by Jay Parini
Our friend Lucina lived there in a light-filled villa. I had been with her only recently, and my heart lifted at the thought of her reassuring presence. She had been a source of funds to the Way, generous beyond measure, our companion in the Christ. As we rode into the pink sky of early morning, the wind cooling our cheeks, I convinced myself that she had rescued Paul and that we would meet again in her garden. Soon my friend and I would settle in a house she owned along the coast, and we would write at the same table with the surf rippling beyond our window.
“God bless you, dear Luke,” Paul would say.
I could hear the sweet susurrus of her voice, a way of talking that soothed and satisfied.
The early-morning ball of sun cast a scarlet light along the eastern ridge of hills, where a patchwork of hayfields and vineyards unfolded. I could smell the odors of cooking and saw smoke rise from a stone house by the roadside. As we rounded one corner, I saw a group of perhaps a dozen men in the road ahead. They were Roman soldiers, with a few horses tethered to nearby trees. I saw Julius wave to them as comrades.
They acknowledged him as we drew close.
He dismounted and spoke to one of them.
I remained on my horse, allowing my scarf to disguise my features. Nobody would recognize me, I had to suppose. But it was best to leave nothing to chance.
When I saw a stump at the roadside, only slowly did I realize that it was a chopping block, a place of beheading.
We had stumbled upon an execution, not a mile before arriving at Lucina’s villa.
“My dear friend,” a voice called with a familiar flourish, unmistakable. “How I love you, and what we have accomplished! Rejoice! Always rejoice!”
I knew at once this was Paul’s voice, and that he had never said such a thing to me before.
Quickly I dismounted, tying my horse to a tree. I made my way toward Julius and his fellow soldiers. Nobody looked in my direction, and Julius himself ignored me: not a good sign. Was he afraid? When at last he caught my eye, he nodded toward the roadside.
Paul’s head had been separated from his body, and it lay in the ditch. His eyes were open, as if startled, his mouth wide. I could not restrain myself and rushed to his side, taking off my shawl and tunic, wrapping his head in the soft cloth. His blood soaked through the fabric immediately, and my hands turned crimson and sticky. I began to shake all over.
It might well have been dangerous for me, as nobody could doubt my allegiance to Paul. But Julius protected me, ushering the others away. He could use his authority in the right circumstances, and nobody would disobey a centurion.
“You will carry on, for me, for the sake of Jesus! For your own sake, Luke,” a voice called.
“Paul!”
“I hear you,” he said. “We are always together.”
And those were the last of his words, the last I would hear in this present life. His voice faded from the air, and as the sun rose and the daylight found its footing, I was left with nothing but the empty bright space of everyday life.
“He will like it here,” said Julius, a while later.
It was an odd remark, I thought, as we stood together in Lucina’s garden. She had agreed to Paul’s burial beside a tall stone pine, near an ancient cistern. Above us, an arc of doves rose and whirled in a great ring.
Lucina read from one of Paul’s letters, where he said to the gathering at Corinth that “the splendor of heavenly bodies is of one kind and that of earthly bodies another. Just as the sun has its own splendor, the moon another, and the stars another. And so, with the resurrection of the dead, we should understand a final truth: The body that is sown is perishable; the body that is raised is reaped by the creator and will live forever.” I made the sign of the cross as Paul had taught me and watched the birds wheel into the sun and disappear, and I understood at once that all would be well, as we—Paul, everyone who followed in the Way of Jesus, including myself—had already risen in the Christ. The waters of baptism had been a sign of our survival, our everlasting life together in the divine presence, and we would never be separate again.
Author’s Note
My father was a Baptist minister, and he would often read the letters of Paul aloud at the breakfast table to the family. Later, I studied Paul’s letters closely in college and graduate school, and I became intrigued by his unique voice, which is challenging, even unnerving, but memorable.
Like others, I often found his patriarchal tone off-putting and bristled at his views on homosexuality and the role of women in the church. But in recent years, when I came to read the best modern scholarship on Paul, I realized that only seven of the thirteen Pauline letters in the New Testament are widely accepted as being written by Paul: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Colossians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. The rest stand on shakier ground and were probably written much later and by those who considered themselves part of the “school of Paul.”
The authentic letters offer a singular portrait of Paul, one different from that put forward in the later ones, which often work overtime to undo what the apostle had done. The real Paul believed in radical equality between men and women, between slaves and free men, between Greeks and Jews. He celebrated women—Phoebe, Lydia, Prisca, and others—as leaders in the Jesus movement, people in every way his equal. He comes across in these epistles as a visionary, a proselyte of extraordinary power and zeal, and a gifted writer himself, a thinker whose influence on Western thought is second only to that of Plato.
I determined to write this book when, some years ago, I was rereading the Dialogues of Plato and, to my amazement, kept stumbling upon phrases and ideas that Paul adopted as his own. That made sense to me because Paul was a Jew born in the Greek world of Tarsus, and he was surely as familiar with Plato and Greek philosophy as he was with the Hebrew scriptures. This Attic-influenced Paul brings a fresh sense of the man, his origins and development, and helps to explain his drive to Athens, where he lectured eagerly on the sacred ground where Plato had established his Academy in a grove of olive trees.
In this novel, I hoped to imagine what it was like for Paul and his fellow missionary, Luke, to live and move around the Roman world in the early to middle years of the first century. What did it look and smell like? What were its tastes and sounds? How did people talk? What were the religious currents that shaped their thinking?
Luke wrote both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and so it made sense to use him as a co-narrator in this novel, a contrapuntal voice that reflects a contrasting temperament. In fact, the writer of these texts may or may not have been the same man who traveled with Paul, but that is a traditional assumption that seems at least possible and worked for me as a novelist.
The Damascus Road is a vision of what might have happened, an attempt to take in the world of early Christianity. And it conforms largely to the sequence of events as narrated by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, a chronology augmented by the letters of Paul, which represent the earliest Christian writings. My sources, apart from the New Testament writings, were varied, and it’s almost impossible to give credit to every book or article I read in the course of the five or six years during which I researched and wrote this novel.
For a start, I could hardly have written the book without reading closely The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (1983) by Wayne A. Meeks, where the essential atmosphere of early Christian life is evoked with granularity. In addition to this, I owe a great deal to a range of modern scholars, from E. P. Sanders to John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Douglas Campbell (who kindly shared with me one of his unpublished books on Paul). I drew on my friend A. N. Wilson’s Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997), and benefited from serious conversations with him over the years about Paul and the meaning of Jesus. I found Karen Armstrong’s St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (2015) useful as well. The scholarship of Amy-Jill Le
vine was crucial to my understanding of the women in Paul’s life. And this is only to name a handful of the writers whose books and articles I have lived in over the decades as I studied this infinitely complex figure, the man who more than anyone is responsible for inventing Christianity as we know it.
During the writing of this book I also benefited from conversations with Shalom Goldman, a good friend and scholar of Jewish studies. He read early drafts of this novel and offered many helpful suggestions.
Again, the main source for this novel is the letters of Paul and Acts, which I read in various translations, often returning to the original Greek, working with The New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament, edited by J. D. Douglas (Tyndale House, 1990 edition). To me, it was worth rephrasing the language of the Bible as it has been passed on to us through the fourth-century Latin Vulgate to the King James and later translations. I often put into modern English key terms, such as ekklesia, which is usually translated as “church.” It really means “gathering,” so I avoid the more familiar term, as it mistakenly gives the impression that some form of institutional Christianity existed at the time of Paul. There was no “church” then, just a loose aggregate of followers with an unstable theology. There was no Christian priesthood, as such, and certainly women were the equal of men in the clerical role. I move away from loaded terms like “salvation,” preferring “enlightenment” as a translation of soteria. I usually call Satan the Adversary, which seems like the best translation. On and on, in little and large ways, I rephrase terms that are so familiar their meaning is often lost. My intention is to give them a freshness, even a strangeness, that makes their interest and oddness visible again. Finally, I make sure to call Jesus “the Christ,” as Christ is the translation of the Greek word for Messiah. And I rarely use the word “Christian,” as it had no currency at the time of Paul.
I do, here and there, quote the familiar King James translation of the Hebrew Bible, especially when the phrasing is either too beautiful to dismiss or useful in the context. It’s especially the Greek New Testament that I prefer to convey in my own versions.
In the course of my research, I did a good deal of traveling and have seen firsthand most of the places I write about. I also turned now and then for inspiration to some favorite travel books, such as H. V. Morton’s marvelous In the Steps of St. Paul. I ransacked for images and ideas a range of relevant earlier books, such as Richard Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor (1775), T. R. Glover’s The World of the New Testament (1933), and James Smith’s incisive The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul (1866).
This is, needless to say, a novel and not a work of scholarship per se. I wanted to imagine as fully as possible the world of Paul and Luke, seeing the men and women of the earliest Jesus movement with the usual failings, worries, and ambitions. I left out a lot of things, as one must: Paul (with or without Luke) zigzagged through imperial Rome freely, with abandon, and I skipped over parts of his life and conflated certain crises, as there was a certain repetitive quality to his adventures. Overall, I adhere to the agreed-upon facts of his life and travels, and my vision of Paul is an attempt to dream the particulars of this world in ways that could well be true.
About the Author
Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975–2015. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award–nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, and The Way of Jesus: Living a Spiritual and Ethical Life.
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