by Gerald Kersh
He thought a moment, and said: ‘From you, Diomed, your general grounds for belief. Diomed’s considered conjecture carries more weight with me than a judge’s summing up. How many times have you demonstrated to me the fallibility of the eye-witness?’
‘Yes,’ I said, pleased with his sincere vehemence, ‘multiply the witnesses, and you divide the truth. I have, for example, questioned witnesses who swore most solemnly – having nothing to gain and possibly something to lose by so swearing – that they, and hundreds of others, saw Jesus Christ being carried into the sky over Jerusalem, in the arms of two or three angels. He was lying like a man asleep, and his mangled hands hung down. Some of them had drops of his blood on their head-dresses to prove it – neat, star-shaped splashes that couldn’t have fallen from higher than a man’s nose; and any clodhopper who has been sprinkled with blood from a stricken bird will tell you that such drops must make a narrow, pear-shaped splash, never a round one. But still they swore; and when one witness said: “It seemed to me his hands were folded”, half a dozen others were ready to tear him to pieces. There is a point worth remembering, incidentally – their sect is not half formed, and they are already letting the image of their Christ come between themselves and what he preached.’
‘This I know,’ said Paulus. ‘But you were coming to your evidence, not theirs. You have an eye in your mind which is worth a cart-load of the jelly they keep in their skulls.’
‘That was only a case in point. Let us come to the subject of Jesus himself. What are the known facts about this person? There are very few. His birth was registered at Bethlehem. His parents came from Nazareth, a small town. One of Jesus’s brothers, or stepbrothers, is still conducting the old carpenter’s shop where our Nazarene grew up, I hear. Many people know the family. Joseph, the putative father of Jesus, is still alive – or was, when last I heard of him – a sour old man, crippled in the joints, and with a face like the claw of a crab, as I am told. Those who knew his family best hate Jesus the most, not for personal reasons, but because it simply does not make sense that the boy who used to sweep up the shavings and carry bags of sawdust to the meat-smoker should be a Redeemer, a Prophet. As you know, every Jewish wife hopes to give birth to the Messiah, and all good Jews pray for his coming – but they are not at all likely to believe in him if he happens to be born to a next-door neighbour.
‘If our little Jesus had risen high in the rabbinate through the orthodox channels, no doubt the townspeople would be proud of him. But his immediate origins are too familiarly low. They don’t like that. What is more, it appears that Jesus was an infant prodigy. That is an awkward thing for a boy to be, in a town like Nazareth. A woman may scold her boy, screaming: “Come out of the dirt, ruffian! Does Joseph’s little Jesus play with mud?” But in her heart she hates Mary for having borne the unfortunate brat, and hopes that he will come to a bad end. And rest assured that the other boys don’t like Jesus; he is a target for their spitefullest tricks and dirtiest jokes. Joseph’s other sons detest him. Even Joseph would show his distaste for him, if he dared. Referring to him, he always says to his wife: “Your son”, with a kind of querulous irony.’
Paulus said: ‘No doubt. The woman had a shady reputation. She was already with child when she married this fatuous stool-maker.’
‘So I have heard. If so, she wasn’t the first girl that made a fool of herself, and she won’t be the last. If she had been the whore the Jews say she was, and had not wanted to be with child, why, any midwife could have rid her of it at three months with a pinch of rye-grain smut and a peeled twig. But even if she was that same whore – what, then? Why does your common harlot sometimes choose to bear a child, which can be nothing but a clog and embarrassment to her? To have a brat to beg with? No. They are to be rented by the day or week. Then why? Because it is the high doom of the womb that it shall fructify, and so there comes a moment when the prostitute tenderly opens herself, and the father of her child is a hazy composite of a thousand faces – a dream, my friend, a dream! – and so it happens that even the son of a whore may be begotten upon a virgin by a god. But wait! The same is true of the pure girl betrayed. Let her have a dozen children, the child of her secret grief and trouble is the one that is most entirely her own. Oh, moderate your moralities, my boy! As you live you will learn that many men born in wedlock are the fruit of fantasy, of spiritual adultery; or why do mothers love to call their children by strange names? Many a gritty charcoal-burner has been Apollo, if he only knew it, one night when there was no moon; and little does more than one plucked, pious matron know that she has conceived in the form of some cat-eyed slut her husband caught a whiff of when she brushed him in the street.’
Paulus said: ‘We will assume that in fact, however, this Jesus was the child of some stranger.’
‘Excuse me. Why should we assume that Jesus’s father was a stranger to his mother? Let us say, some person unknown. Why did Joseph marry her? Because he was a middle-aged widower and she was pretty? There is no shortage of presentable virgins among the Jews; girls with dowries, too. It may be surmised that the girl was of some respectable family whom she might disgrace, who paid Joseph well to marry her and take her away. We don’t know, and it is not material. We know that as soon as he was old enough, Jesus ran away. He simply disappeared, and there is no record of his movements. Why should there be? A carpenter’s son in a growing family leaves home. He appears to have joined the crowd that followed a prophet called John, who baptized his people in the Mithraic style and preached the coming of the Messiah as foretold by Isaiah. Herod put a stop to John, and the record goes blank. Actually, between the birth of Jesus and his appearance as a dissenting rabbi, there is an almost complete lacuna of about thirty years.
‘Then – pssst! – out of the desert comes Jesus, the voice of God, the very seed of God, the only begotten son of God, God, at the head of a rag-tag and bobtail of disciples and a riff-raff mob of worshippers weeping with ecstasy! And he is hailed as that Messiah who was to be born of a virgin and redeem the world. Some call him King.’
‘King!’ said Paulus.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was absolutely without fear, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he could find words to say this in a manner to excite popular enthusiasm. And, my boy, if you are a swineherd and have these gifts alone, you will carry yourself like a king by your own virtue – you will inspire faith, the people will look to you for guidance, and they will follow you. And at this point, you had better watch your back.’
Paulus protested: ‘He knew what he wanted to say, he said what he wanted to say! What did he say?’
‘Very little, and there was the genius of it. He made eloquent the tiny vocabulary of incoherence. The poor love great words, but not to pray with when they are in earnest. The poor like to worship a fine fat god, but it irritates them a little to see his priests get too gross when they are hungry. He sweated their god down to the sinew in the flesh while he filled the sky with him in the vapour. The poor are humble, but they don’t like to be made ashamed; they feel awkward in the presence of a god who says to the copper-miner: “You have a green face”, or to the iron-smelter: “You have black hands”. He said: “Spin them fast enough and all colours are white. Rinse your hands and come just as you are.”’
‘A faith for a rabble,’ said Paulus, contemptuously.
‘Absolutely. And so it caught on. But let me continue …’ I suppose I sighed; Paulus was no company, just now, for a man in a mellow, discursive mood. I was willing to discuss the nature and character of Jesus, as one of those strange men whom love of God destroys. I think I understand why some Jewish chroniclers sometimes imagine God coming out of nowhere and spinning the dead dust into a singing trumpet. Jesus was one of those to whom the trumpet sang in the emptiness of the desert. It sucked him in, spun him to its still heart, twirled him out, and sent him staggering away drunk with revelation down the crooked roads of the world, to spread the news that God was here and he was a part of him. It happen
s to all kinds of men everywhere. ‘I am God, and so are you, fellow dust-mote!’ they cry. ‘Ride with me to the place where the light sleeps when the lamp dies and the music goes when the harp is broken!’
Fevered imagination? Not so. Your Jesus sees his god’s countenance and reads his purposes as clearly as your Paulus sees a column of tax figures and reads their ineluctable sum total. If anything, the god-poisoned visionary is even deficient in imagination. To him, the men of the world are the dreamers. Only the Noumenon, the invisible, intangible Essence is the fact. For example, it takes a most unimaginative man to stand up and speak to a gathered audience, and expect them to go away satisfied with a hundred plain words of unsupported statement. But the divine authority is in this man if he can send that audience away satisfied, as Jesus did, no matter what he says.
I went on: ‘This Jesus said little because he believed that he was speaking literally with the voice of God, and giving voice to ultimate truths that needed no elaboration. He was a man of learning, competent to split hairs with the rabbinical analysts and interpreters, but he reduced his vocabulary to a couple of hundred words. He wrote nothing, because he felt that there was neither time nor need to write. His sedentary life was over, and he was a man in a hurry, on the road, always on the road – he was God’s own courier, the Messiah – the liberation of the world was at hand!
‘And his message delivered, he had to die like the Messiah in order that the Prophecy might be fulfilled. For if you believe in your Isaiah, you will bend your present to suit his future. It was necessary for Jesus to be betrayed, dragged through the streets, mocked, spat upon, humiliated, flogged, and hanged.
‘This was arranged in all its details, even to the difficult affair of the betrayal. Here comes a paradox: whom can a man trust to betray him? The betrayal of Jesus evidently had to be entrusted to a man who not only loved him, but who at the same time understood and worshipped him, upon whose discretion Jesus could absolutely rely. It was a delicate business, this betrayal. Rome didn’t want Jesus – if she had, she would have known exactly when and where to find him, but he was breaking none of our laws. His followers were quite orderly in their public demonstrations. The Temple couldn’t provoke anything like a satisfactory Nazarene riot. They could bring Jesus before the Sanhedrin, but at the most they could only try him on a fairly trivial religious charge, and even then their case would not be open and shut; he wasn’t an easy man to argue Law with, as they well knew. Now if they could only get him into the Procurator’s court on some such charge as sedition, and pack that court with a hand-picked rabble of their own just before the Passover festival, they might sway Pilate and get Jesus lawfully and permanently out of the way. They would base their charge, of course, on the fact that Jesus had let the people hail him as king.
‘This Jesus knew. So he sends his beloved friend and spiritual brother, Judas of Karioth, to lay information before the priests that on such-and-such a night, at such-and-such a time, Jesus will be found at a certain garden, where he may be arrested without the slightest trouble – for if he were to be apprehended in the streets, not even his exhortations could prevent the cobblestones and tiles from flying.
‘So the priests call the Roman patrol, and march out, and Jesus is arrested – ostensibly, to be questioned concerning such little matters as sabbath violation, and the like. But the High Priest has his questions carefully framed. Throwing up his hands in righteous alarm, he gives Jesus over to the Roman authorities on political grounds – the fellow is a pretender to the throne, and therefore a menace to our Peace in Judaea.
‘The only one I pity here is poor Judas. He was, when you consider it, one of the true heroes – for the love of his master he let himself be condemned not to mere torture and death, but to the disgust of everyone who loved Jesus. They say that Judas sold Jesus for thirty silver denarii. Nobody stops to think that Judas’s father, Simon ish Karioth, who loved his gentle little mystical son, would have filled his hands with gold any time the boy chose to ask. Perhaps you know of the old man?’
Paulus shrugged. ‘I think my father has had some dealings with Simon of Karioth. I seem to remember that it had something to do with wine. But please go on.’
‘It may be that Judas did take the few pieces of money in order to maintain his rôle of informer. The story goes that after Jesus’s arraignment, Judas came back to the priests and threw the blood-money in their faces. Whatever really happened, at this point poor Judas passes out of our field of vision, the one and only truly tragic figure in this pathetic little history – a gentleman of high courage. And Jesus is arraigned before the High Priest, who rattles off a few leading questions and rushes him before Pilate. It was smoothly managed. The mob is well handled; its temper is ugly, and the priests are resolute. Jesus is crucified with the bandits – and there is the beginning of the story.’
‘If you say so,’ said Paulus. ‘The beginning, if you say so.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now we must pause here to consider another very curious character, who is on record as the one who claimed and received delivery of Jesus’s body. I refer to a merchant out of Arimathea, a wealthy man named Joseph, nicknamed Amygdal, or Amygdalus, because he was in the almond trade.’
Paulus said: ‘Joseph Amygdal of Arimathea – I know something of that one, and he is a damned rogue.’
‘I find him interesting as a type. I know that if and when he comes back from Egypt we may have a few questions to ask him concerning certain discrepancies between his stated profits and his paid-up taxes, but that doesn’t concern us at this moment. I know that they say of him “a thorn bush grew out of an almond”. He began by selling some horses that belonged to his uncle in order to put down earnest-money for a large shipment of almond oil. This he sold quickly at a lower price than he was to pay for it, to get ready cash to buy grazing lands and herds dirt cheap, having bribed a certain Roman official and an engineer to confirm a rumour that a river was to be diverted and a valley thereby sentenced to death by drought. Then, having sold the land at a staggering profit, he paid for the horses and the oil – to the delight and gratitude of the men he had swindled. But the oil-presser, his chief creditor, was attacked by bandits on his way home, robbed, murdered, and thrown into a river. Our Joseph publicly mourned him as a friend. A little later he was seen wearing a diamond which was recognised as one which had been noticed on the oil-presser’s finger after he left Joseph’s house. But Joseph the Almond produced four reputable witnesses to confirm his statement that his cook had found the ring in the belly of a large fish while cleaning it; the cook being a slave, any property of his was the property of his master. He also swore that this unlikely story was true – so should I have sworn, if I had been Joseph’s slave. “The slave and the fish both being mine, so is the diamond,” said Joseph. “Besides, what proof is there that this was my poor friend’s diamond? One diamond is very like another diamond.” And while the dead man’s heirs were arguing de jure and de facto with Joseph’s lawyer, the diamond got lost in transit, somehow or other.
‘He is quite a character, this Joseph. He has made cinnamon out of birch bark; and a huge consignment of peppercorns, examined, sealed in boxes, and paid for on purchase, miraculously turned into little balls of clay after the boxes had been delivered and accepted and their seals broken. He organised a lottery on the Antioch chariot-races, with an “accumulative system” of computing the winnings so full of quantities, magnitudes and the relationship of forms, that Archimedes himself might have broken his head over it; the entire profits to be devoted to the building of a hospital for lepers. The profits, counted after Joseph’s expenses were deducted, were so small that the hospital was abandoned, and Joseph was regarded in some quarters even as a kind of martyr. I suppose a few lepers did get a few parcels of food and old clothes which they wouldn’t otherwise have got. As for Joseph, in spite of his “irretrievable loss” he was very anxious to start a new lottery, “bigger, simpler and better”, only a more influential philanthropist
got in first.
‘But the poor always get a little out of Joseph the Almond, especially after he has done something more than usually wicked. He is one of those contrivers who have a daemon of cleverness on their backs which forces them to be dishonest as other men’s daemons might compel them to write poetry. But after the writing comes the reading; and then even Ovid squirms. When Joseph’s conscience growls like an empty belly, there is black bread and meat for the beggars and white bread and incense and doves for Jehovah, and he is a lucky man who wants a favour and catches Joseph in one of his hours of contrition. This doesn’t last, you know. Today, tomorrow, Joseph is possessed by a new scheme – the last scheme, the scheme to end the need for scheming – and off he goes again, leaving his conscience at home like a toothless old house-dog to welcome him when he returns, while he goes poaching with his yellow lurchers.
‘However, when the inevitable repentance sets in, his is no mere form of apology to a god. He is truly sorry; incense and doves aside, he wants to demonstrate this. So – haven’t you ever noticed it in this type? – he wants to do something dangerous for a friend. He wants to angle Destiny with himself for bait. Yesterday, every aspect of business that might expose himself to the slightest jeopardy was covered and double covered. Now, when there is nothing to be got for himself, he wants to dangle naked in the teeth of Chance; this is something he owes to the Eternal. Furthermore – and possibly first and foremost – he is one of those desperate characters who crave excitement, and cannot get the flavour of a thing unless it is salted with risk. He would rather lose on long odds than be safe on even money; let him hedge his bets as he will he gambles against himself. Only he likes to think of his gambling as an act of faith.’
Paulus said, scornfully: ‘I have heard players praying to the rolling dice. Gamblers are superstitious. Joseph of Arimathea bought Jesus’s body for a mascot, as another might buy a baby’s caul or a hare’s foot.’
