“Science can say how, but it never asks why,” he had told Monica. “It can’t answer.”
“Who wants to know?” she’d replied.
“I do.”
“Well, you’ll never find out, will you?”
“Sit down, my son,” said the rabbi. “What do you wish to ask of us?”
“Where is Christ?” he said. “Where is Christ?”
They did not understand the language.
“Is it Greek?” asked one, but another shook his head.
Kyrios: The Lord.
Adonai: The Lord.
Where was the Lord?
He frowned, looking vaguely about him.
“I must rest,” he said in their language.
“Where are you from?”
He could not think what to answer.
“Where are you from?” a rabbi repeated.
“Ha-Olam Hab-Bah . . .” he murmured at length.
They looked at one another. “Ha-Olam Hab-Bah,” they said. Ha-Olam Hab-Bah; Ha-Olam Haz-Zeh: The world to come and the world that is.
“Do you bring us a message?” said one of the rabbis. They were used to prophets, certainly, but none like this one. “A message?”
“I do not know,” said the prophet hoarsely. “I must rest. I am hungry.”
“Come. We will give you food and a place to sleep.”
He could only eat a little of the rich food and the bed with its straw-stuffed mattress was too soft for him. He was not used to it.
He slept badly, shouting as he dreamed, and, outside the room, the rabbis listened, but could understand little of what he said.
Karl Glogauer stayed in the synagogue for several weeks. He would spend most of his time reading in the library, searching through the long scrolls for some answer to his dilemma. The words of the Testaments, in many cases capable of a dozen interpretations, only confused him further. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to tell him what had gone wrong.
The rabbis kept their distance for the most part. They had accepted him as a holy man. They were proud to have him in their synagogue. They were sure that he was one of the special chosen of God and they waited patiently for him to speak to them.
But the prophet said little, muttering only to himself in snatches of their own language and snatches of the incomprehensible language he often used, even when he addressed them directly.
In Nazareth, the townsfolk talked of little else but the mysterious prophet in the synagogue, but the rabbis would not answer their questions. They would tell the people to go about their business, that there were things they were not yet meant to know. In this way, as priests had always done, they avoided questions they could not answer while at the same time appearing to have much more knowledge than they actually possessed.
Then, one sabbath, he appeared in the public part of the synagogue and took his place with the others who had come to worship.
The man who was reading from the scroll on his left stumbled over the words, glancing at the prophet from the corner of his eye.
The prophet sat and listened, his expression remote.
The Chief Rabbi looked uncertainly at him, then signed that the scroll should be passed to the prophet. This was done hesitantly by a boy who placed the scroll into the prophet’s hands.
The prophet looked at the words for a long time and then began to read. The prophet read without comprehending at first what he read. It was the book of Esaias.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all of them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
(Luke 4: 18–20)
5
They followed him now, as he walked away from Nazareth towards the Lake of Galilee. He was dressed in the white linen robe they had given him and though they thought he led them, they, in fact, drove him before them.
“He is our messiah,” they said to those that enquired. And there were already rumours of miracles.
When he saw the sick, he pitied them and tried to do what he could because they expected something of him. Many he could do nothing for, but others, obviously in psychosomatic conditions, he could help. They believed in his power more strongly than they believed in their sickness. So he cured them.
When he came to Capernaum, some fifty people followed him into the streets of the city. It was already known that he was in some way associated with John the Baptist, who enjoyed huge prestige in Galilee and had been declared a true prophet by many Pharisees. Yet this man had a power greater, in some ways, than John’s. He was not the orator that the Baptist was, but he had worked miracles.
Capernaum was a sprawling town beside the crystal lake of Galilee, its houses separated by large market gardens. Fishing boats were moored at the white quayside, as well as trading ships that plied the lakeside towns. Though the green hills came down from all sides to the lake, Capernaum itself was built on flat ground, sheltered by the hills. It was a quiet town and, like most others in Galilee, had a large population of gentiles. Greek, Roman and Egyptian traders walked its streets and many had made permanent homes there. There was a prosperous middle class of merchants, artisans and ship-owners, as well as doctors, lawyers and scholars, for Capernaum was on the borders of the provinces of Galilee, Trachonitis and Syria, and though a comparatively small town was a useful junction for trade and travel.
The strange, mad prophet in his swirling linen robes, followed by the heterogeneous crowd that was primarily composed of poor folk but also could be seen to contain men of some distinction, swept into Capernaum. The news spread that this man really could foretell the future, that he had already predicted the arrest of John by Herod Antipas and soon after Herod had imprisoned the Baptist at Peraea. He did not make the predictions in general terms, using vague words the way other prophets did. He spoke of things that were to happen in the near future and he spoke of them in detail.
None knew his name. He was simply the prophet from Nazareth, or the Nazarene. Some said he was a relative, perhaps the son, of a carpenter in Nazareth, but this could be because the written words for “son of a carpenter” and “magus” were almost the same and the confusion had come about in that way. There was even a very faint rumour that his name was Jesus. The name had been used once or twice, but when they asked him if that was, indeed, his name, he denied it or else, in his abstracted way, refused to answer at all.
His actual preaching tended to lack the fire of John’s. This man spoke gently, rather vaguely, and smiled often. He spoke of God in a strange way, too, and he appeared to be connected, as John was, with the Essenes, for he preached against the accumulation of personal wealth and spoke of mankind as a brotherhood, as they did.
But it was the miracles that they watched for as he was guided to the graceful synagogue of Capernaum. No prophet before him had healed the sick and seemed to understand the troubles that people rarely spoke of. It was his sympathy that they responded to, rather than the words he spoke.
For the first time in his life, Karl Glogauer had forgotten about Karl Glogauer. For the first time in his life he was doing what he had always sought to do as a psychiatrist.
But it was not his life. He was bringing a myth to life—a generation before that myth would be born. He was completing a certain kind of psychic circuit. He was not changing history, but he was giving history more substance.
He could not bear to think that Jesus had been nothing more than a myth. It was in his power to make Jesus a physical reality rather than the creation of a process of mythogenesis.
So he spoke in the synagogues and he spoke of a gentler God than most of them had heard of, and where he could remember them, he told them parables.
And gradually the need to
justify what he was doing faded and his sense of identity grew increasingly more tenuous and was replaced by a different sense of identity, where he gave greater and greater substance to the rôle he had chosen. It was an archetypal rôle. It was a rôle to appeal to a disciple of Jung. It was a rôle that went beyond a mere imitation. It was a rôle that he must now play out to the very last grand detail. Karl Glogauer had discovered the reality he had been seeking.
And in the synagogue there was a man, which had a spirit of an unclean devil, and cried out with a loud voice, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him, and hurt him not. And they were all amazed, and spake among themselves, saying, What a word is this! for with authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out. And the fame of him went out into every place of the country round about.
(Luke 4: 33–37)
“Mass hallucination. Miracles, flying saucers, ghosts, it’s all the same,” Monica had said.
“Very likely,” he had replied. “But why did they see them?”
“Because they wanted to.”
“Why did they want to?”
“Because they were afraid.”
“You think that’s all there is to it?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
When he left Capernaum for the first time, many more people accompanied him. It had become impractical to stay in the town, for the business of the town had been brought almost to a standstill by the crowds that sought to see him work his simple miracles.
He spoke to them in the spaces beyond the towns. He talked with intelligent, literate men who appeared to have something in common with him. Some of them were the owners of fishing fleets—Simon, James and John among them. Another was a doctor, another a civil servant who had first heard him speak in Capernaum.
“There must be twelve,” he said to them one day. “There must be a zodiac.”
He was not careful in what he said. Many of his ideas were strange. Many of the things he talked about were unfamiliar to them. Some Pharisees thought he blasphemed.
One day he met a man he recognised as an Essene from the colony near Machaerus.
“John would speak with you,” said the Essene.
“Is John not dead yet?” he asked the man.
“He is confined at Peraea. I would think Herod is too frightened to kill him. He lets John walk about within the walls and gardens of the palace, lets him speak with his men, but John fears that Herod will find the courage soon to have him stoned or decapitated. He needs your help.”
“How can I help him? He is to die. There is no hope for him.”
The Essene looked uncomprehendingly into the mad eyes of the prophet.
“But, master, there is no one else who can help him.”
“I have done all that he wished me to do,” said the prophet. “I have healed the sick and preached to the poor.”
“I did not know he wished this. Now he needs help, master. You could save his life.”
The prophet had drawn the Essene away from the crowd.
“His life cannot be saved.”
“But if it is not, the unrighteous will prosper and the kingdom of heaven will not be restored.”
“His life cannot be saved.”
“Is it God’s will?”
“If I am God, then it is God’s will.”
Hopelessly, the Essene turned and began to walk away from the crowd.
John the Baptist would have to die. Glogauer had no wish to change history, only to strengthen it.
He moved on, with his following, through Galilee. He had selected his twelve educated men, and the rest who followed him were still primarily poor people. To them he offered their only hope of fortune. Many were those who had been ready to follow John against the Romans, but now John was imprisoned. Perhaps this man would lead them in revolt, to loot the riches of Jerusalem and Jericho and Caesarea. Tired and hungry, their eyes glazed by the burning sun, they followed the man in the white robe. They needed to hope and they found reasons for their hope. They saw him work greater miracles.
Once he preached to them from a boat, as was often his custom, and as he walked back to the shore through the shallows, it seemed to them that he walked over the water.
All through Galilee in the autumn they wandered, hearing from everyone the news of John’s beheading. Despair at the Baptist’s death turned to renewed hope in this new prophet who had known him.
In Caesarea they were driven from the city by Roman guards used to the wildmen with their prophecies who roamed the country.
They were banned from other cities as the prophet’s fame grew. Not only the Roman authorities, but the Jewish ones as well seemed unwilling to tolerate the new prophet as they had tolerated John. The political climate was changing.
It became hard to find food. They lived on what they could find, hungering like starved animals.
He taught them how to pretend to eat and take their minds off their hunger.
Karl Glogauer, witch-doctor, psychiatrist, hypnotist, messiah.
Sometimes his conviction in his chosen rôle wavered and those that followed him would be disturbed when he contradicted himself. Often, now, they called him the name they had heard, Jesus the Nazarene. Most of the time he did not stop them from using the name, but at others he became angry and cried a peculiar, guttural name.
“Karl Glogauer! Karl Glogauer!”
And they said, Behold, he speaks with the voice of Adonai.
“Call me not by that name!” he would shout, and they would become disturbed and leave him by himself until his anger had subsided.
When the weather changed and the winter came, they went back to Capernaum, which had become a stronghold of his followers.
In Capernaum he waited the winter through, making prophecies.
Many of these prophecies concerned himself and the fate of those that followed him.
Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.
(Matthew 16: 20–21)
They were watching television at her flat. Monica was eating an apple. It was between six and seven on a warm Sunday evening. Monica gestured at the screen with her half-eaten apple.
“Look at that nonsense,” she said. “You can’t honestly tell me it means anything to you.”
The programme was a religious one, about a pop-opera in a Hampstead Church. The opera told the story of the crucifixion.
“Pop-groups in the pulpit,” she said. “What a comedown.”
He didn’t reply. The programme seemed obscene to him, in an obscure way. He couldn’t argue with her.
“God’s corpse is really beginning to rot now,” she jeered. “Whew! The stink!”
“Turn it off, then,” he said quietly.
“What’s the pop-group called? The Maggots?”
“Very funny. I’ll turn it off, shall I?”
“No, I want to watch. It’s funny.”
“Oh, turn it off!”
“Imitation of Christ!” she snorted. “It’s a bloody caricature.”
A negro singer, who was playing Christ and singing flat to a banal accompaniment, began to drone out lifeless lyrics about the brotherhood of man.
“If he sounded like that, no wonder they nailed him up,” said Monica.
He reached forward and switched the picture off.
“I was enjoying it.” She spoke with mock disappointment. “It was a lovely swan-song.”
Later, she said with a trace of affection that worried him, “You old fogey. What a pity. You could have been John Wesley or Calvin or someone. You can�
��t be a messiah these days, not in your terms. There’s nobody to listen.”
6
The prophet was living in the house of a man called Simon, though the prophet preferred to call him Peter. Simon was grateful to the prophet because he had cured his wife of a complaint which she had suffered from for some time. It had been a mysterious complaint, but the prophet had cured her almost effortlessly.
There were a great many strangers in Capernaum at that time, many of them coming to see the prophet. Simon warned the prophet that some were known agents of the Romans or the Pharisees. The Pharisees had not, on the whole, been antipathetic towards the prophet, though they distrusted the talk of miracles that they heard. However, the whole political atmosphere was disturbed and the Roman occupation troops, from Pilate, through his officers, down to the troops themselves, were tense, expecting an outbreak but unable to see any tangible signs that one was coming.
Pilate himself hoped for trouble on a large scale. It would prove to Tiberius that the emperor had been too lenient with the Jews over the matter of the votive shields. Pilate would be vindicated and his power over the Jews increased. At present he was on bad terms with all the Tetrarchs of the provinces—particularly the unstable Herod Antipas who had seemed at one time his only supporter. Aside from the political situation, his own domestic situation was upset in that his neurotic wife was having her nightmares again and was demanding far more attention from him than he could afford to give her.
There might be a possibility, he thought, of provoking an incident, but he would have to be careful that Tiberius never learned of it. This new prophet might provide a focus, but so far the man had done nothing against the laws of either the Jews or the Romans. There was no law that forbade a man to claim he was a messiah, as some said this one had done, and he was hardly inciting the people to revolt—rather the contrary.
Looking through the window of his chamber, with a view of the minarets and spires of Jerusalem, Pilate considered the information his spies had brought him.
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