by Nick Tosches
“As a manifestation of his sense of inferiority, his sense of being lost in this world. As a justification of the ways of this world. As an eternal anchorage in the killing-sea of tossed and fleeting mortality.”
“No,” I said emphatically. “I am surprised at you. If not as a god, then surely as a thief, you have the answer in you.”
“I believe what I have said to be true. If the answer is not in what I have said, then I have not the answer.”
“What is felt as one with shame in the moment that Adam and Eve cease to be divine and become mortal? When they eat of—”
“Fear.”
“Yes. To be human is to be fearful. Most men are composed of little else but fear and shame.”
“This I know.”
“When is this tale of the creation supposed to have been concocted?”
“I do not know. They say that Moses was the first writer of the Book. A thousand years ago and more.”
“All tales are first told by firelight. And so it is with the invention of the gods. We will never know when your God was born. It was probably so long ago that the secret in its telling was forgotten and unknown to those who first set it to skin in the Book, if indeed it was known beyond the earliest teller. For it is as they say: if a thing is known to more than one, it is not secret.
“So, a thousand years ago and more, or five thousand years ago and more, a flame danced in a campfire in the night, and this tale was told. What is that word with which the tale begins?”
He pronounced a word of three syllables that was something like beresit.
“And this word carries the meaning of ‘in the beginning,’ does it not?”
“Yes, but not exactly. It is an odd formation. It means ‘in the beginning of.’”
“Of what?”
“It does not say.”
“And the next word we encounter is the name of God in the plural, is it not?”
“Yes. Elohim.”
“This Book of yours is high holy wreckage and massacre of meaning from the outset.”
He smiled broadly and nodded his amused agreement. Light from the stars moved in his soft, pale-brown eyes.
“It all must have been very different as told into the dancing flame of that long-ago campfire. The rabbis are crafty, the rabbis are wily, but they cannot rabbinize away an ‘in the beginning of’ that falls abruptly in a sheer drop to nowhere and nothing. They cannot rabbinize away their one true God being introduced as more than one.
“And nor can they explain why the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil imparts nothing but shame and fear. The fruit was forbidden because it held the knowledge of good and evil. Were fear and shame the sum of this knowledge?”
“Perhaps,” my good Lord uttered, “perhaps.” It seemed as if he would say more, but he did not.
“The forbidden enlightenment in the forbidden fruit was the knowledge that man created God. For this inelegant tale with which your Book begins is not the tale of the beginning. It is the tale of the tale of the beginning. In telling of God breathing the first breath into Adam, the tale breathes the first breath into God.
“So it is that Eve and Adam are of a sudden in shame and in fear. They are in shame because they know that they go naked not before God, but before those who made him. And they fear those who made him. Their children, their kindred, their fellow-kind. Cain, the first born of all men, and Abel, first slain of all men, and Cain’s sister-wife, from whose incest we are all derived, and on.
“So, why did man invent the God of your Book? Of what use to him was this God? What need did he have of this God?
“To protect him from what he feared. That first breath that man breathed into him was the breath of his protectorship. As man feared, so he invented God to thunder forth commandments that might protect him from and forfend what he feared.
“Man fears being killed. Thus he has his God thunder most fearsomely: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
“Man fears his wife being fucked by another. Thus he has his God thunder most fearsomely: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’
“Man fears being robbed. Thus he has his God thunder most fearsomely: ‘Thou shalt not steal.’
“And, less forcefully but fully and formally: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.’
“The gods of the Greeks and Romans are embodiments of the forces of nature, and reflections of the natures of men. Your God is a dictator against the natures of men. You speak so eloquently of the evils of teaching. Your God is a teacher, a rigged mouthpiece, that teaches in behalf of the self-interests of frightened men who created him that they might hide behind him. His inventors were forgotten, but he was not; and the imagining grew greater than the imaginers.”
“And why would men adjure and endure so angry a God?” he said, as if not to me, but to the night.
“Some men take to rough hemp rope and pillory. Some men enjoy the lash.”
“I knew a whore in Caesarea who made good coin lashing politicians and priests and such who came to her in garments of disguise.”
I smiled at the grace, balance, and justice of this. His mind seemed to drift back to the days before we met. With a long breath, I said the last of what was in me then.
“The serpent, who in the tale is coeval with God, maybe older than him, is the only one in the fable who speaks the truth and leads man to knowledge, of which there is of course no forbidden species. The serpent is wisdom.”
He whispered into the night the word nachash, which in the fable is the serpent’s name.
“Chokmah or Hokmah,” I said, “Athena or Sophia, Minerva or Sapientia, she has been known always by a feminine name. Wisdom is a woman. The serpent of wisdom is a woman.”
I let myself fall silent. I had talked too much. I looked at the mounds of donkey shit as if they measured the accumulation of my gross long-windedness.
“Who is it who said ‘Know thyself’?” he asked.
“The maxim has been attributed to many. I myself believe it to have been Thales.”
“You have helped me to know myself,” he said.
“Maybe you can help me to know what I have long yearned to know. Did man invent God before or after he invented good and evil?”
He smiled to me, as if to say: you ask of me the simplest things.
I had gone on and on speaking of wisdom. His eyes bespake it more deeply without sound.
“Man first perceived gods in the forces of nature,” he said. There was no tone of conjecture in what he said. He spoke as if stating facts. “Then man conceived good and evil. After inventing this unnatural morality, he recast his storm-gods into gods of morality, for the reasons you have expressed.
“Morality. Gods of morality. They are one and the same infirmity, one and the same disease.”
“So,” I said, “we are spreaders of disease.”
“Yes. Physicians of a kind, you might say.”
Earlier we had wondered if the donkeys saw figures in the constellations, and what they might be. Now I wondered aloud if they had their gods as well.
“If they do,” said Jesus, “we can be assured that they are saner than ours.”
The others were sleeping that night in the synagogue. We decided to sleep in the open night air. Each of us tied one of the donkeys’ tethers round a wrist as we laid ourselves down.
“Thou shalt not snore,” said he, in a most theatrically pious tone. Then his voice was again his own, natural and relaxed:
“And, speaking of the Shalt-Nots of the Commandments, you are quite right about the new words you have composed. They are beautiful, and I shall be proud to pronounce them. I will give them my best.”
“Good,” I said. “Otherwise, I would have your darling little Andreas deliver them.”
Our laughter rang low through the dark silent night. We were not so very far from the
synagogue, and for a moment it occurred to me that one or more of the others might have heard us. But I really did not care. Nor, I felt, did he.
The seven days of Pesach ended. From the synagogue there came voices that wove together lament and joy. I was told that it was an ancient song, a song of deliverance and freedom from slavery.
But all men are slaves, and always will be. Imprisoned in the bodies in which they are born, confined by the circumstances of their lives, they can measure their relative freedom only in small increments; and these grains of salt can be had only through manumission. Like all salt, the salt of freedom can be bought only with cast coins. And freed slaves often become the slaves of their freedom.
Jesus blessed the people of Capernaum, and I told them of the pronouncement that was to be made on the eve of the new moon, three days and a short distance thence. Coins in plenty were gathered for the building of the temple of the Word and the Way.
We went southward as far as Magdala. As we had expected with some dread, the most vociferous of those who met us at the entrance of that town was the old hag Mary the Magdalene, who had followed and haunted us in former days. Yes, old as she was, she still lived. We learned from the townspeople of Magdala that she had long claimed to have been restored to fertility by Jesus. More than that, she also claimed that she had borne a child by him. This child, whom she called Bar-Jesus, which in the Aramaic way meant “Son of Jesus,” was a bundle of old cloth rags that she carried about cradled in her arms for a time. The eventual disappearance of the “child” was easily explained by her. An angel of God had come to take it away, for as Jesus was the Son of God, so little Bar-Jesus was the grandson of God.
Those who told us this made scoff and sport of it. But Jesus did not. And when Mary drooled from her toothless gums and reached out to fumble at his robe, he looked into her eyes, which were now opalescent with the milkiness of lost sight, and said:
“Woman, have you no shame?”
This was said for the hearing of those gathered about, who responded with approbation. It is doubtful that doddering old Maria could hear or understand what was said.
We say: the fewer the fangs, the finer the fellatrix. I do believe that this saying was first said by salivating crones like our Mary the Magdalene.
Preceding us to Magdala was the rumor that, while we were at Capernaum, our fisherman Simon Peter had caught a tilapia in whose mouth he found a silver coin. One of the Magdalenes specified the coin to be a tetradrachm. Another expressed awe at this miracle.
We were nonplussed. What a paltry excuse for a miracle this seemed to be. A trifle of a miracle, if a miracle at all.
“But surely,” said Jesus, “it is not all that uncommon for a fish to take into its mouth a coin that finds its way into the sea.”
“No,” replied the man. “But how did you know to tell Peter to bring forth the first fish he caught in the lake, for there would be in its mouth a four-drachma coin? That is the miracle of it.”
Men invent rumors and others corroborate them to be a part of them, to say: yes, I was there. Other men transmit these rumors to seem to be possessors of privileged communication. All these men yearn to be party to something, even if at times they know not what.
As always, Jesus took the praise for this new miracle in silence, with an air that was more humble than dismissive. Simon Peter knew that there had been no such fish with a coin its mouth, and that no such fish had been foretold. But his pleased smile was greater than his surprise. The rumor showed him now to be looked on as especially close to Jesus, and as an important participant in his Lord’s miracle-workings, and this appealed a good deal to his vanity. It mattered not to him that the miracle was only hearsay and had never happened. All that mattered to him was his prominence in this hearsay, and he basked in his moment of slight celebrity.
The face of the younger fisherman, the tick Andreas, showed a perturbed and envious look.
I found satisfaction in his look.
The rabbi looked to the priest, and the priest looked to Jesus, who had moved on.
Some new disciples whom I barely recognized, and whose names I did not know, looked to each other, then all around.
What a bunch we were.
Magdala was a city of shipbuilding. Many of the best of boats used for fishing the Sea of Galilee and plying its shores were made here. Crafted of oak and cedar, strong-masted and well-rigged, some of these boats could carry a dozen or more dragnet fishermen or passengers, under sturdy sail, oar, and rudder, in the gentlest or harshest of winds.
The resinous compounds used by those who fashioned big sails and bigger dragnets from bold-woven flax were held in secret by the several masters whose workers used them. Though men of sail differed in their estimations of the sail-makers’ wares, none knew for sure the precise recipe of these various mixed resins. Of the liquid bitumen, of deep dark shades of blue and purple, used by the shipbuilders to seal and waterproof the seams of hull-boards, more was known than of the closely guarded compounds used to fortify the sails.
Magdala was also known for the excellence of its cured fish, and the recipes of the various ways of smoking, salting, drying, and pickling fish were more occult than those of the sail-makers’ compounds. The various fruitwoods used in smoking were numerous, and no smoker made known to another the wood that he used. This was especially true of those who used a combination of woods, such as one or more fruitwoods set to smoke together with berry-bearing alder-wood. The aromatic sprigs and spices that were added by one curer to salts for drying, and to brines for pickling, were unknown to the next.
So esteemed was the fish cured at Magdala that it was not only sold throughout Judea, but was transported in barrels to Caesarea and Tyre and thence by ship to every distant port of the Great Sea. It was the smoked tilapia of Magdala that gave Rome her taste for this manner of curing, which she later applied to every swimming thing in the Great Sea and the inland waters of Italy. A great many Romans, as you know, came to prefer the smoked to the fresh.
The synagogue at Magdala was old and small, and nowhere near as elaborate as the synagogue at Capernaum. It was as if the business of God here was of less importance than the business of shipbuilding or the business of curing fish. To one side of the synagogue door, there was a crude black mosaic adumbration of a boat under full sail. To the other side of the door, there was a crude black mosaic adumbration of a fish. As with some parts of the plaster that covered the walls, some pieces of these black mosaics had fallen away.
This impression was wrong. The industry of this city, its shipbuilding and its fish-curing, was conducted under the supervision of God, and those who conducted it bowed daily before him.
Jesus spoke briefly at the little synagogue, at the midday hour when workers took some rest from their work.
“I walk among the good people of this good city,” he said, as if he felt a deep liking for them. “I see the men wielding mallets and laboring at the joinery that will send forth rugged craft, and I remember my youthful years as a carpenter.
“Our sweat is as one. The bread and wine of our reward, like the burden of our taxes, are one. I am, like you, of the land and waters of Galilee. Two who travel with me on my mission are also of Galilee. They have fished our waters in your craft. They are fishermen who now also are fishers of men.”
As I was hearing this, my mind returned to the night Simon Peter came to us, that glorious night of the Feast of the Trumpets, in glorious Sepphoris, as we yearned for wine and women. “So you wish to be a fisher of men?” he had asked Simon, extempore, with irritation. I was surprised that he recalled those words.
“I walk among the good people of this good city,” he said, the sound of a deep liking still in his voice. “I delight in the fine smells of your cured fish, and I remember that this frail earthly body of mine has its earthly hungers. In this, surely, we are also one.
“But I say unto you, there are labors and hungers of the spirit that call us to a new Word, a new Way.”
> He smiled and looked gently among them. They were his to summon and to sway.
“You concern yourselves with a bit of silver in the mouth of a fish.”
His smiling words were met with smiles and a soft rippling of subdued, complaisant laughter.
“Come to meet me when your work is done on the eve of the new moon. Come to meet me at that place of quiet beauty that you know as the Hill of Riches. Forget about that bit of silver in the mouth of a fish. It was nothing, it means nothing. I will give you the Word that has been given to me. I will show you the Way that has been shown to me. I will fill your ears and hearts with gold.”
There rose a stir of buoyant anticipation among the people of Magdala.
I was astonished. I had given Jesus only a few hasty lines to pronounce. The rest were his, and spontaneous.
We feasted on cured fish, bread dripping with vinegar and rough-pressed oil, warm wine and cool spring-water. The priest, the rabbi, and the others were as buoyant with anticipation as the men and women of the city.
“These words that you will speak,” said the priest. “When did they come to you?”
“The elemental tones of these words were in me for a very long time.” The Lord washed down salted fish and bread with wine and water. “But their articulation was exceptionally elusive. I feared that their meaning was such as to be beyond my comprehension. Then, in a sudden wave, all was revealed. And there was simplicity where I saw complexity and difficulty.”
The newer disciples made as if they understood what he was saying.
I did not press the people of Magdala for offerings, but said only in a light-hearted way to one small group of them:
“If fish give us silver, what give you for the building of the temple?”
The building of boats and the curing of fish had made rich men of many of this city. We were benefacted well and generously. Much to our surprise, even one of the usurers stepped forward to place a coin of modest worth into the hand of Jesus, who tucked it into his cloak and kept it always as a token of sardonic good luck.
We procured a third donkey, whose seller would accept no payment for it, and purchased a third leather packsaddle and set of sacks.