Ester had once spoken with this Theophanus, whom she referred to as a man of considerable magic. He had told her that he had seen Yeshua preach in the Galilee on three occasions when he was a young man, and he further avowed to her that my old friend had initiated him into the mysteries of Yechezkel’s Chariot in Capernaum. Since that seemed entirely possible, I slipped out of the house that evening to hear him preach, going in secret because I feared that emotions long dormant might overwhelm me.
As might to be expected – after so long an absence from Alexandria – I promptly lost my way in the labyrinthine streets of the main Jewish quarter. I questioned several passers-by to no avail, but a young woman, noticing my despair, came to my aid.
I studied her with curious attention, for not only did she possess the dark enigmatic beauty one often sees in Egyptians but she was missing the tips of three of the fingers on her right hand.
When I told her of my destination, her luminous green eyes opened wide with surprise, and she informed me that the Lord had guided me well, since she herself was a member of Theophanus’ congregation. After I introduced myself, she told me that her name was Melitta and that she had been born and raised in Heliopolis.
Our destination proved to be close by, and, since it was too early to go inside, I invited her to sit with me on the outdoor patio of a tavern in a nearby square. When I offered her wine or posca, she gazed down at her feet and hugged her arms around her chest, as though fearing my anger, and she said – in a diffident voice – that she would be happy with just a cup of water.
If anyone had asked me for my assessment of Melitta at that instant, I would have said that she was giving me tacit proof that she had been brutalized at some time in her life.
When I asked how she had come to meet Theophanus, she told me that he had saved her from what she called a vagrant life, and, by way of explanation, she said that she had been orphaned at the age of ten and had turned to begging and thievery.
By that point in our conversation, Melitta had already proved so articulate that I found it hard to believe that she had received no education, but she assured me that she could neither read nor write and that she had made her home in the forests and fields until she first heard Theophanus preaching shortly after her twenty-first birthday. She was now twenty-four.
To explain her extensive vocabulary, she told me that Theophanus and his disciples read aloud to those who studied with them. ‘I have heard all of Mosheh’s scripture,’ she told me with pride. ‘So if I can speak sensibly now, it’s because I have listened closely to his words.’
Melitta went on to tell me that she never stayed in one place for more than a week until she met Theophanus. ‘I moved around more than most thieves,’ she told me, ‘because I even stole food from the altars in the Greek temples – from Zeus and Athena and all the other divinities. And, although I told myself I believed in nothing and no one, I feared their revenge and always hurried away to the next town or village. Sometimes I even risked travelling at night.’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘Perhaps I wanted the gods to take revenge on me by sending bandits to chase me down and hurt me.’
She shook her head in judgement at the reckless waif she’d been, then smiled while shrugging, as if to say that her difficult times no longer mattered. Curiously, her fleeting smile seemed a cry for help more than anything else.
‘Were you ever caught by town officials or the people you stole from?’ I asked.
‘Yes, and I was flogged and beaten many times.’ She raised her disfigured hand. ‘A bailiff in Berea chopped off the ends of my fingers so that everyone would know I was a wicked girl. Then he bound me with rope and left me for dead in the mountains to the west of the city.’
‘But you survived even that.’
‘Yes. The Lord guided two peasants to me – elderly sisters – and they took me in.’ She shakes her head again. ‘I ended up thanking them by stealing all their silver.’
‘Was it Theophanus who put an end to all that?’
‘Yes, he fed me and clothed me,’ she said with a solemn nod, ‘and he spoke to me of the flame of the Lord that, despite all the terrible things I’d done, was still flickering inside me.’ She took a long, pensive sip of her water. ‘On my request, his followers taught me a trade as well. I’m a midwife now, Lazarus.’ She was silent for a time, gazing inwardly, considering the turns in her journey, I speculated. ‘Since meeting Rabbi Theophanus … How can I explain to you? Only now do I realize that it was my own shame that led me around for eleven years.’ She looked around, this way and that. ‘My shame pursues me now – every moment of every day. I can’t even imagine myself entirely free of it.’
Her intelligence and honesty made me feel as if I had stumbled upon a woman I was meant to meet. Still, I wondered why she trusted me enough to tell me her story, and, after speaking to her briefly about my life on Rodos, I managed – hesitantly and awkwardly – to ask her.
‘Theophanus has counselled me to let my shame reveal itself on occasion. In that way, he says, I will get to know it better, and, when I do, it will stop clamouring for my attention all the time.’
As if to obey his words, she opened her sack to me. Beneath a jumble of beans and gnawed chicken bones was something round and brown that might have been a withered pomegranate. ‘I still hoard my food,’ she told me, ‘like I did when I was just a girl.’
Her sack smelled of decay, and the sour face I made prompted her to close it again and clutch it tightly to her chest. Her eyes were moist when they looked at me.
‘I’m sorry I’ve made you uncomfortable,’ she said.
‘No, please, don’t be. You didn’t do anything wrong. The bad smell … it surprised me, that’s all.’
She nodded her understanding, but I sensed something hard in her now – that she’d reached a wall inside herself beyond which she would not go. At least, not with a stranger.
If Theophanus has such a brave and sensitive young woman as a follower, then I will like him, too, I thought. Still, I dared not confess to her my true identity.
To my questions about what she had learned about Yeshua from Theophanus, she replied that she had come to regard him as the Christos. When I asked what she meant by that Greek term, she replied that the Lord had taught Yeshua the secrets of creation and anointed him as our future king – and asked him to help us create an age of peace and justice.
She added that she was certain that – with the aid of her beloved mentor and other courageous men and women – Yeshua would soon achieve that goal.
‘And yet, he is no longer with us,’ I told her gently.
‘Perhaps not, and yet he speaks to me.’ She brushed some crumbs off the table between us, as though needing to put confusing thoughts in order, which reminded me – achingly – of my sister Mia.
‘In truth, I think that he … he speaks to us all,’ she said reticently. ‘Though most of us are too deaf to hear him.’
‘And what is he trying to tell us?’
She deliberated while gazing at a troupe of acrobats preparing their performance across the square. ‘I don’t know what he wants to tell the others, but whenever I think I can’t go on … when I feel my life has been wasted, he tells me to keep walking. He says that a journey well-travelled is a worthy – even glorious – accomplishment in itself.’
That insight set a warm rain falling inside me, for I remembered a spring shower in Bethany and Yeshua telling me much the same thing – which made it seem as though Yeshua had brought Melitta to me. Though I did not yet know why.
‘You believe me – I see it in you,’ she said, as if it were a great surprise.
‘Yes, of course I do!’
‘And yet sometimes I think I’m not hearing him but only myself,’ she confessed in an embarrassed whisper. Her need for help prompted her to smile again in that strange way of hers. ‘Do you … think I’m mad?’ she asked.
‘What I think, Melitta, is that Yeshua has chosen you,’ I replied, and, raising my hand over
her, I blessed her as he would have.
To comfort her silent weeping, I spoke to her then of my admiration for Yeshua and his teachings. Unfortunately, my longing and affection for him entered my voice while I was discussing how he would embrace the lepers who came to him for help, and she cut me off to ask if I had known him.
‘No, though I wish I had,’ I replied.
‘The way you talk of him … You never even saw him preach from afar?’
‘Never.’
‘You’re certain. Perhaps he –’
‘I think I would have recognized him if I had ever seen him,’ I cut in.
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’
‘I was told that Yeshua sometimes appeared in different guises to different people. When he was with the Father, he was able to transform himself into all sorts of things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Rabbi Theophanus told us that Yeshua once came to him in the form of a bird – a royal ibis. And that they spoke together.’
That news hit me hard, and I began to have second thoughts about accompanying Melitta to the synagogue to hear her teacher preach, and as we walked there I envisaged each step leading me back to Bethany and all that I was not yet prepared to revisit.
Melitta wished to sit with me in the synagogue, but I asked to be able to stand at the back by myself. Two hundred followers were soon seated on the marble flagstones of the room. Another twenty or so stood beside me.
Theophanus entered after the crowd had settled. He was perhaps fifty years of age, strong of build, with thick and unruly brown hair and intensely aware dark eyes. He wore long scarlet robes and a jewelled hosen around his neck, as if he were the high priest of his own temple.
After striding to the front, he turned to face Yerushalayim and spoke the Shema aloud, whereupon we in the audience echoed his words. When his assistants placed lanterns around him in a circle, I was able to see the impressive fresco of Mosheh and the burning bush behind him.
Mosheh will summon the Lord of Sinai to join us this day! I told myself, and the expectancy that gripped me was so sudden and overwhelming that I was forced to chant calming prayers to myself.
After a brief chorus of Psalm-singing accompanied by harp, flute and sistrum players, Theophanus began to preach. He spoke first of the tyranny of Rome that had reduced many amongst us to abject poverty, and his parables – delivered in a slow, commanding rhythm – entered me with such force that my hands and face began to tingle. I sat with my head down, so stunned by his eloquence – my chest banging out a message about homecoming – that I dared not look at him.
Keep listening to him closely! I heard Yeshua tell me.
Indeed, Theophanus soon proved he could inflame those of us in his synagogue with both his poetry and his calls for justice.
And that he knew Torah as well as I did.
And that he could shape silence to his purpose.
Just after he reached a particularly dramatic cadence in his evocation of Yeshua’s teachings, he paused, as if waiting in the shadow of my old friend, and I think that all those assembled before him listened to the night sounds outside the temple in the certainty that the Holy One was telling us of the wonder of all of creation through the screeching cry of a nightbird and rolling of wooden carriage wheels against stone.
And then …
Then he lost me with a single word, and the word was anax, the Greek term for king.
Theophanus avowed that the man who had shown him the light of truth – Yeshua ben Yosef – had been our rightful anax, the inheritor of the sceptre of Shelomoh. ‘Yeshua was not only our king but also the direct descendant of David,’ he told his congregation.
With a moan, I realized that he seemed to have no deeper an understanding of Yeshua than the Romans who had murdered him. Yet the crowd cheered his claims.
How could so many adult men and women believe that Yeshua’s goals had been so trivial? Did they think he rebelled against the priests of the Temple and Emperor in Rome simply because he wished to wear the robes of royalty and collect our taxes?
‘My Kingdom is not of this world,’ he had told us many times. Did they think he was lying?
Theophanus went on to describe Yeshua as the Mashiah who had come to us to strike down our enemies with a sword – to cast them from Egypt and the Land of Zion. In Greek, he referred to Yeshua as the Christ, as Melitta had, though, unlike her, he seemed to understand this term only as an unschooled peasant might – as a general bent on military conquest.
You are turning Yeshua into a Jewish Alexandros of Macedonia! I would have cried had I believed I could make it out of the synagogue with my head still on my shoulders, but an armed bodyguard stood at each of the doors.
Did anyone in the room but me know that Yeshua had asked us to cherish the Romans as our brothers?
When Theophanus told the crowd what now seemed inevitable – that he was Yeshua’s rightful heir – I felt the ground beneath me shiver.
My gaze sought out Melitta – she was seated near the front – and I implored her to turn to me so that I might see what she was thinking. I waited for some time, but she would not face me.
He may be a man of understanding and wisdom, and I know that he has helped you, but he has reduced Yeshua to the size and shape of his own desires, I told her in my mind, and, knowing that she and all the other good people in this synagogue deserved far more, I prayed that Theophanus would lose his ambitions for kingship over the coming years.
Then I gathered up my disappointment, covered my head with my hood and rushed away.
Near the end of our month-long sojourn in Alexandria, I was able to re-establish contact with Yaaqov and Yohanon, who were both living near Yerushalayim. I also began a correspondence with Maryam of Magdala, who had moved years earlier to a place that she wished to keep secret.
Over the past three decades, Yohanon has anxiously recorded the development of the many new sects competing for the hearts of the people of Zion. He tells me that most are composed of Jews who have modified the sacred laws to include beliefs based on their understanding of Yeshua’s teaching. Others, like the congregation presided over by Theophanus, welcome members who had previously worshipped the Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Phoenician divinities.
Maryam of Magdala has asked me never to reveal to anyone – not even my children –where she makes her home because some of these sects show unqualified scorn for women and have threatened her life at meetings where she has spoken of her years of association with Yeshua and her understanding of his teachings.
Several of these new faiths condemn those Jews who refuse to renounce their traditional beliefs as traitors. The most sanctimonious amongst them claim that Yeshua had abandoned Judaism long ago.
Why would he have abandoned his faith? And, if he had, would he not have sought to teach us the tenets of his new religion?
Unfortunately, a number of branches of this divisive and imprudent movement are growing in strength. Yirmi told me recently, for instance, there are now two synagogues in Ephesus for a Greek-speaking sect whose members refer to themselves as Christians and who have abandoned certain traditional commemorations and celebrations, including Yom Kippur. Furthermore, and to my immeasurable outrage, they have added prayers to Yeshua to their liturgy.
Just six months ago, I met one of their emissaries, a rabbi born in Elephantine by the name of Kalev ben Enoch. My friend Agapetos – who has studied Torah with me – met Kalev at our small synagogue and invited me to dine with him as a way of welcoming him to our island.
It was a risk to meet him, of course. After all, if he questioned me about my beliefs about Yeshua, I might once again reveal too much affection for him in my voice – or accidentally mention some facet of his life that only a friend could know. But I was too curious of him and his movement to refuse my friend’s invitation.
Kalev had a fox-like face and vibrant green eyes that charmed me right away. With his
affecting smile and whirling hand gestures, he looked as if he might have made a convincing and popular actor, which made me think fondly of Lucius. In a cheerful voice, he told us of how he had overcome the severe trials he had suffered on his long trip from Egypt, always – and to our delight – emphasizing the amusing details. His beautiful Judaean accent returned my spirit to my home in Bethany.
The silver broach of a dove he wore around his neck was of exquisite workmanship, and he told me that he had commissioned it from a master jeweller working in Caesarea. It symbolized, he said, Yeshua’s purity of spirit and the freedom from death granted to those who believed in his words, which caused a surge of excitement in me.
Might Kalev help me with my own continuing doubts about the afterlife?
Before I dared give voice to my old worries, he asked me about my adaptation to the culture of Rodos, and we laughed together about the misunderstandings that invariably occur when we live in a place whose customs are not our own. As we talked, the moon slipped into the open window of my friend’s cluttered but comfortable dining room, as though to offer our conversation its luminous blessing.
Our words turned sour, however, the moment that he told me that his intent was to establish a synagogue in one of the coastal cities of Thracia. His eyes took on a wolf-like intensity when he spoke of the obstacles some local authorities had put in his way, and, as he leaned over our table, his voice gained an arrogant, abrasive edge.
I thought it best to return to safer ground, and, to my questions about his knowledge of Yeshua’s mission, he told me he had studied with two of his disciples, Andreas and Didymus, whom he described with eloquent and moving affection.
Again we seemed to be moving in the right direction, but when I asked after the fundamental beliefs and requirements of his sect, Kalev started by telling me that Yeshua had been born to a parthenos. Since that merely meant girl in the dialects of Greek that Agapetos and I spoke, we remained confused until he clarified his meaning by confiding – behind the awning of his hand – that Maryam had been a virgin.
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 39
