ii.
In the middle of the afternoon, twenty-two months, one week, and a day after Jesus’s death, rain thundered onto the library roof, waking me from a strange and unintended sleep. My head felt full and fuzzy, like it was stuffed with heaps of newly shorn wool. Lifting my cheek from my writing desk, I looked about—where was I? Gaius, who’d once nailed me into a coffin, had recently built a second room onto the library so I would have a scriptorium and space for cubicles to hold the library’s scrolls, but in those first muddled seconds of waking, I didn’t recognize the new surroundings. I felt a flicker of panic inside, and then of course, my whereabouts in the world returned.
Later, I would think of my old friend Thaddeus, who’d slept every day in the scriptorium in Haran’s house, practically curled up on top of his desk, napping out of boredom and for a time from Yaltha’s spiked beer. I, however, could only blame my somnolence on the passion that had driven me to work late into the night for weeks making copies of my codices. Two copies for the library and another that could be disseminated.
I pushed the bench back from my desk and shook my head, trying to clear the drowsy aftereffect, but the cobwebs clung to me. As I’d slept, the room had darkened and chilled, and I pulled Jesus’s cloak around my shoulders, drew the lamp closer, and turned my attention back to my work. My codex, Thunder: Perfect Mind, lay open on the desk, and beside it was the copy I’d been making of it on a fresh sheet of papyrus. Skepsis planned to send the copy to a scholar at the library in Alexandria with whom she corresponded. I’d taken extra care with the lettering and added my small flourishes, but my chevrons and spirals were wasted. A large, messy ink smear gaped at me from the middle of the papyrus, the place where my face had rested on the manuscript when I’d fallen asleep. The last lines I’d written were barely legible:
I am the whore and the holy woman
I am the wife and the virgin
I rubbed my finger across my cheek and the tip of it came back with a smear of ink. It seemed ironic, sad, beautiful, almost purposeful that I am the wife had been smudged onto my skin. For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed.
A great tiredness came over me then. I closed my eyes, wanting the dark, empty void.
I woke to silence. The rain had quieted. The air seemed weighted and still. Looking up, I saw Jesus standing across the room, his dark, expressive eyes staring at me.
I drew in my breath. It took several minutes before I could speak. I said, “Jesus. You’ve come.”
“Ana,” he said. “I never left.” And he smiled his funny, lopsided smile.
He didn’t move from where he stood, so I walked toward him, stopping suddenly when I noticed he was wearing his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve. I looked down, taking in the garment draped about my shoulders, his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve, the one I’d worn daily for twenty-two months, one week, and a day. How could he be wearing it, too?
I tried to discern what was happening. This is most assuredly a dream, I thought. Perhaps an awake dream or a vision. Yet I felt the realness of him.
I went and clutched his hands. They were warm and callused. He smelled like sweat and wood chips. His beard bore traces of limestone dust. He looked as he had when we were together in Nazareth. I wondered what he thought of the ink on my cheek.
I sensed he was leaving. “Don’t go.”
“I’ll always be with you,” he said, and he vanished.
I sat at my desk a long while, trying to comprehend. Skepsis had once told me her mother appeared in her holy room three weeks after she’d died. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” she’d said. “The mind is a mystery.”
I believed then, and still now, that Jesus’s visitation was the workings of my own mind, but it was no less a miracle than if he’d been flesh and blood. His spirit returned to me that day. He was no longer lost to me.
I removed his cloak, folded it neatly, and tucked it into an empty cubicle. I said aloud to the shadows in the room, “All shall be well.”
iii.
We climb the path to the cliffs, Diodora, Tabitha, and I, walking one behind the other in the orange light. I walk at the head, holding my incantation bowl against my chest. Behind me, Diodora strikes a goatskin drum and Tabitha sings a song about Eve, the seeker. For thirty years, the three of us have lived together on this hillside.
I glance over my shoulder at them. Tabitha’s hair flutters out behind her in the breezes, smooth and gray as a dove wing, and Diodora’s face has become a tiny field of furrows like her mother’s. We keep no mirrors, but I often see my reflection on the water’s surface—the crinkling around my eyes, my hair still dark except for a streak of white across the front. At fifty-eight I can still move with quickness and ease up the steep incline, as can my two sisters, but today we walk slowly, weighed down by the bulging pouches on our backs. They are stuffed full of codices—thirty leather-bound copies of my writings. All the words I’ve written since I was fourteen. My everything.
Nearing the clifftops, we veer off the footpath and pick our way over rocks and wind-bowed grasses until we arrive at the spot I’ve selected—a little plateau surrounded by flowering marjoram bushes. I set my incantation bowl on the ground, Diodora stops drumming, Tabitha ceases her song, and we stand there, staring at two mammoth clay jars that are nearly as tall as I am, and then at two deep, round holes that have been dug side by side in the earth. I peer into one of the holes, and a mingling of elation and sadness passes through me.
We peel the heavy pouches from our backs, sighing with relief, making little grunting noises. “Did you have to write so much over the course of your life?” Diodora teases. Pointing at the little mountain of soil that was dug from the holes, she adds, “I imagine the junior who was required to dig these bottomless pits would also like an answer to that.”
Tabitha circumambulates one of the clay jars as if it’s the size of Mount Sinai. “The poor donkeys who bore these Goliath jars up here would like the question answered as well.”
“Very well,” I say, joining in their fun. “I’ll write an exhaustive answer to the question and we shall return and dig another hole, and bury that writing, too.”
They groan loudly. Tabitha no longer hides her grin. She says, “Woe to us, Diodora; now that Ana is leader of the Therapeutae, we have no choice but to obey her.”
We look at one another and break into laughter. I’m unsure whether it’s because of the weight and volume of my books or because I have indeed become the Therapeutae’s leader. At that moment, both of these things seem remarkably funny to us.
Our levity fades as we remove the codices from the pouches. We grow quiet, even solemn. The day before, I cut Jesus’s cloak into thirty-one pieces. Now, sitting beside the holes dug into the hillside, we wrap the fragments of cloth around the books to protect them from dust and time, and tie them with undyed yarn. We work quickly, listening to the sea slap against the rocks far below, to the marjoram bushes alive with honeybees, the vibrating world.
When the task is done, I stare at the wrapped codices neatly stacked beside the jars and they look like they’re wearing little shrouds. I shake away the image, but the worry that my work will be forgotten lingers. Earlier, I recorded exactly where the jars would be buried, writing the location on a sealed scroll that will be passed on within the community after I die. But how long before the scroll is forgotten, before the significance of what’s buried fades?
I take the incantation bowl in my hands and lift it over my head. Diodora and Tabitha watch as I rotate it in slow circles and chant the prayer I wrote as a girl. The longing i
n it still seems like a living, breathing thing.
As I sing the words, I remember the night on the roof when Yaltha presented the bowl to me. She tapped the bone over my chest, striking it to life. “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies,” she told me.
* * *
• • •
YALTHA FELL ASLEEP BENEATH the tamarisk tree in the courtyard four years ago at the age of eighty-five and never woke up. She had all sorts of things to say to me during her life, but at her death there were no parting words. Our last real conversation had taken place beneath that same tree the week before she died.
“Ana,” she said. “Do you remember when you buried your scrolls in the cave to prevent your parents from burning them?”
I looked at her with curiosity. “I remember.”
“Well, you must do so again. I want you to make a copy of each of your codices and bury them on the hillside near the cliffs.” Her left hand possessed an occasional tremor and she’d become increasingly unsteady on her feet, but her mind, her glorious mind, had always been sound.
I frowned. “But why, Aunt? My work is safe here. No one is coming to burn it.”
Her voice sharpened. “Listen to me, Ana. You’ve dared much with your words. So much that a time will come when men will try to silence them. The hillside will keep your work safe.”
I simply stared at her, trying to make sense of her pronouncement. My face must have been ridden with doubt.
“You’re not listening,” she said. “Think what you’ve written!”
I scrolled through them in my head: stories of the matriarchs; the rape and maiming of Tabitha; the terrors men inflicted on women; the cruelties of Antipas; the braveries of Phasaelis; my marriage to Jesus; the death of Susanna; the exile of Yaltha; the enslavement of Diodora; the power of Sophia; the story of Isis; Thunder: Perfect Mind; and a plethora of other ideas about women that turned traditionally held beliefs upside down. And these were only a portion.
“I don’t understand—” I broke off, because I did understand. I just didn’t want to.
“Copies of your writings are gradually being dispersed,” she said. “They shed a beautiful light, but they will unsettle people and threaten their certainties. There’ll come a time—mark down my words, I foresee it—when men will try to destroy what you’ve written.”
I’d always been the one who had moments of prescience, not Yaltha. It seemed unlikely she’d divined a glimpse of the future and more likely she spoke from wisdom and prudence.
She smiled, but there was a firm, urgent quality about her. “Bury your writings, so one day they can be found again.”
“I promise, Aunt. I’ll make certain that day comes.”
* * *
• • •
“WHEN I AM DUST, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.” I chant the last line of the prayer in my bowl, and together, Diodora, Tabitha, and I lower the jars onto their sides and place the codices inside, fifteen in each one.
Reaching into my pouch, I remove the mummy portrait I commissioned all those years ago as a gift for Jesus, meant to preserve my memory. The three of us stare at it a moment—my face painted on a piece of limewood board. I carried it all the way to Galilee to give him, but I was too late. I will always regret that lateness.
I fold the last remnant of Jesus’s cloak around the portrait and slip it into the jar, thinking with wonder how his memory is being preserved three decades after his death. The past few years, Lavi has brought bits of news to me from Alexandria about Jesus’s followers, who didn’t disappear when Jesus died, but grew in number. Lavi says small groups of them have even sprung up here in Egypt, meeting in homes, telling stories about Jesus, and imparting his parables and sayings. How I would like to hear the stories they tell.
“They speak of Jesus as having had no wife,” Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months. Was it because I was absent when he traveled about Galilee during his ministry? Was it because women were so often invisible? Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.
We seal the lids with beeswax, and with a grand effort, lower the jars into the earth. On our knees, we rake the pebbly soil into the holes with our hands, filling them. The codices are buried, Aunt. I’ve kept my promise.
We stand, brushing away the dust, catching our breath. And it comes to me that the echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, what a shining thing—it is enough.
The sun slips from the sky and the dark gold light rises up. I gaze into the far distance and sing, “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice.”
Author’s Note
It was an October morning in 2014 when the idea struck me to write a novel about the fictional wife of Jesus. Fifteen years earlier, I’d thought of writing such a novel, but it hadn’t seemed the right time, and honestly, I couldn’t muster quite enough audacity then to take it on. But that day in October, a decade and a half later, the idea resurfaced with a great deal of insistence. I made a weak effort to talk myself out of it. Centuries of tradition insisted Jesus was unmarried, and that position had long been codified into Christian belief and embedded in the collective mind. Why tamper with that? But it was really too late to dissuade myself. My imagination had been captured. I’d already begun to picture her. Within minutes she had a name—Ana.
I have a habit of propping signs on my desk. This one remained there throughout the four and a half years I researched and wrote the novel:
Everything is the proper stuff of fiction.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what’s possible. The Book of Longings reimagines the story that Jesus was a single, celibate bachelor and imagines the possibility that at some point he had a wife. Of course, Christian New Testament Scripture does not say he was married, but neither does it say he was single. The Bible is silent on the matter. “If Jesus had a wife, it would be recorded in the Bible,” someone explained to me. But would it? The invisibility and silencing of women were real things. Compared to men in Jewish and Christian Scriptures, women rarely have speaking parts, and they are not mentioned nearly as often. If they are referenced, they’re often unnamed.
It could also be argued that in the first-century Jewish world of Galilee, marriage was so utterly normative, it more or less went without saying. Marriage was a man’s civic, family, and sacred duty. Typically undertaken at twenty (though sometimes up to age thirty), marriage was how he became an adult male and established himself within his community. His family expected him to marry and would have been shocked, perhaps even shamed, if he didn’t. His religion dictated that he “not abstain from having a wife.” Of course, it’s possible Jesus defied these imperatives. There is evidence that ascetic ideals were beginning to encroach into first-century Judaism. And, too, he could be something of a nonconformist at times. But I saw more reason to think that at the age of twenty, a decade before his ministry began, Jesus did not reject the religious and cultural ethic of his time and place.
Claims that Jesus was not married first began in the second century. They arose as Christianity absorbed ideas of asceticism and Greek dualism, which devalued the body and the physicality of the world in favor of the spirit. Closely identified with the body, women were also devalued, silenced, and marginalized, losing roles of leadership they’d possessed within first-century Christianity. Celibacy became a path to holiness. Virginity became one of Christianity’s higher virtues. Certain that the end-time would come soon, believers in the second century hotly debated if Christians should marry. Considering the accretion of such views into the religion, it struck me as not particularly acceptable for Jesus to have been married.
Perceptions like these allowed me to move outside of traditional ecclesias
tical boxes and begin to imagine the character of a married Jesus.
Of course, I don’t know whether Jesus was married or not. There are reasons, just as compelling, to support the belief he remained single. Unless some genuine ancient manuscript is discovered buried in a jar somewhere and it reveals that Jesus had a wife, we simply cannot know. Even then the matter would likely be irresolvable.
Yet from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism. Perhaps the relationship between sexuality and sacredness would have been less fractured. Celibacy among the priesthood might not exist. I wondered what, if any, effect imagining the possibility of a married Jesus could have on these traditions. How does imagining new possibilities affect realities in the present?
* * *
• • •
I AM DEEPLY AND REVERENTIALLY aware that Jesus is a figure to whom millions of people are devoted and that his impact on the history of Western civilization is incomparable, affecting non-Christians and Christians both. Given that, it may be useful to comment on how I went about writing his character.
It was clear to me from the beginning that I would portray Jesus as fully human. I wanted the story to be about Jesus the man and not God the Son, who he would become. Early Christianity debated whether Jesus was human or divine, a matter it settled in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea and again at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, when doctrines were adopted stating Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Nevertheless, his humanity diminished as he became more and more glorified. Writing from a novelist’s perspective and not a religious one, I was drawn to his humanity.
The Book of Longings Page 40
