“Simon,” Joshua said, “I can heal your affliction, if you’ll allow me.”
“What affliction?” He lay down at the table across from Joshua. “Biff, come sit with us.” He patted a cushion next to him and I ducked in the event that fingers started flying. “I understand that Jakan used my sister as bait for a trap for you two.”
“Not much of a trap,” Joshua said.
“You expected that?” I asked.
“I thought there would be more, the whole Pharisee council perhaps. I wanted to answer them directly, not have my words passed through a dozen spies and rumormongers. I also wanted to see if there would be any Sadducees there.”
Just then I realized what Joshua had already figured out: the Sadducees, the priests, weren’t involved in Jakan’s little surprise inquisition. They had been born to their power, and were not as easily threatened as the working-class Pharisees. And the Sadducees were the more powerful half of the Sanhedrin, the ones who commanded the soldiers of the Temple guard. Without the priests, the Pharisees were vipers without fangs, for now anyway.
“I hope we haven’t brought the judgment of the Pharisees down on your head, Simon,” Joshua said.
Simon waved a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry. There’ll be no Pharisees coming here. Jakan is terrified of me, and if he really believes that Maggie is possessed, and if his friends believe it, well, I’d bet he’s divorced her already.”
“She can come back to Galilee with us,” I said, looking at Joshua, who looked at Simon, as if to ask permission.
“She may do as she wishes.”
“What I wish is to get out of Bethany before Jakan comes to his senses,” Maggie said, coming from the other room. She wore a simple woolen dress and her hair was still dripping. There was still green goo on her sandals. She came across the room, knelt down, and gave her brother a huge hug, then a kiss on the eyebrow. “If he comes by or sends word, you’ll tell him I’m still here.”
I sensed Simon was smiling under the veil. “You don’t think he’ll want to come in and look around?”
“The coward,” Maggie spat.
“Amen,” I said. “How did you stay with a creep like that all of these years?”
“After the first year he didn’t want to be anywhere near me. Unclean, don’t you know? I told him I was bleeding.”
“For all those years?”
“Sure. Do you think he would embarrass himself among the members of the Pharisee council by asking them about their own wives?”
Joshua said, “I can heal you of that affliction, if you’ll allow me, Maggie.”
“What affliction?”
“You should go,” Simon said. “I’ll send word about what Jakan has done as soon as I know. If he hasn’t done it already, I have a friend who will plant the idea that if he doesn’t divorce Maggie his place on the Sanhedrin might be questioned.”
Simon and Martha waved to us from the doorway, Martha looking like a compact ghost of her older sister and Simon just looking like a ghost.
And thus did we become eleven.
There was a full moon and a sky full of stars thrown over us as we walked back to Gethsemane. From the top of the Mount of Olives we could see across the Kidron Valley to the Temple. Black smoke streamed into the sky from the sacrificial fires which the priests tended day and night. I held Maggie’s hand as we walked through the grove of ancient olive trees and out into the clearing near the oil press where we camped. Philip and Nathaniel had built a fire and there were two strangers sitting by it with them. They all stood up as we approached. Philip glared at me, which baffled me until I remembered that he’d been with us at Cana, and seen Joshua and Maggie dancing at the wedding. He thought I was trying to steal Joshua’s girl. I let her hand go.
“Master,” said Nathaniel, tossing his yellow hair, “new disciples. These are Thaddeus and Thomas the Twins.”
Thaddaeus stepped up to Joshua. He was about my height and age, and wore a tattered woolen tunic and looked especially gaunt, as if he might be starving. His hair was cut short like a Roman’s, but it looked as if someone had cut it with a dull piece of flint. Somehow he looked familiar.
“Rabbi, I heard you preach when you were with John. I have been with him for two years.”
A follower of John, that’s where I knew him from, although I didn’t remember meeting him. That explained the hungry look as well.
“Welcome, Thaddaeus,” Joshua said. “These are Biff and Mary Magdalene, disciples and friends.”
“Call me Maggie,” Maggie said.
Joshua stepped over to Thomas the Twins, who was only one guy, younger, perhaps twenty, his beard still like soft down in places, his clothes finer than any of ours. “And Thomas.”
“Don’t, you’re standing on Thomas Two,” Thomas squealed.
Nathaniel pushed Joshua aside and whispered in his ear a little too loudly. “He sees his twin but no one else can. You said to show mercy, so I haven’t told him that he’s mad.”
“And so you shall be shown mercy, Nathaniel,” Joshua said.
“So we won’t tell you that you’re a ninny,” I added.
“Welcome, Thomas,” Joshua said, embracing the boy.
“And Thomas Two,” Thomas said.
“Forgive me. Welcome, Thomas Two, as well,” said Joshua to a perfectly empty spot in space. “Come to Galilee and help us spread the good news.”
“He’s over there,” said Thomas, pointing to a different spot, equally empty.
And thus did we become thirteen.
On the trip back to Capernaum Maggie told us about her life, about the dreams she had set aside, and about a child that had died in the first year of her marriage. I could see Joshua was shaken when he heard of the child, and I knew he was thinking that if we hadn’t taken off to the East, he would have been there to save it.
“After that,” Maggie said, “Jakan didn’t come near me. There was bleeding right after the baby died, and as far as he knew it never stopped. He’s always been afraid that someone might think that there’s a curse on his house, so my duties as a wife were public only. It’s a double-edged sword for him. In order to appear dutiful I had to go to the synagogue and to the women’s court in the Temple, but if they thought I was going there while I was bleeding I would have been driven out, maybe stoned, and Jakan would have been shamed. Who knows what he’ll do now.”
“He’ll divorce you,” I said. “He’ll have to if he wants to save face with the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin.”
Strangely enough, it was Joshua who I had trouble consoling about Maggie’s lost child. She’d lived with the loss for years, cried over it, allowed it to heal as much as it would, but the wound was fresh for Joshua. He walked far behind us, shunning the new disciples who pranced around him like excited puppies. I could tell that he was talking to his father, and it didn’t seem to be going well.
“Go talk to him,” Maggie said. “It wasn’t his fault. It was God’s will.”
“That’s why he feels responsible,” I said. We hadn’t explained to Maggie about the Holy Ghost, the kingdom, all the changes that Joshua wanted to bring to mankind, and how those were at odds, at times, with the Torah.
“Go talk to him,” she said.
I fell back in our column, past Philip and Thaddaeus, who were trying to explain to Nathaniel that it was his own voice he heard when he put his fingers in his ears and spoke, and not the voice of God, and past Thomas, who was having an animated discussion with empty air.
I walked along beside Joshua for a while before I spoke, and then I tried to sound matter-of-fact. “You had to go to the East, Joshua. You know that now.”
“I didn’t have to go right then. That was cowardly. Would it have been so bad to watch her marry Jakan? To see her child born?”
“Yes, it would have. You can’t save everyone.”
“Have you been asleep these last twenty years?”
“Have you? Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on thi
s guilt. If you don’t use what you learned in the East then maybe we shouldn’t have gone. Maybe leaving Israel was cowardly.”
I felt my face go numb as if the blood had drained from it. Had I said that? So, we walked along for a while in silence, not looking at each other. I counted birds, listened to the murmur of the disciples’ voices ahead, watched Maggie’s ass move under her dress as she walked, not really enjoying the elegance of it.
“Well, I, for one, feel better,” said Joshua finally. “Thanks for cheering me up.”
“Glad to help,” I said.
We arrived in Capernaum on the morning of the fifth day after leaving Bethany. Peter and the others had been preaching the good news to the people on the shore of Galilee and there was a crowd of perhaps five hundred people waiting for us. The tension had passed between Joshua and me and the rest of the journey had been pleasant, if for no other reason than we got to hear Maggie laugh and tease us. My jealousy of Joshua returned, but somehow it wasn’t bitter. It was more like familiar grief for a distant loss, not the sword-in-the-heart, rending-of-flesh agony of a heartbreak. I could actually leave the two of them alone and talk to other people—think of other things. Maggie loved Joshua, that was assured, but she loved me as well, and there was no way to divine how that might manifest. By following Joshua we had already divorced ourselves of the expectations of normal existence. Marriage, home, family: they were not part of the life we had chosen, Joshua made that clear to all of his disciples. Yes, some of them were married, and some even preached with their wives at their sides, but what set them apart from the multitudes who would follow Joshua was that they had stepped off the path of their own lives to spread the Word. It was to the Word that I lost Maggie, not to Joshua.
As exhausted as he was, as hungry, Joshua preached to them. They had been waiting for us and he wouldn’t disappoint them. He climbed into one of Peter’s boats, rowed out from the shore far enough for the crowd to be able to see him, and he preached to them about the kingdom for two hours.
When he had finished, and had sent the crowd on their way, two newcomers waited among the disciples. They were both compact, strong-looking men in their mid-twenties. One was clean-shaven and wore his hair cut short, so that it formed a helmet of ringlets on his head; the other had long hair with his beard plaited and curled in the style I had seen on some Greeks. Although they wore no jewelry, and their clothes were no more fancy than my own, there was an air of wealth about them both. I thought it might have been power, but if it was, it wasn’t the self-conscious power of the Pharisees. If nothing else, they were self-assured.
The one with the long hair approached Joshua and kneeled before him. “Rabbi, we’ve heard you speak of the coming of the kingdom and we want to join you. We want to help spread the Word.”
Joshua looked at the man for a long time, smiling to himself, before he spoke. He took the man by the shoulders and lifted him. “Stand up. You are welcome, friends.”
The stranger seemed baffled. He looked back at his friend, then at me, as if I had some answer to his confusion. “This is Simon,” he said, nodding toward his friend. “My name is Judas Iscariot.”
“I know who you are,” Joshua said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
And so we became fifteen: Joshua, Maggie, and me; Bartholomew, the Cynic; Peter and Andrew, John and James, the fishermen; Matthew, the tax collector; Nathaniel of Cana, the young nitwit; Philip and Thaddeus, who had been followers of John the Baptist; Thomas the twin, who was a loony; and the Zealots, Simon the Canaanite and Judas Iscariot. Fifteen went out into Galilee to preach the Holy Ghost, the coming of the kingdom, and the good news that the Son of God had arrived.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Joshua’s ministry was three years of preaching, sometimes three times a day, and although there were some high and low points, I could never remember the sermons word for word, but here’s the gist of almost every sermon I ever heard Joshua give.
You should be nice to people, even creeps.
And if you:
a) believed that Joshua was the Son of God (and)
b) he had come to save you from sin (and)
c) acknowledged the Holy Spirit within you (became as a little child, he would say)(and)
d) didn’t blaspheme the Holy Ghost (see c),
then you would:
e) live forever
f) someplace nice
g) probably heaven.
However, if you:
h) sinned (and/or)
i) were a hypocrite (and/or)
j) valued things over people (and)
k) didn’t do a, b, c, and d,
then you were:
l) fucked
Which is the message that Joshua’s father had given him so many years ago, and which seemed, at the time, succinct to the point of rudeness, but made more sense after you listened to a few hundred sermons.
That’s what he taught, that’s what we learned, that’s what we passed on to the people in the towns of Galilee. Not everybody was good at it, however, and some seemed to miss the point altogether. One day Joshua, Maggie, and I returned from preaching in Cana to find Bartholomew sitting by the synagogue at Capernaum, preaching the Gospel to a semicircle of dogs that sat around him. The dogs seemed spellbound, but then, Bart was wearing a flank steak as a hat, so I’m not sure it was his speaking skills that held their attention.
Joshua snatched the steak off of Bartholomew’s head and tossed it into the street, where a dozen dogs suddenly found their faith. “Bart, Bart, Bart,” Josh said as he shook the big man by the shoulders, “don’t give what’s holy to dogs. Don’t cast your pearls before swine. You’re wasting the Word.”
“I don’t have any pearls. I am slave to no possessions.”
“It’s a metaphor, Bart,” Joshua said, deadpan. “It means don’t give the Word to those who aren’t ready to receive it.”
“You mean like when you drowned the swine in Decapolis? They weren’t ready for it?”
Joshua looked at me for help. I shrugged.
Maggie said, “That’s exactly right, Bart. You got it.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Bart said. “Okay guys, we’re off to preach the Word in Magdala.” He climbed to his feet and led his pack of disciples toward the lake.
Joshua looked at Maggie. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Yes it is,” she said, then she took off to find Johanna and Susanna, two women who had joined us and were learning to preach the gospel.
“That’s not what I meant,” Joshua said to me.
“Have you ever won an argument with her?”
He shook his head.
“Then say amen and let’s go see what Peter’s wife has cooked up.”
The disciples were gathered around outside of Peter’s house, sitting on the logs we had arranged in a circle around a fire pit. They were all looking down and seemed to be caught in some glum prayer. Even Matthew was there, when he should have been at his job collecting taxes in Magdala.
“What’s wrong?” asked Joshua.
“John the Baptist is dead,” said Philip.
“What?” Joshua sat down on the log next to Peter and leaned against him.
“We just saw Bartholomew,” I said. “He didn’t say anything about it.”
“We just found out,” said Andrew. “Matthew just brought the news from Tiberius.”
It was the first time since he’d joined us that I’d seen Matthew without the light of enthusiasm in his face. He might have aged ten years in the last few hours. “Herod had him beheaded,” he said.
“I thought Herod was afraid of John,” I said. It was rumored that Herod had kept John alive because he actually believed him to be the Messiah and was afraid of the wrath of God should the holy man perish.
“It was at the request of his stepdaughter,” said Matthew. “John was killed at the behest of a teenage slut.”
“Well, jeez, if he wasn’t dead already, the irony would have killed h
im,” I said.
Joshua stared into the dirt before him, thinking or praying, I couldn’t tell. Finally he said, “John’s followers will be like babes in the wilderness.”
“Thirsty?” guessed Nathaniel.
“Hungry?” guessed Peter.
“Horny?” guessed Thomas.
“No, you dumbfucks, lost. They’ll be lost!” I said. “Jeez.”
Joshua stood. “Philip, Thaddeus, go to Judea, tell John’s followers that they are welcome here. Tell them that John’s work is not lost. Bring them here.”
“But master,” Judas said, “John has thousands of followers. If they come here, how will we feed them?”
“He’s new,” I explained.
The next day was the Sabbath, and in the morning as we all headed to the synagogue, an old man in fine clothes ran out of the bushes and threw himself at Joshua’s feet. “Oh, Rabbi,” he wailed, “I am the mayor of Magdala. My youngest daughter has died. People say that you can heal the sick and raise the dead, will you help me?”
Joshua looked around. A half-dozen local Pharisees watched us from different points around the village. Joshua turned to Peter. “Take the Word to the synagogue today. I am going to help this man.”
“Thank you, Rabbi,” the rich man gushed. He hurried off and waved for us to follow.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked.
“Only as far as Magdala,” he said.
To Joshua I said, “That’s farther than a Sabbath’s journey allows.”
“I know,” Joshua said.
As we passed through all of the small villages along the coast on the way to Magdala, people came out of their houses and followed us for as long as they dared on a Sabbath, but I could also see the elders, the Pharisees, watching as we went.
The mayor’s house was large for Magdala, and his daughter had her own sleeping room. He led Joshua into the bedchamber where the girl lay. “Please save her, Rabbi.”
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