The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  Do not underestimate your enemy, however. The Jews were cunning. They dug tunnels under the wall surrounding them and hollowed out the earth under the soldiers’ platforms, propping them up with timber. When the works were complete, they sent men in with bitumen torches to set the timber struts on fire and the first the Romans knew of the whole operation was when their platforms suddenly collapsed into the tunnels and pure flames burst through the ground and consumed them utterly. This lengthened the siege considerably.

  Do not be concerned about setbacks, however. Hunger will eventually destroy the people. In Jerusalem, after a few months, they ate even the sacred wheat set aside for the Holy of Holies, and the sacred oil for the holy lamps. When they asked people to swear they had not a handful of barley, they used the very name of their God, Yahaveh, as the binding seal of the oath, that same name which had been so sacred to them that any who uttered it was put to death. Very few men, it turns out, love God more than they love their own aching hungry belly. They will sink to such degradation of themselves that you will scarcely believe it possible.

  As time goes on, more and more people will attempt to desert the city. Use them where you can—for information, or to take as slaves. Do not hesitate to kill them if they seem useless.

  Batter the walls, of course, night and day. Attempt to lever out stones. Build up your platforms again. There will come a time to invade. You will be fighting against weakened, sickly, hungry men. You will prevail, for Rome always prevails. This is the whole of the law.

  There is nothing new under the sun, says Solomon, son of David, that selfsame David who stormed the walls of Jerusalem and took her from the Jebusites, who perhaps themselves had taken her from someone else.

  So it goes the same way. The battering of the walls had not ceased for six days and six nights. The inexorable platforms rose level with the city walls and the commander, Titus, had them test the ground under the struts with long blades ceaselessly. The people in the city knew the end was coming.

  They were different then from the way they had been one hundred and thirty years earlier, when Pompey first let a stone tumble from the wall in the glittering air. The services in the Temple continued, but what did they have to sacrifice? They had eaten the sacred oil and the sacred grain. There were no lambs left to slaughter. The priests circled the sanctuary with pale skin and dark hungry eyes and a gnawing sense within them that God was angry and His wrath could not be quenched.

  Titus knew that the wall would fall the day he stood in the morning on the highest platform and addressed the citizens of Jerusalem. The stench of the place rose to his nostrils even as his generals helped him up the wooden structure. There were rotting bodies in Jerusalem, unburied. It was silent, apart from the birds circling overhead. He spoke loudly. The dark-eyed people on the ramparts could hear him.

  “People of Jerusalem,” he said, “you Jews have been in constant rebellion since Pompey first conquered you. Not just rebellion—open war with Rome. And why did you think you had any hope at all?

  “Did you think you’d win because of your numbers? A tiny proportion of the Roman armies has been strong enough to defeat you. Did you think you’d win because of the loyalty of your allies? We are in the empire of Rome and no nation would support you over us. Did you think you’d win because you’re so muscular and strong? Even the Germans are our slaves. Did you think you’d win because of your strong walls? There are no walls stronger than the ocean that encircles Britain and yet they kneel down and worship our swords.

  “No. Do you know why you thought you’d win? It was because we were kind to you. We gave you too much. We crowned your own people as kings, we let you observe your religious laws, we even let you take collections for your Temple. We treated you well, and you have taken our kindness as a sign of weakness.

  “Jews, surrender now. We will kill only the men and take the women and children as slaves. Surrender now or understand what it means for Rome to be unkind.”

  Titus is even now regretting the generosity of Pompey when he stood in his sandals in the Holy of Holies and said, “Let them keep their ritual, why not? They have fought bravely.” Pompey should have crushed them, and then Titus would not have had to undertake this long and boring siege.

  The people of Jerusalem sent back a message that if he would only let them leave, they would depart, every man, woman and child, into the desert and leave the empty city to Titus. Titus angrily replied that they should understand their position: they had been conquered, they could not bargain. He prepared his troops for the final assault.

  The Jews say that at this precise moment a tiny beetle flew into Titus’s ear and laid an egg which grew into a grub. And they say that over time that grub bored into his brain and lived there as a full-grown beetle, eating more and more of the matter of his head every year so that the pain and the sensation of being battered from the inside were utterly intolerable to him and when he died and they opened his head they found that the beetle had grown to the size of a bird. But no commentators other than the Jews mention this, so one may doubt the accuracy of these reports.

  And the first stone fell, brought down by the battering engines. The soldiers swarmed into the city and began to kill, for they had waited a long time and many of their fellows had been killed by Jewish missiles and Jewish fire across those many months. Titus was no Pompey, and this siege had been no swift and well-managed affair. In any case, the purpose was not to secure the city for the good of Rome but to punish. To send a message.

  The soldiers pulled down the buildings stone from stone. They slew anyone they met. They set fires in the colonnades of the Temple and the other public buildings, so that the silver and gold covering the timbers melted into shining puddles on the floor of the great plaza.

  And they came at last to the Holy of Holies in the very heart of the Temple, where, they had been promised, the richest prizes of gold would be. They stopped then, amazed. Not just by the precious metals but by the workmanship, the rich decoration on every surface, the finely turned candelabrum, the beautiful silver trumpets whose metal was as thin as a blade of grass. Jerusalem’s riches were here, indeed, her most precious things entirely inward.

  The soldiers milled around the outer sanctuary, collecting the golden goblets and ewers. And one man, seeing the veil across the inner sanctuary ripped away and the space within revealed, jumped up on his friend’s back to get a better view. And yes, the strange little sanctuary was empty. And, laughing, he pulled a burning timber from the hand of his friend and positioned himself just so and pulled back his arm, straining at the shoulder, and threw it like a javelin into the holiest place in the world.

  The old wood and the dry cloth caught fire almost at once. And in the whole of Jerusalem there was a wailing, keening cry as of a woman who has woken in the morning to find her child dead.

  There were other brutalities. The Romans set fire to one of the remaining colonnades of the outer court even though six thousand women and children were sheltering there, having been told by a false prophet that God had promised him that this place alone would be spared. The corpses were piled up so high on the altar of the Temple that blood flowed in a constant river down the steps.

  They set fire to all the large buildings of the city: the council chamber, the tax office, the citadel, the palaces, the dwelling places of men of high rank, even the building that had once been the Prefect’s home. By the eighth day of the August moon those who still lived woke to see the dawn bloodred, for the whole city was on fire.

  The fires burned for days. And when they finally burned themselves out, the soldiers went through the city and if any stone was sitting on top of any other they pulled them down. Except for one wall, the Western Wall of the outer courtyard of the Temple, which had remained standing and which it pleased Titus to leave in place to show what a mighty feat he had accomplished by destroying this city.

  Titus took his troops back to Rome and there he celebrated a great triumph, parading through the st
reets of the city the holy vessels he had won in battle from the Temple in razed Jerusalem. They constructed a triumphal arch of marble depicting the spoils of war, Titus’s Arch, which stands in Rome to this day, just west of the Colosseum. And they minted a special commemorative coin in honor of the victory: Judea Capta, it read, Judea is captured. They struck more and more of them, for twenty-five years. And all across the Empire, from Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Turkey, when men paid for a loaf of bread or a side of pork or a turn at the whore, they paid with a coin showing a Jew bound with his hands behind his back or a woman weeping under a Judean date palm.

  “How deserted sits the city that once was full of people!

  How like a widow she is, who was great among the nations.

  The princess among all provinces has become a slave.”

  —The Book of Lamentations

  Time continued, of course. The Jews did not cease to rebel, nor did the Romans cease to smite them. The Emperor Hadrian, crushing a rebellion sixty-five years later and attempting to forestall another, renamed the city and forbade the Jews from entering it at all. His soldiers brought in new populations to Judea and chased the Jews out into other lands, to arrive in Antioch or Syria or Gaul or Kush or Rome herself and mourn their Temple and conduct their little rites of remembrance.

  And in time, a new god rose in Rome. A small cult, grown slowly mighty. And although one might say: this was the triumph of the Jews, this Jew-god risen to a high place in Roman esteem, nonetheless by the time he arrived there he was no longer a Jew at all, quite the reverse in a sense.

  For the new god was welcomed for one thing at least: it was evident to all that the destruction of Jerusalem must be a message from the God of the Jews. The wisest men sought for prophecies that could make the thing comprehensible. They thought of signs they had seen—perhaps a comet, perhaps a cow giving birth to a lamb. The new god, the Crucified King, provided an explanation: the Jews had angered their God by rejecting his true emissary. The people fingered their coins, rubbing their thumbs over that weeping Jewish woman, the figure of a man with his sword raised against her. It needed an explanation. If the Jews had rejected their God’s true emissary, that was why Jerusalem, one of the greatest and most famous and most prosperous and most beautiful cities on the earth, had been destroyed. Blame could not, this explanation made abundantly clear, in any way attach to Rome.

  Storytellers know that every story is at least partly a lie. Every story could be told in four different ways, or forty or four thousand. Every emphasis or omission is a kind of lie, shaping a moment to make a point. So when, between thirty-five and seventy years after Yehoshuah’s death, Mark and then Matthew and then Luke the complier and then John the theologian came to tell their stories it was as well for them to exonerate the Romans, who ruled the empire they lived in, and to blame the Jews, whose wickedness had clearly caused the destruction of their holy city. It was as well for them to add in perhaps a line here or there in which Yehoshuah had predicted that the Temple would fall, that the city would fall. This made him look wiser, as it made the Jews look worse for not believing, even in the face of such clear evidence. Nothing happened without a reason.

  Storytellers know that people enjoy tales that explain to them the origin of things, the way things come to be the way they are. This story is no different. Every story has an author, some teller of lies. Do not imagine that a storyteller is unaware of the effect of every word she chooses. Do not suppose for a moment that an impartial observer exists.

  Once upon a time there was a man, Yehoshuah, whose name the Romans changed to Jesus, for that sat more easily on their tongues. There may well indeed have been such a man, or several men whose sayings are united under that one name. Tales accreted to him, and theories grew up around and over him. He became, like Caesar, the son of a god. Like the god Tammuz, or the god Ba’al, or like Orpheus, also the son of a god, it was said he died and rose again. Like Perseus, he was born of a woman who had never known a man. He was turned into a god and certain things were lost and certain things were added.

  And when one peels away the gilding and the plaster and the paint that were applied to him, what remains? So much of what he said, he took from the Torah of the Jews. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an old Jewish ideal. But Yehoshuah was unique, in his time and place, for saying, “Love your enemy.”

  It is a dreamer’s doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently. And if those who claimed to follow him later had dedicated themselves to that one thing—“Love your enemy”—much bloodshed might have been avoided. But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed, even to this day. Easier to prefer one’s friend to one’s enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing.

  And so the Temple burned. The walls of Jerusalem fell. The people were scattered into exile in ten lands and ten times ten. And they took with them their unusual stubbornness and their distinct ways. And a book walked those same paths, from synagogue to synagogue at first, telling a tale of how miraculous one man had been and how evil those who rejected him were, and therefore bringing good news for some and bad for others.

  This was how it ended. And all the sorrow that came after followed from this.

  Notes on Sources

  This is, of course, a work of fiction. Much of it is made up, especially the personal lives of public figures, which tend not to be recorded. However, many of the most surprising parts of this book are based in fact. So, a few brief notes on some of the things that are true. Insofar as we know what is true. My main sources have been the works of Josephus, the Talmud and the Gospels themselves.

  Miryam

  “When his family heard about it, they went out to lay hold on him, for they said: ‘He is out of his mind.’” —Gospel of Mark 3:21

  “Then his mother and brothers came to see him and, standing outside, sent someone in to call him.…And he answered them saying, ‘Who is my mother, or my brothers?’ And he looked about on those who sat around him and said, ‘These are my mother and brothers!’” —Gospel of Mark 3:31–35

  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVII, 10, contains an account of the rebellion at the festival of Shavuot (The Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost) in around 4 BCE, along with the result: “The number of those that were crucified on this account was two thousand.”

  Iehuda from Qeriot

  “A follower said to him: ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him: ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.’” —Gospel of Matthew 8:21–22

  “And in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table there came a woman with an alabaster flask of pure spikenard, very precious. And she broke the flask and poured it on his head. And some disciples were angry and said, ‘Why waste this perfume? It could have been sold for a very high price and the money given to the poor.’…Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles, went to the priests to betray him.” —Gospel of Mark 14:3–10

  Caiaphas

  “Seven days before Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement] we sequester the High Priest from his house…we even make sure there’s another wife for him, because what would happen if his own wife died?” —Talmud Yoma 1, 1

  “And the priest shall write these curses in a scroll, and he shall wash them out in the bitter waters. And he shall make the woman drink the bitter waters that cause the curse.” —Numbers 5:23–24 (the whole ritual is recounted in Numbers 5 throughout)

  The massacre in the square by plainclothes soldiers is recounted in Josephus, The Jewish War, II, 9.

  Bar-Avo

  Sicarii mingle with the crowd and kill people with daggers concealed in their cloaks in Josephus, The Jewish War, II, 13.

  Epilogue

  “[Titus’s soldiers] caught every day five hundred Jews; some days they caught more…they nailed those they caught, one in one way and
another in a different way, to the crosses for a joke. Their multitude was so great that there was no room for all the crosses.” —Josephus, The Jewish War, V, 11 (Titus’s speech here is also largely taken from Josephus)

  Dramatis Personae

  Jews

  (anglicized versions of the names are in italics)

  Yehoshuah/Jesus a wandering healer and teacher

  Miryam/Mary the mother of Yehoshuah, and several other children, living in the village of Natzaret

  Gidon of Yaffo a fugitive

  Yosef/Joseph Miryam’s husband, a woodworker

  Shimon

  Yirmiyahu

  Iehuda sons and daughters of Miryam

  Iov

  Dina

  Michal

  Rahav a woman of Natzaret

  Ezra the Teacher a learned man

  Iehuda of Qeriot/Judas a follower of Yehoshuah

  Pinchas Miryam’s brother

  Shmuel Miryam’s brother

  Elkannah Iehuda’s wife

  Caiaphas the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest of the great Temple in Jerusalem

  Annas father-in-law of Caiaphas, a former High Priest