The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘We’re all one, all one,’ Peter moaned.

  ‘Ye’ll not deny that he’s been saying the wrong things. Just when things were going so well. Ay, too well I’ve been thinking. What will ye do about it?’

  ‘Things,’ Thaddeus said, with the prophetic insight he, the small artist, sometimes showed, ‘will proceed to their end. He’s in God’s hands. Things will be done that have to be done and they’ll cry to heaven for vengeance. But there’ll be no vengeance, only a greater glory.’

  ‘Go on, make a song of it,’ Thomas jeered. ‘Play it on yon flute.’

  There was a considerable crowd outside the council chamber the following morning. Said the Temple was a load of rubbish, cursed the priests, said that Moses was a juggler, I always said the Nazarenes were a bad lot, a Godless load of bastards, here he is now, a Greek, the Greeks were always a rotten crowd, my sister married a Greek and where did it get the poor bitch?

  Annas wrinkled at Stephen, a clean-looking boy despite his night in a dirty prison, his beard sparse, his eyes wide but unfrightened. He stood in the heart of the half-circle the seated Sanhedrin made. The morning sun from the wall of high windows bathed him. Annas said: ‘More trouble from you Nazarenes. I quote.’ He quoted from the papyrus handed to him by his son-in-law, quoting: ‘“This man does not cease to speak words against the Temple and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy it and shall change the customs that Moses delivered unto us.” Are these things so?’ Stephen looked at the grim assembly, noting a preponderance of Sadducees. One Pharisee, clerk to the court, leant against the wall without windows, grimmest of all there. Stephen smiled at him and spoke.

  ‘Brothers, holy fathers, this is a grave accusation and perhaps I may be permitted to answer it by means of a recapitulation which to many of you will seem supererogatory, but I beg your patience: my logic will, granted a little time, shine clearly enough with God’s help.’

  ‘We do not require logic,’ Caiaphas said. ‘We can manage without such Greekish importations.’

  ‘Very well, nothing Greekish. Merely the truths of the holy texts. As you all know, God in his glory spoke to our father Abraham at the time when he dwelt in Mesopotamia, before he moved to Haran, saying to him that it was to Haran that he must move. So he left the land of the Chaldaeans and dwelt in Haran in the upper valley of the Euphrates, staying there till the death of his father Terah. Thereafter, under God’s direction, he travelled as far as Canaan. Note that this was not his land, nor did he have any part of it. He was, as it were, a resident alien there.’

  ‘Come to the point,’ Jonathan said. ‘We know all this.’

  ‘The point is already before your eyes,’ Stephen said boldly, ‘if you will but look. Abraham had no land but believed the Lord’s promise that there would be a land for his descendants. There would be oppression, exile, slavery for many generations, but the exile would not last for ever. In time God would avenge the injustices done to his children and bring them back to the land of Canaan where in peace they would worship him. A sign was given to Abraham, the sign of circumcision, the outward emblem of an inward grace and a divine promise. When Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him on the eighth day, and this sign was passed on from generation to generation, from Isaac to Jacob and from Jacob to his twelve sons, these twelve being the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.’

  ‘Look,’ Alexander said, ‘we’re priests and sufficiently, I believe, instructed in the scriptures. We await the answer to the grave charge that has been made.’

  ‘Patience,’ Stephen said patiently. ‘For those with ears to hear the answer is already unfolding. I shall not, I promise you, detain you long with this recital of ancient history. Now note that even in those old days of the patriarchs there were men opposed to God’s will in the guiding of the children of Abraham. For Jacob’s sons sold their brother Joseph as a slave in Egypt. But, by God’s grace, he did not long remain a slave. He rose to be grand vizier to the Pharaoh and, when famine struck Canaan, he was able, through his foresight in hoarding corn in the granaries of Egypt, to sell a sufficiency of grain to his brethren. Joseph saved men who at first did not even recognise him as their own brother. They had dealt harshly with him but he forgave and there was a reconciliation. Surely there is a lesson here. As a result of that reconciliation the whole seventy-five members of the family of Jacob came into Egypt to settle and prosper.’

  ‘The correct number is seventy,’ Annas said. ‘You are citing a corrupt Greek text.’

  ‘Pardon me,’ Stephen said. ‘Not corrupt. Your text mentions Jacob and Joseph and the two sons of Joseph. Ours omits Jacob and Joseph but mentions Joseph’s nine sons. If you wish to spend some time with me now on the comparative arithmetic—’

  ‘We want nothing Greek,’ Caiaphas bawled. ‘And we want no arguments with the high priest.’

  ‘As Father Annas well knows,’ Stephen said, ‘his title is honorary. An arithmetical interlude would be a fitting irrelevance. Pardon me for that unwilled pertness. May I continue?’

  ‘Keep it short, man,’ Annas cried, though grinning.

  ‘Very well. The Israelites prospered in Egypt, but there was still the question of reaching the promised land. It was necessary for God’s purpose that a tyrant arise in Egypt, to persecute them, to make them long for deliverance. By God’s grace and human cunning the child Moses, who should have perished with the rest of the male children of the Israelites, was saved and brought up in the house of the princess. His sense of justice, whereby he slew a brutal Egyptian overseer of the Israelite builders, drove him into exile. Now note this carefully: his exile took him to the northwest of Arabia, to the wilderness of Mount Sinai – far far far from the holy land. Here God spoke to him and rendered that piece of Gentile territory holy. Now you will see, I trust, an important truth: that no place is holy of itself, that sanctity comes where God reveals himself. You may now legitimately question the claim of the city of Jerusalem to possess an innate holiness.’

  There were the expected cries of blasphemy and heresy, but Annas held up his hand for silence. ‘He is cutting his own throat,’ he said. ‘Why do you hinder him? Let him continue.’

  ‘Another thing,’ Stephen said, unflustered. ‘As Joseph’s brothers repudiated Joseph, so the children of Israel repudiated Moses. There came in each instance a second time when they were forced to accept their saviour. There they were in the wilderness, far far far from any promised land, but they had the covenant, the living oracles which spoke through Moses, the Angel of the Presence. They had the qahal or ekklesia, there in the wilderness, but they were not content. They wanted a visible tangible god of gold. They refused the authority of Moses. I am accused of speaking blasphemous words against the prophet, but who accuses me? The children of those who rejected the prophet. They longed to go back to Egypt to chew onions and leeks and garlic and breathe foul air in the invisible face of the Most High. And, once out of Egypt, their idolatry continued. Prophet after prophet was rejected, stoned. As the prophet Amos puts it, they took up the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of the god Rephan. But there was not lacking the tabernacle of the one true God, the trysting tent of the wilderness. Yet they disregarded, in their rebellion, the shrine which spoke to them of God’s indwelling presence – not in one place but wherever their wanderings led them. I speak of the ark of the testimony, which we Greeks term skene toumartyriou, in Hebrew ’ohel mo’ed, which may be rendered the tent of God’s meeting. My old schoolfellow Saul, chief of my accusers to my sadness, knows all about tents. The place of the Most High is a tent. David spoke of building a mere habitation, a bivouac, a tabernacle. It was left to his son Solomon to erect an immovable bayith or oikos of stone faced in gold and silver, but this did not fulfil the intention of his father. Solomon himself spoke of the insufficiency of his edifice, saying: “But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, how much less this house that I have built.”’
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  ‘We respect your learning,’ Caiaphas said with some sarcasm, ‘but you have not deployed it to make your point.’

  ‘Have I not?’ Stephen cried. ‘Is not my point now clear? I do not blaspheme against the Temple that is Solomon’s, but I inveigh against the stiffness of mind that can grant a special holiness to a building of stone and forget the glory of what was housed in a tent of skins. For was not such a tent as pleasing to God as the temple that Solomon built? Is not the faith the faith of a pilgrim people, scattered by the winds of oppression all over the earth, scattered often in the past and without doubt to be scattered again? What will your Temple here avail you when you join, as my own people joined, the company of the dispossessed? The earth is the Lord’s and the Lord’s people are of the earth, not of a fixed and stony place in a populous city. I say again what I have often said, citing the Lord’s own word: “The heaven is my throne, the earth my footstool.” When he makes his own temple with his own hands, what right have men to mock him by saying: This that we have built is the Lord’s place?’

  Caiaphas raised both hands to quell the rising gale of fury and said: ‘So the Temple is nothing and the priests of the Temple are less than nothing?’

  ‘Now,’ Stephen said, ‘you put words into my mouth. There is no need. I have words enough of my own.’ Then he raged, for the first time, lion-like, yelling: ‘Stiff-necked leaders of the people, uncircumcised in your hearts and in your ears, you resist the Holy Spirit now as your fathers did before you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? Any that prophesied of the coming of the righteous one you slew without mercy. You received the law as the angels ordained it, but you did not keep it. Did you not saw Isaiah asunder in the reign of Manasseh? Did you not slay Jeremiah by stoning? Oh, there will be some of you to say: we are not our fathers; had we lived in their day we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets. Yes, you now honour the prophets you killed and build monuments to grace their memory, for those prophets being dead cannot stir you to thought or right action. Now your fathers did no more than slay the messengers of the Righteous One – but you mocked the Righteous One himself and delivered him to the slayers. You accuse me. It is you who stand accused.’

  Annas and the other priests had great difficulty in restraining the outraged fathers of the law who, having no words but blasphemy and outrage and to the death with him, made up for their bawling dumbness by putting out their long claws and stumbling in their blindness to seize and tear Stephen. Then Caiaphas, seeing the matter was outside control, said to Annas: ‘We can do nothing. It is as well it is happening like this. His blood is not on our heads and hands.’ Stephen, seized and rent, raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried:

  ‘The heavens are opening. I see the Son of Man standing on the right hand of the Almighty.’

  Now the doors had been pushed open and Stephen was pulled and clawed by the mob waiting outside. Peter was restraining the muscular James. Stephen, seeing the group of disciples, cried that they should withdraw, there was nothing profitable that they could do. And then he roared in anguish as he saw his father Tyrannos and his mother Maia and, insisting on coming too to their evident danger, the two sisters of Caleb. ‘Away,’ he cried. ‘Go home and pray for those who have reverted to the beast. Let them be forgiven. They do not know what they are doing.’ This was both true and untrue. The Jerusalem mob gloated at the prospect of an act of righteous violence, though they did not know why it was righteous, the pious mental state which ennobles briefly the bestial act usually referring itself to sources it would be dangerous to examine, since this would allay the awakened brute. Saul was there with a rope, and with this he bound the hands of Stephen behind him, so that the victim could not wipe the spit out of his eyes. So bound, Stephen was hurried towards the city gates, outside which was a patch of ground hallowed by custom to acts of punition fulfilled, God being in the people, by the people. Stephen’s friends and fellow workers in the faith were thrust to the periphery, where they moaned and prayed, though some cursed. A few Roman soldiers looked on, at first with apprehension and then in relief that this was a wholly Jewish matter, they could keep out of it. But a man that had once been crippled and now earned his bread as a leaper and dancer, his boy assistant playing unhandily on the flute, pointed out to the under-officer of the maniple the two Jewish girls that had once lived near him, in the house of Elias the mad, saying that at last they had come to light, these were the ones that had been sought on the orders of the procurator, seize them quickly and (hand out) do not forget those that are on the side of the law. He had a few bits of metal thrown at him which he scampered under feet to pick up. The two girls saw what was coming and tried to run, but one of the mob hit the praying Stephen on the mouth and Sara, seeing the blood, could not forbear hurling herself at the grinning fool and beating him with her fists. Thus she was easily taken and her sister Ruth with her. Thank God their mother was dead.

  When Stephen had been delivered to the rough place of punishment outside the walls the mob began with righteous eagerness to pick up the stones that lay there in a heap, ever convenient for the chastening of prostitutes, women taken in adultery, alleged blasphemers and the like. Saul expressed himself willing to hold the coats of the throwers; he would not himself throw, having fulfilled his own act of piety and being no vindictive glutton. Stephen said:

  ‘Untie my hands, Saul. A small request from a friend. I do not propose to defend myself. I merely wish to join my hands in prayer.’ Saul surlily unbound him and then, a stickler for correct procedure, spoke to the mob:

  ‘According to Deuteronomy, the hand of the witnesses shall strike first, and afterward the hand of all the people. Seventh chapter, seventh verse. Back, all of you, ten cubits, for that is the law too. Now, four cubits from the place of stoning, let him be stripped.’ So Stephen’s garments were ripped off and he stood naked, thin, his body not much more than a boy’s, his shame, according to the obscenity of the custom, exposed. A worshipper and disputant of the Libertines’ congregation was glad to come forth as chief witness. He took a sharp flint and hurled. Stephen’s lip was split and it bled. Then came the other stones. Stephen’s nose broke and blood drained on to his joined hands, deforming the words Lord Jesus receive my spirit. That praying mouth had to be closed, as also the eyes that drank the sky and the birds in it that were blessedly above the enactments of men fired, as they would say, by faith. Soon the whole face was a bruised ruin, and an ear drooped unsecured by its cartilage. Stephen fell to his knees and cried, though only Saul could hear: ‘Let this sin not be laid to their charge.’ Those were his last words, for his skull was split thrice and the spirit left its seat or perished with the bone and tissue whose workings had seemed to raise it. But the stoning continued. Stephen lay quite motionless on his belly. Following custom, he should now be rolled on his back and three or four men should raise the greatest of the stones and break the ribs as an emblem of smashing the heart. But it was certain that he was dead. Saul put out a hand of authority (that of one who could cite the Second Law verse and chapter about the ritual of holy killing) and the mob looked with some awe at its handiwork. He handed back the coats he had held while Peter, John, Andrew and the two Jameses came forward. Peter said:

  ‘I take it that nothing in your interpretation of the holy law hinders our taking the body of our brother and preparing it for burial?’ Saul sneered and said:

  ‘Skene tou martyriou.’ None understood his reference, but John caught the last word and said:

  ‘Protomartyr.’

  ‘There will be others,’ Saul said. The poor torn body with its mouth open showing broken teeth was raised on four shoulders and carried off to the house of the grieving parents. Saul walked away towards his sister’s house. On the crowded Street of the Loaves he fell. He was lucky that Bartholomew, whose morning had been busy with the splinting of a broken arm, was hurrying towards whence Saul came, to what he was appalled to have heard was proceeding and could hardly believe.
Recognising Saul, he divined that all was over, and then Saul became merely one who had collapsed with the falling sickness. He saw the twitching limbs, heard the high scream. He took from his robe a small wand he used for depressing tongues and examining ulcerated throats. This he quickly placed between Saul’s teeth lest, in the spasm of the muscles of the jaw, this particular tongue be deeply bitten. Around him were people talking of possession by devils, but Bartholomew said:

  ‘Nonsense. This is called epilepsia. Help me to lift him. It’s a few steps only to the place of healing.’

  Saul shortly after opened his eyes to wonder what he was doing here on a rickety pallet, one of a row of a dozen, all laden with the broken and sore. Two men were talking about him, so he shut his eyes to listen.

  ‘You know the man?’

  ‘I know him. And I know what he has done. But the physician may have no feelings. Remember that, Joseph Barnabas. He must desire merely to make his patient well.’

  ‘Well enough to do evil again?’

  ‘Or good. Men can always choose. Look at the face. There is a strong pressure behind the forehead, like dammed water trying to break loose. A great power for good or evil, and to this brain it perhaps does not matter which. It is the power that matters. Nothing lukewarm there.’

  Saul opened his eyes, raised himself from the bed, said: ‘Doing good to your enemies. I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ Joseph Barnabas said. ‘You’re welcome to stay longer. But also well enough to go home.’ Saul, weak but standing, saw a number of Nazarenes around him. They looked at him with wonder and a certain pity. He scowled in bitter humiliation and tried to stalk off with the gait of authority. But he tottered somewhat.

  It is not certain where the body of Stephen was entombed. His parents had a family plot, but an artist’s inspiration welled up in Thaddeus. Joseph of Arimathea, no longer in the city, had left a tomb to the brethren, and that tomb, though cheated of its freight, was available still. Nobody thought that Stephen would rise again, but no tomb could be more appropriate for the first martyr or witness in blood of the faith. But whether Stephen’s body, made fragrant with ointments and wrapped in clean linen, was placed there is a thing unknown. It is, however, known that his interment took place that night, under a full moon that set the desert dogs to baying. There was, in the perhaps admirable perverseness of this new faith, more rejoicing than mourning.