This is the gospel of Paul.
I slump across the desk, I upset the ink, it flows onto my robe. My knees crack and cannot support me. On the cold wooden floor, I sleep.
I arise again to the third morning.
I do not eat, I do not let my sister bring in food.
I write. I write the gospel of my lover, my friend, the beloved disciple. I write the gospel of Thomas.
I write of his understanding that the meaning of our Saviour is to be found in his life. Of how he was born coarse and rough, born to labour and to work, but that the spark of truth was in him from childhood and he was apprenticed to the priests. Of how in youth that truth within him was tethered to hate, to his abhorrence of injustice, be it the injustice of Rome or the debauchery and hypocrisy of Israel’s kings. Of how the fire of the Zealots was in him. But the truth is not only fire, it is also light. The Zealot pledges to justice but in the violence of that pledge he is stripped of compassion and understanding. In the Zealot’s declaration against the world, he is also declaring against the beauty of the Lord’s Creation. That beauty is found in the faces of those most stricken by poverty and disease, in the face of a prostitute and in the face of the thief. That beauty is found in the face of both Stranger and Israelite. And Yeshua, son of Joseph, became the Saviour when he was transfigured by this very comprehension: that to change the world is to alter nothing for the world has been changed again and again and always, after every alteration, suffering and poverty and slavery and hatred and war return. The kingdom to come cannot be wrought by man but is born of the Lord and that kingdom to come is here whenever we greet our violator with forgiveness and meet our foe with sympathy and submit to our enemy with acceptance. But we must not forget that the Saviour is not a god, the Saviour is a man and he understood the great exhaustion of feeling that comes with such love and the terrible sacrifice of such submission. To be a passer-by to affliction is the greatest burden demanded of us by the Lord. Jesus understood this as he suffered and died on the cross. There, his fury soared and he shouted, not with strength from the gods or from the worlds beyond, but the gathering and shrieking of living, grieving, human will: the Promethean scream, ‘Father, Father, why are you demanding this of me? Why have you abandoned me?’ But at the end, as his body slumped into death, he laughed. Jesus laughed. His beloved Twin attests to this. Because he had an understanding truer than death: that he was not greater than any other man. That the Saviour is no greater than man. When we reach that understanding, then the kingdom has come.
They are my final words to this gospel. Jesus the Saviour, he laughed.
And as I write these final words I laugh as well. I release an eruption of joy that I have not experienced since I was the young lad following my teacher Paul across Anatolia and Greece, or when I was rambling beside my beloved Thomas and he was showing me the shore of Galilee where he and his brothers fished. Is the path to the Lord to be found in the meaning of the Saviour’s life or in the violence of his death? I am only a man and I will die without knowing this. It has taken the whole of my long life to come to this understanding, and the peace it brings makes me into a child again. I am a son of the Lord. I have known joy and I have known love. I will die in gratitude, and when I am raised, I will sing the song of thanksgiving to my God.
I roll up all that I have written in my days of blessed delirium, seal the scrolls with wax and place them in the cedar box that even after so many years still carries the perfume of my home. I leave them for my brothers and sisters to find. I take a small carnelian token out of the box. Latin letters are carved onto its surface. Andromenos, a nobleman of Ephesus, gave it after I’d baptised him. I had initially refused the gift but he had insisted I keep it, making an argument that still holds strength: ‘You may require its protection, brother; there are many who condemn our faith.’ I rub the dust away from the token and put it in the pocket sewn inside the sleeve of my tunic.
My work done, I kneel and close my eyes. There are no visions and no apparitions. I fall straight to sleep.
It is late in the morning when I awake. I dress quickly. At the doorway, as I push aside the curtain, I glance back at the room that has been home in my middle years and my old age. I offer a small prayer to the guardian spirits of my abode, who have looked after me so gently and so benevolently over those decades. I ask the Lord’s indulgence for my childish whim in wanting to appease these phantoms. It is as if today it is my father’s blood that is running through my veins.
The women are busy at their tasks and, though they greet me and offer blessings, they pay scant attention to me. I step outside to find that the wind is almost a gale. The streets are clogged with people and animals: beggars and merchants; dogs and fowl and goats; children playing as the wind sends swirls of sand around them.
I head towards the centre of our town and stop outside the gate to the bathhouse.
I have diligently avoided such Greek pleasures for years. It is past noon and there are no peasants, no workers and no merchants. Only the rich and idle use the pools at such an hour. I slip my fingers into the pocket of my tunic and present the chalcedony seal to the attendant at the door. He studies it, then bows and welcomes me.
It has been a long, long time since I have indulged in such luxury. Inside, the attendant shows me through to the antechamber of the baths and I suddenly feel faint.
‘Are you alright, sir?’ the attendant asks as he guides me to a stool.
‘Yes. Thank you, brother.’
At that word—brother—he jumps back as if I have struck him. As well I might have. He has seen the Roman seal and taken me for a gentleman. He turns his face away from me now to hide his distress at my vulgarity.
Gather yourself, old man, I scold myself. I have chosen this day and its progression and now I must obey its intent.
‘Boy,’ I call out impatiently, ‘bring me some water.’
He smiles now and, with another bow, dashes off to obey.
The water is scented with apple and the air in these chambers is suffused with frankincense. As I step into the first pool and sink beneath the surface, it is as if the water brings youth to my limbs and to my bones. I come up for air and flick my eyes open. There are only two other gentlemen reclining in the water. They pay me no attention. I too fall back and float. The ceiling above is the night sky as inferno, smooth bronze plates studded with flecks of lapis lazuli, and slivers of red crystal and gold-gilt stars. At the centre of this rounded canvas is a mural of a glorious long-limbed Narcissus gazing down at us, his handsome face aglow with adoration at his own image reflected back to him in the still waters of our pool; the lovelorn nymph Echo is a wisp of silver behind his shoulder. In this idyllic vault there is the constant trickling of water entering the bath, there is the incense, the glowing daphne leaves burning before the statue of Hera Ascendant. I am not ashamed to be naked before these idols. Today, I am indeed of my father’s blood.
This luxury is a sin, I know it is, but I am hoping that the judgement of our Lord, our true Father and the only God, will be tempered by the forgiveness of our Redeemer, his anointed son. The demands of my faith are brutal but I have surrendered to them willingly. I was not present at the hour of my father’s death. I hope that he did not die in suffering and pain but that he chose the hour of his leaving. Did my mother outlive him? Did my brothers bury her as a Jew? I do not know how my teacher Paul died, nor how my beloved Thomas ended his life. We never spoke of death except of it as a force to be vanquished.
I was wrong.
In this warm and luxuriant pool, I understand. We were not wrong about the truth: we will find abiding life in the Lord. But we were mistaken to think that our mortal eyes would bear witness to the end of the world. Like all men, I cannot imagine a world without myself in it. Even my teacher, the best of men, a man chosen by the Lord, could not escape that most human of failings: vainglory. He believed he would witness that cataclysm. The destruction of this world as prophesied and as demanded by truth and b
y justice; truly, it is coming. But only the Lord knows the hour of its commencement. I will not live to see that day. But this generation just born will see it, and if not this generation then the next or the one to come. But we must die to be reborn. As all men do, I must die.
The air of the bathhouse is thick with heat and the sound of fires spitting and crackling in the basement below. One of the bathhouse slaves asks if I would prefer the attentions of a boy or a maiden. It has been the longest time since I have felt the soft caress of a woman. I ask for a girl, and the slave they bring me is tall and startlingly pale; her skin is as marble and her shorn hair has the tint of burnished gold: she is a child of the savage western lands. She lays a linen sheet across the slab and I lie on my back upon it. Now I am blushing from the shame of my nakedness. She takes a tiny amphora, tips some liquid into her palms and begins massaging the oil into my neck and shoulders. Her gentle and thorough ministrations have me sighing as if I were an infant being pampered by a doting mother. Her hands knead my hollow chest, my belly, they press into the slack folds of my crotch.
Then her actions cease and I open my eyes. She is staring at my sex, at the mark of the ancient covenant. I shift her hand to my thighs and she continues her task. I am not seeking any more gratification than that which she is giving me: the delight all men of my long age must feel from the touch of youth.
She then takes an ivory comb and runs it across the thin hair on my scalp. She finds the lice, pulls them off the comb, and crushes them between her fingernails. Done, her hands move down to my crotch. Carefully parting the sparse grey tufts cradling my sex and testes, she plucks out the lice and crushes them.
She asks me to turn over and her hands whip across my back, my buttocks, down the other side of my weary limbs. With my eyes closed, I see a vision of myself. It must be the heat and steam of the chamber, the rich perfume of the incense: I am transported and I am no longer this old man but I am returned to my birthplace of Lystra. I am seated at the doorway of my ancestral home and in the yard my children are feasting, for it is the end of harvest and my wife who has grown fat is smiling at me as she offers me bread. I can smell the yeasty pungence of the freshly baked loaf and I can hear the sounds of my grandchildren and I can see our bondsgirl standing at attention at the end of the table and in the field beyond is our bondsman, he too is a beautiful youth, and I know that I have possessed him as I have possessed her, have lost myself over countless nights in the glory of their bodies and in the tenderness of their kisses, and I know that this is a life that would have been mine if I had followed my father and I had not received the Lord. And I know that if it were only this world that was our due, then all of this pleasure and duty, all of this husbandry and mastery, all of this that is desired by men, would have been satisfaction enough. But I clench my eyes shut more tightly and the house of my father has fallen to ruin and the fields are overrun with wildflowers and instead of the sound of children there is only the desolate shriek of the wind and all that was mine is gone, dead and vanished. And beautiful as this first vision was, I know it cannot satisfy. I wanted to understand what accrues to us, the advantage and the cost, to have been created in the image of our Lord.
A voice calls through the chambers of the bathhouse: ‘I was not wrong!’
The girl, startled, recoils from my shouting.
I grab the edge of the cloth, raise myself, and cover my nakedness. I thank the girl, then wash off the oil in the chilled water of the cleansing tub. An attendant returns my garments and dresses me. I thank him but as I am about to take my leave he glares at me. I have not paid obeisance to the seated idol at the door of the baths. These children have been gracious to me. I take Andromenos’s gift and leave it at the feet of the garish bronze idol. But as I do I speak in my mother’s ancient tongue, in the Lord’s first language. I utter the words that my beloved Paul taught me.
‘You are formed by man and as man returns to dust and oblivion, so will you; for you are nothing but the shadow of death.’ I turn and bow to the young slave. He returns my bow; he returns it three times.
At the eastern gate of the city, I look back to my adopted home. The wind still chops and rushes and the fall of dust is as a mist; the city is a hive of movement, of soldiers and slaves, taxmen and labourers, priests and beggars, shopkeepers and prostitutes. Even under a dull sky, the grandeur of Ephesus is thrilling. The gleaming marble temples of the acropolis are an island that floats serene over the unending chaos of the human city. The painted head of the goddess, adorned with garlands, looks up to her brother and husband, the sun.
The fading twilight illuminates the ravaged face of the hilltop we call Despair. As I climb the steep rise, I grab at shrubs and the limbs of trees to keep me steady. I find the first ledge, pause to regain breath and strength, and I enter the cave. The smell has the force of a blow, the reek of the abandoned infants. Ants swarm over the body of a recently left child; maggots are feasting. Vile waters rise to my mouth and run down my chin.
I tear at my tunic, wrap the cloth tight around my nose and mouth, but even so the stink of death and rot burns my eyes. As I venture further into the cavern I hear the susurration of the serpents and I steel my fear. My feet crush the tiny bones that form a carpet in this lair. I find a shelf, push aside the bundle left there. The sheet falls away and the skeleton of an infant is revealed. Death: this world cannot conquer death. I take a seat, and as I do I feel the weight of a serpent gliding across my foot. But I am beyond fear, just as I am beyond death.
I don’t know how long I sit in my own silence. Long enough that when I come to after my prayers—the recitation of all the words of the Saviour that my beloved Thomas taught to me, all the instructions and preparations for the world to come that my teacher, my Paul, gave to me—when I open my eyes again the dark is absolute and the cold has me shivering. I am in night.
Hidden in the pocket I have sewn to my tunic I take out the blade. I ask the Lord’s forgiveness. My mother’s blood declares against the sin I am about to commit. But I turn away from the justice of her unyielding God and trust in the revelation that the Lord’s son gave us through his death and his resurrection: I ask to be forgiven.
I bring the blade twice across one wrist, slicing through flesh and sinew, and then I do the same to the other. There is pain, stinging but brief. With the outpouring of my blood, there is balm and there is composure. I slide to the ground, bones scattering and breaking as I drop.
Lord, I am tired. I have done your bidding for three generations and I am exhausted by this gift of life. Forgive me my evil doing, the perversity of my lusts and covetousness, my envy and my pride. This death I am undertaking, I do so to privilege that which is best in my father’s tribe, the understanding that man is nothing without dignity and self-honour, and that is why I choose this end. This blood that now flows out of me is his. But it is also my mother’s, and from her tribe I have been granted the knowledge of compassion and of justice. From her tribe arose the Redeemer who will guide my passage in the world to come. From her tribe I learned that I am brother to the lowest of men, and that in poverty and in renunciation there is glory.
Where was I happiest, Lord? In a prison cell in Antioch, lying next to my brother Paul, him cradling me in his arms and imparting through his kisses the knowledge of truth and fidelity, of faith and hope. For without hope there is only despair: and this world I am leaving, it moans with the suffering of helplessness which is true misery. Even in a prison cell, my body marked with lashes and wounds, stripped of clothes and lying there in excrement and filth, I knew and was in love. In abjection I still had hope—and that is why our faith grows even into the fourth generation. We are granted hope: slave and master, maiden and youth, woman and man; we are not defined by our poverty and lack but are fortified and strengthened by the bond of faith which is greater than blood and land and tradition and which is a communion that will envelop the earth and unite us in the world that is coming. Truly, it is coming.
In faith, in
knowing faith and having lived in this hope, we are more fortunate than the richest men and the most powerful kings. In prayer, we receive a solace that is unknown to the most privileged. I expire in joy, my Lord. I have lived in poverty and hunger and in suffering, but I count myself amongst the most blessed of men.
I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed, if it is night or morning. I am no longer cold. I am loved. Here in this cave, surrounded by proof of the desolation of the world when it knows not or denies or refutes God, in this cave I am loved. I leave the world held in love. When next I see, when next I rise, I know that I will awaken to love.
‘If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.’
—THE GOSPEL OF JOHN
The world has contracted to the limits of his prison walls, to the rough, chafing straw that is his bedding and to the announcement of dawn and nightfall by his guards. His world has become smaller but he is content. He has endured greater deprivations in other prisons. His present gaolers are brutish but not cruel and though the food is meagre it is all that he requires. He is accompanied to his toilet once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and those mean sojourns are his only chance to see the sun. Every noon, he is visited by Gabriel, who continues to petition the governor to clear his extradition to the First City—to Rome.
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