Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine

by William Roskey

  “That’s a pretty optimistic estimate for such a serious endeavor. I was figuring on a lot longer.”

  “What can be so difficult about it?” Bartholomew shrugged. “We listen to see if he makes sense and that he does not contradict Mosaic Law. We speak to members of his entourage as well as to him. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, agents provocateurs of Herod Antipas as well as of Pilate himself will be bombarding him with questions, trying to trip him up. We’ll see how well he acquits himself in the defense of his teachings. We’ll see if he is in fact fulfilling the prophecies as set forth in the Scriptures, and, lastly, we’ll see with our own eyes whether or not he is enabling the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the crippled to walk. What could be simpler? A month at most—that’s how I see it.”

  “I intend to follow him to the end.”

  “To what end? Surely not until the end of your life?” Bartholomew was incredulous.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of until the end of his life.”

  “But that amounts to about the same thing! He is a young man—about the same age as you, certainly not a day over thirty I’m told. You could spend three decades following him!”

  “I think not, Bartholomew. In any event, you will be free to return home at any time. I will pay you two denarii a day in addition to all expenses, and you may go home whenever you have satisfied yourself about the man. If you still want to.” Bartholomew shook his head wonderingly.

  “You must be truly dedicated to your king to accept such a mission.”

  “I am dedicated to truth. Nothing more; nothing less.”

  Bartholomew studied me curiously for a few long moments as we walked along. “You are a peculiar man, Lightfoot, and your king and your countrymen are no less peculiar, I warrant. But I accept your commission.”

  What a character. He was suddenly like a kid being let out of school for the summer, eyes dancing with thoughts of adventure to come, but he was trying at the same time to make it look like he was doing me a favor. Well, who knows, I thought; maybe he was.

  “It’s done then,” I smiled.

  “Yes, Lightfoot, and now all we have to do is to tell Anna. You are so good with words, my friend. I wonder if you’d mind …”

  27

  I told her all right, and it was like being caught smack dab in the middle of the desert when a thunderstorm comes barreling in from the northeast. About all you can do is to stand there and get wet. I got a good two and a half sentences out of my mouth before she darkened, and the verbal thunderclaps broke over us like a string of atom bombs.

  “Who is the bigger fool?” she demanded of me in what was clearly a rhetorical question. “An imbecile or the man who hires one? You men,” she spat vehemently, “you disgust me! None of you ever grow up! Can any of you ever be long content with responsibly meeting the demands of everyday living? With mending the roof, with plowing, with tending to the animals, with acting like adults in the real world? No, you become easily bored and want to escape into a pretend world. You run off like children after one adventure or another. You start a war, dress yourselves up in silly costumes, and go marching off to foreign lands. Can women do thus? No! It is we who must pay for your folly. If it’s not war, it’s ‘seeking truth.’ How noble!” she mocked. “Ask the women of Capernaum what they think of this Jesus! It’s the scandal of Galilee! Those so-called ‘disciples’ he recruited here left their boats and nets at the docks and their wives and children to fend for themselves! Those irresponsible bums simply walked off to follow their ‘Lord and Master.’

  “I appeal to that pea-sized brain of yours, Bartholomew: would any good man, let along the ‘Holy One of God,’ encourage men to desert their own families, to forsake their duties? Go then!” she said, her dark eyes flashing. “Go!” she shrieked, picking up an earthenware platter and throwing it at us. We ducked, and it sailed over our heads and shattered against the wall behind us. We backed off.

  “This fool,” she shouted at me, pointing at Bartholomew, “not eight months ago, wanted to follow the Baptist! A grown man wanting to be dunked by a lunatic in the Jordan so that his ‘sins could be washed away.’ And just where is the Baptist now? Imprisoned at Herod’s fortress of Machaerus! What will happen to him? He will be put to death, Bartholomew, just as this Jesus will be. Mark my words: no good can come to him or to any who follow him!

  “How childish you men are! You cannot leave well enough alone. You cannot be content with what you are and what you have! There must always be the Great Cause, the Crusade, the Search for Truth! How utterly like children you are, wanting to run away, seeking glory, honor, and meaning, wanting to believe in romance, mystery, and magic. GO!” she screamed, hurling a pitcher. We ducked again and, although we were still unscathed, backed up some more.

  “Would that the world were ruled by women! Would that the world were ruled by practical creatures who are closer to nature and to reality! We live in the real world, with the pain of childbirth, with nursing our young, tilling the garden, preparing meals, washing clothes, curing ailments … with real life!

  “You worthless scum, Bartholomew! You are good for nothing! You inherited this inn from your father. It was his energy that built it, not yours. Just as it is my energy and business sense that run it! When you are not sleeping, you are daydreaming, and, when you are not daydreaming, you are in the midst of silly philosophical discussions over wine with your other air-headed friends. Be off with you then! It will make my lot easier!” With this, she picked up a five-gallon urn. We headed for the door fast and were through it and swallowed up in the cool dark night when we heard the urn crash inside. Bartholomew looked at me and said, “She’s Assyrian,” as if by way of explanation. He stroked his beard thoughtfully for a moment, considering the situation. “At least we were almost through with the meal when you broached the subject. It’s best to begin any journey with a full stomach.”

  I nodded.

  “I’d hoped for a good night’s sleep before continuing, though,” I said.

  “I also, Lightfoot. Anna? Anna, my sweet dove? The good gentleman is paying me for accompanying him. Do you hear me? It is a job, my little nightingale. I will be paid in gold, Anna. GOLD, do you hear? I am to be a guide.” Silence. “Anna?” Emboldened, he approached the door. “I will be bringing home money, my beloved.” Our bedrolls and my bag were thrown out.

  “Bartholomew, if you’re gone for any longer than a month, or, if you come home with empty pockets …” the threat hung heavily in the night air.

  “Thank you, my little treasure,” Bartholomew called out cheerfully as we picked up our things. “I will be counting the moments until we’re together again.”

  And so we set out for Gennesaret, the next town further south along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. We reached it in no time at all, and, since I was so wound up, I insisted we push on further south to Magdala, the home town of Mary of Magdala, better known as Mary Magdalene. But along about 11 p.m., Bartholomew began dragging, so, since we were on the outskirts of Magdala anyway, I called a halt and we sacked out in an olive grove. I was beginning to get excited and so slept little.

  28

  “All, right,” I said to Bartholomew as the sleepy town began to stir in the bright early morning sunlight, “let’s split up and meet back here in about two hours. You go to the market place and get us some food; here’s the money, not only for today, but for several days of travel. At the same time, ask as many people as you can about Jesus, when he came through here, when he left, where he went, and so on. If you have the time, talk to anyone who had direct personal contact with him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find a prostitute.” I caught the upraised eyebrows and quickly added, “A certain very special prostitute.”

  “Aren’t they all?” the little innkeeper remarked drily.

  “Look, Bartholomew, I’ll explain later. But, believe me, my reasons have nothing to do with my glands. It’s just that I unders
tand that there is a certain prostitute in this town who is, or is about to become, very close to Jesus.” Bartholomew shook his head sadly.

  “And he is supposed to be a holy man of God.”

  “This shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. You told me yourself that he is known to associate with sinners.”

  “And I also told you that that is precisely one of the things that casts serious doubt upon his claim to be of God. As Anna has reminded me on more than one occasion, her people have a saying. ‘He who lies down with dogs, gets up with fleas.’”

  “Very catchy. I must remember that. Now let’s get moving. See you later.”

  Where does one go to inquire about the whereabouts of prostitutes, I asked myself. Why, to the docks, of course, I responded. I walked up to a crowd of fishermen on the quay, who were deep in consultation, alternately scanning the sky and pointing at several different places on the Sea of Galilee, obviously conferring over the best places to fish that day, considering the weather, the temperature and condition of the water, and similar factors.

  “Excuse me,” I said, interrupting the pontifications of a swarthy man who was clearly a leader of some sort. He glowered at me. “I was wondering if you fellows could direct me to a prostitute.” Guffaws and raucous laughter rang out in the chill morning air. It was accompanied by much rib-poking and not a few lewd remarks.

  “Isn’t it a bit early in the day?” leered a squat Neanderthalic type, displaying a mouthful of rotten teeth. I flushed.

  “You misunderstand me. This woman, I’m searching for a particular one, you understand, has information that … will be useful to me.”

  “What is the woman’s name?” growled the leader, whose dark complexion only served to highlight the stark-white puckered four-inch scar on his right cheek.

  “Mary.”

  “Mary, you say.” He scratched his left armpit reflectively. “There are ten towns on the shores of the Sea, and Magdala is by far the largest. Of prostitutes we have plenty. In addition, Mary is a very common name. Is she called by anything else?”

  “Not to my knowledge. ‘Mary’ is all I know.”

  He shook his head. “What does she look like then?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Indeed,” he said, now pensively running his hand over the stubble on his face, trying to give the impression of a man of infinite patience even when confronted with a village idiot. “How old is she then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do not,” he observed with heavy irony, “give us much to go on.” There were barely suppressed smiles all around, and I felt the perfect fool.

  “That’s true,” I admitted, “but I approached you because men of your obvious worldly wisdom might be expected to know of such matters. There was a marked change in the atmosphere. They’d been prepared to scornfully dismiss me. Now they’d received a challenge.

  “Stranger, how can you possibly expect even us to guide you to a certain wench when all you know is that she’s called Mary and is a wanton? You don’t know her by any other name. You don’t know what she looks like. You don’t know how old she is. Do you know if she is now in Magdala, or whether she is called a Magdalene because she once lived here? What is her father’s name? His occupation? Her mother’s name?”

  Well, he had me, of course. Not only did I not know the answers to any of those questions, but it suddenly occurred to me that she might be called Magdalene because she was going to be taking up residence there before she met Jesus, and that that hadn’t happened yet. Although he’d been through here once, he’d be through here several times during the course of his three year-ministry. It could be entirely possible that Mary just hadn’t yet come to Magdala. Or it could be that the Bible refers to her as a Magdalene, not because she had lived there, but because her family lived there. She may have been visiting them when Jesus came through. Perhaps that had already happened, and she was following him even now.

  At any rate, I certainly couldn’t go to the nearest telephone booth and look under “Magdalene, Mary” in the directory. Once again it was brought home to me that my job was not going to be an easy one. Clarence had told me that one of the most important requirements for the job was resourcefulness. He was right.

  “You are, of course, right,” I responded to the group. “I’m sorry.” As I began to leave, the leader spoke.

  “Wait! Friend, it is clear that you are on a most unusual errand and, further, that there is a great deal you’re not telling us.” When I turned back, his probing, intense eyes locked on mine, and I could see the high intelligence that resided behind them.

  “It’s simply that I have a great deal of interest in the iterant preacher named Jesus. I was told that this Mary I seek knows him well. It is really nothing more complicated than that.”

  “The Nazarene,” the scar-faced man said softly, thoughtfully, “ah, yes. The self-styled ‘fisher of men’ who netted a number of our brothers in Capernaum.”

  “That’s the man.”

  “We heard his words. He stood on the deck of a boat in this very place and preached to a multitude. His words are … powerful. Scores left to follow him south.”

  “But you did not.”

  “We did not,” he acknowledged, his eyes dropping to the ground for a moment.

  “But if his words were so powerful …” I left the rest of the question unspoken. The crowd began to murmur. The incident had changed, all in the space of a couple of minutes, from making sport of a funny-looking foreigner with a thick accent who was in search of a prostitute to being asked to account for turning away from a strange Nazarene who spoke to their innermost heart of hearts. Their leader spoke for them, speaking with a passion that suggested he was also trying to convince himself.

  “We have wives, children, old people to take care of. We have responsibilities. We must work for a living, my friend. We live in the real world, not a dream world of prophets’ visions! In the real world, a man must eat, and he must labor to earn his bread!”

  “What you say is true as far as it goes,” I said. “But I cannot help but feel that it is now you who is not telling all.” Our eyes locked again. He opened his mouth to protest but then shifted his gaze to the south, to the direction Jesus had taken.

  “His words are too hard,” he said sadly, almost plaintively. “Too hard,” he whispered. “We are only men.”

  I nodded, knowing exactly how he felt. A strong wind came up as I turned and walked away.

  29

  The Horns of Hattin is an extinct volcano that dominates a large basalt plateau 860 feet above the town of Magdala and just west of it. Eons ago, a shifting of the Earth’s crust caused adjacent surfaces of the hard, dense, dark volcanic rock to be differentially displaced parallel to the plane of fracture. The effect is breathtaking in more ways than one. The fissure, or rift, is known as the Valley of Doves, and, as Bartholomew and I toiled up it, I felt some of the same kind of awe I felt when I first saw the Mogollon Rim in the Arizona uplands. The cliffs here were every bit as sheer, dangerous, and visually dramatic, the northern wall rising to 320 feet, and the southern to 600 feet. When we reached the summit, we could see the village of Arbela below, and it was here that I called a halt for the day. The sun was beginning to set.

  I began writing my report on the following morning before we moved out. Writing my report at dawn was to become standard operating procedure. At dawn I was not in a hurry to scribble the report down quickly, racing against the fading light of the sunset. In addition, my mind was fresh. The trouble was that until we caught up with Jesus, there was little to report. All the research Clarence had done was right on the mark. There were few surprises in my journey across the face of first century Palestine. The construction of the dwellings, public houses, and places of worship; the way the people dressed, what they ate, how they earned their livings—it had all been described in the chronicles of the times. Nevertheless, like a good military man, I entered every detail in my report every morn
ing. Everything. The date, time, weather conditions, place names, people’s names, the prices of food and lodging, the flora, the fauna, everything. A friend has urged me to publish my report, but it is my feeling that that document would be of little interest to anyone except a handful of archaeologists and historians.

  Somehow I still couldn’t believe, really believe, that I wasn’t going to be coming back from this mission. My mind just wouldn’t accept it. I still pictured myself being debriefed by Clarence back in his home or sitting in Ike’s den back on the farm in Gettysburg, showing him on a map the places I’d been, telling him what Christ had said, my observations, and so on. I still saw myself returning to my squadron at Nellis Air Force Base. I still saw myself watching television, flying, driving a car, flipping an electric light switch, and doing a thousand everyday things that my conscious intellect knew very well I’d never do again. Palestine in the first century was no more or no less “civilized” than many parts of the world were in the mid-twentieth century. I guess that’s what made it so hard to believe that I wasn’t going back again. Subconsciously, I was looking at this as a tour of duty in an underdeveloped country, not unlike my tour of duty in Korea. Well, I knew I’d have to face the truth and come to grips with it sooner or later, but foremost in my mind was getting the mission accomplished, my investigation completed, and my report back in the document canister under five feet of earth. Then I’d face it. In the meantime, if it made things a little easier to believe that, on the other side of the world, people were watching the “Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday nights, I could see no harm in it.

  Bartholomew was not an unpleasant traveling companion. He was exuberant, like a kid playing hooky from school. I guess if I were in his sandals and away from that shrewish wife of his, I’d feel the same way. At any rate, he was a good little guy, and his infectious high spirits made the miles melt away. As we journeyed along, we met a number of people who had seen Jesus, and most, at least most of those whom we’d asked, were of the opinion that he was clearly a major prophet, perhaps even on the same order as Elijah. Since my interviewees were not by any means part of a statistically validated sampling anyway, I varied my line of questioning, with some interesting results. Of some who were most glowingly enthusiastic, I asked point blank, “Do you think he is the Messiah?” In most cases, the eyes would suddenly become guarded and furtive, darting about, possibly to see if there were any Teachers of the Law within earshot. Remember, blasphemy was a capital offense. “Of that, I am not qualified to pass judgment,” would be the usual cautious reply. It was in the afternoon in the village of Arbela that we met an extraordinary exception.