Great Lion of God

by Taylor Caldwell

  Saul was silent.

  “I must have fainted,” said Milo. “For when I awakened all the soldiers and the guards were still asleep, fallen into a trance like death. And I—I rose and I went away. I went,” said Milo, “to the Temple and I prayed there all the day and told no man.”

  “And the tomb?”

  “It was empty. The light had receded as the light of the sun falls behind the curve of the world. It was nothing but a tomb. I looked within, by the first light of the morning. The grave-clothes were there, discarded, and their pungent perfume floated in the dense air the tomb. I thought, for a little, that I saw the bright outlines of two of those Titanic forms, but I remembered their celestial indifference, and so I fled. The tomb was empty.”

  Chapter 26

  IT WAS very hot in the shade of the summer portico now and the gardens were humming with multitudes of insects and the fountains splashed and scintillated languidly in the sun. The massed cypresses and karobs and sycamores panted in the bright heat, and the pool had turned to a vivid silver and the water fowl had retreated from it.

  The two men in the portico were not aware of their own sweat and discomfort. Their eyes held each other’s. Then Saul rose and went to the edge of the portico and seemed to be regarding the garden. He said, without turning, “There is an explanation. The wine was drugged, or the food, which your men and you consumed.”

  Milo uttered an oath in exasperation. “Who would do this? Pilate? Herod? For what purpose? It was the will of Pilate and Herod that He be executed, this Jesus of Nazareth, and that He be entombed, and that He rot, and so kill the faith of His wretched followers and restore, as they said, peace to Israel. Or are you implying that in some fashion His poor disciples drugged our meat and the wine, to which they had had no access? They had fled to the desert, to little hidden towns, all but a very few, among whom was His Mother, as poor as they and as helpless. The soldiers and the guards were struck swooning to the ground. I had eaten and drunk as they had eaten and drunk. I was not affected—”

  “Still,” said Saul, his strong back still to his cousin, “you had delusions, hallucinations, which can come only from administered drugs. Who did this I do not know, nor do I know the reason, unless that it was someone’s purpose to steal the body and then so declare that he had—risen. Or, you were hypnotized, and your men with you.”

  Again Milo swore, incredulously. “There were no drugs! I have been wounded in my campaigns and was given nepenthe and opium for the pain, and I know the sensations. I did not have them that night. I was awake as I had never been awake before, disturbed and uneasy. As for being hypnotized—who did that to me? My parents, by Jupiter! I saw no one that day but the members of their household. And how is it possible for a large number of men to be hypnotized simultaneously, in the darkness, by an unseen person? I have watched hypnotists, physicians. They gaze into the eyes of those they desire to influence. There was none there that night but the legionnaires and the guards, and myself! Who hypnotized whom?”

  “Perhaps you all expected—him—to rise, or some preternatural event to take place. And so you dreamed, or imagined.”

  “You are straining wildly, Saul. None expected Him to rise. I had seen Him die. The men were simple soldiers, jesting, eating, gaming, laughing, looking for the dawn. They have testified they saw nothing, and only that they fell like trees to the ground before the lightning. But I—I did not fall. And I saw. I saw Him. With these eyes I saw Him, and none other.”

  “Sorcery,” said Saul.

  Milo groaned in his vexation. “With a word—which is mysterious in itself—you dismiss the event. Men give a mystery a name and then believe it is solved! I am not hysterical. I am not a woman. I am a soldier, and not a dreamer of dreams, nor do I believe easily. I have told you of the immense radiance that fell on the tomb, which almost blinded me, and blinded my men. How do you explain that, you man of facile words?”

  “The moon was exceptionally bright.”

  “The moon had fallen before.”

  “Then the rising sun struck it.”

  “The sun had not yet appeared over the mountains. It was still dark.”

  Saul turned suddenly and his freckled face was tense with fury. “What is it you believe? That this Yeshua of Nazareth, this Jesus, as you call him, is the Messias of the Jews, this unknown carpenter from the hills of Galilee? If you believe so, then you are blasphemous, for we know that when He comes, blessed be His Name, the whole world will know in a twinkling, and He will come in clouds of glory for all men to see. He will not creep from obscurity like a thief in the night, with only a miserable handful of the inconsequential to herald Him! Titus Milo, you are a Roman, and you are a man of hard realism. How is it possible for you to believe that—he—is the Messias?”

  “I believe He is the Messias,” said Milo. “I believe the testimony of my own senses, my sight and my hearing. I was in your grandfather’s house and I saw the child restored to life. I saw the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and I saw Him rise from the dead. This was not done by the artful magic of unknown deceivers, by Castor and by Pollux! If there are such deceivers, then they know thaumaturgy unknown to other men, and men of such gifts do not move slyly in darkness when they could make their fortune.”

  “Listen to me,” said Saul. “I have seen Indu magicians, here in Tarsus. I have seen them toss a long rope into the air which immediately became rigid like a pole, and very high, higher than the height of four men put together. And I have seen several men swarm up that rope—and disappear instantly before my eyes! I do not attempt to explain it, except that I know it is not supernatural. And did not Pharaoh’s magicians perform wonders before Moses, and was he not given the magic to surpass them? This is not unknown.”

  Milo sighed despondently. “You will not believe.”

  “I do not trust, always, the evidence of my senses. Our senses are frail and easily deceived and distorted. There are a thousand rational explanations for what you believe happened.”

  “And each of them is more incredible than the other,” said Milo. “I have brought you letters. Read them.”

  With a face full of dark suspicion Saul read the letter from his sister, Sephorah, in which she related what had occurred in her grandfather’s house, as Milo had related it. “He is surely the Messias!” she wrote, in words of joy. “We know it, in our hearts and our souls, all of our household. The house is blessed, that He entered it and restored our son to us. We wept when we heard He had been condemned for inciting riots and rebellions against Rome, and for blasphemy. But we remembered the prophecies. We waited in patience—and He rose from the dead, as He had raised our son from the dead. Blessed is Israel that she has known this day, and blessed are we that we lived in His years. Now with greater happiness and dearer peace we can say, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!’”

  Saul shuddered. How was it possible that his sister, gently reared like a princess in her father’s house, fastidious, cosseted and loved, a daughter of a noble name, could believe that this Galilean was the Messias? The very thought horrified the young Pharisee, and shamed him, and he feared for her soul for this blasphemy. His enormous pride was wounded, and it smarted with rage, for had not Sephorah complained of this Yeshua a few months before? Now she adored him!

  There was a brief letter from Joseph of Arimathaea who had written:

  “Your cousin, Titus Milo Platonius, will tell you what he saw with his own eyes and what he heard with his own ears. But I knew Him from the beginning. I gave Him the tomb in which His mortal Body reposed for a brief space, and I knew it would be brief. I had seen Him die, but I knew it would be so, as it was prophesied. I wished to see Him rise from the dead, as He had foretold, but I was given a silent message that I must not be there. I was sorrowful in my heart, but now I know that if I had been present it would be rumored that I had stolen Him away and had secreted Him in my own house! Such is the infamy of the human mind, and the soul’s rejection of truth. I rejoice! Fo
r God has not forgotten His people, and has given to us our Messias, and the world has been moved from her place and has been absolved of her sins. For the Messias had said, and I heard Him, that He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it.”

  Saul put aside the letter in gloomy silence, then stared down at it where it lay on the table. He felt he hated Joseph of Arimathaea for this appalling folly; he felt personally betrayed, for had he not come to love Joseph as a second father? He remembered that day on the desert, and Jochanan the Essene, whom the Greeks called John the Baptist. Was it on such that men of great houses and culture and nobility, and of education and intellect and pride, built their immortal hopes? And their faith? Had these cultivated men lost their reason, their wits, that they could descend to worship and to hail vagabonds and mountebanks? Had they, unaware of it, themselves, absorbed the Greek mythologies of gods disguising themselves as men and performing wonders and rising from the dead? Or the Egyptian myths? Adonis and Osiris: They were fantasies as surely this Yeshua of Nazareth was a fantasy of fevered and hopeful minds. They, too, Adonis and Osiris, had risen from the dead! It was an old, and pretty, story, but it was only a tale for children.

  Saul turned to Titus Milo and the Praetorian captain saw, with considerable grief, the great distaste and even dislike his cousin revealed for him, and the umbrage.

  “I will return at once to Jerusalem,” said Saul. “I will do what I can, with what influence I own, and with what money, and what knowledge, to destroy this myth of Yeshua of Nazareth, for if it is not destroyed then must all Israel perish in heresy and blasphemy. The wrath of God must be appeased.”

  Milo said, “Seek, rather, that you, yourself, do not provoke it, Saul of Tarshish.”

  Chapter 27

  SAUL, in his young manhood, had become mistrustful of his own subjective apprehensions, emotions and observations, for, as Rabban Gamaliel had often told him, “It is a fallacy, and often a dangerous one, to expect others to accept our subjective conclusions and experiences as objective fact. Therein lies peril, as the history of good men has often illustrated, for good men, convinced that their subjective convictions have verity, have sought to impose them on others—with considerable violence and enthusiasm—and this has frequently led to massacres, cruel and oppressive laws, coercions, despotisms, and universal madness.”

  Saul, who tended in his own nature to excess and positive affirmations-or negative ones equally intense and violent-reluctantly had to admit that the Rabban had been quite correct. He practiced self-discipline at all times, sometimes successfully and sometimes with no success at all. He now had a wary mistrust of his subjective impressions, suspecting that he threw the shadow of his mind on reality and called it a fact which should, surely, be obvious to other men!

  Yet, when he entered Jerusalem his senses, or his intuitions, or his imagination, led him to believe that the city had changed in some indescribable and subtle way. As he was driven through the streets in a car he had engaged at Joppa, he saw, or thought he saw, a certain stillness that permeated all things, even the market rabble, and that the light had altered. He told himself that this was absurd. He had expected some change and his imagination had obliged him. But—was that not a different aspect on faces now, a thoughtfulness? Were the markets and the narrow rising and winding streets less noisy? Was it possible that a city had a life of its own, secret from Wen, and that its vast and hidden thoughts metamorphosed the very air, the angles of light, the cast of shadows, and made men vaguely aware of them?

  It was late summer and the hills and fields were golden with the I coming harvest, and the distant mountains were a deep pulsing purple, and the twisting walls of Jerusalem had had, to Saul’s eye, a deeper and brighter yellow than he had ever seen before. Still, he remembered, no day or night or even hour was the same as the one preceding it, and in nearly a year Jerusalem must have inexorably altered. That was what the traveler discerned; the inhabitant did not observe.

  He went first to his shop on the Street of the Tentmakers. Had it always been so narrow, so dark, so ill—smelling—and so subdued? The rattle and clang of the looms was louder, now, than the voices in the shops. Had it been that way before? He dropped his few pouches and his one small chest, and looked about the dusty gloom of his own shop with a sense, not of homecoming, but of exile. He shook out his blankets and they smelled musty. He pushed open shutters. The mice had been busy here and there, and he cursed them. He went to the nearest market and, standing on the black cobblestones, he drank some poor wine and ate some cheese and bought a grape leaf heaped with hot and steaming spiced meat. A merchant was arguing nearby with another miserable merchant, and though they were hidden from Saul by the wall of their little shop he could hear them clearly.

  “I tell you, He was truly the Messias!”

  “Quiet. You will be accused, like Him, of blasphemy and heresy. Or of incitement against Rome. If the priests don’t seize you by the neck the Romans will!”

  “You are laughing at me. But I say to you again, that I saw Him send light and sight into the clouded eyes of a blind man, who had his station at the wall of the Temple, begging!”

  “I have heard of this from many of our penniless rabbis in the past. Is that all the proof you have?” The merchant chuckled.

  “No. It was something else. I saw His Face, and I knew Him for the Messias. My heart told me; my soul quivered—”

  “If you do not tend that fire your meat will quiver into cinders!”

  There was a muttered cursing, a wave of smoke that bellied out into the street, a stench of overcooked meat. Saul was frowning, and eating without awareness. Titus Milo Platonius had said the same thing: “I saw His Face, and I knew Him for the Messias.” The merchant said, panting and choking somewhat, “Laugh if you will, Amos, but it is true, and one day you will know it is true.”

  Saul walked slowly past the shop and with pretended unconcern he lanced within it, to see two burly men with white and black headcloths and garments chopping meat and seasoning it on a plank of wood not too clean, and mixing it with onions, and stirring it in pots. Their hands were soiled and their nails grimy. Saul dropped his grape leaf on the stones. He still idled. He caught the odor of the men, rank and tinged with garlic, and he saw their heat—flushed coarse faces and their big red mouths. He smiled darkly to himself. From among these, Yeshua of Nazareth had drawn his followers! He was welcome to them, and to their base, vulgar acceptance of Him. There were only a few men of family, like Joseph of Arimathaea and his cousin, Milo, who had been so deceived.

  He returned to his shop, bathed and put on his better clothing and went to the house of his grandfather, Shebua ben Abraham. He had bought, in Tarsus, gifts for his sister and her five children and in spite of his frugality he had spent considerable money. He had also brought a tithe for the Temple in Jerusalem, as was customary. The gift for his sister was a flexible golden serpent with ruby eyes and a glittering tongue, to be worn on the arm, a silly Egyptian trifle in his estimation but one sure to please Sephorah. For her children he had bought golden small replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, piously inscribed, and excellently wrought. It came to him, as he placed them in a pouch, that he had bought nothing for Sephorah’s husband, that silent gentle young man with the lake-blue eyes. Saul was annoyed. But one easily overlooked Ezekiel, who never had anything to say for himself.

  For his favorite of Sephorah’s children, Amos ben Ezekiel, he had made a special gift, an ornate cap of black, red and white, signifying the Tribe of Benjamin, elaborately bordered with gold embroidery and heavily inset with precious jewels. At the top was a round fringed circle of blue, the sign of the Pharisee. The expensive thing was not to Saul’s taste, but immediately he saw his sister’s face he knew that he had delighted her. She put it on Amos’ fair curls and stood off to admire it. The boy smiled at her indulgently. Though he was now a man, according to Jewish tradition, he still wore the purple-bordered tunic of adolescence.

  Saul, at his request, made in a
letter to Clodia Flavius, was admitted to the women’s quarters of his grandfather’s house. He knew that the Roman lady had granted him a rare privilege: Men Were rarely admitted to the women’s quarters by ladies of propriety, and only on specific invitation, though women, if they desired, could invade the rest of the house. Clodia had told Sephorah, “Men are very tedious and vain and childish, and a woman of sense can endure them only infrequently. Hence, the ladies of my generation, and all true ladies even in these degenerate times, adhere to the old ways of a woman’s sanctuary.” Sephorah’s two older sons, Amos and his brother of fourteen years, were received in these plain but pleasant quarters only for certain hours of the afternoon. Within a short time they could not enter except on special occasions, and on invitation. The younger boys, still children, and the little maid, lived in the women’s quarters with their mother and grandmother.

  Clodia Flavius had become plump and even more sedate over the years, though her eyes were still clear and observant and mildly severe, and she sat in an ebony chair near Sephorah, who everyone believed was now a most decorous young matron. But her golden eyes were still dancing and merry and eloquent as she looked at her beloved brother, though her hair, bright as gilt, was concealed by a headcloth. Her clothing was modest and demure. She sat with her hands folded patiently in her lap. Saul, for the first time in his life, approved of her, though he had never ceased to love her.

  He had come here for a definite purpose, and Clodia sensed it within a few moments and she looked at him openly and waited.

  Saul drew Amos to him with a gentle but peremptory hand, and the boy stood at his knee and looked at him with Hillel’s soft brown eyes, which had an inner radiance of intelligence. Amos was tall and slender, with a beautiful strong mouth and a complexion of rose. So Hillel must have looked in his youth, thought Saul, with the familiar pain at his heart.