Some scholars have argued that Jesus was speaking as someone who indeed had nobody on earth to call father. That is, as an "illegitimate child." It is an oddly literal reading, especially since the term was as irrelevant in the first century as it has become in the twenty-first. In Maryam's Palestine, a child was only defined as a legal bastard if born to a married woman and fathered by someone other than her husband—if, that is, the mother had jeopardized the system of inheritance. Otherwise, every child was a legitimate member of society, born into a family clan or hamula rather than a nuclear family, and addressing the head of the hamula as "father" regardless of biological paternity.
Being born again was clearly intended as a metaphor, and just as clearly it was understood that way, especially since it was a factor in many pagan faiths of the time.
Joseph may have been the biological father, or the stand-in. We can see him as a kinsman who took the pregnant Maryam into his home, whether as a duty to the hamula or, as Matthew has it, because he was instructed to do so by an angel. Or we can see him as a normal husband of the time, his marriage to Maryam arranged as all marriages were, the bride taken to his home along with her dowry, and his first-born son delivered nine months later. Or he may simply not have existed.
We will never know for sure. And perhaps what we really need to ask is if this even matters.
The search for "the real father" seems an oddly sentimental quest not only for Maryam's time, but also for our own. Nearly a third of all births in the United States are now to single mothers. In Norway, single mothers account for half of all births. In Iceland, 62 percent. In Britain, 38 percent. In France, 41 percent. And in deeply Catholic Ireland, where legal abortion is still not an option, 31 percent.
The phrase "single mother" may or may not mean that there is no father—that is, that the father is absent and takes no responsibility for his child. Many single mothers are still involved with the fathers of their children; they simply do not marry them, whether out of principle or lack of choice. What they do choose is motherhood. Though abortion is generally safe, legal, and relatively inexpensive, they choose to carry their pregnancies to term and raise their children as the sole legal parent. Their children take their mother's name, not their father's.
From everything we know of Maryam—her resilience, her ability, her courage—she may very well have made the same choice. But that does not mean she was a single mother. There was no such thing in the peasant villages of Palestine of two thousand years ago. She and her child would have been absorbed into the hamula, and the child raised by the extended family, as was the custom. The absence of a husband would not have been at all unusual. Since women were married at puberty to husbands twice their age, many were widowed, and their youngest children grew up never knowing their biological fathers. Disenfranchised men often went far away to work for months and even years at a time, leaving their wives and children in care of their kinfolk; their wives were "grass widows," but their children were anything but orphans.
Maryam was the mother, and that was enough. For us, it should surely be more than enough. Perhaps she married, perhaps not. Perhaps Jesus knew a human father, perhaps not. But any way you look at it, everything hinges on Maryam. She was the active one. Her decision to carry her pregnancy to term and give birth is what determines the whole of western history of the last two millennia.
Without Joseph, nothing would be different. Without Maryam, everything would. It was Maryam who chose her son, Maryam who gave birth to him, Maryam who nursed him and raised him and taught him all she knew. Maryam, be-ezrat ha-shem.
Part Three
Her Women
VIII
They call it Skull Hill. Golgotha in Aramaic. The place of execution, just outside the northeast gate of the city.
It's really more a rise than a hill, but the name fits nevertheless. There are indeed skulls rolling in the nearby ravine, along with leg bones, rib bones, arm bones—all that remains of crucified men, their bodies tossed there by the soldiers to be picked clean by jackals and hyenas, buzzards and vultures.
If you enter Jerusalem from this direction, you cannot avoid Golgotha. Even when there is nobody hanging here, the place still reeks of death. The uprights of the crosses are permanently embedded in the rock, waiting for the next victims to be nailed to heavy crossbeams and hauled up. All too often, the crossbeams are already in place. Usually just a few victims, but when there's been a disturbance or a riot, dozens. At times, there have been hundreds. Or rather, the remains of hundreds.
Some are still alive, if you can call that life. Each rasping breath is a struggle, a massive effort of failing muscles. They are already dead men in effect, just waiting for the mercy of a last breath. And below the crosses, kept at a distance by the soldiers, those they loved in life keep vigil, enduring a slow death of their own—a death of the soul.
The sun shines, but it does so in some cold, clear reality that is utterly remote from Maryam. For her, the world is darkness. Everything she took for granted, everything that once seemed real and solid, is now crumbling, breaking away. Even the ground beneath her feet. Her whole body trembles, and the earth seems to tremble with her in horror and protest.
A slight breeze carries the sounds of the city over the walls. But how can birds sing and donkeys bray and people chat and barter and gossip when this is going on? How can there be anything but a terrible silence, a silence so loud it rings in her ears, blocking out all sound, all vision even, all sense of anything but this one vast agony that encompasses everything—her body, her mind, her world.
It is mid-afternoon, and the sun is at its most relentless. The women around her try to persuade her to at least drink some water, if not eat. She ignores them. What mother could eat or drink as her son slowly dies before her eyes?
She has heard it said that as you die, scenes from your life flash before your eyes. Now she knows that if your son is dying, part of you is dying too. She sees herself all those years ago, huge-bellied, riding on the donkey led by Joseph. She almost smiles as she remembers him picking out the smoothest path he could, for even the most minor bumps and stumbles jolted through her. She should have been at home with her women kinfolk gathered in the room and Salome crouched between her legs, waiting for the contractions to come quicker. The women humming birth songs, and the gentle strength of Salome's hands on her stomach, pressing down. Instead, she was riding along the hilltop ridge from Nazareth to the Galilee Bethlehem to register for the census. That evening, in the house of Joseph's kinfolk, women who were strangers would lay her down to give birth in the dank warm straw of the stables beneath the house. And the next day, the Herodian scribe would register a newborn of Bethlehem, resident of Nazareth.
Now she is indeed far from home. She shakes her head, trying to focus on what should surely be the simple task of standing upright, with eyes open. She resists the impulse to collapse to the ground and curl up into a ball, arms over her head to block everything out. If all she can do now is witness, then by God that is what she will do.
She barely remembers screaming when they nailed his hands and feet, though her body still aches from the force with which she shuddered at each blow of the hammer. How long ago was that? Hours, yes—it was just after dawn when it began. But it feels like an eternity, or rather, like one single moment that will not let go, that refuses to move on, as though time itself has stopped dead in its tracks.
She has a vague recollection of hurling herself at the soldiers as they hauled the crossbeam into place. Of ripping at her thin shift, trying to tear it away from her body. Of hearing the pleas pour out of her: "Take me. Take me instead!'' The other women reached to hold her back as the soldiers jeered and then taunted her with stinging obscenities. "He's my only son," she cried. "My one and only son. Just let him live, that's all I ask, and you can do anything you like with me. Anything at all!"
And the soldiers laughed and turned their backs on her.
What else could she expect? These soldiers
are from the Antonia fortress, the Roman garrison overlooking the temple. Mercenaries from Syria, they're crude men—men who hate being here and so hate the people who are the reason for their being here. What do they care for a desperate mother's pleas? They've seen and heard it all hundreds of times before.
Maybe they never knew their mothers. Never had a mother's voice to tell them stories as they drifted into sleep. She sees her young child's eyes shining as she tells him stories Salome had told her when she herself was young, open-ended parables creating mysteries to sleep on. Remembers him fascinated by the story of the prodigal son who "was lost and now is found." Or begging for her to tell him more even as he sank into sleep with the parable of the wedding feast echoing in his mind: "For many are called, but few are chosen." There was a look of determination on his face then, strangely adult in one so young. And when she told the stories of Hezekiah and his brave resistance fighters, that look would turn fierce, and he'd fall asleep frowning slightly. He dreamed then, she thought, of freedom, of liberty and justice for all. As though he could change the world.
Is this, then, what he was chosen for? The sun still shines over Golgotha as though nothing is happening. The world is not changed. People go in and out of the city gate and look the other way. Some of the soldiers are throwing dice, gambling to pass the time, seemingly deaf to wracked breath rasping out of tortured lungs.
The end must be near, surely. To her horror, she finds herself praying for her son to die—praying to the sky, to the air, to the hills, to whatever power in heaven or on earth can put a stop to this. Death, she knows, is the only way out of the agony. For him, that is. For her, it will continue. That is the curse of the survivor.
Perhaps she should never have taught him what she knew. Never have answered his questions as she and Salome prepared their herbs. Yet he was so quick and apt a student, as though the healing power were in him all the time, just waiting for her to release it. She remembers her pride at the deftness with which he first mixed powdered yellow clay with saliva, as though he had been doing it all his young life. The assurance with which he laid the mixture on the pus-covered eyes of a newborn lamb. The calm nod he gave when the lamb's eyes healed, as though he had never entertained the idea that they would not.
That pride was dangerous, she realizes. What healing can there be now?
One of her son's followers approaches the gambling soldiers. He walks with the air of authority that comes from wealth. Joseph, she remembers his name is, Joseph of Arimathea. They talk briefly. One of the soldiers stands, and something glints in the sun as it changes hands: a gold coin. The soldier goes up to the cross her son is on.
There's a sudden movement. A flash of metal thrusting into her son's side.
She gasps as though the spear had entered her own flesh. As though that were her own blood running free from the jagged wound. Her own head lolling. Her own cry of pain no more than a barely audible sigh.
The soldier wipes his spear on the ground and spits in disgust, and something about that gesture snaps her immobility. She breaks free of the cordon of women around her and runs for the cross. All she knows is that she must get as close as she can, reach out and touch her son one last time. She hurls herself at the foot of the upright, arms around it as though they were already trying to pry her away. Looks up and sees her son's bloodshot eyes staring down at her.
What she sees there terrifies her. They are the eyes of a stranger who has slept at her breast. The eyes of a gentle man subjected to excruciating violence. Of a son so far gone that he no longer even recognizes his mother. Hanging onto this world by a thread, he seems to be looking over the edge of a chasm so deep there is no end to it.
She hears a sound that seems to come from all around her—a long low moan, more primitive, more primeval, than any she has ever heard before. She has heard animals in mortal pain, she has heard women in childbirth, she has heard far too many times the agonized groans of men hanging on crosses. But never has she heard a sound as terrible as this. It is a sound to make the hairs stand up all over your body, to make you shiver uncontrollably in the hottest of heat waves. A sound to penetrate deep into the soul of anyone within earshot, to lodge there and haunt you until the day you die.
And slowly, it dawns on her that her mouth is open, and that this terrible sound is her own. It surges up from the very depths of her being, born out of her into an uncaring world.
Walk around the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and without warning, you find yourself staring at a human ankle bone, hung on a wall at just about eye level. It seems almost innocuous, if oddly out of place—this is not the Museum of Natural History, after all—until you realize that there is a nail stuck right through the bone. A crude six-inch nail. And then you realize that the nail is there because it is bent, and so couldn't be pulled out to be re-used on the next victim.
The shock that goes through you is visceral. You feel your stomach rising. The hairs stand up on your arms. For the first time, the reality of crucifixion is literally right before your eyes.
It is a ghastly one. Even today, when methods of torture have become "sophisticated" by comparison, the very idea of crucifixion still produces a shudder of horror. Not the crucifix itself, which is an icon. Nor even paintings of Christ on the cross, with their strange mix of the pious and the erotic. But the physical evidence of crucifixion is another thing altogether. It was an excruciating way to die.
They used iron nails. Not always, mind. Sometimes they just tied the victims to the crossbeam with rope. Others, they nailed only the hands. Others again, both hands and feet. The owner of that ankle bone in the Israel Museum had his feet nailed either side of the upright.
Some of the uprights had a footrest, but there was no respite in that. The footrest just prolonged the agony. The tortured man would try to balance on it in a doomed battle to retain muscle control. In a feat of endurance that he had no choice but to perform, his muscles automatically struggled to hold his weight and prevent him from hanging by his arms alone. But they could only do this for so long. Eventually, inevitably, they gave way, and then what killed him—after a few hours if he was fortunate enough to be weak, a few days if he was unfortunate enough to be strong—was asphyxiation. The trapezius, the rhomboids, the deltoids, all the muscles of his shoulders and back and chest failed, and then the weight of his body hanging from the shoulders collapsed his ribcage, blocking his windpipe and his lungs and cutting off his breathing. In effect, he was killed by his own body.
If he was lucky, he would be flogged first. Yes, lucky. The flogging would weaken him, so that he'd die quicker. And this was an essential part of the horror of crucifixion. It made preliminary torture into a mercy. It turned things topsy-turvy, so that what now seems cruel was in fact kind, and vice versa. The footrest made death more drawn-out and more agonizing; flogging made it quicker and easier. Crucifixion attacked not only the body of the victim, but also the most basic concepts of human morality.
Sometimes the soldiers in charge of the crucifixions would thrust a spear into the side of the man on the cross, who would then die quickly from loss of blood. Others, they'd take a club and break his knees or his shin bones, so that he couldn't use his legs to support his weight, and so died quicker. But these were not acts of mercy. The soldiers may have been bribed by relatives to hasten death. Or they simply wanted to entertain themselves, like young psychopaths torturing a helpless animal, which is why they'd sometimes hang people on the crosses upside down, or even in obscene positions. They may have done it out of mere boredom—anything to liven up the slow, drawn-out process. Or perhaps it was simple impatience—they wanted to get back to their beds or to their supper, and they were tired of the sounds and the stench of the dying.
That stench is one detail that is rarely mentioned. Crucifixion was an utterly humiliating way to die, not the least because the victim would lose control of his sphincter muscles, and in plain sight of all who cared to look. Again, religious paintings of Jesus' crucifixion ar
e misleading; out of respect, or perhaps simply wishful thinking, they show him wearing a loincloth, although those being crucified were usually stripped naked before being nailed or tied to the crossbeam. It was a stripping away of whatever remnants of dignity a victim might have managed to retain up to that point. All he could hope for then was the inadvertent kindness of a spear to the side or a blow across the knees, and a quick death—in hours, that is, instead of days.
Nobody knows exactly how many people were crucified in Palestine during the years of Roman control, but it is safe to say that it was in the thousands. Crucifixions were rarely individual affairs, or even, as in the traditional representation of Jesus' crucifixion, a mere three at a time. In 4 B.C., the Roman general Varus dealt with the uprising that followed the death of Herod the Great by having two thousand "troublemakers" crucified in Jerusalem alone—a number that, in a city of perhaps fifty thousand, was literally a decimation of the male population. Add all the crucifixions mentioned by the historian Jose-phus during the several Judean rebellions against Roman rule, and you find almost ten thousand. And this total does not take account of the unknown thousands of crucifixions carried out in relatively normal times, whether for common crimes of urban poverty, like petty theft, or for real or imagined crimes against the state.
Individual suffering was not the real point of crucifixion, however. The real point was the display of total, ruthless power, along with the corollary of that display: the creation of fear in those who witnessed it—fear not only of the death itself, but of its sudden, merciless application.
There were no trials. No due process. No defense. You could literally be grabbed out of the fields or off the street, be identified, whether rightly or wrongly, as a threat to imperial property, public order, or state security, and be hung by the arms until dead. "Justice" Roman-occupation style was swift and ruthless.
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