by Nick Tosches
“The very last of the Book’s prophets, Malachi, to whom God spoke only thirteen generations ago, was told by him: ‘I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me; and the Lord, whom you seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.’
“Can you imagine the Messiah coming suddenly to the Temple? Can you imagine the terror with which the Sanhedrin might look upon the prospect of this prophecy’s fulfillment?
“No one knows who is meant by the messenger, but most agree that the messenger and Lord of our seeking are one, embodied in the Messiah anointed by the God of judgment and justice himself.
“These words come very close to the end of the parchment that is the end of the Book.
“God goes on to demand: ‘Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me.’ He is speaking of tithes and offerings to a corrupt temple.
“He then warns: ‘Surely the day is coming.’ It is like unto that coming of which you speak, that shaking that Aaron feels in the air.
“And God’s very last words, with which the Book ends, threaten that the true law, as he gave it unto Moses, must be obeyed ‘or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.’
“Worshippers heed these words. The Sanhedrin, to whom they seem to be addressed, shrink from them.”
When Jesus spoke, there was a hushed excitement in his voice:
“But whose temple? It says only that he shall suddenly come to his temple.”
“The Holy Temple in Jerusalem, I assume. This is the temple that rightfully belongs to both God and the Messiah.”
“But I am to build a great new temple. This is our only reason for accepting donations and collecting funds.”
The seriousness in his voice was so convincing that even he seemed convinced of what he said.
“Yes, I have heard you tell of it wherever you speak. I and the others gather what we can for this.”
“Which temple, now, do you believe was meant?”
Then came the voice of young Andreas, who was, like me, believed to be asleep but was not:
“It is clear to me,” he said.
Neither Jesus nor the rabbi seemed to pay his words any mind. There was no sound from either of them. I could not see if they even turned to look his way. Then there was no sound at all but for the crickets in the grass.
17
THERE WAS TALK OF A MAN WHO WAS CALLED BY MANY NAMES. Some of these names were Aramaic, some Hebrew, some Arabic, some Greek. Some said he was an Essene, some said he was an itinerant beggar, or a self-appointed priest. As many were those who told of him, so many were his names and natures and physical features.
It was said that he spoke of a Messiah and was a great baptizer of people, much given to rivers and streams and immersions of the faithful in their waters. It was said that Jesus had been among the faithful who had come to him, and that on beholding Jesus, the Baptist had humbled himself before him, saying that he was not fit to bless him who was blessed beyond himself and all men.
And as many the people who told this tale, so many were the places where it had occurred.
The source of this legend was unknown to us, but it was good for our purposes, so we let it be said and we profited from it, as we let be said and profited from all the tales of little miracles that Jesus had performed as a child in Nazareth, all the tales of greater miracles that he had performed in the more recent times of his ministry. Many of these miraculous doings were beyond our imaginations, and we often wondered at the seeds of the imaginations from which they had sprouted. But when asked about them, Jesus responded with an almost imperceptible smile, an even more subtle lowering of his head in vague affirmation, and a silence of profound humility.
His nuanced affirmation seemed not to affirm anything to do with the miracles of which he was asked, but rather to dismiss them as trifles while affirming something unspoken that lay beyond them. As for his silence of deep humility, it had been developed to perfection by him from the near-silence of his taking no credit for raising the dead: “He only slept.”
When we heard that we had fed five thousand with two fish and a few loaves of bread in the Decapolis desert, those who told of this received the almost imperceptible smile, the even more subtle lowering of his head in vague affirmation, and the silence of profound humility.
There was even an explanation as to how five thousand people had come to be gathered in the desert. They had gathered, of course, to hear the Messiah speak. And how could the voice of Jesus be heard by the farthest of such a multitude? This, too, was a miracle, of course.
When we heard that this cripple or that had been cured by him: the almost imperceptible smile, the even more subtle lowering of the head in vague affirmation, the silence of profound humility.
Our dear disciples, the fishermen and the learned men alike, often wondered at these tales, which were told as if they had happened in days just passed. Why, they wondered, had they seen or known nothing of these things?
They were hesitant to speak of this to Jesus, but not to me.
It troubled me that I had no answer. One morning, the rabbi provided me and the others with the answer we sought, I in my way, they in theirs.
“I believe our Lord is several in his oneness, as the aspects of God.”
The priest spoke of Pythagoras, saying:
“His was the most scientific of minds the world has known. He traveled as far as mathematics, reason, and logic could lead him. Then he came to the spheres where they did not enter; where they, and he with them, ceded to the mystical.”
To these words I made as to agree with the rabbi and the fishermen, and things were well.
So it was that the people of Judea, wherever we journeyed, and wherever we did not, worked our miracles for us. Our concern—my concern—was to keep them from saying our words for us. The miracles, the cheap tricks, they craved were of little matter. The pith and substance were in the words. Let them become lost in interpreting all they wanted, so long as they did not embellish them too much with their own tales of what was said.
I saw that the Word and the Way, the Way and the Word should indeed remain without precise meaning. Let them mean all things to all men, and let them discuss these things.
New disciples joined us. Some remained. Some returned to their families. I remember some of their faces, some of their names.
There was the errant tax-collector, Levi, who always seemed to be scratching at himself, and who said little but obeyed. There was a second Simon, who was also given another name by Jesus. There was a Thaddeus, a drifter of Canaan, I believe, and a most somber man. There were other fishermen. There was a gentile, a Roman by birth, like me. There was an Eleazar, a merchant of crude wares, whose two young sisters were eager to have congress with the Lord, were hard to resist, and were hard to have return to their home. There was for a time an elderly man whose good cheer I will not forget, but whose name has long escaped memory. He could not go far with us. There were others, many others.
At this time, in the cities of Judea, politically minded young Jews were aligning themselves with one or another of several idealistic groups advocating change in society.
The Herodians were led by Pharisees and Sadducees of the priestly caste, along with soldiers and courtiers of Herod Antipas. Young Jews recruited to the Herodians foolishly espoused a renewed dedication to rule by the dynasty of Herod, king of the Jews and hater of them. They believed in their ignorance and folly that such a return to despotism might bring about a more perfect theocracy. The young Jews did not see through to the ulterior motives of the aristocratic priests who lured them with talk of this more perfect theocracy.
The Zealots were more radical in their cause. The Herodic rulers, after all, were mere client kings and puppets of Rome. The Zealots, though they too sought a more perfect theocracy, advocated a revolution against and freedom from Rome itself.
Other groups were taken less seriously. Some of these fell apart as quickly as they appeared, only to be revived later. One of th
em was the Sicarii, who took a boyish delight in calling themselves by this menacing name for dagger-wielding assassins. They were as laughably tough-talking flower boys to the Zealots.
Rome saw these groups as being as potentially dangerous as they were naive. This was particularly true of the Zealots. Rome had been distressed by its share of rebellions, and the one invariable fact she knew was that every rebellion began with the rumor of rebellion.
Thus a certain God-fearing young man of unweathered innocence who professed himself a Zealot had to be coaxed from among our disciples. His name was Barnabas, or something like that. Serious in the way that only innocents can be, he was altogether a nice enough boy. He spoke of the injustice of taxes, as if others did not see and feel this as he did; and his talks about this with our disciple Levi, the quondam tax-collector, were most entertaining. But we had to rid ourselves of him.
We could not be seen as out to ruffle the feathers of Rome. To conquer Judea under the Romans, we must not be construed to be at enmity with Rome. In this way, someday, we would command the faith of Rome as well.
It was at this time that I wrote one of my most masterly pronouncements for my Loiterer and Lord, words that would be received well and with strong approval by any Roman authority whose ears they reached.
Jesus would begin this pronouncement, which was to be repeated many times in many towns, by asking that someone in the crowd bring forth to him a coin of tribute. Never was it merely a coin that he asked be brought to him, but always a coin of tribute. This was to ensure that it be a Roman denarius, as older Jewish coins were not accepted as tribute, but only the Roman denarius, which represented the capitation tax levied on every Jew.
He would hold the face of the silver coin to the crowd, who knew that it presented the profile and name of Tiberius. He would move his arm in a long slow sweep before them. Sometimes, if the coin was of a new minting, it reflected intense sunlight into the eyes of those who stood before him.
“Whose image is this, and whose superscription is this?” he would ask with some force.
The force in his voice never failed to rouse most of them to call out in response: “Caesar’s!”
To which he would declare with increased force: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”
Never would he cease the long slow sweep of his arm, or lower the coin during these words, but only when he lessened the force in his voice to say what he said next:
“And unto God the things that are God’s.”
In placing Rome before God, and in placing the obligations due Rome before those due God, our Lord could be seen as a propagator for the authority of Rome as much as a propagator for the God whose Messiah he was. The powers of state and God were set in equation, and men could go so far as to here sense a syllogism: powers were deserving of tribute; Rome and the God of the Jews deserved great tribute; therefore Rome and the God of the Jews were powers in like kind and measure.
Thus, for now, our safe passage was insured among both Jews and Romans.
After every performance of this display, the man who had brought forth the denarius would step forth to retrieve it, whereupon I or one of the more devout disciples would hold the coin to him and ask, in the presence of onlookers: “Tribute for Caesar or tribute for the building of the new temple?” Invariably, though often begrudgingly, he would give it up for the latter. When he did this, others in the crowd tendered their coins of godly tribute as well. Thus this pronouncement served more than one end.
As we traveled, we were sometimes mistaken for Essenes, as women were not seen among us. But in fact many women were taken by our Lord. At times, this presented problems, for our Jesus must appear to be chaste in every way.
There were walks in the woods with women who came to our camp seeking the presence and guidance of our Lord. I would follow after them for a distance, then post myself to be sure that his beast noises could not be heard by me, and thus not by the encamped disciples.
But there were too many women, too many woods, too many walks. I had to lay down the law.
“Would you sacrifice a kingdom for a whiff of spoiling tilapia?”
He looked at me. He smiled. His chest moved with silent laughter. He understood.
Sometimes the women who followed him brought problems of a more absurd nature.
There was much talk of a woman who traveled after us from town to town, city to city, settlement to settlement, desert wilderness to desert wilderness. She was called Maria—not to be confused with the fair sister of our Eleazar, who bore the same name: a name to which Jesus always reacted with occluded eyes, as it was, too, the name of his own mother—and Maria the Magdalene, after Magdala, the town whence she claimed to have come, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, near Tiberias. And she was called simply the Magdalene. Between ourselves, Jesus and I called her the Magdalen Hag.
Many were the tales of her beauty, but not one of these was ever taken up by any who chanced to see her. She was a toothless crone of eighty-six who walked with a staff, cackled unpredictably, and was given to muttering nonsense. The tale-tellers who had never seen her spoke of the romantic desires she harbored for our Lord. I believe these desires to have been real, as she was much given to drooling and offering to rub his tired limbs with balm. It was also said that she was a prostitute who had changed her ways upon experiencing the light of Jesus. She may in truth once have been a prostitute, but if so, it was age and not the light of Jesus that changed her ways.
We never knew the source of her means, which allowed her to follow after us again and again; and she came always bearing gifts.
The Lord did allow her to rub his feet with aromatic oil on an occasion when she presented him with several olden coins of heavy gold; but he stayed her rough and gnarled hands as they moved above his ankles. She worked her wiry gray hair like a cloth upon his oiled feet.
There was another woman, also said to be of most stunning beauty by those who had never seen her. The name by which we knew her said much: the Hemorrhaging Woman.
This unfortunate woman was in years beyond the moons of her natural bleeding, and even then her bleeding was in no way natural. She bled horrendously, and more days than not. She had come to our Lord to be healed of this affliction, the like of which we had never witnessed. Jesus could of course do nothing for her, but said to her:
“No woman can bleed so profusely and live. This truly is a sign from God that you are most special. He has chosen you to suffer for many. Not only do you bleed without losing life, but your reward will be great indeed.”
This uplifted her, and she followed us for many weeks, cooking for us when we spent our nights in the countryside. She was a very good cook. But what a blood-sodden mess, attracting mosquitoes and flies, and leaving puddles of gore to be stepped round wherever she went. We liked her, but were relieved to see her go.
For a very long time, we remained in or close to Galilee. Known as both the Nazarene and the Galilean, the Messiah had a strong hold there that grew stronger by the day. We discussed the need to journey farther, but we were slow to do so. Then one night something befell us that precipitated our farther journeying and taught us that it is dangerous to have known whereabouts for too long. It was a miracle of sorts, in that we escaped with our lives.
Whether the Baptist lived or was a phantom of rumor, we knew that others who proclaimed themselves to be the Messiah were very real, and that none of them was pleased with the new fame of Jesus and the shadows of increasing anonymity to which it consigned them. The most angered of these, we knew, was the man who called himself, and was called by others, the Egyptian. This particular Egyptian was one of a few who went by that name. All of them claimed to have spent years in Egypt, but none of them could speak a word of either older Ptolemaic or even Roman Demotic.
The Egyptian who harbored anger for Jesus was a Jew who went in a Jewish-made approximation of the old-fashioned striped head-cloth worn by men in Egypt. His preachings had been cobbled toget
her from second-hand mis-readings of the Sibylline Oracles of the Jews and the alleged teachings of the Egyptian cult of the ibis-god, Thoth, which had passed piecemeal into Greek as the nonsensical “secret wisdom” of Thrice-Great Hermes.
The fading impression of the man who called himself the Egyptian, or the men who called themselves by this name, was such that Jesus himself was sometimes rumored to have journeyed early in his life to the treasuries of learning in Alexandria. To these rumors, I had Jesus answer:
“I have sought God nowhere but here, in this land that is my home.”
We were far to the north, near the raised road to Tyre. The disciples had been sent to Sidon, to procure provisions and to minister to the poor with bread and kindness. We were to meet them there and enter twin-harbored Tyre together in the morning, crossing over the bridge that Alexander the Great was said to have built in fulfillment of a prophecy in the Book.
We had seen two spring-traps set for birds, but not the pit-trap set for venison or big cat or whatever might fall to it. We heard the sudden cry of its catch, which was the cry of a man. Then three men were upon us with daggers.
Jesus struck one of them in the face with wood aflame from our fire. I drew my dagger, and another of them took it to the hilt in his gut as he flung himself at me with his own dagger raised to strike me. As Jesus, our prince of peace, no longer carried his dagger in his sash, I took the knife from the gutted man’s hand and hurled it to him on the ground. Seeing that the two remaining men were poised above him and ready to strike, I grasped my weapon with both hands and drove forward its long blade into the back of one, while Jesus in one continuous movement took from the dirt the dagger I had tossed him and deeply slashed the other man above his ankle. The man wailed his pain as Jesus rose and with a fast sweep of his arm, cut open the man’s throat and was bathed in a rush of blood.
