The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  These walls would not stand for long, that much I foresaw. And thought of the words of Jeremiah, the prophet: O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved. How long shall your vain thoughts lodge within you?

  In the past weeks, a fiery Jew from Alexandria, one Ezekiel, had entered the city under cover. This zealot had been massing rebels in the distant hills for months, and he wished to incite further trouble in Judea, calling himself “the new Maccabeus,” reminding those who gathered around him that Judas Maccabeus had overthrown the Seleucid occupation many centuries ago with far fewer men. “It’s not the size of the rebel forces,” Maccabeus famously said, “it’s the size of their fury.” He and his men shattered the pagan statuary that Antiochus Epiphanes had put in the Temple, restoring Jewish worship, making the Holy of Holies a sacred place once again. The name of Maccabeus rang of resistance, with the aura of victory.

  Despite my misgivings about the directions the Jews had undertaken in recent decades, and how they had turned their backs on the Christ, I understood the wish to rid our ancient and sacred land of invaders—there had been so many over the centuries, and we as a people recalled with sorrow the long exile in Babylon. (My father never ceased to remind me of Babylonian atrocities, as if they had happened a week, and not centuries, before.) But the Roman Empire had overwhelmed us thoroughly and definitively, and it made little sense to fight against them, especially now, with the Kingdom of God at hand.

  The Christ would conquer every army with the purest love.

  Dear Luke often called me an “apostle of love,” and I would not contradict him on this. I tried to follow the Lord’s directive: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. There was no higher commandment.

  Jesus would heal all divisions between God and man, as he had done in my own life.

  I was a young boy, visiting the Holy Land with my father, when I had first seen Herod’s restoration of the Temple. I recall standing below it, peering up at the gold-clad façade, this accumulation of glory. “It is brighter than the sun,” my father had said. He told me that one day I would sit among the elders and would see for myself the high priest as he stood before the Holy of Holies, his robe glinting with emerald, onyx, beryl, jasper, and sapphire, his miter of linen tied by a blue ribbon, his golden crown in which the four letters symbolizing the name of God had been lovingly engraved. My father never tired of ceremonial details, and he had fixed them permanently in my head.

  Temple life had meant so much to me, and I had, in my years under Gamaliel, often gone to pray there, mounting the fourteen steps, lifted on a chorus of the Levite choir, whose lovely music was, my father reflected with uncharacteristic grace, “so beautiful and yet a pale reflection of the choir that sings to God.”

  I missed being near the Temple, with the sheen of its walls, the glow of its limestone ashlars at sunset, the mix of gold and bronze that answered the sunrise back with as good as it gave. I missed the slightly sweet smell of burnt offerings, and the noise of pigeon wings and mewling goats in the courtyard, where sacrificial animals were sold. I had returned several times to this sacred place in the past few days, as if drawn to the source, its axial power, and the hush that lay behind the colorful veil enclosing the Holy of Holies.

  One morning I took Trophimus into the Court of the Gentiles. He was a friend from Ephesus, a Greek convert to the Way who often stopped by our leather shop to tell stories and listen. A cheery silversmith, he was not much younger than myself but could boast a stout belly and loose jowls, which he considered a mark of his prosperity. Blood-red ears and a purple nose distinguished his face.

  “Such a colorful fellow,” said Timothy, who could never restrain himself.

  Trophimus had come to Jerusalem on business, his first visit to the city where our Lord had been crucified. He heard from an acquaintance in the Way that I was here. Word traveled in our circle quickly, more so now than ever.

  “Show me the Temple,” he said, as we walked in the city, arm in arm.

  I knew exactly how far to take him into the Temple grounds, being well aware that the established barrier—so clearly marked—must never be crossed by gentiles under any circumstances. I had once, as a young man, witnessed a visitor from Thrace, a Greek merchant, step blithely beyond the boundaries, ignoring threats blazing out in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek: “No gentiles beyond this point!” The poor fellow lasted perhaps ten minutes before Temple Guards swooped. They led him outside the city walls that same morning and stoned him to death without needing to inform the civilian authorities.

  The Romans allowed for these “religious executions,” as they called them, shrugging their shoulders at our “brutal cultic habits.” A Jewish matter, in their minds, was beyond their jurisdiction, something they preferred not to consider, dismissing Jewish rules and practices as a kind of fanaticism beneath contempt. Toleration had been the official policy of Rome for decades, and one that had benefited everyone. But now a terrible war loomed, as anyone could sense, though I hoped our Lord would return before it began.

  War solves nothing. It never does. As Jesus well understood. And it would be unbearable to see this shining Temple destroyed yet again, as it certainly would be.

  I told Trophimus about Solomon’s Temple, the magnificent predecessor to this one, and how it had been destroyed by the Babylonians. I explained that we had rebuilt it slowly over centuries. “Herod took all the credit for this,” I said, “but it was a project much larger than him.” That day Trophimus left the Temple grounds without incident.

  The inundation of visitors to Jerusalem at this time of year added to political anxieties that shifted in the air and upset the Roman authorities, who knew how little it took for a riot to become a revolutionary surge beyond their control. Those in our circle found this disturbing, as we felt more vulnerable than even the Jews, having so many enemies.

  Josephus lived here, one of the Antioch Jews who had despised and condemned every Jew who dared to call Jesus the Christ (he particularly disliked Phoebe, in part because of her wealth and influence). He and his many allies claimed that our movement had insolently rejected the Law of Moses, the heritage of Israel itself. “They eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols, they dine with gentiles, they refuse circumcision,” he complained. “The Temple means nothing to them!” Did we fornicate with pigs as well?

  A rumor circulated that I, an apostle of the Lord, had burned a scroll in plain view of one congregation of Jews “somewhere in Asia.” Such nonsense. But rumors can be difficult to contain, especially when they are florid and play to the excitability of gullible listeners. It never worked simply to say: I did not do that, I burned nothing!

  As Timothy exclaimed when I told him this, “You have become, Paul, a rumor in your own time.”

  The sad thing is that Josephus in his fury reminded me of myself at twenty, a hater of those who followed the Way, eager to wipe out this persistent sect that threatened and made a mockery of everything I prized.

  I heard that Josephus and his followers regarded me as the Adversary. He said he would do his best to see that I stood accused of the foulest crimes, including blasphemy. My skull would be crushed by Jewish stones. “We shall erase the name of Paul!” he proclaimed.

  I didn’t care a whit about the name of Paul—I was nobody, nothing. I had erased myself in the name of the Christ. Josephus either didn’t understand this or had not listened closely to my words.

  A pack of Jews led by Josephus now took me by surprise as I stood in the heat of the sun in the Courtyard of Gentiles with the four young Jews who had shaved their heads and gone with me into the Temple for purification. Perhaps foolishly, I had come here to satisfy James, to prove my continuing devotion to God and Temple worship. But I never expected this treachery!

  The attack began with a round of jibes and hisses, followed quickly by sputtering threats. “That’s him!” someone cried. A crowd see
thed around me, and a young man spat in my face.

  At first I didn’t take this seriously, and wondered who these people were and what I had done to elicit their wrath. Surely they mistook me for another. It could not be a crime to bring four pious young Jews into the Temple for purification. Had I not shaved my own head in obeisance to Almighty God and his descendants through Abraham and David?

  The heavy Corinthian bronze doors of the nearest gate drew shut from within, a sign that the priests wished not only to protect their sacred area but also to hear nothing and to know nothing about what transpired in the outside world. Ignorance was their self-protective gesture in every awkward circumstance.

  Then Josephus himself stood before me, pointing.

  “He’s the one, Paul!”

  Was it pure hatred, that sharpness in his eyes, which narrowed like points of fire?

  Two burly men seized me by the elbows, claiming that I had taken “an Ephesian, a filthy Greek” beyond the boundaries.

  “This is a lie,” I said.

  But it seemed impossible to defend myself or reassure them that I had no intention of defiling this Temple. Was I not a Pharisee? Did they imagine I didn’t understand the rules?

  Escape routes caught my eye: a slight opening in the crowd. I had disappeared into the general surge and bustle many times, as one leaf in a forest becomes invisible. Yet I could not escape the invisible noose my accusers tightened around my neck that day. Temple Guards appeared in numbers, accompanied by Roman military policemen, who must have been summoned from the Antonia Fortress.

  I looked up at the Temple, thinking of our Lord in the days before his crucifixion. He had said, “Destroy this Temple and I shall rebuild it, and it will take only three days.” I had often dwelled on that uncanny remark. Perhaps Jesus referred to the temple of his body, which they would soon destroy, tearing him limb from limb over the course of Passover. He would be beaten and scourged, then crucified. But in three days he would rise to new life, his temple rebuilt, transmogrified.

  His body was broken for us so that we might have new life. I had uttered this phrase many times at the sacred meal, in far-flung parts of the empire. They might break my body, too. But I had been changed forever on the Damascus Road, and would rise instantly to life in him, my Lord. A strange calm settled over me as I thought about the brief time ahead of me on this earth, knowing I could not be harmed. What could they do to me, with God as my shield? I turned my eyes to heaven in thanks, and saw a brilliant circle of light above my head. An angel? I heard its wings bell-beat the air. Then a voice spoke: “Paul, my son! Say only what is true, and I will protect you. Have no fear.” The phrase “no fear” echoed and dwindled as the crowd fell silent.

  Had they heard this voice as well?

  I knelt on the paving stones, bowing my head. “Thy will be done,” I said, praying as our Lord had prayed in the garden before his arrest.

  “This is Ezekiel!” a boy shouted.

  I lifted my head, looked into his emerald eyes and saw his coppery hair: He didn’t seem more than thirteen. Was this Simon, my old dear friend? Had he come back to accuse me falsely of being a dangerous zealot?

  I saw Luke now, and tried to rush toward him, but several of the mob restrained me, pulled me backward. Guards fastened my wrists with leather straps and lifted me to my feet. One of them pulled a chain around my neck, cutting the skin, and I bled. Unable to speak, dizzy, I tried to look at my accusers as the crowd lunged toward me, ripping my tunic, pulling my ears. I thought I might suffer dismemberment at their hands when a young man with appalling hatred in his eyes kicked one of my shins, drawing more blood.

  I prayed to myself: Jesus, how you suffered! I know how you suffered!

  The thorns dug into his scalp that day, the ignominious crown that mocked his pretense to kingship. My pain did not compare to his, but I felt strangely closer to him, to his experience on the hard but holy day of his torture. He had walked through the streets only a short distance from this spot, a rough-hewn heavy cross on his shoulders. He had stumbled and fallen, whereupon a benign passerby had assisted him, taking that instrument of death upon himself. If only I could have been there, able to help him. I would surely have carried that cross to the four corners of the earth.

  I must have passed out, as I wakened within the Antonia Fortress, where Jesus had spent his last night before the crucifixion. I lay on the dirt in a filthy room where they interrogated prisoners, often torturing them, extracting false confessions before scourging and beheading them. Their shit, blood, and piss darkened the dirt, and the room swam in this stench of terror, an invisible steam of misery that lifted to the ceiling. There was no air in the cell, which had a single narrow window with an iron grate. A torch blazed in one corner, casting a pallor over the walls. And yet I felt safer here than on the streets, where I would never have survived. The thirst of a mob for vengeance cannot be contained.

  One pathetic creature lay in a heap on the floor beside me, a tangle of limbs, and I thought he must already be dead. A broken thighbone pushed through a festering open wound, and I could see into his chest, where a knife had tunneled through the skin between cracked ribs. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen. His features had been severely distorted, his nose flattened, his auburn hair a sopping mat of blood. The eyes fell back in his head, and his tongue lolled to one side through a grate of shattered teeth.

  He coughed now, surprising me.

  “Can I help?”

  “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  “Give the boy water!” I called to the guard, who sat by a wall.

  He laughed, asking if I were a nurse.

  The cruelty of this present world crushed me. The human misery before me was sin, error, transgression—a sign of our separateness from God. The fall of man was the fall into creation, but we would be lifted out of creation into new life at last. I recalled the words of Jesus as framed in one of the books of sayings that Luke had found in Ephesus: My dear people, we are already the children of God. Only what lies in the future has not yet been revealed. All we know is that, on the proper day, we shall be like God.

  Poor Luke struggled to understand this concept, which I did my best to elaborate, and I prayed for him. As a physician, he trained his eyes on the things of this world, and he could be confoundedly literal. “Look elsewhere!” I would say, puzzling him. “Lift your eyes!”

  I raised a palm in the direction of the young man, who in revealing his thirst had inadvertently echoed the words of Jesus from the cross. “Heal this prisoner, Lord,” I said loudly. “Make him whole, in the name of Jesus!”

  The boy’s eyes focused. He smiled faintly, sitting up by himself, breathing deeply, revived before my eyes. His bloody wounds, the broken skin and bones as well, miraculously healed, as if weeks became moments. He opened a broad smile of relief.

  Our befuddled guard, in astonishment and fear, brought him a cup of water and put some bread on a plate in the dirt beside him, and we watched him drink and eat.

  “You are not an ordinary prisoner,” the guard said to me.

  “You’re quite wrong, sir,” I said. “I’m ordinary.”

  But I seized on this opening, asking to see Lysias, his superior.

  Claudius Lysias was a Greek officer of some fame who had risen through his diplomatic skills to this key outpost of empire. In the past weeks he had commanded his soldiers to search throughout Judea for Ezekiel, the zealot from Alexandria, raiding houses in Bethany, Hebron, and Ziph. The results had been unhappy for everyone. One pious community of scholars in En-Gedi had been routed thoroughly, with several arrests and one beheading, though not the head of Ezekiel. The radical Egyptian would be caught soon, I guessed, and given a peremptory trial, then crucified, much like the ruffians who hung on either side of Jesus that day at Golgotha.

  The guard led me to the commander’s office at the end of a reekin
g dim corridor, saying, “Speak for yourself. He will listen.”

  I could feel God’s hand at work that day.

  It surprised me that command headquarters in the Antonia was such a stifling and narrow room, with a single desk in one corner and only a tiny window for light and ventilation. A slave took dictation from Lysias, writing on a wax tablet.

  I stood before him, waiting.

  Lysias paused, staring at me. “And who are you?”

  I liked the look of this fellow: a tall man of perhaps thirty-five, with straight black hair, black eyes. His long nose arched at the bridge. His firm voice suggested experience and calm in the face of difficulties. One would like such an officer in charge in dangerous times, and I understood at once why the imperial army had chosen him for this job.

  “You’re staring at me,” he said. “Speak! Who are you?”

  “I’m Paul, an apostle of the Lord.”

  This provoked a slight smile, and even his slave grinned.

  “So how may I assist you, Paul the apostle?”

  “Why have you arrested me? I’ve done nothing, have offended neither civil nor religious laws. I’m not a zealot, certainly not Ezekiel the Egyptian. This is a mistake!”

  He put down his papers and looked at me with cool interest. “You speak Greek without an accent.”

  “It’s my native tongue. I had a wonderful tutor in Tarsus. Together we read Plato and the poets, the best of the Attic playwrights.” I nearly quoted Ion of Chios but thought better of such a display of learning. Restraint is the beginning of wisdom, and it never paid off to intimidate—or try to intimidate—men like Lysias.

  My response puzzled him, and he took a while to absorb it.

  “You’re not a Judean?”

  “I came here as a young man from Tarsus to study with Gamaliel. His school was legendary. But I’m a visitor now, an apostle of Jesus.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus of Nazareth, who spoke for God, and who lives now, though he was crucified.”