by Barbara Wood
When Solomon died, it was Amelia who had been Rachel’s mainstay and empathizer, coming to the house in all weathers, with words or silence, depending upon Rachel’s mood at the time, but always there, sharing the grief and the burden of being suddenly alone in the world. Many times in those dark days Rachel had wondered if she would have even gotten through it all without Amelia.
And then the tables had turned. “I feel as though I am losing my soul,” Amelia had confessed one evening as dusk crept softly into the private garden. “Cornelius is draining me, Rachel, and I haven’t the strength to fight him.”
Rachel wished she could pull that necklace from Amelia’s neck and grind the poisonous blue crystal beneath her heel. But Cornelius made sure his wife wore it every day; worse, Amelia believed she deserved it. “I did commit adultery,” she said unhappily.
“Amelia, listen to me. One day the Lord came upon a group of people about to stone a woman caught in adultery. He stopped them and offered the first stone to anyone in the mob who had not themselves committed a sin. And Amelia, no one took the stone! Is Cornelius without sin?”
“It is different for him. It is different for men.”
Rachel could not argue with that, for the inequality between men and women was the same in both Roman and Jewish traditions, which placed the father or husband above the women in the house. But Jesus had preached of equality between men and women, and wasn’t Rachel herself proof? In the synagogue she must sit in a balcony, hidden behind a screen, and not take active part in the service, whereas at the Sabbath feasts in her home, celebrating the life and death and resurrection of the Lord, she was the deaconess, the one who presided over the service, the prayers, and the breaking of the communal bread. And when Jesus returned and the new kingdom of God commenced, it was going to be a new age for women as well as for men.
Rachel was not going to give up on her friend. When Jesus returned, only those who were baptized would be admitted to the new kingdom. And he was going to return soon, for Peter said the Lord had promised to come back in the lifetime of his disciples. Jesus had died over thirty years ago, those of his followers still alive were of extreme age, like Peter, who was so frail that it looked as if each breath might be his last. As Rachel tasted the stew that had been simmering since the beginning of Sabbath the night before, with morsels of lamb so tender they melted on the tongue, she vowed that no matter what it took, whatever strength she had and purpose of mind, she was going to save her friend’s soul.
Amelia hummed as she arranged the small loaves of bread on platters. Such little tasks made her feel useful. In her own home, she was no longer needed. Cornelius was spending more and more time at the imperial palace as he had become a member of Nero’s inner circle, and although Amelia had five children, one son-in-law, two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren, her house on the Aventine Hill was a strangely silent and deserted place. There was just the two boys left, Gaius, who was to receive his toga of manhood in two years and no longer a little boy and who spent most of his time with his schoolmates or his tutors and had no time for his mother; and little Lucius, who wasn’t really her son, who had his nanny and tutors and the attention of Cornelius when he was home. Amelia would roam the rooms and colonnades and gardens of their hilltop villa as if searching for something. Rachel told her that it was faith she sought but Amelia was not so sure. If it were faith she was seeking, then would she not have found it by now in this hotbed of zeal and religious fervor? At some meetings, people fell to the ground in religious fits of ecstasy, speaking gibberish or prophesying the end of days. The group prayed and sang and baptized new converts, they witnessed the Lord as their savior and pledged their souls to God. But so far none of this had touched Amelia.
She turned her attention to preparing special food for poor Japheth who, having no tongue, had difficulty eating. His tongue had been cut out by a sadistic master and he had joined Rachel’s house-church because the God of the Jews listened to silent prayer. A priest at the temple of Jupiter had demanded a fee for reciting Japheth’s prayer out loud to the god, saying, “How do you expect the god to hear you if you can’t talk?”
When Amelia handed a plate of bread to Cleander, a young slave with a clubfoot whom Rachel had recently freed, she could not help but think of her lost baby, wondering again if it had survived the rubbish heap or if she was already in the afterlife waiting to be reunited with her mother, as Jesus had promised. If only she could believe! Amelia had not joined Rachel’s group out of faith but for the friendship. She felt needed again, and part of a family: Gaspar, the freed slave with only one arm; Japheth, the tongueless mute; Chloe, the evangelist from Corinth; Phoebe, an elderly deaconess who lived here in Rome. It didn’t matter to Amelia that Jesus was many things to many people—wise man, rebel, teacher, healer, redeemer, son of God—for had not Jesus himself spoken in parables that each might interpret his message according to his own belief? Amelia saw Jesus as a teacher of a moral life. She saw no divinity in him, no miraculous powers, with perhaps one exception: his message had brought happiness back into her life. That was a miracle.
She wondered if Cornelius had noticed the change in her. And if he thought about her at all, what did he suppose she was up to? Did he picture her and Rachel sitting like two contented hens comparing grandchildren and complaining about current hairstyles? He could not possibly imagine the weekly assemblage Amelia found herself in, especially the social mixture. She shuddered at the thought of his reaction to his wife sharing bread with men and women of low birth, or to learn that she had given up a bracelet that had been his wedding gift to her twenty-seven years ago to help bail a Jew from Tarsus out of prison.
Cornelius. After all these years, she still did not understand him. Why, for example, after six years, was he stepping up his punishment of her, taking every opportunity to humiliate her, when surely it was time to let the matter fade from memory? But then she had started seeing the sideways looks in her direction and hearing the whispers behind her back. After being back in Rome for only a few days, the rumor finally reached her: Cornelius had taken the beautiful widow Lucilla to Egypt with him. Amelia felt sick. The blue-crystal necklace was a means to keep her past sin in the forefront of everyone’s mind while he quietly got away with his own.
Upon their return from the country, she and Cornelius had plunged back into the social whirl of nightly dinners and holiday galas, Roman high society having little else to do. Cornelius always insisted Amelia wear the Egyptian necklace, and though she concealed it beneath her dress, he made her bring it out to show others while he told the legend of the adulterous queen. Nero’s wife, Empress Poppaea, had lifted the heavy gold pendant in her hand, narrowed her eyes at the blue crystal, and said with delicious glee, “Scandalous!”
Nightmares plagued Amelia, and during the day, whether gardening, weaving, or inspecting the house, she felt the dark shadow of the Egyptian queen at her heels, a malevolent phantom to remind her of her sin. But when she came to these joyous Sabbath feasts at Rachel’s house, where the guests were noisy and pious and followed the laws of their god, Amelia felt light of heart. She wished she could say to Rachel, “I am a believer.” But how did it happen, this miracle of faith? What was it that worked through people who experienced sudden epiphanies, right here in Rachel’s garden, causing them to fall to their knees and speak in an incomprehensible tongue? And why did the mysterious power work in some but not in others? Every week, congregants sang and clapped their hands and shouted “Hallelujah!” and worked themselves into a frenzy, they grew fevered with devotion and many fell into fits of religious ecstasy and hysteria, while others simply looked on in bafflement.
They were all so convinced that the world was coming to an end—not just Rachel’s group, but visitors from house-churches all over the empire—that many had given away all their possessions. Even Rachel’s house was changing: she had freed her slaves, much of her expensive furniture was gone, and her silk dresses had been replaced by ones made of ho
mespun cloth. She was constantly collecting money to send to their poorer brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, and her exquisite collection of silver necklaces had been sacrificed to finance evangelical missions to Spain and Germany.
But Amelia had discovered that the lack of a unified belief among the Christians was growing. More gentiles were joining, people from all walks of life and bringing with them their own beliefs, so that when Rachel finished leading them in the “Hear O Israel” prayer, several crossed themselves, or made the sacred sign of Osiris. Occasionally special visitors came to speak to the assembly, some who had even known Jesus, but these were very old men who spoke in croaking voices, their Greek so colloquial that they needed translators even in a group that spoke Greek! To Amelia’s puzzlement, even these men could not agree on what happened in Galilee over thirty years ago. There were the followers of a man named Paul, who had never met Jesus in person but who was popular because people took his preaching to mean that, once they had embraced the Christian gospel, they could live as they liked (Paul kept writing letters to set people straight on this issue, but they seemed to keep misunderstanding him). Another group, made up mostly of Greeks, interpreted the Christian message in accordance with Greek philosophy. The followers of Peter, the man most popular in the Christian movement, believed in strict observance of Jewish law and that gentiles must convert to Judaism before becoming Christians. And then there were the mystics, people who had come from mystery religions, who claimed that the new sect should not develop around ordinary men but through mystical union with Christ only. Each group believed itself to be more correct and superior to the others.
Individual beliefs varied as well: although all believed in Jesus’s imminent return, some said he would arrive in a chariot made of gold, others said he would come humbly on a donkey; some argued he must come to Rome, others said he would appear first in Jerusalem. On the Kingdom of God, they differed as to its nature, where it was and when it would be established. Some regarded Jesus as a prince of peace, others as a prophet of war.
Adding to the confusion were the many gospels that were being circulated in scrolls, letters, and books, each declaring to be the “true” message of Christ, though none had been written until long after his death. Compounding this confusion further was the fact that few men who had actually known Jesus in his lifetime were still alive. A new generation who had never heard Jesus preach were interpreting thirty-year-old events against contemporary issues and moods. The debate over conversion of the gentiles continued to rage: baptism or circumcision. Those advocating circumcision claimed it was too easy to join the faith, that converts were not giving up their old gods, merely adding Jesus to their pantheon. Gentile Christians were starting to praise Jesus’s name on the twenty-fifth day of December when they celebrated the birthday of Mithras, and followers of Isis, Queen of Heaven, said that Jesus’s mother Mary was the Goddess incarnate. Each person believed that it was their god whose kingdom Jesus proclaimed.
There was even an argument over the Lord’s name. He was Joshua, Yeshua, Iesous, or Jesus, depending upon one’s nation and tongue. Some called him Bar-Abbas, which meant “son of the father,” while others argued that Bar-Abbas, whose first name was also Jesus, was a different man altogether. And those who called him Jesus bar-Joseph were met with opposition by those who claimed that if the Lord called himself the son of God then he had no earthly father, like other saviors before him.
But Amelia wasn’t concerned with rules and ideology, or who was right and who was wrong, or what the Lord’s real name was, for unlike the others she did not believe in Jesus or his god or the promises he had made. Amelia came to the weekly gatherings for the friendship and good company, to be among people who did not whisper or gossip about her, who did not judge her on past misdeeds, who joined hands and sang together and shared a bountiful feast in the name of a crucified martyr. Most of all she came because as Rachel had promised, the evil phantom that dwelled in the blue crystal she wore beneath her dress was left outside the door—for the spell of an afternoon Amelia knew peace and love, and freedom from fear.
Finally, everyone had arrived and this Sabbath’s meeting was about to begin. Rachel was preparing to read from the Torah. She had chosen a passage from Deuteronomy: “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near to us whenever we pray to him?” Rachel had finally made a break with the synagogue where it was forbidden for a woman to read from the Torah to the congregation. When the rabbi had told her she must stop this practice, she had reminded him that Miriam was a prophetess in her own right and that she had helped to lead the Israelites out of Egypt as her brother Moses’s equal, not as one subordinate to him.
Before she could unroll the scroll, one of her freed slaves came hurrying into the garden to inform her that a latecomer had arrived. When everyone heard the identity of the guest, great excitement erupted.
Amelia turned to the elderly Phoebe and said, “Who is it?”
“Her name is Mary, and she knew the Lord,” Phoebe said with reverence, and disbelief in her voice, that such a great personage would honor their humble assembly. “A woman of means, and of influence, who fed and housed Jesus and his followers that they might spread the message.” Amelia knew that Jesus had had many women among his followers, women who gave their wealth to him and to his cause, just as Rachel, Phoebe, and Chloe did today. But she hadn’t known that any were still alive. Phoebe continued: “Mary was his closest companion, his first apostle. When Jesus was arrested, Peter and the other men denied knowing him. When Jesus was crucified, it was only the women who wept at the foot of the cross. The women took his body down and placed it in the tomb. And after the tomb was sealed, it was the women who held vigil outside, because Peter and the men were away hiding in fear. When Jesus came out of the tomb, it was to this woman that he first appeared and told of his resurrection. It is my secret belief,” the elderly woman said with a light in her eyes, “that when the Lord returns, he will come to this woman first, to Mary.”
The visitor was unremarkable in appearance. A woman of extreme age, she was small and bent and draped in white homespun cloth. She walked with a cane and the aid of a young woman, and when she spoke it was in a voice as thin as a butterfly’s wing. Her Greek was the colloquial dialect of Palestine, and so her young companion translated into Latin for the gathered company. She spoke plainly, but from the heart.
The July day was hot; flies droned in the garden, bees filled the air with their buzz. A breeze hardly stirred so that people had to fan themselves. In the corner, an old man began to nod off.
Mary first asked everyone to pray with her. They stood with their arms outstretched and heads back in imitation of the Crucified One, their eyes open and heavenward as they chanted loudly and in unison. Afterward, several crossed themselves. Then Mary began her story. “My Lord was the kindest of men. He loved little children and his heart wept at the sight of sickness and poverty and injustice. He healed and blessed and taught goodness.”
The heat of the day settled in the garden, like a guest wishing to hear the story, bringing with it a kind of magic warmth, a soporific effect that transformed the old woman’s words into hypnotic chant. Lulled by the heat and the cadence of Mary’s words, Amelia felt herself slip into a kind of altered consciousness, as if she had drunk unwatered wine, and after a while she began no longer to hear words but to see images instead. She saw herself walking with Jesus in the green hills of Galilee; standing at the lakeside and watching him preach from a fishing boat; she sat among boulders and grass as he spoke from a hillock about mercy and kindness and turning the other cheek; she tasted his wine at a wedding and felt his smile brush her cheek as he passed by.
Mary spoke of money changers and priests, a little girl in a coma, a man named Lazarus. Amelia saw a feast of fish and bread, smelled the dust of the roads and byways of Palestine, and heard the clip-clop of hooves as Roman soldiers rode by.
Heavy air and heat and the bu
zzing of bees, and the garden slipped into another age, another place, taking Amelia with it. Mary’s frail voice painting vivid pictures. And then suddenly—
He was here! In Rachel’s garden! The renegade Jew and the peaceful preacher, the armed zealot and the son of God, his multiple images swirling up from the hot paving stones, shimmering like phantoms, finally coming together and coalescing into a man.
Amelia was transfixed. Mary’s words, riding on the turgid air with the bees and dragonflies, had brought the man into their company and Amelia saw the flesh and blood and sinew of him. When Mary spoke of how Jesus wondered why God had placed this burden upon him, Amelia saw the doubt in his eyes and the sweat on his brow. When she told how he prayed, Amelia saw the glory radiate from his face. All the Jesuses that had been preached about and debated over were here now among the blossoms and greenery of a Roman peristyle garden, in the form of a man, no longer a myth or mystery, but a human born of a mother and burdened with all the hopes and doubts and foibles that were humankind’s lot.
“And then he was betrayed,” Mary said, her voice breaking. “Roman soldiers stripped him and mocked him, pierced his brow with thorns and flayed his back with whips. And then my Lord was forced to carry the beams of his cross through Jerusalem as people jeered and threw dirt at him. Nails were driven into his wrists and feet, and then he was hoisted high for all to see. My precious Lord hung there like a pitiable animal, bleeding and helpless, humiliated and shamed. As flies began to feast upon his wounds, as the air began to leave his lungs and his face was twisted in the utmost agony, he spoke. He asked the Father to forgive the men who had done this to him.”