by Nick Tosches
“You are Simon, son of John, of Bethsaida. You will be called Cephas.”
This name of Cephas in Hebrew is also their word for “rock,” as our Roman name Petrus is also our word for the same. I was later to ask Jesus why he re-named the man in this way.
“Because the man seemed as slow and witless as a rock” were his words. “But a rock is also stalwart, and the symbol of strength immovable. As such, I felt that he and others would perceive this as a name of good and trustworthy honor.”
When the faithful tilapia-man joined us, it occurred to me that it would be for the better if we disposed of the word follower in favor of messenger, as the one suggested a lowly going behind, like a laggard retinue or servile lickspittle, while the other suggested an exalted and active going forth, like the chosen bearer of an important message from on high. Thus the fisherman would be the first of what we would call our apostoloi, as the Greeks denote what we know as nuntii, the messenger-delegates of a mission.
Jesus demurred.
“If I am to be seen as a rabbi, a teacher, it is pupils that I need, not messengers. Would you entrust this man with a message? The wit of the sender would be brought into question. A sack of tilapia, yes. The Word of the Way, or the Way of the Word, or whatever it is? No, definitely not.”
What he said was true. So it was that the fisherman who rose one day as Simon and went to sleep as Peter, who woke another day as a follower and went to sleep as a messenger, in the end rose and slept as a pupil, a learner of the Word of the Way. Or the Way of the Word. Or whatever it was.
Thus the fisherman became the first of what in Latin would be called our discipuli, our devout and dedicated learners of the Word and the Way. Or it might be said that he was the second, as I myself had long and well posed as the first, even as I was the author of the teachings, the disciplines of the Word and the Way, to be learned and taken to heart. Jesus and I used the Greek word for “pupils,” mathetai.
We were not in the mood for our first mathetes—Simon or Peter, or whatever you will; follower, messenger, student, or whatever you will—on the night he came to us. But in time both Jesus and I came to like him. He was indeed a good man. And no finer an inlicitator could we have hoped to find than we did find in our Simon Peter, for the best of shills are those who do not believe they are shilling but believe they are advancing truth, and the most desirable of all accomplices are those who are unaware of the conspiracy of which they are part.
His discipulate was of benefit to us. It seemed to benefit him, too.
When he came to us amid the joyful blasting, Jesus tried to get rid of him for the night. The stars still spoke to us of wine and women, and the fisherman and his expectations could wait until daybreak.
Jesus granted him the night to fetch his belongings, and told him to meet us in the morning.
“Fear not to travel by night, for the spirit is now with you,” he told Simon Peter, who looked to him but did not move.
“I say, what of your possessions?” Jesus pressed him.
“All that I need is with me.”
“What of your boat and nets?”
“Don’t worry for my boat. All boats on the Sea of Galilee are safe. The Jordan is unnavigable. Even if a man were to survive the rapids and had a team of other men to tow him over the sandbars of its southerly current, he could go only to the Dead Sea, where there is not one fish to be caught, and from which there is no way out by boat. No. My little boat is safe, as it always has been. If a storm destroys it, the same storm would destroy it if I were there.”
“He tells us what Strabo neglected to tell us of Galilee,” I said, seeking to halt his excursus. Neither of them knew the name of the geographer, or what I was talking about. I looked to the stars and thought of the nearby inviting grass beneath it. I could taste the first, long draught of wine. I could feel the warm soft flesh of recumbent thigh horripilate to my caress. But the fisherman talked on.
“As for my little cast-net, I took it with me to Nazareth, and when I set out to find you, I gave it to the minister to store. My great-net is in Bethsaida, with a friend who often fishes with me.”
There was to be no getting rid of him for the night. Jesus and I retired to a good inn. Simon Peter went to make his bed on a knoll in the public gardens. He was the only one of us that night to lie under and rise to the morning star of heavenly Venus.
I wonder, do you still call this brightest and most beautiful of stars after her, as Virgil had Aeneas do? I have always much preferred it to Lucifer, as this bringer of light was known of old.
Recalling the words of Jesus to Simon Peter—“You will be called Cephas”—I recall too that, in our myths, the father of Lucifer was called Cephalus, a name cognate to our word meaning “pertaining to the head,” and thus in many instances also relating to rock.
15
WE ATE A GOOD MORNING MEAL OF STEWED BARLEY AND calf marrow, sardines, eggs, bread, and ewe-milk. The cook, a big-bellied Syrian, pressed food on us even after we had eaten more than our share.
The new member of our cohort, Simon Peter the fisherman, had much to say on the subject of sardines.
Jesus and I glanced to one another as he expounded on size and species.
Then we discovered that all of his expounding on sardines was based on hearsay. He had fished only inland waters all his life.
“Tell me, Simon, son of John, of Bethsaida, who is called Cephas,” Jesus interrupted him in his recounting of hearsay. “Do you see God? Describe him to me. Tell me how you see him. Describe him as you would a sardine.”
At this, Peter Simon fell still. His hesitant silence was long in passing. Then he began to put words together slowly.
“I see God not as I see a man. I see God as a sort of running brook, a brook that is more of soft light than of water. A brook that gives forth light that runs through everything, that seems to stream between this world and another.”
“But you do not see him—you do not see this brook—when you look outward, is that not so? You see him, do you not, only when you look inward?”
“This is true.”
“Then why do you feel that he, the God that you see, the brook that you see, does not reside within you, and only within you?”
“Within me only?”
“Others see no brook.”
“But it is…”
He had no words to follow these, and Jesus let silence be with silence.
We had much time before meeting the priest in Simonias at sundown. There was splendor in the sky of the day, which was warm with cool light breezes from the west. We wandered.
Not far from Nain, we came upon a funeral procession. The body of the only son of a widow of that place was being carried to a burial ground north of there. Some in the procession recognized Jesus from his visit to Nain, where he had ministered saving grace to the blind girl. Her gift of inner seeing was now apparently regarded as beatific, and the hue of her father’s exaltations was heard and known throughout the village.
It was one of those who recognized him that besought him to raise the dead son to life.
In my consternation, all became suddenly abstracted. The splendor of the sky was no longer there, and I knew not what to do. But an accidental glimpse of the widowed mother struck me like a mote of sand in my errant eye. The look on her face suggested to me that she did not want to see her son alive again. The look on her face suggested to me that she was terrified of her son being returned from the dead.
She immediately countered my glimpse with a contortion of her face into a great weeping and wailing. I looked to Jesus, and he to me. We both had suspicious minds. Having read this far, you may be inclined even to call them criminal minds. And, as is said, a suspicious mind sees everything on the dark side. But there seemed to us to be a false note in her wailing, a forced trace in her weeping. Simon Peter stood by, as if he himself were without breath, watching.
I drew close to the body of the boy on its wooden bier. I could smell the myrrh and al
oes from within the linen winding-cloth that enwrapped his body. Enlacing the scent of these funerary resins was an altogether more bitterly unpleasant scent, which issued from the separate cloth of his head-wrapping. I recognized this noxious odor. It was not the smell of death. It was the foul smell of imperial Roman stealthy political maneuverings, the smell of the murder of Drusus by Sejanus and Livilla, and of many another calculated mourning.
It was the stench of henbane. I parted the head-wrapping with respectful care. The acrid scent filled my nostrils.
There are those who, to induce trance and visions, ingest small doses of henbane, the rank extraction of the purple-streaked yellow-flowering plant. Priests and devotees of various gods do it and call it holy ritual. Others do it in the name of no god and simply, and more honestly, call it pleasure. Occasionally one of them ingests too much—an imperial portion, so to speak—and dies. Occasionally one of them takes only a bit too much and is lost to a stupor between life and death, the “deep sleep” that the Greeks call coma.
In closing the head covering, I surreptitiously put one of my fingers to one of the boy’s nostrils. I felt the warmth of faint latent breath.
Had he taken a drop too many in his quest for thrillsome delights, and was his mother overly eager to be rid of him? Or had she put a drop too few in the wine she had served him? As with brews of thorn-apple, which can bring stupor and coma but rarely death, henbane leaves its survivors with no memory of the event.
“There is nothing that can be done,” I announced to Jesus. “The boy is dead.”
I went to him as if in sadness, and I whispered to him, all the while making gestures of sadness, contradictory to the nature of my whispers, for the lookers-on to see.
Jesus went to the wicked widow, and said in a consoling way, “Do not cry, good woman. Your dear son is not dead. He sleeps.”
She wept now in relief, believing this to be the end of the matter.
Jesus went to the body, drew aside the head-wrapping, covered the boy’s nostrils with his hand so that air could neither enter nor exit them, drew open the boy’s mouth, brought his own open mouth down full upon it and into the henbane stench of it howled of Iao Sabaoth and Adonai and howled on in a language that was not a language, and as the body of the boy jerked with a horrid gasp, Jesus fell to the ground as if to show that he had drawn from the boy into himself, and the mother of the boy fainted where she stood, and many in the procession fell to their knees to pray, and Simon Peter with them.
Amid much panic and rapt terror, Jesus, on his feet again, made as to calm them with words that brought further frenzy and dismay: “He only slept, my brothers and sisters. He was not dead but only slept.”
I went humbly mannered among the many processioners, collecting offerings for the new temple. This was somewhat difficult, not because they were hesitant to give—they were quite eager to give, and well they gave—but because they were almost as dazed and disoriented as the risen son, who remembered nothing of poisoning himself or being poisoned, and was quite alarmed to hear that he had been dead. Of course, the mother, for the sake of appearances, gave more than her neighbors.
We had done it. Many besides our disciple Peter had seen it. As surely as God had breathed life into the mouth of Adamus, so Jesus had sucked death from and breathed new life into the mouth of one of the faithful. We had done it, and there was no one to say we had not done it. On that aimless afternoon, under that sky of splendor, we had wagered out of the game every other would-be savior, redeemer, prophet, messiah, sage, mage, and madman gathered round the dice. We had done it. We had raised the fucking dead.
As we moved on, Simon Peter appeared visibly shaken. Jesus said to him: “He only slept. He was not dead but only slept.”
The disciple looked on him with awe.
Traveling with Peter, who was but the first of many to join us, we now were forced to be doubly wary. There could be no open talk between Jesus and me when he was near. This presence of innocence, no matter how good-hearted, was difficult for us, but it was also good for us, as it behoved us to play the game all the more, to live it and to breathe it, rendering it all the more convincing, all the more real, until we and our roles all but merged.
When we needed to discuss words that I had written for him, or plans to be laid, or moves to be made, Jesus would send Peter to pray, and we would have to listen carefully for his return.
Jesus took to saying nonsense that was taken by Peter, and others whom we encountered, as profound enigmas to be delved.
“Man has two arms but only one heart,” he would say, and there would be the slow contemplative stroking of beards and slow nods of deep pondering.
“I am the son of man,” he would say, and there would be the slow contemplative stroking of beards, slow nods of deep pondering, and, when we returned months later to the town where he first said this, we found men still engaged in interpreting it.
“What do you mean when you say that you are the son of man?” asked Peter of him one day, feeling that his closeness to Jesus was such that he could ask; but asked it of him reticently, circumspectly, also feeling that one should tread carefully in the presence of a man who could raise the dead.
“Is not a sardine the son of a sardine?” Jesus smiled. “When you ask things of the brook within you, do you receive answers? Do you know yet the true nature of the brook that you call God?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I have never seen the brook within you that you see. I believe you, but you must discover its source. I feel that I have failed you in not leading you to it.”
“You have not failed me.”
“Then you have failed yourself.”
“Others call you the son of God. Why do you never call yourself the son of God, but always the son of man?”
“Because I am the son of man. I am the spawn of your brook. I am the son not of man’s seed, but of his imagining. This frail body that you see was born of the flesh of man and woman, yes, but it is my fleeting form and nothing else. All else of me, the unseen part of me, was born of the imagination of man.”
“But you command the imaginations of men. It is not the imaginations of men that command you.”
Our good man Peter had a way of confusing himself, of entangling himself in his own words and thinking. Sometimes he could extricate himself, sometimes he could not.
“You are right,” said Jesus. “It is I who command, but only because I was imagined into being to do so. The imagination of man, of whom I am the son, is fearful; and thus was I born to be fearsome, that man might protect himself and allay his fears through me. Truly, I am the son of man.”
“And so—”
Regardless of what, if anything, Peter was about to say, Jesus answered what may or may not have been his question:
“Yes. I am the son of man. And it is man who is the son of God.”
He had entered dangerous ground. I, careful not to outstep the bounds of my disciple’s role, tried to warn and halt him, not with the words I said, but the tone of voice in which I said them:
“I feel, my Lord, that we are beginning to understand.” But on that late afternoon following the evening of the joyful blasting, that late afternoon following the raising of the dead, that late afternoon when we approached Simonias with the dirt of distant hills turning the color of copper all around us, Peter was without words for almost all the way, stricken dumb by what he had witnessed on the road not far from Nain.
Entering Simonias, we were hailed by a crowd that rushed toward Jesus, then stopped respectfully not far from him.
“You have spoken great words that portend great things. David’s key is on your shoulder. The panther has lain before you in peace and eaten from your hand. You have made the lame to walk. You have graced the blind. To the faithful you have delivered gifts from the Lord. Lightning has struck you and issued from you as a rainbow. You have this very day raised from the dead the only son of a worthy widow.”
Several moved closer to h
im, to kneel and kiss the hem of his tunic.
A chant rose among them: “Mashiach, mashiach, mashiach…”
In my mind, there rose a contrapuntal chanting: “Merda, merda, merda…”
As grand a city as Sepphoris was, so negligible a speck in the dust to the southeast of it was the hamlet of Simonias. The people who came forward to us were, then, a significant number of its populace.
“You honor us,” said one of them. He was the oldest of those who gathered. His beard was long and full and white, brindled with silver and tarnished with yellow.
“It is I who am honored,” said Jesus.
“What brings you to our town, where the plain ends and few visit?”
“I feel it to be a hallowed place.”
These words were met with self-satisfied approbation all round among those who stood before us.
“Will you speak to us?” asked one who stood close to the old man.
“I have come here to meet a priest.”
“We have no priest,” the old man said. “We have not even scrolls, or men to read them.”
“But a priest will be here with the setting of the sun. I have asked him to meet me here. Why Simonias, he asked. I told him the same as I have told you: because I sense it to be a hallowed place. He comes from the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.”
They took in breath as one. Some repeated their entreaty, seeking exhortation from him.
“Perhaps,” said Jesus, “you would stand to gain more from the words of the learned priest.”
“We wish to have words from you,” someone said, and the others voiced their agreement.
Jesus moved to the shade of a date-palm tree, so that the shadows of its weaving fronds might pass over him in a hypnotic way as he spoke. They went to the date-palm, and he smiled gently to them. He glanced above for a moment. Others joined those who gathered.
“This tree bears good fruit in its season, as do you, through your work, and through your children. This life is a life of fruitfulness. It has by God been so designed.”
