The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  A silence followed that was happily filled by a nightingale in a lemon tree behind the house. “This is the teaching of Jesus, and you need only remember and repeat it. Tell the world!”

  “I will tell everyone,” said Aharon.

  “Praise to God,” said Timothy, on his knees beside Aharon.

  Silas joined them, as did Paul, who fell to his knees in concert with the others and raised his arms to heaven and began to sing. At last, I joined them, although they sang a song I didn’t know.

  It was memorable, the sight of this visionary company, everyone praising the Lord and singing, though I myself felt out of joint.

  * * *

  The next day, I asked Paul why he would let Silas and Timothy return to Thessalonica, but he would not give me a satisfactory answer.

  “God has a plan,” he said. “Timothy will not only survive, he will prosper. This is the promise of heaven.” He did not mention Silas.

  The next day Paul and I left, with a guide supplied by Aharon. He led us to a coastal village where, without difficulty, we joined a small ship traveling to Crete with a layover in Athens. “Athens is the center of the intelligent world,” said Paul, in a buoyant mood. He shook the dust from his heels again and again, rarely looking back. But I was less easy about the people we abandoned to uncertain fates in our wake. The Roman authorities, now controlling Macedonia and much of the world we traveled, feared and despised what they considered treason. They could tolerate Jews as long as this restless fringe of fanatics kept to their own habits, lived within their communities, and didn’t interfere with the life of the larger body politic. The Way of Jesus was another matter, less easy to understand and potentially a threat, as they proclaimed the kingship of their leader.

  I had explained to wary Godfearers that the Way of Jesus wished only for heavenly kingship. We posed no threat to the local authorities and certainly the emperor should never worry about our movement. Disloyalty to the imperial powers never figured in our discussions; in fact, we often cited a famous line of our Lord: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”

  Caesar could hardly disapprove of that sentiment!

  But we occupied a highly wrought, aggressive, and intensely political world. The Pax Romana persisted, with the imperial “peace” guaranteed by the use of selective brutality. It would never be simple to follow the Way of Jesus without offending someone, and I worried about what might happen now. I lacked Paul’s massive faith in the future, though I prayed to God to sustain me despite my disbelief, my cowardice and befuddlement.

  The two-day journey by ship to Athens absorbed me. We often sailed close to the shoreline, smelling the sweet grasses, the unruly banks of thyme and purslane. Sheep bleated and dogs barked in invisible notches above the hills, and in the distance I got a good view of Mount Olympus as we passed the coast of Thessaly. Without much wind, we lay by for a whole afternoon outside the port of Athens, about half a day’s journey from the city. The sea there was a green slick, with a few dead fish floating belly-up, pecked by gulls and other seabirds. The lungs of jellyfish lay open, festering.

  “I don’t know if this is a good sign or a bad sign,” said Paul.

  “Our lack of motion or the dead fish?”

  “I hoped for better.”

  That evening, just before sunset, the winds picked up, the air turned cooler, and we sailed into the ancient port.

  I knew a smattering of Greek history, and it was not difficult to imagine the Persian Wars, when Darius invaded Thrace and Macedonia, then tried to overwhelm Athens, without luck. The intellectual vigor characteristic of Athens was accompanied by military prowess, and they defeated the Persians roundly at the Battle of Marathon. A great age began, when playwrights and poets flourished. Soon Plato established the Academy, where he taught for many decades, wandering with the young amid the olive groves or sitting in the shade. These scholars devoted their lives to self-perfection, imagining a virtuous world—which of course meant trying to isolate the virtues deserving of replication.

  “Jesus brought the ideals of Athens to Judaism,” Paul said. “As a child, he would have encountered merchants from Greece, many of them on their way to the East.”

  Ideas from Persia or even the Kush may well have arrived by travelers heading from east to west, I suggested, and this excited Paul, who had met such men in Jerusalem as a young man as well as during his time with Musa in the desert.

  After docking, we made our way toward the looming Acropolis, which rose above the plain, this dazzling white outcrop, which was composed of several structures that, according to Paul, “mirrored the perfection of the soul.”

  It was a sight we had longed to see, and it satisfied our longings.

  The next day, we climbed to the Pantheon and the Erechtheion, where votaries of Athena gathered. “God has brought us here to reveal his entrance into the world, his interruption of history,” Paul said, to nobody in particular. “The name of Jesus will one day live on every tongue in Athens.” His plan was not merely to speak in the marketplace but to engage the wisest of Athenians. He said that philosophical thought itself emanated from this city, and so every remark had weight here. One could not proceed lightly with an argument but needed ballast, the weight of authority, and sound logic, all of this lifted by the Holy Spirit. I could see that being here had forced his concentration.

  On the third day in Athens we visited the synagogue, a small limestone house at the end of a white-dust road in the Jewish quarter, although it took a while to summon any Jews, who were sparse on the ground. An elderly man led us to Enoch, a revered rabbi about whom Paul, as usual, seemed to have prior knowledge. In a low rumble, Enoch explained to us that pagans overwhelmed the city, as ever. “They imagine gods are everywhere, and yet they trust nobody. Zeus or Hera, Athena, Poseidon—one hears the names, but they carry no meaning. Philosophy reigns here, but this is not what Plato meant. They are Stoics and believe the world cannot be trusted.”

  “It cannot,” said Paul.

  The rabbi ignored him. “They spend much of their time reminding each other that time is short, that life is a flicker that fades in a moment.”

  “And this is true.”

  “But they see virtue as patience, forbearance, allowing the rational mind to adjust to circumstances.”

  Paul considered this proposition. “Life,” he said, “is propositions about life.”

  Enoch leaned toward him, scratching his long, grizzled beard. I doubt he had encountered anyone quite like Paul thus far in his long life.

  “There are unwholesome propositions,” said Enoch. “But we, in our small circle, know the true God. We have the Law of Moses.”

  “No longer,” said Paul.

  This worried the rabbi, who asked Paul to elaborate. And Paul, as one might expect, told him that a New Covenant had replaced what God handed to Moses. “Not supplanted, not exactly,” said Paul, “but Rabbi Jesus has become the new Moses.”

  Enoch was a simple man, with natural wisdom, as I could see. There was a sweetness about him that appealed to us both, and Paul did astonishing work now, convincing this rabbi that Jesus was the Christ whom everyone had long expected. It is never easy to change an old mind.

  When the Sabbath arrived, Enoch invited Paul to read from the scrolls and talk about Jesus, which he did with renewed energy, as if discovering his ideas in the process. This was, I realized, the secret of Paul, that he could wipe his mind clean of past expressions, beginning anew each time he spoke in public to discover his thoughts, to frame them again. And so every time he stood before an audience of any size he appeared to have only just found his footing in the expressions he put forward.

  I watched closely as he tested his verbal skills in the marketplace in Athens, where on any given day one could find wealthy young men who flocked here from distant parts to talk about ideas, the purpose of life, the nature of the gods
, and the fate of this world. The names of Crates, the great Theban, of Epicurus, and of Zeno, the philosopher from Cyprus, circulated. Zeno had walked in the colonnade here, teaching his disciples that virtue creates peace in the soul, and that to live in accordance with nature was the most effective approach to life. He had learned from his teacher Polemon, accepting the notion that one could never know the purpose of the gods but had nevertheless to protect oneself against their whims and depredations.

  It excited Paul to move among these brisk thoughtful people, and he engaged one after another, telling them about Jesus the Christ. Their skepticism was boundless, however, and one of them mocked Paul, repeating what he said in an irritating voice. But Paul waved a hand to dismiss him: “The pigeon squawks! Away, bird!”

  An uncomfortable space opened between how Paul viewed his experiences with others and what I actually saw, and it worried me that he could be less than candid with himself about what occurred, even self-deceiving. But I had no inclination to make this point because it would only enrage him, and I didn’t imagine it would change anything.

  We spent many of our Athenian days in the public areas, though it was hot and humid, unbearably so, with even the locusts gasping in the fields of long grass at the edges of the city. We paused for a drink by a well one afternoon, sitting in the shade of a broad plane tree. Overwhelmed by the heat, Paul trembled as we drank from a cup that a man passed to us. I thought he would swoon.

  “Are you all right, Paul?”

  “I wish Timothy could be here,” he said, as if Timothy might protect him from the carping of these young philosophers and the heat of the sun.

  We stayed in a tiny house adjacent to the synagogue, once a stone barn, with a packed-dirt floor and no windows. Good Enoch had given us this place to sleep, however cramped and unappealing. It had a flat roof, which we climbed up to in the early evening to drink wine and look at the chalk-white glimmer of the Parthenon perched on its promontory like a prehistoric bird. The sea beyond, at sunset, upheld a thin yellow band of clouds, and the sun plunged into the horizon, turning the whole bay into a bath of blood-bright vermillion.

  One morning three young men appeared at our house, a makeshift delegation, inviting Paul to the Areopagus, which the Romans called Mars Hill. It was a legendary outcrop where public trials occurred in ancient times, and where debates could be heard any day of the week. One could easily imagine Socrates in his toga here, the squat and craggy philosopher defending his unconventional approach to the instruction of Athenian youth. This moment of ancient history—it could not have lasted many years—continued to fascinate Paul, who often referred to Plato (a pupil of Socrates) as “the first follower of Jesus,” much to the confusion of many in Athens.

  On that blistering day Paul seized the occasion and rose among the scholars to submit to their questions, as did anyone visiting Athens who wished to walk in the footsteps of Plato. I counted at least thirty people in the crowd, few of them more than twenty years old. And one of them appeared quite belligerent, behaving as if Paul had offended the tradition of Attic reason by suggesting that a peasant from Galilee represented God on earth, and that he had been crucified and lifted up to new life after three days.

  “We can only tolerate what is absolute and true,” the man called from the back of the circle.

  “Come forward,” said Paul. “What is your name?”

  “Damian.”

  Damian stepped to the front of the crowd, and many snickered. Cleverness seethed in him; indeed, he seemed to fizz with excitement, savoring his role as interlocutor with Paul.

  “I know something about Athens,” said Paul. “I studied Plato as a young man, and I know about your Stoics. Everyone here talks about them. I’m aware of Metrodorus as well and have heard his criticism of the Stoics.”

  I worried that Paul had wandered onto unstable ground here. Was his knowledge of these thinkers ample enough to sustain a lengthy and very public argument? On the other hand, it rarely paid to underestimate Paul, who had surprising byways in his learning.

  But Metrodorus!

  “What is your religion?” asked a tall, thin young man with a black beard, who pushed to the front and stood beside Damian.

  Paul said, “I know in Athens this is a serious question. Everyone in this city is concerned with the soul, and religion is the practice of soul wisdom.”

  I had never heard anything like this before, nor had they. Soul wisdom!

  “As I moved among your many statues in Athens, each of them a place of veneration,” Paul said, “I discovered an inscription that worried me: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. You are intelligent, thoughtful, articulate men. So consider this proposition: An unknown God is no God whatever. Let’s reason by analogy. The poems of an unknown poet are, quite simply, not read. They make no impression on the world, as the words fail to exist. My God, let me tell you, is the only true God, himself the creator of this universe. But he was far removed from us and scarcely knowable. In an act of compassion, he decided to make himself known to his creation. He erupted into our lives in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who showed us what God is like, gave him a voice. Jesus became the human face of God.”

  I saw that Paul was alert today, radiant in his manner, comfortable in himself as he spoke, or God spoke through him, shaping the words that formed on his lips.

  “God made this outcrop, and—see there—Mount Olympus.” He gestured in that direction, and their eyes followed his finger. “The sea itself is his doing. The fish and fowl. You, me, all of us. We are creatures of his invention, sustained by his affection. And he dwells in every man and woman, in the rocks, wildflowers, within the far hills. When the wind surrounds with its invisible arms and seizes a forest, this is God rocking the world.”

  Paul insisted on this elaborate figuration in his speech. But it was sometimes, as here, overwrought, too pretty in its frivolities of association. Nonetheless, every eye fixed upon him. And nobody wished to interrupt the flow.

  “He created you and me, and every nation, and he breathes life into everything around us. He orders and appoints the faithful seasons. He determines the boundaries of our habits, the width and breadth of our being. I don’t believe he is far away, like Zeus and Hera, Aphrodite or Artemis, or Apollo. No! He’s in my breast. He’s in your breast, too. In him we live and move and prosper. Your own poet, the great Ion of Chios, once wrote: ‘Bone of their bone, we grow from the gods. / Every finger and toe extends from them.’ But there is only one God, the Almighty, the center of being.”

  “What does your God want from us?” asked Damian.

  “You must change,” said Paul. He touched his temples with both hands, then gestured as if lifting or releasing his skull to the sky. “Open your mind to the wider mind of God, and you will be healed, enlightened.”

  “What if we prefer being as we are?” one wry fellow asked.

  “You are broken, as we all are broken,” Paul answered. “Only God can heal us. You have transgressed—stepped over a line. We have all done things we should never have done. We resist doing the virtuous thing.”

  “We must be virtuous?”

  There was some laughter in the crowd.

  Paul raised a hand to silence them. “God asks for nothing but perfection. As Jesus was perfected by God in his death upon a cross in Jerusalem, you shall be perfected. This is wholeness and health. Jesus was crucified and buried. On the third day after this atrocity, God lifted him to new life. He is here.”

  One young man at the back spoke up: “So the dead come back to life? Is that what you’re telling us, old man?”

  “Stone him!” someone shouted.

  But of course the Greeks had no taste for the Jewish practice of stoning dissenters, and this produced only laughter.

  “We should go, Paul,” I said, tugging his arm.

  He looked at me as if wakened from a trance and followed me. I notic
ed that Damian and his friend, a woman introduced to us as Demaris, walked beside us, asking more questions.

  “I want to hear more about your Galilean,” said Demaris.

  Paul had an eye for loveliness in young people, and he reached out to touch her arm.

  “What a good thing,” Paul said. “I will tell you everything.”

  That night, leaning with his back against a wall in Enoch’s house with a large cup of wine in his hands, Paul talked about what had happened that day on Mars Hill. He understood that his afternoon in the sun had not changed anything. Not markedly. He had not been nearly as persuasive as he might have been, not as eloquent or rational as when the spirit filled him. This long-awaited moment in the Attic sun had passed without much effect.

  “They were impervious to reason,” Paul said, “which seems quite ironic, in the house of intellect.”

  He had clearly drunk too much, or spent too long in the sun that day, as his words slurred, even tumbled over each other. I told him not to fret about his performance, that he had planted seeds and these might take root in unexpected ways. One could never know what might follow from this or any work. I quoted the saying of our Lord about the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed—a line that Paul often used.

  “Don’t humor me, Luke,” he said.

  Enoch didn’t like to see Paul in this black mood and removed himself from our company.

  “I will always tell you what I see,” I said. “Depend on my frankness.”

  I wondered if I should end my association with Paul. Vanity had inflated him in Athens, and he had lost sight of our plan to alert everyone to God’s plan for humanity. One could not, by syllogism or analogy, conjure the spirit or explain the message of Jesus. Paul’s efforts on the Areopagus became a display of his powers of intellect, testing the force of his will. Once, I had heard him say that “in Jesus we lose ourselves, our will to shine over others.” Where had this Paul gone?