by Nick Tosches
The Jews hated the Samaritans, and the Samaritans hated the Jews. It was a deep and fierce hatred rooted in the mists of time, in the earliest days of the Book. The Samaritans held their ways to be the truest and ancient-most ways of the faith of the Israelites, and the Jews of other tribes held them in contempt and denounced them as worshippers of false gods, such as Nergal, the war-god of Babylon. And so there were hate and howling and bloodshed without end between this tribe of Semites and the other tribes of Semites. As they all looked the same, it is difficult to understand how these God-crazy Jews knew which, one or the other, of their kind to hate, spit upon, or slay. When I asked about this, I was told that it was a simple matter, as the Samaritan dialects of Hebrew and Aramaic were identifiable to the discerning ear.
Jesus was not opposed to traveling directly through the land of the Samaritans. He had neither care nor fear about the matter. It was at times such as this that he showed himself to be so unlike others of his countrymen. We encountered no trouble in Samaria. They seemed, the Samaritans, as good a people as any other, as bad a people as any other.
We searched for an easy path through the foothills west of Mount Ebal, but there was none. Had we known what lay before us, we would not have entered those foothills.
At last we reached the town of Bemesilis. We looked back on the formidable terrain that we had endured. We looked ahead to the easy passage of the Jezreel Valley between Mount Carmel and Mount Gilboa that lay west of the Sea of Galilee.
The foothills of Mount Ebal had taken much from body and spirit. But the ordeal was behind us. After food, drink, and rest, we felt a sense of strength, confidence, even elation. We were told in Bemesilis that men, Roman troops among them, had been known to die trying to make their way through those terrible precipitous foothills. But we had more than survived. We had prevailed. We felt like victors. Conquerors of rock-slides, earth-slides, crags, hunger, and thirst, but conquerors nonetheless.
As for our good dun donkey, we were proud, even envious of him and the way he had negotiated the foothills.
“Are we still in Samaria?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jesus, shrugging his shoulders. “Why do you ask? Do you feel enmity in the air?”
“I feel only amity.”
“Then we cannot be in any of the lands that you Romans call collectively Judea.”
As I said, we felt strong, confident, elated. Having emerged from the foothills of Mount Ebal, we could do anything. As we approached the luxuriant welcoming meadows of the Jezreel Valley, with the majesties of Gilboa and Carmel rising into the slow-rolling white clouds of the endless blue, our talk was imbued with all that was in us and around us. Each and every breath was full of the miracle of breathing.
We decided that it was as good a time as any to hazard a healing.
In the fields ahead, there appeared a small village. A stream of spring-water rushed nearby us. Though he had bathed at Bemesilis, he wanted to bathe here again, and launder his tunic. As he did this, I lay on my back and watched the movement of the clouds. I turned to see him run through the locks of his head of hair and the locks of his beard the teeth of the wooden comb I had given him.
11
THERE ARE THOSE WHO FEIGN INFIRMITY. THERE ARE THOSE who seek sympathy, pity, or attention while affecting a condoned manner of subsisting on charity rather than toil.
In this settlement without name, we came upon a man who by means of clutched stakes dragged himself and his seemingly lifeless lower limbs about on the ground, moving from the shade of one tree to another, following the movement of the sun. He appeared disinterested in the fate he seemingly had been dealt, and bored and impatient with it. Occasionally someone threw a small copper coin to him.
“What would you give to walk again?” I asked.
“I have nothing to give,” he said bitterly. “And dead legs cannot walk.”
I gestured to my Jesus. “He can restore life to those legs. And in so doing, he can endow you with the power to heal others, to do what physicians cannot. There is more coin in that than in crawling about like this.”
“I am curst. For many years have I moved about thus, low, with the crawling things, upon the earth.”
“But curst not by God, I sense. He who here stands before you can raise this curse from you. He can make you to rise. But he too, while he is among us and of mortal body, must live; and, as it is written, man cannot live by bread alone.”
The man knew these words of the prophet, taught me by my Jesus, and he spoke them in full:
“He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.”
“The words of the Lord are his, and spoken through him.” I gestured again to my Jesus, who stood silent, pure, and gentle. “He wants not for them. It is the price of the bread that concerns him, as it concerns me, as it concerns thee. It is but this humble price that we seek in return for restoring you, raising you, and giving to you the gift of restoring and raising others in turn.”
“You speak more as a demon than as a holy man.”
“Demons have no need for bread.”
I beckoned him to follow us. He dragged himself behind us from the shade of a tree to the more isolated shade of a quiet blind alley between two small buildings.
He lay at the feet of Jesus. I receded and looked on. I saw Jesus lower himself. On bent haunches, knees, and ankles, he placed one hand to the man’s head, the other across the man’s prone legs. I saw him let his own head fall back with closed eyes.
I heard him invoke the names Iao Sabaoth and Adonai. I heard a low chanting in a language that was not a language. “Rise.”
The man appeared to struggle to lift himself upward by the force of his arms. He grimaced. His arms collapsed beneath him, and his head was sideways on the ground. He lay with labored breath.
Jesus was standing again. He reached down to the man. The man grasped his wrist.
“Rise.”
The man’s legs were doubtless weak unto atrophia. I went to them, lowered my own right hand. The man grasped the wrists now of both Jesus and me. He half-rose, fell, rose again, staggered, fell, almost taking us down with him. I could hear the man’s labored breath. I could hear Jesus cursing under his own breath.
At last the man stood upright, roused by the promise of scheme and fortune.
I exacted coin from him. Looking down at what he put in my hand from the purse round his neck, I looked at him with chagrin.
“The price of bread is but a few prutot,” he protested in a most unconvincing and disingenuous way.
“Yes, we seek bread. We seek also the building of a new and greater Holy Temple, exempt from corruption, greed, and aristocratic despotism. Have you neither gratitude nor concern for what is good and right?”
He hesitated a moment. My final words to him were stern with impatience: “It is nothing compared to what shall be yours. For he who has been graced with a miraculous healing, it is then within his powers to so grace others.”
Confused by this Janus-talk of humble bread and great temples, and eager to present himself to the others of this place as one who had been transformed and blest by the touch of miracle—as a new man, exalted and attracting awe instead of mere pitiful attention and sympathy, offerings of substance instead of small bits of copper cast to the dirt—and still toil not, he surrendered the full, paltry contents of his purse.
He followed us upright, if unsteadily, into the sun, and men did make much wonderment.
“His heart was pure, and he is healed,” I told them. “Now others who are afflicted, if their hearts be pure and there be no darkness upon their houses, he can help them.”
The conditional clause “if their hearts be pure” was all-important, as it transferred the blame for any failed healing from the healer to the supplicant.
As for the condition that there be no darkness upon the supplicant’s house: truth be told, there was a darkness, real or imagi
ned, on everyone’s house. Were there not, his neighbors would be quick to see one, as well as the transgression, committed yesterday or generations ago, that had brought it on that house.
In excitement and wonderment, the settlement elders asked who this healer was. He answered them simply and humbly.
“My name is Jesus,” he said gently. “Jesus of Nazareth.”
“He comes on his way from Bethlehem,” I said. “There the voice of David spake to him, and priests and teachers of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem have told him that the key to the kingdom hath been laid upon his shoulder.”
12
AS I HAVE MADE CLEAR, MORE THAN ANY OTHER PEOPLE TO be encountered, the Jews were much given to woe and lamentation. Their afflictions very often existed only in their minds.
These, who had brought on themselves an infirmity that was not feigned, were easy enough to cure. It demanded subtlety and nuance to instill in the self-afflicted a sense of shame and guilt for conditions that had been born of shame and guilt.
They must be made to see and feel that the Lord now deemed that they had suffered enough for him, and he wanted them to suffer no more, but wanted them now to look to his light and serve him in joy. This reward from God for their suffering must not be turned away, as that would be an affront unto him.
This subtlety and nuance of words and manner was a quite delicate process, but in the end it could be worked with ease. I discovered that the words light and reward were very instrumental, very effective. I would come to use them more in my pronouncements for Jesus. For are we not, all of us, self-afflicted?
There were, of course, those whose afflictions were very real. These we strove to avoid, but many were the times when the ranks of the latter infiltrated the ranks of the former in their desire to be healed.
In Nain, after rousing one of the self-afflicted, a woman in her youth, from the bed in which she had lain wailing for many seasons, we were approached in the street by a man who seemed to be of dignity and means.
“My daughter is in need of you,” he said to Jesus.
“And what has befallen her?” I asked him.
“She has no sight.”
We were not prepared for this, but my Jesus did not fail me. I was about to tell the man that we had not with us the medicative that, with the laying on of hands, restores sight; that this balm was gathered from rare plants far away; that the season of these plants had passed; and that we would return in due time.
But before I could speak these lying words, Jesus did speak, and he asked the man if he might see the girl.
The man led us to a house that was indeed distinguished among the other dwellings of Nain. He brought forth the girl, who was but a child.
With the assent of her parents, Jesus took her little hand in his, and together they walked to a tree where flowers grew, and they sat together between two roots that protruded reachingly from the earth. We saw him pluck and give to her a flower, and we saw them speaking, but we could hear nothing of what was said.
He stroked her head. After some time, he took again her small hand in his, and they returned to us. The child was smiling.
“She is not afflicted, nor curst. She is blest. She sees what we cannot. The Lord has given her this gift. Hers is a world of light and visions that far surpasses the world of your own seeing. She sees colors unknown to your rainbows. Her sun beams more golden than yours, and the riches of black night are many-fold to her, for all the more in number are the constellations that are hers to see and read in wonder.
“Others who cannot see the vileness that surrounds us can be said to live in darkness. But your daughter, who can see holiness and glory where others see none, lives not in darkness but in illumination. In time, through the gift that has been given her, she will bring great gifts to you and to others.”
He closed with words that every man and woman yearns to hear:
“Your child is special among other children, and deserving of adoration.”
He bowed his head gently toward the little girl, then to her parents, who looked on her with new soft gladness.
We made as to move on, but the man bade us wait but for a moment, as I had suspected and hoped he would so bid.
Bringing his wife and child into their home, he came out to us and laid three heavy gold aurei in the hand of Jesus.
Jesus put the fistful of gold to his breast, thanked him in a manner of deep sincerity, told him of the building of the new and greater Holy Temple to which his generosity would contribute. He passed to me the gold, as if in regard for the purity of his sanctified hands.
“And I thank you,” said the man, “for delivering me from the blindness that was mine.”
We passed two men whom I had not seen before. They looked on Jesus, and I heard one of them say in a hushed voice to the other:
“He comes on his way from Bethlehem, where the voice of David spake to him. Priests and teachers of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem have anointed him and proclaimed that the key to the kingdom hath been laid upon his shoulder.”
I had told as much to an inquiring stranger while Jesus was in conference with the unfortunate child. I had used the same words with which I had answered the elders of the settlement south of here. But now, in the echo of these words, there were anointing and proclamation, where in my words there had been neither, but only the exaggeration of making plural the one priest we had encountered among the three men outside the gates of Bethlehem.
There would be no whores, no drunkenness from here on. People knew us. There was too much at stake. Jesus knew this without my telling him.
“And I shall witness the building of my own temple in Rome, and the building too of my own private villa. I shall bathe away my life in luxury and in leisure. My riches shall be such.”
“Yes.” I smiled.
“And I shall become drunken in my private feastings, and my concubines will be beautiful and many.”
“Yes.”
“And I shall have the most finely groomed asshole in all of Rome.”
We smiled together for a long time, then the smiles faded from us. Rome was far.
We spoke not again of the little girl.
13
MOUNT TABOR ROSE BEFORE US AS WE DESCENDED TO THE plain of Esdraelon, making our way to Japha, on the high ground that once, in the dew of time, had been the land of the tribe of Zebulun.
Of the twelve tribes of the Book, eleven were either lost to unknown fates or absorbed into the tribe of Judah. The tribe of Zebulun was one of those lost to an unknown fate.
The tribe of Judah had become the kingdom of Judah, and our David of the key, our David who was descended directly from Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah and mother of twins by Judah, became the king of Judah.
Our King David committed adultery with a woman called Bathsheba, the wife of a Hittite soldier in his army. David ordered the murder of her husband most ingeniously, commanding his other troops to withdraw from him during battle, leaving him, alone against many, to be killed. David then took Bathsheba as one of his wives, and she bore him his successor, Solomon. It was said in the Book that Solomon, a man of revered wisdom, had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.
“But we do not know if his asshole was clean,” said Jesus in concluding his little story from the Book.
And as we passed the town of Endor, he told me of the witch of Endor, who, according to the Book, did summon through her necromancy the spirit of the prophet Samuel. A king seeking guidance from the ghost had asked her to do this. This king of something or other was by name called Saul. The spirit of the prophet was so incensed at being roused from his peaceful sleep in the house of the dead that he berated the king and predicted his end, as well as that of his entire army.
The next day, Saul’s army was defeated in battle, and Saul took his own life.
We looked to one another and laughed.
“And so it is written,” he said in a voice deep with mock gravity.
“The more I know of
it, the more queerly intriguing the Book becomes. I do wish someone would translate it.”
“Perhaps someday in our old age we can work on it together.”
“Someone should. Such lurid comedy and lurid tragedy commingled. It is like Sophocles buggering Aristophanes, to the rhythms of a chorus of moon-mad gods, so ever-changing, irascible, many-faced, and various is its almighty one true God.”
He did not know the names of these makers of plays. I should not have expected him to know them. But he said nothing. When he did speak again, it was to ask the value of an aureus.
“It is different at different times. It represents about a month’s pay to a legionary soldier.”
“And how many of them would make a man rich?”
“A great many of them. A great many for you. A great many for me.”
“How many of them do you think are in the Holy Temple?”
“A very great many of them. A very, very great many of them.”
A hawk flew high above us. We watched it swoop down in the distance on its unseen prey.
We wondered to each other at what birds might think as they looked down in flight on all the pitiable earth-bound creatures, men and beasts, below. Did they in turn wonder at us? At why we could not, or did not, take to the sky? At the lowly wretchedness of us, who would never know freedom, as they did?
Our wondering became wordless, and it was in silence that we walked the rest of the way to Japha.
Only two men who were traveling north, as we were, had passed us on the road from Nain. Yet when we arrived at Japha, we saw that our coming was awaited. Several men came forward to receive and welcome us with much interest and perfunctory bowing. They whispered among themselves. One of them used the word mashiach.
Yes, talk travels fast, and it is magnified and embellished along the way.
We could see the village of Nazareth. We passed through two small settlements as we neared it. The gatherings awaiting us grew from one settlement to the next. The closer we got to Nazareth, the more sullen he became.
