’s waist and who looked like some wild animal she had captured, dirtied and dishevelled, her face covered in scratches and scabs. The girl’s hands were bound in rags that she was constantly gnawing at to free herself, all the while emitting long howls and moans, eerie and guttural, that seemed to border on speech without quite becoming it.
I had stayed down in the parlour after supper and was one of the first to speak to the woman when she showed up in the courtyard. She said word of Yeshua’s power had reached her after he had passed through a village near hers the previous day and cured a child there, and she had brought her own daughter in the hope he might cure her as well. The rags, she said, were to keep the girl, who had several times tried to take her own life, from doing any further injury to herself.
I was surprised to learn that Yeshua enjoyed this renown as a healer. A boy was sent up to his room to fetch him and a few minutes later he appeared in the courtyard with his men. A curious and almost comic thing happened then: at the sight of Kephas, the girl, who despite her rantings had appeared relatively harmless until that moment, suddenly lunged at the poor man and began hitting at him with her rag-covered fists. It took both Yaqob and Yohanan to pull her off him.
The mother, by this point, was practically prostrate with apology.
“Master, please,” she said, nearly incoherent, “master.”
Yeshua had wisely been holding himself back a bit from the fray. But now he came forward to put a hand on the girl’s forehead. The gesture seemed to calm her.
“Bring her into the sitting room,” he said.
His men sat her on a bench in the parlour. She was still mumbling in her indecipherable speech but seemed to have retreated into herself, staring out glassy-eyed as if entirely unaware of us or her surroundings. At Yeshua’s instructions the servant boy brought a basin of water and a cloth, and Yeshua proceeded to dab at the grime on the girl’s face and at the streaks of dried blood from her scratches. I remembered how he had tended to Ezekias in this way, how he had made him seem human again; and somehow he managed to work this same effect now with the girl. From out of that demonic visage of grime and blood there emerged suddenly a child, an innocent. He ran his cloth over her hair as well, bringing it back to rough order; then he began to unwrap her hands. All the while the girl grew increasingly placid, until her ramblings had died down to a whisper.
“Bring her something to eat,” Yeshua said, after he had her hands free, and when a bowl of soup was brought out she set into it like someone famished.
From a pouch on his belt Yeshua pulled out some bits of herb and told the girl’s mother to make a brew from it to help calm the girl if she should suffer another attack.
“Is it a demon, master?” the woman asked.
“The girl is pregnant. When you find who’s responsible, you’ll have your demon.”
The woman was instantly silenced by this, as were we all—the girl was no more than nine or ten. But it was immediately clear that Yeshua was right, both from the woman’s guilty silence and from the small bulge in the girl’s dress that grew obvious now that our attention had been drawn to it.
The girl was quietly licking her bowl to get the dregs of the soup.
“Take her home and look after her,” Yeshua said.
There had been nothing miraculous in any of this, yet the whole incident affected me deeply. The vision of that young girl’s face, called back, it seemed, from some precipice as if indeed by a kind of magic, had seared itself into my mind. I had seen instances of this kind of possession before, if that was what it could be called, and also “cures” of varying degrees of success (on more than one occasion staged, I was sure, to win over a credulous audience). But while usually these cases were handled with all manner of obfuscation and subterfuge, with chants and potions and charms or countless animal sacrifices that usually ended up on the doctor’s supper table without any appreciable benefit to the patient, Yeshua had held true throughout to the plainest and simplest of observations and gestures, and in so doing had brought about an improvement that, if not permanent, had at least the great virtue of being honest. That he had taken the trouble of examining the girl’s condition from the point of view of physical causes already set him apart from the usual run of physicians and healers, who leapt at once to the mystical in order to cover their own lack of understanding.
Afterwards I held Yeshua back on the pretext of speaking to him of his education, which he told me he’d received during his time in Alexandria. But in fact a notion had taken hold of me: I had begun to think of his earlier offer to join him. I reasoned to myself that he would provide cover for my return to our own territories, even if at bottom he wasn’t much less a fugitive than I was; and also that in Galilee I could move freely, being unknown there. I had it in mind, or so I said to myself, that I might look to building our movement there, since as far as I knew we had no strength in the region. But the truth was simply that I was drawn to Yeshua. I had seen something in him, the mark of a leader, and was loath to let him slip from me.
We sat talking there for an hour or more, long after his men had returned to their room. As he presented himself, it seemed he was merely an itinerant teacher of the sort that was common enough even in Judea, with a little following there in the Galilee that supported him. Yet he did not much resemble the teachers I had known when I’d studied in Jerusalem, whose minds were like windowless rooms circumscribed on every side by the law, while Yeshua’s was curious and quick. The innkeeper had joined us and brought wine, which Yeshua did not abstain from, and soon we were drawn into political arguments and to talk of the emperor Tiberius and his strange retreat to the isle of Capri, where it was said he indulged every lust and gave no thought to the affairs of state. The innkeeper saw hopes for our independence in this, saying surely his house must crumble if he did not look to it. But Yeshua, cutting to the heart of the matter, said, “I’m sure he has servants enough to tend to his house if he doesn’t,” which indeed proved prescient, for it wasn’t long afterwards that we began to hear how Sejanus had wormed his way into power, managing things with greater brutality and rigour than ever Tiberius had.
At one point Yeshua asked after my own schooling and I was quick to mention Ephesus, as if I was anxious not to seem to him some mere Pharisee, who had read nothing outside of the scriptures.
“So we’re both Greeks, then,” he said to me, joking. Yet the truth was that even in Ephesus my father had sent me only to the Jews of our own quarter, since he himself had been raised in the Negeb and was hardly worldly. What larger education I had got then had come mainly from scrounging the occasional text from the market and from wandering the streets, and it had always seemed to me that our little quarter was like some island we lived on, the tiny realm of the familiar, hemmed in on every side by the great, dark swell of the unknown.
I asked him if he had ever seen Ephesus and he said once, in passing, before he had joined Yohanan.
“It seemed to me there were many wonders there,” he said.
But in fact it still pained me to speak of the place since my parents’ death there.
“Surely there were more in Alexandria.”
He laughed at that.
“Maybe so. But not every wonder is a boon.”
Before we retired I finally put it to him that I might take up his offer to share the road. I was afraid he might surmise I was merely using him for my own ends and take offence. But if he was troubled by the notion of travelling with someone he had by now surely gathered to be a rebel, he did not show it.
“Of course you’re welcome with us, as I told you,” he said, and seemed sincere in this.
So it was set that I would leave with him and his men the following day. I asked the innkeeper to pass on word to my Tyrian colleagues that I had gone, but I did not imagine that I would be missed.
Yeshua, no doubt sensing the uneasiness of his men at having me included among them, seemed therefore to throw us together, for much of the journey walking some paces ahead of us and out of hearing so that we were forced to make our way with one another. For their part, his men, after the first awkwardness, made a genuine effort to integrate me into their party, and regaled me with stories—some of them, however, utterly fantastical—of the great works that Yeshua had already wrought in Galilee. (Later, of course, I would hear them recount in these same exaggerated tones the story of Yeshua’s treatment of the young girl in Tyre.) Even Kephas, in the end, maintained the strictest civility, passing his flask first to me whenever we stopped to drink and in the evening, when we set up camp at the side of the road, carefully portioning out the bits of food he had in his pack—I, assuming we would be having our supper in Gush Halav, had neither brought my own provisions nor purchased any along the way—so that everything was perfectly equitable.
In amidst the tales Yeshua’s men passed on to me I was able to pick out that Yeshua had come to Kefar Nahum early that spring, which would have been not long after we’d met in En Melakh. The men were very mysterious about how he had ended up there and how they had come to be his followers, saying only that he had called them, giving to the words that special weight with which converts invested their particular terminology. I thought perhaps he had chosen the place for the refuge offered by the hills in the area should he need to flee, since as far as I knew it was otherwise without distinctions or charms. But it came out he had family nearby in Notzerah, a town just outside of Sepphoris, the former Galilean capital. I was surprised when his men said they had never met with any of his family; it appeared, however, that they had little to do with Yeshua’s past, nor indeed did they seem curious of it.
We crossed the frontier at Gush Halav not long after dawn the following day, getting through without incident. I immediately felt my blood quicken at stepping back onto native soil. It was just coming on to the end of the summer and the grape harvest was in progress, the vineyards already alive with workers and the air rife with the sweet, half-fermented smell of must. After the gloomy woods that had lined the road to Gush Halav, it was a relief to see open fields again and signs of human presence. I had never been in that part of the country before or indeed spent more than a matter of days in the Galilee and so was surprised at the level of cultivation, not only in the valleys but even on the hilltops, which were covered in olive groves. I imagined it was the Jews who had so tamed the place, in the generations since the Maccabees had won it back for us, though many of the olive trees we passed looked so gnarled and old they might have gone back to the ancient Canaanites.
It seemed that Yeshua and his men livened up as well when we crossed the frontier, perhaps at the prospect of returning home. But it turned out there was more to it than that—they were recognized here. In each village we passed there was someone who knew them, and came quietly offering homage; in one town, where we stopped for our midday rest, there seemed a whole little colony of Yeshua’s followers, who came slowly filtering in to pay their respects at the house where we’d put up. Yeshua appeared different among them than he had among the crowd in Tyre, more at ease, though it wasn’t the elders or even the men of standing who came to see him but the merest peasants and the like.
It was twilight by the time we reached Kefar Nahum. The town lay along the Damascus road and the caravansary outside the walls gave off the noise and stench of animals and men. But the town itself had a dulled, neglected air. Just outside the gates we found a little crowd who had heard of Yeshua’s approach and had come to await him, most with some particular ailment they wished him to minister to. For the better part of an hour, until it grew too dark to see, Yeshua tended to those gathered. There was one boy, writhing in pain, who’d been brought to him with a broken shin bone, the fractured end of it protruding through the skin; Yeshua, with a few smooth motions, massaged the bone back into place, so that with a splint affixed the boy was practically able to leave on his own two feet. Surely it was more than simple learning that Yeshua brought to this work; he had a gift. You saw it in the concentration that came over him like a possession, the way every fibre in him seemed devoted to the task at hand.
Afterwards we made our way to Kephas’s house, where Yeshua stayed. It was a small compound just off the main street, dank and cramped and swarming with animals and children. There we had our supper, which was ample enough, and then Yaqob and Yohanan—who were brothers, it turned out, a point no one had mentioned before—returned to their own home. Kephas invited me to sleep on his roof, which hardly seemed fit to hold my weight. But in fact the late summer heat sent several of the children and a couple of the men of the household up there as well, though not Yeshua, who apparently had his own little closet to sleep in at a back corner of the compound.
One of those who came up to the roof was Kephas’s brother Andreas, who had taken a strange liking to me at supper, leaving his own place to come sit at my feet like a dog in search of a scrap. It had taken me a moment to realize he was simple—as I later learned, he had suffered some accident as a child. The others seemed uncomfortable when he came to me but did not really try to stop him. So for the rest of the evening he stayed close by, and then that night came up to the roof, setting his mat close to mine and giving me a huge child’s grin. The truth was I took comfort in his attachment to me—it was such a guileless thing, and so undemanding, that it made me feel welcome there, among strangers though I was, in a way that the mere protocols of hospitality could never have done.
It was not until the following morning, when I awoke there on Kephas’s rooftop, that I had a chance for a proper view of Kefar Nahum and its situation. My impulse then was to revise my original harsh judgement at Yeshua’s choosing it as his base. The town itself—a city, Yeshua’s men had called it, though it had the most makeshift of walls and no battlements of any sort—did not amount to much, just a straggle of compounds similar to Kephas’s stretching along its few streets, all in the coarse black stone of the area and each looking as forbidding and cramped as the next; and then to the south the harbour, which was large enough but built with a confusing disarray of jetties and quays and crammed with every sort of ramshackle craft. It was the prospect, however, that struck me, the view out over the whole of the Sea of Kinneret, which seen from there—unlike from Tiberias, where it seemed merely a backdrop laid out for the king’s amusement—appeared truly to merit the name of sea, not from its size, perhaps, but from the sense of being in some way on a distant shore. Jerusalem felt very far from here, in another world; Rome, non-existent. Of course, all this was perhaps no more than the feeling one often got in the provinces, the illusory sense that nothing beyond the immediate was important or real.
I was surprised, however, to make out just a couple of miles east of town what looked like a military camp, with Roman eagles flying. I had not heard of the place and wondered how it had come to be there, and that Antipas allowed it. Since the household had not yet come fully to life, I took the chance to slip away and make my way out to it, imagining I might learn something of use that I could then bring back to Jerusalem to show my superiors I had not been idle.
The camp lay right at the Jordan, which fed into the lake there and formed the frontier of Herod Philip’s territory. It looked large enough to house perhaps a hundred men, and stood watch over a sizeable customs house that controlled the border crossing. A sleepy-eyed guard, a young Cilician, told me the Romans had set the place up a number of years before to deal with the brigands in the hills—freedom fighters, I took him to mean, though it was true that many of them were no better than thieves—after Antipas and Philip had shown themselves unable to. The so-called brigands had been more or less eradicated, but the camp had remained; no doubt the Romans were happy to use it to keep an eye on their client kings, and on the revenues coming in from the customs house. At the moment only a meagre twenty-five men were stationed there, commanded by a captain who was apparently quite well liked by the local population and who in fact had recently married a girl from Kefar Nahum.
I made my way back to Kephas’s house. It was still not an hour past daybreak and so I was surprised to find a small crowd had already gathered in the narrow street outside his gate, imagining them to be supplicants for Yeshua’s attentions. But there were no ill with them, nor indeed did they seem there for instruction, for there was a tension among them and an angry murmuring that died down only when I came near and they saw I was a stranger.
I asked one of them what had brought them there and he said bluntly, “They’ve killed the prophet Yohanan.”
I was shocked. As we’d heard, even in Tyre, Yohanan had lately been taken down to the fortress at Macherus, to rot there, we assumed, until he was forgotten; but this was unexpected. There had been no trial, not even a charge—the Romans would at least have taken the trouble of that, though perhaps that was why they had left the job to Antipas. No doubt Antipas had assumed he might simply append Yohanan’s execution to the recent spate of political ones, not reckoning how much greater was the affection Jews felt for their prophets than their insurrectionists.
The crowd continued to grow. I could see how he’d been loved even this far along the lake, many of those who came looking stricken as if one of their own family had died. At one point a wail of mourning started up, and slowly filled the street; but still Yeshua did not come out. I could not tell what the crowd wanted of him, simple condolence or something more—there was that peasant anger to them that I’d seen elsewhere, born of helplessness but more dangerous for that, if it found an object.
When Yeshua finally did emerge, however, he looked so naked in his own mourning, his robe torn and his forehead blackened with ash, that the crowd seemed instantly quelled. For a few minutes he talked, though without great conviction, I thought, of how Yohanan’s death merely confirmed his greatness, invoking the usual scripture and the familiar stories of the rejected prophets. The speech appeared to have less the effect of reassuring the crowd than of bringing home to them their loss. Yet in this way the threat of violence that had been palpable moments before seemed to dissipate.
As he finished, there was a commotion at the far end of the street: a contingent of soldiers had arrived from the military camp. They’d clearly been roused in a hurry, given that there hadn’t been any sign of activity when I’d been out there not a half-hour before. The captain—Ventidius, I’d learned his name was, after the famous general—left his men at the back of the crowd and made his way through it to Kephas’s door. He was a man of forty perhaps, not young at any rate, and too old surely to be commanding such a forgotten outpost. But he had a natural dignity to him and carried authority, to judge by the ungrudging way the crowd let him through. He addressed himself at once to Yeshua, with an intensity and familiarity that surprised me.
“I assure you Rome had no hand in this,” he said.
He seemed almost to believe this, though it couldn’t have been true. Yohanan’s only crime against Antipas had been to denounce his lusts, which in any event were well known.
To his credit now, Yeshua said only, “The Romans have many hands besides their own.”
Whatever the case, it was obvious that Ventidius had been caught off guard, and also that he was angry not merely at having been left in the dark but at the actual outrage of Yohanan’s death. Later I learned he was a God-fearer, as they called them, one of those sympathetic to the Jews.
He stood there awkwardly an instant, not able to look Yeshua in the eye, then faced the crowd and asked it to disperse. Everything had gone strangely quiet, and it seemed for a moment that things might turn again. At the foot of the street the soldiers stood by uneasily, seeming to hem the crowd in because of the narrowness of the space. But Yeshua, for his part, did nothing to relieve the tension, turning and retreating without another word back through Kephas’s gate. A kind of panic seemed to go through the crowd then at being left suddenly leaderless. But finally this too passed and people began to drift away, until Ventidius gathered up his men and led them off without further ceremony.
In the end only a small group remained there in the street, huddled outside Kephas’s gate. Seeing that the brothers Yaqob and Yohanan were part of it, I went over and Yohanan, the younger of the two and the more friendly, introduced me around to the rest of the group. The men were mainly fishermen and labourers, from the look of them; there were a few women as well, to whom I was introduced, however, with the same blunt lack of formality as to the men. I was amazed when Yohanan said that all these, too, were among those whom Yeshua had called to be his intimates, for it was clear at once that there was not a person of education or of standing among them. The whole group of them looked chastened and subdued with the news of Yohanan’s death, and I sensed as well a measure of fear in them.
Soon Kephas came out. We followed him around the corner to the harbour and from there out through one of the town gates and onto the lakeshore. Yeshua was already there by the water, still in his torn robe; he had apparently slipped out of the house by a back way. The barest of greetings were exchanged, and then a couple of the women set about preparing a cooking fire, into which some fish were heaped with some onions and leeks. One of the women had brought bread; for water, Kephas filled a flask directly from the lake. When the meal was ready everyone sat in a circle right there on the stones and a little ritual of deferment was played out, the disciples first offering the food to Yeshua who in turn offered it back to them, so that in the end it was Kephas who broke the fast.
It was not until we had eaten that anyone broached the subject of Yohanan’s death. Yaqob—I took it that he and his brother were thought the hotheads of the group, by the group’s measure—was of the opinion that a protest should be lodged directly with the governor in Damascus, or with Caesar himself. But a few of the others felt rather that they should remain quiet for the time and perhaps even disband.
“Fools!” Yeshua said. “Haven’t you learned anything from Yohanan’s death? Don’t you understand it’s the same road we’re on?”
Everyone was taken aback at this. There was an awkward silence and then someone timidly asked if he thought then that they should follow Yaqob’s advice and protest to the governor.
“What’s the governor to us, who wouldn’t have been fit to touch Yohanan’s sleeve? Try to think what I’ve taught you when you say things.”
He was out of patience. It was clear Yohanan’s death had unsettled him.
There was another long silence.
“Teacher,” one of the men said, and you could see it was what they were all thinking, “will Herod come to arrest us now?”
Yeshua relented.
“No,” he said, “no. We have no fight with Herod.”
Not long afterwards the group broke up. Kephas and I were left alone with Yeshua on the beach.
“Are you so sure of Herod?” I said to him.
“We’re nothing to him. You can see for yourself.”
And it seemed true enough, seeing him there with his little band of peasants. Yet he talked like someone who would bow to no one.
Kephas was busy clearing away the remnants of our meal.
“You think I’ve surrounded myself with simpletons and cowards,” Yeshua said to me, though it wasn’t clear if Kephas had heard.
“It’s not for me to judge.”
“When you look at us, you probably imagine only how we would seem to your friends in Jerusalem. But in the end the people you’re trying to save are these same ones you might look down on. And without them, who is left? Without them, what is the point?”
He said this although I hadn’t spoken to him in anything but the most guarded terms of my work. Yet he appeared truly to believe what he was saying, though in my experience it had always seemed that the vast mass of men were expendable, and had little to redeem them.
Yaqob and Yohanan had brought a boat out from the harbour up near the shore where we were sitting, apparently setting out for a day’s fishing despite their mourning. They called out for Kephas to join them.
“You’re welcome to stay with us for a time if you wish,” Yeshua said to me. But I couldn’t tell if he meant this merely as an offer of refuge.
Kephas was still lingering nearby.
“I have affairs—” I started.
“Of course.”
And yet I knew in that moment that I would stay. The truth was I had no other plan, nor could I bear the thought then of returning to Jerusalem to the fear and distrust I was certain to find there.
Only now did Kephas finally take his leave, giving his respects to Yeshua and me and then hiking up his tunic and wading out to the awaiting boat. In a matter of minutes the boat was already far out onto the lake and I could make out merely the dark speck of its hull amidst a dozen others. So I had thrown my lot in with fishermen, it seemed. But it appeared honest enough work, something to put against all the empty gestures and talk I had left behind in Jerusalem.
Apart from Andreas, then, whose artless attachment to me even the women had been unable to undermine, only Yohanan showed me anything like friendliness. He had apparently taken to me on our trip in from Tyre, and his natural liveliness and curiosity made him see in me a window onto the world. He often asked me about my travels and about life outside the Galilee, the wonders I had seen and the different customs and beliefs; he was a bright young man, and the only handsome one of the lot, and I suspected that if Yeshua hadn’t taken him in, he would have found a way to make a name for himself in Tiberias or Jerusalem. His father was a successful fisherman in the town, with one of the larger residences; and eventually, unable to bear any more the congestion at Kephas’s house and the tension that my presence there seemed to arouse, I took up Yohanan’s offer to repair to his, where I had a little canopy of my own off the courtyard and was left more or less to myself.
There was something else that set me apart from the rest of the group: I was one of the few who carried a purse. I was never certain how the original injunction against money had come to assert itself among them—with some of the group I was sure it was mere superstition, and predated Yeshua, since I’d heard there were still many in those parts who believed that demons lived in coins. But Yeshua, it appeared, had some program in mind. It was nothing so plain, say, as the simple eschewing of greed; it seemed rather a kind of surrender, a means of stripping away the usual barriers between people. Often enough we would arrive in a town with not a scrap of food with us and not a penny in our purse, and then somehow it would seem that exactly because we had nothing, what we needed would come to us, and a meal would be offered and a roof put over our heads.
As time went on it happened more and more, however, that we could not exist entirely outside the usual systems of exchange. For one thing, as Yeshua’s popularity grew, a few of his wealthier patrons were forever urging donations on him, to help with the purchase of medicines or to distribute to the poor; and even before I came to them they had appointed one of their number, Matthaios, who worked at the customs house, to carry the common purse. Gradually, however, that role came somehow to devolve upon me, partly, it seemed, as Yeshua’s way of showing the others that I could be trusted. The others appeared happy enough to let me have the thing—I was their scapegoat, bearing the taint of lucre so they needn’t. In fact, not a little of the money that we took in came from the most dubious of sources, publicans and collaborationists and the like, people shunned by the local populace but openly welcomed by Yeshua, who neither refused their money nor asked them where it came from. If it had been taken from the poor, he said, then all the better that we should have the chance to return it to them; and if from the rich, then we would surely put it to better use than they would have themselves.
It seemed to me that Yeshua was often in danger of contradicting himself in this way, championing the poor in the morning, then sitting down to supper with the local tax collector at night. Coming from Judea, where we were in the habit of seeing every act as a political one, I was shocked at first by such vacillations. But many of Yeshua’s notions, I came to learn, were not the sort that could be reduced to simple principles; rather they had to be felt, as it were, and lived out, so that it was only the experience of them that could bring you to understanding. In the beginning I often lacked the patience to follow him in this logic, particularly as regarded his talk of God’s kingdom, a notion he had borrowed from Yohanan but had adapted to his own ends. He had developed many analogies and stories to explain the nature of this kingdom; yet each seemed as obscure as the next, nor was it clear if the place was in heaven or on earth, or if it had a governor or was ruled solely by God, the way the Zealots preached. The first time I heard him speak of the thing to his followers I imagined he might be a secret ally, and taught revolt, and only cloaked his message to escape arrest. But then in private it grew clear I’d been mistaken. As far as I could gather, his kingdom was of an entirely unpolitical nature, a philosophical rather than physical state, requiring no revolution. I complained to him that it seemed then a mere salve to make more bearable the yoke of an oppressor.
“You want to change things yet you’re incapable of changing such a simple thing as your own mind,” he said to me then.
And indeed there was that part of me that felt he was right in his assessment of me, and that it was the rigidity of my own notions that made it hard for me to follow his. For if the kingdom, in my way of reckoning things, was merely a sort of dream he had invented, yet he seemed to live in it; and I often had the sense with him that where I saw the world in shadow and grey, he saw it rich in colour.
Though not overly given to ritual like many of the cults, Yeshua had nonetheless established a routine with his followers that he stuck to fairly closely, perhaps because it provided a level of stability and order for what was otherwise a somewhat amorphous movement. Generally he met with his inner circle every morning at Kefar Nahum, except when his travels had taken him too far afield; and there we would take our meal together, either on the beach or in Kephas’s house. Afterwards, if he did not go out on the lake with his men, he would take a small group of us and make his visits to his disciples in the surrounding towns, usually following the schedule of the rotating market days of the region. Given the terrain of the Galilee with its deep valleys and precipitous hills, so that sometimes a dozen ridges separated towns only a stone’s throw from one another, it often amazed me the ground he covered and how far afield his followers were spread. Nonetheless, the Sea of Kinneret remained the heart of his ministry, and it was rare for him to travel further than Sennabris to the south or Cana to the west. I noticed that he avoided Tiberias and Sepphoris, the only cities of note in the region, though perhaps this was because of the cool reception he had had in Tyre. At any rate, Antipas had so Hellenized these cities and so packed them with foreigners that for the mass of Galileans they might as well have been in different countries; and indeed they were generally regarded as cursed, Tiberias because it had been built on the site of a burial ground and Sepphoris because for many years Jews had been all but banned from it, on account of the revolt there at the time that Antipas came to power.
Yeshua’s usual practice when he arrived in a town was to go to the house of one of his disciples and share a bit of food or wine there while word of his presence was sent around to any other followers he might have in the place. When people began to gather he would tend first to any sick who had come, then settle in his host’s courtyard to do his teaching or perhaps repair to some field outside of town. His methods were very informal—usually he simply sat in amongst his disciples and answered the queries they put to him, often turning the question back onto the questioner in the manner of the ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what he conveyed in this way was no more than what one heard in the assembly houses: follow the commandments; give alms to the poor; believe in the one true God. But he had a way of making these notions seem new again, and vital, while most teachers intoned them as if they were the remotest arcana of a forgotten era.
What truly struck me in these sessions, however, was how he did not condescend to his pupils, or consider anything above their understanding; and this amazed me, for when it came to the core of his teaching, and to those notions that were distinctive to him like that of the kingdom, it often seemed to me that not Hillel himself could have followed the nuance of his thought. Like the Pharisees he subscribed, or so it seemed, to the idea of resurrection, believing no god would have set us to suffer on this earth, where the wicked prospered and the just were punished, without the chance of a final reckoning. Yet he would not say it was the body that rose into the heavens at death, when clearly it went to the worms, nor would he say the soul, as the Greeks did, but rather that we must not think in such ways as life and death, or body and soul, as if one was distinct from the other; for in that way we would only come to value one at the other’s expense, and live as gluttons and libertines, not thinking of death, or live as ascetics, and so miss our lives. For my part, I thought it coyness at first that he did not put the thing more clearly, or a sign that he himself had not worked it through. But over time I came to see a wisdom in his approach, and the folly of putting into words notions that by their very nature, like God himself, must exceed our understanding.
It was not surprising, however, that such views, which were easily twisted, should lead him into conflict with some of his counterparts, and indeed I soon learned that he had already amassed an impressive group of enemies. At Kefar Nahum, for instance, I had wondered from the start why he did not avail himself of the assembly house to meet with his followers, avoiding it even on the sabbath, when instead we met for our prayers on the beach; and it came out he had actually been barred from the place by the town’s teacher, an old Sadducee named Gioras. No doubt Gioras had felt provoked by Yeshua’s preaching resurrection, which was anathema to the Sadducees. But it was a different question that had brought them to public confrontation—it seemed Yeshua had treated a sick child on sabbath day and Gioras had accused him of breaking the sabbath, since the illness had apparently not been life-threatening.
The matter might have ended there except that Yeshua had insisted on confronting his accuser in the assembly house the following week. Instead of broaching the matter directly, he told the story of two teachers who were each visited on the sabbath by a man in extreme hunger. The first, believing the man who’d come would survive until the following day, sent him off, saying he could not break the sabbath by preparing food for him. That night the man died, but the teacher was deemed by the scholars and priests to have acted correctly, since he could not have foreseen the death. The second teacher, however, finding at his door a man who was clearly suffering, invited him in and made him a meal. But this one was deemed to have sinned, since he could not have been certain the man’s hunger was life-threatening, and so was sentenced to death.
The story was such an obvious parody of Gioras’s charge that Gioras had been outraged, and had rallied the other leaders in the town to have Yeshua banned from the assembly house. By the time of my own arrival, the town was polarized between Gioras and his camp and Yeshua and his, with the mass of people, however, letting caution guide them and giving open allegiance to neither. The story was the same throughout the region: in any given town there seemed always a handful among the leadership who truly despised Yeshua and worked actively for his downfall. All manner of accusation was levelled against him—that he encouraged the young to turn against their parents, that he was possessed of demons, even that he was not a Jew at all but a pagan trying to trick the people into following a foreign god. Because he had lived in Egypt, he was everywhere dogged by the charge of magic, on account of his cures; and because he would not hold his tongue but always spoke his mind, it seemed he had more than once come close to stirring violence. At Tsef, for instance, he had apparently intervened in a land dispute on the side of those whom the Galileans mistakenly called the Syrians, the descendants of the line that dated back to the Assyrian conquest and that had been forcibly converted under the Maccabees. A good deal of enmity still existed between this group and the Jews whose ancestors had come to the Galilee as colonists, as well as many disputes over property; that Yeshua had taken the Syrians’ side had nearly got him stoned. Some said he had done this merely to increase his following among the group, which indeed had been the result, for there were many Syrians now who were among his fiercest supporters.
So Yeshua had gained a reputation as a rabble-rouser, though in his teachings he counselled disarming one’s enemies with kindness and forgiving even those who flogged you, the way the Cynic philosophers did. I had at first discounted this type of statement as mere rhetoric or even a calculated sort of insolence, just as some of the Zealots, when they were arrested, would at once confess their crimes as a way of showing their contempt for their captors. Yet I had heard that early in his ministry there was a faction, led by one Aram of Kinneret, that had split with him precisely over the issue of force. For my part, I had never quite been able to bring myself to broach this particular subject with him. I told myself it was simply that I did not wish to start down a road that must inevitably lead to a break between us should we disagree. But that was not quite the whole of the matter—there was also that part of me that did not wish to expose to his scrutiny views that defined me so deeply.
Once it happened that we argued over his friendliness towards the tallyman at the docks in Kefar Nahum, a stunted half-pagan they called Rakiil, the Babbler, who worked tabulating the catches the fishermen brought in so they could be assessed for tax. In Galilee, it seemed the tax collectors were not nearly so hated as in Judea, where they worked directly for the Romans; yet neither were they embraced, nor free from corruption. Rakiil was a figure of ridicule at the docks, because of his deformities and his work—the local boys tormented him, intoning his name in a mocking cry like a gull’s that would send him chasing after them red-faced with anger. But he had a streak of petty baseness in him that made it hard to feel any sympathy for him, seldom missing a chance to inflate a tally or to set a fine, if he could find the excuse for one.
Yeshua, however, had somehow got it into his head to make Rakiil his friend, and never neglected to greet him and exchange a word with him when he passed through the docks. Now, if Rakiil had responded to his overtures by becoming suddenly merciful and fair, I might have been the first to see the wisdom in his actions. But in fact he continued as mean-spirited as before, regarding Yeshua’s friendliness with suspicion and going out of his way to impose the stiffest possible tallies on Yeshua’s men, to show he had not been duped. I could not fathom, therefore, why Yeshua continued in his kindnesses and did not simply condemn him as an ingrate and a churl, who took pleasure in extorting from the poor rather than simply doing his job, as even Yeshua’s master Yohanan had taught.
When I made this argument with Yeshua, however, he said, “How honest would my kindness to him be if it were only a means of seeking more favourable treatment from him?”
This sort of logic infuriated me.
“By that reckoning we might just as well embrace even the Romans, and make an end of it.”
“You hate him because he’s a tax collector,” Yeshua said.
He was trying to bring the thing around to my politics, so that he might say, Did not even Solomon collect taxes, so why take it out on miserable Rakiil, and what did it matter what yoke you were under since there was always a yoke. But this was not an argument I cared to engage.
“I hate him because he’s vile.”
“Will your hatred make him any less so?”
“No more than your love will.”
I knew that to follow him to the logical end of his reasoning must lead where I could not go, for if I must love even my oppressor, then how could I ever muster my forces against him. Yet the fact was that there was something in Yeshua’s stance in this matter that I admired, perhaps because it reminded me of my own youthful contrariness, that he seemed always to embrace exactly those who were universally despised, as if to show how little he cared for the opinions of the world. Indeed, it was almost axiomatic with him that he reverse the usual order of things, giving the smallest heed to those of highest standing while always finding the way to raise up those whom no one else took into account. In this he showed himself exactly the opposite of a collaborationist, since he did not profit in any way from his behaviour, but rather often opened himself up to censure.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the matter of the lepers. The Galilee was even more hopelessly backward than Judea in its treatment of lepers, subscribing to the usual Levitical proscriptions and refusing to acknowledge any medical basis to the condition; and since none of the towns had any adequate authority for sorting the more serious cases from common boils or sores, they turned people out at the first hint of an eruption, with the result that the leper colonies were filled to overflowing and that many who entered them with some minor ailment ended up condemned along with the rest. Yeshua had apparently understood this situation and addressed himself to it, going out to the colonies to sort out the curable from the truly diseased and treating the former so that they might be allowed to return home.
All this might have been seen as a great public good if not for the outcry of his detractors, who claimed that it was nothing more than devilry to attempt to cure an affliction that the Lord had ordained and that Yeshua’s true intention was rather to render unclean the whole of the population. The situation was compounded by the lepers themselves, who began to hear rumours of miraculous cures and so stole out from their colonies, which were poorly guarded, to mass outside the towns that Yeshua was known to frequent. For the local townspeople, the sight of dozens of lepers huddled outside their gates, people who heretofore had taken all necessary care to hide their uncleanness from the world, provoked great concern, and indeed made them fear that perhaps Yeshua had come to visit a pestilence on them.
It was at Korazin that we were first turned away on this account: we arrived there one morning from Kefar Nahum, half a dozen of us, to find several armed men already warned of our approach, standing at the gate to bar our entry. What surprised us was that they were not the henchmen of the local leader, a landowner named Matthias who held most of the townspeople in thrall in one way or another and whose avarice Yeshua had often publicly ridiculed, but rather common peasants, men who a week or a month before had no doubt been among those who had come for Yeshua’s sermons or cures. They looked awkward barring our way, refusing to meet Yeshua’s eye.
“Why are you coming with weapons against me?” Yeshua said, though the truth was they had only a few sticks among them and maybe a dagger or two, still in their sheaths.
“We have to think of our families,” one of the men said. “We don’t say you mean us any harm. But you’re always with the lepers. The law tells us that makes you polluted like them.”
“It’s what’s inside you that pollutes you, not what’s outside,” Yeshua said.
But the men held their ground.
Kephas was with us and seemed ready to come to blows with them.
“Has our master ever lied to you?” he said to them. “Has Matthias ever told you the truth?”
But Yeshua merely bid the men good morning and motioned us on our way.
Clearly Matthias had found the way to turn the townspeople against us. But from the sullen stubbornness of the men at the gate it seemed he had done so more by persuasion than coercion. When the word spread that even the common people of Korazin had gone against Yeshua, his reception in other towns grew cooler, and it began to happen from time to time, coming to a new town, that the authorities had heard of his reputation and did not permit us to enter. Some of his followers began to beg him then to cease visiting the lepers, lest he end up barred from every town in the region. But their arguments only hardened him.
“What kind of a doctor ignores the sick?” he said. As for being barred from the towns, he said if it came to that, then he would preach in the wilderness the way Yohanan had done.
I was inclined to agree at first that he abandon his missions to the lepers, since for the handful he saved among them, he risked losing his entire following. But when I put this to him, he said that if I could make such an argument then I’d understood nothing of his work. The following day, to make his point, he took me with him to visit the colony at Arbela. Normally he made these visits alone, or took along a group of us but left us outside the walls while he went in to do his rounds. But on this day he passed me off as a fellow doctor to the guards and brought me in with him, assuring me that there would be no risk to me. Such was the faith I had begun to put in him by then that I believed him.
The camp was not nearly as ramshackle a place as I’d expected, having been built not by Antipas but by the Romans, with their typical efficiency and precision. They had been motivated in this less by philanthropy than by strategy: the colony was set on the promontory that stood over the Arbela caves, and was a way of keeping the caves, which were accessible only from above, out of the hands of the rebels and bandits who normally inhabited them. Several barracks-style dormitories ran along the length of the promontory, with a courtyard and common kitchen at the centre of them. Apparently before the Romans had turned the place over to Antipas, as they eventually had, they actually supplied food for the residents and encouraged large communal meals and a sharing of tasks as a way of maintaining some sort of discipline and order. Now, however, the residents were dependent on the generosity of their relatives in bringing food and on the honesty of the guards in delivering it.
What was surprising in the camp was its air of normalcy: people went about their business, cooking and cleaning, carrying water, even farming a bit of field there, with only the slightest sense of hush and shame at their afflictions. Clearly Yeshua had brought an air of hope to the place. He encouraged cleanliness and had set up special areas of segregation to monitor various ailments and work towards a cure; and he treated people from an entirely medical point of view, with none of the condescension that the priests in Jerusalem showed in sending the afflicted off to their quarantine, nor indeed with the least concern for their uncleanness. When I asked him how he reconciled his approach with the proscriptions of the scriptures, he said merely that our forefathers had found their own way of expressing things that could not otherwise have been understood then.
When he had finished his rounds in the camp proper, he led me down to the caves. This was where the worst cases took refuge, those without hope. The whole mountain face at Arbela was riddled with these caves, which were accessible only by a steep footpath, one that here and there required you to scrabble against the rock face; already as we neared the end of it there was an overwhelming stench of putrid flesh, people moving like wraiths against the caves’ darkness. It was from here that Antigonus, the last of the Maccabees, had fought Herod the Great, Herod finally resorting to swinging grappling hooks down into the mouths of the caves from above in order to drag his enemy out from them. But for the lepers who had now retreated to them, the caves had become their permanent homes, not because they had been forced into them but because shame had driven them there. So it was that once their disfigurements had rendered them hideous they repaired from the barracks above to this forsaken place, where they lived out their final agonizing years wondering what sin of their fathers or themselves had brought this horror on them.
Yeshua was surely the first visitor from outside the camp whom many of these people had seen in months or years. He told me they had shunned him when he’d first come, out of shame and their concern for his own purity. But now at his approach they came together quite openly, gathering on a little rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff face. It was an astounding sight, these dozens of lepers congregating there, men, women, and even some children, many of them so gnarled-limbed and deformed they were hardly recognizable as human. But what was surprising in lepers was that as putrid and corrupt as their outward form might be, their mental faculties were not affected in the least, so that you were suddenly astounded to hear from out of their mass of rotting flesh a perfect human voice. Thus it was that Yeshua did a most simple and amazing thing: he sat himself down amongst these lepers and conversed with them as if their affliction counted for nothing in his eyes.
This was no doubt what Yeshua had wished me to wit-ness—the utter contrast in these people between the outer person and the inner one, a theme he returned to again and again in his teaching. He liked in particular to tell the story of the pious man and the sinner who went to the temple to pray: the former used the occasion as an opportunity to list all his virtues, while the latter, not even daring to look up to heaven, merely begged the Lord’s mercy. The sinner, of course, was the hero of the tale, for his inner humility made him more worthy of God’s love than the other’s outer piety; and the story always went over well with people, who saw in it, I imagined, a sanction for their own laxity. I, however, always felt sorry for the poor pious man, who was stuck with the rigour of his discipline and self-denial while the sinner was left free to sin again.
But sitting among the lepers I did not feel quite so cynical. For the longest time, not even aware I was doing it, I stood well back from the circle they had formed around Yeshua, so repulsed was I by their smell and their hideousness and so accustomed to keeping lepers at a distance. But perhaps it was their own unthinking acceptance of my aversion, even as they sat conversing in the most normal fashion with Yeshua, that shamed me, that brought home to me not only how quick we all were to judge by appearances but also how deeply ingrained were the prejudices that got passed on to us. It was second nature in a Jew to see in a leper’s affliction a sign of hopeless corruption. But it took only a few minutes among them to see they were merely average sorts of beings like the rest of us, made perhaps more humble and timid by their isolation but still recognizable as people you might have passed in the streets of any village. Afterwards I could hardly remember what was talked about—the most mundane of things, what had been done in the towns for the feasts, how the harvests had been, what marriages had taken place, petty matters I would not have imagined that Yeshua would have paid the least attention to. But within a matter of minutes I was sitting there amidst the others and had almost forgotten their deformities, so much had the smallest acquaintance with their inner selves transformed my vision of their outer ones.
At one point water was passed around, and a bit of oil and bread. To save me embarrassment, one of the women brought me a separate portion that had apparently been specifically sent for from above, the bread wrapped in leaves so that no hands should have touched it and the water and oil set in pots of stone to keep them pure. But for Yeshua, I saw, no special arrangement was made, nor did he so much as flinch at taking the ladle from which the others had drunk. It seemed so repellent a thing and yet so intimate, to share with them in this way—the sight of it left a strange agitation in me that afterwards I could not shake for many days, as if I witnessed some horror. Yet it was clear that, for the lepers, it was as though he had thus taken their affliction upon himself, to share the burden of it. I thought I understood something in him then, though I could not quite have expressed it, that indeed he was like the lepers in some way, or even Rakiil, all those who were marked, though he had a prince’s bearing and the looks of one. If I saw the lepers differently afterwards, it was perhaps exactly in this, in understanding in them a dislocation that was still in some sense spiritual yet not moral, which was a manner of thinking that as a Jew I was not accustomed to.
Whatever Yeshua’s intentions with the lepers, however, it remained true that his treatment of them continued to polarize feeling about him, so much so that for a time it grew difficult for us to travel freely and people were forced to come looking for him at Kefar Nahum, where he would speak to them either on a hill above the town or on the beach, sometimes standing in a boat a little ways off from the shore then so that they could see him. For the core of his following, of course, the matter was merely further evidence of his greatness, and for all I could say, that was indeed the case. But as tensions and emotions rose, there seemed a danger of descending into fanaticism, with the attendant risk of calling onto Yeshua the fate of Yohanan before him.
For my part, I could no longer pretend that I might somehow be able to turn an association with Yeshua to the good of my own cause. The animosities he had aroused in the region made it difficult for me to establish relations with anyone outside his following; while within it I had found no one who seemed sufficiently like-minded to be a good prospect for recruitment. Even the faction that had split from him under Aram of Kinneret, when I tried to approach it, would have nothing to do with me: they apparently assumed at once I was a spy, either for Yeshua or for Herod, so that even when I finally managed to arrange to meet directly with Aram himself, I was left standing half the night in the woods outside Kinneret without seeing any sign of him.
It so happened that it was just around this time that Pontius Pilate arrived in Caesarea Maritima to take up his post as Judean procurator. News of his arrival would likely not have drawn much attention among the Galileans, who seemed to make their indifference to Judean politics a point of pride, were it not that as his first act, Pilate had the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem regarrisoned and had the new squadron erect around the place, secretly and by night, standards that bore the images of Caesar. When the populace awoke to find Caesar’s image flying well-nigh over the temple, there was a great outcry. Almost at once a mob formed to travel to Caesarea, where Pilate had apparently remained the whole time without so much as having stepped foot outside the palace.
When word of the protest reached us in Kefar Nahum, it was my immediate instinct that I must join it, as much from shame over my long idleness as from eagerness for the cause. In any event it seemed certain that some from our own movement would be among the protesters there, and so I might learn from them how matters went in Jerusalem and if it was safe to return. At the back of my mind I knew that if I left Yeshua now, I might not find the circumstance that would let me rejoin him, and no doubt it was for that reason that I chose to leave in haste, and without explanation—not, as I deluded myself, because I feared I should be forced to lie to him, since he surely would not have required any excuse from me for my departure, but rather because I was afraid of that part of me that simply wished to remain with him. Later I had cause to regret this hasty exodus not only on my account but on Yohanan’s, from whom I had been unable to hide my departure and who begged to accompany me. In the end he got only as far as Sepphoris before turning back, confessing that he feared his father’s anger, since he had not sought his permission. But I later discovered that despite his early return he was severely chastised, as if he had gone off on some debauchery, though he was hardly a child to be so much under his father’s yoke.
By the time I reached Caesarea on my own, the protest had already been going on for several days. I was amazed by the numbers I found gathered there, in the thousands and still growing, not only from Jerusalem but apparently from all the countryside in between. The entire square in front of the palace was filled with protesters, all the usual traffic there come to a halt; and though apparently soldiers had initially been posted at all the entrances into the square as if to hem people in, the crowd had grown so sprawling and large by now that it could no longer be comfortably contained and the soldiers had retreated to form a line in front of the palace instead.
The crowd looked made up of the simplest sort of folk, men, women, and children all mixed together as if whole families had simply stood up from their dinners and set off en masse for the capital the instant word had reached them of Pilate’s sacrilege. As far as I could tell, the only leadership to speak of consisted of a few of the more radical members of the Council (certainly none of the priests were there; nor, at first, did I see any of our own people); and then, from the villages, a number of teachers and elders, each to his group. Under normal circumstances, with such a crowd and no one dominant voice, there would have been the danger of the entire affair deteriorating into factionalism. But since people had come so single-mindedly, with no motive except their outrage and no objective except the removal of Caesar’s standards, there was an atmosphere in the crowd of tremendous solidarity.
It seemed Pilate had not yet made an appearance, but had sent word that even if all of Palestine gathered at his door, he would not have the icons removed. As the crowd continued to grow it appeared that indeed would be the case, that soon the whole of the country would have joined us there at Pilate’s gate. But rather than being encouraged by this show of force, I felt a familiar despair. In the first place, it frustrated me how quick we were to take affront at this type of incorporeal challenge when our people were daily murdered and enslaved without our raising a whisper of complaint. In the second, what I was most struck by at seeing us gathered in such numbers was less our strength than our weakness. Not a man of us was armed; and even had we been, we would never have been so well-armed as Pilate’s soldiers, who, apart from the weapons they carried with them, had engines in their garrison capable of killing whole swaths of us with a single stroke. Beyond that, even if by sheer force of numbers we were to overwhelm them, the empire would yield up an almost infinite number of replacements for them, so that in the end the sum of every last Jew scattered throughout the civilized world from beyond the Euphrates to beyond the Nile would not total a fraction of the forces that Rome could muster against us.
These were truths, of course, that our movement had always kept before it—so we had laid down our foundations, and eschewed populism, and sent our missions abroad in search of allies, all so that we might avoid the senseless massacre in which most of our uprisings had ended. But perhaps it was exactly being there in that crowd, feeling the energy of it, that I saw clearly how doomed our own enterprise was as well, just endless scheming and planning and waiting that bore no relation to the mass of people, our tiny gains promptly erased at every smallest setback. There seemed only these two extremes, either to recklessly seize the moment in the face of certain defeat, or to plan and plan so endlessly that all momentum was lost and the moment of action forever deferred.
In the square, however, the main concern by that point was with finding food. No one had been prepared for the thing to drag on like this, and what supplies people had brought with them had long been used up. There was little help to be expected on this front from the Caesareans, who were mainly pagans and regarded us as at best an annoyance and at worst a positive menace; and even the Jews who lived there seemed unwilling to show us open solidarity lest they be made to pay the price after our departure. But teams had apparently been organized to fetch food from the surrounding countryside, and these returned not long after sundown with vegetables and cheese and fruit, wine, fresh bread, all of it donated by the Jewish villages and farms around the city and parcelled out equally among us so that no one of the thousands gathered there in the square should go hungry. In addition, reeds and branches had been brought in to make booths against the cold as if it were the Feast of Tabernacles, and there was such a celebratory mood in the square that night, with fires and singing, that you would not have known if you had stumbled upon us that we had come there in anger and in protest.
It must have put a fright into Pilate, however, to look out from the palace windows the next morning and see the square taken over by our booths as though by a conquering army. Not long after sunrise he responded by calling out what seemed the whole of his legion, maybe some three thousand in all, who lined up practically a testudo in front of the palace ten rows deep, seeming fully prepared to march against us. Most of us were just coming to after the night’s festivities and we stared out bleary-eyed and hushed at this apparition. But when half an hour had passed and still the soldiers had not moved against us, the crowd began to taunt them. Many of the soldiers were Samaritans, and understood perfectly well the abuse that was being hurled at them; and we would surely have descended into violence had the soldiers not been recalled as suddenly as they had been deployed, the bulk of them filing away into the palace courtyard and seemingly back to the garrison to leave only the nominal handful guarding the gates.
None of us had any idea what to make of this apparent backing down. Pilate, having only just taken up his post, was an unknown quantity to us, and whether he was showing cowardice or benevolence in withdrawing his troops we couldn’t judge. But not long afterwards he sent his pages out among us to announce that he was prepared to come to terms, and that we should gather in the stadium so that he could comfortably address us. Such a feeling of elation went through the crowd then that no one thought to question the wisdom of letting ourselves be penned up like that, the whole crowd instead surging at once towards the stadium gates so that even those of us who might have resisted were swept along with the rest. Meanwhile the citizens of Caesarea, happy to have their square liberated, stood lined up in the streetside arcades to watch us pass as if we were prisoners being marched along in a triumph.
At the stadium there was a handful of troops who directed us to the arena, into which the several thousand of us were crammed like so many sheep. Pilate had already taken his seat on the tribunal—he was smaller than I’d expected, and had that bearing, at once arrogant and defensive, of someone perpetually conscious of being of second rank. It was always hard to tell with that sort what excesses they would be prone to when given power. In this case, it was also unclear whether Pilate had acted on his own in setting up the standards, or on the express orders of Tiberius. The rumour was that he so hated the Jews he had been determined to put them in their place at once by rescinding the special privileges they had always enjoyed. But if that was the case and he had acted without Caesar’s sanction, then he was foolish enough to be a real danger to us.
When we were all assembled, Pilate raised his hand and we fell silent. At that point there were only perhaps fifty soldiers visible in the stadium, most of them milling around the gates in what appeared to be a casual way and the rest stationed up near Pilate’s tribunal. But then on a nod from Pilate the gates were suddenly secured, leaving no exit, and an instant later there was a great rattle of armour while what seemed the entire contigent of troops that had beset us that morning suddenly poured out from the wings and into the stadium’s first rows to encircle us, the host of them planting themselves there with their hands on the hilts of their swords as if ready on the instant to leap over the barricade and massacre the lot of us. We all stood dumbfounded: even those of us who might have suspected Pilate’s intentions would never have believed he would consider resorting to such wholesale slaughter. Either he was bluffing or he was one of those madmen that the emperors sometimes sent out to the provinces simply to rid the capital of them.
“Cease your protest and go home,” Pilate said, “and I will spare your lives.”
And on that signal the soldiers to a man unsheathed their swords.
This was an act of such provocation that it seemed there would be nothing for it but for us to riot, weaponless though we were and composed as much of women and children as of able-bodied men. Perhaps that was exactly what Pilate had hoped for; he could then send word back to Caesar that the Jews had revolted, and he had been forced to put them down. For a long moment then the strangest sort of tension seemed to hover over us, of outrage mingled with fear and with the simple astonishment that we could suddenly be facing our deaths. I was surprised at how little zeal I felt at the thought of such a sacrifice—it was not the way I’d ever foreseen my contribution, as a simple number in some tally of our dead.
At that instant, however, it happened that one of the leaders from Jerusalem, a young teacher by the name of Eleazar, suddenly came forward out of the crowd and had himself heaved up onto the barricade beneath Pilate’s tribunal. Before the soldiers could remove him, he shouted out to Pilate that we were prepared to die rather than transgress our own law. Then, for all to see, he knelt down on the narrow shelf the barricade afforded and bared his neck to the soldiers, as if to invite their swords.
A hush fell over the stadium while we waited to see how the soldiers would respond. But since no signal was forthcoming from Pilate, they made no move. Someone else took up Eleazar’s cry then, and someone else again, so that it spread by degrees across the stadium, and then, one by one, people began to kneel down in the dirt with their necks offered up, until nearly every man, woman, and child in the place was readied for the sword.
My initial reaction at the sight of such submission was abhorrence, for while there had clearly been something calculated and cynical in Eleazar’s gesture—he was, in effect, simply calling Pilate’s bluff—the crowd seemed to be following his lead in utter seriousness, as if people were truly prepared to be slaughtered there where they knelt. But even as I struggled with my revulsion I found myself kneeling with the rest, perhaps merely because I feared being taken for a coward if I did not; and in kneeling I had a sort of revelation, for what I felt was not a sense of submission but of sudden power. The most an enemy could take from you was your life; offer that to him freely, and his hold over you was gone. So it was that the ten thousand of us kneeling there in the sand, our lives at stake, suddenly seemed to be the ones who instead were holding Pilate for ransom: he could only submit to us or have us killed, though in so doing only take that which we had willingly given over to him.
I could hardly have described the feeling that went through the stadium as we knelt there except to say that it was as if we had all of us for a moment been bound up in a single will. The fear that had been palpable when the soldiers had first appeared had completely vanished; and if it had happened at that moment that Pilate had given the signal and the soldiers had descended on us, I would have wagered that not one of us would have flinched before the knife. As it happened, however, the signal didn’t come: Pilate merely stood staring out at us as dumbfounded as we had first been at the sight of his soldiers. He had reckoned us the merest savages, to be frightened off our beliefs at the first hint of any threat; instead, he found us willing to die over a matter that must have seemed to him almost trivial.
After a few minutes, Pilate, pale with anger, got up from his seat and left the stadium, leaving us kneeling in the sun and the soldiers watching over us with their weapons still bared. For perhaps an hour we remained at that standoff; and then again, as suddenly as they had come, the soldiers withdrew and the message came through from the palace that we were free to go. This time, there was no rejoicing: under the leadership of Eleazar and a few others, we marched in almost total silence back to the palace square—where our booths, in the meantime, had been knocked down—and sat ourselves on the paving stones as if we were prepared to remain there until the end of days if we weren’t granted our original demand. We could see Pilate watching us from the palace windows; no doubt he had hoped that after he’d released us we would simply pick up and go, happy to escape with our lives, instead of stubbornly returning to torment him. When sunset came and we began to rebuild our booths and distribute what food we had remaining, he must have made a decision to cut his losses, for he sent his pages out again to announce to us that the standards would be removed.
It was doubtful whether any of us in the crowd had ever quite believed that the matter would end in this way, that without violence, and by sheer force of will, we would achieve our goal. The normal expectation in protests of this sort was that there would be skirmishes or at least arrests, that the matter would be appealed finally to the governor in Damascus or to Rome where it would fester for months or years before any decision was made—in short, that our people would still in the end be made to suffer every indignity while the administration, even if it had massacred scores of us, would at best be only mildly reprimanded. That we were walking away now with what seemed total victory left us a bit stunned at first—it was as if we hadn’t quite understood why in this case things had turned out differently. Somehow Eleazar, either by stroke of genius or of luck, had rescued us, had found the way to save at once both our honour and our lives. I remembered a story I’d heard as a young man of a similar protest in Alexandria, where the Jews, to save their quarter from attack by fellow citizens during some dispute, had simply lain down in the path of the approaching mob; faced with the prospect of having to trample a mile of them, the mob had eventually turned tail and headed home. At the time, the strategy had struck me as foolhardy and craven. But now I saw the matter differently; I saw the power there was in confronting the enemy with the spectre of his own barbarity.
Since it was dark by the time of Pilate’s announcement, most of us bedded down in the square for the night and only set out for home the following morning. We were a haggard lot by then, seeming more sombre and chastened in victory than we’d been in adversity. No one dared to rejoice until we’d seen with our own eyes that the standards had truly been removed. For my own part, I believed that Pilate would keep to his word—surely he wouldn’t risk another confrontation of the sort he’d just been through. Nonetheless, it was my plan to follow the crowd back into Jerusalem, as much, however, for the cover it provided for my return there as out of concern for the standards. I could not go any longer without some news of our group; it did not bode well, I thought, that I had recognized none of them amongst the protesters.
It was exactly then, however, on the road out of the city, that I finally met some who were familiar to me, two young men whom I knew by the names of Rohagah and Yekhubbah. They behaved strangely towards me, hardly meeting my eye, and it was only by pains that I was able to learn from them that I was under question because I had not yet returned to Jerusalem. I was outraged at this. I said to them that surely they’d had word of me from Tyre.
The elder one, Rohagah, though they were neither of them much more than boys, said, “From Tyre we heard only that you had left in the night, and given no message,” which was untrue.
The two of them were types of a new recruit that I did not get on with, and who hardly differed from Zealots in the narrowness of their thinking and the severity of their manner. Towards me, their sort were disdainful and thought me untrustworthy because they regarded me as a foreigner, and hence tainted by the ways of the world.
I said to them that in any event I was just then on my way to Jerusalem, and that surely I had been wise to await the proper moment for my return rather than risking bringing further suspicion on us in the midst of the reprisals.
“Then you should not come at all, if you’re under suspicion,” Rohagah said, stupidly, it seemed to me.
I might have thrashed him. We stood there in the middle of the road not speaking until Yekhubbah, seeing my anger, said awkwardly, “They’re planning an action for Jerusalem,” though it was clear from Rohagah’s look that he had overstepped his bounds. “They only want to take care.”
I was amazed at this. Surely it was foolishness to proceed with an action in Jerusalem when we could not be certain of any of the outposts; if Pilate did not crush us, the Syrian governor surely would.
I said, “I’d heard the reprisals had left us decimated.”
“Those who were lost have been replaced,” Rohagah said, which chilled me, for I understood him to mean that he and his lot had now got the upper hand.
He had been good enough to leave me a way out.
“Perhaps you’re right that I should wait,” I said. “You’ll tell the others that I’m looking to our work in Galilee.”
“Of course.”
And when they had gone I felt a tremendous relief to have escaped them.
I realized then how loath I had been to return to Jerusalem from the start; understanding the situation there made me infinitely more so. The truth was that once I had got caught up in the spirit of the protest, I had hardly given a thought to Jerusalem, or to our cause; rather it had always been to Yeshua that my mind had gone back, and to what he might make of the thing, and to what I would say to him if I returned to him. It seemed my experience in Caesarea had changed my view of things in some important way, like a shift of light that made you see some object differently, that made you reconsider what you thought its nature to be. The object, in this case, was our freedom, which I had always imagined was a thing that had to be wrested away from our enemies like a trophy or prize. But in the stadium, when we’d been kneeling there, it had seemed something more subtle than that, not to be captured or won but somehow called into being, conjured up like a spirit.
Thus it fell out that I did not go on to Jerusalem as I had planned but rather left the crowd where the road forked north to return to the Galilee. While I was stopped in Sepphoris the word came through that Pilate had in fact kept his pledge, though no one in that city, filled with Greeks as it was, showed much interest in the event. Later, of course, Pilate would make us pay dearly for this early leniency, never missing an opportunity to put us in our place. But at the time the victory seemed a significant one, not least for the method by which we had brought it about.
On my way out of Sepphoris I could not resist the urge to detour southward a few miles to Notzerah, the town of Yeshua’s family, though I did not know what I hoped to find there. Apparently the place had been just a hamlet until workers hired on for the rebuilding of Sepphoris following the rebellion had begun to take up residence there, forbidden as they were from living in Sepphoris proper. As a result, the present town was rather sprawling and unkempt, and stretched out pell-mell along a series of irregular slopes so that it made a disagreeable impression and so that defences of any kind were impossible. All the buildings showed signs of haste in their construction; several that I noticed had upper storeys that lay collapsed in ruins above the main one, so that it was easy to surmise they had been added on in the shoddiest possible manner as the town’s population burgeoned. Ironically these were the hovels that the craftsmen who built the splendours of Sepphoris had had to return to every evening. At the height of the construction the town must have been a bustling one; but now I found it half-deserted, many of the houses abandoned and an air of desuetude hanging over the place. In the surrounding region the town had a reputation for roguery and dishonesty, though also, apparently, for the beauty of its women, which, however, I saw scant evidence of during my own visit.
I asked about Yeshua. People knew at once who I meant, though at first I wasn’t certain we were referring to the same man, so different was the image people gave out of him from the one I had come to have. As it turned out, he had left the town long before, only a matter of years after his family had come there from Egypt; and from the sound of it, the townspeople had been glad to see the back of him. He’d had airs, people said, the town couldn’t abide him; or they said he’d gone mad and run off, and his family hadn’t been able to bring him back. Of his current ministry, which most of them had heard about, they were dismissive—what kind of a man, they said, and him the eldest son, left his widowed mother and siblings without a further thought to them.
About his family they were more generous: they were good people but kept to themselves. The father, who had died not long after coming to the town, had been a stonemason; but not much more seemed to be known about him. Since his death the family had been supported by Yeshua’s brothers, who worked at odd building jobs as well as farming a plot of land outside the town bought by the father just after his arrival.
This was not the background I would have guessed for Yeshua, whom I had imagined the son of a clerk, at least, or a merchant, to judge by his education. No doubt this explained the town’s dislike of him: he had acted above his station. I would have liked to have met some of his family, to get a clearer notion of him, but I did not know what I might say to them, or if they would welcome me. Instead I contented myself with a view of his home, which I was directed to, in the hope I might catch a glimpse of some brother of his in passing.
The place was built on a steep incline that led down to one of the little valleys the town was folded into, clinging there precariously, I thought, though it looked of slightly sturdier construction than many of the other houses in the town. It was double-storeyed, the bottom floor built directly into the hillside and seeming to function as a stable, with a little courtyard out front, and the second one reached by a narrow stone stairwell, though apparently opening out at ground level in back. There was nothing particularly distinctive about the place—it seemed the house of a family that had done neither excessively well nor excessively poorly, that was not remarkable in any way, except that it had produced this Yeshua who was either a madman, as the townspeople had it, or a saint, as his followers did.
While I stood staring at the place from across the street, a woman emerged from the stable into the front courtyard and looked out at me—his mother, I presumed, though she did not look nearly as old as I would have expected, her hair pitch-black and her eyes blacker still. She was the first woman I’d seen in the town in whom there was any sign of an intrinsic beauty, though it was clear from her look, which had something of the Arab to it, and from her bearing, which was that of a city woman, that she did not belong to the place, and that indeed she would gladly have kicked the dust of it from her heels. She held my gaze an instant, though distractedly, with a sort of hollowness that seemed to suggest her life had failed her in some way. I was almost tempted to go to her, to bring her some word of comfort: I come from your son, who sends his greetings. But as abruptly as she’d come she turned away and retreated into the shadows, and I saw no more of her.
I might have simply gone my own way then except that I lacked not only destination but means: at my departure, to repay any debt I owed, I’d left the bulk of my remaining funds to the common purse, which I’d left behind for Yohanan’s brother. The purse had now been given over to Matthaios again, with no suggestion it would be returned me; and so I was in some measure held hostage there, unless I chose to hire myself out in the streets for my living. It was as if while I’d been gone some enemy had worked every means to put me at a disadvantage should I return. Had I foreseen the reception that awaited me, I might just as soon have gone back to Jerusalem after all, where at least I was known and felt of some use, while here it seemed that for a few days’ absence I had become a stranger.
There had been some changes while I’d been away. Yeshua had added a new disciple to our inner group, a pagan they called Simon the Canaanite, the first heathen he’d included among us; and he made it clear to all of us that he was to be treated as an equal, even though in so doing he seemed merely to emphasize the man’s difference from the rest of us. In the end, of course, none of us could shake the tinge of condescension that marked all our exchanges with him, particularly as he himself had the cringing manner of someone used to abasing himself for the sake of fitting in. Apart from the fact that his addition to the group brought our number to a portentous twelve, as if we were the twelve tribes reborn, the sole reason for his presence seemed to be to further rile the powers already set against us.
It had never been any secret that Yeshua considered his mission to extend to the heathens. But until now his proselytizing had always been seen in the same light as that of the Pharisees, aimed simply at winning converts for the Jews. Simon, however, had remained uncircumcised, and though he would surely have submitted to the knife at once had Yeshua required it of him, Yeshua seemed to want to make an example of him. The thing was never spoken about openly, of course, but as the rumour of Simon’s condition spread, the matter threatened to be an even more explosive one than that of the lepers. At every gathering a question would come up about the covenant; and Yeshua would use his usual evasions and riddles to avoid confronting it directly. Then when someone asked him outright if some different sign would replace circumcision in his new kingdom, Yeshua said it was only the weak of faith who required a mark of their covenant. On that occasion there were some in the audience who were ready to stone him on the spot had they not been restrained by the people around them.
In the end, however, the matter resolved itself quietly: it seemed Kephas and some of the others went behind Yeshua’s back and convinced Simon to have the thing done. Yeshua was furious when he found out, railing at us that we were as simple-minded and faithless as the rest. Kephas took all the blame on himself, not daring to put up the least defence; but the truth was that he’d probably saved the lot of us, because once the word had got around that Simon had been circumcised, the tension at Yeshua’s gatherings dropped and the questions ceased. Even Yeshua, in the end, seemed content to let the matter rest—it wasn’t time, was his favourite refrain to us now, a sort of blanket forgiveness for our great ignorance.
There was something slightly disturbing in this refrain, and in the hints he had begun to drop that there was some moment we were moving towards when all the criticism and misunderstanding that now confronted us would fall away. It was as if he could no longer bear his own contradiction, that he so openly courted controversy and dissension in all he did, seemed in fact to thrive on it, then counselled love and forgiveness towards those who hated us as a result. So he had hatched this notion that even our enemies, in the end, would be won to us. As I discovered, he seemed willing to go to some lengths to prove his point on the matter—a few weeks after my return, for instance, I learned that in my absence he had somehow worked a reconciliation with that same Aram who had earlier split with him over the question of force. It was only by chance that I heard of the thing, from Yohanan, who had always been my faithful informant but had kept somewhat shy of me since my return, on account of the grief he had suffered; as I understood the matter, Yeshua had managed to win Aram back mainly because of Aram’s fear, however unjustified, that Yeshua would turn him in as a rebel. So Aram had renounced his views and come meekly back to the fold, and Yeshua had been able to show his great mercy in accepting him. But to me it seemed a manipulation—surely Yeshua had merely preyed on his insecurities, which I myself had seen ample evidence of in my own frustrated overtures to him. Indeed they continued to manifest themselves even now: still unconvinced of my own trustworthiness, Aram kept well wide of Yeshua after my return, so that in the end I never even so much as laid eyes on him.
I now understood, however, some of Yeshua’s coolness towards me, for Aram had surely told him of my attempts to contact him, which must have made it seem that I had been courting his enemies behind his back. If I had known of the thing at once, I might have found the way to smooth it over. Yet the truth was that I held the whole matter against him, and could not bring myself to go to him now as if in apology. At any rate, it was seldom that I found myself in private audience with him any more, on account of the women, who having rejoiced when I had gone, as they no doubt hoped for good, now found the way to keep him from me at every instant, and so to keep alive the disaffection between us.
It was perhaps inevitable that in the light of these tensions I should begin to see Yeshua differently, and I wondered now if I had not earlier been as besotted with him as the rest. The contradictions in him that before had made a sort of sense now seemed held together only by the strength of his character; and his contentiousness, at first engaging, suddenly appeared so much theatrics, directed as it always was at petty local despots and leaders rather than at our true enemies. It was this that most struck me, though I still had the cold in my bones of my meeting with Rohagah and Yekhubbah, that I had deluded myself into believing I might find with him some better way. Perhaps it was exactly that I expected more of him now when before he had been merely a diversion, and so I judged him more harshly. Yet it was a bitter disappointment to have returned, as I thought, to a sage, and to have found instead someone arrogant and petty and vain. All the exhilaration I had felt in Caesarea had drained away from me—now I had neither one thing nor the other, nothing to hold me here with Yeshua yet nothing to return to.
Yeshua’s growing popularity had made him increasingly bold. In the towns we went to there were a number of elders and teachers who had trained under Pharisees of the school of Shammai; and these Yeshua had begun to take a particular pleasure in baiting and goading. Yet while it was true that many of them, in those towns, took their superior learning as an occasion for condescension and sententiousness, others were among the most pious and respected members of their communities. Yeshua did not always take the trouble to separate the one from the other, nor was he without duplicity in decrying Shammai’s excessive legalism, which he seemed to use as an excuse for his own laxity towards the law. The attitude had begun to wear off on his inner circle as well, some of whom, for instance, openly flouted the sabbath now by travelling from their villages to join us for evening prayers in Kefar Nahum. When Yeshua was challenged over these matters, he shrugged them off.
“How can you fault them for coming to pray with their teacher?” he said.
“They have teachers in their towns.”
“And if the Messiah came,” Yeshua said, “would you tell them to keep to their towns rather than worship him?”
This kind of provocation struck me as foolhardy, particularly as there was no shortage of fanatics attached to him now who might be inclined to take such statements literally. But while logic suggested that his insolence would increasingly marginalize him, in fact the opposite seemed to be occurring—the more brazen he became, the more the crowds grew, even if half of them came merely for the spectacle and many of the rest out of superstition, hoping that some good fortune would descend on them by being near him or that some ailment they had would fall away. So his rise had begun to resemble that of the usual charlatans and false prophets, for whom it could truly be said that the more outrageous their promises and claims, the greater their sway over the people. Yet with Yeshua there remained this distinction: that for all his irreverence there was always a core of truth in whatever he said. Perhaps even now this was why I did not simply leave him—there was still that sense at the back of my mind of some answer he might hold to me, like some intractable nut he had cracked open.
Once, just among the group of us, Yaqob put a question to him about Simon’s circumcision, still troubled, as we all were, by how Yeshua had handled the matter. It was my suspicion that Yeshua’s views were even more radical than he had dared to say, or than any Jew could accept. But he answered Yaqob now by citing Hillel’s reply to the heathen who wished to learn all the law in an afternoon, that its sum was to do to others as you would have them do to you. It was one of the few times I heard Yeshua cite an authority, unlike those teachers who could not so much as put on their shirts without quoting the Torah; though it was typical that he should choose a teaching that even in its day had caused no small amount of bafflement, and that indeed had helped Shammai in gaining ascendancy over Hillel. Now, however, Hillel’s meaning seemed obvious enough—wasn’t there more virtue, in fact, in a single kind act than in the keeping of every covenant and code?
With regard to Simon, anyone could see that circumcision or no, it would have been hard to find a more faithful proselyte: it was not only that he hung on Yeshua’s every word but that he set all his teachings into almost immediate practice, with an earnestness that would have put even the most pious of Pharisees to the test. It happened, for instance, that not long after he’d joined us he heard Yeshua in one of his sermons chastising those hypocrites who made a great public show of their praying; and for some time thereafter we could not get him to join us in our prayers on the beach, so frightened was he of falling into the same hypocrisy. To ward off the least possibility of pridefulness he even went so far as to deny that he prayed at all, though we would see him stealing off to some closet every morning and hear his whispered offerings. So it seemed true that his circumcision had not the least bearing on his piety, though it was the work of a Samson for any Jew to separate the two in his own mind.
When Passover approached there was an assumption amongst Yeshua’s followers, many of whom had abandoned their teachers in the towns on his account, that he would lead their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was in my own mind, however, to advise him against any journey into the city, because I feared that the action Yekhubbah had hinted at was imminent, since it was always for the feasts that such things were planned, to take advantage of the crowds then. I travelled into Tiberias to see what news I might gather there and in fact was very troubled by what I heard. It seemed there had been a spate of assassinations in Jerusalem, though there was much confusion over these—some said it was the Romans who had hired assassins to root out any remaining rebels, others that the rebels themselves were purging their own ranks of those suspected of any betrayal during the reprisals. I did not know what to make of these rumours, what to discount in them and what to believe, or whether they showed us under siege or on the assault. On my own account, remembering my exchange with Rohagah, I had cause enough for concern—surely if they were attacking those under suspicion, I must number myself among the threatened.
Afterwards I was unsure how to proceed. While I wished to protect Yeshua from risk, I did not want to bring any more to myself or to break the oaths I had made to the movement by revealing what I knew. But in the end it was Yeshua who one night took me aside from the others—it was the first time since my return from Caesarea that he’d sought me out in this way—and led me out to the lakeshore to speak. It was a moonless night and pitch black, but he insisted on rowing out onto the lake in one of Kephas’s fishing boats, which struck me as peculiar and even frightened me a little. I had the instant’s foolish thought that he intended me harm in some way, as if I had misunderstood him until then; though the truth was that for all that he preached peace, there had always seemed this side to him that was volatile and unpredictable and slightly sinister.
He rowed us out in silence a little ways from the shore. In darkness that lake had something of the oppressive to it, since you were still somehow aware of the mountains pushing in on every side, with only the small light of lamps here and there from the shore.
He said to me, “We did not expect you back from Caesarea.”
I did not know how to respond.
“And yet I’m here,” I said.
It seemed some matter weighed on him but he wouldn’t broach it.
“You didn’t go down to Jerusalem.”
“No.”
“Is there a warrant for you there?”
I was surprised at this. So it seemed that was his concern, that I would compromise him should I travel with him to the city.
“Surely if there were a warrant,” I said, somewhat arrogantly, “they would have made the day’s journey to fetch me here.”
We were silent. I was angry now, and had lost the will to warn him of what I knew. There seemed something unreasonable in this and yet I thought surely he knew what I was when he asked me to join him.
Finally I said, “I hadn’t planned to accompany you on your pilgrimage,” which was the truth, given my situation then.
After this he tried to make light of the matter. He asked me about Jerusalem, but only to flatter me, I felt, broaching subjects that I thought were of no concern to him—who the power-brokers were in the council, what the mood of the people was. But then he asked about the troubles in the city, of which he’d heard, and I could not feign ignorance.
“They say the rebels are killing their own,” he said.
“Whatever the killing,” I said, “there’s sure to be more of it soon enough.”
But I didn’t go on, nor did he press me, rowing us back to shore in silence.
In the night I repented that I had not given him a clearer sign of the danger to him in Jerusalem, since whatever anger I bore him, I couldn’t wish on him the massacre that might result should there be an uprising. But the following morning he surprised us all with the announcement that he would not be going to the city for the feast after all but rather into retreat, giving as his excuse his wish to worship free from the crowds. He would be taking with him only his usual retinue, Yaqob, Yohanan, and Kephas; the rest of us should feel free to celebrate in our own homes, since, as he said, God didn’t live only in the temple that he could only be worshipped there.
His followers didn’t know what to make of this, and were greatly disappointed, while his detractors were quick to denounce him and to say he preached sacrilege against the temple. But I wondered if he hadn’t understood more than I had thought, and had taken my warning without however pressing me into betrayal. It occurred to me now that perhaps it had been concern for my own safety rather than his that had made him ask after the warrant against me. But still I couldn’t find the way to make amends to him before his departure, so that when he left there remained the same strain between us that there had been ever since my return from Caesarea.
As it happened, the feast passed with no report of insurrection. But when Yeshua and the others returned to Kefar Nahum I learned in secret from Yohanan that Yeshua had led them into Jerusalem after all. They had put up in Bet Aniah with one of Kephas’s cousins, and any time they had gone into the city Yeshua had made them cover themselves with their cloaks lest they be recognized by any of his followers. All this might have seemed sensible enough, and in line with whatever warning he’d understood from me, except for some peculiarities in his behaviour that Yohanan described to me. For instance, there were many parts of the city Yeshua avoided as if he had enemies there; and then at the temple he had refused to inscribe himself in the rolls for the temple tax, claiming exemption because he carried no coin. On that occasion he had argued so fiercely with one of the temple priests that they had nearly come to blows, and Yohanan and the others had had to spirit him away to save him a beating from the crowd. Afterwards he had not entered the temple grounds again, and it had been left to Yohanan and the rest to bring the lamb for its blessing.
I had no idea what to make of this behaviour and wondered why he had travelled to the city at all, or why, after the pains he had taken to conceal himself there, he should then have risked a public argument. As it was, a number of his followers who had gone to the city on their own had recognized him and could not understand why he had deceived them. But Yeshua held to the story of his retreat, saying he had been to Mount Tabor. As Yohanan told me, there was at least some truth in this—they had spent the night there, on their return.
All of this seemed the sign of a creeping strangeness in Yeshua, one that was all the more alarming because it appeared finally to have attracted the attention of the authorities to him. Until this point he had seemed protected by the relative insignificance of his following and the apparent respect in which the Roman captain Ventidius held him. But now it grew clear that someone had taken note of him, whether because of his altercation in Jerusalem or simply on account of his increasing brazenness, because it happened that certain narrow-eyed sorts who had obviously been sent out from Tiberias began making appearances in Kefar Nahum, asking questions here and there or lingering at the edges of the crowd when Yeshua preached wearing an air of innocence that seemed exactly to trumpet their sinister intent.
In Jerusalem such matters were handled much more delicately, the knife already inserted and removed before the least suspicion was aroused. But these men seemed hardly to bother to mask themselves. Indeed, when I slipped a few coins to one of them, he admitted at once that he had been sent by Herod Antipas, to keep an eye on the upstart Yeshua. Clearly what had happened was that Antipas, who was not known for keeping an eye on the happenings of the Galilean countryside, had finally got wind of Yeshua’s ministry, and was anxious now to head off the rise of another holy man whom the Romans might later compel him to kill.
For my part, I believed there was a real danger from Herod’s men. But Yeshua played with them in a way that seemed unwise, saying any number of things that could be used against him should someone have a mind to twist his words. Antipas was not some village elder, whom he could get the better of by a clever turn of phrase; and Pilate and Rome stood behind him, who not all the peasants of Galilee could stop should they decide to remove him. It had been easy enough, after all, to do away with Yohanan, who had had a greater following and not so many enemies.
But when I brought these concerns to Yeshua, he dismissed them.
“They hire scribes to write down what you say so it can be used against you,” I said, which I had seen one of them do.
“Should I stop telling the truth, then?”
“The truth has nothing to do with it. You provoke them.”
“Why are you so timid,” he said, “when you are the one who wants to chase them all into the sea?”
So he made the thing appear simply a matter of staying true to his beliefs. But the fact was the more he was threatened, the more he became reckless. This seemed especially the case since his return from Jerusalem, so that I suspected there was more to what had happened there than Yohanan had been able to tell. I remembered Yeshua in Tyre, how ill at ease he had been with the crowd, and thought perhaps he had travelled to Jerusalem on his own so that he might again test himself outside the world of fishermen and farmers. But it seemed he had fared even worse in Jerusalem than he had in Tyre.
As part of their strategy, Herod’s spies spread many calumnies about Yeshua, some of which had a sufficient element of truth to take hold. So, for instance, they began to cast aspersions on his morals, on account of the women in his group. I had often warned Yeshua of the ill-advisedness of going about like some desert chieftain, with all his wives in tow, and he had laughed off my criticisms as if it did not matter to him what people made of these women. Yet it was exactly the accusations against them now that seemed the thing he took most to heart. In his typical way, however, he did not simply counter them but rather raised the flag higher, and ensured that the women were always with him now whenever he appeared in the streets. This had the odd effect of once more increasing the size of the crowds who came to see him, as many were anxious to catch sight of the eccentric holy man and his concubines; and again, in the unpredictable way of these things, the rumours of his indiscretions seemed only to raise his authority with much of the peasantry, particularly the Syrians, who apparently had begun to see in him some remnant of the fertility cult they had had in their Asherah before the Jews had forced them to abandon her.
All this was a matter of great irony, I thought, for though Yeshua had always been happy enough to eat and drink well when the occasion arose and to surround himself with young women, he had often struck me as someone almost entirely lacking in desires, as if his physical nature was merely so much baggage he carried, that he might slough off at its first inconvenience to him. Though he did not encourage fasting, for instance, he himself sometimes did so for days, as if simply by oversight; and though I had never heard him advocate sexual abstinence, which was the case with many of the cults, he had never shown any particular favour to one or the other of his women or given reason to believe he might choose one as his wife, so I might almost have wondered, if it were not so uncommon among Jews, whether his desires did not run in another direction. For these reasons, I felt no cause to believe there was any substance to the rumours against him. But exactly because there was so little in his teaching that reflected this ascetic side of him, it went unnoticed. Instead people made much of the feasts he went to at the homes of his wealthier patrons and how he never refused a glass of wine, so that it seemed entirely reasonable to believe as well that he kept his women with him for his pleasure.
Thus many who had followed him before, and who counted themselves pious, now grew uneasy with him; while others who had ignored him suddenly thought him a Bacchus come to life, and began to come to him to bless their crops or cure their infertility, which appalled him. Sometimes a dozen or more would already be awaiting him at Kephas’s gate when he arose; sometimes at his sermons above the town he could hardly be heard for the clamour people made to be attended to. In the midst of these there were the usual ill who continued to come, and whose numbers had grown, so that more than once it happened that seeing the crowds waiting in ambush of him he would steal away with a few of us and leave them in the lurch.
“If someone comes with only the truth, it’s not enough for them,” he said, growing bitter. “They have to have wonders.”
So he grew increasingly reclusive, and even those times when he tended to the sick he appeared worn out by the effort, as if his healing had become a drain on his own vital force; because while at the outset his healing had appeared the natural complement to his ministry, it now began to seem an obstacle to it, and so he lost the heart for it. In this matter as well, however, logic was confounded: rather than diminishing his reputation, Yeshua’s growing reluctance to cure seemed instead to have the effect of enhancing it. As what had once been freely offered became more inaccessible and rare, so did the stories grow of the wonders that Yeshua was capable of and of the miracle cures he had brought about. Thus the blind and the lame appeared at the gate, and those close to death, filled with hope; and thus we were forced to turn them away. For Yeshua, there seemed no way out: the less he appeared in public, the more the rumours of his potency grew; but if he should come out and simply tend to people in the usual way, they felt disappointed, as if some sin of theirs or some failure of faith had kept him from using his powers to the full.
On one occasion an old cripple who had had his relations bring him across the lake from Sennabris was so insistent on being seen that he had himself lifted up on his stretcher to the roof of Kephas’s house and lowered down by ropes into the courtyard. Kephas was ready to chase him and his people away at the end of a stick. But Yeshua was impressed by his persistence, though the man freely admitted it was skepticism and not belief that lay behind it: he wished to put to rest the rumours of Yeshua’s abilities.
“You’re right to be skeptical,” Yeshua said. “Only God has that sort of power.”
“Then why do you allow such lies to be spread about you?”
“I can’t control what people say.”
“Ah,” the old man said, “you’re like the ugly girl who to hide her ugliness never leaves the house, so the rumour spreads she’s in fact very beautiful and the suitors begin to line up at her door. When her sister accuses her of deceit, she says, ‘I can’t control the lies people tell about me.’ But in the meantime she doesn’t mind being thought beautiful.”
Yeshua took all this very well and indeed seemed enlivened in a way he had not been for many weeks. He and the old man ended up talking together at great length, and parted friends. The man promised to return to Sennabris saying he had found not a miracle worker but something much rarer, a man of wisdom.
This was the sort of thing that most pleased Yeshua: a reasoned discussion that ended with his interlocutor won over to his point of view. In this he revealed himself to be at heart a teacher—not a mystic, not a cultist, not even a healer per se, but merely what he had presented himself to me as from the start, someone with a few plain truths he wished to impart to people. Indeed, this was the Yeshua that I had been drawn to, and that I now missed. If things had been different, if the need of people hadn’t been so great or if he himself hadn’t had that special air to him, the quality of being chosen or marked that seemed almost to stand outside him like a second person, then he might have simply lived out his life in Notzerah or Kefar Nahum with his little following and his bit of renown. As it was, however, the mood of the times went against him, so that though he preached peace, yet he would not be left in it.
It was around this time that one of the women in our group, Ribqah, from Migdal, took seriously ill. She was a girl of little means and of questionable virtue whom Yeshua, however, no doubt exactly because the world held her in such low regard, had always kept very close to him. He had suffered much criticism on this account even from his own people, and Herod’s spies had been quick to make use of the thing to further discredit him. Thus when she was struck down it was taken as a sign, in the way the peasants did, and the matter assumed a much greater importance than it merited.
It was mid-morning when word came to us that she was ill. A group of us set out at once from Kefar Nahum for her village, which was some five or six miles down the lakeshore. When we arrived there we were directed to a salting shed on the beach, and were surprised to find her simply spread out on a table next to a heap of entrails from the night’s catch. Yeshua was livid.
“Why hasn’t she been brought inside?”
But her father couldn’t seem to fathom Yeshua’s anger.
“We wanted to keep an eye on her while we worked,” he said.
She had suffered a bite of some sort while she’d been walking along the beach, no one knew from what. The bite, on her shin, had already formed a suppurating abscess and had bloated her leg. Yeshua brought her to her bed and treated her as best he could, lancing the abscess and drawing blood from her in the hope of draining the poison. But within the hour she was dead. When the life passed out of her, Yeshua wept. It was a long time before we could get him to leave her so she could be dressed for burial.
“I did nothing for her,” he said.
Afterwards he kept up his mourning for many days, holed up in his little room at the back of Kephas’s house. The entire time he neither ate nor washed, his forehead still smeared with the dirt he had put there when Ribqah had died. He seemed to be mourning his own impotence—for all the wonders people ascribed to him, he had been unable to save one of those closest to him. So it was that whenever he heard there were supplicants at the gate, he would at once slip out by the back way, and be gone for many hours.
We were all of us worried for him at the time, and wondered what would become of him. With each day that passed without food he seemed to grow more wild-eyed and less reasonable, so that we feared he would descend into madness. The only one of us whose presence he would suffer then was Andreas, from whom he took water at least and who would cling to him to comfort him without the least affectation or reserve, so that tears would come to Yeshua’s eyes. Indeed it was Andreas, I thought, who was the thing that held him to the world then, since he was such a child and could not be put off, whereas the rest of us hardly dared to go near him.
For my part, I wondered, seeing the depths he had fallen into, if I had ever really understood him, since he seemed such a stranger to me in that state, and more defeated even than when I had first met him at En Melakh. Clearly it was not only the matter of Ribqah that had undone him, for there were any number he had not cured and more than one who had died in his arms. Rather it seemed he had lost his way, as if he himself was no longer certain what he must be to people or as if the second person he was, which was his public one, had somehow split away and left only this ghost of himself. Afterwards I thought it had been a mistake for even those of us closest to him to have avoided him during that time, and to have failed to reassure him. But in my own case I no longer felt sufficiently in his confidence to believe I could reach him in any way.
After many days in this state he finally called us together at Kephas’s house and said he would be leaving us for a time, he could not say for how long. Among the twelve there was a great sense of destitution at this, and it seemed only by force of will that the women were able to keep themselves from wailing aloud. Yet because we didn’t know the state of his mind no one dared to beg him to stay. Perhaps he took offence at this, or indeed had been awaiting some sign from us of our support for him, because he left the house at once then to be alone again.
When he’d gone I said, “We must find the way to accompany him, when he goes,” and I could see there was some relief at the suggestion, since the notion apparently hadn’t occurred to any of the others.
It was agreed that three of us would go with him. Kephas put himself forward to lead the group, but it was the height of the season for him, and his mother-in-law was ill and near death, and we rightly discouraged him from going off on a sojourn of uncertain destination and length. It was the same with Yaqob and several of the others, so that in the end we were left with Yohanan and Simon the Canaanite and also myself, because no one, I supposed, had been quick enough to voice an objection to me.
I went out in search of Yeshua then and found him on the beach just outside the town. He had walked out along the breakwater there, which sat low at that time because of the rains, so that he seemed to hover on the surface of the lake.
I told him the plan we had made, and who would accompany him. He did not put up any objection but seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, with whom we had settled on for the purpose.
“So you see how the last are first,” he said, which was a saying of his, meaning that Simon and I had been the last to join the twelve.
I, however, felt a throb of anticipation at the journey, though I would not have foreseen this. Perhaps what drew me was simply the prospect of leaving Kefar Nahum, which had begun to be a prison to me. But it was also, I had to admit, the chance of being in close quarters with Yeshua again, for it seemed now I had missed him in these past weeks and months as if he had been away from me, and I wished for his return.
From there on, it was clear that we were in foreign country. The landscape became increasingly rugged and wooded; the villages we passed were like little pagan fortresses, high-walled and forbidding and seeming cut off in some absolute way from the rest of the civilized world. All along the roadside were shrines to the local gods, little altars in the middle of nowhere or strange, demonish faces carved into the cliffs or just arcane agglomerations of rocks and stones that only the slightest bit of order distinguished from the random rocks nearby. It was hard to believe this land had formed part of old Israel, so completely had it reverted. As it turned out we were lucky to have Simon along with us—he spoke the dialect, and helped to mitigate the instinctive distrust that most of the locals felt for Jews.
We put up for the night in the woods just outside Paneas, or rather Caesarea Philippi, as Philip had now renamed it. Simon warned us that we would be much safer in the town; but Yeshua, who had hardly spoken the entire trip, refused to pass through the gates. In the morning, Yohanan and I went in to fetch some food and managed to steal a glimpse of the cave of Pan where the Jordan began. The entire site was dominated now by Herod the Great’s temple to Augustus, one sacrilege laid over another; though at least the worship of Pan had the virtue of being rooted in the honest feelings of the people. Even that early in the morning the shrine was already filled with pilgrims, some of them caught in fits of ecstasy. Niches carved into the cliff face were filled with idols; everywhere were offerings of food and garlands and coins and bits of silver and gold. Yohanan, who had never seen such a sight, was very affected by the visit—no doubt he had never imagined that pagan gods could inspire such a level of devotion.
Though Yeshua had not told us as much, it was clear by now that we were headed up Mount Hermon. Simon appeared to grow agitated at this prospect—the mountain was a site of worship for his people, and he seemed to fear some vengeance from his former gods for his desertion of them. His panic increased when in the woods we passed a group of acolytes of Pan writhing and moaning in the morning fog. So his conversion had not quite taken after all; later it came out that what he had feared the previous evening when we’d slept in the open had been not the threat of thieves, as we’d thought, but rather of Pan visiting mischief on us in the night. All of this he tried to hide from Yeshua, of course, only reluctantly confiding in Yohanan and me when his fears began to get the better of him.
Though well worn by pilgrims, the road up the mountain was not much more than a sheep path, irregular and stony and steep. We passed an altar where a sacrifice was in progress, the smell of blood heavy on the air; it occurred to me that we were not far removed here from our own forefathers, slaughtering their lambs in the high places of Canaan. But Yeshua continued forward in his single-minded manner, always slightly ahead of us, seemingly unmoved by the strange, pagan atmosphere of the place, the sense that a thousand spirits hovered around us. The higher we went, the more alien and savage our surroundings became; but Yeshua did not even so much as look back at us, climbing the slopes with the agility of a mountain goat while the three of us struggled to keep up. At one point a patch of mist cut off our view of him entirely and Simon, in a fit of panic, shouted out to him.
We found him waiting for us in a clearing.
“I was afraid we’d lost you,” Simon said.
“And what would you do then?”
The hardness in Yeshua’s voice made Simon redden.
“I would look for you.”
“How long? An hour? A day?”
“Until I found you,” Simon said, and I saw there were tears in his eyes.
By sunset we had reached the point where the wooded slopes of the mountainside began to give way to barren rock. There was still a bit of snow at the mountain’s peak, which gave a bitter chill to the wind that blew down from there, and as we had not brought any tents Yohanan and I suggested we spend the night in a little temple nearby, a crude construction of wood and unfinished stone. Yeshua, however, would have none of it, and insisted we build huts from what branches and saplings we could scrounge together. We built a separate one for him and then, a little apart, a large one for the rest of us, since Simon had made it clear that he was too frightened to sleep alone. Yeshua retreated into his own the instant darkness fell, declining to share our supper. A while later we heard sounds from his tent that we took at first for sobs, but he was merely praying. Nonetheless, Simon was thrown into a panic again, and edged up to his hut.
“Master!” he said.
“What is it?”
“Ah! I’m sorry. We thought—I was frightened.”
Silence.
“Master, we’re wondering why you’ve come here,” Simon said.
“What is it to you, why I’ve come? Is it such a burden to keep me company?”
We passed a miserable night. A fog had set in that chilled us to the bone; and then all night long Simon plagued us with his fears, growing more and more crazed. I gathered that in his mind the gods that had peopled his old life had not so much vanished with his conversion as been transformed into demons, all of them now intent on his destruction. To be fair to him, there was something about the place that inspired this kind of madness; and then in the middle of the night, as if his worst fears had materialized, there was a great crashing in the underbrush and wild animals of some sort—we were never able to determine what they were—encircled our camp. For the longest time we sat huddled in our tent trying to keep silent while the animals rampaged around us; Simon, despite our imprecations, finally broke down and began whispering atonements to his old gods, believing the animals to be demons that had been loosed upon us. It seemed only by some fluke that the beasts didn’t knock down our flimsy hut and make off with us. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone.
We went out at once to check on Yeshua: his hut was empty. Simon let out a wail at this discovery. But there was no blood nearby, so far as we could tell, nor had there been any sounds of struggle; it was possible, therefore, that he had simply fled. Clearly we had to wait until morning to begin a search, given the fog and the dark and the danger of falling prey to the very beasts we had just been saved from. But Simon had grown frantic, weeping and lamenting as if the entire blame for the calamity fell on his own shoulders, and before Yohanan or I could stop him he rushed out into the dark, calling out for his master. We tried to chase after him to bring him back, but within a matter of paces we already seemed in danger of losing our way.
We had no option except to wait, huddling once more in our little tent. The time seemed interminable; at one point we heard distant sounds in the underbrush again, called out, got only an animal moan in return, and decided to repair after all to the little temple nearby, shoring up a small pile of stones inside as ammunition and stopping up the entrance with a few boulders and rotting logs. The place was drafty and dank, with a smell of lamp oil and smoke and old blood; we tried to build a fire but couldn’t get it going. Out of sheer exhaustion and cold we finally fell asleep, only waking when the first light had begun to show through the mist.
Our first priority was to look for Yeshua—we reckoned that if he had fled, logic would have sent him along the treeless upper slopes of the mountain, where it would have been possible to run in the fog and dark without fear of obstruction. We set out along the rough path that led up towards the mountaintop, able to pick our way even though the fog was so thick at first that we could not see more than half a dozen paces ahead of us. Then, as we rose higher, the fog began to thin and the light to grow stronger. We had not gone very far, however, before we heard shouts in the distance: Simon. He was coming down the path towards us.
“I’ve found him!” he was saying. “I’ve found him!”
He emerged finally, breathless, out of the fog.
“He’s on the mountaintop!”
“Is he safe?” I said.
“Yes, yes! He’s with the others!”
“What others?”
“Come and see!”
He was babbling. We tried to calm him but couldn’t get much sense out of him.
“Come and see for yourselves!”
We followed him up. Soon we had risen above the fog into brilliant morning light. It was as if we had entered the heavens: at our feet the fog stretched, a great cloud spread out for as far as the eye could see; then, before us, bathed in light, the snow-covered peak of the mountain. At the very peak we could make out the figure of Yeshua, alone.
“They were there before!” Simon said. “I swear it!”
Angels, he said they were, all in white; who knew what trick of the fog and light and of his own fevered mind had induced in him this vision. From what we gathered, he believed they had interceded to save Yeshua after the demons had carried him off to the mountaintop.
“I assure you I came up here entirely on my own,” Yeshua said, when we reached him. It turned out he had been there most of the night, and had not even been present when the animals had attacked. As to our own miraculous escape, he put it down to God or blind luck.
“If there had been angels, I would have been the first to see them.”
But he didn’t manage to shake Simon of his belief; and later, of course, when we returned to Galilee, it was Simon’s version of things, being the most fantastical, that seemed at once to gain currency.
Yeshua showed no particular joy that we had survived our attack, and indeed I had the impression he might just as soon have had us devoured and been rid of us. What seemed of greater concern to him, when we returned to the camp, was that we had been so foolish as to leave our sack of food within easy reach, and the animals had made their supper of it.
“So it seems you’ll keep me company in my fast,” he said, and thus gave us to know he would not give up his retreat, though we were without food and at the mercy of the wild animals.
There was no thought of abandoning him. But a plan had to be devised to keep safe our own lives. In the end it was Simon, again, entirely calmed now that he’d seen that Yeshua’s magic was greater than that of his demons, who proved indispensable: it turned out that for all his fanciful notions he understood a thing or two about the wild, pointing out, for instance, that most animals would be loath to leave the wooded lower slopes of the mountain for the barren ones higher up. Accordingly we moved our camp to the mountaintop, where the air was colder but actually less damp than on the slopes; and for added security we built a little fortress of mud and branches and stones for the three of us, then a smaller one, again, for Yeshua, which, however, as far as we could ascertain, he seldom used. It was Simon also who found a spring for water, and who fashioned traps so that we were never in want of meat; and though with each day that passed there seemed less and less to distinguish us from the wild beasts, it was also true that our survival no longer ever seemed in serious threat.
As it happened the retreat lasted many days and weeks, so that we had only the moon to tell us the time and sometimes could not even say for certain which day was the sabbath and which was not. Yeshua, at first, had little to do with us, and would take his food apart if he ate at all and spend his time praying alone on the mountaintop or wandering in the woods or caught up in some little project that would then take up all his energies. Once he borrowed a knife from Simon and spent the entire day carving and whittling away at a log he had dragged up from the forest; and when evening came and we dared to look at what he had done, we saw he’d carved our own three likenesses, Yohanan and Simon and myself, so amazing in their accuracy that even Yohanan and I, despite our unease, stood a moment speechless at his skill.
“But, teacher,” Yohanan said finally, “it’s forbidden.”
“You’re right. Burn it.”
And without further ado he had us throw the thing into the fire.
But after some time it seemed he slowly came back to himself. It started with his joining Simon on his morning rounds to his traps, which pleased Simon no end, and had him instructing Yeshua in every detail of how he set the traps out, and laid the bait, and studied the animals’ habits so that he knew how such and such a placement or such and such a trick would catch them up. We’d see the two of them go off every morning like seasoned hunters, and hear Simon’s chatter, and somehow all seemed right with us again. By then Yeshua had begun to join us for our meals and the small, crazed glint of his fast had left him, so that he began to seem happy with us out there in the wild, with no one to pester him or make demands. What I understood then was that he was not one of those who felt his very existence threatened if he did not have the adulation of the crowds, but rather someone who felt most himself exactly alone like this with his few friends and unremarked, and who suffered leadership only because he could not find the way to avoid it. For my part, I felt we had returned at last to the simple friendliness there had been between us at the outset, uncomplicated and unfraught, when we had often talked into the night in Kephas’s courtyard or on the beach.
Once, when we were alone, we came to discuss Ephesus and he asked after my family, the first time he had ever done so. I told him then that my parents had died in the famous fire there some ten years before, during the riot against the Jews. I was already in Jerusalem then, finishing my studies; when I returned to Ephesus to settle my father’s affairs I saw that the entire block where we had lived had been reduced to cinder.
“It affected you deeply,” Yeshua said, which was not what I’d expected.
“It changed the course of my life.”
“Because you blamed the Romans for what had happened.”
“In short, yes.”
I expected an argument from him, how the Romans protected the Jews, how they everywhere granted us special privileges; it was not the Romans, after all, who had burnt my father’s house but the ignorant masses, who hated us exactly for our special treatment. I did not know what to put against this logic except the arguments I had made to myself as a young man—that a Jew must be free, and did not go on bended knee to ask for privileges, and that until the bond to Rome was broken we would remain the target of the world’s persecutions, because we claimed to be chosen yet were in chains. But I did not know if I believed in these arguments as I once had.
To my surprise, however, Yeshua said only, “I’m very sorry for your parents’ deaths,” and did not challenge me, for which I was grateful.
In the end, his silence on this matter did more, perhaps, to question my convictions than any argument from him might have, for I understood in the wake of it how my hatred of Rome was as much a loyalty to the memory of my parents as a reasoned stand. I remembered my anger when I’d learned of their deaths, how I had wanted a target for it—I had been an easy prospect then for whatever cause or creed had first got hold of me, and might just as soon have become a Zealot. For the truth was that there were not many of those I’d met in the movement then who had struck me as men of great integrity or vision, and had I not been so blinded by rage and grief, I might not have been so quick to follow them. I wondered what I would have made of a Yeshua, had I met one then, how different the course of my life might have been. Yet it was likely I would not have heard him, or given him any heed, when even now it seemed always that I fought him in some part of myself and could not give in to him.
After we’d been on the mountain for some time it began to happen that some pilgrims who had made their way up to the place for their own ends got wind of the holy man who had pitched his camp there and began to seek him out. These were to a one pagans, mainly locals but also from as far away as Damascus and Tyre, and I was certain it was Simon who had somehow managed to spread the word among them, though he denied this. Usually they brought little offerings of food with them, which Yeshua, despite their taint of idolatry, authorized us to accept. But he did not grant them much of an audience, and then was uncompromising in his treatment of them. When they asked him the path to wisdom, he told them to follow the one true God; and when they asked after their own gods, he said they were phantoms, inventions of their own errant minds.
“But your own disciple here says they’re demons,” one of them said, referring to Simon.
“He’s a child, and so he understands things as a child would,” Yeshua said, at which Simon, however, beamed and took not the least offence.
I was surprised at how much these visitors indulged him—he had pitched camp, after all, on their own sacred ground, then had the audacity to blaspheme their gods. But most of them took this in stride, though I could not have said if they simply assumed he was mad or were genuinely drawn in by his strange air of authority.
One day a man from Sidon arrived, a wealthy merchant of some sort, with an entire entourage of slaves and a gilded litter that bore his sick daughter, whom all his doctors had been unable to cure. He had taken her to the shrine at Caesarea Philippi, again without success; but while there he had heard of the holy man on the mountain, and so had come to him to try his fortune. Yeshua’s first reaction was to chastise the man for dragging his poor daughter across the countryside when she would have been much better off at home in her own bed. But then he set to work on her, draping her in a dampened cloth to bring down her fever and cooking up a pungent brew from a plant I was unfamiliar with that he found on the mountain slopes, small-leafed and bitter and brilliant green. Within a day her fever had begun to abate and her colour to return. Her father was ecstatic—he offered Yeshua a permanent place in his household, all the riches he could ask for, a temple dedicated to his god.
“Will you worship with me there?” Yeshua said.
“I have a dozen temples already to worship in. But if you want, I’ll join you in your own as well.”
“And if I asked you to come only to mine?”
The man laughed.
“Now your price is too steep.”
When they’d gone, Yeshua fell into low spirits again.
“They were only pagans,” Yohanan said, to console him. “Why should you trouble yourself over them?”
But Yeshua turned on him.
“Wasn’t Simon a pagan? Do you think our god looks after only the Jews and doesn’t concern himself with the rest? Is he just some little wood nymph to make an idol of, who lives in his little cave?”
The outburst silenced us, and left Yohanan red-faced with shame. But Yeshua’s anger had surely come from his own divided mind: he seemed both to resent the help he gave to the heathens and yet unable to find the way, within his own philosophy, to refuse it.
We all feared the incident would send Yeshua spiralling back to the depths. But he recovered quickly enough, and even seemed heartened in the end, for he began to greet the pilgrims who came to him with some of his old humour and open spirit. Then one day, without any warning to us, he said the time had come to go home. At the news, Simon was so happy he began to scamper around like a foal and turn somersaults, until we were all in stitches. As for myself, I was pleased enough to be leaving the wild; yet already I regretted the loss of the closeness we had had there, with our fires and our makeshift meals and our men’s unthinking camaraderie.
We spent the first night of our return journey at Caesarea Philippi. This time, however, we took rooms in the city proper, with alms the merchant of Sidon had given us. There we attended the baths, and walked through the city streets until late in the night. Yeshua spoke about his childhood in Alexandria, the first time I had heard him do so, and described some of the wonders he had seen including the Pharos, whose light, he said, could be seen halfway to Rome. When Yohanan asked which city was greater, Alexandria or Jerusalem, he surprised us by naming Alexandria, saying Jerusalem was the home of one great nation but Alexandria the home of many. He had never seemed so simply a man among men to me as he did that evening—we might have been soldiers on furlough, taking the town in, wending our way towards some final tavern or brothel to spend the night.
But already by morning, as we approached the border, he had begun to retreat into himself—I understood now the extra skin he put on to be with his followers, to become the teacher, the healer, what he must be to them. He had grown distracted and quiet with us; at Lake Huleh, where we stopped to refresh ourselves, he did not join us in the water, though he had bathed with us like any common Greek only the night before. The lake seemed to have a different aspect after our trip up the mountain, more pagan and desolate and wild, not part of God’s creation at all. I thought of what Yeshua had said, how our god was not some creature in a cave like the gods of the Greeks. But it was true that I had always thought of him in that way, perched above his little promised land not bothering himself with what went on beyond it, the whole insignificant pagan world. What a paltry deity it suddenly seemed I had made for myself compared to Yeshua’s, in whose dominion a place had to be found not only for us handful of Jews but for this savage lake, for the acolytes writhing in ecstasy in the forests of Mount Hermon, for the rich merchants who made temples to the gods of every nation.
We were not far past Thella before we began to draw a little crowd of hangers-on of those who knew Yeshua. I was surprised to discover that tales of the miracles he had wrought on Mount Hermon were already circulating, along with Simon’s story of the angels; it was amazing to me, this hunger people had for wonders, and the speed with which they published them. I had almost forgotten the stature Yeshua had with many of his followers—alone with us in the woods he had appeared fallible and mortal and unsure, but here the adulation of his disciples seemed instantly to raise him up. The cloud under which he had departed appeared to have dissipated; it was the usual way of these things, that a scandal that one day was on every tongue, and seemed insurmountable, was all but forgotten the next.
Because Yeshua stopped to speak with all of those who came up to him, our progress was slow. By sunset we had not yet reached Kefar Nahum, though by then some of the twelve including Kephas had got wind of our approach and had come out to meet us. We were still on the river then and I suggested we cross over to Bet Zayda on the other shore, where we could rid ourselves of the crowd and get a decent night’s rest. But Yeshua, to our surprise, said we should camp there in the fields so that he could be with his followers. There were perhaps fifty or more who chose to stay with us; a great fire was built and some of the women were sent into a village nearby to fetch food for us all with what was left of the alms we’d had from the merchant of Sidon. Yeshua stayed up teaching well into the night, seeming his old self in a way but also changed, more circumspect and controlled. Perhaps it was simply that I had seen him miserable and out of sorts and so understood now what he hid, and the struggles in him, which he would not show his followers.
Out in the open there with our fire it seemed we were not so far from the pagan places we’d left behind, with the bit of woods nearby and the smell of smoke and the cool air off the lake. Even the disciples who had gathered were at bottom not much different from the heathens who had come to Yeshua seeking they knew not what, some magic solution to their dilemmas or some potion or charm against the world’s ills. I knew Yeshua did not encourage them in this and yet it was his lot to inspire extreme reactions in people, and to raise their hope, and to touch the need that was bottomless in them. So I had the sense that he was lost to me again, because his people had claimed him, and he could not be simply a man or a friend as I wished him to be.
The truth, however, which it seemed the others had always known, was that I’d had no real place with him there from the start, because of that part of me that would not quite relinquish itself, that could do no more than love him. So the others could not accept me, because I reduced to merely a man the great notion that Yeshua was to them, the notion of their own betterment and redemption. I had understood this in an instant when Kephas had come and made his greetings, and I’d seen how he ached with emotion at Yeshua’s return and with the things he wished to say to him but held himself back on my account. And though I had never held Kephas to be a man of great intelligence, I wondered now if he did not see Yeshua more clearly than I did, because he understood him with his heart, while I had always striven to find the argument that would defeat him.
In the morning, because his followers would not leave him and others had begun to join them, Yeshua hardly stopped at Kefar Nahum before making for the hill above the town where he often spoke. All morning, by ones and twos, the crowd continued to grow, which surprised me, given how divided and in disarray his following had seemed at his departure. At one point the crowd had swelled to such a number, well up into the hundreds, that Ventidius arrived with some men from the Roman camp to see if there was any trouble. But seeing Yeshua teaching peacefully there, he quickly withdrew.
It was towards midday that I noticed someone eyeing me nervously from the edge of the crowd: it was the same Yekhubbah whom I had met at Caesarea. My heart fell at the sight of him—my first thought, given the news I had heard out of Jerusalem, was that he had been sent to accuse me as a traitor.
“I’ve come to call you back to the city,” he said when he had taken me aside, making it seem he came in good faith by naming the lawyer I had reported to in the city administration as one of those who had sent him. Yet he wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What of your friend?” I said, meaning Rohagah. But he answered only that Rohagah awaited me as well, and thought I might be of use.
I wasn’t sure what to make of him. It seemed he had been waiting for me there for many days, which did not bode well. But perhaps he had simply not known what to do, being sent to fetch me by his betters and finding I had gone.
I did not know what path to take. Yet in the end my way was clear, because though with Yeshua I felt quickened in a way I had not for many years, still I didn’t belong with him, while in Jerusalem, even if I was vilified by my own people, at least they were my own. I was certain that this time I would not find the way to return to Yeshua if I left, and so did not know how to part from him.
“We’ll go in the morning, then,” I said to Yekhubbah.
But Yekhubbah would not be put off.
“It would be better to leave at once,” he said, which did not boost my confidence in him. “You may say that your family has need of you.”
I realized then that he would not leave my side, and that therefore there was no thought of speaking frankly with Yeshua. Indeed I did not wish to speak to him at all, with such a one as this at my elbow.
“Then let’s go immediately,” I said rashly.
“You don’t wish to take your leave?”
“No.”
He was clearly bothered by this but didn’t know what to do.
“We’ll go, then,” he said finally.
It happened that I still had my few things along with me from our retreat, so there was nothing for us to do but set out. Yeshua had a crowd around him then, and I saw that Yohanan too was in the midst of it. Only one of the women noticed me there at the edge of the crowd and caught my eye, with that coldness the women reserved for me.
“I’ve heard troubling news from Jerusalem,” I said to Yekhubbah.
“There are many lies being spread,” he said. “In Jerusalem you’ll learn the truth.”
And it was on that comfortless note that I set off with him towards the Jerusalem road.
When we reached Jerusalem, however, I found the situation much worse even than I had imagined it. Yekhubbah led me at once to Rohagah’s quarters in the lower city, where there was much toing and froing and many whispered words; and I saw how the others deferred to him, and the fear in them.
To me, he said only, “It was good of you to return, now that we have need of you,” in a tone devoid of inflection.
However I was not invited to speak to him again for many days, nor was I given any mission, and it seemed that those I had known before in our cause were at pains to avoid me. When I asked after my former contact in the city administration, whom I had trusted, I was told he had left the city for Alexandria; my other contact, following his arrest, had been deported. So I was alone, with no one to turn to. It was only by chance once, at the temple, that I met someone who was willing to speak to me, a pock-faced tanner named Abram whom I had known only in passing, and never much trusted because of his boasting manner. Now, however, fear seemed to have humbled him.
“We’ve done a better job killing our own than the Romans ever did,” he said, and he described how it was not only those suspected of betraying us who had been killed off but even several of our own leaders, whose deaths had been arranged by those who opposed them, then blamed on the Romans. To do the work the sicari had been hired, named after the daggers they used—they would attack their prey in a crowd and slip off before they’d been noticed. So the old leaders had quickly been done away with and no one dared to oppose the new, because of their ruthlessness.
I had no way to gauge the truth of these accusations, since even to repeat them was a danger. But I grew increasingly uneasy in the wake of them, watching my back each time I stepped from my gate and feeling spied on at every corner. I had put up at a cousin’s house, since I had abandoned my own when I’d left the city; but he knew nothing of my cause and so found me increasingly peculiar, because I made no effort to reopen the shop I had run in the bazaar, nor did I leave the house at all for days at a time, afraid as I was for my life. When Tabernacles approached, he said to me that his brothers would soon come in from the countryside for the feast and I must give up my bed, and so made it clear that he wished to be rid of me.
I sold off some of the inventory from my shop then that I had put away before my departure and took a room in a boarding house near the Dung Gate. There I passed the time of the festival, hardly daring to go out into the crowds, which were thick then because the year of Jubilee had been proclaimed, yet not wanting either to leave the city, for I was determined to do nothing that could be used against me. Then when the feast had ended and the city had emptied again, I was finally called back to Rohagah. This time we met in the upper rooms of the old school building that his quarters stood behind, and that served to mask the many comings and goings. There were several others present whom I did not recognize and whose faces I could hardly make out, since it was night and the room was dimly lit.
Rohagah said, “Because there have been many traitors among us, we must make sure of you,” and I understood that I had been brought to stand trial before them.
I might simply have flouted them then and gone my way, and so at least kept my dignity. Perhaps it was only cowardice that kept me from doing so, since I surely had reason enough to believe by then that they would take my life if they saw the need. But the truth was also that I did not wish to give them that satisfaction. They thought my kind could not be trusted, that we would not lay down our lives for our nation, simply because we had been abroad or had read more than the scriptures or had shown ourselves open-minded towards the customs of the world. But I wished them to see it was not a crime to seek education and knowledge, nor did it make you a traitor to your people.
As it happened my trial lasted many days and weeks, and was as much in the silences I endured as in the interrogations. Thus they would ask about some obscure episode in the past, often hardly memorable, as if it had given rise to the suspicion over me; and when I had accounted for every action and cleared every hint of doubt they would make as if they had acquitted me and assign me some little mission in the city. Each of these, however, was more insignificant than the last, and seemed only to push me further and further to the margins of their work, until finally after weeks had passed I would be called in to them again and they would recommence their questions. The chief accusation against me, as I gathered, was that I had been the one to betray Ezekias, since I had fled then and had been so long out of communication; but even this seemed only an excuse for their general distrust of me. In the meantime I was kept in the dark about their activities and so learned only the barest rudiments of the great action they had put their hopes in, which was set for the coming Passover. In this, at least, it appeared they had planned well: because of the Jubilee the crowds would likely number into the hundreds of thousands then, who, if they rose in revolt, would easily overwhelm the few thousand who guarded the Antonia fortress.
Towards the end of my interrogations I was several times asked about Yeshua, who I was surprised to learn was well known to Rohagah and his group. It grew clearer to me now why they had sent for me: they wished to know if Yeshua might be of use to them, having somehow formed the opinion that he was a firebrand and a rebel. I ought to have disabused them at once of any hopes they had on this front. But either out of pride or sheer contrariness I somewhat encouraged them in their notions, even if only by ambiguities, since I did not want to make it appear that I had merely been biding my time with Yeshua, which would have given force to their accusations against me. I soon had cause to regret this strategy, however, because Rohagah was quick to call my bluff.
It seemed his informants were much more extensive than I had imagined, and had learned that Yeshua planned a pilgrimage with his followers for the Jubilee Passover.
“You must find the way to put yourself among them again,” he said, “so that you can turn them to us at the right moment.”
I was at a loss. It was on my lips to blurt the truth, and be blunt about the sort of man that Yeshua was. Yet in those few words I would have undone all the work of the previous months, since I knew Rohagah was angry at having proved nothing against me and would take the least chance to have me convicted. So I let my silence give him cause to believe I would do the thing, when I could not.
It was only a matter of weeks then to the Passover. The mood in the city was one of great expectation, and already the streets had begun to fill and barricades were being built to control the crowds and every corner was being swept and scoured, so that God should not find us derelict. Yet it did not seem now, after all, that Rohagah and the others had judged our time well, or that we remained anything more than the merest anomaly in the city’s life, or that there was any stomach in people for insurrection, when all their thoughts were on feasting and profit. It was true the Roman procurator was hated, and that he had already committed many other offences large and small since the first one of the standards; yet he did not much occupy people’s thoughts. Indeed, returning to the city after an absence from it, and living as I had amongst the peasants and fishermen of Galilee, I saw now how prosperous the Jews of Jerusalem were despite their foreign yoke, and how they lived well and ate well, and perhaps thought of the Romans as a godsend after the many abuses they had suffered under their own rulers.
Some days after my final meeting with Rohagah a messenger came to me at the boarding house where I was still staying to give me instructions to set out for Galilee. There I was to insert myself again amongst Yeshua’s men and join them in their pilgrimage, though saying nothing, of course, of our plans; once back in Jerusalem, I was to report for further counsel. I knew very little at that point of what Rohagah and the others had in mind—an attack on the fortress, I assumed, and then perhaps the formation of some makeshift battle force once the armoury had been breached. It was all madness, of course, I saw that, and was amazed that Rohagah and his cronies did not: we would all be slaughtered, either quickly and cleanly at the outset, or more slowly and more disastrously. In the process our cause would be set back many years, and many innocents who knew nothing of us, and perhaps did not even care what we stood for, would be slaughtered along with us. So I did not know what to do, for if I did nothing I would be killed, yet perhaps also if I fled; and if I said nothing to Yeshua he would march his own lambs into the slaughter, yet if I warned him, I still put him at risk.
I regretted now that I had ever come back to Jerusalem, and had not simply turned tail at the sight of Yekhubbah and set out for the hills. And I thought, We have been deluded from the start, the old guard as much as the new, not because of this failed plan or that, or this or that schism, but because of our great irrelevance. Yeshua, with his few hundred, had never made that mistake—he sought to bring along with him only those who understood him, and made no claim to the rest. Meanwhile, we with our dozens imagined instead that we spoke for the whole of our race, when they cared nothing for us, nor we, for that matter, for them. No doubt it was exactly this fear that drove the likes of a Rohagah, that we were powerless and insignificant and small, that history would erase every trace of us. Or perhaps it was the greater fear of every Jew—that God had deserted us, that he would no longer descend from the heavens to redeem us from our humiliations, and we, like an army whose commander had deserted, were merely skirmishing towards our doom.
Many years before, when I travelled once to Rome, I was taken by the strange contradictions I found there in the worship of their gods, who seemed at once revered as the authors of human fate, yet also disrespected and mocked at every turn in a manner no Jew could ever countenance. It seemed that at bottom their gods were regarded as no better than mortals, except for their bit of magic that gave them power over us, and worship of them was not so much devotion as simple appeasement, in the way we flattered a tyrant to save our necks. I saw in this at the time a sign of our own superiority—how much greater our own god from whom our entire moral order flowed, who was so much above us we could hardly fathom his ways. There was the famous story of Pompey’s surprise upon entering the Holy of Holies at finding it not bedizened with all manner of riches as he’d expected but empty and barren as a grave: it was beyond the scope of the pagan mind, we had been taught, this sense of a thing larger than their own imaginations, unrepresentable. Yet how truly different was our god, in the end? What we called inscrutable in our own god, we called simple fickleness in theirs; and while our god, for all his greatness, had made our people insignificant and weak, the Romans, who debased our temple and committed every sacrilege against us, ruled the world. What sense could we make of such an injustice, and how could our god, in the face of it, seem what we believed him to be? When I thought of the splendours I had seen in Rome, the great palaces and public buildings that were just the tiniest fraction of what the empire had built throughout the civilized world, it seemed the sheerest folly, while we struggled here for our few wretched acres of promised land, that we should imagine our god the one true one. And if he were, then surely we must surmise that we had displeased him in some final and absolute way, that he should so plunge us down and give such solace and strength to our enemies.
Though a man barely of middle age, I had often had the feeling I had come up against the brink of things, had reached the end of every path. As a young man, I believed I would define who I was through my actions; when that failed, when I became involved in what revealed itself as an endless process of deferral, I hoped at least for wisdom. But wisdom, too, eluded me. I had visited a dozen nations, and heard tell of a hundred philosophies; but what had most struck me in this was how little of value there was in the world, how men were deceitful and base and would espouse to you the loftiest ideals in one breath and contradict them in the next. When the chaff was sifted from things there seemed only further chaff, the same tired notions, the same predictable vice. Thus when I considered what it was in Yeshua that had held me to him, it seemed exactly the hope of something new: a new sort of man, a new way of seeing things. I thought, If there was a single person who had found the way to speak the truth, perhaps the rest was worthwhile; if there was someone whose vision was truly more than hope for his own gain or greater glory, then perhaps God had not made us simply animals, a pestilence the world would be well rid of. I thought of the times in which we lived, of the murders and massacres, the kings who thought only of their treasuries and the bandits who robbed and killed the innocent in the name of justice; I thought how miserly and mean even the common people had become, so that in every village the gates were slammed shut against any stranger and the poor died of hunger by the road. Perhaps, then, we were truly at the end of days as some of the madmen in the desert preached. But there was in Yeshua that quality that made one feel there was something, still, some bit of hope, some secret he might reveal that would help make the world over. Tell me your secret, I had wanted to say to him, tell me, make me new. And even now, though I had left him, I often saw him beckoning before me as towards a doorway he would have had me pass through, from darkness to light.