‘Let him be baptised,’ Saul mouths to the open sea, ‘so that I can see Gabriel again.’
The light has not abandoned him, even at this great age. It has vanquished flesh, and it has conquered doubt.
And now he doesn’t see the lapping water or the endless sky. He is returned to the gilded chamber of Governor Felix, he is returned to Thomas. How can the world be both evil and the kingdom to come? But as age sloughs off temptation and wickedness, it also sheds animosity and hatred. A delight twitches and blossoms deep within Saul. Dare he pray, ask from the Lord through the intercession of the Saviour, that the Twin be forgiven? He wishes that it could be possible—that in the coming kingdom, Thomas will be there. To see his beloved Timos fall once more into the older man’s arms and for them to find completeness together in eternity. Could it be that jealousy, that most ancient and deeply buried of Saul’s sins, has been vanquished?
I forgive you, brother. They were Thomas’s final words.
Forgiving me for my jealousy, for my pride, for my spite. For my doubt and for my failings. For my deceit and for my hypocrisy. Thomas has forgiven him but will the Lord do so? Saul laughs at his own vanity—yet one more sin to be forgiven.
The sea wind on his face; and he knows the question is unanswerable. The light, the Spirit, is too vast to be contained within one soul; it belongs to the Lord and it is foolish to think that a man can fully comprehend it. Saul doesn’t know whether Thomas will be there with him in the life to come any more than he knows if his Timos will be there. Or Gabriel. Or the loyal Lydia, the first Stranger he brought to Israel. Or Peter or James or the Magdalena or even himself.
They all grasp for the light, trying to snatch parts of it, to hold it in their hands; but the light is as water, it runs through their fingers—but unlike water, it doesn’t drain and vanish, it grows and amplifies: it is all around but can never be grasped. It is everywhere.
He does not know. Knowing is not what matters. We are mortal and we will fail. In our pettiness and in our vanity. In our temptation and in our sinning. And in our hatred and our misbegotten righteousness. We will fail and hope to be forgiven. We cup our hands and catch the available light.
Saul’s eyes flash open. The anchor cranks and the captain calls the last of his men on board. The sea is calm and of such blue that it meets and becomes the open sky. The journey is beginning and this is the moment of the greatest thrill. What is ahead is not known but that is of no importance.
He stretches out his hands, his damaged and callused hands, and with his palms open he collects the light. The light of the sun and the light of the sky and the light of the sea. He does not know but he welcomes all that is to come. All that is good and all that is grace passes through his hands and slips through his fingers. No matter. He has held it once and he will hold it again. Light, not blood; light, not flesh; light, not the earth: that is all that matters.
The ship is setting sail and Saul calls out to the void, which has been made whole with light. The sailors around him are also offering their prayers. His is loudest for his is true.
Author’s note
I first encountered the writing of Saul of Tarsus, better known by his Greek name, Paul, when I was an adolescent. At that time, I was estranged by the famous strictures against homosexuality in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I could not reconcile my Christian faith with the imperative to honour my own sexuality and independence, and so I became a non-believer. It was only in my late twenties that I returned to his letters during a period of personal confusion and despair, and this time I found solace, compassion and understanding in his words. It might well be that the seeds of this novel were planted back then. Since that time I have wrestled with Paul, wanting both to honour the great universal truths that I find compelling in his interpretation of Jesus’s words and life, but also to question the oppression and hypocrisy of the Churches that claim to be founded on these very same words. Who was Paul? And is it possible to reconcile what is revelatory and crucial in Christian ethics with the fraught history of Christianity itself? That questioning is what led me to writing this book. I wanted to comprehend this man, who took the teachings of the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, and proclaimed that they had meaning for the whole world.
It has been five years since I began work on Damascus, and in that time Paul has dominated my dreams, my imagination, my curiosity and, yes, my doubt. As always with a novel, the point of departure—who was Paul?—altered and shifted as I undertook my research, and then my writing. I had, of course, returned to the canonical gospels of the New Testament but my readings also took me, for the first time, to the apocryphal writings that had been excised from the canonical Bibles. Of central importance was my exploration of the collection of early Christian and Gnostic writings that were discovered in 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. In particular, I was startled to read the Gospel of Thomas. This gospel is a collection of the sayings of Jesus, and though an exact historical dating of the text is impossible, it is clearly a very early Christian work, possibly contemporary to the Gospel of John. In Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism, our main knowledge of the apostle Thomas is that he was famously the one who doubted Jesus’s resurrection. What is astonishing in the Gospel is that there is no reference to Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. The Nag Hammadi texts reveal that there were myriad currents to early Christianity, including an understanding of Jesus as a prophet rather than an incarnation of the godhead itself.
There were many false starts and much confusion as I struggled with the early drafts of this novel. It seemed that I wanted to do the impossible: to be faithful to both Paul and Thomas. In Aramaic, Thomas means the Twin, and there is an apocryphal legend that Thomas was indeed the twin brother of Jesus. (If the fact that Jesus had a sibling strikes a reader as disturbing or bizarre, I would direct that reader to the New Testament itself, to where the Book of Acts refers to Jesus’s brothers and sisters and, in particular, to his brother James, who became the head of the Jerusalem sect after the death on the cross of his brother.)
There is no way of writing the story of Paul without coming to a reckoning with the man that Paul and Thomas both loved and followed, Jesus of Nazareth. And even though I am no longer a believer in the Christian myths, I discovered I am still committed to and challenged by the injunctions of this prophet. To love one’s neighbour, to turn the other cheek, and to understand that none of us have the right to throw the first stone all remain fundamental to my beliefs. When I appreciated this, I knew how to shape the novel. Whatever the difference between Paul and Thomas, I believe that they too were moved and challenged and changed by these instructions.
As he declares in his letters, Paul was born a proud and observant Jew. He came to believe in the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection after an encounter with the reawakened Saviour on the road to Damascus. He was convinced that he was chosen by the Lord to bring all of the nations of humanity to God. He made it his work to travel the Greek-speaking Roman Empire, and to bring the God of Israel to the Strangers.
I have used that term—Strangers—to identify all those he encountered who were not Jewish. In the Book of Acts we are told that one of the first Strangers he brought to Israel was a Greek woman called Lydia. She too has become a character in this novel. We can never be sure of how Paul died, or even where he died, but I have created a character, Vrasas, a proud pagan Roman and former soldier, who I have made Paul’s gaoler while he is under house-arrest in the Eternal City. If indeed Paul did end up in Rome, as is suggested in the New Testament, it is highly probable that he was murdered in the catastrophic riots against Jews and Christians that erupted during the reign of Emperor Nero.
The character of Able is based on references in Paul’s letter to Philemon, part of the canonical New Testament. Paul writes of Onesimus, a runaway slave who belonged to Philemon. The Greek name translates as Beneficial, or Able, and that is the name I have given him in Damascus.
If Judea had not fallen t
o Roman occupation and siege, if the temple in Jerusalem had not been destroyed, it is possible that Christians would have remained a forgotten Jewish sect. Such speculation is tantalising for an historian, but as a storyteller what I want to convey is the catastrophic consequences of that war and occupation on the refugees who survived the annihilation of their homelands. The penultimate part of the book takes place a couple of decades after Paul’s death, and is narrated by Timothy, who was his companion, his friend, his amanuensis. In orthodox Christianity, Timothy is also a saint. I wanted to imagine Timothy as a man, as someone whose faith is the only bedrock he has in a world that has collapsed and which he believes is about to face destruction.
If it is tantalising to wonder what would have happened to Christianity if Jerusalem had not fallen, it is equally tempting to consider what Christianity would be if so many of the Gnostic texts unearthed at Nag Hammadi had been incorporated into the New Testament. It is the allure of this imaginative speculation that makes Thomas an increasingly prominent character in this novel. Yet if the non-believer in me is sympathetic to the notion of understanding Jesus as only human, I also know that it is Paul’s powerful conviction that Jesus did indeed reawaken to life on the third day that offered the sweet promise of eternal life for all of us. If, in a secular age, we might scoff at such an understanding, we must also acknowledge how it was a promise that gave hope to the most destitute and despised in an often cruel and unforgiving world. The Gospel of Thomas counsels that we be as passers-by in the world. Paul’s letters contain the seeds of revolution. The last few centuries have shown us that it is not only the religious who wish to found Heaven on earth. I hear Paul’s whisper in every contemporary ideology that wishes to change the world. And I hear Thomas’s echo in every dissident who doubts that the ends justify the means.
I began this work with a hunger to understand Paul, and that initial impulse has never left me. I am grateful that his mission gave us the great insights into justice and compassion that were forged over millennia by the prophets of Judaism. That is one of the great blessings that this ancient and still living religion has bequeathed to us. And I am so very grateful that his travels and teachings—and most importantly his letters—made it possible that the sublime and deeply humane teachings of the Jewish prophet, Jesus, were also offered to the world. I don’t think that it is fair that Paul is blamed for the subsequent corruption of these teachings. I wanted to forget two thousand years of history in my struggle to understand Paul. I wanted to be guided by the solace, compassion and understanding that I found there when I returned to his letters. Of course history can’t be forgotten and its ghosts have also made their way into this novel. But I am not wrestling with Paul any longer. I am walking beside him. With gratitude.
Acknowledgements
It is Paul’s letters, which form a major component of the Christian New Testament, that have been that have steered me in writing this novel. It is through these letters that we can hear his voice. But I have also been guided by excellent works of scholarship that I read while researching the story of Damascus. Diarmaid MacCulluch’s A History of Christianity: The First 3000 Years was pivotal in making me better understand the rich ferment of ideas and arguments that were being debated in the genesis of the early Church. Erudite and beautifully written, MacCulluch’s is a magnificent book, and a wonderful introduction to Christian history.
There are many books about St Paul. One that inspired me greatly is Paul: The Mind of the Apostle by A.N. Wilson. I owe a debt to Wilson for bringing me closer to the flesh and blood Paul. I also highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s The First Christian: St. Paul’s Impact on Christianity. As in all her work, Armstrong offers great insights into both theology and history.
Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas was instructive in making me understand the importance of this lost gospel. Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels is an excellent introduction to the apocryphal texts, and to the early Gnostic tradition in Christianity. I am also indebted to the insights gleaned from reading the historian E.P. Sanders, in particular The Historical Figure of Jesus. Martin Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations brought the first century AD to vivid life. James Davidson’s The Greeks and Greek Love was a highly entertaining but also immensely useful study of attitudes to sex and love in antiquity. Luke Timothy Johnson’s Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity and Timothy Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible were also bracing reads on the relationships between pagans, Jews and early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Dale B. Martin’s Yale University podcast, An Introduction to New Testament History and Literature was of terrific assistance in guiding me through the scholarship of the early Church.
I first read John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality when it was published in the early 1980s. I returned to it in writing Damascus and I was reminded of the power of Boswell’s compassion, and the breadth of his understanding of Christian ethics.
I am also deeply appreciative of historians in Rome, Athens, Ephesus and Jerusalem who were so sympathetic to my questions and enquiries.
My partner, Wayne van der Stelt, drew the map for Damascus. His patience and faith and love have also steered this novel. My friend, Catherine Woodfield, has provided succour and challenge in thinking about Christianity for decades now. Jane Palfreyman is my publisher and editor. Without her guidance and her questioning, and without her meticulous editing, this novel would not have been possible. I am so very lucky to be published by her and even luckier to be her friend. I want to thank Ali Lavau for her editorial wisdom and diligence, and to thank Christa Munns for her good humour and her editorial care and patience. Thank you indeed to everyone at Allen & Unwin for their support. I have also been fortunate in having Fiona Inglis, Angela Savage, Jane Gleeson-White and Chris Brophy read drafts of this work. Their comments and criticisms made me work harder, and for that I am deeply appreciative.
If it wasn’t for Malcolm Knox’s generous encouragement, I might have given up wrestling with St Paul. You pushed me, mate, you saw this was a novel even before I did, and though I take complete responsibility for the world and the words of Damascus, without you being in my corner, I wouldn’t have had the courage to keep going. This is why it is dedicated to you: in deepest gratitude.
Christos Tsiolkas
July 2019
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