Ein Kerem, then, is where Maryam starts her life again after the crucifixion—not alone, and not with John or Peter or any of the male disciples, but with the other disciples: "the many women who went up with him to Jerusalem."
Maryam learns to laugh again. She plays hide and seek with the children between the rows of vines or along the stone-walled terraces planted with olive trees, and when she finds herself panting yet exhilarated with the effort of it, she grasps the lovely paradox that energy spent is energy created. That's when she knows that these children, born here to the women of her community, are the real resurrection of the flesh. For what is resurrection if not a matter of hope, of belief in the future? These women have given her new life.
Sometimes she goes out with the goats and the sheep, a switch of acacia in her hand, just as she did when she was still a girl. High on the hillside, she hitches up her smock once more to give her legs freedom to move, and urges the animals on with the familiar guttural "krrr." The Magdalene tells her she doesn't need to do this—it is young girls' work—but she replies that she does need to, for herself. She needs the sense of her muscles working, the feel of sweat on her forehead and in her armpits and trickling down her back: the physical signs of vitality, of life.
She watches every fall for the signs of renewal: anemones and cyclamens poking up between the rocks, ready to open into flower. She notes where artemisia and rue, sage and fennel grow thickest; when they're ready to harvest, she'll bring the young girls and teach them as her grandmother once taught her.
The herbs are harder to find here than in the greener, gentler hills of Galilee. Even the springs are different; they're set at the foot of steep slopes, instead of high up on the hillside. Yet there is something deeply satisfying about this Judean landscape. It may have the harshness of the desert, but it also has its cleanness. The cold winter nights are so sharp that Maryam's vision seems clearer than ever, while the searing heat of summer days burns clarity into her mind.
High up on the hillside, she turns and looks down on the community below, deep in the valley, and marvels at how much it has grown in the fifteen years they've been here. There were some twenty of them then, every one of them a refugee from Golgotha, every one feeling as though she'd aged a lifetime in the past few days. Now they are more than a hundred, and it's the spirit of her son's life that rules their days, not his death.
Maryam loves each of them like a daughter. They call her amma, "mother," in the same way that members of a family clan call the oldest man abba, "father," and she accepts the title gratefully, even as she says that like her, they are all daughters: the daughters of the Lady Wisdom. Through these women, the best of her son's teachings will bear fruit and bloom. In the spirit of Wisdom, they will keep him alive. And she knows they will carry on their work after she is gone.
She doesn't know how much longer she has left. Not long, for sure. She is fifty-one now, her face deeply etched by time and experience. Her hair has long turned gray, though in the summer it bleaches a silvery white in the sun. She still wears it in a single loose braid down her back, just as she still wears the thin linen smocks of her girlhood.
How strange it is to be old. She smiles as she remembers how incredible it once seemed that she would ever live to be as venerable as her grandmother. To a young peasant girl, the old seemed to exist in another country, one of infinite experience and wisdom. And only when she herself arrived in that country did she realize what she never could when she was younger—that there is no border, no barrier, between youth and age.
She feels as young now as she ever did, even if her muscles tire easier. Age, she has found, confers a different kind of strength. Call it mental, call it spiritual, no matter: it sustains her, as it sustains them all.
Yes, she's old enough now for the Magdalene to fuss over her, to try to stop her climbing up hillsides after the sheep and goats. Old enough to become venerable, though she adamantly refuses to be venerated. And the women respect this. To them, she is real, a flesh-and-blood woman like themselves. If she is an earthly manifestation of the Lady Wisdom, so too are they. She only wishes the male disciples could see this.
A few visit from time to time—Peter and James, Matthew and Luke—walking out to Ein Kerem from their small community inside the Jerusalem city walls. Always, they ask for stories of her son's life before they met him, but she can tell that they don't really listen. They have already formed the stories in their own minds, and if what she says does not fit, they barely hear her. In a way, she no longer exists for them. They come to pay their respects, yet they do not really respect Maryam the woman. She has become a figurehead for them, not a real person. "But I am here," she wants to say. "Touch me, I am real. Hear me speak, these words are mine." Then she looks into their eyes and sees the harshness of absolute conviction burning there, and she knows that nothing she can say will change them. They will place what they consider the right words in her mouth. And doubtless in her son's mouth too.
Where he preached renewal of the great Judaic tradition, they have begun to preach separation. They dream of a whole new tradition centered not on Yahweh but on her son. They talk of him almost as though he were divine. "We are all divine," she reminds them, "all children of God. If my son was the messenger of God, then so too are we. It is his message he would want you to honor, not his person." But they will not be content with a messenger, nor even with a prophet; like the Greeks, they seem to want the divine to have walked among them in human guise.
She places her faith where her son placed it. Wisdom will prevail. Not in her lifetime, perhaps, nor even in the lifetime of the youngest of the children born in this community built around the spring of the vine. But eventually—she smiles to just think of it—a hundred years on perhaps, or a thousand, or two thousand or three . . .
Up on this stony hillside she sighs, and leans back against the rough, runneled trunk of an olive tree—"the tree of light," as they call it, whose oil dispels darkness. She remembers the smell and the smoke of burning olive trees when she was a child, when the Romans retook Sepphoris and vandalized the olive groves. Remembers the old men calmly telling her not to worry, that there is no destroying an olive tree. "Wait, little one," they said, "you'll see." And sure enough, by the same time the following year, new shoots had sprung up all around the burned-out stumps. The trees were coming back to life again. The villagers pruned the shoots carefully, leaving only the strongest and sturdiest ones to grow. By the time Maryam gave birth, they were large enough to bear their first fruit.
The Nazarenes knew what the Roman mercenaries did not: that olive trees live hundreds, if not thousands, of years. You can cut them down or burn them, neglect them or deliberately deprive them of water, and still, in time, they will come back to life. They cannot be killed. They are the ultimate symbol of resurrection.
Some of the trees on this hillside are ancient, like the one Maryam now rests against. Others are still young, grown from shoots transplanted by the women each time a child is born. At age five,the child is brought to pick the first fruit of the new tree, plucking the proof of renewal.
Many such rituals bind their community, along with songs to Miriam the prophet of exodus and freedom, offerings to Isis the greatest of virgins, celebrations of Eve the mother of all. But they are bound above all by their practice, for this community exists not only for those who are already here, but also for those who might one day want to come. It is a safe haven, a refuge for those in need of shelter, or of healing, or of a renewed sense of faith and life.
Maryam has handed on the art and science of healing, and the other women are now as skillful as she. Word has spread. People in pain or chronic sickness, city dwellers and peasants alike, make their way here to be cured. Wounded resistance fighters are brought here by kinfolk or fellow partisans to be nursed back to health, staying for weeks and sometimes months at a time until it is safe for them to move on. Women who have been beaten and raped, men who have been imprisoned and tortured, all find
refuge here. Some never leave. They come to be healed, and stay on to heal others.
The years of hard work have left their mark on the faces and bodies of the small group of founding women—not just the Magdalene and Joanna and Maryam herself, but the prophetess Hanna and the seamstress Tabitha, emancipated slaves—libertinae—like Rhoda, and entrepreneurs like Lydia, who used to trade in lapis lazuli, the treasured pigment made from crushed azure stone from far to the east along the great Silk Road. And the other Maryams, of course: the wife of Cleopas, the mother of James and Zebedee, and Lazarus' sister Mary, together with Martha. They are all ageing now, yet their eyes shine like those of young girls, as alive and vital as ever.
Maryam admires them as much as she loves them, and has done ever since they refused to disband after the crucifixion. It was no longer possible, they said. After becoming so close to each other over the two years of Jesus' ministry, how could they now abandon everything he stood for? How return to conventional family and respectability? And so Joanna, who was married to a high official in the Herodian treasury and who managed all his estates as high-born women often did in Rome, led them to this land in Ein Kerem. "We shall be safe here," she said. "This now belongs to us all."
And in a way, Maryam admires those who have joined them over the years even more, for these younger women never saw or heard her son;
they acted on faith alone. They had been prostitutes and courtesans, pampered urban wives and hard-working peasant women, women of the lowest social rank and of the highest too, like Caletha the daughter of Nicodemus, Neshra the daughter of the famed Pharisee sage Gamaliel, and Tabitha the daughter of the deposed king of Judea, Archelaus. Now they are all part of this discipleship of equals around Maryam. All are her sisters, all her daughters.
Shadows begin to lengthen on the hillside. The bright light of afternoon is deepening into the soft gold of early evening. Maryam hasn't meant to sit here so long. Perhaps she really is beginning to tire.
She stands and stretches her arms and her back. Becomes aware of voices calling for her from far below. Yes, she has been blessed with these women who love her. She thinks of the Essenes down in the desert fastness of the Dead Sea, "the sons of light," they call themselves, girding for an apocalyptic war with the sons of darkness. Here in Ein Kerem, the daughters of light follow a different path—the path of understanding, of healing both body and spirit. Where the Essenes dream of overthrowing the temple hierarchy and instituting a new, purer temple of their own, the women know that the true temple is not one of marble and gold, nor of any other physical material, but of the mind. It is the spirit of Wisdom. "Honor her in yourselves," Maryam will tell the women this evening, "and in each other. This is where renewal starts."
She smiles, and follows the sheep and goats down the hillside.
"Wise" is not a word much used any longer. One can be smart, one can be intelligent, one may even be a genius. But wise? That has an unreal feel to it, as though it were simultaneously too grand and too vague for practical people to wrap their heads around.
Yet in Maryam's time, there was nothing vague about wisdom. Quite the contrary. A great deal of contemporary Jewish theology was built around the divine female figure known as the Lady Wisdom. And she had a very distinct voice. She spoke directly, in quotation marks, in several books written by Judean gnostics living in Egypt from the third century B.C. on.
Her Hebrew name, Hochma, was the abstract form oihachama, "wise woman." Her earliest appearance—at least the earliest that we know of—is in the third-century B.C. Book of Proverbs, where she descends from the divine world to guide and save humanity. She was there when God created the world, she says, before anything else existed. She proclaims her greatness, gives dire warnings of the dangers of ignoring her, and demands and expects loyalty. As the manifestation of God's presence in the world, this is her due. She is the female aspect of God. And she is wise indeed.
In the Book of Wisdom, written in the first century B.C., her knowledge encompasses all the sciences of her time: physics, alchemy, astrology, biology, psychology, herbalism, and medicine. She knows:
the structure of the world and the properties of the elements,
the beginning, end and middle of times,
the alternation of the solstices and the succession of the seasons,
the revolution of the years and the position of the stars,
the natures of animals and the instincts of wild beasts,
the powers of spirits and the mental process of men,
the varieties of plants and the medical properties of roots.
The book goes on to praise Hochma in a list of twenty-one attributes—three times the magical number seven—that make her everything a woman and a goddess could be: "Intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp, irresistible, beneficent, loving to man, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits."
At times, her language reflects the grandeur of contemporary hymns to Isis; at others it seems very close to the sensuality of the Song of Songs. In the second-century B.C. Ecclesiasticus—often called The Wisdom of Ben Sirach to distinguish it from the better-known Ecclesiastes—she says she is like the finest vines, the sweetest blossoms, the most beautiful roses, the tallest and most graceful trees:
I have exhaled a perfume like cinnamon and acacia, I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh . . . Approach me, you who desire me, And take your fill of my fruits, For memories of me are sweeter than honey, Inheriting me is sweeter than the honeycomb. They who eat me will hunger for more, They who drink me will thirst for more . . .
And so they did. Two centuries later, Christian gnostics would expand the earlier Jewish writings and elevate the Lady Wisdom still further. Calling her by her Greek name, Sophia, they explicitly revered her as the great virgin mother. In The Apocryphon of John, she becomes "the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit." She impregnates herself and so is "the Mother of everything, for she existed before them all, the mother-father." She is the origin of all things; without her, the world would not exist.
Inevitably, gnostics hungering for divine knowledge identified Sophia with the first great biblical figure who hungered for knowledge: the mother of all humans, Eve. Where Adam was content to exist in ignorance, Eve dared to reach for more. She picked and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The gnostics saw this as reaching for knowledge of the divine. It was an act of courage and spiritual integrity, not of disobedience. Eve was Wisdom in action, to the extent that in the gospel On the Origin of the World, she becomes Sophia's daughter, sent by her mother to teach Adam, who has no soul, so that he might attain one.
But Sophia's main child in the gnostic gospels is Jesus, the teacher and mediator of Wisdom. He is shown as her son, her lover, and even, in The Sophia of Jesus Christ, as Sophia herself. "The earliest Palestinian theological remembrances and interpretations of Jesus' life and death understand him as Sophia's messenger and later as Sophia," says theologist Elizabeth Schiissler-Fiorenza. "The earliest Christian theology is sophialogy."
It would not be allowed to last. Sophia was dangerous to the powers-that-be. She challenged the status quo: the traditional vilification of Eve, the priestly lock on knowledge, and above all, the separation of human and divine.
As the gnostics saw it, to eat and drink of Wisdom was not just to partake of the divine; it was to assimilate it, and thus become divine oneself. This was the ultimate expression of Jesus' teaching that "the kingdom of God is within you." The gnostic gospel of Philip stated it explicitly: whoever achieves gnosis or true knowledge becomes "no longer a Christian, but Christ."
In this, the gnostics were part of a long mystical tradition. As John the Baptist had taught, and as the Kabbalists would elaborate more than a thousand years later, a spark of the divine exists within every human being. We are all thus potentially divine—a belief that posed a radi
cal challenge to the developing institution of the church, just as it had done earlier to Herod when preached by John the Baptist. If the divine lay inside each person, what reason then to have intermediaries? What purpose could be served by bishops, creeds, canons, prescribed ritual?
In the ensuing power struggle, the anarchic mysticism of the gnostics was no match for the increasingly politicized and centralized church hierarchy. In 367 A.D. the powerful bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, ordered a purge of all apocryphal books with "heretical" tendencies. Most of the Egyptian gnostic gospels and writings were destroyed. The remnants were hidden deep in the desert, where some would be uncovered by chance only sixteen centuries later. The vibrant, dynamic presence of Sophia was suppressed, and would not resurface until the kabbalists revived her as the Shechina, the powerful and compassionate female manifestation of the godhead.
In Maryam's time, however, a world without Wisdom, without Hochma, must have been unimaginable. She was literally a proverbial presence, constantly invoked. Jesus had spoken of himself as the child of Wisdom—of them all as the children of Wisdom. And now here she was among them. For if ever there was a flesh-and-blood manifestation of Wisdom, it was Maryam herself: the healer, the mother, the wise woman.
XI
Amma, mother, they called her. If the title seems unusual for the leader of a spiritual community, that is because it survived only in its male form, abba, which in English would become "abbot." Even when women were finally allowed to enter Catholic monastic life, the senior one among them would be called the abbess—the feminine form of "abbott"—making her a kind of female father.
And yet amma was definitely a familiar term in the first century, for women played central roles in numerous faiths throughout the Mediterranean of the time. Just as the divine was often female, so too were those who mediated it.
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