Chapter Four
LUKE
Paul talked a good deal, even in his sleep, and told the story of his first encounter with the Christ many times. I grew quite tired of the road to Damascus after a while.
I heard the anecdote in various forms, as the details, and the emphasis and tone of the story, shifted. The audience mattered, and he possessed a keen sense of his listeners and could alter his presentation in mid-flight, adjusting to the responses in the room: a laugh, a sigh of boredom, even a snort of contempt. For all this, I had no doubt that his experience on that legendary road changed everything for him.
“I’m not the man who set off from Jerusalem to Damascus,” he said to me. “Not the man who stoned dear Stephen.”
“All true,” I would say. “You changed course, reversed direction.”
“No,” he would say, argumentative as ever. “That doesn’t go far enough.”
Paul wanted everything framed in terms that measured his ideas of reality, and yet he clung to strange notions about himself. Often he would push back at me, resisting the shape of whatever I proposed, as if my version of Paul the apostle could never quite capture his reality.
“It was a transformation near Damascus,” he explained, “but not what you imagine. On that road I discovered what I already possessed, which is eternal life. It had been there all along, in my hand but concealed. I simply opened my hand, and there it lay.”
All very brisk and fetching, that comment, but I’m not sure his explanation was logical. Logic was never his gift. “It only leads to untruth,” he would say. “I never liked the syllogism as a form of thought. Aristotle be damned!”
What remained true was that he had wished to persecute followers of the Way. A friend had enlisted him as an adjunct of the Temple Guards: an unlikely prospect for a small, stumbling, stooped man with a squint who had no martial training, no gift for violence. They accepted him only because they imagined he would advance in elite Jewish circles and sit among the Court of Elders one day. His pervasive learning, skills of persuasion, determination, and blunt expressiveness boded well.
It must have disappointed them to see Paul reverse course, becoming an apostle of Jesus, especially among the Greeks. What puzzled many in the Way, however, was Paul’s lack of interest in the actual life of Jesus.
“Jesus never talked about his childhood,” he told me. “He stepped into the world at the moment of his baptism in the River Jordan. Anything before that was irrelevant. I suspect that his mother annoyed him.”
Mary had become a leading figure in the Way, and her role as the mother of our Lord gave her a special status in Jerusalem. With my plan to write a life of Jesus, I had a strong wish to interview her. What a thing it would be to have her voice in my head. But Paul discouraged me.
“Write as the spirit inspires you,” he said. “Let God push your fingers. A good story obliterates the material it serves. It creates truth.”
I did my best to convince him that a narrative of the events in the life of Jesus could be useful, providing a portrait of man perfected by God, a man chosen by the Almighty to express his voice. Followers of our Lord would (and did) have many questions: Where did he come from? What were the conditions of his birth? How was he different from other teachers who claimed a special connection to God?
Paul insisted that nothing mattered but the crucifixion, followed by the resurrection. Only this was relevant. Even the relationship between Jesus and the Law bored him. “He was himself the Law,” he said, a comment that didn’t go down well in Jerusalem with Peter and James, the Pillars. Of course he hoped to retain their approval, even thought that he required it. They gave him their approval, yet remained uneasy about his approach to gentiles like myself. He argued that the Kingdom of God would embrace the world at large, Greek and Jew alike. “There is no boundary,” he would say.
Paul’s mind often played over his youth in Jerusalem at the school of Gamaliel. I think one always recalls the days of yore with fondness, and perhaps trepidation as well, as this is a time of misplaced affections, unexpected turns, fancies and fantasies, inklings and excitements. (I often pushed away thoughts of my own distant childhood in Antioch, which had never been especially happy. Is there such a thing as a happy childhood?) I understood that Paul’s training with Gamaliel had formed the basis of his broad learning, and I could feel his gratitude to this old teacher, who had taken him in hand—and recently joined the Jesus circle himself, much to everyone’s astonishment.
If anyone understood the matter of reversals, of changing course in mid-flight, it was Paul.
Recollections of the Damascus Road became the opening gambit in most of his sermons, especially when he met an audience for the first time. And the tale adapted readily to local conditions, accumulating fresh dimensions in the moment of its telling. Paul usually failed to say that he had spent a good deal of time in Damascus before this visit because his family had business interests there, believing this somehow lessened the drama of his tale. He was in fact widely known to the Jews in that city. This fateful journey was a return of sorts, and he expected a bright welcome in the synagogue near the market, where he would be called on to read the scriptures aloud and comment as well. Paul knew the Torah well, and it was a rare thing for a scholar trained in the school of Gamaliel to appear in their midst, so they would have taken full advantage.
“I was halfway to Damascus when the ground beneath my horse began to tremble,” he might say, although I knew from other conversations that the “horse” was in fact a donkey, as he confessed one day. But a donkey doesn’t play well in public. “I clung to the quivering mane of my tall white horse,” he would say, “sure I would be thrown and mangled underfoot.” Sometimes he would begin: “Not far from the pink city walls of Damascus, the sky began to brighten. It was almost night, so this seemed odd, even ominous.” Another time he opened with: “One morning, as I mounted my small gray horse to begin the fourth day of my journey to Damascus, the clouds above me parted, and the face of our Lord shone like the sun itself, only brighter. I could see his eyes!”
The animals disappeared from the anecdote on many occasions. “I went by foot from Jerusalem to Damascus,” he could say. (I always missed the donkey.) He was with or without companions on this journey. Once he moved through the desert in a train of camels, which seemed highly unlikely, but he enjoyed talking about camels, which he considered “the most amusing of all God’s creatures, a divine joke.”
Did he actually meet the Christ, our Lord?
That cannot be doubted, although the exact nature of the manifestation and the meeting varied in the telling.
“A great light wavered in the desert, and a voice spoke to me,” he would often declare. “Why do you persecute my people? I am Jesus. You know me, I’m quite sure. You have always known me. I will make you my apostle.”
I took notes, as was my habit, accumulating a range of Damascus Road stories. The narrative might vary in detail, but the message was firm. The Lord had made contact with Paul, shaken and blinded him. He had been transformed.
The face of Jesus may or may not have glistened in the sky, but there can be no question about the intensity of the light or its effect on Paul. “As if lightning flashed and failed to fade,” he said. “It was steady, a bright surrounding glow, overwhelming.” Once he said, “My own flesh seemed to melt,” but that image displeased him and I never heard it again.
Somewhere near Damascus, Jesus appeared to Paul—the persecutor of the Way—in a blast of light, and Paul fell from his horse. Or fell to the ground as he walked. Or tumbled from his donkey. And the men who accompanied him fell beside him or didn’t. It was significant that the earth itself shook violently, as this detail drew gasps from the crowd, whatever their disposition. And the voice of Jesus, with his appointment of Paul as apostle, mattered to everyone but especially to Paul.
One night, as he lay next to me on a straw pallet near the Galatian town of Derbe, he recalled the Damascus experience with less bombast: “We slept beside the road each night, our donkeys tethered to a tree. When I woke one morning, before sunrise, there was the body of Jesus—a glorified body—crouched beside me on the blanket. I sat up, and we talked face-to-face, and he asked me to direct my attention to the mind of God. He said I could become like him, part of the Eternal Mind. He told me that time only existed for those who were lost. To be ‘found’ was to find myself outside of time.” He paused. “And he asked me to follow him.”
That was a singular monologue, possibly accurate, though I much preferred the image of Paul riding on a white horse, perhaps a warhorse, charging toward Damascus with anger in his heart, eager to slaughter those who belonged to the Way. The ground shuddered beneath him, tilting in air. A mighty wind arose, lifting the sand in a cloud. The sky turned blood-orange and gauzy. At once a brilliant and blinding light enveloped Paul, and in the midst of this effulgence came a voice telling him to stop persecuting people of the Way. Instead, he must join them. And spread the Good News about Jesus and God’s kingdom.
I quite preferred that version, although I perhaps have combined the details of many versions in my own way. A good story is a running river that never empties itself.
“Listen to what I say to you, my son,” Jesus said to Paul in one often-repeated version. “Go into the city now, pray, and ask for forgiveness. You will be told what to do by someone within the walls. Do not be afraid.”
In the course of years, the death of Jesus became the focus of Paul’s thought, the still point at the swirling center of his imagination. “Everything follows from the cross,” he would say. But it was the life and ideas that interested people in the Way, not so much the humiliating death. This was also true for the Jerusalem leaders, who regarded Jesus as the anointed one, the Christ, a man who asked his followers to turn their eyes to the heavens and to their community, where the need for service arose. “Love God and love one another. These are my commandments,” Jesus said.
I liked the simplicity of this formulation: Love God, and love others—much as I have loved you. That message could be taken into the world, and it would change the world as well.
The death of Jesus and his resurrection didn’t concern many of our circle in Jerusalem, especially those who admired James. But Paul, raised in Tarsus, understood the range of meanings one could discover in the imagery of blood and torn flesh: It was Mithras, after all, who held Tarsus in thrall. Paul knew the usefulness of suffering, how it served as an invitation to the spirit, a path to resurrection in life. Over time, he uncovered a language for thinking about Jesus that stuck in our heads and helped us to understand the meaning of the cross.
The slaying of a sacred bull obviously intrigued him: an aspect of Mithras and his cult that acquired a ritual significance in the time of Paul’s boyhood and mine. We had both seen hot blood poured over the heads of the devout. With a gift for symbolism, Paul acknowledged the power of blood as a sign of rebirth. And he used this symbol in ways that linked it to the execution of Jesus, focusing on the crucifixion as an act of self-sacrifice, with the symbol of blood granting new life to those who held Jesus dear, who valued his teachings, who believed that the soul undertakes a passage through a dark tunnel before resurfacing into what Paul called “the glorified body,” which is radiant and changeless.
I settled back with pleasure to hear Paul turn rhapsodic, as he often did before a gathering, especially on the topic of the resurrection, which was not the Great Resuscitation, as he would say: “It was so much more than simply that and more confusing, too. Even Mary Magdalene and Peter did not, when Jesus returned to them, recognize their teacher and spiritual master.”
This intrigued me, especially when I heard about the disciples who, only a couple of days after the crucifixion of their Lord, headed out of Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus. Two of them talked of the death of Jesus, shaking their heads sadly, when a third appeared beside them, someone they didn’t recognize. This stranger asked them about their stories, and they said, “Haven’t you heard about Jesus, and his execution?” He feigned ignorance, listening all day to their lamentations, absorbing their grief. At the end of the day they asked this sympathetic stranger to dine with them, gathering around a fire pit. Jesus said, “Would you mind if I offered a word of prayer?” As they listened, it dawned on them that this was actually their Lord. “Rabbi!” one of them cried. At which point Jesus disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Paul adored this story, and he implored me to include this exemplary tale in my life of Jesus. “It will teach your readers the truth, that we can’t know Jesus fully in this life, and that his resurrection is mysterious. The new life we find in him is nothing like the old life. It’s a transformation, and it’s complete.”
Paul’s way of talking entranced his listeners, even if he wasn’t necessarily the most polished of speakers and often seemed baffled by his own message, almost babbling in tongues. He could lose his thread, backing around a narrative rather than moving through it, fumbling and fussing for the right word, occasionally settling on the wrong anecdote or parable. But there was a thrill in this, too: watching the mind of a prophet at work as he stumbled toward the truth.
“They don’t understand,” he would say to me, frustrated when listeners didn’t catch what he meant. “I was clear, wasn’t I?”
I would reassure him. Nobody doubted the force of his message, even when the exact meaning eluded his listeners. The proof of his power was in the number who turned to the Way of Jesus because of his rhetoric. And it surprised me how rapidly we grew, with pagans and Godfearers coming to our gatherings, not infrequently demanding baptism in the nearest river or lake. We would sing hymns and hold hands, standing up to our waists in water.
“The Word is alive in my mouth, and in yours as well,” Paul told me one evening before bed, kissing me on the forehead as if to confer apostolic powers.
He knew the power of ceremonial gestures, though I resisted the idea that I had any special access to God. I was, always, an ordinary man, another follower of Jesus. No more and no less.
I watched with fascination as Paul developed ceremonies that seemed to draw our communities together, giving us a vision. He broke bread and shared cups of wine with gatherings in ways that generated reverence as well as loyalty. “We become one body in the breaking of this bread,” he would say, lifting a tiny loaf above his brow, breaking it. The phrase proved durable and moved from outpost to outpost along Roman byways as our movement spread. “We who are many have become one body,” they would say.
Were those Paul’s words or the words of Jesus? When I asked, he glared at me.
Blunt questions proved an inconvenience. Did I somehow not realize that Paul could speak for Jesus? “Are you with me, my dear Luke?” he would say, raising his voice. “Have I lost your confidence?”
I didn’t doubt him, as I had seen the strength of his utterances, even felt God growing inside me, overwhelming me, in his presence. Paul stood among the prophets, a true descendant of Moses and Ezra, Isaiah and Daniel and Jeremiah. Of course no prophet was perfect except in the quicksilver moment of prophecy.
I loved Paul and his perfervid ways, but he could be awkward and demanding, a human thorn. A look of his could whither a fig tree, I once told him, and he laughed to think I compared him in this to Jesus, who had supposedly cursed a fig tree in Bethany, for reasons I never understood.
“You want everything explained,” Paul said. “This annoys me.”
He knew that I, as a physician, sought explanations. In the pursuit of healing, I must take into account causes and effects. I didn’t often speak in metaphors or parables, preferring the plain sense of things. Nor did I traffic in abstruse thoughts: a trait better left to garrulous Athenians, who made fools of themselves in the public square with arguments and counterarguments, with gaseous musings.
I lay beside him night after night on the road and listened to his stories, hearing them unfold in the dark. It occurred to me that, in living so close to Paul, in listening with such attention to his conversation, I absorbed his way of thought, even his language. Sometimes I could hardly separate myself from him.
The tale of what happened after he got to Damascus rarely varied, and it had about it the exactness of truth. I myself witnessed these events, so I could judge this part of the story. I had come from Antioch to visit Ananias, my uncle, a leader of the Way of Jesus in Syria for some years, and to pursue some business connected with the salves that I had begun to sell throughout the empire, although in small quantities. I had been in the city for only a few weeks when Paul thundered into view, a figure who raised considerable terror, since word had traveled to our ears about the death of our friend Stephen in Jerusalem and the role Paul had played in that grisly execution. He was, my uncle said, “something of a holy madman” with a “vengeful nature.”
The combination of elements here caught my attention. A holy madman?
I must see this for myself, if I could.
Having lost his sight, Paul was led by a kind soul to a house on Straight Street, near the loud, frenetic market where merchants sold spices and leather goods, silk and wool, knives of Damascus steel, trinkets, meat, eggs, and pigeons. Paul knew the city from earlier visits, and he sensed his whereabouts, hearing people shout and laugh, the cluck of chickens, the wheels of carts grinding through dirt and gravel ruts. Someone played a wooden pipe nearby.
In a hot room, with the shutters drawn, Paul sat on a low divan, unable to understand what had befallen him. Had he committed such a miserable transgression that blindness and isolation would consume his future? Would God ever forgive him?
Ananias had told me about Paul’s intention to punish our circle of blasphemers and heretics, which is how he viewed us. Peter in Jerusalem had forewarned my uncle about this fellow, saying in a note that a messenger delivered in the nick of time: “Beware of this rabid one, Paul of Tarsus. He is quite unhinged, a fanatic, possibly deranged and homicidal. He may do great harm to our movement.” Another member of our circle had studied with him at Gamaliel’s school and spoke of his intensity, calling him a fool who nevertheless had a command of the scriptures unlike anyone he had seen before.
But God spoke to my uncle in a dream, informing him that Paul had arrived a couple of days before, and that he would find him in a particular house on Straight Street, which was more like a cave than a comfortable dwelling: the sort of place that attracted no attention. This was important because the followers of Jesus already felt threatened by the Jews in Damascus, who dismissed their fanciful stories about a Christ who had come without a sword, who asked Jews to ignore the Law of Moses.
For three days Paul ate little, rocked in prayer, and begged God for mercy. He saw nothing but flickering spikes of light that actually hurt when they flashed, digging into his brain. He lived on bread and water and was sucked into an empty space, a deep mind well with no bottom.
I arrived with my uncle, and we sat on either side of him on the divan. My curiosity was piqued, and I will never forget my first impression: This wild man was clearly a prophet. A strange glow surrounded him, as if he were a fallen angel in human flesh. His eyes rolled like empty orbs, apparently seeing nothing. He winced and smiled and frowned. He spoke in an excessively loud voice, with authority, even in his great distress.
“I scoured the pit of darkness, below this earth,” Paul told us. “I was tempted. But God is faithful. He never allows temptation to exceed what a man can bear. He shows us how to endure it, how to find a way out.” In the depths, he told us, he spoke face-to-face with Ha-satan, the Adversary, who tempted him with glories. He was offered empires, principalities, a golden throne, a kingdom of his own to rule. But he resisted these enticements. He didn’t want an empire, he told the Wicked One. He wanted the eternal life that had been promised by Jesus, if Jesus wanted him.
“Does Jesus want me?” he asked Ananias.
“He does,” said my uncle, grasping one of his hands.
The room smelled of mud and sweat, and green flies swarmed with their brittle buzzing wings, and I could not breathe. My uncle stood over him, and Paul lifted his chin, as if looking into the sun.
“You persecuted the saints in Jerusalem,” Ananias said, with an unlikely hint of kindness in his voice.
“It is my shame,” Paul said, after a long pause.
Tears gleamed on his cheeks, then sobbing overwhelmed him. And yet Ananias made no effort to comfort him or intervene in this necessary struggle; he merely sat again on the edge of a bed and watched Paul weep, listening as he began to mumble phrases in an alien tongue. Foam seeped from Paul’s lips before he finally spewed a rank green vomit onto the floor. He knelt like a cat, then fell sideways, shuddering, and drew his knees to his chest. More foam ran from his mouth, dribbled into his beard. He had slipped back in time, returning to childhood. Or fallen into complete madness.
As a physician, I could not help myself. I knelt beside him and lifted his head slightly.
“I’m Luke, a physician,” I said. “And I’m visiting from Antioch, here with my uncle, who is beside you.”
“You are with the Christ?” Paul asked.
“Yes, the Christ lives in my soul.”
Paul began to shudder again, quaking so violently that I thought he would break his neck, so I held him to the floor, pressing myself upon him until he grew still.
When the fit ended, Ananias whispered in his ear, “Do you wish to turn away from evil?”
“I do.”
“Will you pray with me, Paul? And Luke?”
“Pray for us, uncle,” I said.
“Pray for me, sir, yes,” said Paul, with a spiritual hunger in his voice that moved me.
Ananias put his palms on the blind yet beseeching eyes, pressing his thumbs into the lids. He prayed intensely, lifting his voice: “This is your servant, Lord. This is Paul. You invite him now to preach to all the children of Israel, and to the Greeks as well. He will stand before kings and queens, proclaim the news of your kingdom, your advent in the world.” He waited for a moment. “You will do this, Paul?”
“I will.”
“As Jesus himself became the servant of his father, you shall be his servant. Remember that Jesus humbled himself, obedient even in death, losing himself in the flesh, finding himself in the spirit.”
With that, light filled the room for Paul, and the face of Ananias wavered into being. He saw the old face smile at him.
“I see you!” said Paul.
“Of course you do.”
I was present at the moment when Paul’s sight returned, and yet he seemed to forget my witness in the room, the fact that I could supply evidence from memory. In later years, I often heard him talk about how his sight returned to him that day on Straight Street. At times he claimed that actual scales fell from his eyes onto the floor like goose feathers and “disappeared miraculously” when he stepped on them. Once in a while he said that Ananias broke into an angelic voice, summoning the angels with a chant. “We heard tambourines, Luke and I, and Ananias—the tinkling of bells, and wonderful strange horns,” he declared, though I never heard these instruments of heaven. “Even the cherubim sang my name, a chorus of welcome.”
So odd, to hear these embellishments, which he could not resist, lifting them into the air as if to test their meaning, truth, and force. And yet the core of the narrative didn’t change.
At the end of this particular story about the experience in Damascus, he invariably intoned: “And the Light of God flooded the world, and I could see at last. There stood beside me Ananias my deliverer and Luke the physician, my dear friend Luke.”
Paul insisted that Ananias take him to the synagogue, only a short distance from the house of Judah, as in his new state of transformation he felt the urge to preach, to declare himself a changed man. The synagogue was familiar to him from earlier visits to Damascus, and he recalled the names of many Jews who worshipped there, and he thought they would never turn him away.
I followed them, curious to see what might occur. As it happened, we found only a handful of elderly Jews in the room, and they did not respond to Paul’s enthusiasm for the fabled rabbi from Nazareth. One or two raised a skeptical eyebrow at Ananias, a Greek whom few of them trusted, and the leader of what they considered an eccentric sect that had drawn too many Jews away from the fold.
I, a Greek stranger, meant nothing to them.
“Do you know the Christ has come?” Paul asked.
They shrugged, looking more with curiosity than anger upon this intrusion, although rage would follow.
“Who is this Christ they speak of?” one of them asked.
Paul blurted out his message, which was not so well refined at the time. I can recall their baffled faces looking up at him. Why was he breaking into their prayer circle in the synagogue? Was this the Jew supposedly sent by the Temple priests to help them deal with the Way, which had caused a good deal of annoyance and threatened their own existence by appealing to Jews and Godfearers alike? Had something gone amiss?
At this point a young man in a filthy tunic walked into the room with the help of a cane, his right leg withered from an affliction of early childhood. It could bear no weight, and he nearly toppled as he leaned forward. Paul saw an opportunity.
“Sir, the Lord Jesus can heal you.”
“What’s he saying?” the poor fellow asked, looking around the room.
The elders shrugged. They had no idea what Paul meant by this assertion.
“Come to me!” Paul cried.
The young man thumped toward Paul, and the elders sat forward in their seats.
One often saw magicians in this synagogue, sorcerers who laid claim to healing powers, but the thought of Paul in this role probably worried them. He looked possessed, his eyes flashing like hooks. His mouth twitched, and he blinked rapidly. I feel quite certain that a light surrounded his head.
“Come,” said Paul, motioning with a hand to the benighted fellow, who approached to within arm’s length, allowing Paul to lean into his face. “Will you kneel with me, sir? And what is your name?”
“I am Jesse.”
“Then kneel, Jesse. You are a gift to this community.”
With difficulty, Jesse knelt. He had learned how to do this in a manner that allowed him to crank himself to a standing position with the good leg while leaning on his cane. It was a maneuver he would avoid, or so I assumed, but he felt drawn to Paul and sensed an opening in his life.
“Believe me, Jesse, that Jesus is your Lord and Master. He can heal this leg, if you put trust wholly in his goodness, in the great goodness of God, our father in heaven.”
The young man dipped his head forward, and Paul put a thumb on his brow.
“Jesus is here,” said Paul. “He’s inside me, inside you, Jesse. I invite the spirit of the Christ to enter the body of this young man and to heal him! Heal him, dear God in heaven! In the name of your son, Jesus!”
Did the walls begin to shake at this point? Did the ceiling lift? Paul claimed they did, although I saw no such thing. But he often felt tremors that eluded others. I don’t doubt that, to him, the ceiling would appear to lift. His world frequently succumbed to trembling. It shook, even splintered and broke apart.
“Say aloud, with me: I love you, Jesus. God, make me whole!”
Jesse repeated this. And he wept now.
Suddenly throwing his cane to one side, a gesture that startled us, he rose and walked across the room with confidence and ease.
“I love God,” Jesse said.
The others murmured, and one of them left the building quickly. Perhaps he wanted to tell others about what had happened to Jesse. Nobody in Damascus could have expected this young man, whom they all knew, to walk again without great pain and the assistance of a cane.
Soon others came to meet this Pharisee who they assumed was an enemy of the Way of Jesus, an emissary of the Temple Guard.
“You are Paul?” someone asked. “You come from the Temple?”
“I’m Paul of Tarsus,” he said. “And yet the Temple of God is here.” His hand touched his breast. “Your own body is a Temple.”
That evening, a gathering of nearly two dozen Jews arrived at the synagogue, several of them upset about what they had heard, questioning the motives of this emissary from Jerusalem. They could not tolerate the idea of Paul as an advocate for the Way of Jesus and had never expected this turn, not from a Pharisee, a student of Gamaliel, an associate of the Temple Guard. To most of them, miracles were off-putting, and Damascus teemed with magicians and mountebanks who made outrageous claims for themselves. Their behavior invited scorn from the authorities, even censure. On the other hand, a man who can heal is always welcome, and several Jews brought relatives who were lame or sick before Paul, who prayed with each of them in turn. In many cases they were healed, though he made it clear that he did not actually do the healing.
“I heal no one,” Paul explained. “Only Jesus the Christ heals. He does so from within. He heals the soul first, then the body.”
The chief rabbi in Damascus at this time was Jacob ben Isaac, who called a number of elders to his house the next day, warning them that trouble might follow from the disruptions of Paul. “I’m not happy about what I hear,” he said. “Those from our tradition who turn against us, these are the ones who create the most trouble.” It was difficult enough to pursue the faith of their fathers in a city overseen by Aretas, a barbarous king who found enemies wherever he looked and punished them swiftly, without mercy.
No Jew felt safe in Damascus now.
Jacob’s council unanimously agreed that Paul must die. They could not afford to let him stir up trouble in Syria, and he had clearly become blasphemous, claiming to heal people in the name of Jesus and not the God of Israel. The sooner they killed him, the better.
They summoned a number of rough young men, laying a plot to kidnap Paul that night. They would take him outside the city walls, where he would be buried in the sand, stoned, then covered over. And nobody would complain to the authorities, who would be only too glad to see the end of this troublemaker from abroad, an alien from Tarsus, another crazy Jew.
But word of this scheme reached Paul, who often talked about what happened that night. I heard many versions over the years, and this again dismayed me because I had been there and seen everything with my own eyes. Did he not believe I had eyes and ears? And why could he never stick to one story, the true one?
“A woman in a white veil told me about this plan to kill me,” he might say. Another time: “God woke me in a dream while I was sleeping and warned me that I would soon be captured and murdered.” The messenger often changed but not the message. There was a modicum of consistency, at least. “I was packed into a laundry basket, then lowered over the city walls at night,” he would say. Or: “I insisted that they put me in a crate, which they tied with ropes, and pushed over the walls of Damascus.” Sometimes the basket went crashing to the ground. Sometimes it seemed “almost to fly” and landed far from the wall in a bed of reeds, although reeds would have been unlikely there, without a river nearby. The “bed of reeds” became “high grass” in due course, and this was probably not inaccurate. The reeds, perhaps, were a bid for an association with Moses in the bulrushes!
Once Paul told an amazed crowd in Antioch that he flew over the city walls. “I stretched out my arms and glided softly in the star-filled night after riding the wind for a good while. And with a company of angels as an escort.”
The angels ruined the story, I explained to him, and he never in my presence used that sullied version again. It was sheer megalomania, even madness. A basket would do, as I had been the one to fetch it, to attach the rope, and to help a few others lower him carefully over the city wall.
As I learned the hard way in later years, it didn’t pay to question Paul too closely, as it could cause him to bristle and fall silent for long periods. He disliked challenges, and the last thing I wanted was to alienate this servant of God, an apostle of our Lord, who had done so much to spread the news of Jesus to the far ends of the earth. Better just to let the stories breathe and carry the crowd, as they usually did.
I learned never to raise my hand in objection, saying, “But I was there…”
My assistance was useful to his missionary work, especially toward the end. He often drew on the sayings of Jesus and the parables I had culled from a variety of sources. The story of the lost sheep and the prodigal son were not broadly in circulation at the time, nor was the tale of the Good Samaritan, which Paul adored and frequently employed. With ease, he folded my notes into his sermons, quoting my versions of the sayings:
Knock and he will open the door, seek and you shall find.
God will always give exactly what you require. He is your own dear father, and will a father deny a fish if his child asks for a fish? Will he offer a snake instead? Of course not. So imagine how much more generous will be your father in heaven than your father on earth!
I heard myself—my own voice—talking in Paul’s public addresses and didn’t mind this eerie ventriloquism: Jesus speaking with the help of scribes, his voice caught and fed through me to Paul, on and on. This is how the spirit moves, around us and within us. I had to trust in this fact of life, to accept it. God had something in mind for me, as he did for Paul. Our meeting in Damascus had been revelatory for me, and it determined the course of the rest of my days, though I didn’t know this at the time.