Testament Page 5

  It seemed to me that Yeshua was often in danger of contradicting himself in this way, championing the poor in the morning, then sitting down to supper with the local tax collector at night. Coming from Judea, where we were in the habit of seeing every act as a political one, I was shocked at first by such vacillations. But many of Yeshua’s notions, I came to learn, were not the sort that could be reduced to simple principles; rather they had to be felt, as it were, and lived out, so that it was only the experience of them that could bring you to understanding. In the beginning I often lacked the patience to follow him in this logic, particularly as regarded his talk of God’s kingdom, a notion he had borrowed from Yohanan but had adapted to his own ends. He had developed many analogies and stories to explain the nature of this kingdom; yet each seemed as obscure as the next, nor was it clear if the place was in heaven or on earth, or if it had a governor or was ruled solely by God, the way the Zealots preached. The first time I heard him speak of the thing to his followers I imagined he might be a secret ally, and taught revolt, and only cloaked his message to escape arrest. But then in private it grew clear I’d been mistaken. As far as I could gather, his kingdom was of an entirely unpolitical nature, a philosophical rather than physical state, requiring no revolution. I complained to him that it seemed then a mere salve to make more bearable the yoke of an oppressor.

  “You want to change things yet you’re incapable of changing such a simple thing as your own mind,” he said to me then.

  And indeed there was that part of me that felt he was right in his assessment of me, and that it was the rigidity of my own notions that made it hard for me to follow his. For if the kingdom, in my way of reckoning things, was merely a sort of dream he had invented, yet he seemed to live in it; and I often had the sense with him that where I saw the world in shadow and grey, he saw it rich in colour.

  Though not overly given to ritual like many of the cults, Yeshua had nonetheless established a routine with his followers that he stuck to fairly closely, perhaps because it provided a level of stability and order for what was otherwise a somewhat amorphous movement. Generally he met with his inner circle every morning at Kefar Nahum, except when his travels had taken him too far afield; and there we would take our meal together, either on the beach or in Kephas’s house. Afterwards, if he did not go out on the lake with his men, he would take a small group of us and make his visits to his disciples in the surrounding towns, usually following the schedule of the rotating market days of the region. Given the terrain of the Galilee with its deep valleys and precipitous hills, so that sometimes a dozen ridges separated towns only a stone’s throw from one another, it often amazed me the ground he covered and how far afield his followers were spread. Nonetheless, the Sea of Kinneret remained the heart of his ministry, and it was rare for him to travel further than Sennabris to the south or Cana to the west. I noticed that he avoided Tiberias and Sepphoris, the only cities of note in the region, though perhaps this was because of the cool reception he had had in Tyre. At any rate, Antipas had so Hellenized these cities and so packed them with foreigners that for the mass of Galileans they might as well have been in different countries; and indeed they were generally regarded as cursed, Tiberias because it had been built on the site of a burial ground and Sepphoris because for many years Jews had been all but banned from it, on account of the revolt there at the time that Antipas came to power.

  Yeshua’s usual practice when he arrived in a town was to go to the house of one of his disciples and share a bit of food or wine there while word of his presence was sent around to any other followers he might have in the place. When people began to gather he would tend first to any sick who had come, then settle in his host’s courtyard to do his teaching or perhaps repair to some field outside of town. His methods were very informal—usually he simply sat in amongst his disciples and answered the queries they put to him, often turning the question back onto the questioner in the manner of the ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what he conveyed in this way was no more than what one heard in the assembly houses: follow the commandments; give alms to the poor; believe in the one true God. But he had a way of making these notions seem new again, and vital, while most teachers intoned them as if they were the remotest arcana of a forgotten era.

  What truly struck me in these sessions, however, was how he did not condescend to his pupils, or consider anything above their understanding; and this amazed me, for when it came to the core of his teaching, and to those notions that were distinctive to him like that of the kingdom, it often seemed to me that not Hillel himself could have followed the nuance of his thought. Like the Pharisees he subscribed, or so it seemed, to the idea of resurrection, believing no god would have set us to suffer on this earth, where the wicked prospered and the just were punished, without the chance of a final reckoning. Yet he would not say it was the body that rose into the heavens at death, when clearly it went to the worms, nor would he say the soul, as the Greeks did, but rather that we must not think in such ways as life and death, or body and soul, as if one was distinct from the other; for in that way we would only come to value one at the other’s expense, and live as gluttons and libertines, not thinking of death, or live as ascetics, and so miss our lives. For my part, I thought it coyness at first that he did not put the thing more clearly, or a sign that he himself had not worked it through. But over time I came to see a wisdom in his approach, and the folly of putting into words notions that by their very nature, like God himself, must exceed our understanding.

  It was not surprising, however, that such views, which were easily twisted, should lead him into conflict with some of his counterparts, and indeed I soon learned that he had already amassed an impressive group of enemies. At Kefar Nahum, for instance, I had wondered from the start why he did not avail himself of the assembly house to meet with his followers, avoiding it even on the sabbath, when instead we met for our prayers on the beach; and it came out he had actually been barred from the place by the town’s teacher, an old Sadducee named Gioras. No doubt Gioras had felt provoked by Yeshua’s preaching resurrection, which was anathema to the Sadducees. But it was a different question that had brought them to public confrontation—it seemed Yeshua had treated a sick child on sabbath day and Gioras had accused him of breaking the sabbath, since the illness had apparently not been life-threatening.

  The matter might have ended there except that Yeshua had insisted on confronting his accuser in the assembly house the following week. Instead of broaching the matter directly, he told the story of two teachers who were each visited on the sabbath by a man in extreme hunger. The first, believing the man who’d come would survive until the following day, sent him off, saying he could not break the sabbath by preparing food for him. That night the man died, but the teacher was deemed by the scholars and priests to have acted correctly, since he could not have foreseen the death. The second teacher, however, finding at his door a man who was clearly suffering, invited him in and made him a meal. But this one was deemed to have sinned, since he could not have been certain the man’s hunger was life-threatening, and so was sentenced to death.

  The story was such an obvious parody of Gioras’s charge that Gioras had been outraged, and had rallied the other leaders in the town to have Yeshua banned from the assembly house. By the time of my own arrival, the town was polarized between Gioras and his camp and Yeshua and his, with the mass of people, however, letting caution guide them and giving open allegiance to neither. The story was the same throughout the region: in any given town there seemed always a handful among the leadership who truly despised Yeshua and worked actively for his downfall. All manner of accusation was levelled against him—that he encouraged the young to turn against their parents, that he was possessed of demons, even that he was not a Jew at all but a pagan trying to trick the people into following a foreign god. Because he had lived in Egypt, he was everywhere dogged by the charge of magic, on account of his cures; and because he would not hold his tongue but always
spoke his mind, it seemed he had more than once come close to stirring violence. At Tsef, for instance, he had apparently intervened in a land dispute on the side of those whom the Galileans mistakenly called the Syrians, the descendants of the line that dated back to the Assyrian conquest and that had been forcibly converted under the Maccabees. A good deal of enmity still existed between this group and the Jews whose ancestors had come to the Galilee as colonists, as well as many disputes over property; that Yeshua had taken the Syrians’ side had nearly got him stoned. Some said he had done this merely to increase his following among the group, which indeed had been the result, for there were many Syrians now who were among his fiercest supporters.

  So Yeshua had gained a reputation as a rabble-rouser, though in his teachings he counselled disarming one’s enemies with kindness and forgiving even those who flogged you, the way the Cynic philosophers did. I had at first discounted this type of statement as mere rhetoric or even a calculated sort of insolence, just as some of the Zealots, when they were arrested, would at once confess their crimes as a way of showing their contempt for their captors. Yet I had heard that early in his ministry there was a faction, led by one Aram of Kinneret, that had split with him precisely over the issue of force. For my part, I had never quite been able to bring myself to broach this particular subject with him. I told myself it was simply that I did not wish to start down a road that must inevitably lead to a break between us should we disagree. But that was not quite the whole of the matter—there was also that part of me that did not wish to expose to his scrutiny views that defined me so deeply.

  Once it happened that we argued over his friendliness towards the tallyman at the docks in Kefar Nahum, a stunted half-pagan they called Rakiil, the Babbler, who worked tabulating the catches the fishermen brought in so they could be assessed for tax. In Galilee, it seemed the tax collectors were not nearly so hated as in Judea, where they worked directly for the Romans; yet neither were they embraced, nor free from corruption. Rakiil was a figure of ridicule at the docks, because of his deformities and his work—the local boys tormented him, intoning his name in a mocking cry like a gull’s that would send him chasing after them red-faced with anger. But he had a streak of petty baseness in him that made it hard to feel any sympathy for him, seldom missing a chance to inflate a tally or to set a fine, if he could find the excuse for one.

  Yeshua, however, had somehow got it into his head to make Rakiil his friend, and never neglected to greet him and exchange a word with him when he passed through the docks. Now, if Rakiil had responded to his overtures by becoming suddenly merciful and fair, I might have been the first to see the wisdom in his actions. But in fact he continued as mean-spirited as before, regarding Yeshua’s friendliness with suspicion and going out of his way to impose the stiffest possible tallies on Yeshua’s men, to show he had not been duped. I could not fathom, therefore, why Yeshua continued in his kindnesses and did not simply condemn him as an ingrate and a churl, who took pleasure in extorting from the poor rather than simply doing his job, as even Yeshua’s master Yohanan had taught.

  When I made this argument with Yeshua, however, he said, “How honest would my kindness to him be if it were only a means of seeking more favourable treatment from him?”

  This sort of logic infuriated me.

  “By that reckoning we might just as well embrace even the Romans, and make an end of it.”

  “You hate him because he’s a tax collector,” Yeshua said.

  He was trying to bring the thing around to my politics, so that he might say, Did not even Solomon collect taxes, so why take it out on miserable Rakiil, and what did it matter what yoke you were under since there was always a yoke. But this was not an argument I cared to engage.

  “I hate him because he’s vile.”

  “Will your hatred make him any less so?”

  “No more than your love will.”

  I knew that to follow him to the logical end of his reasoning must lead where I could not go, for if I must love even my oppressor, then how could I ever muster my forces against him. Yet the fact was that there was something in Yeshua’s stance in this matter that I admired, perhaps because it reminded me of my own youthful contrariness, that he seemed always to embrace exactly those who were universally despised, as if to show how little he cared for the opinions of the world. Indeed, it was almost axiomatic with him that he reverse the usual order of things, giving the smallest heed to those of highest standing while always finding the way to raise up those whom no one else took into account. In this he showed himself exactly the opposite of a collaborationist, since he did not profit in any way from his behaviour, but rather often opened himself up to censure.

  Nowhere was this clearer than in the matter of the lepers. The Galilee was even more hopelessly backward than Judea in its treatment of lepers, subscribing to the usual Levitical proscriptions and refusing to acknowledge any medical basis to the condition; and since none of the towns had any adequate authority for sorting the more serious cases from common boils or sores, they turned people out at the first hint of an eruption, with the result that the leper colonies were filled to overflowing and that many who entered them with some minor ailment ended up condemned along with the rest. Yeshua had apparently understood this situation and addressed himself to it, going out to the colonies to sort out the curable from the truly diseased and treating the former so that they might be allowed to return home.

  All this might have been seen as a great public good if not for the outcry of his detractors, who claimed that it was nothing more than devilry to attempt to cure an affliction that the Lord had ordained and that Yeshua’s true intention was rather to render unclean the whole of the population. The situation was compounded by the lepers themselves, who began to hear rumours of miraculous cures and so stole out from their colonies, which were poorly guarded, to mass outside the towns that Yeshua was known to frequent. For the local townspeople, the sight of dozens of lepers huddled outside their gates, people who heretofore had taken all necessary care to hide their uncleanness from the world, provoked great concern, and indeed made them fear that perhaps Yeshua had come to visit a pestilence on them.

  It was at Korazin that we were first turned away on this account: we arrived there one morning from Kefar Nahum, half a dozen of us, to find several armed men already warned of our approach, standing at the gate to bar our entry. What surprised us was that they were not the henchmen of the local leader, a landowner named Matthias who held most of the townspeople in thrall in one way or another and whose avarice Yeshua had often publicly ridiculed, but rather common peasants, men who a week or a month before had no doubt been among those who had come for Yeshua’s sermons or cures. They looked awkward barring our way, refusing to meet Yeshua’s eye.

  “Why are you coming with weapons against me?” Yeshua said, though the truth was they had only a few sticks among them and maybe a dagger or two, still in their sheaths.

  “We have to think of our families,” one of the men said. “We don’t say you mean us any harm. But you’re always with the lepers. The law tells us that makes you polluted like them.”

  “It’s what’s inside you that pollutes you, not what’s outside,” Yeshua said.

  But the men held their ground.

  Kephas was with us and seemed ready to come to blows with them.

  “Has our master ever lied to you?” he said to them. “Has Matthias ever told you the truth?”

  But Yeshua merely bid the men good morning and motioned us on our way.

  Clearly Matthias had found the way to turn the townspeople against us. But from the sullen stubbornness of the men at the gate it seemed he had done so more by persuasion than coercion. When the word spread that even the common people of Korazin had gone against Yeshua, his reception in other towns grew cooler, and it began to happen from time to time, coming to a new town, that the authorities had heard of his reputation and did not permit us to enter. Some of his followers began to beg him then
to cease visiting the lepers, lest he end up barred from every town in the region. But their arguments only hardened him.

  “What kind of a doctor ignores the sick?” he said. As for being barred from the towns, he said if it came to that, then he would preach in the wilderness the way Yohanan had done.

  I was inclined to agree at first that he abandon his missions to the lepers, since for the handful he saved among them, he risked losing his entire following. But when I put this to him, he said that if I could make such an argument then I’d understood nothing of his work. The following day, to make his point, he took me with him to visit the colony at Arbela. Normally he made these visits alone, or took along a group of us but left us outside the walls while he went in to do his rounds. But on this day he passed me off as a fellow doctor to the guards and brought me in with him, assuring me that there would be no risk to me. Such was the faith I had begun to put in him by then that I believed him.