Chapter Fourteen
PAUL
We left Athens unhappily. It had not gone as well as I hoped, and I could see no point in remaining. The Athenians had only a limited understanding of the workings of the spirit, and their cynicism had overwhelmed their intelligence. Perhaps I would go back there one day, if the Almighty Lord pushed me in this direction, although I worried that the time drew short and that little would change in this city before the end of history. It occurred to me that Luke, however resilient, had no interest in rhetoric or inquiry. My sense of Athens as a place of high argument and philosophic inquisition failed to move him. He had not been schooled in Plato, in the Attic poets and playwrights, as I had. And he held a low opinion of the young men who gathered in the olive grove to walk where Plato had walked and taught. Wealth and position, he said, had blinded them to truth.
Now the prospect of Corinth—a gaudy jewel in the diadem of the Achaean world—brightened on the horizon. It was our next destination, and we moved forward without regret. I was learning this hard lesson, how to leave what must be left, how to accept failures, to adjust to them, and to face the days ahead unhampered, unbowed.
We stopped at Eleusis at my insistence, though Luke dismissed it as “a cesspool of superstition.” I knew something of the parades that arrived twice yearly by torchlight, descending on Eleusis with hope as well as trepidation. And I admired the compulsion of these pilgrims to understand the mysteries of the site, whatever the cost. I thought of them as we walked along the Sacred Way, which led out of Athens to this holy place and its cypress grove.
Throughout the year, seekers engaged with the priests here, learning about resurrection, as taught through the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Musa had possessed a knowledge of these mysteries, and he didn’t dismiss the truth of what lay behind this Greek story of death and rebirth, with its rites of initiation. “All truth comes to us obliquely,” he told me, “through stories. A myth is a story that isn’t just true; it’s more than true. It marks a tear in the fabric of reality.”
Musa insisted that resurrection must occur each day, if not several times each day. Once I asked him about death, and he said, “Life comes, at birth, as a glorious sunrise. I have no reason to expect anything less of death.” He spoke often of Demeter, the goddess of nature, and her beautiful young daughter, Kore, with her curly auburn hair, who had been kidnapped by Hades, the master of the underworld. Demeter searched in vain for the missing girl, coming to rest in Eleusis, full of despair. In the guise of an old crone, she looked after the queen’s son, dipping him in cool liquid fires that made him immortal. He became a splendid princeling, devoted to the cultivation of crops and the seasonal rounds of agriculture. But in sympathy the crops failed as Demeter’s grief for her daughter increased year by agonizing year. Seeing this pain, the prince asked the gods to intervene, and Zeus obliged him, persuading Hades, the dark master, to allow Kore—now renamed Persephone—to return to the world of light, although she had been tricked into eating deadly pomegranate seeds, which meant she must spend half of each year in the land of the dead.
The story embodied a great mystery: the dying of the natural world in the autumn, its revival in springtime. Eleusis taught the truth of this mystery, and transmogrified all who understood its message and thereby lost their fear of death, becoming aware that death is simply part of life. But Jesus, as I knew, signaled the end of this cycle. He put death to death, by his own death and resurrection. Just thinking of this truth, its ferocity and wonder, I felt emboldened. I would bring Corinth to the foot of the cross. We would excite and transmogrify the Greeks, this wise and spirit-filled people, who would join us in our efforts to create the world again, once and for all.
I had planted seeds in Athens, that much I knew, and these seeds would drift toward Corinth, perhaps would populate the whole of Greece one day.
Several votaries stood outside the Hall of the Mysteries, a formidable temple erected to shelter those devoted to the spirit of this place. As many as three thousand worshippers came in the autumn and spring at appointed times to celebrate the story of Demeter and Persephone. Those who dared to brave the mysteries would be led by a priest into a dark cave, descending with him into the underworld, where they encountered in that twilight world the ghosts who lived there. The goal of this descent was to reemerge in daylight, coming back to life from a kind of death.
“It’s not unlike baptism,” Luke said, when I explained this.
“How strange to see a parallel there,” I said.
He didn’t mind when I mocked him. Indeed, I liked Luke because of his infinite capacity for humiliation. (And tried very hard not to take advantage of this.) That he would make occasional jokes at my expense didn’t matter; my resilience overrode this. I indulged him, appreciating his loyalty and the fact that I could throw ideas against the wall of his mind, see them scatter and reassemble. At times he drew me toward the earth. His clarity had a calming effect, prompting me to think of those lines of Horace: “Reason and sense promote tranquility, / Not villas that look out upon the sea.”
We sat in the pooling shade with a number of intelligent young men, and I found in them fertile ground for persuasion: Greek minds eager to understand the mysteries of life. They took a keen interest in our stories of Jesus, and one of them, seized by the spirit of God quite unexpectedly, asked me to baptize him in a nearby stream.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Luke said to me.
“Let the spirit do its work. Don’t interfere!”
To be frank, I wished for more like this young man, and for a violence of conversion, for masses awakening to the call of God through the voice of Jesus. It was not always necessary for a man or woman fully to comprehend what I said. Understanding might come slowly, in time—if time was allowed. To rest in God mattered more than anything else.
The journey from Eleusis to Corinth took us southwest along a coastline of sheer cliffs, where we stopped in tiny villages and sat with the Greek fishermen, who fed us sardines wrapped in fig leaves and steamed over hot coals. They had no interest in hearing about Jesus but politely listened to our stories. At Megara, with its beach like a half-moon of sand, I watched long-legged boys with spears who waded up to their thighs in green surf and stabbed the fish that swam close.
“Call me a fisher of men,” I said.
“One of the best lines of our Lord,” Luke said. “It will go into my story.” As ever he gathered quotations for his life of Jesus and regularly sent versions of this book to Rome by messenger for safekeeping. Our travels were such that we could never depend upon arrival, but we could count on dear Patrobas, who had collected written material for the Way for some years, welcoming everything that Luke would send.
And yet I wondered if Luke’s work would ever see daylight. His meticulous nature might impede his ability to finish a final version of this life of Jesus. (Already other accounts circulated in various drafts, and I had read two or three of them, frustrated by their apparent contradictions and lack of focus.) That Luke planned to write a narrative of our missionary journeys did worry me, as he saw everything strictly in his terms, believing in his own truth as the universal reality, always proceeding along the most logical lines. This was, perhaps, a consequence of his medical training.
On the other hand, I felt lucky to have Luke walk beside me.
We arrived in Corinth on a brilliant afternoon. It had none of the stuffy and self-congratulatory atmosphere of Athens, and I was relieved to enter this swarming and abundant city. From its ports at Cenchreae or Lechaeum sailors arrived in vessels from the world over, and the markets pulsed with a variety of hucksters who had things to sell: leather goods, silks, woolen blankets, baskets, jewelry, bronze and clay pots, glassware, paintings, silver platters, and exquisite pieces of marble sculpture. Everything opened to the eyes and ears: temples and monuments, bathhouses, public fountains, an amphitheater for games, and a capacious odeum for the recitation of poetry and song. Statues of one goddess or another rose in nooks and crannies, some gilded or cloaked in scarlet masks. There were porticoes and long colonnades on the main streets. The massive bronze figure of Helios, the sun god, took dominion over the principle gate to the city, with its big brass doors. Helios rode in a chariot with his son Phaëthon, and this seemed fitting, as the sun flooded Corinth, which had become a prized colony of Rome.
We stopped to gaze at the city from a nearby hill, with a view of the Gulf of Corinth and the surrounding mountains. A golden river slipped past Corinth, then emptied into the harbor below. It rippled by the Temple of Priapus, that rustic god of fertility, whose obscenely swollen member adorned statuary throughout the city. One could feel diverse erotic energies at work here.
The Temple of Aphrodite crowned the Acrocorinth, where alabaster columns suggested a purity it did not possess. The structure—really a sequence of buildings and open spaces between them—swarmed with more than a thousand whores, “priestesses” who offered their wares to sailors who made a point of stopping at this port. And this sordid aspect of Corinth reached back many centuries: Plato had referred to a whore when he used the phrase “a Corinthian girl.” I mentioned this to Luke, who recalled a lurid Greek epigram of unknown origin: “The lively girls of Corinth never slack. / One finds them in the temple, on their back.”
It surprised me that Luke, of all people, should allow such a fragment to stick in memory.
I had seen promiscuity and fornication before, often in grotesque incarnations, as in Cyprus at the governor’s palace, where the most insolent acts took place in public view. But Corinth seethed on another level. Commerce ruled here, and the Corinthians brought carnality to a feverish level, as any physical desire could find fulfillment for a price. Anything or (nearly) anyone could be bought or sold in this city.
I knew something of their history. The original Corinthians had fled two centuries ago to the island of Delos, chased out by marauding armies. In recent times they had returned, eager to compete with Greeks from elsewhere, outwitting Syrians, Egyptians, and Jews from the farthest corners of the empire. The Jews had a pervasive presence here, and one or two of the prominent synagogues attracted Godfearers, ever the most receptive audience for our message.
As always, Luke and I sought out the Jews, and I did my best to capture their attention by proclaiming myself “a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, trained under Gamaliel.” It was my opening pitch in most synagogues, but here it drew only sighs of indifference. I did manage to read from the scrolls on the Sabbath, as they had few enough readers who could actually read aloud in Hebrew or Aramaic; but my reflections on Rabbi Jesus attracted neither rebuttal nor assent. One elder at the synagogue on Melus Street said, “I believe that many new voices have arisen, and your rabbi is one among them.” He told me that Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, had quite a following. And Apollos had apparently been baptized by John himself in the Jordan.
Luke said, “We should meet this Apollos.”
I was skeptical: Our world teemed with wandering mystics and mountebanks, healers and tricksters. It seemed unlikely that Apollos would interest me, except in that he had won admirers throughout the eastern empire.
It wasn’t a month before we met Prisca and Aquila. They had been among the Jews expelled from Rome by the emperor, who now and then took against those who refused to acknowledge his divinity. They worked in leather and made a handy living in the repair of tents and sails in the western district of Corinth, where craftsmen labored in small workshops, and attended a synagogue led by Crispus, a kind and receptive rabbi who would prove an advocate for our circle in Corinth. I quickly liked this young couple. Prisca was shockingly clever, with an ardent manner and blazing tongue. But I never was afraid of her. Aquila, her husband, was by contrast laconic, offering only a few words on any occasion. But I trusted him and understood that Prisca thrived in his presence. They were devoted to God and had come into contact with the Way in Rome.
I wasted no time in telling them about my encounter with the Christ on the Damascus Road, my subsequent years in the desert with Musa, and my travels among Jews and Godfearers throughout Asia, Macedonia, and Greece, where many of those I met had opened their hearts to the energies of the spirit, all in preparation for the establishment of the kingdom. I mentioned the gatherings, too.
“We’ve been to such gatherings in Rome,” said Prisca.
She didn’t say more, as if she didn’t yet trust me.
Prisca was taller than Aquila by half a foot, lean and lithe. Luke said (to my annoyance) that she “looked like a young man.” She certainly wore her hair shorter than women commonly did and carried herself in a confident way. Her eyes lit up when she talked. When she sang, she did so in a sonorous, lovely, low-pitched voice. She liked people, and her long fingers often reached out to those around her.
It surprised me, pleasantly, that when we held our first gathering at Corinth, Prisca spoke so eloquently about the Kingdom of God and “the New Covenant of the Christ.” Her grasp of the Way impressed me, as did her reflections on the scriptures. I had not imagined I would meet such a follower of the Way in Greece, one with such knowledge and aplomb. Her father, she told me, had been a rabbi, and he had taught his beloved daughter to read the Torah in Hebrew. Most women never actually learned to read, and few gatherings of Jews admitted them to their inner circle. Her way of talking mirrored my own, and she often echoed my words as well, giving back what I said in clarified form, shaped in her own way. I loved her peculiar energies, the way she brought life into a room. I admired, even envied, Aquila for his connection to Prisca and his own wise silences.
Had I been younger, and Prisca not married, I might have wished for a closer friendship. That I could imagine myself married to her quite shocked me—I had never had such a thought before. It made no sense to me. But perhaps life makes less sense than I would have preferred, and I must accept this as one of its limitations.
To my dismay, I was unable to expel fantasies of sexual relations in Corinth, as hardly a day passed without a whore approaching me. Beautiful young men, too, winked at me, asking if I wished to walk away with them, for a price. I never knew what to say to these steadfast workers in the flesh, whom I did not disdain or rebuke. Had not Jesus been willing to talk with whores?
One night, as I walked alone in a public garden, a young woman, not unlike Prisca in outline, with long legs and arms, with a sloping neck and short hair, approached me, stepping from the shadows of an umbrella pine in the burning moonlight. Her eyes sank their hooks into my heart.
“You would like to spend a little time with me?” she asked.
Her voice was like a boy’s, fluting and steely, as were her thin hips, her lanky form.
“I have very little money,” I said.
“Whatever you have is fine,” she said, drawing close to me, putting her arms around me.
Her honeyed breath lured me toward her, and I kissed her mouth, then touched her breasts with my tongue. The salty sweetness appealed to me, and I let myself kiss her belly as well. Her arms pulled me toward her with such force. And I lay with her that evening on the grass under a million stars, in a shower of comets, allowing her to press herself against me, letting the length of her inform me, becoming a part of me as I became a part of her. I touched her in ways I had only imagined in the years before this, savoring each moment as she pressed upon me, her body rising above me, enveloping my manhood as I held my hands against her tight buttocks and let myself go.
I walked home in the dawn light in a state of mingling excitement, confusion, and remorse.
I wept, then prayed desperately on my knees the next morning: Lord, forgive me for what I have done. I have not listened to your voice. I have turned my back on you. I am sorry. And I will turn away from this. I promise now with every fiber of my being. I promise!
Luke appeared behind me and stood with a hand on my shoulder.
“Is something wrong, Paul? You didn’t come home last night, and I was afraid for you. I almost went out looking. The darkness is unsafe.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You look well enough,” he said. “But I don’t think you are fine. No.”
“Do you believe—deeply in your heart—that God forgives us, again and again? No matter what we do?”
“Have you done something in need of forgiveness?”
I broke into tears and revealed everything to Luke. I could not hold back, not now, and not with him. That would have been pointless. In deep sympathy, he sat beside me on a divan, with an arm around me. “You have only been human,” he said, “and God asks no more of us than our brokenness.”
It was a kind thing for him to say in this circumstance, and useful as well. Suddenly I understood in a most visceral way the crooked timber from which God had fashioned us, and knew it was impossible to live in the purity to which I aspired. That had been a fantasy of mine.
“I’m broken,” I said.
“You can’t understand God’s forgiveness if you can’t forgive yourself. Have pity, my friend, on your own heart.”
I never loved dear Luke more than on that quiet morning in Corinth. I felt truly human for perhaps the first time in my life, and utterly exposed as well, knowing at last that God had forgiven me, as he forgave everyone. As I forgave myself, and I did.
I surprised Prisca and Aquila with my skills at tent-making and the repair and manufacture of sails, and they invited me to work every day beside them in the shop that they recently opened in Corinth. It felt good to plunge into this task again, reviving old skills. I was able, for instance, to procure hides from local temples, where sacrificial offerings meant an abundance of goatskin, which we dressed with alum—perfect for certain kinds of sails. The demand for our strong sails only increased when it became clear they could withstand heavy weather at sea, and soon we had to employ others in the task of production.
It delighted me to see Prisca and Aquila so happy with these results.
“We must put a fair portion of this money aside for the Jerusalem gathering,” I said.
News of the drought in Palestine had been filtering in for months, with reports of a desperate famine, and I explained to my friends that we should follow the example of Jesus and give as much, even more, than we could afford. Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will after many days return to you, one read in Ecclesiastes. This rang in my heart as the height of ethical wisdom. God would only reward our loving with more love. There was a glorious circle of affection that we could describe.
It also mattered that we should not lose the confidence of the Pillars, who must regard us as supportive, not peripheral or oppositional. Though we differed on certain matters, we worked in our separate ways to make the world ready for the return of the Christ, helping to realize the Kingdom of God. “Many messengers,” I would say, “but only one message.”
I never planned to stay in Corinth for nearly two years and longed to return to Macedonia, sensing that the spirit breathed a deep life into the assembly at Philippi, Lydia’s gathering, which could become a base for our movement in the West. Lydia had begun to gather money for the Jerusalem collection after I had written to her about this project, responding as I knew she would. I hoped to return to transport her gift, and those of others, to Judea myself. I would go with Luke and Timothy at my side, and perhaps Silas as well. It would be a kind of triumph for us, for our movement in the West.
But I worried about Timothy, whom I had sent back into Thessalonica. What had become of him? And what would I tell his mother if I never found him again?
The question of Timothy preoccupied me as I sat at my table in the shop, surrounded by sails and canvases. I suffered now, filled with a strange and horrible longing I could not quite assuage or understand.
Aquila said little, which was true to his nature, but Prisca told me countless good stories about the assembly in Rome, where the Way now prospered, and I prodded her for more details. What had Peter said to the circle when he passed through the capital? Did Andrew come as well? The Good News had begun to flood the synagogues at the heart of the empire, and the Way attracted a growing number of Godfearers in the emperor’s court, even within his own family. All of this boded well for us.
Roman seamen came frequently to our shop with sails to repair, and they added to my fund of stories. As ever, I longed to go to Rome, to see for myself the Forum where Cicero had walked and talked. And the Circus Maximus, which owed its grandeur to Julius Caesar. This great city continued to grow as a destiny in my imagination, and I knew that God called me there. One day I would stand on the Palatine Hill and proclaim the glory of God and the healing energies of his son, Jesus of Nazareth. I would stand at the imperial center.
Prisca never tired of my questions about her city, and said, “Well, you must go there.”
“One day,” I said.
Luke and I moved among the synagogues on the Sabbath, expanding our contacts within the community of Corinthian Jews. And we held meetings each week on the First Day in Prisca and Aquila’s house, which Luke and I shared with them, on Corvo Street. Our assembly multiplied week by week, spilling into their garden, where eventually we had as many as three dozen worshippers, mostly Greeks, who saw the love of God expressed in the face of Jesus and labored in the anticipation of his return. We shared the sacred meal, and I would talk afterward about whatever passages in the scriptures had caught my attention in recent days. Luke would sometimes read sayings of Jesus culled from one or another of his collections.
I would sit in the garden alone with Prisca at twilight, drinking wine, listening to the nightingales and owls, which lifted their songs over the constant thrumming of the cicadas. Thousands of fireflies flashed and failed in the dark, a mirror of my soul, which tingled as we leaned into each other.
How can I talk about this with moderation? I loved Prisca. And thought about her constantly.
“Your obsession with her is evident, and it’s unhealthy,” Luke said.
I didn’t agree. One knows God through people and in people. I felt the love of God in Prisca, in the way her sympathies lit my day. I wanted simply to live in her company. I wanted to know her, more and more, finding out everything about her. The slightest detail from her past interested me, such as what she liked to eat as a child, what stories her father told her before sleeping, how she liked to play a flute in the family garden or walk alone by the river through the great city, dreaming of the vast imperial web of roads and remote outposts she would visit one day.
She knew the writings of Plato and Heracleitus quite well, and we talked at length about the meaning of Logos. “Everything passes, changes,” said Heracleitus, “but the Logos remains, it’s what we hold in common.” Even before I could articulate the association, she compared the Logos to God and his manifestation in Jesus. It was, she said, “what Jesus had in common with God, the core element of his Christhood.” At times Prisca went a little far, perhaps revealing too much, as when she said, “Aquila and I, let me say…we do enjoy our bodies. We live inside each other. But our souls are conjoined as well, and the spirit exceeds the boundaries of our flesh.”
I didn’t need to be told this, because I had a room adjacent to their bedroom and had been shaken by their cries in the night. I knew only too well the configurations of their physical love and could imagine their ecstasies. Love among the married was not a sin, of course, unless it was misused. Lust itself was human and necessary, as it drew a man and a woman together, a gift from God, a way of intersecting souls and creating the race. But hadn’t the time for generation ended? Was it not the right moment to cast our thoughts beyond the mortal world?
I understood their dilemma, of course. I knew as well as they did that lust overwhelms us, as I myself had been overwhelmed.
I wanted to lie with Prisca, that was true. But I knew I must banish such thoughts, and I prayed fervently, asking God to spare me, to relieve me of the images and feelings that made me weak in her presence. I begged him to pluck me from these flames.
I began to worry about Timothy now. Had he been killed or imprisoned? There was nowhere to send a letter to him, though I tried to get information about his whereabouts as best I could.
“You’re mad, Paul,” Luke said, when I revealed my worries. “The young take care of themselves. Timothy and Silas are competent men.” After a pause, he said, “Silas in particular.”
This gave me no comfort. Having promised Timothy’s mother that I would look after him, what had I done?
Luke heard rumors that a number of missionaries from Jerusalem had passed through Thessalonica and Galatia as well, and they had severely contradicted the message I had brought from the Pillars. It was even worse. They insisted that James had strongly condemned my teachings, calling me a false prophet, a derogator of the Law of Moses. He claimed that Jesus would not have found anything I said plausible. I was a manifestation of Ha-satan, the Adversary.
Me!
I took it upon myself to write sharp letters to the gatherings where these evil things might be believed. It was tedious, the way I must repeat myself. The mysteries must remain mysteries, as we possess only a partial view, and our vision is distorted; we look through a milky glass. It became clearer to me each day that God addressed the whole world in Jesus, not only the Jews, as James would have it. God was God, of course, and still Jehovah, in love with Israel, but Israel itself would expand to include the whole of the human race. No man or woman in the end would be lost.
I fear that some of my darker energies got into my reflections, and Prisca upbraided me after one of my weekly talks. “You often lose me, Paul. I can’t follow your thinking,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
I didn’t really answer her, but I leaned close, eager to smell her breath.
Luke saw this and said, “You look at Prisca in ways that make me, and probably her, uneasy. You sigh plaintively in her company. Your longing is palpable, and Aquila has noticed this as well. He is restrained but not blind!”
Such nonsense, I told him. But I knew what I had done and felt guilty as charged. I slumped into a darkness of the soul, and no depth of prayer relieved me or could take me out of this hole. Perhaps James was right, I thought. I was a pawn of the Adversary, lost in the well of my own black soul. Night after night I lay awake, fearing that the dawn would never come. And then I was afraid it would come, and I would have to walk into the daylight exposed as a fool, adrift. The sun would kill me with its blaze, tear me apart. I prayed, as Jesus had prayed in his worst hour: God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
But then, in springtime, everything changed.
I was sitting by myself in the garden when, unannounced and unexpected, Timothy stepped into the sunlight. I had never seen anyone more radiant.
Had his hair turned gold?
I could barely stand. He approached with a sweet shy smile, and I opened my arms and held him without saying a word for such a long time. “My son, you’re here, and safe,” I said at last.
He brought news of Thessalonica, and the stories were worse than I had feared. The Way had slipped into strange ideas, narrowing their view of what Jesus had said and what his life and sacrifice had meant. Hearing this, I knew I must get back there as soon as possible. It seemed impossible, how we advanced a step or two, then slipped back. Whatever did God have in mind?
Over Timothy’s shoulder I could see Silas, who had gained weight. His jowls hung loose, his feet splayed, and his toes looked black as dates. I knew I must send him away, although I hated to do this and didn’t know how it might happen. I must pray for guidance, I told myself. God would explain everything and guide me. But he had a lot of explaining to do!
I didn’t, in fact, know what trouble lay in store in Corinth itself.
The Jews in the city, unbeknownst to me, resented our accomplishments and regarded me as a threat. A few of them thought I exaggerated the accomplishments of Jesus and wondered if he was the actual Christ promised in the scriptures. “He is Lord and king,” I said in a synagogue one day, though my words were met with hostility, with Abel Ben-Ezra, the most respected rabbi in Corinth, taking me aside.
“I know you mean well, and that God has touched your heart,” he said. “But you should leave Corinth while it remains possible.” He told me that a new proconsul was making his way from Rome, a man called Gallio, the brother of Seneca, the well-respected philosopher. “He may be hostile to the Way,” he said, adding that he “wants to squash all potential forms of rebellion.” Our popular gathering of the Way in Corinth was “not in any way good for the Jews,” he added. “We live always on the fringe, as you know. We can’t arouse their suspicions.”
The day after this exchange with Ben-Ezra, which worried me badly, I came upon a crowd that had gathered to see the new leader’s arrival. They stood four and five rows deep along the roadside cheering him as he passed. And I thought of Cicero and his return to Rome from exile in Thessalonica. After a dreadful separation from power, from his family and friends, his homecoming was delirious for him and his multitude of admirers. For miles and miles the masses—Roman workers and slaves, freemen, tradesmen—lined the roadside to catch a glimpse of the great orator, this representative of Reason and Good Sense, who would restore the republic to its democratic origins, bring calm again after years of autocratic misrule and brutality.
Gallio’s presence delighted the Corinthians, who believed a new broom might sweep the stables clean. This was always the fantasy when new regimes came into power. But this proconsul’s strong presence inspired my enemies, who appealed to him in person at the palace, calling me “a subversive, a traitor to Rome.” They began to harass us at our gatherings, too: shouting from the back of the room, claiming that we taught a twisted version of Judaism, contravened the Law of Moses, made light of circumcision, allowed Jews and Greeks to fornicate, and served meat that had been sacrificed to idols. (They knew that I purchased sacrificial goats from temples for sails and tents and had somehow convinced themselves I would make a meal of these poor creatures before tanning their hides.)
One morning I was apprehended on my way to the workshop by a gang of young thugs, who bound my hands behind my back with a rough piece of rope. One of them boxed my ears, while another spat at me. They tossed me into the back of a cart and wheeled me to the basilica, where Gallio presided over a once-a-week Court of the People. I was brought before the bald, overly ripe Gallio, whose forehead bulged, inflated with thought and self-importance. His nose was large and soft, with flat nostrils. He sat on a throne of sorts between potted plants and two Roman guards in bronze helmets. A number of menacing lictors flanked these guards, ready to apprehend and flog those whom Gallio considered guilty of breaking the law.
I had heard terrible things about the Corinthian prisons and could not imagine myself in custody there. So fear squeezed me in its tight fist. I should have listened to Ben-Ezra and left while it was still possible.
“What is the charge against this man?” Gallio asked. He looked rather annoyed by this intrusion on his time, dipping his eyes to one side, as if mesmerized by a tiny green lizard on the floor.
Susthanes, a leading Jew in Corinth, said, “This man is a Jew, a Pharisee who studied in Jerusalem under a great scholar. But he teaches that the Mosaic Laws don’t apply to him and his associates. He doesn’t care if a Jew and a Greek dine together. He eats the flesh of unclean animals.”
“Does any of this matter?”
“It does to us, sir. As you know, Roman law protects us. We have the right to conduct our lives in a manner that accords with Jewish traditions and practices.”
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Has this been written into law?”
“I know the emperor agrees.”
“You and the emperor, I assume, are friends?” There was laughter in the hall, and even the lictors could not suppress their smiles.
“What I say is commonplace knowledge.”
“Not to me! Are you saying I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“I’m asking for justice.”
“Ah, yes! Justice! Excellently put.” He looked at me directly. “And who are you?”
“Paul of Tarsus, a Jew in good standing. I studied in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, as this fellow has said. But I mean no harm. I’m a Roman citizen, and I support Roman authority.”
Gallio sighed, turning to Susthanes. “Has anyone been hurt?” Silence followed. “Has this man stolen anything, broken anything? Has he fomented violence? A riot, perhaps? We do not want riots in Corinth.”
“He disregards Jewish law.”
“You don’t seem to realize that I have no power over such things. Jewish laws don’t interest us. Do you not have priests, a tribal council of some kind?”
“Trouble will follow from his teachings.”
“The trouble is with you, sir!”
Gallio caught my eye again. “Go back to where you came from, Paul of Tarsus. I don’t want to hear about you again.” Then he fell upon Susthanes. “You have wasted my time. We have important cases to deal with, not squabbling among Jews over laws that do not concern anyone beyond your circle.” He stood now, furious. “Take him away from me! That one!”
He gestured to the lictors, who seized Susthanes.
From what I later discovered, they beat him badly. But I can’t say that I didn’t believe he deserved this treatment.
I returned home to inform Prisca and Aquila that we must leave, as soon as possible, and urged them to accompany us. Why not help to spread the Good News abroad? The leather shop would continue without us, as we had employed a dozen others and taught them well.
I expected resistance, but they agreed to go with us for a time, believing that the end drew near and that the Christ would return soon.
“Jesus will find us in motion on his behalf,” said Aquila.
It was one of the finest things he ever said, I told Luke.
“And one of the only things,” he said.
Silas, much to my relief, asked to remain in Corinth. He and Crispus had founded a gathering of their own at the western edge of the city, by the Windy Gate, on the steep hill near Lechaeum. In every respect, this solved a problem that had tormented me, and I gave him my blessing.
“God will stand behind you, Silas,” I said.
Luke looked at me askance, but I ignored him.
The following day we secured passage on a merchant vessel bound for Syria with a plan to lay over at Ephesus for a time. From what I already knew of Ephesus, I could only believe that God wanted us there. It was the obvious next point on our journey home.