by Nick Tosches
In the synagogue, we stood in silence and allowed our eyes to adjust to the darkness.
Synagogues offered shelter to wayfarers. We wanted to be sure there were no sleeping wayfarers.
A rat scurried from pilaster to pilaster. There was nothing else.
I watched him remove his sash, fold it to the ground, and kneel on it. I watched him bow his head, and I heard him speak aloud his humble, reverent, and heartfelt petition for much-needed guidance.
“I implore thee. Bestow on the senses with which thou hast blessed me, or breathe into me, a sign.”
He was good. He was very good. And so was I. Never before had I written for the theatre. Do not take me wrong. I was no Aeschylus. But I was good. I was very damned good.
8
THE NEXT MORNING, BEYOND THE CITY GATES, HE STOOD UPON a rock. I sat in the grass beside him. I had not yet deduced the proper distance that should be maintained between us, the span of hands that evinced both deference and closeness.
Across the way, there was what appeared to be the fallen remains of a pyramid of eleven stones. Was it emblematic of something? Had it been an olden shrine of sorts? Was it nothing at all, a mere random configuration of fallen rocks? We were never to know, but I can see it to this day.
Many passed our way, some coming from, some entering, Bethlehem. Again and again, for as long as they paused to hear the words he spoke, he would speak them.
“I returned here,” he would begin, again and again, “to the city of my birth, in the hope of finding here, where I drew my first breath, a sign of guidance, which I could not find elsewhere, though the journey of my seeking has brought me to many a place.
“For perplexity is mine. Within me, mingled winds await direction.
“In the good synagogue of Bethlehem, I prayed. In the good synagogue of Bethlehem, I supplicated. In the good synagogue of Bethlehem, I implored.
“The mingling of the winds neither diminished nor found direction, nor were lifted from me.
“There was a voice that then did speak unto me. Could some unseen man be making mockery from the shadows? No. This voice was not from the shadows. This voice enfolded me. This voice was low and strong. It issued from within the synagogue itself and did fill the air of the synagogue, though there was no speaker.
“He whose voice this was did call me by my name, though I had not revealed my name. And he whose voice this was did call me christos, though I knew not this word; but later learned that it is the Greek for our Hebrew mashiach, our Aramaic meshichah, which mean ‘anointed’ and nothing more.
“The Book describes priests as anointed. I am no priest. We are told in the Book that Cyrus the Great was anointed by God. I am not great, and I do not worship Persian or Babylonian gods, as Cyrus did. Why, then, should I be called anointed? Why, then, should I be called by him christos? Why should he speak to me in the ancestral tongue, but for this one word?
“I did ask of him an answer. But there was no answer. And he spoke then of a key. But there was no key.
“And then there was no voice. As it had come, so it had gone. And perplexity is now all the more mine.
“Please, any among you: do you know of this voice in the synagogue? Do you know of this talk of keys?
“Please, my brothers, my sisters, I seek not alms. I seek only knowledge. This voice unnerves me, and I do not understand this talk of keys.”
As I said, many passed our way. Some of them merely glanced at him. Some paused, then moved on. A child pointed to him and made laughter, at which his parents smiled to him. One man listened long, then slowly shook his head, as if gravely concerned, and continued on his way. A large group of travelers gathered before us awhile, talked among themselves in hushed tones, then were gone.
And so it went the better part of the morning.
“I am tired,” he said at last, when there was none to hear but me.
“Do not weary,” I told him. “Do not allow the strength of your words to lessen.”
“You are sitting,” he said. “I am standing. And my throat and mouth grow parched.”
I raised the goatskin of water to him.
The noonday sun was upon us now. I recalled the street-corner prophets of Caesarea. The madder they were, the more idlers they attracted. But while the ravings of the insane could attract crowds, they could not attract followers. As dispirited as I grew this long morning, I remained convinced that my way was the only way, that my way was the true way.
Three men passed in silence. One of them turned slowly round and retraced his steps.
“It was David whose voice you heard,” he said to Jesus. He spoke simply, calmly, in earnest.
He spoke then by memory from the Book: “And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder.”
The man looked into the eyes of Jesus, as into what was ineffable, as if those eyes held something of the colors of the final setting of the sun.
He was a young man, but intense in his bearing. There were early wrinkle-lines below and at the corners of his eyes, the creases of too much study by too little light.
“Bethlehem is the city of the house of David,” he said. “You, who were born here, are of the house of David. It is upon your shoulder that the key has been laid, or is to be laid, as was very long ago ordained by the Lord. The key of David is the key of the power and the authority of the Davidic dynasty, the kingdom of our people, Israel.”
“And why the lone word in Greek?” asked Jesus, as if he was of considerable suspicion and doubt.
“Because the koine tongue of Greek is the koine tongue of all the world. The key to the kingdom is to no one place alone, not only to Israel, but to the world.”
This man captured us as much as we had captured him. It had not occurred to me, this perspective of Greek being the language of the world as a reason for its utterance by the voice. I had been thinking more along the line of conveying a sense of the humbleness of Jesus, a man to be shown as one who knew Greek but was not so fully literate as to have all its less common words in his vocabulary.
The young man’s companions looked on from a distance. He summoned them to him by a gesture of his hand and arm.
They spoke together in whispers. Occasionally, one of them looked to Jesus, or to me. I heard the word mashiach.
“And who is this Roman?” the eldest of them asked, in Greek, evidently so that I could understand his words, though they were addressed to no one in particular. There was in his voice no implication or disparagement, no undertone or overtone. It was simply a question.
We were well-prepared for this inevitable eventuality. Jesus said to them:
“He is my devoted friend, who has accompanied me in my journey for some time. He believes that he will find guidance in me, as I seek guidance from whom or what I do not know.”
“A Roman who serves a Jew,” another of them commented.
“He knows not the Book, but he seeks the way,” said Jesus, with words I had not provided him.
It was I who then spoke, saying in Greek: “I heard the voice also, though it spoke in Hebrew and I could not understand it.”
Jesus and the others ignored my words.
“You have explained much,” Jesus said to the young and studious man who had first approached. “But still I do not understand. If what you say is true, I ask you this: Why me?”
“Why you? Why the foundling Moses? Why King David himself, for that matter?”
“The questions that are most profound are always without answer,” commented the second of them.
The third of them then addressed me: “And what is it that you seek, to which you believe he will lead you?”
I delivered my words with poetic grace and force, a single line in the dactylic hexameter of Homer, ending with an ancipital foot of the two grand syllables of the Greek genitive, theou to our monosyllabic dei.
“I believe that in following him I will find the kingdom of God.”
Nothing more, nothing less. It was indeed th
e rhythm and not the meaning of these simple words that struck with might.
Heed this, my good grandson; for he who controls rhythm, controls.
“You seem to have more faith in him than he himself has in him.”
There were smiles in a friendly way all round, save for the look of Jesus, which remained somewhat confused and apprehensive.
“It is as you have said. The chosen are at first blind to what the unchosen can see, and in turn can see what the unchosen cannot.”
When I said this, I was thinking of blind Homer, and surely not of my loiterer.
The three men introduced themselves respectfully. The first of them asked Jesus if he would tell them his name.
He told them his common name in a common enough way. There was no openly sly dawdling in the dirt with a stick.
They repeated his name and nodded among themselves. “Where will you go now?” one asked of him.
“To Nazareth, to the town of my home, to bid farewell.”
“It is a long way.”
“I have much pondering to do. I seek to hear further voice.”
“Surely the voice of David is here and nowhere else.”
“I sense now that the voice I seek is everywhere, within me and without me. I await it.”
The one who had first approached him asked with some hesitance if he might join us on our journey.
“As I say, I have much pondering to do.”
The young man seemed disappointed. It was unclear if his companions sought to join us as well.
“Meet me in Galilee,” said Jesus. “Meet me in Simonias. I will do what must be done in Nazareth, then will go to the holy town of Simonias. Await me there as the day begins, at sunset, on the second day, yom sheni, after the first shabbat kodesh of the new moon, the Sabbath following that which now approaches. It is a matter of ten days, nothing more.”
By this, the young man seemed heartened. He nodded to his companions, who seemed heartened as well.
“I have never heard Simonias called holy.”
“I sense it to be so,” said Jesus. “I know not why.”
All the while, he assumed the air of one who endured a great burden dutifully and without complaint. Furthermore, one got from him the impression, which issued from the mind of the beholder independent of that air, that this burden was the burden of divine radiance, the unique unweighable weight of the key upon his shoulder.
“There is no synagogue in Simonias. But the town is small. You will find me there, at that hour when the fallen sun brings forth that day.”
Jesus wandered some steps away, and I conversed with the men. We spoke awhile of the Greek philosophers, the philosophers of the elements, long before Socrates, and of the flaws in what Cicero called, in Greek, the logic of Socrates. Thence we spoke of the putative meanings of the word logos itself; and thence of other things.
I learned that one of these three men, he who had first spoken to Jesus, was a Sadducee priest, a member of the kohanim who controlled the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Another was a Sadducee rabbi, or teacher of Jewish law, in Jerusalem. The third and eldest of them was a subaltern to the vice-justice whose office was under the high priest of the Jerusalem temple and above the sixty-nine general members of the legal council known as the Great Sanhedrin, the supreme high court of Jewish religious matters. This high court of the Sanhedrin convened in the Hall of Hewn Stones in the north wall of the Temple, with doors leading both to the inner sanctuary of the Holy Temple and to an outer city thoroughfare.
I learned that it was under King David that the sacerdotal leaders of the Jews were divided into twenty-four orders of priests, all of whom were descendants of Aaron. I made good note of this.
Jesus wandered back to us. The men walked with us until the road became twain, and, for now, we departed from them.
9
FOR SOME TIME ON OUR JOURNEY FROM BETHLEHEM, JESUS and I discussed the prudence of aligning ourselves with men of aristocratic and conservative nature such as these Sadducees must be.
“If they were Pharisees,” said Jesus, “we would worry over the prudence of aligning ourselves with Pharisees. If they were Essenes, we would worry over the prudence of aligning ourselves with Essenes. In truth we have aligned ourselves with nothing. Those men just happen to be Sadducees. There will be Pharisees. There will be Essenes as well. It is good to be embraced by all. Especially by the ruling class. You want money? Well, it is the Sadducees who have it.”
This struck me as sound thinking. Our experience with the Sadducees had strengthened him, given him confidence, and rendered him sanguine.
“There will come a day,” he said, “when men of all sects and sorts will follow us. Those of different gods, those of no god. They will be ours. If the words you have given me can make fools of earnest men of much study and solemnity, they can make fools of all.”
We stopped the night in unfortified Gabaon, where we decided, perhaps prematurely, to celebrate the auspicious beginning of our venture.
On the road from Caesarea to Bethlehem, Jesus had been given to masturbating almost as frequently, and as openly, as he pissed.
“It is my calmative,” he said.
Out of some misplaced sense of decorum, I had abstained. I indeed had grown sick of seeing his disfigured cock, which in youth had been mutilated to emulate the cock of his tribe’s great Sem, believed to have been born without foreskin. I had grown sick of his brutal gruntings, sick of his countenance of palsied pain, sick of the sound, like that of a man taking the thrust of a dagger, that came from his mouth when he ejaculated. I had told him to take his imaginary lovers to the bushes.
Now, at the brothel-house in Gabaon, I was filled with good Lebanese cooking, Roman wine, and lust. I drank with a whore on my lap, Jesus with a whore on his. There was no telling who was more drunk, he or I.
The whore he grabbed said that she would not take the membrum virile of a Jew into her mouth. I was dismayed.
“But you are a Jew yourself,” I said to her.
“It is unclean.”
“His mentula, or the taking of it into your mouth?”
“Both,” she said. “It would command a higher price.”
It was then that I saw her game.
“Save your money,” said Jesus. “I’ll fuck this pig where it shits.”
I loudly rhapsodied on the loveliness of our expression culibonia, used only to describe a whore who offers anal intercourse.
“But who is it who gets thus fucked?” he yelled in loud response. “She or the Roman who comes to her?”
All the while, he was drunkenly laughing. He shoved the whore from his lap, laughed all the more as she fell to the floor.
“Who will take the mentula of a Jew in her mouth?” he called out.
Several whores rushed eagerly to him. One was a Roman, another an Arab, the rest of them Jews.
“Who will pay me to take my mentula in her mouth?” he demanded more than asked. “For I tell you, it is the mentula of your savior.”
They laughed all around. I kicked at him, called him a fool, and told him to shut his jaws.
The prospect of casting my seed into my chosen whore and waking from sound sleep in her arms presented itself to me as blissful.
To my drunken, squinting eyes, she was the most voluptuous girl I had ever seen. I was no adulterer, for, in my stupor, the mother of your father did not exist except in an ill-remembered dream.
I spent my pent seed almost immediately, and woke sickly with what appeared to be a bloated sun-rotten corpse beside me. Worse: a bloated sun-rotten corpse that snored.
Steadying myself, I searched the other chambers for Jesus.
I found him with two half-naked whores at his feet, listening silently as he spoke.
“No woman is unholy. No man is holy who believes her to be, for woman is the vessel, deemed by God, that brought that man, and every man, unto his life.”
As if on direction of a prompter, the cry of a babe was heard from a whore’s
chamber above us.
“Yes,” continued Jesus, “cursed was Eve, but blessed was she, too. No woman’s body belongs to any man, but to her and the Lord alone.”
These were indeed my words. They were not written, however, for an occasion such as this, nor a setting such as this.
The women who reclined at his feet looked to him with eyes of adoration. They were younger than he. One of them stroked his ankle, softly, almost maternally.
I went downstairs for bread and wine.
Later, as we made our way along the northern road, he asked me what my whore had cost me.
“A silver shekel.”
“You were robbed.”
“And what did you pay for the brace of them?”
“They would take nothing. In fact, one of them gave me this.”
He reached inside his tunic and lifted forth a slender golden necklace with a single perfect pearl.
I snatched it from him, put it in my purse. We had agreed from the outset that I was to be the banker of our enterprise.
“Our first offering,” I said. “We shall remember and cherish it always.”
I patted the donkey’s rump, then, more smartly, I patted the rump of Jesus.
I shook my head and recited to him in surly reprimand his mis-spoken words of the night before: “the mentula of your savior.”
He looked away, hastened some steps ahead of me, and moved on.
10
THE CUSTOMARY ROUTE, FOR JEWS, FROM THE SOUTHERN province of Judea to the northern province of Galilee took them by steep descent to the Jericho Valley Road, whence, north of the Dead Sea, they traversed the Jordan to Perea on the eastern bank, then, farther north, in the Decapolis region, they crossed back across the river as it neared the Sea of Galilee, where one road continued north along the Sea of Galilee, past Tiberias, through Magdala, and on to Capernaum, and another road veered northwest to Nazareth.
It was a tortuous route, and was taken solely to circumvent the province of Samaria, which lay between the provinces of Judea and Galilee, and through which one must pass on the more direct route, west of the Jordan.
