Why the shameful whisper?
When I asked him, he told us in a definitive tone that a woman’s body was a vessel for evil.
No one had dared speak such slander in my presence in decades – owing perhaps to my well-known pride in the accomplishments of my daughters – and my shock made me realize I would have to be even more careful about what I revealed to him about my life. As to how a virgin had come to be with child, Kalev told me that the Lord of Hosts went to Maryam’s bed and lay with her, to which I said, ‘You mean, of course, that God gave her a child through the person of her husband Yosef.’
‘No, that’s not what I mean at all!’ he snarled, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. When I took a long inquisitive look at him – to see if he truly wished to offend me – he showed me a defiant look.
I longed to reveal to him I had known Yeshua’s father very well, and that he had been devoted to his wife in both spirit and flesh, but I could not.
After he had finished his explanation of Yeshua’s birth, I leaned back in my chair – to seem less threatening – and likened his story to the legend of the virgin birth of Alexandros of Macedonia that is told throughout the Greek-speaking world. I told him that it is generally only believed by small children.
Kalev glared at me and gripped his silver dove. In a haughty voice, he assured me that Yeshua had been a far more powerful king than Alexandros. ‘And if you do not believe in Yeshua’s divine birth,’ he added in a threatening tone, ‘eternal life will not be granted you.’
Divine birth? I realized then that I had chosen the wrong comparison; Kalev and his friends had not turned Yeshua into Alexandros but rather into Pharaoh!
I was pleased that he threatened me, however, since that enabled me to be give voice to my growing resentment and frustration.
‘But if Maryam was pregnant, then why did Yosef marry her?’ I demanded.
‘The child did not yet show in her womb,’ he replied confidently.
‘So she tricked Yosef ?’
‘No, she confessed to him that the Almighty had impregnated her.’
‘Which she knew because she had gone to the bed of the Lord and permitted Him to enter her, so to speak?’
‘An angel appeared to her,’ Kalev told me, ‘and he explained to her how she had come to be with child.’
‘And how did this angel come to learn of her condition?’
‘The Lord told him.’
‘And Yosef believed Maryam’s story?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘For what reason?’
Kalev jumped up and banged on our table. ‘Because he trusted his wife!’ he shouted in frustration.
‘But she was not yet his wife,’ I pointed out.
‘No, but she was betrothed to him.’
‘Betrothed and pregnant … So why wasn’t she stoned to death as an adulteress? Or, at the very least, sent away by her parents as a common whore?’
‘Because she wasn’t any of those things! I told you – the Lord had placed His child in her!’
‘How old are you, Kalev ben Enoch?’ I asked, knowing then that I was about to give in to my own worst impulses but unable to stop myself.
‘Thirty-seven,’ he said.
‘And were you ever dropped as a baby? Or perhaps hit on your head by your father with a mallet?’
Kalev turned to our host. ‘Why does this friend of yours insist on provoking me?’
‘Because’, I replied, ‘you have expressed the single most childish understanding of the way God works through men and women – and all the creatures of the woodlands and meadows – that I’ve ever heard. My daughters, by the time they were seven years old, understood more than you do – and simply from watching the insects that crawl and rabbits who hop and all that participates every day in the Lord’s creation.’
To my astonishment, Kalev made his hands into fists. ‘You’re a heretic!’ he shouted. ‘And if you persist in your ways, the Lord will punish you!’
I never spoke another word to Kalev. After offering a quick apology to Agapetos, I rushed out of his house and made my way home.
As I sat fuming in my prayer room, it was Melitta’s face that came to me, and I saw again that idiosyncratic smile of hers that seemed to reveal so much of her despair and shame.
After a time, my memories of our conversation reminded me that she and her fellow Christians were clearing a new path forward, and that it was inevitable that they would occasionally find themselves steered on to dangerous byways by leaders with selfish objectives – arrogant men eager to charge those who disagreed with them with heresy.
Perhaps the first Galilean Jews had seemed as wrongheaded to their brethren as these Christians now seemed to me.
Listening again to my conversation with Melitta also reminded me that those men and women who believed in Yeshua’s divine birth were – like all of us – looking for the doorway out of their suffering, and they therefore deserved my understanding and empathy.
If you’d have remained calm, you could have tried to help Kalev see a different way forward, Melitta now told me in my mind. If not for his own benefit, then for me.
This wise counsel now seemed the reason why the Lord – or Yeshua – had brought us together. And that night, while sitting on my roof and searching out the constellations, I even began to consider that I had lost my way in Alexandria’s Jewish quarter precisely so that she could help me overcome my outrage and resentment.
I sent a letter the next day to Yaaqov about my troubling conversation with Kalev, confessing my own intolerant and rude behaviour, and he informed me in his reply that entire communities – tens of thousands of adherents in Zion alone – hold Yeshua’s virgin birth as a fundamental belief. ‘Worse,’ he wrote, ‘they have come to worship my mother as a goddess – the wife of the Lord – which is why they refer to Yeshua as the son of God.’
Yaaqov added that he would not have been surprised now to learn that they believe that what dripped from the nail-wounds in his brother’s heels was not the red blood of mortality but golden ichor.
While writing of his mother, he informed me that she had had to move a number of times over the previous decade and now lived far beyond the borders of Zion. She has taken an assumed name, because the moment her identity becomes known hundreds of pilgrims appear at her door wishing to worship her as if she were an idol.
‘How can they really believe I’m a goddess when my beloved son was crucified in front of me and there was nothing I could do?’ she wrote to me recently through a cousin of hers who has become our go-between. She fears for her life and never leaves her home during the day – and never without a bodyguard.
I have invited her to stay in my home as long as she likes, for I am convinced that her worshippers will not discover her in so isolated and unexpected a refuge, but she told me that for the time being she will remain in her chosen hiding place.
Of course, I wrote to her that if these sectarians had once seen Yeshua and Yosef together they would have immediately noticed their resemblance, but she and I both know that their insistence that her beloved husband was not her eldest son’s father is but a minor flaw in their reasoning compared to their veneration of Yeshua as a Jewish Pharaoh of divine birth. Such a ludicrous belief proves that they understand very little of the man I knew. Indeed, if they are like Kalev, they cannot even comprehend that when Yosef put his seed in Maryam the Lord of Benevolence was working through him, just as He is at work in all acts of creation!
They have eyes unable to see. And ears unable to hear.
And here is something that I ought not tell you, Yaphiel, but my fear that they may one day try to move you to join them keeps me from stilling my calamus: if we employ the poetic language favoured by Mosheh in his Torah, then we may indeed say that Yeshua is the son of God, but then, to be fair, we must also say that I am also His son, as is every man who has ever been born – just as every woman is His daughter.
We are all of us childr
en of Havvah and Adam. God does his work on earth with our hands and eyes and lips.
Let me make my point even clearer: Kalev and his friends believe that the Almighty is not manifest in His creation – not manifest in each of us. They hold that He lives apart from us in some far-off Eden.
Presumably, this distant paradise lies somewhere near the Cloudcuckooland that Aristophanes describes in The Birds, but you will have to ask them about its exact location, since I would prefer not to know.
When Yeshua told us all that the Kingdom of Heaven was within us, were they too busy counting heretics to hear him?
I doubt you have ever met anyone who could see three decades into the future, Yaphiel, but believe me when I tell you that there are men who can. On occasion, they are born amongst us, and they look exactly like us, but their higher soul lives a part of each day in the Hekhal ha-Melekh.
I think now that it is just possible that Yeshua saw across the length and breadth of his life – following a thread of destiny too slight for the rest of us to see – until he glimpsed how his message would one day become distorted and betrayed.
Now, nearly thirty years after his death, he is counting on my help.
Even if this speculation is madness, I have to defend him against those who would sculpt him into an idol and worship at his feet. What other choice do I have?
If I am right, then he did not bring me back to life to save him on Golgotha, as I used to believe. Instead, he resurrected me in flesh and spirit because he knew that he would need me one day far into the future.
Our greeting was always I answered you in the hiding place of thunder. It took me until after his death to realize that he chose those words because I would one day need to remember the very next verse: I tested you at the waters of Meribah!
Yes, I am convinced that he put me on trial in the River Jordan to see if I would be willing to risk everything for him now.
Twenty-nine years ago, a wounded man named Ehud told me that your mother – then a baby – might one day tell me why my life was of such importance to Yeshua. It seems now that he was almost right; it was not your mother who told me but you!
Only you could force me to return to my past.
Only you could bring me back to Yerushalayim.
So, my answer is Yes, I will take you there.
I must go, in fact.
It was the Angel Raphael who told Tobit to write down all that had happened to him. And, like that righteous Naphtalite, I have written what I know of Yeshua and all that happened to us over the days prior to his death.
I shall tell you much more about him along our journey. And I shall initiate you into the mysteries you will need to know in order to understand why I refer to him as the Living Torah.
Yirmi will want to return with us to the city of his birth. And Nahara and Ilana may wish to come as well.
Once we are there, I shall go to Yohanon and Yaaqov, and I shall ask them to help us. Perhaps Maryam of Magdala will join us as well.
Of late, Yaphiel, I have begun to feel a potent vibration inside me in the morning – as if the world is singing through my body. It is, I think, a kind of silent ecstasy and gratitude – for Yeshua’s having chosen me.
I sense, too, that hope is beginning to stir again – to flex its muscles and renew its strength. Both inside me and in all the myriad creatures who inhabit our world. And even in the sun and moon.
Life takes us places we could never have expected. And only one man could have predicted what I would need to request of you at this time.
As you know, I dwell now in the kingdom of old age, and it happens that I have been deliberating about my mortality of late. I have come to understand, in fact, that I have neglected an important duty: I must select a man or woman to inherit my knowledge of Yeshua.
I hope you will not be frightened to learn that I have chosen you.
Will you come to find this an onerous inheritance? I hope not.
I ask that you occasionally reread what I have written for you and heed what I shall tell you on our journey. It will be an immeasurable comfort to me to know that you will guard and protect all that I am able to tell you of Yeshua.
It may be the greatest sadness of all to think that we shall be unable to pass on what we have learned to those who come after us, but we can try.
Show this scroll to those whom you can trust. If you come to be threatened, then pass it around in secret. Some day – whether five years from now or five thousand – men and women will want to know that Yeshua was neither a king nor Pharaoh.
Yes, this will undoubtedly be a burden to you at times, but it will also be, I think, a source of joy and comfort.
And, when the time comes, when you find yourself as stooped and frail as I am now – when you sense the end of your individual journey approaching – choose a worthy man or woman or child to take on this responsibility.
Ask me any questions you like as we talk of these days gone by and the mysteries that informed them. Doubts are good; they are proof that our minds are sojourning in lands far from home.
Perhaps I knew a Yeshua that the others did not, and the man I have described to you is vastly different from the one they would sketch and paint for you. That is as it ought to be, of course; we are each wide and deep enough to be many things, and we change shape and colour any number of times over the course of our lives, and we are often contradictory. Sometimes we have wings and at other times two arms and legs.
I would not expect my Yeshua to be the same man who appeared to Yohanon, Maryam or anyone else. Let them write of him if they want, and we shall put all our accounts together.
I do not know what we shall find in Zion. At times, you may hear me reviled and cursed for what I plan to tell Yeshua’s followers. That will be hard for both of us. Still, we shall keep on walking, remembering always the teaching that Yeshua once gave Melitta – that a journey well travelled is a glorious accomplishment in itself.
A warning: I would not be entirely surprised to find Yeshua in Yerushalayim or Natzeret or somewhere along a hidden byway, either as himself or in the body of another man or woman. If he is alive, then he must be hiding where none of us would expect him to be. And waiting.
We shall look for him and call to him in our thoughts. And he will answer us any way he can.
The oak where I found your mother must be a towering giant by now, if it has not been cut down by the Romans. We shall thank it for keeping your mother safe until I could find her.
A second warning: if we come to be threatened or menaced by Roman soldiers or other men with swords, I shall send you and the rest of my family back to Rodos without me. I vowed long ago not to risk the lives of my children and grandchildren, and I shall not go back on that pledge.
This is Yeshua’s final test for me, and I do not intend to fail him.
But do not worry about me. If my life must end at the tip of a sword, then so be it. My journey has been blessed with more affection and friendship than I could ever have hoped for.
And I shall not be alone, for he will be with me.
56
Dearest Yaphiel, I have been looking for a way to introduce the first of the mysteries to you – of what is often called the Sacred Treasure – before we set out on our journey. Last night, while seated in my prayer room, under my terebinth tree, a brief story came to me. It is not true – in the sense that Yeshua never greeted the visitor I write about. Yet it is true enough, for it will tell you about the Sacred Treasure in a way that is consistent with his teachings.
What I write here might very well have happened – indeed, it has taken place many times in the world that exists beyond the one we see. Through it, I hope you will begin to understand that, although we are certain we are creatures of a particular time and place, we are nothing of the kind. We are, in fact, a great deal more than that.
Will Yeshua come to you as you read my words? I hope so, because I know he would wish to tell you this particular tale himself.
A young sandal-maker from Isfahan once dreamed of jewels and gold hidden in the walls of the City of David in Yerushalayim. In his dream, a strangely familiar voice coming out of a thick mist told him that he would only be able to find happiness by taking possession of this treasure, so over the course of three months he travelled across desert and mountain to reach Judaea. When, at last, he found himself by the walls of the City of David, he realized he had not had any notion of their grandeur. He understood that it might take him many years, if ever, to locate the treasure.
And even then, how could he claim it as his own?
Yeshua was passing by at that very moment, on his way to have supper with me and my family in Bethany. After introducing himself to the Persian, he asked him the reason for his grim countenance. The young man decided it would be best to tell this humbly dressed but kind-hearted resident of Yerushalayim the truth; perhaps he could locate the treasure and they could divide it equally.
After he had heard the sandal-maker’s story, Yeshua said to him, ‘I have often had a similar dream, but in mine the treasure is hidden in Isfahan. It is in a house on a street near the Temple of the followers of Zarathustra.’
Yeshua and the Persian discussed the appearance of the houses and shops in this dream. By making use of clues that the young man unwittingly gave him, Yeshua was able to contrive a detailed description of the visitor’s own street.
‘The treasure … it’s on the street where I live!’ exclaimed the Persian excitedly.
‘I suspected as much when I saw you,’ Yeshua replied.
‘Tell me more about the house where the treasure is hidden.’
‘I saw flowers in the courtyard – pink oleander, or perhaps they were some other flower that I mistook for –’
‘Might they have been roses?’ the man interrupted.
‘Yes, I think you might be right,’ Yeshua told him, and he closed his eyes tightly, feigning deep concentration. ‘They were lovely – a certain shade of … is it red? Or perhaps the colour of fire, or maybe even …’
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 40
