Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  The psychology of crucifixion had a profound political purpose. This was the end that awaited every enemy of the absolute Roman state: the opposite of the peaceful death that all good men hoped for at the last; instead, an end in which one’s dignity and pride were torn away, then all shreds of one’s identity in life, and finally the last semblance of one’s humanity till one died the comic gargoyle of the moment. For Jesus’s disciples, the crucifixion hit like an earthquake, destroying in a moment their entire world. No matter how many times he had told them that the Son of Man would have to suffer and die, they had not really listened: they had pushed it aside as the one part of Jesus’s message they didn’t want to hear.

  If the crucifixion left the disciples utterly desolate, the news that Jesus was risen came on them like a tidal wave following an earthquake. They knew, as do we all, that death is the end and that there is no possibility of reversing its finality. If their world had been destroyed, would nature now play tricks on them, upending the only things they still knew to be true, the constant and reliable laws of the cosmos? If one has just suffered a tragic loss that sucks life dry of all its joy, one may somehow find the dull courage to go on—but one doesn’t want to open one’s door two mornings after such a tragedy to find that earth and sky have changed places.

  This is what happened to the disciples, which is why they were not so receptive to the seemingly meaningless news that “he is risen.” For the first disciples to hear this, the loyal women who had stood by him in his final agony, these words constituted one shock too many. Mark, in the most primitive account left to us, paints a vivid picture, despite his wobbly grammar:

  Having bought new linen and taken [the corpse of Jesus] down [Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin and a secret follower of Jesus] wrapped him with the linen, put him in a tomb hewn from rock and rolled a stone across the entrance of the tomb.

  Mary the Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses watched where he was put.

  When the Sabbath passed Mary the Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could come and anoint him. Very early on the first day of the week they came to the tomb as the sun was rising. They said to each other “Who’ll roll the stone off the tomb door for us?” and looking up they [were surprised to see] that the stone had been rolled back for it was huge. Entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right dressed in a white robe and they were much stunned.

  But he said to them “Don’t be stunned. Are you looking for Jesus the crucified Nazarene? He was raised. He isn’t here. Look, the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter ‘He’s going ahead of you to Galilee. There you’ll see him as he told you.’ ”

  Going out they fled the tomb—they were shuddering and wild—and they told no one nothing for they were afraid.

  I took this passage from Reynolds Price’s fine translation, which has the rough, unrehearsed quality of Mark’s Greek. Even readers long familiar with the gospels may themselves be stunned to learn that Mark’s original ends right here with the shuddering and wild fear of the women. (A later scribe, feeling that this was no way for a gospel to end, added to one manuscript of Mark’s text some resurrection appearances borrowed from Matthew, Luke, and John; Mark’s Gospel is usually printed with these additions.) Some scholars have seen this abrupt ending as proof that Jesus was not “raised” and that Mark is merely recounting a wild rumor. But it would make no sense for Mark, having so painstakingly assembled a story that presents Jesus as a true prophet, indeed the promised Messiah and God’s “beloved son,” to pull the rug out from his entire narrative with a final “Fooled ya!” Mark means rather to depict for us the utter confusion and even terror that the news of Jesus’s resurrection evoked in his dejected, disoriented disciples. As Nick Cave, lead singer of the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, has written: “Mark’s Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy, and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence.” This gospel’s open-ended conclusion should invite the psychologically astute reader not so much to skepticism as to credence: the shuddering women, afraid to tell anyone what they’ve seen and heard, make for a far more likely story than would some bogusly triumphant finale.

  From the other gospels, however, we do learn of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances and last teachings to his disciples, which included the promise of “the Spirit” of God, the divinely prophetic presence that will remain with them after Jesus leaves them and returns to his “Father.” Certainly, after Jesus’s final disappearance the disciples felt themselves imbued with a courage they had never known before, a courage that enabled them to communicate to their fellow Jews a new vision of a Judaism that no longer awaited an unknown Messiah but that had already received God’s Anointed One in the fullness of time and that now, living in the last age of the world by the breath of the Spirit, awaited only the end-of-time return of this Son of God and Man. This new Judaism traveled from Jerusalem along the many trade routes of the ancient world, so that within a few years of Jesus’s death, groups of his followers could be identified as a subset within many of the communities of diaspora Jews that were to be found in major cities throughout the far-flung Eurasian empire of the Romans.

  JERUSALEM, where several of the chief witnesses to Jesus’s life and teaching had taken up residence—men like the repentant Peter and Jesus’s brother James—became the obvious hub for broadcasting the Good News. And it was at the door of Peter’s humble house in Jerusalem that a man knocked one evening about seven years after the tumultuous events of Jesus’s last days. He was a smallish, balding man in his late thirties, as intense, lean, and quick as the curly-haired Peter was tender, bearlike, and lumbering. Though both men were of an age, Peter appeared the older because his hair and beard had gone white as the result of a sudden shock; and with his hulking fisherman’s frame, his wide shoulders, and pronounced upper-body musculature, he towered over the man at the door, whose neat figure, tight muscles, and corded forearms gave him the appearance of a gymnast or even a long-distance runner. Peter had good reason to be suspicious of the fellow before him, whose Jewish name was Saul, though he was also called by his Roman name, Paul.

  Saul-Paul was a Pharisee, one of the party of rabbis who had gradually grown suspicious of Jesus and set themselves against his teaching on the Law and who were now beginning to speak of him not as the promised Messiah but as an unworthy renegade from authentic Judaism. Some of their number had gone from public opposition to Jesus’s followers in the synagogues to active persecution, attempting to have the Messianists expelled from the synagogues, shunned by other Jews, and, when possible, arrested (and sometimes even executed) by local Jewish authorities. Some Pharisees seem to have tried to get the Messianists in trouble with the Romans, who were always on the lookout to eradicate any group that might be about to foment political instability.

  Paul was known to be one of the persecutors and relentlessly effective. How far he went—whether he simply hounded the Messianists out of the synagogues or collaborated with the hated Romans—is not clear from the records of the New Testament, but we know from Paul’s own words that he “persecuted God’s Gathering [or Church]” and that he did not confine his efforts to Jerusalem but, in his zeal, pursued the new sect as far and wide as the limitations of ancient travel permitted. So the man was a constant worry to the leaders of the Messianic movement and had among them the reputation of a canny enemy whose sharp vigilance made him hard to outwit. Now the enemy himself stood before the Rock asking acceptance.

  Word of unlikely occurrences had preceded Paul’s knock at the door. This Pharisee, riding his horse hard toward Damascus in hot pursuit of his favorite prey, had been knocked from his mount by—what? By what the man himself had come to call an intervention of God. As he scrambled in the dust of the road, overcome by a blinding light, a Voice asked a question that the dismounted rider could not have found more unexpected or unwelcome: “Saul, Saul, why do you
persecute me?”

  Forever after, this would be for Saul the moment at which his life took a completely new direction: God cared about him in the same way he had cared about the great figures of Israel’s past. Only a few men had heaven ever addressed by name—and always with their name spoken twice: “Abraham, Abraham”; “Moses, Moses.” God himself was telling his child that his road was a mistaken one and giving him a new direction. The identity of the Voice was evident: it was the same Voice that had spoken to the patriarchs and prophets, but the meaning of its words would take the fallen rider many moons to ponder. In persecuting “God’s Gathering,” Saul-Paul had been persecuting Jesus, the discredited prophet, who had died so ignominiously. But if the Voice of God now spoke on behalf of this prophet—indeed, so identified with him that the Voice could say “me” of Jesus—then this Pharisee who had been so certain of the righteous godliness of his course must come to discover that the hated Messianists were, collectively and in some mysterious sense yet to be fathomed, the Body of Jesus and that the dead Jesus, now exalted by God, was somehow identifiable with God himself. From then on Paul would speak of his overthrow on the road to Damascus, the blinding light, and the questioning Voice as his encounter with Christ, his own belated “resurrection appearance.” Jesus risen had come to him just as surely as he “showed himself to the disciples”—to Peter and the others—so that Paul, who had not known Jesus previously, ever after thought of himself as one “born out of time.”

  This dismounting on the Damascus road was just as disorienting to Paul as the empty tomb had once been to the little embalming party organized by Mary Magdalene. According to Luke, Paul, temporarily blinded, had to be led “by the hand” into Damascus, where he found himself unable to eat or drink for several days. His sight, as well as his appetite, returned after an encounter with a Damascene disciple of Jesus named Ananias, who, already aware that Paul was to be God’s “chosen instrument,” laid healing hands on the stunned man. In Luke’s theatrical account of these events, Paul, now feeling course through him that infusion of courage characteristic of so many of these early “conversion” experiences, stands up and asks to be baptized.

  Our two sources for Paul’s story are his own words, as preserved for us in his surviving letters, and the evangelist Luke’s second work, the Acts of the Apostles, which recounts the early years of the Jesus Movement and in which Paul figures as the central character. To the ear of most scholars, Paul, who is remarkably cut-and-dried about his extraordinary experiences, is much more trustworthy than the literary Luke, who, anxious to present the movement to his readers in the most favorable light, tends to smooth over all rough edges and, in highly colored presentations, to dramatize events that must originally have appeared more commonplace. But whatever the actual, physical details of Paul’s Damascus experience, there can be no doubt that the man himself saw it as the turning point of his life, the moment in which he went from being a devout persecutor of a movement that he thought a tremendous danger to Judaism to becoming the most arresting advocate of this movement in his day. Following what can only be described as his “meeting with Jesus,” Paul spent the remainder of his life preaching that Jesus, crucified to death and now risen, was the long-awaited Messiah of the Jews and the fulfillment of all their hopes.

  For Paul, it will become extremely important that this Gospel he will come to preach far and wide is “no human message, for I did not take it from any man, nor was it taught me: rather, it was revealed to me by Jesus Christ himself!” Given this stress, it is no surprise that Paul never makes mention of Ananias (who, unless he is Luke’s literary invention, must have taught Paul something). In Paul’s brief account of the period of his conversion in his letter to the Galatians, he will insist that the revelation he was given at Damascus is not in any sense secondhand, so much so that “I was in no hurry to confer with anyone, nor to run up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was. No, I went off immediately to Arabia and later came back to Damascus.”

  Luke, who may have known nothing of this Arabian adventure, omits it altogether; and we can only wish that Paul had more to say on the subject. His “Arabia” would have been the kingdom of the Nabateans, whose fabulous capital was the desert city of Petra, carved from the pink rock of the Great Rift Valley and looking today in its uninhabited state like the unreal movie set it has become. What must it have been in Paul’s day when it was still a bustling capital? But Paul, who will in his zeal visit many of the great cities of the ancient world, traversing its roads and sea-lanes and encountering many of its most exotic wonders, has no time for tourism. He is a man with a mission; and every ounce of energy will be directed toward his goal—the divine commission given him on the Damascus road—of spreading the Gospel as far as possible.

  According to Luke, Paul had to quit Damascus for good because his uncompromising preaching in the synagogues there “threw the Jewish community … into confusion” and even invited their murderous attention, which Paul escaped in the knick of time by being lowered from the city wall in a basket by his new Messianist friends in the dead of night. If it doesn’t take much imagination to see the confusion of the Jewish community, who had so recently known the preacher as the implacable foe of the Jesus Movement, it takes only imagination to appreciate the Scheherazade-like detail of Luke’s basket. Whatever the real reason for Paul’s exit, we can more securely trust Luke’s information that Paul’s appearance in Jerusalem (where he went next) alarmed “the disciples,” who “were all afraid of him” and that it took them some time to cool down and find him credible. According to Paul himself, by the time he arrived in Jerusalem, three years had elapsed since his conversion, and the express purpose of his visit was “to meet the Rock,” with whom he “stayed fifteen days.”

  If readers can only be curious about where Paul went in “Arabia” and what he did there (probably a novice’s unsuccessful attempt at preaching), what would we not give to know something of the conversations that passed between the relentless former Pharisee and his host, the formerly faithless fisherman, during Paul’s two-week sojourn? The Voice that spoke to Paul from heaven (or from within himself) had such personal impact that it reoriented his whole course, but it could hardly have filled in for him all the events of Jesus’s earthly life. For this, he had no doubt the stories already circulating in the communities of Jesus’s disciples, stories that would eventually attain written form in the four gospels. But who could give Paul a sense of Jesus—what he looked like, how he sounded, how he moved, what he meant—more palpable than Peter? Surely, a fortnight with this principal friend of Jesus was worth a lifetime of gathering stories from here and there. So, though we have no record of their conversations, we can take it for granted that they did not waste their time on pleasantries and that at the end of those two weeks the insatiable Paul had as much information on his new Lord as one man could impart to another.

  But Paul also had something of importance to impart to Peter, who though faithful to Jesus (after his one night of betrayal) had a naturally muddled mind. Peter, the bighearted friend, was not the sort of fellow you would wish to rely on for drafting a difficult document, whether of science, law, or theology. In the gospel stories, he is full of generous intentions and can-do attitudes, but woefully short on self-knowledge, analysis, and follow-through. Paul, angular, tense, and hardly anyone’s ideal buddy, possessed nevertheless the very qualities that Peter lacked.

  Paul was born in Tarsus, by his own description “no mean city” but rather the cosmopolitan capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, a great crossroads where Asian and European, Jew and Greek met in often fruitful intercourse. He had received two very different kinds of education. Within his family circle, which was Pharisaic and devoted to the Mosaic Law, he had learned biblical Hebrew in order to study the sacred scrolls. As a young man (or perhaps even earlier as an adolescent), he was sent by his pious father to study in Jerusalem with the most learned rabbis. According to Luke, Paul’s teacher was Gama
liel himself, remembered in subsequent Jewish literature as the most renowned rabbi of his time. It is obvious from Paul’s self-descriptions in his surviving correspondence that he gloried in his lineage: “An Israelite am I, of Abraham’s seed, of Benjamin’s branch”—the same tribe to which Saul, Israel’s first king, belonged. If he boasts of his descent, even more does he glory in his commitment to Judaism: “If anyone has cause to be confident in his body, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day; a member of the people of Israel; … a Jew of Jews; as regards the Law, a Pharisee; … as regards righ-teousness before the Law, blameless.” Elsewhere, he makes the claim that “I, in Judaism, outstripped most of my peers because of my zeal for the traditions of my fathers.”

  This athletic metaphor—in which the young man’s advance in his understanding of Judaism is remembered as his distinguishing himself in a race—betrays something of Saul-Paul’s other world: besides being a yeshiva boy, he was also a pais gymnasiou, a gymnasium boy, a prep school kid. His father wished him not only to know thoroughly the world of his pious ancestors but to be able to negotiate the “modern” world that he would have to live in. Thus did he need to attain mastery over the exceedingly un-Jewish environment of Greek athletic competitions and Greek education. The agon—the Greek athletic contest—is one of the few reliable metaphors in the repertoire of this sparingly metaphorical author. (Not surprisingly, the strongly physical image of the living human body—its parts and unitive movement—underlies many of Paul’s other essays into metaphor.) Paul’s Greek flows from his pen with a facility far beyond that of Mark (or even Matthew) and is obviously shaped by his knowledge of the models of classical rhetoric, disputation, and diatribe; and there is more than a hint that he was widely read in Greek literature and had read at least some Greek philosophy.