Chapter Five

PAUL

I could not afford to dawdle, given the hostility around me in Damascus, where both the Jews and the king’s men wanted me dead. Either of these groups, or some ruthless offshoot, might drag me behind the city walls, and I knew how this would end.

“Go now,” Luke, my new friend, had said. “And may God be with you.”

“If I could stay a few more days…” I didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Even saying it, I understood that to remain in this city was not possible. I had only begun to regain my sense of balance, and my vision needed to clarify. I could see, but not well, with streaks of orange-and-red light jabbing into the periphery. I would reach for something, and it would disappear. I stumbled over objects in my path. I mistook one of my sandals for a massive pit viper, which terrified me one morning when I woke, and my high-pitched scream horrified the others.

“You can’t stay,” Luke said. “They will find you soon. The city is small.”

That evening at sunset he and a few others lowered me over the wall in a wicker crate. There was a violet glow on the western rim of the desert, and clouds stretched in broad blue-vermillion lines like veins in a wrist. I landed in high grass that smelled heathery and sweet, then hurried away into the dusk, following a crease through scrubland. A path opened beneath my feet, with the moon casting a shimmer on the pink limestone walls that receded. Where to go?

A return to Jerusalem was unthinkable. The Jews, my former friends and allies, would consider me a traitor, a blasphemer, no better than Stephen and perhaps worse, as I had been an agent of the Temple Guards, sent on a distinct mission. It seemed unlikely that Peter and James, who worked patiently and with ingenuity to maintain good relations with the Jewish community, would find it in their hearts to forgive me for everything I had done. The Jesus circle would never open their arms to one who had so recently been their persecutor.

I must go into the desert, as Jesus had done.

Ananias favored this plan and explained that I would find a stream after two days of walking beyond Damascus, and I should follow it into Arabia. But the wilderness spread in every direction, and I wondered if I could find this rumored stream or, in the end, anyone at all. The company of friends seemed like an impossible shore, and I could feel my body softening, breathing from every pore, as if changing into air as I moved forward. Scuffling sounds in the nearby brush alarmed me, and I feared I could be torn apart by jackals before dawn.

It was all unfamiliar, and I couldn’t think how I had stumbled into this situation, whatever it was. What had actually happened on the way to Damascus?

Possibly I should never have left Jerusalem.

I replayed the scene again and again, but the truth eluded me. No matter, I told myself: I was not the same man who had rushed toward that city with a few comrades, eager for vengeance against those who lived by the name of Jesus and threatened to disrupt the Law of Moses. Now I had been touched by Jesus himself and turned in another direction. And I could not tell where any of this would lead.

From my earliest years I had been enamored of Mosaic Law. It had built bones in me, created my body, and formed the foundation of my soul. I had become its knowledgeable defender. Yet I was a new creature now, a kind of Christ myself—that was my distinct feeling, however hard to understand or fully absorb. Was I deranged, unstrung? Had my companions really not heard the thundering voice that afternoon on the road to Damascus?

“Jesus has spoken, the Lord himself, the Christ, and I’m blinded,” I had said, and wept.

They stood above me, a haze of concern. What did I mean? How could I have lost my sight, and without apparent cause? Who had spoken?

I would often recount what had happened that day, trying to understand the meaning of this holy encounter. I needed to find a narrative sufficient to the experience itself. But what language could suffice, could hope to describe and embody what happened to me that day? A spiritual wind had whirled the desert of my own heart, scattered the sands of my soul, but how could I explain those feelings, which even now churned inside me? How could I account for the radical intervention of God’s presence in my life?

The elderly Ananias had prayed beside me with his nephew, Luke the physician, a dear man from Antioch. They had told me more about Jesus of Nazareth, about his simple birth on his mother’s farm in Galilee, and his long apprenticeship to his father. He and Joseph walked from nearby Nazareth, a tiny village, to the major city of Sepphoris each morning, where masonry skills were in demand, as it recently had become the seat of Herod Antipas, whose royal court drew visitors from distant parts of the Roman Empire. Ananias had any number of anecdotes about the Christ, some of them contradictory. But I was eager to learn more.

Others told me that Jesus had gone off into the Arabian desert by himself, encountering any number of teachers along the way, including magicians who unlocked secrets and recited sutras from hidden scriptures. After forty days of fasting and prayer, and a fiery encounter with the Adversary, Jesus assumed a ministry of healing and teaching, having been immersed in the Jordan by his cousin, John the Baptizer, a man who lived on dry, salted locusts and wild honey and wore only a sackcloth made from the long, bristly hair of camels. He lived in prayer, rejoicing in each moment of life, saying that every step he took was an answer to God.

I enjoyed all stories about this wild man of the desert, this ascetic who lived on the simplest food, who had no pretense or worldly possessions, whose fasting drew him closer to God each hour of the day. I, too, must rejoice and pray without ceasing. “This was the way of John the Baptizer and the Christ as well,” Luke had said.

“And what was the nature of Jesus’s teachings?” I asked him. “What did our Lord ask of us?”

I knew so little about him then. But one must begin somewhere.

“He went among the Essenes,” Luke had told me. “They are a mystical group who live in desert caves, who read the scriptures, every kind of scripture. They meditate, and they sing hymns of their devising.”

I had heard of this sect, a gentle people devoted to reading and all-consuming prayer. They lived in small communities, and would chant together from ancient writings, and had in their possession many versions of the holiest books, as well as esoteric texts, and believed one could find eternal life in death itself, dying into the flesh to emerge in the spirit. I had heard such language before from Greeks in Tarsus, who sometimes carried stories of Eleusis, where sacred mysteries had been celebrated from the beginning of earthly time. Those who worshipped Mithras understood these mysteries as well, which centered on renewal of the spirit.

“It’s like Persephone,” I said to Luke and his uncle, “the descent into death, the awakening in spring. A kind of rebirth.”

His uncle laughed when I suggested this, tugging my ear as if I were a child trying to speak like an adult.

“You’ve spent too many years in study,” Ananias said. “Go into the desert, where all things begin. Luke is right. You will find guides, and they will instruct you in the Way. I can only begin, pointing my finger in a direction that may help, but you must walk that way yourself.”

Ananias told me about a particular community of Essenes who lived near Mount Sinai in the eastern desert. A number of them belonged to the Way of Jesus, and they had key insights that would help me along my own path. “Go there,” he said. “Ask for Musa. They will take you to him. And he will know you are coming.”

“How will he know?”

“Don’t ask this,” he said.

It made no sense to question him, I could tell. But I did wonder how many people in the desert near Mount Sinai might answer to the name of Musa, a common name. On the other hand, Ananias knew something, and this was part of my humbling. I must withdraw and not wish to understand. Nor should I attempt to control outcomes. Instead, with effort, I must learn to pray as Ananias taught me, after the manner of Jesus, crying, Thy will be done.

This concept dizzied me, as I had lived by getting my own way from earliest childhood. I might as well have prayed, My will be done.

“Jesus emptied himself out,” Ananias said.

The phrase played on my ear, beautiful and mysterious.

I found myself thirsty for instruction, having only begun to empty myself into Jesus the Christ, who had emptied himself into me. I would go into the desert, as Ananias suggested, although this would not be undemanding for someone who had spent most of his life in cities. I had never slept like a shepherd under a shower of stars in the company of wild beasts and biting insects. I had never crouched in caves or moved through evergreen forests or across silent deserts. My life had been spent in churning streets and noisy markets, in schoolrooms and synagogues, in the society of rabbis, scholars, merchants, men of trade.

A letter to my father needed writing, that much I knew. I must explain that I would not be shipping hides from Jerusalem to Tarsus, not for a while. I would tell him that Amos could manage. Amos understood exactly where those hides came from, and the supply would not shrink without me. My father would be furious with me, of course, having raised me to meet his expectations, and disobedience never entered his mind as a possibility. Sons did what their fathers required of them. Just in case I felt tempted to stray, he often quoted one of the Proverbs of Solomon: A foolish son is a grief to his father.

But I must seek the face of God, my real father, going into the wilderness as prophets had done for centuries: Ezekiel and Ezra, Miriam, Aaron, Isaiah and Huldah. I must go among the gazelles, jackals, lizards, sand cats, vipers, badgers, scorpions, and fire ants. I must learn to listen for God in the roiling midst of his creation. Live in the whirlwind, listen to the icy choir of stones.

As night settled, with a full moon, the desert opened before me, and I sank happily into the accumulating silence, grateful for the directions of Ananias and the encouragement of his nephew, whom I knew I would see again one day. For now, I would walk myself out and sleep in full exhaustion, spent of myself and my small worries for personal survival. I was nobody, nothing. And it was good to know this in such a visceral way, with the world around me a reflection of my emptiness.

What little I understood of wild places I could trace to Simon, the friend of my youth, who once suggested that a man could live for months in the desert as long as he found something to drink. “You won’t notice at first, but water is everywhere,” he said. He showed me how to suck at the roots of the saltbush for moisture, or tear into the soft bark of the boras tree. He forced me to fill my mouth with juicy red-and-yellow insects and to sip at rock pans in the shelves where water pools at dawn.

I had done all of this in the country beyond Tarsus, though it was long ago.

Late on the second day of my journey, when I had seriously begun to worry about quenching my thirst, I heard the flourish of a stream behind a thicket. A trail moved beside it, and I assumed I could follow this route into the desert. It was the path by the stream that Ananias had mentioned, and God had led me here, as promised in the Psalm: I sought the Lord and he answered me.

I kept to the north side of the stream, stopping occasionally to dangle my feet in the cool water, letting it catch and frill around my ankles. One evening I stopped well before sundown, falling asleep on a patch of moss, drifting in a timeless time. When I woke, I drank as much as I could from the stream before filling my waterskin. I told myself that God had opened his hand for me, and I could nestle in his palm. I felt safe in his presence.

But was I fooling myself?

After eating a handful of nuts and dates, I bathed in a pool where the stream had caught in a backwash of silt, and I remembered Simon, who had plunged headfirst into a swirl. I would never forget how I found him, his limp body in the reeds, and how I lifted him to shore. After the briefest rest, numb with grief, I pulled him over my shoulder and carried him into Tarsus. For a while blood continued to seep from his wound, where the bone of his head was exposed. Then it clotted and caked. The eyes stared ahead, as if he had begun to look beyond his life on earth. Perhaps he had seen eternity, its ring of light. My forearms and hands were stained, sticky and somehow burning. After a couple of hours of walking, I brought my friend to the doorstep of his family house and knocked, wishing myself anywhere else in the world but there. His father opened the door casually, with a slight frown, as if annoyed by having to deal with a visitor.

He looked at me without fear. The poor man.

“Simon has drowned,” I said.

The dead body of his son lay on the ground beside me, where I had gently put it down.

There was a pause as he gathered into himself this blunt and brutal fact, allowing it to seep into his bones and sour the honeycomb of his brain. Like all grief, it had to become physical in order to become real. And yet I never knew horror could take such proportions. In an instant, Simon’s father understood his life was utterly changed and could not settle again into its former texture. He would never sleep without the horror of dreams that could unmake him and never count on eating a meal without thoughts of an absence, a hole ripped in the tissue of his spirit.

He fell on his son’s body with alarming force, burying his face in the child’s stomach.

I caught sight of his mother in the dark shadows of the house as she peered from behind a curtain, her face covered with a shawl. She would never recover, as one does not recover from such a thing.

Some impossible phrases by way of explanation stuttered from me. These fragments hung in the air, dissolving as I stepped backward, eager to get out of their sight.

That afternoon, when I told my father about Simon, he said nothing for a while, walking into another room to collect himself. When he returned, he told me to follow him to Simon’s house. I admired this aspect of my father, his willingness to step into the anguish, not hide from it. “It’s our duty to go there,” he said.

The forlorn parents grieved in silence with a few other friends, the body propped on straw cushions on a table and covered by a linen burial cloth. I could smell the cinnamon and cumin, eerily fragrant, perhaps too sweet, which had been pressed into Simon’s skin. He would be put into the dirt and covered before sundown, as was our custom from the time of Adam and Eve, who had been taught by a raven how to bury Abel, their beloved son; the black ragged bird had scratched in the dirt, and they knew what they must do.

God teaches by symbol and semblance.

I sat behind my father, avoiding the afflicted parents. Nobody spoke, but soon a broad-chested bearded man from the synagogue appeared, a beautiful singer from the tribe of Levi. He lifted a Psalm into the air. Oh God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

In his anguish on the cross, feeling abandoned by heaven, Jesus himself had quoted from this poem by David.

Why hast thou forsaken me? I would ask this question myself so many times in my life.

But there is an honest wildness in such inquiry, facing into pain with an inward rage that works to equalize the violence coming from without.

I wanted this for myself, a wild bravery of spirit.

As I resumed my trek, I thought of Aryeh, who I assumed I would never see again. I longed to hear the timbre of his voice, the eruption of his laughter at unlikely moments, his bluff, easy approach to life. I liked the way he leaned against a doorjamb in his own fashion, watching others at work with a wry wincing smile. His childlike manner contrasted my own looping, convoluted thoughts, my tortuous ruminations, and I wished only to simplify what I thought, to live by a few bold assertions. But this seemed impossible now.

Suddenly a pillar of sand swept toward me, whirling in midair, and I stood amazed before it. In the swirl itself, the black eyes of Aryeh burned, ice and fire.

Was I awake and dreaming?

“You disappoint me, Paul,” a voice said.

Was it possible?

“Why have you not come back to us?”

“I have met Jesus,” I said. “He came to me on the road.”

“You must kill him.”

“He is my Lord.”

“I didn’t expect this, Paul. I thought you and I would fight together—for the twelve tribes, and the one God who rules the universe.”

“I’ve been called by Jesus,” I said. “Let me go!”

He raised his arms in the air, and I could see the auburn hair under his arms, a bare torso. The wind rose in a girdle about him, absorbed him. And soon the air was clear, with no evidence of a sandy pillar.

Was it Aryeh who spoke to me? Or had I met the Adversary, who had assumed this familiar and alluring form? No matter. I felt sure of myself now, and looked at the open horizon, and began to walk into my new life with fresh energies.

Before my escape from Damascus, I had filled a sack with bits and pieces of food, and could feed from this cache for any number of days, maybe weeks, eating as little as possible. Hunger was good, I told myself, as it forced an alertness. I felt nimble and adroit, quick-witted. I had met the Adversary, or some specter, and not been overwhelmed or deceived.

The crude map of the desert that Ananias had drawn led me forward. I would follow this route, avoiding “soldiers and small gatherings,” as he warned me. The news of my change of heart would have traveled, and condemnation would greet me in territories governed by Aretas, who assumed that all of Judea was his. At least for the time being, I would stay far away from towns and villages as I moved into the pink sand and silence before me. The less contact with people, the greater my chances of survival.

Surely my former associates in the Temple Guard would puzzle over my transformation, my apparently traitorous turn, and I did not doubt that Aryeh would feel betrayed, even furious. The fury I had just heard in Aryeh’s voice—real or unreal—rang in my ears.

Stopping to pray by the wayside, I allowed myself to sink into God’s presence, saying nothing. I recalled that my father, a pious Jew, rarely departed from set prayers, which he recited in a low grumble, a scowl on his face as he rocked before a scroll that had belonged to his own father. I tried to imagine a different way of praying, allowing the flames of love to kindle inside me. And I would seek this fire in the desert.

After a week or so, I stopped counting days and simply watched as constellations banked in the sky at night, and I grew more comfortable with sleeping under that luxurious canopy, wrapped in the blanket I carried as a bedroll, my head on a mossy patch or tuft of grass. Sleep enveloped me in its blessing, cushioned me, carried me to a space where I could escape from the hardness of life in the wild, could evade my own terrifying but exhilarating solitude.

I slept in stone huts when I could—one came across them now and then—but mostly it was open air around me or a lee of sand. My sandals barely covered the soles of my feet, their straps wearing thin. My clothes turned into clouds, mere threads that traced the lineaments of flesh, however vaguely. But none of this mattered.

Nobody knew where I was.

I barely knew.

And so I prayed, spending an hour or more in devotion each morning after dawn. At night I would talk to God freely, appealing for mercy. I thought about Mary, the mother of Jesus: Ananias had dwelled on stories of her purity and faithfulness. God singled her out, of all the people in history, as a portal through which his radiant power would pour, an intersection where a timeless vertical beam passed through horizontal time. Mary was chosen for this mission of love and would suffer with him as well.

“She is our mother, too,” said Ananias.

I wanted to find her in Jerusalem one day, to speak to her, as I knew she still lived somewhere in the Upper City, an elderly widow. She was looked after by James and his brothers and revered by many in the Way. And when I dreamed of her, I could see my own lost mother, whom I never knew, with her smile of sweet unending compassion, with a maternal heat that could warm me still.

From the little I knew, I guessed that Jesus had been a tiresome child to raise, determined to gain access to his heavenly father, willfully dismissing his earthly one. I could understand his frustrations. He would have felt the spirit at work in his soul, and this would have both thrilled and terrified him.

I had myself been thrilled and terrified. I began to hear voices more frequently now, many of them suspicious. Devils? The Adversary? I decided to ignore them, unless I sensed that Jesus approached again and wished to communicate with me. I felt quite sure that he would, and that my encounter on the Damascus Road had not been singular, an incident that would never occur again. I expected more from the Lord now, and knew I would get it.

But I must be alert, open to every possibility.

As I knew, angels inhabit unlikely forms, often taking you by surprise, such as when I encountered a hermit in a cave where I took shelter from a particularly nasty sandstorm. I had thought myself alone but heard him snoring only a few feet from where I crouched against a wall in meditation. This ill-shapen creature had an angular jaw, a large crooked nose, and blue scars on his face, as if he’d been through many battles. His look unsettled me, but apprehension turned to gratitude when he offered me a drink of water from his skin and food from a satchel of sycamore figs and raisins mixed with walnuts.

He asked about my destination, aware that most of those he met in the desert were in flight. Why else would anyone be here?

When I told him that Mount Sinai was my goal, he brightened, telling me about the communities that lived in caves. I had made the foolish assumption that, given his odd visage and isolation, he must be illiterate or mad, a lost soul. But he spoke with surprising eloquence and seemed aware of the scrolls in their possession. He wondered if I had any interest in what he called “esoteric learning,” and I nodded, although I didn’t like the term. What was esoteric to one inquirer, the fruit of some foreign tree, might be common fare to another, if we took “esoteric” to mean abstruse and possibly profound as opposed to simply rare and perhaps from another tradition.

I asked if he knew of Musa.

“Musa ben-Zakkai!” he said, with a grin.

He introduced himself as Abel-Sittim, which (according to him) meant “meadow of acacia.” He said he was born beside such a meadow, in a remote part of Judea, where his father had been a shepherd. “But that was long ago,” he said, “in the days when stars applauded us.” I didn’t know what he meant, but it didn’t matter. He appeared well-meaning, intelligent, and kind. I didn’t worry he would stab me while I slept or rob me of my few possessions.

The sandstorm made travel impossible, so I spent two days in conversation with this unlikely new acquaintance. Abel-Sittim was a connoisseur of desert survival, and he told me that almost any insect was good to eat, though I should avoid scorpions. One could feast “quite happily,” he said, on rodents and snakes. Lizards tasted “wonderful when roasted over a fire.” As he pointed out, there were locusts everywhere. “They are the gift of God to anyone who hungers, a feast for our pleasure.”

I wondered about dead snakes, having seen any number of them recently.

“You are not a vulture,” he said. “Carrion may kill you.”

Quicksand was another hazard, he explained, and this was especially so for those unfamiliar with desert ways. He said not to panic should I get stuck. “Lift your knees, lie back and paddle to a dry spot. It is only water and sand, and those who drown in these puddles do so from panic.” Dust storms could also prove fatal, he told me while we hid ourselves from a particularly nasty one that whirled about the cave with a massive whining like a thousand jackals. “Storms suck the goodness from the air,” he continued, appreciating my receptive ears. “Get somewhere you can breathe, into a cave or behind a large rock. Avoid dunes, even though you may feel tempted to shelter against them. It never works. The wind carries sand like waves over any crest, and it may prove impossible to extricate yourself. If there is no shelter, sit with your back to the storm, covering your head and face, keeping low to the ground. Put a wet cloth over your nose and mouth, even your eyes, if you have enough water.”

We talked about water. It is the primary subject among desert people, and he mentioned sources I had never imagined. “The speckled cactus plant will be found everywhere, and it’s clever at collecting moisture,” he said. “You can break off its spikes, and suck on them. But be careful, as they’re sharp!” He mentioned several beetles that acted like sponges and could fill the mouth with an “explosion of moisture.” He said to “pay attention to the birds, and the insects. They know where to find water. Follow them.”

The most dangerous element in the desert was the sun, with its lethal radiance. “Walk by night,” he advised. “It’s the first lesson of the wilderness. Daylight is your enemy.”

I knew this but adored the sun and preferred to walk in its rays, although never in the middle of the day.

With so many pitfalls, it might not be easy to make my way to Mount Sinai unscathed. But spring was an especially good time for desert walking. The weather had yet to begin to blister the rocky ledges, and I could make progress in the early-morning hours, moving in the predawn dark as it faded into light and burst to flame. I would sleep through the midday, taking shelter where I could, under a cliff or ledge, in the lee of a dune, under a date palm, or, ideally, in a sycamore grove. One could create a shelter with dead leaves, too, though I didn’t want to spend much of my time creating shady hutches for myself, which I would abandon after only a few hours of rest. The conservation of energy mattered.

When the storm abated, I thanked Abel-Sittim and set off again, following a narrow trace in the desert that he had recommended.

Hours later I saw the oasis he had told me lay ahead. It was bordered by tamarisk, with a flourishing of date palms. Alas, a caravan watered their camels there: never a good sign. I approached the men warily, as desert people jealously guarded sources of water, and one could easily cause offense, which could lead to violence, even death. Nobody in the desert worried about courts of law, so murder was unimportant, simply a reflex. This was a savage world, and you survived by your wits, or didn’t.

I approached a thin, dark man who stood by a camel with its long neck dipping forward toward the water. He knew some Greek, much to my relief, and asked for my destination. I didn’t fully trust him but had a hunch this caravan might help me along a potentially treacherous way, where you could easily be waylaid by thieves or worse. Abel-Sittim had been quite explicit about what dangers lay ahead.

For a sum, Dumuzi—he had given me his name—said I could join the caravan. He stated this with authority, so I assumed he didn’t have to consult the others. And soon I discovered that nobody objected to my presence. Nor did anyone welcome me. They hardly seemed to see me, though one prune-skinned older man brought me a cup of barley beer one day after we set off. Perhaps I was not as offensive to them as I had thought.

Without reason, I began to trust these rough-hewn men, and the routines of caravan life soothed me, with travel beginning in the middle of the night and continuing through the first part of morning. During the midday hours, they lay in the shade of their tents, sleeping on cushions or under trees when possible. As the sun tilted into evening, they would begin again, pushing ahead on their camels until dark, sleeping for a while, then beginning again. It was as if they had been traveling for centuries and, in a way, they had.

I fell into these rhythms, in the soothing cradle of long-established routines, and found that, like them, I could sleep heavily without notice. Too heavily perhaps, as I woke one day with Dumuzi hovering near. He breathed deeply, rumbling like a cat, watching to see if I would waken. It relieved me to find my coins intact, and from this point on I slept with my pouch under my head for a pillow. I must guard my few possessions, especially this little cache of money, which might provide a lifeline at some point.

Dumuzi and I exchanged a few words each day, though nobody else spoke to me or caught my eye; loneliness didn’t trouble me, however. I savored my independence and worked to bolster my prayer life. Praying (which I could do as I walked or, more easily, before I slept) became a source of nourishment and a place of refuge. I could feel the presence of God flow through the rooms of my mind like the odor of jasmine, those aromatic tiny white flowers that open in the wilderness at night to become low little stars.

When I felt pain, exhaustion, or fear, I told myself that these feelings were just the cracking of a shell that enclosed the truth. It might hurt to break through this shell, but it must be done—just as a chick must shatter its eggshell to emerge.

My Lord, Jesus, I would pray, take everything from me. Fill me. Make me your vessel on this earth, your hands in the world, your voice.

After four weeks of travel, when mostly I walked beside the camels and once or twice rode high on their humps, I found myself in the depths of Arabia, somewhere in the purple foothills near Mount Sinai that Abel-Sittim had described. And one morning, at the outskirts of a village, Dumuzi said, “We arrive for you.” He winked and grinned, ever so briefly, before turning away.

I understood what this meant.

The caravan rested in the shadow of clustering palms, and nobody seemed to notice as I gathered my few things and, as unexpectedly as I had joined them, walked off by myself. One man, posted as a kind of sentry at the edge of their encampment, saw me go. I didn’t trust this fellow, who had a dark semicircular scar on his cheek and one tooth (his only one) that reached over his bottom lip in a most disgusting fashion. I had nodded to him a few times before, without a response; now I glanced at him casually, as if nothing was amiss, and moved ahead steadily, my head down, half expecting a hand on my shoulder.

But I was not their prisoner and nothing happened. I didn’t need to take my leave of the group in any formal manner, as they had largely remained indifferent to my presence. Whether Dumuzi shared any of my payment with them, I could not know. Nor did I care now.

In the village itself, which was much larger than it appeared from a distance, I found the local synagogue, where I spoke with a man who directed me to the house of Milka, a widow only too glad for a paying guest. We sat together in her garden with a cup of wine, and she told me that she had never been to Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, but hoped one day to make the journey for Passover. Her spiritual hunger impressed me, and I explained that new voices had emerged among our people.

She welcomed my stories about Jesus, whom I carefully described as a “great rabbi.”

I often referred to him as Rabbi Jesus, especially among Jews, telling them that as a boy he had discussed the scriptures with the wise and erudite scholars of the Temple, and his knowledge had amazed them. He seemed to have read and fully absorbed the five books of Moses, the prophetic writings, and the Ketuvim as well—those poetic anthologies of wisdom that included a variety of psalms and proverbs. (As I would learn, Jesus had a special fondness for the prophecies of Daniel.)

Milka knew something of Musa and said that she could get word to him about me. This amazed but didn’t surprise me: Everything in my life felt improbable now. So I made a plan to sit still, often in prayer, waiting for Musa. I might have stayed for several months with Milka and it would not have troubled me, as great happiness flowed in me and her kindness and hospitality pleased me.

But after only a few days, at daybreak, Musa himself stood at the edge of my pallet, waking me with a sharp cough.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

His gold eyes darted around the room, but he was not shifty. The world inside him expanded, growing wider with each breath. His long face was made of putty, caked and cracked by the sun, flaking when he grinned. His nose swelled at the tip, a fist of purple veins. His toes bulged from his sandals, knobs of flesh with black nails, and his hands were yellow with a parchment-like pallor—the large callused hands of a man who had lived rough for most of his life.

“Gather yourself and come,” he said.

Milka stood in the background and looked at me, perhaps a little sadly, putting dried meats into my sack and then touching my forehead with her thumbs as a form of blessing. “I will miss you,” she said. And I would miss her, more than I could ever miss the invisible mother I never knew.

I followed my new master on foot beyond the village into the mountains, drawn into the wake of his long strides. He carried his own food, which he shared: stale bread, nuts, seed cakes, raisins. He said he would take me to a settlement near the holy mountain, where I would meet his friends and fellow Essenes. “They have been expecting you,” he said.

Exactly how that could be the case eluded me. But what did I really know?

We talked of Jesus that evening beside a small fire, and it startled me how much he knew.

“He lived among us for a few years,” Musa told me. “He studied our scriptures. But he knew most of them already by heart. Even the lost songs.” He added: “What a beautiful chant he could lift to the heavens. The stars would gather overhead to listen.”

He referred to the hundreds of psalms in the vein of the Davidic hymns. They were gorgeously framed, mystical, and moving, and I would learn many of them myself and recite them before sleeping or when, in the middle of the night, I woke with terrors: Lord, my master, fill me now and find a place in this world. Lord God Almighty, make me whole and make me hale, a part of your deep and vegetable kingdom, acceptable and lovely in your sight, your own forever.

I was glad that I committed that one to memory, as I never found it again, not in any other scroll.

Musa took a special interest in my education, telling me about the Garden of Twelve Palm Trees, in Bethany. Jesus had gathered his disciples there and taught them the secrets of deep affiliation with God through prayer. He demonstrated before them a form of communion that he perfected among the Essenes, who spent much of their lives deciphering ancient manuscripts, meditating or praying, forging their connection to heaven. “We are the sons and daughters of God,” Musa told me. “Jesus understood that God is presence: I am that I am. This is what God said to Moses. I am the Way, and also the Light.”

Musa unsettled me when he would burst into laughter at odd moments, shaking and even salivating with amusement, as if suddenly aware of some private and quite hilarious joke.

“You have no sense of humor, Paul,” he said one day. “It is your principal defect.”

I objected, but there was a point in his remark, and it was probably true. Humor had never been one of my gifts, and I regretted this. It’s better to laugh than to weep, as laughter is a balm for wounds of the heart.

Musa would talk a lot to himself or to God—or possibly the angels. Alone with him, an otherwise empty room felt crowded, with invisible ears and eyes all around. In a cave as I slept beside him during our first night together, I heard strange laughter in the dark.

At his bidding, I soon found myself absorbed in translations of ancient texts from the Chaldeans. “The holy sages of Babylon passed along these revelations. They understood the figures in the constellations. A few of them traveled a great distance to find Jesus the infant, who was born beneath an especially bright star.” This was among many stories that would circulate in various forms in the decades to come, and Luke often extracted them from me. To be frank, I invented variations at will, depending on my mood, although I trusted in God to guide my imagination on the paths of righteousness. I heard many contradictory but often credible and illuminating things about Jesus, and learned to accept them as ornaments, to treasure them, holding them in my hand like fruit from a strange tree.

But not every piece of exotic fruit should be eaten.

“Study the scrolls,” Musa said, “and pray over them. Then we can talk about their meaning.”

These teachings had been handed down over generations, carried by groups of men and women from as far away as the legendary Kush and preserved in dry caves, now treasured and examined by this community.

“Once you absorb our teachings, you will never dream in the same way,” Musa told me.

Musa called Abraham our “true father,” reasoning thus: “He was not a Jew—not in his own mind. God’s commandments came to Moses many years later, as we know. But Abraham was the father of everyone, Jew and gentile, the beloved of God. He worshipped God as the single master of the cosmos.”

This rhymed with my own preference for Abraham over Moses as the true father of mankind, the source of our longings, our dreams, our ideas of justice and redemption. (I had to work very hard not to dislike Moses, whose arrogance worried me.)

With his odd and discomfiting thoughts, Musa jolted me out of the complacent ideas with which I had lived so comfortably for much of my life. He didn’t let me fall back on facile thinking or received wisdom. “That is not wisdom,” he would say. “Wisdom allows for the unexpected. It feeds on error, which it modifies into truth.” And so I began to read again as if for the first time the opening movements of the Torah, marveling at the work of God as delivered by Abraham our father.

A long period of study, prayer, and meditation followed, and gradually I found my place in this community, which had welcomed me without reservation, asking no questions about my past, taking me for who I was.

The Essenes worked and studied with an impressive stillness. Musa told them about my father’s trade, and I was glad to pass along my skills at tent-making: how to sew the seams in a way that would form a barrier against sun and rain, how to find the most durable materials, what tools worked well. We sat together in silence, studying in the pink-and-gray early hours of the day, and prayed together in the evenings. And we kept the Sabbath, a time for deep prayer and rejoicing.

Musa and most of the others here had encountered Jesus, many of them personally, and they often would talk about their experience. This was useful, as I continued to try to understand and absorb what had happened to me on the Damascus Road. This was probably the work of my life, as I knew. What did Jesus want of me? Obedience? Was the Christ simply another god who needed my fealty? I put this last question to Musa.

“Jesus doesn’t want or need your allegiance.”

“So what does he need?”

“The universe has no need. He is the Logos.”

“Meaning?”

“He directs us to an awareness that was here before and after everything. He is understanding itself.”

“That is cryptic,” I said.

“I don’t wish to confuse you.”

I pondered what he had said. “I must pray to God?”

“No,” he said. “You must learn to pray through God.”

It would take time for these ideas to make sense, for them to settle into that depth below depths, where we no longer ask questions but sit beyond any need for understanding or logical thought. A thought, to become your own, must taste of acacia and fresh figs. It must have an aroma, the sharp smell of reality. It must sting like nettles.

“We live in a thousand minds at once, in the Christ,” said Musa. “We unleash ourselves, let go. We are one body, not alone. Not ourselves.”

After a day of labor, in my case working to repair canopies, I sat with Musa and the others around a fire, and we broke bread together, then passed a cup of wine, and the heavens opened inside us.

“I give you this, the resurrection,” said Musa, intoning. “We rise together.”

And everyone said, “We rise together.”

I said it myself, over and over. And I would rise, with them, that day.