The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  The woman was giggling still, crushing the alabaster to smaller and smaller pieces in her oil-covered and now blood-streaked hands. One of the other women pulled out a rag to wipe those poor hands. It was not purely a charitable gesture. Even a rag soaked with spikenard would be worth something. The woman did not resist, even when they led her out to the well.

  The house emptied quickly. No one could bear to be near the smell of too much goodness gone to waste. The floor was stained with the oil.

  “The worms will enjoy their heaven-scented earth,” said Shimon.

  There were only three or four of them left around Yehoshuah. Those who never left.

  Something was building in Iehuda now. Like vomit, it would not be denied.

  Iehuda said, “Why did you let her do it? We could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor people all around us. It’s worth a year’s wages to any of these men.”

  He kept his voice low and spoke quickly. There was nothing to be done now about the spikenard. The oil was dripping still from Yehoshuah’s face and hair onto the floor, every drip a meal, a blanket, a handful of good seed. In the streets they would smell the intense foolishness which had been done in this house. Half the village would know it by walking past the door. The earth floor might smell of it for a year or more.

  Yehoshuah looked at him, that bright burning look.

  “Iehuda,” he said, shaking his sorrowful, dripping head, “Iehuda, why do you insist on seeing only with your eyes?”

  I don’t, he wanted to say. I saw you with my heart, and you have led me here, to a place I do not understand.

  Iehuda had heard it said: if the rabbis tell you that day is night and night is day, believe them. He thought perhaps he had once been capable of this. He did not know whether he was luckier then, when he could, or now, when he found he could not.

  Iehuda tried to swallow it, like a Nile crocodile eating a new lamb. But he could not make it go down. Certain things cannot be right, no matter how you squint at them.

  “We could have sold it,” he said again, “to feed the poor.”

  “Do you think I will be with you for much longer?” said Yehoshuah. “When God himself lays waste to the whole world, do you think anyone will care that some oil was poured on the earth here?”

  And Iehuda shook his head.

  And Yehoshuah said, “If you cannot see, I cannot make you understand.”

  He trailed behind the group as they walked on from Bethany, pretending to be tired, but he was muttering to himself and the words in his mouth made his pulse quicken.

  He said, out loud, to the broken yellow hillside and the scrubby bushes: “Everything can be justified this way.”

  He said it again. In different words:

  “If the world is to come to an end, how can we know that one thing is right, another wrong?”

  He thought of a dozen problems to ask his master. How if the woman had thrown chests of spices into the ocean for Yehoshuah’s sake? How if she had cut herself with lancets, as the Moabites do? How if she had sacrificed her own child? How much waste of wealth, and self, and life, would have slaked him, made him cry, “Enough! Too much!”?

  In his mind, he asked him, “How much do you think is due to you? Have you not yet honor enough?”

  He could not find it in himself to speak aloud.

  They camped that night and he was quiet.

  Yehoshuah said, “We have come away from Bethany, but the stink of that perfume is still on your head, Iehuda.”

  And he thought: how dare you know me so well as this? How dare you use myself against me?

  But he said nothing.

  In those days, he saw Calidorus again. The man was getting ready to leave the camp, his slaves strapping boxes to the wagon and preparing a soft place for him to sit on the long journey.

  “Well,” said Calidorus, “how goes the quest to overturn heaven and earth?”

  Iehuda said, “There are men casting bones by the side of the road who say Yehoshuah will be king before New Year.”

  Calidorus half smiled.

  “Would he make a good king, do you think? Would he set appropriate taxes and negotiate successful trade agreements with Rome and array his forces to the north to keep off invaders?”

  Iehuda shook his head.

  “The man I first followed would never have wanted to be king.”

  “You know, I believe that is what Caesar said when he first took power. It seems to be a pattern with them. In this time of special emergency, they say, I must take more power than usual, but this shall be given back in time to the people. Somehow it is always a time of special emergency. It is quite surprising how seductive a crown can be.”

  Iehuda looked at him, frowning. Calidorus was a wealthy Roman citizen, in that sense more powerful than almost anyone Iehuda had ever met.

  “Why are you here, Calidorus? Here in Judea, I mean. Why here?”

  Calidorus shrugged. “I like the climate. The autumn rains in Rome would make you howl. Much of my trade is here. Interesting people pass through. And Rome is not…” He paused, thinned his lips. “I like to be able to speak my mind, Iehuda. That used to be the foundation stone of Rome, they tell me, but now anyone who opposes Caesar is swiftly found by spies to have been ‘plotting treason’ and apparently,” he said, laughing, “we leave poets in exile for writing saucy verse. I can speak more freely here than I could in Rome. Here I am no threat to anyone.”

  Iehuda blinked.

  “Even a Roman citizen? Even you have to calculate like this?”

  “Even I, Iehuda, am subject to Tiberius Caesar, a man with all the power in the world and not much idea of what to spend it on.”

  “If you could plot against him,” said Iehuda, suddenly bold, “would you do it?”

  Calidorus looked at him very keenly.

  “No man should be told he’s a god while he still lives,” he said at last. “It doesn’t promote good thinking.”

  He knows now he had lost his mind. He thought himself above the others because he did not gather round, begging for a blessing, longing to sit at the right hand of the master. But he noted who sat where. His eyes did not cease from searching out who had received more favoring glances, who seemed momentarily to be the one most praised.

  He tried again, in the evening, when the others were asleep. He had always slept lightly and not for long. Yehoshuah did not seem to sleep at all these days. He found him stirring the glowing embers of the fire, blowing on them to bring them back to life, lighting twig from twig and branch from branch.

  He said, “Explain it to me.”

  Yehoshuah shrugged. “The vessel was already broken. What could I have done? Only shamed her.”

  “You could have stopped her.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You could have spoken out against doing as she did. So that no one else will do it. Others will come with the same idea now.”

  “And if they do, what is the harm?”

  Iehuda felt that snake rising up in his throat, making him gag and cough. He thought: it is a demon. There is a demon in me and my friend cannot see it or cast it out.

  “The harm,” he said. And stopped. And thought.

  “We are not here for your glory,” he said at last.

  And Yehoshuah smiled.

  And Iehuda said, “We are not here to glorify YOU. Not your name but God’s name. Not your words but God’s words. Not you, not any one of us. Something bigger than us. The poor, the crippled, the broken. To help them, not to make you into a little god. An idol.”

  It was the first time he had let himself think it. He had not known he thought it until he said the words. He was panting, his pulse beating very fast and loud in his ears, his chest aching.

  “Are you jealous?” said Yehoshuah.

  They had had this conversation before. And Iehuda had admitted his jealousy freely and felt cleansed of it. He wanted to say yes and to fall into his friend’s arms, and to be free again of everything.


  He shook his head slowly.

  “This is not because I want what you have,” he said, “but because you are using your possessions wrongly.”

  And Yehoshuah shrugged and said, “What I own it is my right to use, as a master orders his servants to perform one task and leave another.”

  “Like the love of those who follow you? Are we your possessions too?”

  Yehoshuah looked at him, his eyes very brown and clear and fine.

  “Only for as long as you wish it, my dear friend.”

  Was there a command in this? A wish? A suggestion? Or just a piece of understanding, as two old friends have of one another? The way out is always simple. All it takes is courage.

  Losing one’s faith is so very like gaining it. There is the same joy, the same terror, the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding. There is the same fear that it will not hold, the same wild hope that, this time, it will. One has to lose one’s faith many times before one begins to lose faith in faith itself.

  Iehuda left the camp before dawn. He felt elated. The sky expanded overhead. The moon big and low nearing the horizon, the stars rejoicing in their dark sea. They had turned the stones of the hills of Jerusalem to silver, to opal, to bone. The air was clear and cool as well water and the whole of the house of Israel was sleeping the sweet predawn sleep with soft breaths and gently curled hands. He felt the world move under his shoes as he picked his way across the rocky hillside down towards the city, a gentle tug because the very land was with him, urging him on. It was a blessed night. God, he knew, was watching and smiling upon him.

  It was God who had kept the other followers soundly asleep when he left, and God who made the night unclouded and the moon bright so that he could find his way. God had touched his head with a cool calm hand and said softly in his ear, so that no one else could hear, “It is time, my son, time for this to be at an end.”

  He arrived at the Temple when the faintest hint of dawn was beginning to touch the sky. Like God had dipped his thumb in bright yellow pollen and run it around the edge of the vellum world. This would be a day like no other.

  Men were sleeping in the courtyard, their heads on their full packs, or the sacrifice sellers under their tables, but the priests were already about their business. They were cleaning out the old ash from the last day’s sacrificial fires, and washing the steps and the flagstones. Every morning and every evening, a lamb. They would make the first sacrifice shortly. As they always did. How had he imagined that anything they did would overturn any one of these unchangeable things?

  He felt suddenly like a child who had been playing a game all this time. What had they thought they would do? Dismantle the great Temple stone by stone? Defeat the Roman army? Overturn the traditions handed down from Moses? Had they thought that they could take the place of God?

  Like a child coming in from a game, like a penitent returning to grace, like a servant yielding to his master, Iehuda spoke softly to one of the priests. He was a man of maybe sixty years, with a good full gray beard like Iehuda’s father.

  Iehuda said, “I have come because I know you are looking for Yehoshuah of Natzaret.”

  The priest nodded gravely.

  “I know where he is,” said Iehuda. “I can take you to him.”

  The priest nodded again, three times, and said, “Come with me.”

  And as they walked towards the house of Caiaphas, the High Priest, Iehuda said to God,

  “I have returned to you. I am sorry for my absence.”

  And God, who is a loving Father said, “You are welcome in my house, my beloved son.”

  Caiaphas was a bustling man, unexpectedly cheerful. Avuncular. He bobbed his little head and said, “I think we have enough influence with the Prefect that if your friend admits his crimes and declares that he has no claims to the throne, no more harm will come to him than a few lashes. You’ve all inconvenienced us a little, you know.”

  And Iehuda thought: is this what we were? While we imagined that we could change the world, these men of high office thought of us only as irritating children, throwing stones and firing blunted arrows? And he thought: really? Men had been put to death for far less than this.

  Caiaphas busied himself with sending messengers to the soldiers and to the Prefect. There was little enough for Iehuda to do. He sat quietly on a stone bench in Caiaphas’s study and felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from him. It was relief, at last, knowing that things would be put right now. Yehoshuah’s claim to the throne was at an end. They could go back to spreading his message, instead of putting everything in the storehouse of one man.

  The sun was high in the sky when Caiaphas said to him, “It is time for you to go back now, do you not think?”

  Iehuda blinked. Yes. He had not thought as far as this, not further than doing God’s holy work. But yes. Yehoshuah would miss him, would ask after him. No special alarm would be raised for him, but he might be in danger if his friends knew what he had done. He thought of the mad woman with the rolling eyes cracking the alabaster jar and bleeding and laughing. Followers like that would send a knife after him once the thing was done. Safer to go back now and pretend surprise with the others when the guards came.

  “We will come tomorrow morning,” said Caiaphas.

  This was longer than the matter needed to take.

  “What if we move on from our camp before morning? Yehoshuah sometimes…” The truth was that he sometimes told them that God had commanded him to move them on. “He sometimes moves us on unexpectedly.”

  “We will be watching you,” said Caiaphas mildly. “Just stay close by him now. Do not leave his side. And we will come and find you.”

  He saw them on his way back across the hillside to the encampment. They did not even seem to be walking in the same direction as him. Sometimes they came directly towards him, sometimes they were far in the distance, watching him walk away. They were cunning and they were swift, and they watched where he went and what he did.

  The encampment had not moved. Taddai greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks and a punch to the shoulder.

  “Mattisyahu said you’d gone whoring,” he said, and some of the others round about laughed because they could not believe it of Iehuda.

  “I took myself off to pray,” Iehuda said at last, and they all nodded.

  Yehoshuah was speaking with some of the women under an open-walled canopied tent, and did not see Iehuda return and did not look at him with suspicious eyes or ask where he had been. And on the top of the ridge, behind Taddai’s head, he saw the faint smudges of the men waiting for him, and for Yehoshuah.

  They ate together that night, as they often did. This was the first night of Passover, though—they went to the Temple to purchase a lamb, sacrificed it, brought it back for the meal—it felt significant. So many people were in Jerusalem for the festival. The atmosphere was febrile, still, every man wanting to be the one who prompted Yehoshuah to say words which they would all remember as long as there was breath in their bodies. They were excited, like children.

  Shimon wondered aloud whether the High Priest in his home was wishing he was here in this room among those who truly cleaved to God. Yehoshuah frowned at him and said nothing. Netan’el ate his share of the Paschal lamb and spoke of how the rich priests like Caiaphas and Annas, close bosom friends of Rome, could not understand the meaning of the sacrifice—that some men would only eat the meat of a lamb on this night, that many beggars would fill their bellies to the point of sickness. He hoped thereby to encourage Yehoshuah to speak again about how the poor are close to God, but Yehoshuah merely smiled. One of the hangers-on shouted that when the Messiah came, Rome itself would burn like the charred flesh of the lamb and some others laughed and cheered.

  They walked in the fields after the meal, the ones close to Yehoshuah. They talked of the great miracles God would surely make, and of how many in Jerusalem already longed to follow them. They were anticipating the end of days which God would bri
ng soon, so soon the day of judgment. And in the corner of his eye Iehuda saw his tails always, a few men melting into the shadows. Enough to keep watch and to send word.

  “They will come at dawn,” he said to himself. “When the world is quiet but they have light to see what they are doing.”

  At some point between dusk and dawn he dreamed. Or thinks he dreamed.

  In his dream, Yehoshuah came to learn with him, as they had learned together two years before, at the very start. They studied in the great hall of scrolls that is heaven, the kingdom of God. They read the words of the Torah from the stone tablets which Moses himself had carved and Iehuda saw that the letters were fire.

  And in his dream he said to Yehoshuah, “Why me? Why did God send you to me, knowing that I could not accept you?”

  And Yehoshuah kissed him on his forehead and on his cheeks and said, “God knew His business. Now we will see what that business was.”

  And in the dream Iehuda knew that Yehoshuah had forgiven him. But when he woke, with the dew settling on him in a quiet orchard with his friends, he knew that the matter had not concluded yet and the serpent in him was a great sickness and he wished he could vomit it out. But the clatter of arms and shields was at the crest of the hill and it was too late.

  They had not sent enough soldiers for a quiet surrender. There were thirty or forty of them, no more. Yehoshuah’s camp was five hundred men—although they were mostly still asleep and a little distant. The soldiers had their swords but the men had wooden staffs as cudgels, slings and stones, cooking and hunting knives.

  “You shall not take him!” shouted out Shimon, and stood between Yehoshuah and the guards.

  Yehoshuah’s closest men were awake and with him in the orchard. There were probably as many of them as of the soldiers. Several of the other men hefted their staffs meaningfully, shifting their stances to legs apart, knees slightly bent. The soldiers drew their swords.