The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  I hoped we would have less trouble with the noble Bereans.

  Chapter Thirteen

  LUKE

  Although Timothy worshipped Paul, he was also wary of his mentor at times, as the apostle could be intrusive, paying too much attention to the boy’s moods. He loved Timothy, of course; this affection shone in his face whenever the young man entered the room. In his presence, Paul grew alert, even giddy at times, laughing at the slightest remark, finding cleverness and spiritual depth in what struck me as mundane remarks. I knew enough not to say anything about this, as Paul would never understand. He would regard me as excessively critical. In fact, he often said that my “logical and interrogative” manner undermined him and the movement of his thought: “I leap over the stream. There is no need to wade through it.”

  He said I failed to appreciate Timothy, which was untrue.

  Timothy was, now and then, something of a wit, and I admired that. But his thoughts about the Kingdom of God rarely surprised or interested anyone. At his best, he could parrot Paul’s ideas with reasonable clarity, and this was enough to make him attractive as a speaker. He assumed even Paul’s minor gestures, as when he would shake a finger at someone or fall into thoughtful silences in the middle of a sentence. He even began to stutter like Paul, which was odd. He had not stuttered when we first met him.

  Silas felt pushed to one side, and he complained to me about his treatment, recalling that he had gone to jail with Paul in Philippi, had suffered a flogging with him. He had been a dedicated soldier in the Lord’s army. But Paul largely ignored him. I suspect that he disliked the crudeness that at times made Silas an embarrassing companion. For instance, in many Roman-style houses the toilet occupied a corner in the kitchen, and Silas would not uncommonly choose to evacuate himself in front of company, even while a number of us assisted the slaves in the preparation of a meal. He pulled astonishing faces and grunted, and he had unimaginable odors that prompted me, a physician, to wonder about his health.

  Timothy called him “Shitting Silas,” much to the amusement of the slaves, but I refused to join this merry chorus, worried that Silas might, at any moment, abandon us. It upset me to think of the young fellow being ridiculed, and that Paul played into this derision by failing to acknowledge his dedication, his steadfast trust in God’s love.

  It also worried me that Timothy might one day object to Paul’s fawning. Barnabas had hinted darkly to me that Paul, on their visit to Cyprus, had lavished unwanted attentions on John Mark. “He frightened the boy away,” Barnabas had said. The same could happen here.

  It might have been wiser for Paul to marry, thus weakening his need for contact of a kind that brought discomfort to others. It might also have dampened his occasional rages about fornication.

  The Pillars discouraged fornication among all who followed the Way of Jesus, and we told those who wished to join our movement that they must refrain from sexual relations outside of the bounds prescribed by the rabbis and Jewish tradition. Mosaic Law had much to say about these matters. Not myself having been trained in Jewish legal traditions, I refrained from comment. The Jews had so many rules and prohibitions!

  Paul himself never tired of explaining to me their intricate and eccentric laws, especially those governing sexual behavior, as formulated by centuries of Jewish sages. It was, he said, indecent under Mosaic Law for a man to have anal intercourse with another man, as this controverted the law against wasting one’s seed. Masturbation was, likewise, a waste of this precious substance, since it clearly had nothing to do with procreation. Within marriage, according to Jewish tradition, any sexual act was permitted, but there had been commentators on the Torah who warned against “rooster-like activity” on the part of the male. The prohibition against Jews having sex with gentiles continued among Jews and, to a degree, had currency in Jerusalem among followers of the Way. But surely the New Covenant allowed for the marriage of Jew and gentile: This happened in any case, and it would have been self-destructive for the Way to ban the practice. Paul prayed for guidance on this subject, as he frequently advised young couples. (It surprised me how many came to him for counsel, given his celibate life.) He believed passionately that intermarriage caused no offense to God. “Remember that in the Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,” he would say.

  Yet he often taught it was “better to marry than to burn,” which—as Timothy noted—was “not a great recommendation for marriage.”

  In Paul’s way of thinking, it made no sense to marry, since the purpose of marriage was to fulfill a commandment from God: Be fruitful, and multiply. This multiplication had already been accomplished, in his view. He brought to mind what Gamaliel had taught the young men in his school about sexuality, making the traditional distinction between the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer hara: the impulse to good versus the impulse to evil. But he always made a further point that these represented two sides of the same coin, and that one must have both sides for the coin to exist. “I don’t believe we should think of good and bad in simplistic ways,” Paul said. “Every bright flower has its roots in dark soil,” he said, quoting Ion of Chios.

  Paul could be wonderfully attuned to the man or woman who stood before him, asking questions, patiently seeking the truth. On the other hand, he occasionally showed very little sense of audience, and often mistook silence for assent. I don’t, for instance, believe the Thessalonians had warmed to us, not to the extent that Paul imagined. I always felt their skepticism, and it worried me that Paul was blind to this.

  His anger at our expulsion from that city didn’t surprise me, but I tried to reassure him that Thessalonica was only a stopping point. We had planned to take the Good News into the wider western regions, well beyond the borders of Macedonia. And Athens remained a goal of sorts: Paul loved Plato and had studied the Dialogues as a very young man. His earliest tutor in Tarsus had been a scholar of Greek literature, and while in Jerusalem he had continued his studies in Attic philosophy. Gamaliel saw that Paul had a synthetic mind and knew this gift could prove useful one day. He never discouraged his pupil’s love of Attic writing. The Greek thought world and the Hebrew thought world had been profoundly different, conceived and birthed in unique cultural circumstances. But the Way of Jesus, as Paul argued, must draw together these separate strands. He noted that Homer and the Hebrew scriptures arose quite independently: “But there is one God who inspires the poets, Jew and Greek alike.”

  Since our arrival in Macedonia, Paul’s talks and thinking had grown more passionate, speculative, and perhaps even wild. As he refined his ideas about the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, his language deepened in complexity. On one of our last evenings in Thessalonica, he addressed a gathering of perhaps two or three dozen followers in Jason’s garden while peacocks with their shimmering blue necks and combs spread their fans among the lemon trees. He stood on a small flat stone with the setting sun at his back, wearing a colorful tunic, with Timothy and Silas on either side.

  I watched in amazement as he leaped from metaphor to metaphor. This was not the kind of discourse I usually preferred, but it delighted me that evening. It was not how physicians were trained to think. We moved slowly and carefully, amassing evidence, making our deductions. But Paul didn’t operate in this manner. His energies poured out freely, touched his listeners in unexpected ways, and the world around them blazed with new meaning.

  And sometimes he angered those who heard him.

  One young rabbi in Thessalonica had complained to me that Paul made things worse for everyone. “The Romans don’t like us,” he said, and by “us” he referred to the Jews. This expansive and ever-expanding empire could only sustain itself by the use of brutality, and he argued that one day soon the ax would fall, and Jewish heads would topple into the dirt. “I have no hopes for the survival of the Temple,” he said, hinting that all of Jerusalem would burn one day, and perhaps soon.

  The retreat from Thessalonica played in my h
ead like a nettlesome dream. I recalled the night that Paul and I sat in the garden when Aristarchus rushed toward us. “They know what happened in Philippi,” he said, “and they accuse you of treason. The penalty is death.” He tried to control himself. “If you’re here in an hour, they will seize you both, and we will never see you again.”

  “We must leave at once,” I said.

  Paul glared at me, and I knew he would try to remain in place.

  To make my point again, I rose to my full height, towering above Paul. “I will get my things, and leave. You may choose to stay if you like.”

  “But Timothy—”

  “I will tell him you’ve gone,” said Aristarchus.

  “And where exactly will I have gone?”

  “Berea,” I said.

  “I don’t want to go to Berea,” Paul said.

  “Go wherever you will,” said Aristarchus, “but stay out of Thessalonica. The Bereans will welcome you. I feel sure of this.”

  Paul was angry, though reality had begun to freshen his wits. “I shall go, but tell everyone my absence is temporary. When things settle…”

  It was unfortunate that Timothy and Silas had traveled that week to Salumi, a nearby village, where a small gathering of the Way had established an outpost. We had no choice but to leave without them, asking Aristarchus to tell them we had gone to Berea. And to warn them to get away quickly.

  We hurried off, as I insisted, taking only one of our two donkeys, and left by an unobtrusive road, heading southwest, passing through an array of villages, entering a broad plain where only sheep and goats grazed, with a few shepherds to look after them. We slept that night perhaps ten miles from Thessalonica in a tiny hut by a stream, where we filled our skins with fresh water after bathing in the morning.

  Above us, hawks hung steady in a high wind, which augured a storm.

  “Trouble ahead,” said Paul, seeing the blood-bright clouds.

  “Trouble behind as well.”

  It was miraculous that Paul had not died with Silas beside him in the Philippian jail. An earthquake shook the entire city and damaged the prison. The roof collapsed and the guard had been beside himself, sure that the Roman authorities would hold him responsible for whatever happened. He had been a simple man, without sides, and he took to Paul and, it seemed, Silas as well. He begged them not to flee, and Paul, as he would, assured him that he would speak to the magistrate before leaving Philippi. This jailor must not suffer on his account, Paul told him.

  Paul told this story frequently, shifting details. In some versions they had been cast into a crowded jail, and he had preached the Good News to a substantial crowd, all of whom fell to their knees and wept, asking for the mercy of God. In another version, he and Silas had been alone with their jailor, whom Paul baptized with water from a jug. Paul had surely not been as badly beaten as he imagined, as I could tell from the wounds on his back. I applied my salve, and the cuts healed quickly. Silas had, for whatever reason, been more severely treated, and the inflamed skin of his back had taken two or three weeks to calm. His scars would, as I knew but didn’t tell him, never dissolve.

  I worried that his wounds could flare up repeatedly, as this could happen, especially among travelers who moved about the countryside as we did. We slept on hay quite often. Movement and good health lived in conflict, and we all suffered an array of skin inflammations, joint pains, muscle weaknesses, and agues. Rest became important, even critical, but difficult of access.

  And Paul did not rest. Quite the opposite. He leaped from chair to chair, preferred standing to sitting, sleeping only a few hours, rising early to walk into the world on his own. He rushed to meetings, summoned the company of others, and took the lead in most conversations. He moved uphill and down with the same extraordinary speed, exhausting the rest of us, although Timothy proved a fair match for him.

  “Timothy is my son,” Paul said as we left for Berea without him.

  “Well, he is not actually your son,” I said.

  “Parentage is not only physical,” he said.

  I would not have this. “Silas would feel slighted.”

  “Silas is slighted. We should never have brought him. He does nothing to advance the Kingdom of God.”

  “Not true!”

  “Oh, please, dear Luke. You must not try to defend the boy.”

  “He suffered beside you in Philippi.”

  “I wiped the tears from his eyes.”

  “You are impossible.”

  He liked this description and smiled. Impossible Paul!

  “Timothy will join us soon,” Paul said, comforting himself.

  “And Silas,” I added.

  We climbed a small hill before noon, with summer assuming its full-throated cry. Bees lumbered from flower to flower, giving the air a loud buzz, and gnats pulled their little nets around our heads. The sun tore a hole in the sky, heating the grass and the stones where we sat for a few moments to eat crusts of bread with the raisins, nuts, and figs that Paul had brought from Thessalonica: a gift from Aristarchus. We watered our donkey as well, letting him feed by rooting in the weeds.

  “There is famine in Palestine, in Judea,” Paul said, drawing this thought from nothing that had been part of our recent conversation. Had he heard fresh news of this problem, perhaps in a dream?

  “It is sad,” I said. I could not imagine why, out of nowhere, this problem in Judea began to interest Paul.

  “It’s tragic. We must help them.”

  “We’re in Macedonia now. What can we do?”

  “Those in our circle—our people—are starving, so we must find money to pay for their supplies. Jesus fed the poor. You have heard about feeding the multitude?”

  “It happened soon after the death of the Baptizer.”

  I knew this story well and had been writing about it. It happened near Bethsaida. Jesus had been praying in silence, alone in the hills, as was his custom. When he came down, he met a throng of well-wishers who asked him to heal their sick, to make the blind see again, and to cast out demons. Andrew told him that the people lacked food, and that the nearest place to get supplies was miles away.

  “What do we have?” Jesus asked.

  “Only five loaves of bread and two fish.”

  Jesus looked at the crowd, which seemed to grow before his eyes. He directed Andrew and the other disciples to gather the crowd into groups of fifty.

  “Feed them all,” said Jesus.

  Andrew shook his head. “We have only these few loaves and a little fish.”

  “It will satisfy.”

  So they walked among the people, and everyone had more than enough to eat.

  “It was God’s will in the world,” said Paul, whose mind often landed on this tale. “God’s wish to feed the people. It’s the first and last miracle. And it’s how we know what God wants for us. He supplies every need. This is love multiplied beyond counting.”

  Paul continued to dwell on the problem of the famine in Jerusalem, in Judea, and wondered how we could help.

  In Berea, after a few days, we gathered in a synagogue with a handful of faithful Jews, who listened as Paul read from the scriptures. He focused on the passage where Moses proclaimed: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me in your midst, from your own brethren. “The prophet has already come,” he said, “and he’s with us now, although they killed him. He is not dead, I assure you. We have talked, face-to-face. Through him, God has spoken.”

  Aharon, the rabbi, sat upright when he heard this. He recognized a brother in Paul, a man suffused with God’s energy and grace. Instead of hostility, we encountered openness of mind in Berea.

  “You will become the seat of our Lord in Macedonia,” said Paul to the rabbi. “The light of God will shine from this small hill.”

  Over the next week we sat with the leaders of
his congregation and studied the scriptures with them, and everyone admired Paul’s knowledge. He could refer easily to passages that most didn’t know existed. His head teemed with verbatim quotations, in Hebrew as well as Greek. His reflections startled and informed at once.

  One evening in the synagogue, as we sat in a circle, Timothy and Silas appeared at the edge of our group, as Paul had confidently predicted. He nodded toward them, offering the slightest of smiles as he kept talking. When he had finished, he introduced “our dear friends, angels of the Lord.”

  Over a late dinner in the garden of Aharon’s house, where we stayed, Paul nearly shimmered with the joy of this reunion. He even put a hand on Silas’s neck and kissed him on the forehead, provoking a surprised look from him. But Timothy brought unfortunate news. “Those fools in Thessalonica will arrive soon, and they will murder us. They have not been appeased.”

  “They know we’re here?”

  Timothy nodded, while Silas dipped his head. I could sense guilt there, its pervasive odor like damp in an old house.

  Aharon said, “You must go at once. I will deal with them.”

  “Silas and I know these men,” Timothy explained. “We can talk to them. Talk sense into them.”

  Paul liked Timothy’s bravura. They wanted to murder Paul, as so many did, but this plot might distract them. He trusted that Timothy, who had no wish to die, knew what he was doing. “Go back to Thessalonica with them, if you think that will work,” he said. “There is no end of need for the mercy of God. Explain to the Way there that Jesus needs their help. They must give you money for Jerusalem, a donation for our collection, a gift for the poor who are starving there. There is so much wealth in that city. As followers of Jesus, we must help each other.” And Aharon agreed to go with them.

  “This is a good plan,” said Paul. “But first, I must baptize you in the name of the Christ. Do you want this?”

  “I do.”

  Paul asked a slave to bring a cask of water, inviting Aharon to kneel in his own garden. “I baptize you, Aharon, another child of God,” he said. “Remember that in Jesus there is neither male nor female, neither slave nor free man, neither Jew nor Greek.”