by Jay Parini
Julius said, “We may never see him again. And this should not surprise you.”
We spent the next day together at our camp, waiting for Paul to return. It was the Sabbath.
Had Paul been swept into the underworld?
I woke on the First Day to find Paul standing over me.
Or was this Paul? I could hardly recognize him.
“Where have you been?”
“It has been a long journey,” he said.
“I worried about you.”
“There’s no need to fear,” he said.
Julius kissed him. “I know where you went.”
Paul shook his head, offering a sly smile.
We must sometimes go places where no friend may accompany us. And we cannot speak of these journeys. That much I could understand.
But from this day forward, Paul was not the same man.
* * *
Julius conferred with a friend in the imperial courts, who explained that Paul’s chances of a hearing in Rome were slight. Festus had been quite wrong to send him to the capital. It was, he was told, “absurd and irresponsible.” The apostle’s bold appeal to the emperor had no legal status, as no civil charge had been brought against him. Roman authorities would consider his conflict with the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem a ridiculous and petty quarrel within a remote and insular group. Such matters must be settled by Jewish elders within the Temple and, in Nero’s time, nobody cared about such things.
Paul listened without understanding. “So am I still under arrest?”
“In theory,” Julius replied. “Yet probably not.”
Paul hated this ambiguity, but he had no choice. He was, in reality, a free man. Julius told him, indeed, to consider himself liberated. He could pursue the Way of Jesus in Rome as he saw fit. His life was, again, his own.
Paul moved into a house near the river with Junia and Josephus, two of our most faithful servants in Rome. They were friends of Stachys, whom Paul had known for decades, and he understood what Paul required: a quiet room with a small garden, if possible. A place to sleep, read, pray, write, and reflect. But great sadness overwhelmed him when he heard from Junia that Prisca and Aquila had not survived their journey several years earlier. Their ship had gone down off the coast of Sicily.
Paul wept so profusely it terrified me. This was not something I had seen before.
There was no room with Junia and Josephus for me, so I lived separately, some miles away, with Atilius, a new friend in the Way who had room in his house. Quickly I realized how much I liked having a distance between us, after so many years. It had never been easy to have Paul beside me, day and night, ever watchful, critical, argumentative. He was inspiring, of course, but I began to covet my solitude. I could come to Junia’s house every day, or nearly every day, without feeling oppressed. And yet I could get away, as needed.
I confess to feeling a certain lightness in my step now.
Junia herself was a flamelike creature, and the success of the Way in Rome reflected her energies. She moved among the many houses where gatherings occurred. In each cluster a leader emerged, and all relied on Paul’s teachings. Parts of his letters had been copied many times and distributed. Indeed, Junia led any assembly by saying from memory the words of Paul, which echoed those of our Lord on the night before his death in Jerusalem, “This is my body, broken for you. And this is my blood, shed for you.”
I loved Junia, a gentile from Alsium, just north of Ostia on the western coast. She had hosted Peter a few years ago, bringing him to a dozen gatherings, and the mere presence of the first disciple of our Lord had inspired the Way throughout the capital. The Kingdom of God seemed closer than ever, as Paul said to Seth and his gathering in Sidon in one of his last letters, which I rewrote for him:
My dearest ones in Sidon, I greet you, and only wish I could visit you again on that shore, with its view of the mountains. Luke and I, as you may not know, made it—after many trials—safely to Rome, where the Way has progressed as none of us could have imagined. God is alive here, and we shelter in his son, who lives in you, in me, in all of us.
Lately I have gone into the depths, scouring the underworld. I hovered, as did our Lord, in a black Sabbath where I knew neither life nor death. My whole life—more than sixty years!—wavered in dim light. I could hardly see it: my father’s workplace, his taciturn smile, his disbelief that I had gone (in his view) so far astray, having worked to become a scholar of Torah, having stood among the Temple Guard for a brief while, but with such hatred in my soul. As you know, everything changed with my journey to Damascus, when the glories of the heavens opened before me and Jesus himself appeared as I lay on the ground, tilting in space. I kissed his feet. I touched him, as his disciple Thomas had touched him after the resurrection.
He told me to proclaim the coming Kingdom of God, anointing me as his apostle of love.
I hovered by the lake of Avernus between the darkness and the dark. Was it years and not a day? Time failed me. Hanging in the balance was not less than everything, as I could hear a distant crackle, the thunder of the Lord’s return. Was that what I heard? I woke to find myself standing on the lake, and walked to shore over the fiery dawn waters, with my friends still asleep. They slept at my feet, these dear friends in the Christ. And my love for them was great, as is my love for you.
I have made this journey many times in my life, from the day of death to the day of resurrection. All our thinking must be resurrection thinking. We die to live.
As we know, in Jesus there is neither life nor death. There is only light, love, and the security of knowing our place in God’s hands. We rest in him, now as before, then and always. We enter his flames of complete affection.
I feel this fire now. As I have said, imitate the faith of Jesus. In life as in death, he showed us the way to God.
That passage I copied several times for friends, and it would make its way through the Roman gatherings and far beyond.
I came to Paul every day, taking his dictation, offering such help as I could. He wrote letters to distant communities, revising them more obsessively than in earlier years, releasing them only after he had found exactly the right words.
“Will you ever write this long-awaited life of our Lord?” he asked one day. “It has taken a long time. I’ve seen only fragments.”
“Writing takes a long time,” I said.
My “long-awaited” life of Jesus had acquired something of a reputation, even though few had seen anything of it. A number of times I read from it at gatherings, at Paul’s insistence, but these weak performances—I was never a good speaker—drove me back to the desk to rework my narrative. A life is not simply a chronicle of facts, which are in themselves without life. It’s an assembly shaped by the imagination, a work of passion and discretion. One picks and chooses among countless examples. One suppresses. One highlights. One has to imagine the truth with fearlessness as well as humility.
Already numerous accounts of the Christ’s life—his birth in Judea, his years in Galilee among the poor, his teaching, and, most crucially, the final drama of Jerusalem—passed from hand to hand, with collections of “sayings” in wide circulation, many of them bogus, and with variant quotations. Consistency would count in the years ahead, especially if the Kingdom of God were not realized at the pace we expected when our mission began.
I searched for those who had been a witness to the Christ, as their testimonies were invaluable. Once, for instance, I met an elderly woman in Rome, a Jew, who told me that her mother had been present in the Temple when a young couple from Nazareth arrived with a child. And there had been much talk of this infant’s mysterious origins. Was this couple even married? She told me that an elderly man in the Temple named Simeon had been present that day, a legendary figure who came every day to pray for nearly eighty years. He had no wife or offspring of his own. It was known that
Simeon had healing powers, and he was sought out by women with afflicted children, whom he often healed in the name of the Almighty God. As he had financial resources, he supported the families of those who could not manage their lives because of the needs of these children.
The Holy Spirit lived in him, and he was radiant with a love that everyone could feel. When Mary and Joseph brought their child to the Temple for consecration on the eighth day, he took the infant into his fragile arms and wept. He chanted: Great Lord, sovereign one, king of creation: now I may go in peace. My eyes have seen the glory of your child, whom the world will soon observe. He will be a light for the gentiles and the glory of Israel. Make way for the Lord.
He died within a day’s journey of that experience, bathed in the glow of God’s own child.
There was another Temple devotee, the elderly Anna, a prophetess, who knelt and wept before the infant and proclaimed him the son of God, as light streaked from her grizzled hair. Her eyes flashed, and Mary understood that her child would grow and prosper. “He will surprise everyone,” she said to Joseph, who said, “I don’t think any mother or father wishes to be surprised.”
When I mentioned this to Paul, he said, “I would hesitate to put that into your narrative. Irony will never work here, not in this context. It’s too much for the story to bear.”
I pondered this, as I pondered so many things Paul said.
We spent hours talking about my life of Jesus, and what it should include or exclude. Paul insisted that the only thing of interest was his death on the cross, followed by his resurrection in glory. “Everything else is gossip,” he said. “Do we really know much about the childhood of Jesus? What matters is the moment when he found, in himself, the eternal Christ.”
I had in mind the beginning of my life of Jesus. Everyone likes a story of origins, where a tale begins. And rumors about the birth of this child in extraordinary circumstances interested me and others as well. So many in our movement wanted to know about his earliest days, which must have been wondrous. God entering human flesh! Why did we only hear about him at the age of thirty?
I heard any number of stories associated with the birth of Jesus, and these rarely conformed to a single idea. When I told Paul my intentions, he said I would have to choose how to approach the contradictions, how to unfold my tale in the plainest and most efficient and moving terms. He dismissed the idea, put forward by Thomas, the disciple, that Jesus had been whisked away to Egypt by his parents, a fugitive from Herod. The absurdity of this was self-evident, Paul said. “Why would he have gone to Egypt? Why would Herod in fact have wished him dead?”
Paul urged me to focus on the character of Jesus, and his perfection of life during his last years. He was, as Andrew had told me, devoted to the least among us, those who lived on the edges, and I knew I must dwell on this. He also said that Jesus would amplify his sermons with anecdotes, as with the story of a kindly Samaritan (an unpopular tribe if any existed) who went out of his way to help a traveler. “Remember that the Lord is our shepherd,” said Andrew, “and Jesus often adopted stories and images from the countryside.” It also struck me, from what I had gathered over the decades, that Jesus lived and worked among many women, and that these women meant as much to him as any of the men in his company, including the Twelve. They supported his ministry, not unlike the women who had stood behind Paul, such as Phoebe and Lydia, Prisca, Junia, and so many others.
I would present the life of Jesus in my own way, in the time I had left, gathering the disparate strands, creating a text that would truly represent our Lord, the Christ of heaven, and his teachings. As rumors about him surfaced, I felt an urgency, realizing I must get this narrative in place, correcting false information, shaping the story so that readers could appreciate the unique quality of this life. Jesus had modeled how to live, and how to experience suffering with grace and hope. He had treated women and slaves, the poor and desperately ill with respect. He had absorbed the scriptures, the Law itself, and reimagined a covenant between God and his creation. Jesus was, in sum, the Christ. The Almighty had taken flesh in his body, found the contours of human speech in his voice. And through his anguish, his death by execution, and his transformation, he had shown us a way into life that outlasts the ruins of time.
For nearly two years I moved with Paul around Rome, where we found a hunger for his teaching. His letters had been seeds scattered in the wind, and they had rooted here, blossomed and borne fruit. My friend the apostle had spent a life in the slow acquisition of spiritual knowledge, in prayerful conversation with God, and he still had much to say.
* * *
Now the great fire threatened to incinerate Paul’s lifelong mission. The Way of Jesus had been singled out, demonized by Nero, and nearly eradicated in Rome. And it happened swiftly. I had been able to make my way with difficulty across the burning city to Paul’s house, which had nearly been razed by the time I arrived. The only human beings alive in this fire were two small boys, the sons of Junia and Josephus, who had looked on me with terror. A blast of fire, and a spray of sparks, had pushed me to the ground. Coughing, I struggled to my feet in this hot cloud, calling to the boys, who had fled into a smoky passageway beside their burning house. The wood-framed villa was swept in flames, trembling, and ready to collapse.
“Boys!” I called.
I did my best to remain standing, my head spinning as I pushed along the alleyway. I could not let them rush into a blazing city, a world of indifference where they would never find help or comfort again. It was horrifying to think of them as slaves, as servants of some oppressive master. They might well live at the edge of the capital for a few years, skeletons of light, moving in the shadows. I had seen the lost children of Rome, with their faces blackened and wandering by themselves. I had seen small bodies floating in the Tiber or washed onto the shoreline, piled like rags in mounds, or burning on pyres. The remains of dogs and children lay everywhere, their white bones and sad fragments.
From dust we came, and to dust we return, we read in the scriptures. And Paul had amplified this teaching when writing to Corinth, saying that “because death came through a man’s deed, so the resurrection of the dead must also come through a man’s deed. In Adam all men and women die. In the Christ, everyone lives again.”
I plunged into the thick smoke wall, trying to find a footing, even to breathe. Fire poured around me, a stinging swirl of ash and sparks, as I called for the boys. But they had disappeared and doubtless had perished in the fires. How I escaped incineration only God knew or could understand: He had a plan for me, I realized. It was the only reason I had been spared thus far.
Somehow I made it back through the fiery streets to the house of my young friend, Atilius, this kind soul, and spent a night in recovery. He brought me fruit in the morning and sat beside me. But toward evening, against his wishes, I set off in search of Paul. The news that Nero had stuffed our friends into the skins of beasts and set wild dogs upon them had terrified me, and I already knew they had burned some of our people alive in the Circus, creating human torches. There seemed no end to this horror.
Determined to find Paul, I made my way to the Circus garden, once a holy place of prayer, where so often he and I had paused to reflect, to meditate, to beseech God, asking for strength and composure. This enclosure was the property of Agrippina, the mother of the emperor, and once her refuge. As I entered the gate, the brilliance of the night startled me. A blaze of torches lined both sides of the gravel path where I walked, in a baffled and frenzied crowd, pulling a shawl around my head, hiding my face.
I must not be recognized. That much I knew in my gut.
It nonetheless took a while to accept that the torches that appeared to shriek were human beings who had been fastened to posts, covered with tar and straw, set alight.
I had never been witness to such agony.
One man’s blackened face dissolved before me, his hair aflame
, his teeth like needles of light. The cheekbones flared. He reached for me in vain.
Another torch was a woman, and I vaguely recognized her. I paused, and she reached toward me as well, her hand shriveling in fire. It was Junia, her startled eyes drilling through the flames. I walked on, fearing she would recognize me. Embarrassed that I could do nothing for her.
Junia!
And there, not far along the row, blazed Josephus. His voice called out, begged for mercy. Did he, like the Christ, ask God why he had forsaken him? There was such anguish, disbelief, and fury in his voice. Even disappointment.
What could I do?
I followed along the serial display of horror and recognized others. Albanus, Caelia, Crispus, Florianus, Livia, and Marcus. I knew them all, at least by sight. Only weeks ago I had sat with them and prayed and sang.
At the end of the gravel pathway I saw, or believed I saw, Paul. Slowly I approached, trying not to catch his gaze. That would have been too awful to bear. I would cast myself down and die.
But it wasn’t Paul.
I didn’t know who this poor wretch might be, but he was certainly not alive and was not the apostle. His hands drooped at his sides like black flags of misery. They had ceased to quiver.
A hand suddenly grasped my elbow, and I thought I was finished. I would soon join those who had died in the service of the Lord of creation. They had me now.
But the figure said, “Be calm, Luke. Stay with me. Just walk on.” It was Julius! “I know where they’ve taken him,” he said. “Let’s go. We might save him yet.”
He hurried me to the Forum Boarium, near the Tiber, where we mounted horses that Julius had commandeered and rode through the night, under the archway of the Porta Trigemina into the dawning light along the via Ostiensis, a thoroughfare that led ultimately to the coast, although many large villas could be found along the way, some of them connected with the imperial household.