“By the name of Yahaveh!” said Yehoshuah, and the people gasped, because this is the true name of God, which is never to be spoken aloud, except by the High Priest in the holiest place in the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, but Yehoshuah spoke it in this backwater village for the curing of one demon-infested man. “By the name of Yahaveh, come out of him!”
And hearing this forbidden name of power, the man’s whole body stiffened, his back arched and he let out a wild scream. The people said afterwards that they had never been more sure they heard a demon in all their days. In neighboring villages, they said they had heard that scream, five miles distant.
It lasted for the time of ten breaths, and everyone heard that it was the sound of the demon leaving the man’s body. Some said they saw black smoke rise up from his mouth, but Iehuda did not see it, only the clouds of dust he raised from his thrashing. But when the scream ended the man was still and it was obvious that the demon had left him.
A boy at the back of the crowd suddenly called out, “A snake!”
And they turned, terrified, expecting a giant snake, a demon the size of a man. But it was just a mottled viper, lazily coiled behind some rocks.
“The demon has gone into it!” shouted someone, and another boy picked up a stone and threw it at the snake. Then more and more pelted it, and though it arched its back and bared its fangs just like the demon-haunted man had done, it could not win against so many and soon enough it was dead.
They brought the limp, crushed snake to the man, dangling it by its tail. He was sitting up now and blinking, probing his bitten tongue with one finger as the bloody saliva spilled from his mouth. Though the demon was gone from him, he was not as a normal man—no one could expect it—he seemed dazed, and frowned and muttered, but he did not growl or hiss any longer. He blinked at the snake as they laid it beside him.
“That was your demon,” said one of them. “Burn it and you will be free forever.”
But Yehoshuah smiled and clasped the man’s hand.
“Your faith in God and in His holy name has set you free,” he said.
That night the village killed three yearling goats to feed them. And the next morning, when they walked on, more than ten men and women of the village came with them.
There had been others traveling with Yehoshuah before Iehuda arrived, but Iehuda knew that he was special to him. Yehoshuah could tell him things the others could not understand.
After Yehoshuah had taken the snake demon out of the man in Kfar Nachum, they sat up talking long after the others were sleeping the sleep of those whose bellies are filled with roasted goat.
“How does God tell you,” said Iehuda, “which to cure?”
Yehoshuah thumbed the edge of his sleeping blanket.
“I can see,” he said, “which demons will listen to me.”
Iehuda lay back on his own blanket.
“I knew a man in Qeriot ran mad with a demon,” he said. “He would dash his head against walls.”
“Demons make men do such things,” said Yehoshuah.
“But when his mother spoke to him,” said Iehuda, “he became calm. For a while. It was only after she died that the demon would not let him be. He died of that demon, but while his mother was alive he could hearken to her voice and not the demon’s.”
Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire with a stick.
“Is it like that with you?” said Iehuda.
Yehoshuah shrugged. “I do not understand what you are asking me.”
“If a demon listens to a man’s mother,” Iehuda said, “it is not because the mother has power over the demon. The mother has power over the man. The name you spoke today has power over all men. Not just demons, but men as well.”
Yehoshuah threw back his head and laughed.
“This questioning is the wisdom I taught you,” he said. “Use it always with me. You are right. I do not know how I do what I do. When I speak, the demons may listen, but what happens next is in God’s hands.”
They walked on and their host became bigger. Mighty. A multitude. There started to be another group too, among those who came to hear Yehoshuah speak, or watch him doing his cures and casting out demons. They were the other rabbis. They were only to be expected. They came to wrestle with him.
Some met him boldly. In Emek, Ezra the Teacher challenged him to debate and after they had finished calling one another fools Ezra held Yehoshuah close to his breast and brought them all in for supper. In Me’etz, they set up two great piles of stones and had Yehoshuah and their own teacher, Nechemiah, preach atop them. In Refek, the people asked Yehoshuah questions in turn until his patience was utterly exhausted and he cried out that no man could bear such an assault without a cask of wine.
They tried to trip him up, and find the flaw, and winkle out his hidden assumptions and specious reasoning. For Iehuda, these were the most glorious days. Everyone knew that the debates were the “arguments for the sake of heaven” of which the sages speak with praise.
The more a man argues with you, the more he respects you. The more he tries to pick holes in your argument, the gladder is the Holy One Who is in All Places. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai argued with each other so fiercely that their followers attacked one another bodily—several of their students were killed in these fights. And though this is to be regretted, their ardor for debate is commendable. For how are we to hear the infinitely stranded voice of God except in the grappling voices of those who care about the Torah and seek out its never fully graspable truth?
Some rabbis were merely angry, of course. Lesser men and weak men. Every part of the world contains men who cannot bear to hear their words questioned. They are people who believe that only their purple robe or their silver chain gives them power over others. They forget that Moses had only a staff of wood and stuttered when he spoke. And there were such men in Yehoshuah’s camp too—some of his followers could not bear to hear him questioned, just as some of the rabbis could not bear to hear his criticism.
But the best men on each side rejoiced in the fight, chewing on the muscle of it, crunching at the bones of it. And when the arguments were done, in the light of early dawn, more men and more women walked on with them to the next village, and the next.
It was about this time that there started to be twelve of them. The closest ones, the inner circle. Iehuda would not have imagined that the group could grow so large as to need an inner circle, but it had done so. They needed to exclude the provocateurs in their midst sowing dissent or spying for Rome. There were spies, of course. Yehoshuah needed trusted men.
He came to each of them separately, whispering that he had need of their counsel, their eyes and ears. It took Iehuda a little time to work out who the other trusted men were. He noticed that, although there had been many questioners in the outer circle, he was the only one in that inner group who had been known to argue back, to challenge in open meeting.
There had been a time when they made no distinctions. At Beit Saida, when everyone had shared a single meal, Yehoshuah had seemed to be saying that all distinctions would be swept away. But now Iehuda was the only speck of dissent left in the inner circle. He could not speak to the others.
“Do you know what they are saying of you?” he asked.
Yehoshuah frowned, but said nothing. They were alone, by the fire. It was late at night and the others were asleep. It was like it had been at the start. There were not enough such nights now.
“They are saying that you are the Messiah. The one we wait for. The true son of David. The one who will end all disease and suffering. The one whose arrival we will know because there will be no more war and all the dead will rise from the grave.”
He wanted to carry on, to list all the different kinds of magic that the Messiah would do, to make Yehoshuah laugh. He wanted so much for him to laugh. If Yehoshuah laughed, then Iehuda could laugh too, and they could go back to talking about remaking the world through their work and struggle an
d not waiting for God to bless them with miracles when the true son of David was on the throne.
He did not laugh.
“Are you going to make a lion lie down with a lamb?” said Iehuda, and there was accusation in his voice. “Are you going to rebuild all the cities that have been destroyed?”
Yehoshuah spoke very low and quietly: “Who knows what may happen through God’s will?”
There was no argument against this. But still Iehuda knew what he knew in his heart.
“I think some of them already believe it,” he said. “You should tell them to stop saying it, even among themselves.”
Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire.
“It is not for me to stop them. They must speak the truth as they find it.”
And Iehuda wanted to shake him by the shoulders, to slap his face, to say: for God’s sake, man, all that we have worked for, all that we have talked about. But he saw that it was too late for that.
“You have begun to believe it yourself, haven’t you?” and his voice was angry and he could not stop it. “You’ve listened to what they’ve said about you. Like Herod, who could only hear the flattery of his sycophants, you have listened to it too much.”
Yehoshuah became pale and still. His nostrils flared, his eyes reflecting the dying fire, and he said, “Do you think that you know the will of God better than I?”
And Iehuda remembered the man who had taught him to listen to the knowledge of his own heart, and to think out each precept like a Greek, testing it for the signs of truth and for what could be learned from it.
“I think,” he said, very slowly, “that if God has chosen you, He will tell us in his own time, and until then we should not think of it.”
Yehoshuah smiled at that. His old, easy smile.
“Is this my own wisdom you are handing back to me?”
“Yes.” Iehuda smiled too. “If you cannot tell them ‘I am not he,’ then at least do not think of it until God makes it all very clear. Or,” and he laughed, “until the hour of your death. For if you die without becoming the king, we will know you were not the Messiah.”
“I shall have to repent of my folly on my deathbed, then,” said Yehoshuah, and chuckled, and leaned back on the heels of his hands.
It was a little time after that that he sent them out across the land to spread his words and to heal the sick. It did not matter that they said, “I cannot heal as you heal, I do not have the power as you have it”; he touched them on the brow and murmured, “Do what you can.” And they went to try to do what they could. They would meet again in three weeks and bring with them new followers or not as God willed it.
It was clever, also, to disband at this time. The group had grown too large. There had begun to be spies from the local authorities at the edges of the gatherings. A quiet cluster of them sometimes, listening to the words, watching the mood of the people. Any man who can lead a rabble is a threat to an empire. To love their enemies did not mean to submit to them. Rome was interested in anything that stirred people up. So they broke apart, for Rome would have broken them otherwise.
Iehuda set off in high excitement. Most of the other men had gone in pairs but he, and some others, had decided each to go alone. To see what God meant for him to do. And so he came to the place.
It was a village in the east. He does not remember the name now, and he will never go there again. A small place, perhaps eight or nine homes with fields all on hillsides, so that it was with effort that the seed was sown and with pain it was reaped. A place where the living was hard. He arrived in the evening, a preacher in the name of Yehoshuah, whom two or three of them had seen before in Galilee. They fed him soup of lentils and hard bread and he knew it was more than they could afford. When he was left alone in one of the shacks by the field he looked into an earthenware grain store. It was empty, save for two dead wasps at the bottom of the jar.
And there they brought him a boy. The child was perhaps ten years old and crippled. He had a misshapen leg: the bone of it was bent and the knee joint swollen and the skin sore and the whole leg crushed by the weight of his body, so that he had to support himself on a stick. His armpit was blistered from the place where the stick rested. His whole body was overturned by that leg.
Iehuda’s heart leapt out of his body when he saw that boy, and his spirit flew over to him and touched the boy’s heart. He felt it. This poor crippled child needed the love and mercy of God more than anyone he had ever seen. He felt the sore places as if they were on his own leg, and the crooked bone as if it were his bone, and the stiff, aching, oozing joint as if it were his own body crying out in pain.
He prayed to God as he had learned as a child, calling him “Father.” Father, he said, heal this child, take his suffering from him, make him whole as I am whole. Do not refuse, as a father would never withhold water from his thirsty child if he had it. Father, you have the healing of this child in your hands. He felt the power in him, the tingling in his fingertips, the heat in the palm of his hand, and he knew that when he touched the boy the power would flow out of him, and as he lowered his hand he was already saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He thought of the men and women he had seen Yehoshuah heal with his touch, how the demons of pain fled from their bodies, how their backs unbent and their flesh became whole. And the boy on his mother’s knee, both of them looking at him with such trust because everyone had seen the power of God working through Yehoshuah to cure any affliction.
“Thank you,” said Iehuda under his breath as he lowered his hands onto the twisted limb, “thank you, Father, for making me your conduit to do this holy work.” And he grasped the leg with his hands so full of warmth, as if his arm were the outstretched arm of the Almighty, as if his fingers were the mighty hand of God.
Later, when they gathered again as Yehoshuah had told them, the disciples sat around the campfire and told their tales. Mattisyahu told how he had cured the boils of a man afflicted for ten years with this horrible skin disease. A good storyteller, he made them all imagine the suppurating wounds, the pus flowing out from every sore place, the stench of rot on the man’s clothes and the contortion of his face every time he moved and the cloth rubbed against one of his agonizing pustules. Mattisyahu said that he had called upon the name of God, that he had prayed as he had been taught, and when one of the women bathed the man’s legs they found that the sores came off as they washed and that the flesh underneath was new and whole and without pain. “Like the skin of a new-shorn lamb,” said Mattisyahu.
There were other stories like this. Netan’el had cast out seven demons from a woman in Be’er Sheva who had previously spat like a camel and cursed and screeched at anyone who tried to approach her. He had seen the demons rise from her like smoke, he said, like white ash flying up from a fire made of very old dry wood. The demons rose into a tree and went into a flock of birds nesting there, who shat mightily upon the people gathered to watch. But the people were handy with their slingshots and stones and brought the birds down, so then the demons were no more.
Yehoshuah listened to these tales calmly, nodding when one of the disciples mentioned a prayer he had used, or a way he had found to bring greater faith to the people watching.
When it came to Iehuda’s turn, he told his story quickly. He had none of Mattisyahu’s gift with a yarn.
“There was a boy,” he said, “he had a bandy leg, and I called on God by name as my father and the boy’s leg was healed.”
The others clapped him on the back and thanked God for the great miracle.
Yehoshuah looked at him shrewdly and said nothing.
Iehuda wondered how many of them had lied as he’d done. Was Mattisyahu’s tale, full of incident and detail, just an elaborate deception? Was Philip’s simple story of a blind woman given sight a sign that he, like Iehuda, was too embarrassed to say more than a few words?
Iehuda had laid his hands on the boy’s leg. He felt the power in him, in his heart and his hands, a warm ti
ngling rush inside his whole body, the spirit of God moving him, so that he understood why God is called a terror as well as a love. He felt the power go into the boy, and praised the name of God, the one who is and was and will be.
And the boy smiled, and shivered, a shudder going through him. And the leg twitched. And the boy said, “It is so warm!” And he moved his leg and said, “It moves more easily.” But it was not healed. They could all see it. It was still bent, and the sore place in the skin was still raw and he could not put his weight on it.
The boy’s mother looked at Iehuda.
“You may be a man of God,” she said, “but there is no power in you.”
The boy’s father shushed her, and the boy protested that the pain was a little easier, that it would surely mend. But the mother, who knew her son’s body better than her own, knew that nothing had changed.
They offered him a bed for the night still, a place by the fire and a meal for his trouble. And in the morning, when he woke by the ashes of the fire in the lean-to, he saw the boy limping across the yard, dragging his leg. When the boy saw Iehuda, he tried to straighten himself, to smile.
“It is easier already!” he cried, and Iehuda gave a sickened smile in return.
But the mother looked at them both from the door of the house with dark and angry eyes. And Iehuda left, not stopping to break his fast.
He thought, on the slow, dragging walk back, of what Yehoshuah would have done. Had he been there he would have said, “The cure is not in me but in God,” or he would have said, “God has not chosen to bless you in this way, I am sorry for it,” and he would have told them a tale that proved that those who suffered were the most beloved, that God had them close in his heart. Yehoshuah would have told him that the power was not for him to command.
And if Yehoshuah had said those things to him, he still would have known that his faith had been weak, and that was why the boy was not healed. He had seen Yehoshuah do it. The other disciples said they had done it. And the worm chewed at his heart, because he knew that God had not favored him.
The Liars' Gospel: A Novel Page 10
