Great Lion of God

by Taylor Caldwell

  As Saul sat in his gardens, he knew this would be for the last time, and each day was sorrowfully closer to the end. Because his sight had been so sharpened since he had seen the vision of the Messias he was now constantly overwhelmed by the beauty of the world and no longer found sin in the contemplation of it, but only prayerful reverence and marvelings.

  Barnabas said, “As Elias was carried to Heaven in the fiery chariot and Our Lord ascended before our eyes, so Mary was also lifted when she died in the house of John. We were in his house when she died, and she was wrapped in the burial cloths and spices, and we knelt about her bed, praying, and suddenly there was a great noise, greater than any thunder, for it shook the little house, and there was a light more vivid than the sun, and we fell on our faces, mute and blind and fallen of senses. And when we lifted ourselves, dazed, the bed was empty and only a glimmer of light lay there, which faded before our eyes as we stared at it.”

  Instantly, Saul was incredulous, though the others bowed their heads and their faces were illuminated. “What!” he exclaimed. “A mere woman to receive such a divine honor! I do not believe it. You were stricken with grief, and so looked for a miracle—”

  Barnabas said, “Whence, then, disappeared her body?”

  Saul shrugged. He replied, “Who knows? Those who sought a miracle, or wished to reveal prodigies, bore her away while you lay stunned.”

  He suddenly remembered that he had uttered similar words when his cousin, Titus Milo, had told him of the resurrection of the Messias. But he fumed. A woman, a mere woman, who had but given her virgin flesh to the Lord? Despite Leah and Judith and Rachel and Ruth and Sarah, there were few Mothers of Israel, and none of them however worthy and beloved of God, had been granted such divine favors. He had prayed countless times at the tomb of Rachel in Jerusalem, and had thought that despite the obvious nobility and grandeur of Rachel she had died and rotted as had millions of women before her. It was true that Mary had been chosen from among all women to bear the Messias, and had clothed Him with her flesh and had given Him her blood and her milk, but she had only been, as Lucanus had related to him, “the handmaid of the Lord,” a lowly Galilean girl if of the House of David. She had been but a woman, the weak vessel, the river on which Grace had traveled like a white ship. Who honors the waters which bear the sails and the Passenger? The river is but a helpless way.

  It was then that a sad coldness spread over the faces of his guests.

  Barnabas said, “You have forgotten. Even God waited on her consent—this little maiden just past puberty—to bear His Son! She had been announced from the ages, this virgin child. She nurtured God at her breast; she taught Him to walk; she heard His first childish words. She made His clothing; she rocked Him in her arms; she babbled to Him as only mothers tenderly babble, and infants listen with delight and trust. She cooked His meat and His fish; she made His bread. She milked the goats for Him, and gathered the fruit. She attended to the needs of His human flesh. For thirty years He was hers alone, and what wonders must have been revealed to her! And how she must have brooded and wept over His cradle, understanding that one day He must leave her and bring the holy tidings to mankind, and that He must die under frightful circumstances. The Apostles, and Lucanus, have told us of these things. The Lord performed His first miracle at her loving request. It was He who gave her as Mother to all men, as He hung dying on the infamous cross. She was present when the fire of Pentecost descended on His weeping Apostles and disciples. Did it carefully refrain from blazing upon the Mother?

  “She was no ‘mere woman,’ Saul. She was the Mother of God. He loved her before He loved others in His human flesh. He ran beside her as a Child; He was helplessly dependent on her for nurture. We men love our mothers and reverence them. How much more, then, must God love and bless His Mother! Nothing is impossible with God. If He chose to lift her uncorrupted body to Him, as the Messias had been lifted, who shall dispute Him? Though,” said Barnabas, the merriment gone from his face as he regarded Saul, “she was but a woman.”

  Saul reflected. He unwillingly granted all of the arguments of Barnabas. It was a mystery. Still, Mary had been only a woman, and women were not highly regarded by the prophets and the patriarchs, for all of the Mothers of Israel. They were prone to weaknesses of the flesh and the will. He thought of his own mother, and Dacyl and others he had known.

  Then he remembered the one time he had seen Mary, when he had been a youth in Jerusalem, and she had dozed wearily near him, awaiting her Son. He recalled the tender reverence the Messias had given her; He had fed her with His own Hand. He had shown sorrow and concern for her. He had called her “Emi.” (Mother) If the Lord could so honor and love His Mother, when then should men cavil? Had not she cried, “All generations shall call me blessed?” Saul shook his head.

  “It is a mystery,” he murmured, with uneasiness. “I must meditate upon it.”

  The Nazarenes received women among them with full equality and respect. They met in the houses of wives and mothers, to escape the exasperated wrath of their fellow Jews. They honored women because of the Mother of the Messias. Saul shifted in his chair. He must, indeed, “meditate upon it.” Later he was to give reluctant acceptance to women, but it remained reluctant.

  The marriage of Boreas, or Enoch ben Saul, to Tamara bas Judah, took place the day before Saul left Tarsus.

  A Nazarene priest performed the ceremony in the house of Judah ben Isaac, and only before Nazarenes. Saul had dreaded the hour when he must face Elisheba, the aunt of the bride, and yet had longed for the occasion, for the last sight of that beloved face.

  But Elisheba was not among the family. She was not among the guests. Saul dared not ask of her, and no other spoke of her. It was as if she had no existence.

  He welcomed his son and the bride and the guests to his house and he looked upon them with heavy sorrow, and with new foreboding that never would he see them again. The road had finally been revealed to him, and he was a traveler forevermore. He was jubilant. But as a man, of human flesh, he was grieved also.

  Chapter 41

  THROUGH the lonely years of Tarsus it had come to Saul slowly and inevitably as the patient falling of rain, that his mission was to the Gentiles. A thousand times he had rejected the conviction. There were other evangelists, other missionaries, though it was to be admitted that their work among the Gentiles had borne but rare rewards, and few there were among the converted. The Jews would not listen to him, Saul ben Hillel, distrusting him, and the Jewish Nazarenes had similar aversions. They listened to the missionaries and evangelists, but not to him!

  It was Barnabas, who had known nothing of the slow only half comprehended revelations to Saul over those four years of exile, who had told him, “You are to teach and convert the Gentiles. That is your mission. And that is why our fellow Jews, under mysterious promptings, will have naught to do with you. God, blessed be His Name, knows what is necessary.”

  Barnabas added, “The ways and the customs and the thoughts of the Gentiles are not familiar to me, as a Jew of modest life and quiet existence and narrow knowledge, as they are to you, Saul. Therefore, I have difficulty in speaking to them in terms they can understand and in metaphors congenial to their spirits, and in language familiar to them. I can speak and be comprehended by our fellow Jews, especially the humble and devout. (He did not add that Saul’s natural impatience and erudition and learning made it almost impossible for him to speak to those humble ones of little worldly knowledge. He was too easily inflamed.)

  “But you are a learned man, of Greek and Roman understanding, as well as a Pharisee Jew. The Gentiles will listen to you, as they will not listen to me, and others like myself. More and more do I understand why and how God chose you, Saul ben Hillel! How wondrous are His ways!”

  Saul had never been in Antioch of Syria before, the birthplace of Lucanus, who would accompany him and Barnabas on frequent occasions. “My adoptive father,” Lucanus had said with an affectionate smile, “loathed the city, ca
lled it a pestilential den, stinking with urine and gutters and rotten fruit and goats and camels and asses and unwashed hides of men and beasts. It was also too fervent, too hot, too alien to his Roman spirit. He had been sent there as legate, and despised every moment of what he called his exile. He was an able administrator, the noble Diodorus Cyranus, and a firm ‘old’ Roman, and a patriot, and a soldier above all, and adored the old gods and obeyed them, and was a man of justice and honor. For that he was respected by the inhabitants of Antioch, though hated by taxgatherers and not understood by the people of the city. To him, a matter was wholly right or wholly wrong, according to the law of old Rome. He was an anachronism in a world of hot confusion and a multitude of warring tongues. He had a simplicity and purity of nature not to be comprehended by men of compromise and veniality. Alas, the world is poorer that he died, and the world will grow poorer through the years that his kind is known no more.”

  “Surely God will raise up other generations like him,” said Saul.

  Lucanus shook his head. “Who knows? Rome is dying, and all the spirit of Rome.”

  Though Saul, all his life, had been given to deprecating men’s opinions and impressions of the world—as too subjective—he found, to his dismay, that Antioch was somewhat worse than Lucanus had described, and he sympathized with the Roman Legate, Diodorus Cyranus.

  The Romans, of course, were as ubiquitous there as they were in Israel, and their swarming bureaucrats were equally obnoxious. Everything was regulated, supervised, ordered and meanly inspected by those bureaucrats, and their minute records, as Lucanus had ruefully remarked, kept account of every man’s defecations and every new tunic or animal. They had buildings heaped with orderly records, and the bureaucrats toiled among them like ants. To them, men were not men. They were sheets of parchment, a number in a book. Imperial nations,” said Lucanus, “become cumbersome and weighty, and finally fall under the sheer massiveness of their regulations. When a nation no longer has respect for individuals but only for masses, its day is done.” He smiled his cold Grecian smile. “That is what my father always declared, and he was correct.”

  “We have the Roman bureaucrats in Israel also,” said Saul. “However, they are cautious not to trespass too far. We are a people of temper.”

  “The people of Antioch prefer to brawl, feast and lie with women,” said Lucanus, and his smile broadened somewhat as he regarded Saul. “Therefore, they do not openly fight the taxgatherers and other bureaucrats. It is a game: They choose, rather, to outwit them, and I find it a gayer custom.”

  He had encountered Saul but twice before, and on each occasion he had seen a different vivid aspect of him, and since his visit to Tarsus Saul had often baffled him by the presentation of still other aspects, many of them contrary to those once glimpsed. There was a protean quality to this man, apparently bold and courageous and open though he appeared, and without dissemblance. Leonine in appearance and in character, he was yet subtle and versatile, changeful and the same. In comparison with the merry and simple Barnabas, he was like a strong man beside an amiable and tender child. It was apparent that he loved Barnabas, but often when the three would be conversing together and Barnabas made an artless remark Saul did not appreciate the artlessness as did Lucanus and accept it as evidence of a gentle and crystalline nature. He would frown in quick irritability, which wounded Barnabas. Seeing then that he had hurt his friend, Saul would be immediately contrite, but he would change the subject hastily as if he thought the matter too obtuse for Barnabas, which further wounded the latter.

  The three, so dissimilar in all things, were bound together with bonds stronger than flesh and blood or mere friendship or human affection. The bonds were invisible, but they were as mighty as rock and iron. They were evidence of a love greater than man’s, and a faith more invincible than death. They lived and had their being in the Messias. As Saul was to write in a letter later he also said, “To me to live is Christ.—I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20) Therefore Lucanus and Barnabas were, to Saul, not men separate from himself but men inextricably joined with himself in the love and salvation of God. And so they regarded him also. To these men others who did not believe so deserved their tears, prayers and compassion, for did they not live in a darkness from which God intended them to be rescued?

  For the first time, and in Antioch, were Nazarenes called “Christians,” and they were so named by the bantering Greeks, for the word “Christus” in Greek means “the Anointed.” The name was given not always with respect, but sometimes with Greek humor, for they considered that the Nazarenes took themselves and their mission too seriously, and Greeks regarded the gods as beautiful symbols, when they regarded them at all, and at the worst they considered them not only nonexistent but risible. As the Nazarenes in Antioch—as elsewhere—seemed concerned only with an everlasting life beyond the grave, and anxiously sought to draw others to them below the Crucifix—a dire symbol in itself—and did not appear to be happy in the way of ordinary men, and did not sensually pursue pleasure and beauty, I the Greeks either pitied them as men without the capacity for enjoyment and delight or impatiently shrugged and left them. Moreover, they were almost invariably Jews, and the Jews had a reputation for staring beyond the limits of the world and contemplating God, a dreary occupation.

  With the same attitude, but with somewhat less tolerance, the pragmatic Romans also regarded the Christians. They, to the Romans, had but one virtue: They paid their taxes in full, an astonishing phenomenon which even Romans did not practice. Beyond the puzzling virtue they seemed passive, too gentle, too peaceful, to not only the Romans but to the myriad races in Antioch, including Persians, Syrians, Egyptians and Indus, and thousands of dark-skinned, fierce-featured men of unknown desert tribes and to barbarians. True, there were not many Nazarenes, or Christians, in Antioch, but in some incredible manner they also seemed to be everywhere at once, inoffensive but insistent—lovingly insistent—and concerned, not with themselves or trade or gain or feastings or laughter, but with unworldly matters too bizarre and strange for the mind of a sensible man to understand. Their very inoffensiveness, their very soft and tentative smiles, annoyed those about them. Therefore, they were often publicly insulted, or cheated openly in their poor little shops, or exploited in many other ways. A slave who was also a Christian served with eager humility, thus earning the detestation of fellow slaves and the greater contempt of the master. It was known that a man might impetuously strike a Christian and the wretch would not even defend himself!

  But the gentle water was beginning, in some slight measure, to make a matrix in the stone of humanity.

  To this eastern city, then, this lusty, noisy, clamorous, dirty and heated city, had come Saul of Tarsus, to inspire and encourage the infant Church. He was something new to the Romans, and to the Greeks. He was a Jew with an impetuous aspect, contained but visible, a man of hauteur and pride and impatience, with a blazing blue glance, beardless, emanating a mysterious strength, and he was not a man of the lowly places but a man of learning and riches and power and urban confidence. His mane of red hair, now streaked with gray, commanded attention, as did his manner and his voice. There was something military about him, in his abrupt gestures, and in his assurance. It was rumored that he was a tentmaker and a weaver of goat’s hair, something which the Romans rejected as absurd, as did the Greeks.

  Here was a man neither meek nor mild, a man who would not retreat a foot from another aggressive man, a man who could roar, a man capable of his own violence of speech and act. He was a Christian, but, of a certainty, not the sort of Christian extant in Antioch!

  The Romans and others were not the only ones of this opinion. The Christians discovered this for themselves also, and not with entire happiness.

  He came to the young Church in Antioch—that urinous city, that motley city of thie
ves and wayfarers and rascals and riches and slaves and opulence, as filthy as it was uproarious—and it was evident that he intended to take charge of the Church, and not merely to preach. It was first in Antioch that he said to the Christian community, “Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?” (I Cor. 4:15-21)

  His first quarrel with the community came as a result of his insistence that Gentile converts need not become Jews to accept Christ. The Jewish Christians, vastly in the majority, were vocally outraged, and in the presence of Gentiles who were drawn to them. To these Gentiles Saul said, “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” He was not less sarcastic to those Christians who insisted that to be a true follower of the Christ one must live as meekly and inoffensively as a slave, for, as he later often and furiously repeated, “You gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves! For you bear it if man makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face!” (Cor. 11:19-21)

  To Saul, many of the Christians of Antioch were even more exasperating than some of the Nazarenes of Jerusalem. Too, the elders of the Church were offended by his short manner of disposing of their dissensions and intense scrupulosities. Young though the Church was it was already beset by a multitude of interpreters who shouted that they had received divine inspiration and that their opinions must be accepted or the offender suffer hell-fire. Saul attacked these with a passion as devastating as it was ruthless.