Great Lion of God

by Taylor Caldwell

  The priests had found none, not even amongst the most rigid arid devout Jews, not amongst the Nazarenes or Christians, nor among the Zealots and Essenes, who would consent to appear in a body, in public, or in the Temple, to denounce Saul of Tarshish. All had been approached, and threatened, but all had resolutely refused. “If he be of God,” said the Jews, “he must not be disturbed. If he be of the Devil, God will smite him.” The Christian elders said, “He is one of us, and though he baptizes Gentiles who have not been informed of the Torah, and disputes with his own Pharisee sect, we find no wrong in him except excessive zeal.” The Zealots and Essenes said, “He loves and honors our prophet, Jochanan ben Zachary, and speaks of him always, and knew him in his youth, and he loves his people and his country, and though we resent his denunciations of what he terms our ‘excesses’ and calls us ‘extremists,’ we have no complaint of importance against him. We feared his return, believing he would incite our people against us, but he has lived in peace.” (They did not mention that many of the Zealots desired Saul’s death, he having antagonized them.)

  The High Priesthood seethed with wrath, for these very people had frequently complained to them of Saul ben Hillel in the past. Now they were willing that he be left in peace and not punished for some vague violation of some law. Without a public demonstration against Saul, which would inflame the Romans, Saul could not be apprehended and executed. Caiphas had warned the priests of this man, and the present High Priest had vowed to destroy him—and yet this pusillanimous and complaining people refused to do their duty! “I would,” said Ananias ben Nebedaeus, “that a thunderbolt fall on Israel, for its cowardice!” As this was said only to his familiars the Jews did not hear of it.

  There was but one thing to do: To gather a market mob and call them “Jews from Asia,” and have them denounce Saul either in the Temple or on the street, and thus bring about his arrest. There were thousands among the rabble to do this, with bribes and with promise of excitement and violence. So long before Saul went to the Temple on the Sabbath the careful plan had been laid. It needed but the public appearance of Saul ben Hillel. Tonight, he had appeared, and was on the way to the Temple.

  As Saul walked along the streets and descended them, he saw the Sabbath candles already lighted in the scarlet dusk and standing in windows, and he saw the people, streaming from side streets, arrayed in holiday garb and moving with him toward the Temple. The Queen of the Sabbath was presiding again over the hearths and the homes of the people of God, and Saul’s heart was suddenly filled with happiness and expectation. If some pressed too closely to him, and some jostled aside from him and the jostlers moved nearer, he did not heed. He forgot his premonitions.

  Now he saw the Temple, burning gold against the crimson sky, and the mounts like bronze beyond it. He saw the golden dome and the thin spires and the gardens and the colonnades, all so dearly familiar and beloved, and his heart was moved strongly as one who comes home after a far journey. The Temple was always crowded on the Sabbath, even the Court of Women and the Court of the Gentiles, so Saul was not aware for a few moments that he was unable to lift his arms and that he seemed to be sweeping in a tide. When he became aware he attempted to slow his pace, looking about him, in the Temple precincts, at the hooded men, and he saw fierce and sparkling eyes fixed upon him and teeth visible between stretched lips, like the teeth of wolves. His awakened instincts shouted to him that he was about to be killed, and he tried to halt in that mass of shoulders and heads and elbows and arms and legs and feet, but they pressed closer to him and moved him on, and now he heard that sound which affrights any man: The wolf growl of hatred and blood-lust. It echoed back and forth among the columns, low, intense, vicious and deadly.

  The crowd was no longer moving. The mass was retreating to make him the center of a small tight circle, and his white mane rose on his head and the coldness of death raced over his body. He saw the flaming torches on the far walls and the lanterns, and the distant bronze doors standing open and the crowded pale faces beyond the doors, staring. Then he returned his attention to the panting throng near him and made his face firm and bold.

  “What do you wish?” he asked, and now the snarling was silent and there was only the hissing of the torches in the immense quiet.

  Then a man shouted, “You! Vile enemy of Israel, renegade, traitor, despoiler, heretic, blasphemer, betrayer of the people!”

  The crowd roared, and fists were flung up into the warm dim air and many spat at Saul, who stood unmoved and apparently undismayed.

  “Men of Israel,” he said, when the last echo had died away, “you profane the Temple with your cries, your shouts, your imprecations!

  One man, with a loud sonorous voice, was evidently the leader, and the others only the chorus, so Saul knew this was no chance demonstration against him, but a prepared one, and if prepared, it would end in his death. His lips were icy and numb but his eyes looked at his enemies without apparent fear, and there was a blue kindling in them.

  “You are the profaner, you are the profanation!” cried the man with the compelling voice, and again the crowd roared, and a sharp hot wind of fetid breath and sweat blew upon Saul and it revolted him. But he held his place.

  Now he saw the leader, taller than the others, with a lean dark face and a thin black beard and fiery black eyes, his complexion brown from many suns. He had an avid excited appearance, a vicious countenance, and he whipped not only others to fury but himself, also. His garments were dark crimson and blue and Saul saw the dagger at his girdle, half-drawn.

  It was this man who shouted to the other men now: “Men of Israel, help! This is the man that teaches all men everywhere against the people and the Law, and the Temple, and has polluted this holy place! He has brought Greeks into the Temple, and all manner of unclean men!”

  The crowd screamed and yelled hungrily, and Saul quickly glanced about. Where were the Temple guards, the priests? Who had called them away so that he was left unprotected? Then he knew. It was the priesthood, itself, which had condemned him to death.

  “Away with him, from this holy place!” shouted the leader. “For his blood must not pollute the stones of the Temple nor his head rest upon them! Away with him, to the streets!”

  A dozen violent hands seized Saul and dragged him from the Temple precincts into the streets, where the alerted Roman soldiers and their captain awaited. The Romans had been warned discreetly not to enter the Temple, but if the disturbance erupted outside they were to act. Now the waiting soldiers saw the rush of men through the bronze doors, dragging Saul with them, and his mouth and nose ran with blood.

  The disciplined Romans loathed all mobs, everywhere, for they threatened not only law and order but civilization, itself. The High Priest had broadly hinted to the captain that if Saul died, “at the hands of the unruly,” it might be regrettable but it was only what he deserved, for did he not, himself, incite riots and incendiarisms wherever he journeyed? Had he not, many years ago, brought Jerusalem almost to the edge of chaos?

  But the captain acted instinctively, and because of his years of discipline. The mob was now hurling Saul back and forth amongst themselves, and each time men struck him but would not let him fall and kept him flying between them on his feet, and beating him with fists and kicking him with their boots. The warm and darkening air of the Sabbath evening was alive with groans and grunts and thuds and imprecations and tossing arms and heads, and eyes that glowed like the eyes of animals in the dusk, and above it all roared the voice of the leader, hoarsely, pantingly, “Kill him! Kill the blasphemer, the heretic, the enemy of Israel!” And he tried to get closer to Saul to impale him with his dagger.

  It was then that the Roman acted, and his legionnaires made a wedge and drove themselves into the mob, and the infuriated men spat upon them also and tried to kick them, fearful they would be deprived of their victim. But the Romans were stronger, and trained, and they struck the men with the sides of their drawn swords and their alien faces were terrible in the
light of the torches. They hurled the would-be murderers of Saul to the ground and kicked the side of their heads and trampled them, and used their shields as battering rams. Their polished helmets with the crests of horses’ hair glittered in the torchlight, and their swords flashed, and they pressed like a phalanx toward Saul.

  Now the captain caught his arm as he was hurled backward to the waiting and eagerly gasping punishers, and held him upright, bleeding and fainting. Even his white hair was stained with blood and his face was deathlike. The captain snapped manacles on his wrists, and pushed him into the arms of two of his soldiers. Then he faced the snarling and hating and frustrated mob, contemptuously noting the savage eyes, the inhuman froth on wet lips, the heaving breasts, the beards on which lusting saliva was dripping. A sudden silence fell, and then it began to hum as if giant bees had invaded the street.

  It was Roman law that a man must not be punished or executed without a hearing, so the Roman captain said with cold anger, “What has this man done, that you should set upon him?”

  A tumult as of hell broke loose then. The leader shrieked, “He is a blasphemer, a liar, a heretic, a destroyer of Israel!” Others screamed other accusations; grasping hands darted from sleeves toward Saul, who lay half-fainting in the soldiers’ arms, as if to tear him limb from limb. The captain tried to sort out the howling accusations, but it was as if all the animals in the circus dens were yelling and shrieking and roaring simultaneously. He stood there, a young sturdy man, bare legs far apart, hands, in the Italian manner, perched on his hips, his broad face cynical and harshly fierce. He tilted his head, his lips curled. Then he raised his mailed hand, and the noise diminished to that deep humming again.

  “Hearken to me,” said the captain. “No mob, where I have jurisdiction, is going to slaughter any man, no matter who desires his death!” He raised his rough voice higher, so that any lurking priests might hear and thereafter scuttle to their masters with the report. “I will take this man to the Fortress Antonia, which is beside the Temple, and there confine him for a just trial. As for you, if you riot again you shall regret it—if you live.”

  He motioned with his head to his men, who lifted Saul in their arms and began to carry him to the Fortress Antonia, adjoining the Temple. Other crowds had gathered curiously on the street, not Jews but men of other races, and they watched the procession of Roman soldiers, saw Saul carried high by two legionnaires, following the captain, and then the still infuriated mob which was hardly chastened by the captain’s threats. Yet, they made no overt gesture but cursed loudly between their teeth. Now a tawny moon was rising over the tiered city and its light was golden on the stones and the walls.

  “Away with him!” the mob screamed. The soldiers reached the steps of Fortress Antonia, and Saul turned his bloody face to the captain and said in a weak voice, “I pray you that you have me set down, for I would speak to them.” He spoke in perfect Latin, and the captain stared at him, for he had been told that this man was an ignorant and unlettered peasant, a Zealot from the dead hills of Galilee. The captain motioned to the soldiers, who set Saul on his feet on the steps of the Fortress, above the heads of the crowds, and he said to Saul in his blunt voice, “Who are you? It is possible I have heard of you wrongly, and so speak and tell me the truth.”

  Saul said, and his wonderful voice began to return, “I am a Jew of Tarsus, of Cilicia, no mean city, a citizen thereof, and a citizen of Rome. I beseech you, let me speak to the people.”

  The captain stared incredulously, but Saul repeated, “I am indeed a citizen of Rome, and a Roman lawyer, of the University of Tarsus.”

  The captain said abruptly to his men, “Put him down, but protect him.”

  So they stood him on his feet and he swayed dizzily for a moment and a soldier caught his arm to steady him. He gathered all his strength and looked down at the heaving mobs in the red light of the torches, and he beckoned to them like a father, that they might draw closer. Now he spoke in Hebrew, with resonant emphasis:

  “Men, brethren, and fathers, hear my defense, which I will now make unto you. I am verily a man who am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel—”

  “Gamaliel! Gamaliel!” shouted many men, in astonishment, and they glanced at each other, for they had not known this, and their faces darkened and they drew closer to Saul.

  “—and taught according to the perfect manner of the Law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as you all are this day.”

  “He lies!” cried the leader, fearful that his victim, for whom he had already been paid, might escape him, and vengeance fall on him, himself. But the crowd was suddenly very quiet, for Saul’s voice, as usual, commanded attention and his words struck on their ears and they were bewildered, for they had been told he was not only a blasphemer but a malcontent and a friend of the Romans and an enemy of Israel.

  Now Saul’s voice, ringing, soaring, eloquent, narrated the story of his former persecution of the Nazarenes out of zeal and error, and his journey to Damascus. The vast mass of men did not stir; all eyes were fixed upwards on that blood-stained face, and none saw the soldiers and their armor about Saul. They were entranced by the story, which they had not heard before. He told how the Lord had commanded him to leave Jerusalem, after he had returned to the city.

  “While I prayed in the Temple I was in a trance, and I saw the Lord again and He said to me, ‘Make haste and get you quickly out of Jerusalem, for they will not receive your testimony concerning Me.’ And I said, ‘Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed in You, and when the blood of Your martyr, Stephen, was shed I also was standing by and consenting to his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him.’ And He said unto me, ‘Depart, for I will send you far hence unto the Gentiles.’”

  Saul paused. The crowd muttered and murmured uneasily, and looked into each others’ eyes. Some were bewildered, others baffled, still others incensed, and others again lusted after a victim. The soldiers, not understanding, scowled at the men below and shifted their iron-shod feet.

  Then the leader shouted, “You have heard his own testimony, that he persecuted his people and deserted them for the Gentiles, whom he has brought into the holy places for a scornful profanation! Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live!”

  The crowd screamed, and bent and lifted handfuls of dust into the air and flung them at Saul, and some tore their clothing in an access of fury and renewed rage.

  The captain, in disgust at all this undisciplined passion, which reminded him of the motley mobs of Rome, curtly ordered Saul to be taken to the prison within the Fortress. Then he sat, legs spraddled, while the still manacled man stood before him, the dried blood on his face, the eyes drooping in exhaustion. He narrowed his gaze disbelievingly on Saul. “I believe I will get the truth from you by scourging.” And he waited for what Saul would say.

  Saul was still gasping; he tried to steady himself. He wiped his bleeding hands on the side of his long tunic. He looked at the wet gray walls of the inner side of the Fortress, and the wet gray floor, and at the skeptical young captain who was eying him so sharply. The youth of the Roman, the gleam of his big bare knees, his broad unsubtle face and bristling black hair, moved Saul by the reason of his youth, and he smiled. He said, with gentle reason:

  “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?”

  The captain narrowed his eyes again in what he evidently considered a very shrewd expression, and cynical. “What is a Roman citizen doing, inciting the mobs to murder him?”

  “I have done nothing which you could understand, for it is unbelievable yet true. It is a doctrinal matter, which would not interest you.”

  “You Jews are always aflame with doctrinal matters,” said the captain, “while the gods laugh. Well, so you are a free-born Roman!”

  He stood up and removed the manacles from Saul’s wrists and tossed them wit
h a clangor on the stone floor. “Had you spoken sooner, Paul of Tarsus, I should not have bound you, for it is unlawful to bind a Roman. This is no affair of mine, but only the affair of you Jews. I cannot release you, for fear that your own people will murder you, so you will remain in the Fortress tonight, and then you must appear before their own Sanhedrin. As a Roman, that is outrageous, but you are also a Jew. It is a delicate matter.”

  He conducted Saul to a cell which was both dry and comfortable, for it was reserved for prisoners of distinction, and he ordered wine and meat and cheese and fruit for Saul, and clean blankets for his cot, and a lantern to light the darkness. “I trust you will understand my position,” he said to Saul.

  “Yes, and I thank you,” said Saul, and the captain, who could have been disciplined for maltreating a Roman citizen, smiled for the first time.

  Chapter 51

  THE next morning Saul was brought before the Little Sanhedrin.

  The morning was hot and dark and thunderous, but there was no rain. The judges sat, sweltering, in their tiers of chairs and regarded Saul with stern faces, closed and grim. Ananias the High Priest was there, a tall slender man whose figure, under his ceremonial robes, was distorted by an amazingly huge belly.

  Yet all his limbs were thin, and his face, and he wore his tall priestly hat and his garments were splendid and jeweled and his brown beard perfumed and there was the priestly ring on his hand, flashing in the hot gloom. His features were intelligent and alert, yet curiously weak and uncertain, and his eyes were baleful as they regarded the man he. most hated in all the world.

  Saul bowed to the Sanhedrin, touched his brow and then his lips and then his breast, and said, “Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.”