‘Do I have the strength of love too, Rabba?’ asked Baratha. Her voice sounded surer than I had ever heard it since our village died.
‘Of course,’ said Rabba gently. ‘Of course.’
More silence, except for Rabba’s panting breath and the shifting of the goat.
‘It is time for you to go out into the world,’ Rabba whispered at last. ‘You have had the courage to survive. You will find the courage to leave too, for you have love. All three of you have love. I do not know what you will find out there. You may need to come back to this place in years to come, to hide with your children. Or Judea may become a place of peace again, where Caius can be an important family man, a scribe.’
‘It is against the law for a slave to marry,’ said Caius quietly. ‘I know that legally I am no longer a slave, but not everyone may understand that. People see a ragged man, a man with no family, and say, “Is that stranger an escaped slave?” I can’t ask Ju— any woman to marry me, with no money or a home to take her to.’
Rabba laughed. It was almost her old cackle. ‘We will see. But it is time to leave.’
‘You are too weak for a journey,’ he said. ‘We won’t leave you, Wise Mother.’
‘Call me by my name,’ she whispered. ‘The name I had when I was young.’
‘What is your name, Rabba?’ asked Baratha.
Rabba’s half-smile twisted like a snake. ‘Judith,’ she said.
‘I was named for you?’ I cried.
But Rabba said no more.
The next morning, when I kneeled by her pallet, she was dead.
Chapter 26
She was so small. Just a collection of bones and skin, wrinkled eyes and that smile. Why had I never understood before that it was a smile of pride and love?
I sent Caius away while Baratha and I washed her, and said the prayers, and did what was proper. By the time we had finished, he had dug a grave in a small cave further along the hill, one we could block with rocks to keep her body safe.
Caius said the words when we placed her in her tomb. They wouldn’t be exactly the right ones, I thought, but maybe close enough.
It was afternoon by the time we had filled her burial cave opening with stones. It was only when we returned to our cave and rolled up Rabba’s pallet that we saw all the coins underneath it. Not just those she’d once worn sewn onto her veil that showed her to be a woman of standing, but many more. She must have dug them up at night, when we were all asleep, from some deeper spot in the cave so we would find them.
‘Gold denarii,’ said Caius, sounding breathless. ‘It’s a treasure store.’
‘Her husband was a tax collector,’ I said.
I could almost hear Rabba’s voice: What would I spend money on in a village of mud and dust? I kept my coins here for you.
‘Her house was one of the finest in Jerusalem,’ added Baratha.
And somehow we didn’t cry but smiled.
The coins might be enough, I thought, to buy a good house in a city, somewhere no one would ever guess Caius had been a slave.
They would be more than enough to hire servants and tenant farmers to repair the village and its fields and orchards, if that was what we wished. No one would argue about who owned the land if we had the money to hire men with good strong arms. We might even find out where Sarah and Rakeal had been sold and buy their freedom.
The coins were enough to give us any life we chose, if we had the courage.
And suddenly there in these shadows I saw her: Maryiam, a girl from Nazareth, a village bigger than mine but much the same, the Maryiam Rabba had held secretly in her heart all these years. Maryiam, the maiden, treading her path with courage; the widowed Maryiam, proudly following her son as he preached; Maryiam, the grieving mother who still saw beauty, love and joy in all she’d known; the older Maryiam, teaching men, and women too.
Suddenly I saw a hundred Maryiams, a thousand, and even more: maidens, mothers, teachers, through more years than I could number, every one of them with the bravery and endurance to do whatever good must be done.
And not one of them was just a girl.
We sewed half the coins into our undergarments. We left the rest buried, in case we were robbed, or had to find refuge here again, or needed them to hire people to repair the village.
We rolled all we needed into sheepskins, then settled them upon our backs the next morning. Baratha had grown so much in the past few months she could carry nearly as much as Caius and I could.
He wore his pack easily, this slave whose owner had left him for the crows. No, not a slave. We were not slave nor free, man nor woman, Jew nor Gentile. We were ourselves.
I looked around the dimness of the dusty cave, our refuge, at the amphorae, the sacks of food, the bedding we couldn’t carry. Would I ever see this hiding place again? Would we retreat here for refuge? Or would our lives be far away and rich? I didn’t know.
But I did know this: through all I had learned here, I would walk with love. Love for those who walked with me, and those who had gone before me; love for my children yet to come, maybe; and love for my God.
I would walk without condemning those whose ways were different, for wherever I went once I left here, I would be the stranger too.
I would keep the laws; not just those given to me, but those of my heart. I would be kind, not just because Rabba had given so much for me, but because doing kindness day by day builds a heart of joy. And I would walk with courage, for love will give you bravery even in the hardest times.
And every day I would take in the beauty of the world around me, even if all I could see were the clouds sweeping the sky.
Caius took my hand. A friend’s hand. More than a friend one day? We would see. He hesitated, then kissed my cheek, and bent and briefly kissed Baratha’s.
‘Bleeert,’ said the goat, letting us know that wherever we went, she was determined to come too.
We walked into the sunlight.
Author’s Notes
This book is not about religion, nor about my own religious beliefs. It is about a dimly seen historical figure, now known as Mary of Nazareth, Maryiam, Miriam, Maria, as well as other names, mother of Joshua, or Jesus.
This book tries to recreate the time Mary lived in, as well as give insights into the extraordinary woman from whom the Christmas story comes. There are few documented facts about Mary of Nazareth, but much that we can deduce, both from what is known of women in that place and time, and from the Gospels.
The existence of the story of Jesus’s birth is perhaps the most telling of all. How did anyone know the details? Not from the baby in the manger, nor almost certainly not from Joseph, and it doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in Jesus’s ministry. He had only been a baby. The existence of that story tells us that Mary of Nazareth too was a teacher, respected and listened to by the men who would pass on the learning that became the Gospels.
The nativity is a woman’s story. Mary was so young and so alone, just a girl with her baby in a stable. But she gave us the greatest possible example of maternal joy and love, even at a time of pain and exile, tragedy and loss. Her son was murdered in front of her, in a way calculated to inflict the greatest agony and shame. But she lived and loved, and had the courage to tell the story of how love can vanquish pain.
For all of you who follow her example, no matter what your religion, or lack of religion: you are never just a girl.
This book is a work of historical fiction, but fact is woven into it, and deduction from facts. There are only a few historical sources, however, for the desperate land of Judea in 71 AD. A war-ravaged country isn’t a place where many records or letters are made or kept. Despite its importance in our culture, Judea back then was only a small and relatively unimportant part of the vast Roman Empire. The only major contemporary account is the unreliable records of Flavius Josephus, a priest, scholar and historian who had many reasons to lie or exaggerate.
Titus Flavius Josephus (37–100 AD) was born Yosef ben Matity
ahu, or Yosef, son of Matityahu; or the anglicised version, Joseph, son of Matthias. He commanded the northern Jewish forces that fought the Romans in Galilee, but was captured (or surrendered) in 67 AD, saving himself by allowing the sacrifice of his comrades. He then announced that ancient Jewish prophecy stated that the Roman general Vespasian would become Emperor of Rome. Vespasian did indeed become Emperor in 69 AD. Yosef ben Matityahu was given his freedom. He assumed the Emperor’s family name of Flavius and, depending on how you interpret his actions, helped the Emperor’s son Titus destroy the last rebellion of his former people, or was, perhaps, a negotiator with the Jewish defenders, in the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and further campaigns, trying unsuccessfully to bring peace or some mercy. Perhaps he did both, or neither.
Flavius Josephus wrote several histories of the Jewish people. Much of this material is regarded as accurate and deeply valuable — except, possibly, where it touches on his own family or cultural background, or the context of his own actions. Yosef ben Matityahu may have been a cold-blooded traitor; or a victim who made the best of his situation. The truth may lie somewhere between the two.
His work needs to be read with care and a little scepticism, but that is the case with every work of history. Even when historians are not trying to defend their own actions or their culture, it is impossible to entirely put aside one’s own values and misconceptions. Never accept that a document that survives from the past was written by someone who always told the truth or never made inadvertent mistakes. We accept today that much of what we read in the media is inaccurate, either from bias, a simple error or even a wish to hide the truth. There are many reasons to believe this was the case a hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago, as well.
There are two essential things to remember about the decades after the birth of Jesus. Firstly, the members of the early church were real people. We know them now mostly as pious or stately statues or frescos. But they would also have laughed and sometimes been undignified, been young and scraped their knees.
The second point is that although the words and parables and teachings of Jesus were deeply valued, venerated and repeated in the years I am writing about, the beliefs of the churches that would be based on those teachings had not yet been fully formulated. This is not a book about early Christianity. Neither Rabba nor Caius in this book knows much about the major religious figures, beliefs or discussions of their time, and the little that Caius knows comes from Rome, not Jerusalem.
We still know tragically little about the people, religious arguments and beliefs of the early Christian Church in Jerusalem. Its members were either killed, or enslaved and then murdered with the rest of Jerusalem’s citizens. But until the destruction of Jerusalem, it would have been one of the major centres of Christianity, or even the most important one. We know that there were disagreements in belief between the predominantly Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and the mostly Gentile ones whom Paul and Luke preached to. The Jerusalem Church almost certainly placed far more emphasis on Jewish law and practice than the Gentile Luke, but even in Jerusalem, as shown by the stoning of Stephen, there were divisions between the Jewish and Hellenistic followers of Jesus.
The Gospels of the New Testament were written long after the events they describe, and probably not even by those whose names they bear, but by their students, or their students’ students. Legend may have been woven into fact, and other facts forgotten or not understood, as by then times and places were very different from the days when Jesus preached, and not just because of the horror and destruction of the years when this book is set.
Some of the things we assume are literal may be symbolic. Other words simply can’t be translated accurately. English, for example, has only one word for ‘love’. Koine, the colloquial form of ancient Greek spoken in the area back then, as well as other languages, had three words for ‘love’, all with very different implications. Even ‘born in a stable and there was no room in the inn’ may be a mistranslation, as the word for ‘room’ is the same as the word Jesus is said to have used for the ‘room’ to celebrate Passover in. Does it mean a guest room in a private house? Or did the word back then have different meanings in different contexts?
Valid deductions, however, can be made.
The existence of the story of the birth of Jesus indicates that Mary was an authoritative and esteemed member of the Jerusalem Christians. Her memories — like those of the wedding feast at Cana — were listened to and respected. But as far as I know, no stories of her life were written in the years immediately after Jesus’s crucifixion, though there is one record that says she lived in Jerusalem and then moved to Ephesus, where she survived another eleven years.
There is one thing that is (almost) certain about Jesus’s birth story. There was no special census that year — or in any year close to the time he was probably born — to take Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. The Romans, King Herod and the Temple taxed their subjects every year. The Roman rulers kept meticulous records and an annual census for their taxation. The Temple and King Herod also kept census data, as they too taxed the entire population. All three taxation systems were extremely organised, complex and sophisticated.
It is unlikely that any new, unusual tax or census, especially one that meant many people had to travel to the town of their family name, could have existed without there being a record of it.
So how did the census story originate? The story comes from Mary. It is possible she was told they were going to Bethlehem because of a census to save her feelings, so she didn’t realise her in-laws didn’t want her in their home for a ‘premature’ birth. Possibly, to be counted for that year’s (ordinary) census, they had to be at a place where they could be counted by a certain time.
Those who listened to Mary telling her story in Judea at the time would have known there was no special census, or any need for one. Possibly the census ‘fact’ was added at a later date. But as I said, it is only almost certain there was no census. King Herod was erratic in his old age, and it’s possible he did introduce a new local census, one that the Romans didn’t bother to record, especially in the bureaucratic fuss following his death soon after, and all records of it have been lost, except those in the Gospels.
As far as we know, no specific record of Mary’s teachings was ever made. It is possible, however, that such a text from that time, or the following two or three hundred years, may still be found. Early written works about those times are still being discovered and, if possible, deciphered; often a task that takes years, as the words are faded and the material fragile. The ‘Gospel of Mary’, which is based on two slightly different fragments of text, is the account of another Mary, the woman who saw Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This account has only recently been recovered, restored, translated and published — and doesn’t add anything new to the Gospels except to confirm what we already know: that the close followers of Jesus included women and that Simon Peter had a hot temper.
For most of the last two thousand years, in most of the world’s cultures, women might be venerated, but were rarely respected. The recorded acts and words of Jesus of Nazareth, however, and those of Rabbi Akiba a few years after Jesus’s death, indicate that in that time and place a few women were among the well-known teachers and writers who interpreted the law and religious philosophy. Women also played a major role in the Celtic Christian Church for hundreds of years, but as the customs of Rome took over, much of the history of women’s roles has been censored, forgotten or just not mentioned.
Much more is known of Judean life and customs of 71 AD, before war disrupted or destroyed so much Judean culture, as well as of Roman laws and life of the time. The customs and beliefs in this book are as close to accurate as I can make them. It must be remembered, however, that the area where this story takes place was home to many cultures then, not just Jewish. Some villages were entirely Jewish, others mostly Gentile, but it is possible that in that time, in that area, the different cultures influenced each other
more than we might realise.
Most authorities estimate that one-third of the population of Judea was Jewish, with many other nationalities living there too, all ruled by Rome but with some political independence. In fact, Judea, and the Jewish people who lived there, had much more freedom than in many other places in the Roman Empire because Judea wasn’t important — until its people rebelled.
This story also takes place during a time of vicious war, devastation and rebellion. Perhaps over a million people were killed; and ninety-seven thousand enslaved. As most of the men would have been defending Jerusalem, or in the army, or already slain, many of the usual social and even religious rituals would have been impossible or curtailed, and not known or understood by Judith, the young heroine of this book, who had spent most of the two years before this book began herding sheep, not being taught to keep house as a good Jewish wife should (as her sisters were).
It is also important to understand that it would be hundreds of years before Christianity became not just legal and widespread, but also reasonably unified in its stories and beliefs. We often forget that over the past two thousand years many wars have been fought about what Christians ought to believe. At the time this book is set, there were major divisions. Were the teachings of Jesus for Jewish people only? Did Christians who hadn’t been born Jewish have to follow all the Jewish laws? Was Jesus a prophet, or a messiah come to save Judea? Was he a son of God, or The Son of God? It was still a long time before the common Christian concept of the Holy Trinity would be developed.
Even the Gospels tell different parts of Jesus’s life, and none pretend to tell all of it. They are teachings, not biography. Some of my favourite books too are where the writer — or the teachers and apostles the writers took their stories from — say, ‘We did not understand.’
The beliefs of the Christian Church now are mostly those of the survivors, whose swords were more plentiful and sharper, or who had greater political clout, than those who disagreed with their theology. The church also relies on texts translated not just from Greek and Aramaic, but from dialects of both, and even dialects of Koine, the colloquial form of Greek used throughout the Roman Empire. Many of the words and phrases have lost the context in which they were spoken. My favourite ‘loss of context’ is Jesus’s saying that it is as hard for a rich man to enter Heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. We think of sewing boxes when we hear that saying, but back then a ‘needle’ was a small door in the main gate of a city or village. The main gate was closed at night so bandits or armed robbers on horseback couldn’t charge in. But travellers on foot could enter using the ‘needle’. That mistranslation doesn’t matter theologically, but it does show us the many misunderstandings that can arise when so much depends on words written in languages no longer spoken, and in times so different from our own.
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