by Jay Parini
They had executed Jesus after a cursory hearing, seeing him as one of countless troublemakers and petty criminals who must lose their lives at Golgotha, especially as Passover approached and the potential for mob violence loomed. Unrest terrified the Roman authorities, and potential rebels died without the opportunity to appeal their sentence, as they were aliens in their own country. The only way to keep order, in the Romans’ small minds, was to threaten violence, even brutality.
More than once I made my citizenship clear to a soldier who approached me with a challenging glare. It was rare for a Jew to have this status, so they believed me, knowing that the penalty for lying about this was death. They assumed I meant what I said, and backed away.
I didn’t tell them—or any gentile—that I was a student of Gamaliel because they didn’t care about any rabbi or understand what it meant to study at the feet of an illustrious man. But I took shelter in the comfort of this status, wherein I felt some protection from the Roman world, although I seethed, thinking about the crucifixions, the imprisonment of Jews for no reason, even their petty derision, and how they laughed at what they considered our peculiar customs. I had, I confess, murderous impulses, which I did my best to contain. I would have slaughtered the Roman army wholesale by myself if I could.
I did my best, however, to maintain a sense of equilibrium. An intense study of the scriptures must replace my wish to kill the Romans and protect the Jews. Even Gamaliel had said that our only hope was in God, and that our work in his school helped to preserve what mattered in our tradition.
“Never be distracted,” he would say. “See only what God wants you to see. Listen to him.”
My father had written: “To see God, look into Gamaliel’s eyes.” This was, for him, a rare poetic turn.
I did love the Rabban, as we called Gamaliel: this genial, quick-witted man whose beard recalled the white bristles of a boar. His teeth were dark brown, almost black, but the mint he chewed gave his breath an unexpected sweetness. He was perhaps the most respected scholar among the Jews, the author of numerous commentaries on scripture, a rabbi steeped in the legal codes. He rocked back and forth vigorously when he prayed, sitting in a straw-backed chair while a few dozen boys (and not a few men) gathered in a circle on the blue-tiled floor of the study hall to listen as he recited the Psalms in a voice that pinged off the walls and doubled in volume:
Bless the Lord, O my soul. O my God, thou art very great and clothed with honor and majesty.
Who covers thyself with light as with a garment: who stretches out the heavens like a curtain:
Who lays the beams of his chambers in the waters: who makes the clouds his chariot: who walks upon the wings of the wind:
Who makes his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:
Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be cast away forever.
A reflection always followed, as with the above passage, when he said: “Remember that God creates all forms of life. He made everything: the hills, the trees, the wildlife that runs in the desert, in the forests. He is the voice in every bird. He makes the rivers race to their conclusion in the sea. He rains on us. He fills us with breath. He brings the honey of life into the delicate combs of our minds. He is the light we seek.”
I aspired to speak with such clarity, in such natural metaphors.
The Rabban was a poet himself, and when he discovered my early training in the Greek writers, he allowed me to pursue this vein. (None of the other boys even knew about this interest of mine, nor would they easily have understood.) With Gamaliel’s encouragement, I took it upon myself to memorize passages from Homer and Sophocles, Plato, Ion of Chios, and Apollonius of Rhodes. The latter, in particular, appealed to the Rabban, since Apollonius had been the librarian at Alexandria and, he said, “almost a Jew among pagans.”
The idea that one might be among God’s chosen without being a Jew intrigued me. It was something I knew I must try to understand, since my father had taught me the opposite, saying God would embrace only his own, the descendants of Moses, one of the twelve tribes, with particular affection for our tribe, the tribe of Benjamin.
“And what of the rest?” I once asked him.
“And what of them, boy? What of them?”
It somehow comforted me to know that our tradition, based in the scriptures, had been revered in faraway places. As we learned from Gamaliel, the library in Alexandria had acquired multiple copies of the Torah. In his wisdom, Ptolemy—a truly great king—had summoned seventy-two scholars, six from each of the twelve tribes, from Judea; he confined them on an island, in what had once been a fortress, in separate cells, asking each of them to translate the Torah into Greek. It was miraculous, how they summoned the scriptures—each translation exactly the same, word for word, with no variations. The result was “the second great miracle,” as the Rabban taught us, the first being the original in Hebrew.
“Try not to rely on the Greek translation, however wonderful,” Gamaliel told us. “A translation is always an interpretation. Go to the Hebrew for prayer, for deep study. Study God’s tongue.”
I would fail him in this, relying in later life on the Greek text, which sang in my head, the luminous music of the Greek scriptures, which I still hear in my father’s voice. It was the language of Homer and so many fine poets, dramatists, and philosophers. On a walk with the Rabban through the Lower City, I once quoted Anacreon, hoping to impress him with the range of my knowledge. But this produced only a wince and was followed by a clear rebuke. “That is a drinking song, dear boy,” he said. “Profane!”
I never referred to Anacreon again, at least not in his presence.
We were taught to seek God’s face in dreams, to listen for his voice. “Be still and know that he is God,” Gamaliel would say, echoing the psalmist. One evening over dinner he explained in surprising detail to a group of us about the layers of heaven, and how one might, while still in bodily form, visit the spirits above us, penetrating those august layers.
Quoting Daniel, who understood the meaning of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the many-layered heavens, he said, “God gives wisdom to the wise. He gives knowledge to those who sit, who discern.”
I questioned the Rabban about this and other matters—inquiry was encouraged. The school of Gamaliel was designed to lead us in the path to wisdom, to teach us to write vigorously, without fuss or vulgarity, and to instruct us in the techniques of rhetoric and argument, where conflict arose naturally and was a good thing. “You must question everything,” Gamaliel said. “Nothing is beyond interrogation. If a thing is true, God makes that plain to the reasonable mind. If any man is truthful, he will be uplifted. If any man is false, incapable of reason, without the fire of God in his heart, he must fail. The man who does not abide in God will crumble into dust. The man who enters the mind of God will rise like Elijah in the chariot of sound judgment.”
I had developed a deep prayer life during my years in the school of Gamaliel, and would rise before dawn, pulling a shawl around my shoulders before reciting a few psalms from David, or perhaps a passage from the prophets. I often prayed the set prayers, as taught to us by Gamaliel, and would listen for God—sometimes for an hour or more in silence like a desert mist.
This voice I heard only a few times, but it came distinctly, unexpectedly, much as the voice that had come to Samuel in his sleep. “Paul, you are mine,” I heard, quite late one night, after I had nearly fallen into a dream. “Let my own voice be yours!”
I sat up, sweating, and pledged obedience for life. What else could I do in the face of the Almighty?
“I am yours!” I cried.
I realize how much I gathered from Gamaliel and made into my own. We inhabit our teachers, and they are changed in our own flesh. We become their voices, even if they would hardly recognize us.
When my time with Gamaliel came to an end, my father instructed me
to remain in Jerusalem, which surprised me. I had fully expected to return to Tarsus and work beside him in his business.
“You will join me in commerce, but not in Tarsus. In Jerusalem, at least for now,” he wrote. “You will enlarge our business in that city.”
I agreed to this readily, pleased by his confidence in my powers. A young man needs the confidence of his father: It’s the ground he walks on.
At his insistence, I boarded with my sister’s friend, a robust widow called Hadar. Her black hair was streaked with white, and she had skin like yellow parchment. My brother-in-law, Rabbi Ezra, had known her husband, and my father approved of her as “a pious woman, with a fine reputation.” And this reputation was widely shared, as Jews came from different parts of the city to consult her, often bringing problems that she would solve as she passed out chunks of unleavened bread that had been baked in her clay oven and smothered with a paste made from dates and seeds. My father explained that she would provide shelter as well as meals: often a segment of barley loaf with goat cheese or sesame paste with dry fruit on top. Sometimes she boiled sun-dried locusts in salty water or baked a honey cake with cinnamon or cumin. She made delicious pigeon pies and would occasionally roast a shank of lamb over the wood fire in her courtyard. I did not complain about any of this.
Her husband had been close to her, and despite her usual bravura she retained quantities of unresolved grief, as I realized when I heard her wailing at night. She would call her husband’s name, and this unsettled me. I liked to imagine that my own mother, had she survived, would have possessed a stoic nature, and could not have been overwhelmed in this manner.
As Ion once wrote: “A good mother cuts with a keel through clashing waves, and her gunnels rarely dip.”
* * *
Jerusalem in those days was exactly the right sort of place for me to begin my life, within the amber limestone borders of the city walls, in the shade of Herod’s Temple. The city had advantages for a young man of my disposition, who imagined himself sitting among the Council of Elders one day, where Gamaliel had presided as Chief of Court for many years. It would not take long before my contacts there multiplied, and I would use them wisely. (The counterfeit gold of worldly approbation attracted me, as it does in the hearts of most younger men who have not yielded to God in full submission, learning to rest in his presence.)
My father sent clear instructions: I was to assist our cousin Amos, an associate in the family business, in whatever ways I could. Our enterprise had done reasonably well in Palestine in past decades, and Amos understood the growing market for tents as well as anyone. He explained that shipping good hides to Tarsus was our primary task, thus agreeing with my father.
Setting about this work in earnest, I noticed that they slaughtered countless sheep each day for sacrifice at the Temple. I told Amos I had an excellent contact there, a young guard called Aryeh, whom I’d known in school. His uncle sat among the Council of Elders, adding to his luster. I had a hunch he might be willing to assist me.
Amos snickered at me; my bold approach failed to convince him. He said, “Let’s be careful not to upset anyone in the Temple. One could do damage, and that is never good for business. Always remember that.”
“I’m a careful person,” I said.
I liked Aryeh more than he knew, and had spent long evenings in conversation with him, arguing over commentaries much as we had done under Gamaliel. He had a quick smile, an easy and energetic manner. Long russet-brown hair cascaded over his shoulders. His strength of will impressed everyone, and the fact that his nose had obviously been broken in a fight spoke to his combativeness. It bent sharply to one side, although this imperfection did nothing to lessen his attractiveness. To my dismay, he showed little of a scholar’s passion for the specifics of a given text and had only a glaze of learning. On the other hand, he didn’t worry about this insufficiency, which mattered little to him or others in his circle.
Aryeh had acquired the necessary gifts for a young man with Temple aspirations, and everyone marveled at the way he would talk in rambling sentences that nearly lost track of themselves as he spoke, disappearing around obscure corners of thought. Sometimes his language would unexpectedly cohere, and this could delight his listeners. (“He’s quite brilliant,” one of his friends said in my presence, much to my amazement.) One often saw Aryeh in the marketplace with a group of young men straining for his attention. And, indeed, I envied his outgoing nature and admired as well his presence and storytelling powers, with never a ponderous moment. I invited him back to my room one day, where he gently mocked my tendency to speak of Plato and Antipater of Tarsus.
“Don’t talk of Greek philosophy,” he said, in a way that reminded me of my old friend Simon, who dismissed my allusions to the Attic poets and thinkers. “I would have disliked Athens,” Aryeh said. “That sort of elevated chatter gives me a headache.”
I put before him the issue of getting good hides for my father’s business, aware that the prospect of a problem to solve usually excited him. He glowed now with the satisfaction that comes from needing to find a good and practical solution for a friend with a dilemma. Within days, he had spoken to friends in the Temple, working his charm, and soon it was possible for me to buy large numbers of excellent hides cheaply. Taking advantage of the arrangement, I had them tanned in Bethany and shipped to my father from the port of Caesarea. The quantities surprised him, as did their quality, and he wondered about my sudden gift for commerce. How had I managed to acquire this valuable stock, and so quickly—more than Amos had managed in many years in Jerusalem? If I could sustain this level of supply, there were few limits to what we might achieve as a family, my father told me.
His letters became more affectionate, full of praise. One of them ended with “your loving father.”
Could this really be Adriel?
One day Aryeh asked me to accompany him and other members of the Temple Guard who had been charged with ferreting out Jewish heretics, and the invitation appealed to me. I hated heretics, those who dared to contradict God’s word, who threatened our very being as Jews. This paramilitary group had flourished in the last few years, when a number of dangerous cults had taken root. Some were followers of Apollonius, or Simon of Peraea, or Athronges—each of them fiery self-appointed prophets with a following. Among these was the rustic Nazarene called Jesus, whom they had crucified recently. His followers claimed he had actually been raised from the dead by Almighty God and that he continued to dwell among them in some fashion. From what I learned, Jesus had numerous disciples, including Peter and Andrew, whom I had met in passing when they attended some of Gamaliel’s prayer sessions. Jesus’s brother James behaved like a pious Jew, and he could often be seen in the Temple in prayer. I had noticed James in animated conversation with Gamaliel in the Temple only a few weeks earlier, and this puzzled me. My old teacher had often talked about cultic groups and the dangers they posed, and I thought he should have been wary of James.
Peter had caught my eye. A flat-faced man with massive lips and mottled ears, he would crouch with his back against the whitewashed wall of Gamaliel’s school, his arms folded, grunting in prayer. He had become a loud voice in the Jesus circle, but James was obviously their ringleader. Followers of the Way (as they called themselves) had increased in numbers and enthusiasm since the Nazarene’s demise and supposed resurrection. I laughed at their stories—they were absurd—but worried about the political implications of this cult. It was bad enough for the Jews in Palestine without this sort of nonsense, which could only draw further contempt from Roman authorities.
“Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah, not himself,” Aryeh said to me, when I asked about him. “He was an ordinary man with extraordinary gifts of perception, a man of God perhaps. But surely not the Christ.”
This was the first time I heard the Greek word for Messiah, the Christ, applied to Jesus of Nazareth.
Like
most Jews, I felt sure the Christ would come as a warrior, another Judas Maccabaeus, who led a triumphant revolt against the wide-reaching and overbearing Seleucid Empire so many years ago. (We now lit candles every year to recall the rebirth of worship at the Temple, which Maccabaeus had delivered back into our hands.)
“The Christ will arrive on a white horse, raising a sword of steel,” Aryeh said, mouthing what every Jew believed, however improbably. “And they will beg for mercy, the heathens.”
Anything to get the Romans out of Palestine, I thought. They hated us and forced us to follow their laws, to adjust to their harsh and bureaucratic ways while they consumed our resources, which is always the point of empires: They feed without mercy on those they conquer.
Jews had seen this before, successive empires rolling over us, ripping us apart. The Babylonians burned the splendid Temple that Solomon had built, taking the best of us into captivity, and we had wept by the waters of Babylon for decades, although we never forgot Jerusalem, singing the great line from our Psalm: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem! Somehow we survived their brutalities, just as centuries later we survived Alexander on his violent eastward march and, still later, the wicked Seleucid kings, who killed Jews like pesky insects, beheading mothers and children and well as fathers and sons. We would survive Rome as well.
“We must defend the Jews,” I said, feigning gruffness, hoping to match Aryeh’s tone.
“Wayward ideas always fail,” he said.
“We must take them seriously.”
“We do. Come with me.”
At this invitation I followed him into the Upper City, where we heard that an eloquent speaker would appear on behalf of the Jesus circle. This was Stephen, whose preaching had already roiled the Jewish population in Judea and Galilee. We stood at the back of a surprisingly large and buoyant crowd, listening to Stephen, a handsome fellow of twenty-five or so with thick chestnut hair and black eyes, a narrow face, and the whisper of a beard. He had an appealing manner and overflowed with miraculous tales of Jesus, who apparently had healed the lame, caused the blind to see, and had made lepers whole. He was even said to have raised the brother of a friend from the dead at Bethany, summoning him from a tomb. According to Stephen, Jesus did not distinguish among kinds or classes of people, preaching radical equality between men and women, between free men and slaves. He conversed freely with whores, beggars, and petty criminals, even tax collectors.