The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  This produced another smile, a wider one, and I think he saw me as yet another religious madman. Palestine teemed with them. But he was curious as well, and asked me to tell him more. Who was this Jesus, and what was our connection?

  I explained that my life had never been the same after a blazing experience “of light, of God’s glory on the Damascus Road.”

  “The Damascus Road?”

  “God spoke to me there,” I said, “through Jesus the Christ.”

  “I see,” he said, but he did not hide his confusion. It was there in his eyes. “There are so many sects. I don’t understand the Jews. We give them so much freedom, you see…”

  I was about to tell him about my Roman citizenship—always the right card to play in these circumstances—when we heard shouts beyond the walls of the fortress. A band of Jews had gathered outside, demanding that the Romans release me into their hands. An underling came into the room to explain all of this to Lysias, who listened with impatience. This was not how he had planned to spend the afternoon.

  “Your people seem eager to see you,” he said, with a wry smile. “You’re apparently quite a figure. I seem to have missed out on your fame.”

  “They want to stone me,” I said. “But let me talk to them.”

  “You’re quite sure?”

  I nodded, and he gestured to a guard to untie my wrists.

  I stepped through the main doorway, in the shadow of the fortress, where perhaps twenty or thirty Jews had gathered and continued to shout, while Lysias stood behind me and watched with interest. The spectacle, I think, surprised him.

  I lifted my hands to silence them, and to my astonishment, it worked. “Please, friends,” I said. “You’re mistaken. I’m a Jew, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, born of the tribe of Benjamin. I came to this city as a young man from Cilicia. My father was a tentmaker.”

  “You’re lying!” one of them shouted.

  I didn’t answer him but continued: “I studied at the school of Gamaliel. I was, briefly, in the Temple Guard, a friend of Aryeh.”

  I should never have used my friend’s name, as it might put him in jeopardy, and I regretted this false step at once. But there was a sigh of recognition, and I had their full attention. “I prayed every day in the Temple for many years,” I told them. “And persecuted those who followed the Way. I hated their fraudulent Christ, the Nazarene.”

  I could have walked away then, without harm. In fact, one of them cried, “We’ve got the wrong man! Let him go!”

  I said, “Please, hear my story to the end. I helped to stone Stephen, their first martyr. You remember him? I crushed his skull with my own hands! Then I was sent by the high priest to Damascus on a mission. I wanted only to kill those who caused us difficulties, who showed no respect for our tradition or the Law of Moses. We had enough to worry about, being Jews, without this. But a light in the sky overwhelmed and blinded me. A thousand times brighter than the sun it was! I fell to the ground, which shook around me, tilted in air. The Christ himself appeared, speaking in a clear voice beside me: I am Jesus. I have come to make you one of my own. And so I have labored these decades only for him. He will make us whole. Each of us, Jew and Greek, will be made whole in his name. The Kingdom of God opens before us, even within us.” A few moments later, sensing a further opening, I said, “Each of you must find your own Damascus Road.”

  It was not my best speech, but I told them the truth. It remains hard to say what you mean in ways adequate to the experience before you. Words strain at the boundaries of thought and feeling, and mostly they fail us. Every word is an elegy to what lies behind it, the silence of its true meaning.

  I would have liked each of these angry and puzzled men to bow before our Lord, to understand what powers lay within them, what immense possibilities might be uncovered, possessed or repossessed, in the name of the Christ.

  “The end of this wretched life will arrive soon,” I said, “perhaps within days.”

  I expected, awaited eagerly the coming apocalypse. I could sense its approach like a great storm that travels over the desert, gathering speed. Only a few nights before I had dreamed of pigs being born with the claws of a falcon and babies erupting from the womb with cloven hooves. Pigeons exploded in the sky, fell to earth like fireballs, setting fields of corn alight. I saw the massive walls of Jerusalem crumbling, a scrim of limestone dust where they had proudly stood. I saw pillars of fire where Herod’s Temple once rose in glory.

  Was this just a nightmare? Or did the return of Jesus loom? It could not be far away, though it was impossible to imagine the texture and quality of his return, his posture, the nature of his presence. All I knew was that he would not come as so many Jews imagined the Christ would come, on a white horse in the manner of Alexander, with a sword raised high. He was not another Judas Maccabeus.

  “Kill him!” one of them yelled. “This is Satan!”

  “Stone him!” another shrieked.

  They threw handfuls of dirt at me, and at Lysias as well, who stood openmouthed beside me. Did they not realize he was the commander of the Roman army in Judea and beyond? Had the fabled insurrection of the Jews finally begun, and all because of my visit to Jerusalem?

  “Take him back to the barracks!” Lysias told the guards. “I’ve had enough of this man.”

  It upset him that I was not acquiescent, not eager to save myself and, in doing so, to help him calm and disperse the crowd. I could have walked away, disappeared into the Jewish world, never to be seen again. I was clearly not Ezekiel, the dangerous zealot he sought. As a Pharisee and former student in the school of Gamaliel, an ally of the Temple Guard, this Jewish flock would simply have welcomed me into their fold. Or ignored me.

  But this would not happen now, when hatred and fear hovered in the air like unhappy ravenous birds that settled and dug their claws in the dirt and fed at random.

  The guards were supposed to return me to the barracks, as commanded, but they pushed me into a hot dusty yard, where they stripped me, strapped me to the pillar for scourging. Some underling had obviously decided to take matters into his own hands. But this could not have been what Lysias expected!

  I hung there for what seemed like days, though it was hours, the sun licking and reddening my bare skin, raising welts on my neck and back. Mangy dogs prowled in a circle around me, baring their teeth, slavering. Did they throw human meat to these dogs? Did these starving animals finish off their victims, picking the bones clean?

  A hard-looking lictor with iron forearms and blank, unfeeling eyes came toward me with his whip, the straps glinting with jags of metal and sheep bones at irregular points along strands of varied lengths. His whip would rip me to shreds. I had watched this torture unfold at first hand in prisons in Asia and Macedonia. The skin of the victim would break and tear, the sheep bones biting into layers of flesh, with the underlying skeletal tissue exposed so that it quivered and bled. Few survived a genuine scourging. I would never, at my age, outlast this tormentor.

  “Dear Lord, I am coming home,” I cried softly. “Gather me into your arms, Lord. I give myself to you.”

  “You will die here,” said the guard, suddenly eager to open my neck, my back, my legs, and my arms.

  “This is unlawful,” I said, taking a long breath before I spoke so that the words came out with the force of will and clarity. “You may not scourge a Roman citizen. Ask Lysias, and he will explain. This is the law. I’ve not been tried, and I’ve never been condemned. This will cause you a great deal of trouble, sir. Do you want to risk everything? Is your life worth so little?”

  My objections took him by surprise, and he fell back. He spoke to a comrade, and they discussed the circumstances of my scourging as I sweltered and scorched. My armpits ached, and I felt so dizzy it seemed impossible I could stay here longer, not in a living state. The earth itself spun around the post.

  I b
egged for water, just before passing out.

  And I woke to see Lysias before me. One did not dare to claim Roman citizenship without cause. Instant death would follow a false claim of this kind. My head would topple into the dust at my feet.

  “You’re a citizen of Rome? Is that true? Can you hear me, Paul?”

  “I am.”

  Without guile, he said, “I purchased my freedom at great cost.”

  I seized on this opening: “I, sir, was born into this state.”

  He knew I had no reason to pretend to this status, as I spoke with confidence in his own language.

  “I believe you’re telling the truth,” he said. “You’re a learned and cultivated man. I don’t know how or why you put yourself in such a position.”

  He told the guards to untie my wrists.

  “I must speak to the Sanhedrin,” Lysias said. “I know Daan, the high priest. Stay here while I consult. I will do my best for you.”

  “I will stay,” I said, somewhat ruefully.

  They put me into a cell with several other prisoners, with food and water. I waited for two days for further word, using the time for prayer. This was more like a place of temporary confinement than a proper cell, not like the horror of most prison enclosures, where light and nourishment became far and fanciful dreams, and where prisoners often preferred death over imprisonment, taking their lives at the first opportunity. The other three prisoners in this cell listened to me closely, and—here the Lord worked on my behalf, as my energies had slipped—I gathered them into the Way within hours. They were petty criminals for the most part, thieves and vagabonds without much knowledge of their heritage, although I have almost never met a man or woman who did not long for God, did not understand what it means to be taken into his arms.

  I realized that Luke and the others would be frantic for knowledge of my whereabouts, and I tried to get word to them, but no guard would carry a message. One of them insolently slapped my face when I asked for this favor, and slapped me again when I said, “I forgive you, sir.”

  Late in the afternoon of the next day, I had an unexpected guest. I had fallen into a granite sleep on my pallet and didn’t recognize my visitor, waking slowly to his presence.

  “Paul,” he said, touching my shoulder, “are you awake?”

  “I know you,” I said, “but memory fails me.”

  “I’m Joshua, your nephew,” he said.

  Esther was dead, but this was surely her son. I didn’t doubt this as I searched his face, even touched it with trembling fingers.

  “I’m well connected at the Temple,” he said.

  It moved me to see a member of my family, to encounter this physical connection to my deepest past. I could see my father in his visage, even in his slight stoop, with the head craning forward. The dimple in my father’s chin had returned here, a dark purple indentation carried from generation to generation. He had my own massive ears, my bald head, although he must have been twenty years younger than me. Already his beard had begun to gray.

  He sat on the floor beside me, crossing his legs, and there was an intimacy between us that could only have been familial. The force of this connection surprised me.

  “Tell me what is happening, Joshua. Should I speak to the Sanhedrin myself?”

  “At least forty men lie in wait for you at the Temple. I don’t think you would survive the meeting.” He paused. “There is anger, and confusion as well. I know they despise you.”

  “And why is this?”

  “You have turned many away from the Law, from our traditions. That’s what they say.” He looked down at his unblemished hands, the hands of a man who had obviously never worked with them. “My knowledge of your past lacks detail, but I’ve heard terrible things about you, Uncle. I can’t trust what I hear, of course. I weigh what they say carefully.”

  “You’re a good man, and must listen, dear Joshua.”

  I told him my story with love, and with unusual specificity, going back to Damascus and my time in the desert with Musa. We talked as the room darkened, and I marveled at the focus of his attention. What I had to say appeared to move him.

  “I want to know this man, Jesus the Christ,” he said.

  “Let me baptize you,” I said. “It’s our way of bringing you to our side, into the Way of Jesus. It’s a symbol of rebirth. Like him, the Christ, you rise into fresh life.” I looked hard at him. “Do you want this?”

  He nodded, a lovely moment of acceptance.

  There was a clay vessel of water on a table beside my pallet, and I asked my nephew to kneel. “Joshua, blood of my blood,” I said, dribbling water on his head from a cup, “I baptize you in the name of Jesus. In him there is neither male nor female, neither slave nor free man, neither Jew nor Greek.”

  How startling: my own nephew, one of our circle. I sorely wished I had known his mother better. But we had remained distant, as if afraid to get too close. This may have had something to do with our shared loss, the loss of our mother. Or my father’s reticence and hardness. I would never understand the unspoken divide between us.

  I had barely finished baptizing my nephew when Lysias stepped into the room, with a torchbearer beside him.

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “You are my trouble.” He explained that a squadron of soldiers would escort me to Caesarea, where I would stand before the Roman procurator, Felix. He had written to him to explain my situation, outlining the accusations against me.

  “I follow Roman law to the letter,” Lysias added.

  He was a decent fellow, and I could not fault him.

  “God will bless you,” I said.

  He ignored this. “It’s important that you leave at once. We don’t want to attract attention, which is why you must travel by night. An escort is ready.”

  So I took leave of Joshua, saying that, God willing, I would meet him again, perhaps in paradise. I gave him the names of several members of the Way in Jerusalem, and told him to explain to them what had happened to me, and that everyone should pray for my welfare but understand that God directed my footsteps and that I rested happily in him. I urged him to contact Luke as soon as possible, as he would be desperate for news.

  Of course Luke would follow me to Caesarea. I didn’t doubt the faithfulness of my friend.

  I blessed Joshua now, drawing an invisible cross with my thumb on his forehead. “With this sign, I deliver you into the hands of Almighty God, who will protect you as he protects his own.” That was the first time I had ever used this gesture, and it felt right. God had moved my hands for me.

  Outside the fortress, in a wide courtyard previously unknown to me, I was surprised by the contingent of cavalry with spears, and a squad of infantrymen, perhaps two dozen of them. I could hardly believe that Lysias had taken such trouble over me.

  “Felix will receive you,” said Lysias. “Or one of his magistrates. I wash my hands of you.”

  And so we left Jerusalem, descending into the night along a dirt road through a pine forest that drops onto the Plain of Sharon. We traveled some forty miles, passing through a part of country known for brigands, which is why I needed such an impressive escort. Near dawn, we came to the edge of the plain, where the threats of robbery and murder apparently dwindled. At this point, outside of Antipatras, the horsemen turned, heading back to Jerusalem. From this point, after camping by the roadside in a clearing, I marched slowly with soldiers toward Caesarea, arriving at the coast in the early morning.

  As we stood above the curving sweep of the bay and the harbor, which spread its sheet of gold before us to the water’s far horizon, we saw that a large number of ships lay at anchor, and I wondered what on earth God had in store for me.

  Whatever happened, it would astonish me. God knew how to do that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  LUKE

  Was this Paul or p
erhaps his ghost, this rumpled and hairless man who stood in my doorway in the shadows? When he said he was Joshua, Paul’s nephew, I understood.

  “Paul has spoken of you,” I said.

  In the decades I had spent in Paul’s company, he had mentioned that he had a sister and nephew. He had no other family and, I think, required nothing but the branching family of the Christ to surround and comfort him.

  “He’s in considerable danger,” said Joshua.

  He explained what happened, and I had guessed as much. Having the details provided some relief. So I made haste to Caesarea, traveling with a caravan of strangers who, for a few coins, protected me from the brigands who lay in wait for innocents on this road, one of the most dangerous in Palestine.

  They left me alone above the city, and I continued by myself, descending along a rocky path to the harbor, which was in itself a monument to human invention. Not even the Colossus of Rhodes at full height could dwarf this spectacle. It had been elaborately conceived by Herod, who adored all physical extensions of his own ingenuity and grandeur, and it rivaled the Temple as a marvel, having taken more than a decade to construct. Monumental limestone blocks had been dropped into the sea, forming a breakwater that held back the surge of storms and roiling surf, giving merchant and military ships a quiet place to anchor in any season.

  Herod had seized and reshaped what had previously been a nondescript village, laying streets in a pattern modeled on Alexandria. An elaborate complex of mercantile and residential structures rose in sandstone bricks, with running water, sewers, a vast amphitheater, even a hippodrome for chariot and horse races. Overlooking the city was a temple dedicated to Augustus, where one found statues of the emperor and Roma, a version of Hera, the so-called Queen of Heaven.

  I had been in this port city several times, but it always stirred something in me, the idea that the mind can rebuild itself in such configurations, with a vain belief that places like this city can last, that glory inheres in the physical residue of human invention. This quest for immortality could only fail. Rubble to rubble, I whispered to myself, turning my eyes to heaven, where my true glory lay. Paul quite often referred to the treasures that awaited us, and they were not physical, not part of this poor ephemeral and fantastic world.