The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  “I have disappointed you,” said Paul.

  His father rose with difficulty and walked toward his son, letting the stick topple to the tiles. Paul watched the old man quaver, his right hand lifted to the level of his chin, as if uncertain what to do.

  Paul swayed, rocking from side to side. “I really didn’t mean—”

  “Stop!” said Adriel, lifting his hand over Paul’s head as if raising a flag. “I forgive you.”

  Paul welcomed this response, but all was not forgiven. It would take time, and he would never quite repair the breach that had opened between them. His father could never fully understand what his progeny had done, not only to him but to himself. Adriel had raised Paul as a son of the tribe of Benjamin and sent him at considerable expense to Gamaliel’s school in Jerusalem. He had been convinced of his son’s capacities and potential. And this was his reward? Paul had spat on his inheritance, his sacred heritage and everything that came with that, including a position in the world. The Jewish community in Tarsus would never warm to him or trust him fully.

  They embraced and stood for a long time with their arms wrapped around each other, with tears on their cheeks, in their beards. Gila stood to one side, weeping. There was too much to say even to begin to talk. And, given Adriel’s natural reticence, the conversation could hardly begin.

  “I never understood the old man,” Paul would say to me, “and he never took any pleasure in my renewed faith, my contact with God through Jesus, whom he persisted in calling my ‘peculiar rabbi.’ ”

  The break between father and son had insufficient time to heal, as Adriel died in his sleep a few months later. In the meantime, Paul occupied himself with the family business, taking control when his father passed away, making sure that all assets were secure, as he planned to use them judiciously to support the Way. He also made inroads with the local Jewish community, a number of whom actually welcomed the news that Paul offered of Rabbi Jesus. This was especially true among the Godfearers, who had grown in number since Paul last visited Tarsus.

  Paul understood that the future lay among the Greeks, especially those who—like me—already worshipped the God of Israel and felt drawn to the Jewish scriptures.

  Soon Paul’s house became a meeting place in Tarsus for the Way. His gatherings on the First Day of each week attracted many of those who had worshipped Mithras and understood the language Paul had only begun to formulate, seeing the death of Jesus as a kind of atonement for the sins of many. Together they sang hymns and read passages from the Jewish scriptures in Greek; a meal followed, one that involved the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine as symbols of the body and blood of Jesus, using many of the phrases that Musa had developed. Paul often recalled that God had dropped manna on the starving Jews in their exile and hunger. And so men and women ate the bread of angels, as David had written. Paul would hold up a small loaf before his gathering and echo the son of Jesse: “This is the bread of angels. It is the body of the Christ, which becomes your body when you eat. We take him into our body, and we become one with God. We become the Christ ourselves, as Jesus did before us.”

  It was an elaborate idea, which in his mind deepened and took on various hues and contours, and which he developed in letters to various gatherings in Greece and Asia.

  “I’m a tree with many birds in my head,” he said to me. “One chirps, cries out, even shrieks. Then another, and another.”

  “A black cloud of thought,” I replied.

  “Luke, shut up,” he said.

  I knew, or thought I knew, he was teasing me.

  Now the business of cloth production and tent-making in Tarsus prospered, as Paul made sure that good men were in place. He gradually disentangled himself from all daily operations, diverting profits as he could to those in need. An array of orphans and cripples, lepers and destitute widows with hungry children came to his doorstep every day, and they rarely vanished without help, including prayers. And Paul continued for a couple of years to read from the scrolls on the Sabbath in the local synagogue, as his father had done, assuming what he considered his rightful place within this congregation. They could not dislodge him, and nobody had the will or knowledge to discredit his ideas, which they could not even understand.

  * * *

  When I first met Paul in Damascus, some years earlier, the impression I got was indelible. His body was bathed in nearly invisible light. He had clearly been struck by God, and he blazed with the spirit. Even in his great distress, I could see that here was another son of God, a man in whom the Christ had rooted and would blossom. He spoke with authority. It was evident in every sentence that fell from his lips.

  When we lowered him over the city wall and watched him disappear into the desert, I said to my uncle that I would spend my life in his company.

  My uncle looked at me with hard, flat eyes. “You must never say things like this,” he told me. “Language envelops us, it creates us. What we say, we become.”

  I knew this, but I liked it, too.

  My wife had recently died in childbirth in Antioch, and my son had drawn his last little breath only a few hours later in my arms. Chara and I had been friends since childhood, and to lose her like this, and my son as well—it was impossible. The medical practice I had established in Antioch had grown nicely, and I had developed a business in salves that brought me to distant parts of the empire, where sales of my products flourished. I had foolishly thought nothing in my life could go wrong, then everything went wrong. My life closed, and nothing made sense.

  An old friend called on me one evening, months after this tragedy, and insisted I go with him to a synagogue where Joshua, a powerful young rabbi, had attracted a following of Greeks who wanted to know more about the God of Israel. I still remember that Sabbath, when I entered the darkened room and could feel God’s presence. The candles flickered with messages for me, these mysterious tongues of flame seemed to call my name. I listened to readings of the Jewish scriptures, in Greek, and could hear the divine voice in them.

  Joshua invited me to come back, and I did, again and again. I loved it when he read from the scriptures, the strong words of the prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel. The lamentations of Jeremiah moved me deeply and spoke to my own pain. I took to praying at home and reading the Greek scriptures. And Jeremiah’s promise from God called to me: Know that I have plans for you, plans to make you prosper, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

  Could I really believe such a thing? Hope and a future?

  I was trying to find my way in the world after the death of Chara and my tiny son. But was this a way forward?

  Joshua came often to dine with me, and held me by the shoulders with his strong hands, insisting that God knew my heart, saying that I would prosper. Once he suggested that I undergo the ritual of circumcision as a way of drawing me closer to the Jewish people and to enclose myself within the covenant. But I resisted this act of mutilation, thinking it could not matter to God. I prayed intensely about it, and knew I had made the right choice. Then, one Sabbath, our rabbi introduced Phoebe—a wealthy woman with black hair falling across her forehead. Her eyes glistened like raisins. She brought news of Rabbi Jesus, whom she called “the son of God.” She read from his sayings, and told stories about him, and suggested that he was the long-awaited Christ.

  I spoke to her afterward, and she invited me to a gathering at her house the next day, the First Day of the week. She asked me to share what she called the sacred meal. And it pleased me to see the energy and spirit of these people, who surrounded me in love when I told them about my wife and son. They lifted me up, and we prayed together. “God heals,” Phoebe said to me. “He wants you to be part of our movement, the Way of Jesus.”

  For some months I wavered between the synagogue and this gathering of the Way. Joshua understood my dilemma and told me I should make my own decision, although I could not help
but notice that he—a rabbi himself!—found the Way appealing. He often attended Phoebe’s gatherings, sitting at the back of the room with his head bowed, praying for clarity. One night he came to my house and said, in blunt terms, that Jesus was our Lord. “He is the Christ,” he told me. “I have heard his voice in the night.”

  From that moment, I belonged only to the Way, which had by this time gathered strength in distant cities in Asia, in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and beyond. On a sunny morning in late spring, Phoebe baptized me in the Orontes, with five others. So I can date my new life, my eternal life, from the moment I rose through that flaming bronze sheet of water under a blue sky. “You and the Christ are one now,” she said to each of us. “Tell the world what has happened, that we are alive in him! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

  My medical practice flourished, as it had for some years, although I wondered how long I might continue on this path. All I wanted now was to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of God. But it’s hard to break from a profession like medicine, especially since I could help so many others in the course of a day, using the knowledge I had slowly acquired in my youth.

  It was not just physical knowledge I had learned, the working of the body. I had studied the Hippocratic Corpus, and the anatomical work of Herophilus and other Greek physicians. Each of them had stressed the intimate connections between the soul and its ambience, its habitation within flesh and bone. The elaborate distinctions that Paul would make, naming flesh and spirit as contradictory elements, always seemed pat to me, not subtle enough. I wished that I knew more, could elaborate, even for my own purposes.

  When I mentioned these classical physicians to Paul, he quoted Ion of Chios at me: “The mind is air, and air itself is mud and motion, clouds and sunlight.”

  Always Ion of Chios!

  Antioch was home, and would be home again, as I had inherited a family house there, which in my absence was filled with many cousins and their lively offspring. I loved this city, which boasted half a million people: Romans at heart, with a Greek inflection. We were, I would tell visitors, the eastern capital of the empire, having overtaken Alexandria in everything but medicine. Our position on the Silk Road near the Orontes made traffic through our streets exotic and thrilling, with ideas pouring in from the West and East. Julius Caesar had confirmed our freedom more than a century ago, and we boasted temples on every hill. “There are a thousand gods,” my whimsical father used to say, “if you count the monkeys.” We had a forum, where philosophical and political arguments clashed and prospered or failed, and where received opinion was perpetually challenged and reformulated. Our hippodrome equaled the Circus Maximus in Rome, and we boasted theaters and bathhouses, colonnades, even terra-cotta aqueducts: all the amenities of civilization.

  My early days in Antioch often coursed through my dreams, that time when I went about my work as a physician with mild optimism, helping where I could, aware that my limited knowledge of the body and soul could make only small differences in the lives of my patients. I saw I could make a decent living by treating wealthy clients and, on the side, making and selling a variety of salves that proved useful for skin rashes and muscle pains. One uncle, an ambitious merchant, supported my enterprise with enthusiasm, and we hired a dozen workers to concoct these emollients according to my recipes. His eldest son had taken over this business upon my departure from Antioch, and it prospered, so I did not lack for money.

  After my baptism I became a pillar of sorts at the house of Phoebe, who occupied a Roman-style villa with a panoramic view of the Orontes. We drew more than two dozen men and women to our sacred meals on the First Day, and Phoebe spared no expense, providing so much food that her slaves could feed happily for the rest of the week on our leftovers. The Holy Spirit moved upon us, through us, lifting us. I felt that, sooner rather than later, I would reunite with my dear wife in Christ, and Phoebe assured me that even those who had never encountered the Way of Jesus could, in time, move beyond time into the Kingdom of God. God was generous in this way, never vindictive, wanting only the best for us.

  I adored Phoebe, whose name in Hebrew meant “bringer of light,” she told us. This bright widow had business interests in Rome and Jerusalem, where she had met Peter and James. She was, like them, devoutly Jewish, and had at first conceived of the Way as simply a reformation within Judaism itself, a necessary transformation. I loved our meetings in the walled garden at her villa, where we sang newly minted hymns and read passages from one of many books of sayings by Jesus. Her friend Chloe, another leader in the Way, would frequently visit Antioch, and she would lead us in prayer, breaking the bread for us, passing the wine: the high priestess of our gathering. This large, tall, profoundly intelligent woman would visit other assemblies, too, where everyone treated her as a prophet; in keeping with this, she often recited passages from the writings of Ezra and Esther, foretelling the emergence of new prophets. “They are coming among us soon, with their own language and visions,” she would say.

  She argued, as Phoebe had, that scripture was not “closed” but ongoing, active, emerging. We had only to listen with open ears.

  As if summoned by her voice, Paul appeared one day at the back of Phoebe’s house at the sacred meal. It was a crowded room that afternoon, with more visitors than usual, some of them from Jerusalem.

  Paul, once again! I had prayed for him earnestly after he disappeared into the Arabian desert, and I longed to see him, but we had received no word of his whereabouts. Many went into the desert and didn’t return, so it would not have surprised me had I never heard his name again. But there he stood. He nodded to me like an old friend, casually, then seized the attention of the room, asking in a loud voice to speak to the group.

  Phoebe said, “Come to the front, sir.”

  Paul stood on a slightly raised dais, with everyone seated. He said, “An angel of the Lord woke me, some weeks ago, in Tarsus. I am a son of Tarsus, where I run my father’s business in the manufacture of tents. But I am a child of the Christ as well. I have met Jesus himself, and was appointed by him as an apostle. I was told by an angel to come to Antioch.”

  The gasps around the room suggested a mixture of awe and confusion. Who was this peculiar little man, this slightly hunched, hawk-nosed fellow with narrow eyes, and what angel would seek him out? He had this idiosyncratic way of raising his hands when he spoke. The eyes blazed in his long, thin face, and he had a profound dimple in his chin that set him apart: a sign of character, I thought. But there was a wildness in him. His ruff of a beard was in need of grooming as were his eyebrows.

  In a breathless, stuttering manner that I would come to know, he told us that he, a Pharisee by training and inclination, a student of Gamaliel, had stoned Stephen, our first martyr, delivering the final blow outside of the city walls of Jerusalem. He had been stricken by our Lord on the road to Damascus, permanently changed. He lifted his fists in the air and shouted, “God, Almighty Jehovah, we worship you, and we thank you for the voice of your son, for his living presence. May we hide ourselves in the Christ, in his bosom!”

  “Dear God, this is peculiar,” Phoebe whispered in my ear.

  That day I sat with Paul under a spreading laurel, with its pale yellow leaves like hands waving in the breeze that circled Phoebe’s villa. Chickens gabbled in the yard, and I saw a peacock spread its feathers by the garden wall. The gathering had dispersed, and we drank mint tea that a slave had brought to us in warm cups.

  “We met in Damascus, some years ago,” I said.

  “I know you, Luke.”

  “Ah, yes, but I thought perhaps—”

  “Never think. Know.”

  My first instinct was to say: Who are you to speak to me in this way? But he made quick amends, his face softening, the eyes baleful.

  “I should not have spoken like this. I’m impetuous, they tell me.”

  I leaned toward him, listening.

  “Th
is agitation of spirit,” he said. “Sometimes I feel the Lord—the spirit—rising inside me, quivering, making my flesh melt. I lose the governance of my own tongue. At other times I fall away, fade to silence, and God’s door closes. But I knock and knock again.”

  “Knock and the door shall be opened,” I said. “Those are the words of Jesus.”

  He looked interested. “I have never heard this.”

  “It’s in many of the books of sayings.”

  “You know about them?”

  “I’ve got several scrolls in my house. You see, I’m planning to write the life of Jesus—an account of his days, his time on this earth.”

  “His death and resurrection?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does the life matter so much?”

  “He is our example.”

  Paul closed his eyes. His voice became otherworldly now. “In my vision at night I looked, and behold, before me was one like the son of man, and he came with all the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.”

  “I love Daniel’s words,” I said.

  It was a test, and I had not failed to recognize the prophet’s visionary statement. Paul reached for my hands and held them, even digging his thumbs into the loose skin at the top. It was growing late in the day, and sunlight sifted in the leaves, with a dapple of light-and-dark on the ground beneath our chairs. It seemed as if the sun had poured into Paul’s head and shot through his body, as his hands became small flames, difficult to hold, but I held tight and would not let go. I could feel the surge of the spirit there.

  “I love God,” I said.

  “And we know God through him, our Christ. You know this, as you are one of his own.”

  “Pray with me, Paul?”