The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  I heard from Barnabas that Paul had mercilessly teased John Mark about women, making insinuations. “She’s a pretty one, no?” he might say. Or “Don’t get your hopes up,” when a nubile beauty passed in the street. This must have upset the young man terribly. In fact, I met John Mark a few years later, and I could understand Paul’s discomfort. He was an arrogant fellow, one who lived in a shiny sphere of his own, deaf to the wishes of others and consumed by his own voice, which perhaps sounded loudly in his head. His needs whipped him about, and he took offense easily and often.

  After the departure of John Mark, Barnabas and Paul proceeded, following the eastward itinerary established at the outset: Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Traveling on foot, they slept when possible in huts along the way, these lonely outposts used by shepherds. Or they went to sleep under the stars, which had its charms for Paul, who could not cease from speculating on the nature of these gaudy pinpoints in the heavens above, this spectacle that nature offered on a nightly basis. He would lecture Barnabas on the poetic efforts of the pagan Lucretius to understand the meaning of the heavens. “We all derive from that celestial seed,” Lucretius wrote, and Paul recalled in a sonorous voice: “A selfsame father generated all, / And gave this earth, our mother, drops of rain / To bring forth this luxuriant bright world.”

  Barnabas had not heard of Lucretius, but he worried that a heathen should be granted so much leeway to interpret the nature of the heavens. “He would not have known our God,” he said.

  “Our God is infinite, and shows himself in various faces. Even the heathen can find God.”

  Barnabas would never get used to Paul’s curious dicta, these “sayings” of his, which adorned the letters he would write to gatherings throughout the empire. I did my best to make a note of wise or interesting things that he said in passing. Indeed, I hated to imagine how many were lost, as I could not write everything down. And often, when I did, I discovered later that he simply quoted (or slightly misquoted) the ancient authors, usually the Greeks.

  Once I complained to him about this passion for quotation, and he said, “What is the universe but God’s quotation of himself?”

  The idea was ever to seek out Jewish communities first, as Paul knew very well how to approach Jews, being one himself. He respected them and didn’t overwhelm them with intricacies of the gospel. Jews clung to their routines, their ancient practices and legalities, and they would not easily see the advantages of a new way to regard the world. Often enough, they expressed skepticism about the emergence of yet another rabbi, especially one who seemed to overturn the edicts delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.

  After weeks of tramping, Paul and Barnabas arrived at the gates of Pisidia (called Antioch of Pisidia by some), this walled Roman town with a strong military presence and a small but persistent Jewish community. It had long attracted retired officers from the imperial legions, and campaign banners waved from the towers as a stiff wind crackled the surrounding brush.

  “Augustus knew what he was doing,” Paul said to Barnabas. “The army set up bases throughout Galatia and brought Roman order to bear. Governance by extension, propelled by good roads. An excellent formula!”

  Paul admired Roman order, which placed him distinctly at odds with many in the Way, who wondered how he could remain loyal to a government that had crucified the Christ. Jews in turn denounced what they considered his apparent loyalty to the emperor, failing to see that Paul simply and sincerely believed that history would end soon, making all imperial claims to earthly power superfluous.

  Paul and Barnabas expected questions, but nobody even noticed them as they stepped through the city gates. Why trouble over a plump, gray-bearded, middle-aged Jew accompanied by a skinny, stooped, balding companion who leaned on a stick for balance? Visitors were common enough here, and so these unremarkable travelers aroused no suspicion.

  In the market, where chickens and pigeons gabbled under the feet of donkeys, Paul asked a seller of melons, figs, and dates (which were displayed in a wooden barrow) the whereabouts of the synagogue. The merchant gestured to a nearby house, doubtless recognizing Paul as a fellow Jew.

  A venerable, toothless rabbi named Zebadiah welcomed them as if he had waited decades for their appearance. (Paul thought he surely mistook them for someone else.) In any case, they were fed sumptuously that night; the rabbi offered them unleavened bread from his oven, grilled hare, green almonds, and small clay bowls that brimmed with chickpeas mashed with oil and cumin, with plenty of good wine in clay pitchers. A slave girl waited on them, and later that night several elders from the synagogue arrived to ask questions, having heard that an “important scholar of the Torah” had appeared in their midst. They listened with astonishment as Paul once again recalled his experience on his journey to Damascus.

  Paul’s status as a former student of Gamaliel impressed them in Pisidia, and they invited him to speak at the synagogue on the upcoming Sabbath. He was, as ever, happy to oblige, and for two weeks in a row he attended these gatherings—a dozen or more men of various ages—standing in the midst of them and expounding on the scriptures in a rapturous voice, often reciting long passages from memory. The Greek version came to him swiftly and verbatim: the preferred translation of these Jews as well. It also suited the Godfearers, who rarely knew any Hebrew.

  Most of them listened politely to Paul, but one of the elders, Micah by name, upbraided him at the end of the second Sabbath meeting. “I’ve never heard of this Rabbi Jesus,” he said.

  “You will hear him now, but only if you listen,” Paul said.

  “Hear him? He’s not in the room!”

  There were smiles, which Paul expected.

  “But he is!” Paul declaimed. “He’s alive!”

  Paul continued without pause, calling Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, who had been sent by God to establish a kingdom without end. “He is the son of God and our true king,” Paul added.

  Micah said, “The emperor won’t like this.”

  Paul refused to back down. “Let me tell you more. Jesus will soon return from the heavens to judge each of us. And those found wanting will sink into the muck, the black pit.” He elaborated on the idea of the pit, which he filled with vipers and maggots for good effect. It was a rare dark turn for him because he didn’t commonly think in these punitive terms.

  “There is no pit,” said Micah. “With death, we die.”

  “We never die,” Paul responded, raising his arms like Moses preparing to part the Red Sea. “In Jesus, we live!”

  This language perplexed them, but Paul and Barnabas experienced none of the anger in this room that would meet them soon with force. For the most part, his listeners nodded or grumbled. Only one man stood to ask in a polite but pointed fashion, “Does this have anything to do with the Law? I’m not sure I see your point.”

  “Jesus revises the Law,” said Paul. “His way is a new way. Radical equality—this is what he preaches. Radical equality! No Jew, no Greek! No man, no woman!”

  A small number of this congregation met with Paul separately, and they began a circle of the Way that would prosper, although they often fell into division in later years. Paul called them “the quarrelsome Galatians,” and yet he retained an abiding fondness for them, especially a teacher named Adam, one of those rare Jews who had studied philosophy at the Academy in Athens. Paul immediately found kinship with him, and they spent two or three long nights in conversation, working their way through the intellectual byways of Godly thinking, trying to understand how Greek theories (especially the reforms of Solon, the great lawgiver and poet) might function in the context of Jewish traditions.

  In later years, Paul swore it was in Pisidia that his ideas about radical equality in Jesus—an idea that would reshape the Way and its thinking—began to emerge with clarity, when he grew alert to the full weight of its implications. “I saw such bright lines,” he would say. �
��I wish I could have spent years, not days, with Adam.”

  Fears that Paul was corrupting young Jews arose, and Rabbi Zebadiah suggested that it might prove dangerous for them to remain in the city for long. Hearing this, Barnabas insisted that they depart for Iconium the next morning, and Paul didn’t object. He could not see taking unwarranted risks, and he did hope for a return to Antioch before too many months had passed.

  Iconium was a Greek-style democracy, almost a city-state like Athens in the age of Pericles. Paul thought they might find in this community any number of gentiles who were ready to begin the work of creating God’s kingdom on earth. As ever, however, he and Barnabas knew they must begin their mission with the Jews. So they sought out Onesiphorus, whose name had been given to them by Adam. He was a wealthy merchant, a Greek turned Godfearer, known for his spiritual energies and warm manner.

  Onesiphorus struck Paul as a man who could be turned easily to the Way. He knew nothing of Jesus but was immediately able to grasp what Paul told him. He invited Paul and Barnabas to his house for a dinner the same day he met them, asking pointed and useful questions. As he, too, had once studied in Jerusalem with Gamaliel, he and Paul talked at length about the roots of Jewish mystical thinking in the Merkabah school, whose scholars dwelled on the prophet Ezekiel and his vision of a divine chariot, of angels and seraphim.

  I suspect that poor Barnabas was left out of this discussion.

  Soon Paul baptized Onesiphorus in a brisk stream on the outskirts of the city. This impressive man, elegant in every way, occupied a light-filled house on a hill overlooking the city, which was conveniently attached to the much larger villa of his sister, Theocleia, a widow who lived with her beautiful daughter, Thecla. This girl, who had luxurious chestnut hair and olive-hued skin, was betrothed to Thamyris, a shockingly handsome boy, the son of a local magistrate.

  Paul later told me that Thamyris was “among examples of the male form the most exquisite version” that he had yet seen. He compared him to Paris and Adonis, two legendary men of beauty.

  Onesiphorus invited this mother and daughter, with Thamyris as well, to a gathering at his house, where a number of local Jews and Godfearers met for an evening of prayer and conversation, now amplified by the enthusiasm of Onesiphorus himself. The betrothed couple sat on cushions at Paul’s feet as he talked, bewitching him with their rapt gazes, drawing from him what Barnabas (without irony) called “long and rhapsodic divagations on the meaning of the risen Christ.”

  Thecla and Thamyris had a shimmer about them, their faces lit from within, as Paul told me. Thecla, however, fastened her gaze on the apostle with an intensity that was noticed by the others, including her betrothed, who looked coldly to the floor when he realized the extent of Thecla’s absorption. Surely this man’s wild theological diversions could not be taken so seriously?

  That night Paul told everyone in the room that the end of history drew near, and therefore it made no sense to marry. Young people should “forswear copulation, the dream of children, all hope of generations to come” because Jesus would soon return to earth, thus making “fantasies of family life” irrelevant. “Train your affections on God alone,” he said. “Keep your eye on heaven.”

  Barnabas remembered the discomfort in the room as he spoke. He recalled that Paul continued with such vehemence that many of his listeners gasped, and one elderly Godfearer fanned herself and fainted. (Two men carried her from the room, and yet Paul continued to talk without pause, as if unaware of what had occurred.) Thecla sighed as Paul neared the climax of his talk, drawing rapid breaths as she leaned toward him. Thamyris continued to look away in distress. What had at first seemed interesting, even amusing, now annoyed and dismayed him.

  “Let the young be young,” Barnabas said to Paul later that night.

  “I will not! There is neither young nor old in the world. Age is meaningless. The king will return soon, and time will become irrelevant. It’s already meaningless.”

  Barnabas didn’t disagree, but he urged caution. Did God really wish for every member of the Way to rearrange his or her life? He remembered that resonant line in the book of Psalms: For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past. When Jesus suggested he might come “soon,” that could mean thousands of years from now!

  Paul discarded this suggestion. “He has whispered to me in my prayers, and quite recently I could hear his voice in my sleep. Believe me, Barnabas, he will draw near, and soon. And soon is soon, not a thousand years!”

  Drawn to Paul, Thecla became a regular visitor to her uncle’s house, appearing in the afternoon with fruit or freshly baked bread, eagerly seeking out the apostle’s attention. His arguments persuaded her that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and she opened her heart to God in the name of Jesus. Like her uncle, she was baptized in the nearby stream.

  She had asked Thamyris to join her, but he scoffed at the idea. “I’m a Greek. This man, Paul—he is a Jew!”

  When Paul heard this from Thecla, he countered: “Tell him I speak the same language as Homer and Plato.”

  “But you are a Jew.”

  Paul replied, almost chanting, “In the Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew. You must explain this to your betrothed, whom—I fear—you should abandon. There is no point to marriage. That pleasure must be forsworn. The end of time is upon us.”

  Thecla agreed, saying she would not go forward with the marriage. She would devote herself to the Christ, to the work of bringing his message forward in the world. Thamyris would understand.

  In fact, nothing of this set well with Thamyris or his family, who were influential in the city, and it surprised no one to learn that three soldiers soon arrived at the house of Onesiphorus looking for Paul of Tarsus.

  “What do you want with him?” Barnabas asked.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Paul and I are associates.”

  “Is he home?”

  “He is not.”

  “Then we shall wait for him.”

  The soldiers made themselves comfortable under a lemon tree in the garden. They had brought with them bread, cheese, and a jug of wine. It was clearly their intention to stay until Paul returned, whereupon they would seize him. Barnabas feared they might kill him, too.

  Paul was asleep in the back room, and Barnabas had to slap his cheek. “We have a chance to go, but now!”

  Onesiphorus came in, breathless, to say someone had taken away Thecla.

  Paul reddened. “She is one of us!”

  “I suspect they want to get her away from you. She belongs to Thamyris. His father is enraged, and I’m very worried about what will become of you.” He looked genuinely frightened.

  “I won’t allow this,” said Paul.

  “It’s not your decision, I’m afraid. I don’t want your blood on my hands.”

  Barnabas sided with Onesiphorus, who assured Paul that he would not abandon the vision of Jesus, nor would he lose sight of their common purpose. Paul had already achieved what he set out to achieve in Iconium.

  Unexpectedly, as if unmoved by anything that his companions said, Paul fell to his knees and began to pray under his breath, lifting his palms to the heavens. He shut his eyes, and the lashes quivered. He mumbled now, drooling slightly, incoherent. Then he opened his eyes.

  “Jesus spoke to me.”

  “Now?”

  “Lystra awaits us,” he told me. “All of Lystra!”

  “Good,” Onesiphorus said, relieved and helping Paul to stand. “Go quickly, and to Lystra.”

  He mentioned that the soldiers lay in wait in the street and suggested that Paul and Barnabas dress as women—he had several slaves who would help to clothe them—and exit through a servants’ door at the back. “It sounds foolish, but it’s perhaps the only way.”

  “We shall make ugly women,” Barnabas said.

&nbs
p; They slipped on the ankle-length tunics that women in this part of Asia wore, with long veils covering their heads. It was not unusual for modest women who walked in public to hide themselves from view, and they would take their chances in this disguise.

  “We look a fine pair of ladies,” Barnabas said to Paul before they stepped into the afternoon sunlight.

  Paul recited a passage from the fifth scroll of the Torah: The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.

  Barnabas did not find this either funny or pertinent, but he was relieved to see Paul going along with the plan for their escape.

  They passed through the garden behind the house, noticing the three men sitting by the lemon tree, who paid no attention to Paul and Barnabas, as a game of chance (and the wine) absorbed them. Only one of them turned slightly to the passersby and, with a show of respect, nodded slightly. He watched, perhaps puzzled, as these peculiarly shy women stepped through the doorway into a narrow street.

  Nobody took notice as this pair of unappealing older women—one of them stout, the other like a rail and stooped—limped by with their satchels, one of them leaning on a stick. They hurried to the stream where Paul had baptized a number of people in the past week, stopping to bathe their feet in the icy water.

  Feeling disburdened, Paul drew attention to the yellow spikes of asphodels that lined the banks as the sun flashed in the quick water. “God is shining on us,” he said, removing his tunic. “And Lystra awaits. I have a feeling in my stomach: This will be a turning point for the Way. Mark my words, Barnabas.”

  * * *

  The wide plains swept them forward on the two-day journey to Lystra, another walled Roman city. They slept that night perhaps ten miles from their destination in a mountain hut, where an elderly herdsman fed them bread and goat’s milk. He spoke no Greek, and Paul realized they had come into a region where less Greek would be heard, at least among working people and slaves, who had dialects of their own.