The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  I puzzled over the delight that Romans took in gods and goddesses, their pantheon stolen from the Greeks but somehow impoverished in translation. All gestures of veneration missed the point that God is everywhere and requires no images. Idols were, at best, superfluous, and none of these could match what his reality, the Almighty Presence, means to those who live in the spirit.

  The peace of God was sustaining, and yet the situation of Paul worried me hugely. Joshua said he had upset the Sanhedrin, who wished to have him murdered. They didn’t actually want to put him on trial or listen to any arguments he might put forward. Reason and sense meant nothing to Daan or the Temple priesthood. Only revenge mattered. Getting back at the man who had opened the minds of so many in the West, turning them against Judaism as they defined it, this religion of observance and obedience to the Law.

  Lysias had sent Paul to testify before Antonius Felix, a brutal man by reputation. A former slave himself, he had been freed by his owner, then married well—not once but three times. And at least two of his wives had royal blood in their veins, including Drusilla, the current spouse, the daughter of Agrippa II and a granddaughter of Herod the Great. Each of these wives had increased Felix’s wealth and position in society, and he compounded this bounty by revealing a talent for bribery and graft.

  Pallas, his brother, had been the slave of the emperor Claudius and then his courtier. In the latter role, he managed to assemble a fortune, acquiring contracts to import precious metals from Asia, Egypt, and beyond. He persuaded Claudius to elevate Felix to the office of quaestor in Rome, where he had already proven himself as clever enough to impress his superiors, making them all very rich. Now Pallas was dead, the victim of court intrigues, but Felix—ever the survivor, a man who had begun life as a slave—served as the procurator of Judea.

  It didn’t take long to discover Paul’s whereabouts, which was in Herod’s praetorium, a stockade behind the palace where prisoners waited for a few weeks or months for a hearing. I found him by himself in a pleasant-enough room, with a curious guard who sat at the end of the hallway. This prattling young man told me I could come and go as I pleased. “We lack for decent company here,” he said. “Just don’t play any tricks.”

  Did I have any tricks?

  When I saw Paul, in what struck me as a shrunken state in an unlit corner of the room that had become his cell, I nearly wept. What had become of him in such a short while?

  “Dear Luke,” he said, upon seeing me, “you didn’t have to worry. I do believe I’m alive! Look at me.” He wiggled his fingers impishly to show the life in them. “And you? You are alive, too?”

  I had feared I would never see him again, having shared the presentiment with many others that he would die in Jerusalem. He had, after decades as an apostle, acquired too many enemies. And our procession into the holy city possessed, for him, a quality of doom that surprised and unnerved me. I’d never seen him so resigned and yet determined to finish his work.

  I would not leave his side again. We had come far together, and I must honor this effort and not allow anything to come between us again.

  Within days, a prosecuting party arrived from Jerusalem, eager to pursue the case of this man whom they considered the worst sort of traitor. Daan came, accompanied by Temple underlings and Tertullus, his lawyer, who evidently wished to destroy the Jesus circle as much as Paul, in his youth, had yearned to do the same. They scheduled a hearing with surprising speed and—at the appointed hour—I followed Paul into a palace chamber where the procurator sat on a gilded chair, with lictors at his side and a retinue of armed guards. (He had been attacked only a month before in the marketplace by Jewish assassins and would take no risks.) Felix had the threatening look of an annoyed bull, with wide expanding nostrils and furious eyes like small holes drilled in his fat cheeks. He breathed coarsely through his mouth, eating tiny white cakes and Egyptian figs from a silver tray that a slave kept passing in front of him.

  “Speak,” he said, addressing the lawyer as he chewed. “I have only ten minutes for this nonsense.”

  Tertullus, a young prosecutor with a silky black beard and too many rings on his fingers, lifted his chest and coughed to clear his throat before speaking. He said at once that Paul was “a dangerous man.” His voice grew forceful. “He’s of course a well-known agitator throughout the empire. You know as well as anyone, Your Excellency, that we face the most uncertain of times. Unrest will be found in pockets everywhere around us.”

  “Stay on the topic,” Felix said.

  “I apologize,” Tertullus said. “I will come straight to the point.”

  “Please do.”

  I realized that someone had prepared Tertullus well, as he now talked fluently about the difficulties in Antioch that had arisen in years past, noting Paul’s unorthodox position on circumcision and dining with Greeks. He argued that Paul had “stirred the pot” among Jews in Asia and Macedonia, in Cyprus and Greece. The man was an agitator, imprisoned again and again, beaten by his own people, run out of town, scourged, even stoned. And, most alarmingly, “he dared to incite violence in Jerusalem during the days of Passover.” He completed his speech by contending that Paul had brought a gentile across the boundary within the Temple grounds, inviting this “Greek stranger from abroad” into a place where only a Jew could stand, thus provoking a riot. “It took the wisdom of Lysias to contain what might have been a full-blown rebellion,” said Tertullus in a grand finale.

  One slave in the back of the room, unbidden, began to clap—the only one who did so. I suppose he had never heard such a good speech before.

  Paul showed no interest in this oration. He listened half-heartedly to Tertullus, distracted, his arms folded across his chest. He ignored the glare of Daan from the other side of the room, where the high priest’s subordinates huddled on a bench beside him, whispering throughout their lawyer’s presentation.

  Felix turned to Paul. “And what do you have to say? These accusations, they worry me.”

  Paul stood, but he looked away from Felix. The silence around him deepened as he failed to say anything.

  “Well, Paul?” asked Felix, after a while. “Will you defend yourself?”

  “I have not much to add,” said Paul, in a pinched voice that surprised me. “I do only what my Lord, the great rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, commands. I try to love others and to engender love. I renounce violence. I accept Roman law in every particular and refuse to join any resistance.”

  With this, he sat down.

  Felix laughed heartily, for reasons not quite apparent. “And where is Lysias?” he asked, directing his question to Tertullus. “Without him, I can make no sense of this case.” He suddenly rose, refusing even to wait for an answer, and left us there, wondering what had happened. We saw only the back of him as he swept from the room in his colorful robes. I suspected that Tertullus and Daan were annoyed, but they had no recourse. Felix had failed to deliver a judgment.

  The guards took Paul back to the praetorium, and I followed. Of course we had no idea what might happen next, whether they would simply let us go or abandon us to Paul’s accusers, who would surely kill us both before we even got back to Jerusalem.

  Within a day, we were summoned again to the palace to face Drusilla, the procurator’s wife, herself a Jew. She had asked to interview this man who claimed to be the apostle of Rabbi Jesus, having heard tales of this inspiring teacher, a man threatened by the Jews, though he had been a Pharisee himself, a student of Gamaliel.

  Our guard in the praetorium had been full of stories about the procurator, and he informed us with relish that Drusilla, despite her young age—she was nineteen—had been married before. Felix stole her from her husband, a prince. He made a habit of stealing wives, especially if they had royal connections and abundant dowries. Like most prison guards, this one had little to occupy his mind, so rumors appealed to him, and he told us far more than we cared t
o know about Drusilla and her personal adventures. He grew quite animated as he explained that after the death of her father, Agrippa I, the king’s enemies had broken into his palace and stolen a number of prized alabaster statues of his beautiful daughter, then taken them into a brothel in Caesarea and abused them in a most obscene fashion: an act of revenge on her father that our guard described as “unspeakable, indecent.” Like most hypocrites of his kind, only sexual indiscretions offended him.

  Paul listened to this story with increasing discomfort. Royalty and their insipid, wasteful lives held no interest for him.

  So he was led again to the palace to stand before Drusilla, who sat beside her husband, as if eager for the revels to begin. A number of courtiers sprawled on silk pillows on the floor beside her. The familiar white cakes appeared, with the figs, and Felix gobbled them as before.

  “Tell us your story, Paul the apostle,” Drusilla said.

  “I know your story,” said Paul.

  Did he really say this to the granddaughter of Herod the Great?

  “I believe everyone knows everything about me,” she said.

  Felix laughed, touching her arm with approval.

  “You’re a Jew,” said Paul, “and immorality is not something we brag about before the world. The commandments prohibit fornication.”

  “Fucking?” she said.

  They all smiled.

  Paul said, “Your Excellency, we are only human. All of us! Imperfection is, well, our nature. But we must not take pride in our failures.”

  The story of John the Baptizer, who stood defiantly before Herod Antipas and Salome, came to mind. Paul had, like John, condemned their immorality without equivocation.

  For John, it did not go well. Would Drusilla ask for this apostle’s head on a plate as well?

  Paul didn’t hesitate: “Let me tell you about the restoration that awaits you and me, each of us here today.” He swept a finger in a semicircle, pausing on each figure before him on the raised dais. “Jesus is the Christ, and he arrived in this world for a purpose, having been sent by the Almighty. God had previously been obscure to us, an unseen force, inscrutable and terrifying. But now we see God himself in the face of Jesus.”

  I was relieved to see him speaking well again, inhabiting his voice. He continued speaking to Felix and Drusilla about righteousness and temperance, warning them about the judgment surely to come, when the Kingdom of God would arrive in its full glory.

  “We shall not have to wait for long,” he said.

  Felix stood abruptly. “Take him away,” he said to the guards. “He’s a madman. I have heard enough!”

  We left the audience chamber with Drusilla still sitting in her chair. I suspect that she found Paul’s message both arresting and threatening. Paul had both intrigued and moved her.

  It so happened that Felix, without evidence, believed that Paul was a man of considerable wealth and invited him back to the palace a few weeks later, saying that he had spoken well and that, for the right price, could go free. “There are boats every week for Tarsus,” he said. “I shall make sure you get a safe passage. You can forget about those Jews from the Temple. Their accusations don’t interest me. It’s nonsense.”

  Paul explained that neither he nor I had access to money in the amount that Felix would think sufficient. He had given away everything he owned.

  “Any sum will do,” Felix said.

  “Gold is only a color,” Paul said. “It’s a bright one, and some are drawn to it.”

  The procurator could make no sense of what Paul said, nor could I. But he did understand that he would not be getting a bribe from us.

  “Take them away!” he said, waving a hand.

  * * *

  For two years Paul was imprisoned in Caesarea, but it proved an oddly productive time, when he began to revisit his earlier thinking. The Lord had not returned as predicted, not in a sudden burst of glory to redeem history and proclaim the arrival of his kingdom. Paul must, it seemed, recalculate everything as he continued his correspondence with gatherings near and far, with individual leaders in the Way. So much was at stake, and there were few enough thinkers of Paul’s quality, with his ferocity of intellect.

  I slept in a tent in the garden of a family whom I met at one of several gatherings in Caesarea. And each day I walked to Paul’s cell, where I took dictation and, as he complained, occasionally nodded off while he dictated letters, which the gatherings everywhere copied and read aloud at their meetings. Paul heard back from them as well, taking in their concerns, their failures, their triumphs. Many of them misunderstood what he said, and he would have to elaborate on what he had written and, now and then, make corrections. He often shifted in mid-sentence, telling me to cross out what he had just said. “Try it this way,” he would say.

  Once I noted that many of the gatherings seemed discouraged, even saddened, by the slow arrival of God’s kingdom.

  “There is joy and grief,” he said, “but they exist in balance, each drawing on the other for energies.”

  “Is this true of good and evil?”

  “Evil is separation from the good, and repair means union, or reunion.”

  I had, at times, to content myself with his Delphic propositions.

  A period of great productivity followed, and over the course of twenty months he wrote as many letters as he ever had, or more. As usual, his learning amazed me. He could summon a quotation from the Greek scriptures without hesitation, verbatim. But often enough as he dictated his letters I could not tell if he quoted something or invented it. He wrote to assemblies in Asia, in Macedonia, in Cyprus. He replied again and again to Antioch, Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth, Iconium, Ephesus, and Galatia. Often he reconsidered his previous formulations, trying again. “Everything is revision,” he said. “Life is an act of revision, continual revision in the interest of greater understanding. It is the Way of Jesus. We remake ourselves daily and find fresh versions of ourselves.”

  My head spun as I attempted to catch and clarify his phrases, his accumulating sentences. I tried to write everything down, but his words too often had a riddling quality. And after our most recent visit to Jerusalem, his antipathy to the Jews worried me. So many Jews supported him strongly, and they remained the backbone of the Way in most of our gatherings. I pointed this out one morning, and he thought for longer than usual before responding.

  “The Jews quite naturally dislike the idea of a crucified Messiah,” he said. “They cannot accept it, it’s their stumbling block. But to me, to you, to those whom we cherish in our circle, Jesus emptied himself of everything, taking on the power of God, the wisdom of God. This was the paradise he promised to the poor man who hung by his side. Today you will dwell, with me, in the paradise of the kingdom. What beauty one hears in that!” I listened carefully. “Please, my friend, write everything down!”

  Paul spoke frequently about love in its different forms, often referring back to Plato. “Without love, we are nothing, we have nothing. Prophetic powers are useless without love. We can address the mysteries, even absorb them, but without love, everything is nonsense. Only God is love, and when we inhabit God, we find each other. In each other, we discover God. And, in everything we do, we proceed without fear.”

  He knew, of course, that his life lay in danger in Caesarea, that death itself loomed. “For me to live is Jesus. For me, dying is gain. While alive, I labor fruitfully, as I must. I’m caught between two worlds: light and darkness, life and death. But all I wish for, even desire, is removal into the hands of God, lifted by the Christ. To remain in the flesh may be necessary for the moment. We shall, my friends, rise together on the last day.”

  I wrote the last lines of this fine letter, which he sent to Philippi, with such gladness: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice! The Lord is at hand. Let nothing worry you. Make all your requests known to God, and he
will listen, grateful for your supplications. He will listen and bring you a peace beyond the possibilities of human comprehension. Rejoice!”

  These letters flowed, and I copied them out several times and sent them by a variety of couriers. By day I came and went, bringing food and wine. Often we shared in the sacred meal with others in the prison, singing and praying. And yet the conflict between the Jews and their occupiers only deepened in Palestine, as rebel bands previously hidden in the highlands of Galilee fanned out through the countryside, and small but violent groups, such as the sicarii (Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, counted himself among them), made a specialty of assassination. Any number of Roman officers and representatives died from their infamous knife wounds. There had been several attempts on the life of Felix, and even Drusilla had barely escaped an attempt to poison her. She lay ill for six months in a state of near stupefaction, but recovered. According to Paul’s talkative prison guard, Felix entertained himself during her convalescence with an Egyptian catamite—a tidbit of gossip that enraged and disturbed Paul.

  Felix had thousands of troops at his disposal, and toward the end of our second year in Caesarea, in the midst of an uprising that threatened to undermine Roman authority in Judea and beyond, he razed whole villages. “All they understand is terror,” he said. “Kill them!”

  But violence begets further violence, and rioting in Jerusalem followed. This led to a crushing response by Lysias and, finally, the end of Felix. The emperor, now Nero, acted swiftly to change provincial viceroys when things began to go badly, as had previous emperors. And so Drusilla and her unpleasant husband prudently withdrew to a villa by the sea, southwest of Rome, in the shadow of Vesuvius. They were, I think, lucky to survive at all.