The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  “It saddens me to see such intelligence go to waste,” he said. “If only we had one or two like him in Ephesus as followers of Jesus, we might overwhelm the city. Tyrannus knows that the gods they worship represent nothing real. He has no faith in their power.”

  “Did you speak with him?”

  “We had a good talk in the garden at the end of the day. I’ve never seen so many fireflies. Like ideas. They popped, sparkled, tantalized. But there was no heat from that light. It was not sustained and sustaining. Summer lightning?”

  I was not sure if he referred to Tyrannus or the fireflies. “You told him about the Kingdom of God?”

  “Yes. And he was not dismissive.” Paul grew uncharacteristically silent.

  After a while, I asked him if he would return to the Lyceum.

  “Oh, it’s more than that. Tyrannus teaches in the mornings, and he said I could have the afternoons in the Lyceum to myself. I have accepted this offer. It’s an opportunity. Shall I wear a toga?”

  I was startled.

  “I think I shall,” Paul said. “The news will spread to Athens, mark this!”

  “You don’t have any pupils.”

  “I haven’t begun, have I?”

  I should have known never to dismiss Paul’s fantasies or discount his ambitions. Within weeks, he had one, then two, then a dozen pupils. Some of those who sat or walked through the cool hours of morning with Tyrannus returned after a meal at midday to sit or walk with Paul, who found his ideal spot under a leafy tamarind. I would stop to listen, and one conversation stays in my mind.

  “Carpus, Carpus…you are so terribly clever,” Paul said to a brown-eyed boy of perhaps eighteen who sat before him on the grass with his legs crossed. Carpus was an Athenian youth, as I discovered, and the son of an aristocratic landowner. He had found the school at Athens wanting and came to Ephesus.

  “I don’t know how your idea of God differs from what Plato taught,” the boy said.

  Paul brightened. “Plato understood everything. He was a defender of the Logos, which is the center of being. This is God.”

  “Or gods?”

  “Plato didn’t have precise knowledge of the one true God. But if I’ve read the Timaeus properly—and I believe I have—he anticipated our awareness of God.”

  “He refers to a Craftsman.”

  “Who is God, of course! You can’t imagine several Craftsmen, can you? The Hebrew scriptures say that, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

  “So why did your God make the universe?”

  “For the same reason that Plato’s Craftsman went to work. To embody goodness.”

  “You keep referring to the Logos—”

  “We have no choice but to find a word that stands in for the reality we intuit. Logos, God, the Craftsman. I often say: God is the center.”

  “You should be more specific.”

  “It’s the problem of being human. We’re frail, insubstantial. Our souls lodge in this flesh, but so briefly. Plato understood that. Jesus did, too.”

  “Why do you bother with Jesus?”

  “Let’s call our creator the Craftsman. I’m satisfied with that term. But where does he exist? If he made heaven and earth, heaven and earth came into being at a point in time. Jesus is often called the Logos, the Word who existed before time, and who will exist long after.”

  This caused a murmur of confusion, and I worried that Paul had lost his footing. The natural turn, I thought, was for him to refer to Jesus as the voice of God, his way of communicating with his own creation. But nothing along these lines emerged, not at this moment.

  “Did Plato have an idea of time?” asked another boy.

  “He understood eternity as a mode of existence unconditioned by time. In this luminous and mysterious reality, there is no before, no present, no afterward.”

  A couple of the young men scoffed.

  Paul hardened himself, accepting nothing of their guff. “I do believe that Jesus, more than our Jewish sages, or even Plato, understood eternity and time in original ways,” he said.

  He pushed them closer by the day to his understanding of God, made them aware of the way Jesus had swept through the universe and mopped up time, liberating himself and, in the miracle of his resurrection, liberating us all. With an ease that surprised me, he brought these youths, who had little knowledge of Jewish teachings, into line with his own thought. Soon enough, he baptized Carpus, who would become a leading figure in the Way. And others followed.

  We never intended to remain in Ephesus for such a long time, as I kept reminding Paul. But he didn’t want to leave, because he had made such inroads among the younger generation here, and he believed we should stay until this phase of our work was done.

  It was lucky for me that, since we had settled in for a considerable time, I acquired a number of patients in Ephesus, where I found that my knowledge of herbal medicines attracted a steady clientele. I began, once again, to manufacture salves for skin rashes and insect bites, preferring a mix of marigold and Hypericum, which I combined with olive oil and the crushed pods of tamarind, adding the dust of pigeon bones to draw these strands together. The salve proved effective, and I could hardly make it in sufficient quantities to meet the needs of the Ephesians.

  The real surprise was the arrival in Ephesus of Apollos, the wandering teacher, whose fame preceded him. He had been baptized by John the Baptizer in the Jordan, and proclaimed himself a proponent of the Way, even though his understanding of Jesus lacked definition. He turned up at the Lyceum one afternoon, standing at least a full head above Paul, in ragged clothing and sandals. His nut-brown, lean body and long arms conveyed strength and endurance. He was a severe-looking fellow, with a circular scar on his left cheek and abundant gray hair and black eyes. I confess he frightened me a little: a wild creature come out of the desert to terrify us, a scorpion in the shape of a man.

  Paul immediately rose to the occasion.

  “For whom do you speak?” Paul asked him.

  “God, the Almighty.”

  “Not his son?”

  “I know the Way.”

  “The Way of Jesus?”

  “The Nazarene? I believe he was a great rabbi.”

  It puzzled me that Apollos could have been dipped in the Jordan by John and yet have such little awareness of the Christ. Paul revered him, I could see, recognizing in Apollos a true messenger of God, although one who had been diverted. He saw his task as that of informing him about the meaning of Jesus, his suffering and his resurrection. Apollos had only the vaguest awareness of these truths and listened keenly. He was not, like Paul, a man of disputation, deep learning, or philosophical musing. He maintained a rocklike solidity, an impressive stillness, and gave away little of his feelings.

  I could only admire Paul’s way of working with Apollos, appealing to his mystical side, telling him about his own visit to the third heaven. He spoke of Musa and his time in the desert, and showed a knowledge of esoteric scriptures that startled me and appealed greatly to Apollos as a man who had spent decades by himself in the Arabian wilderness, in a profound well of prayer.

  “I have heard of Musa,” he said. And before a further day had passed, he said, “I will follow.”

  Paul wisely replied, “No, Apollos. You will lead.”

  They joined forces in Ephesus, drawing more and more Godfearers to our assemblies, often taking the platform together. The Jews, by and large, found these public conversations irresistible, and attendance at the synagogues began to falter. Not surprisingly, this agitated the rabbis, who worried that a marginalized group like the Jews could hardly afford to lose support from its own people. Paul and Apollos threatened them. The atmosphere of resentment, even hatred, began to resemble what we had encountered elsewhere, most recently in Corinth.

  The depth of Jewish resistance bec
ame clear when I met Jonas, the eldest son of Rabbi Sceva, in the agora. He pushed me to one side behind a stall, gripping my throat.

  “Listen carefully,” he said. We want you and Paul, and this madman Apollos, to leave us in peace. Get out of Ephesus!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have I minced my words?”

  I felt emboldened by the spirit and said, “When God wants this to happen, we shall go. But not before the appropriate day.”

  “Well, God is talking loudly, my friend. And I’m a friend, because I know that the silversmiths—the men who actually run this city—are not friends. And they’re afraid they will have much less to do in the coming year if you persist. Who will ask for statues of Artemis now, or miniature replicas of the temple? Should they make statues of Jesus?”

  He lifted a knee into my groin, and I dropped to the ground. What a friend this was!

  “I won’t kick you in the head, old man,” he said. “But I do hope you value your life. It won’t be worth much in a few weeks.”

  When I told Paul about this exchange, he said, “Pay no attention to Jonas, or Sceva. God protects us, as the Day of the Lord is coming.”

  * * *

  If anything, the opposition of the Jews spurred Paul on. The task before him opened with clarity, and he took it upon himself to counter the influence of the magicians and necromancers who moved among the Ephesians and twisted their souls. He organized a public burning of sorcery books one night in the amphitheater, drawing a crowd. This bonfire attracted both praise and scorn from onlookers.

  “What is he doing?” a man asked me, his face licked by the light of the flames.

  He worried that Paul’s form of “magic” would simply replace another form, and that the cult of Artemis would fade.

  “It’s an act of purification,” I explained.

  Our bonfire also sent a brilliant signal throughout Ephesus that Paul the apostle was here, and that he brought a powerful spirit into the city.

  The Festival of Artemis began a week later, at the peak of spring, when the plum trees blossomed in the grove outside the temple. Whole families descended, coming from the far ends of Greece and Macedonia. The streets of Ephesus overflowed with their chants, their music, with wanton dancing in the agora, in Curetes and Marble Streets. Young couples on the brink of marriage arrived by the hundreds, bidding for the grace of Artemis, which would assure them of an abundant family. The brothels boomed as well, as the spirit of Artemis inflamed men of every age.

  For Paul, this was a ripe time for spreading the Good News, and yet opposition grew in proportion to our success, with discontent rising among silversmiths and other tradesmen, who worried about a potential decline in custom. It was difficult enough to survive without commercial headwinds from the Way.

  One day, quite unexpectedly, Paul said, “I have prayed, and I think it’s finished, my dear Luke.”

  “What is?”

  “We should go to Antioch.”

  The retreat to Antioch at this moment confused me, and I realized I had less desire to go home than I expected. I had become quite used to living on the road with Paul. Yet he understood that the opposition to our presence in Ephesus had become an ungovernable force, and we must retreat. We had, in the past, waited too long.

  Once again, in fact, we had not moved quickly enough. Jonah, the rabbi’s son, and his friend Demetrius, who headed the guild of silversmiths, managed to convince a pliable Roman magistrate that Paul led a “subversive cult” and now “stirred unrest.” They had Paul arrested at the Lyceum one afternoon, dragging him from his students, who protested in vain. They took Paul to a particularly filthy prison at the eastern gate of the city, where he would await a hearing before a Roman tribunal—always an uncertain proposition in Ephesus. The prison itself teemed with petty thieves and murderers, pickpockets from Thessaly, and the usual complement of madmen, who ate their own feces or drew faces with it on the walls of the cells. Of course Paul’s familiarity with prison life was such that he didn’t panic. He had, by his own estimate, been imprisoned at least fifteen times, and he used to say, “I don’t know why, but I feel even closer to God in chains, among the least loved.”

  After a brief search, I found him. Among those unfortunates in his cell was Onesimus, a delicate young man with a red beard and flinty eyes. He was a slave who belonged to Philemon, a friend of ours from Corinth; apparently he had stolen money from his master and fled to Ephesus, where the authorities apprehended him for pickpocketing. Now Paul promised to write to Philemon, asking him to take back this wayward servant, and without punishment. Paul had brought the Good News to Onesimus, baptizing him with a cup of water. The young fellow responded by speaking in tongues, filling the cell with rapturous if incomprehensible chants, frightening the other prisoners but amusing Lucius, Paul’s jailor, who was himself a Godfearer, someone we had met at gatherings.

  Lucius told me I was welcome to visit at any time of day or night. “We have no restrictions,” he said, “especially among those who are not criminals.” I asked if I could bring food and wine, and he said, “As you like, sir. The slop in this prison would horrify a starving pig.”

  The prison smelled of dung and death, and the clay floor was rank with piss, pain, and terror. Fear hovered in the air like motes of dust in the lamplight. One morning I watched them execute a young man of perhaps sixteen in the yard behind the prison, binding him to a post with hemp, beheading him with a dull sword so that his throat bled but he did not die for a long time. Everyone in the prison could hear his agonized dying and fell silent in horror. Any of them could be next, as once you had been imprisoned the guards could seize and execute you with impunity by claiming you were “a threat to the peace.”

  Paul was, by his very nature, a threat to the peace, and I began to worry. Somehow I must secure his release. But how?

  Every day I brought bread and cheese, even salted fish when I could. And Paul asked me to bring writing materials one afternoon, as the spirit had begun to move inside him. Indeed, a blizzard of letters followed, dictated as he paced the narrow room of his cell.

  “I should never say this,” he said, expanding on an earlier observation, “but I think more clearly in prison. I do! The closeness of the walls and the lack of mobility—all of this frees the mind.”

  He used his time in prison wisely, as he often did, and wrote passionately to the testy Galatians about their internal disputes; to Lydia and her friends in Philippi, discussing the Collection; to Crispus in Corinth about his continuing conflict with the Jews; and to Philemon as well, urging clemency for his runaway slave. He wrote affectionately to Timothy, although we did not know his whereabouts with precision. We sent letters to Prisca and Aquila, whom we assumed had made it to Rome by now, and to Phoebe in Antioch. I would dispatch these epistles with friends who traveled among the assemblies, several copies at once by different hands.

  Rome in particular interested Paul, who heard many stories about our success in the capital, where the Way had flourished in the hands of Epaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junia, and Josephus, among others. (These were but names to me, without faces or voices to attach to them, although gossipy Prisca had brought them to life.)

  This creative period in Paul’s life pleased me. I worked, as ever, closely with him as his scribe, taking notes as rapidly as I could during the day and at night revising what he said, working by candlelight, sleeping little, suffering from boils and loose bowels. But I sensed the occasion, the fire of his imagination that burned in the dank of that prison cell in Ephesus. I had never before seen my friend in such a state of frenzied concentration—an oxymoron, but that is how it struck me.

  Paul told me one day, abruptly, that he wished “once and for all to address the problem of the flesh.” He called this “an intriguing side of our fallen nature,” observing that “men who wished for dominance engaged with younger men, their pupils,
at the time of Socrates.” I think he could read the shock in my expression, and he teased me, asking if I had never wished to behave in such a way.

  “I’m quite tame,” I said.

  “Don’t mock me, Luke. You know what I mean.”

  I did, but frankness on this order did not suit me, and I had no wish to engage with him on this subject, as it could lead to unwanted distractions and misaligned thoughts and feelings. And, in truth, I felt few urges of the kind he described.

  “Do you wish to lie with someone?” he asked me.

  “I would never lie with anyone again.”

  “You must look into your heart.”

  “I have looked, and it’s empty.”

  “That does you a disservice,” he said. “Your heart is full. In any case, God forgives everything.”

  “I make it easy for him,” I said.

  Paul brushed this aside (I could see I disappointed him roundly) and began to dictate his beautifully wrought letter to the Romans, a task that absorbed him thoroughly, as he took this opportunity to reconsider many thoughts that had, over the years, vexed him. The question of fornication continued to bubble over in his soul. “God watched them—men and women alike, Jew and Greek—falling prey to dishonorable passions,” he said. “These obsessions block the Holy Spirit. But there is hope in him, the Christ, who understands and forgives.”

  “This is good,” I said. “You move to brighten their hearts. They will like it very much.”

  “It’s no matter to me whether the Romans like or dislike what I say, whether they feel happy or sad,” he told me, with excessive sternness. “I tell the truth, as God reveals it to me.”

  “You offer judgments,” I said.

  “I do not judge anyone!” He seized on this remark, and asked me to write this down: “ ‘Dear men and women of Rome: When you judge another, you judge yourself. Only God can judge us. And he wishes to lead us to sound judgment and repentance. On the last day God’s own judgments will be revealed. Until then, we must not condemn anyone.’ Is that good, Luke?”