The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene

by Frank G. Slaughter

  Seeing Mary once again, Joseph knew that his love for her burned now with an even deeper fire than it had in Magdala. And since she had admitted that she loved him still, he knew he must prevent her somehow from carrying out this insane scheme to kill Gaius Flaccus. It was not so much because killing him would be murder, but because by doing so Mary would be depriving herself of any chance of finding the peace she must find if she were ever to come to him as he wanted her to come, loving as unreservedly as he knew she could love. Her hate, her need for revenge, had become a disease. And even if he had not loved her, it was his duty as a physician to cure it.

  He had set himself a hard task, but an exciting one. And the prize? Could any man hope to win a greater one?

  IX

  Joseph and Bana Jivaka operated upon Demetrius’s right eye a few days later, and in two weeks they removed the bandages that had covered both eyes during the period, shutting out all light and stimulation to either eye, so that movement of the eyeball would be reduced to a minimum and healing promoted. There was some trouble in inducing the trance to shut out all consciousness of pain and, more important, allow the eye to be quiet during the delicate part of the operation, for Demetrius was so nearly blind that he could barely see the emerald. Finally Jivaka had been forced to use a bright flame at which the musician gazed, while in quiet, forceful tones the Indian physician gradually willed him to sleep.

  The instruments on the table had seemed a pitifully small armamentarium with which to restore a man’s sight: a slender metal rod with a tiny hook at the end, and beside it a long, sharp needle with one end embedded in a small wooden handle. Mary and Hadja had watched while they worked.

  “The operation I am performing,” Joseph explained as he took up the slender hook, “is very simple. Since the opaque growth of the cataract is confined to the small, spherical body of the eye, one needs only to dislodge that body from its normal position and let it drop down inside the eyeball away from the sight. Light can then enter the eye. The hook is first used to hold the eye still while inserting the needle.” Carefully he inserted the point of the hook just through the outer side of the white portion of the eyeball so that when he held it firmly, the eye remained still.

  “Does he feel no pain at all?” Mary asked.

  “Pain is in the mind,” Jivaka explained. “We have control of that.”

  Next Joseph took the needle by its wooden handle and carefully forced the point through the eyeball just at the border of the iris. The point appeared in front of the iris, and he drew it back a little, so that it slid back of the pigmented curtain in whose center was the opening of the pupil. “It is possible to go both in front of and behind the iris to reach cataracts,” he said. “But the operation of Susruta goes behind it, and we will use that.”

  Joseph’s movements were steady and sure, for he had done the operation many times in the past few months. He controlled the needle as if it were a part of himself, until he could feel the increased resistance of the cataract-filled spherical body when the point of the needle penetrated it. Next he moved it back and forth, tearing through the outer layer of the lens. As he continued, the point became visible through the small opening of the pupil, and the onlookers could actually see the tear he was making in the outer part of the cataract. Finally a dead white, round sphere, as large as a small pea, appeared just beneath the point of the needle. “It is the cataract,” he explained. “I will push it down into the eyeball, where it will lie below the pupil and out of the line of sight.”

  Slowly, carefully, Joseph pushed the firm round cataract down through the jelly-like substance filling the back of the eyeball. Jivaka had examined the eyes of patients who had died from other causes after such operations and assured him that the dead white sphere was usually absorbed and disappeared after a little while. As he drew the needle back, the upper rim of the white body appeared just at the lower rim of the pupil, and he waited expectantly to see whether it would pop back up in front of the pupil as sometimes happened. If it did he would have to replace it once more, or perhaps even cut it into pieces with the point of the needle, a job requiring considerable time and great danger of damaging the inside of the eye itself and bringing on an inflammation that often destroyed the good effects of the surgery.

  But the cataract remained well below the sight, and it had not been necessary to do more. The bandaging was finished quickly and now, two weeks later, it was being removed. If the operation were successful, the left eye could be treated soon.

  Slowly Joseph unwound the bandages and removed the last layer of linen from before Demetrius’s eyes. The room was in semidarkness, and as Joseph worked he felt Mary standing at his elbow, her body pressed against him in her eagerness to see whether the operation had been successful. For a moment he was reluctant to remove the last bandage and break the spell. Then he gently took it away and saw with a thrill of satisfaction that the pupil of the operated eye was clear.

  “By Diana!” Demetrius cried. “I see the light! I see! I see!”

  Mary threw her arms around Joseph’s neck and kissed him on the mouth. “You did it, Joseph!” she cried. “You have given him his sight!” Then, embarrassed by her outburst, she said to Bana Jivaka, “Will you excuse my emotion, please? We Jews are easily moved.”

  “A man would be stone not to be moved by such happiness,” Jivaka admitted. “The physician knows no greater joy than being able to bring light to the blind.”

  “We must have a celebration!” Mary cried. “It will be like the old days in Magdala.”

  Wine and food were brought, and they sat around the couch on which Demetrius lay propped up, his eye bandaged again, for too much light was not good for it yet. The lyre maker was more like his old self now that he knew he would see again.

  Mary filled the glasses and lifted her own. “To the heart’s desire of each of us,” she toasted. “May the gods grant its fulfillment.”

  The others lifted their glasses, but Joseph kept his by his side. “I cannot drink such a toast, Mary,” he said quietly. “Have you forgotten that there is but one God?”

  The rich color drained from Mary’s cheeks as if he had struck her there. “It is a toast used by the Romans, Joseph,” Demetrius said. “She spoke the words without thinking.”

  “Let us rather say we drink to the divine wisdom that guides the universe,” Bana Jivaka suggested. “The wisdom that stands above and beyond any gods conceived by man.”

  “I will drink to that.” Joseph lifted his glass. “For David said: ‘O give thanks to the LORD . . . to him who by understanding made the heavens, for his steadfast love endures for ever.’”

  “You must not think badly of Mary because she speaks casually of gods as most Alexandrians do, Joseph,” Demetrius said. “After all, Socrates said, ‘To find the Maker and Father of all is hard, and having found him, it is impossible to utter him.’”

  “To the Jew there is only one God,” Joseph said simply. “He is the God of Israel and no other.”

  “There speaks the hidebound Jew,” the Greek twitted him. “But I would rather believe in the god of Socrates—whoever he was—who would let a man say, ‘A good man in his dark striving is somehow conscious of the right way.’ In fact, I think that we are all seeking, like Socrates, ‘that which, existing among men, is the form and likeness of God.’”

  “‘The form and likeness of God,’” Mary repeated softly. “I never thought about the form and likeness before. We Jews have always thought of God as a being like ourselves.”

  “We are told that we are created in His image,” Joseph agreed.

  “You might be wrong, though,” Demetrius suggested. “Socrates taught that goodness and man’s love for man have a real and actual existence. It could be that what we seek for as God is in reality not a being but a quality, a force we cannot comprehend except as we see it at work in our own lives.”

 
; Bana Jivaka had been listening quietly to the discussion but had not spoken. Joseph turned to him now. “What do you think of this problem of God?” he asked.

  The Indian smiled. “Socrates also said of his own beliefs: ‘This may be true but also quite likely to be untrue, and therefore I would not have you too easily persuaded. Reflect well and when you have found the truth, come and tell me.’ I wonder if you Jews would ever allow such a yardstick to be applied to your deity.”

  “Why should it?” Joseph demanded. “There is only one God, the Most High of the Jews. He cannot be doubted, for to do so is blasphemy. And He has promised to send the Messiah and set up the kingdom of God on earth in which the Jews will rule the world.”

  “I would not offend you, Joseph,” Jivaka said. “But this talk of messiahs and kingdoms seems needlessly complicated to me. Socrates taught that the rewards of a goodly life are sufficient in themselves. One needs neither gods nor promises of immortality to justify right living.”

  “I can conceive of no life sufficient in itself,” Joseph objected.

  “Socrates was sufficient,” Demetrius argued.

  “But he was executed by his fellow men,” Joseph pointed out. “Therefore, he must not have seemed sufficient to them. The Jew has only to believe in the Most High and obey His commandments. He needs no lofty philosophies.”

  “But think to what heights philosophy takes man,” Demetrius cried. “And how close to God Himself! Just yesterday the slave was reading me the speech of Socrates to the judges who condemned him. I had him read it again and again so that I could memorize it: ‘Be of good cheer,’ he told the judges, ‘and know of a certainty that no evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death. . . . I . . . see clearly that the time has come for me to die, and so my accusers have done me no harm. . . . And now we go our ways, you to live and I to die. Which is better, only God knows!’ Socrates did not even fear death, as we all do, when he could say of it, ‘Our venture is a glorious one. The soul, with her own proper jewels, which are justice and courage and nobility and truth, in these arrayed, she is ready to go on her journey when her time comes.’”

  “‘There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity,’” Jivaka quoted. “‘Men live it not by virtue of their humanity, but by virtue of something in them that is divine.’ You see, my friends, Aristotle came to the same conclusion as Socrates.”

  “But that something is the fact that they are the image of God,” Joseph insisted. “So no man is really sufficient to himself. He needs always the presence of the Most High within him.”

  “You may be right,” Jivaka admitted. “Although you allow no image of your God, you Jews seem better able to believe in an unseen divinity than those who need something they can see. That might even be one of the reasons for the eternal conflicts between the Jews and their conquerors. Being unable to believe in gods they cannot see and touch, people hate the Jews for the God that dwells within their souls. Naturally such people would indict Socrates as ‘an evildoer and a corrupter of young men because he does not receive the gods the state receives, but introduces new divinities.’” Who knows, perhaps someday people will worship Socrates as a god himself, as some do the Buddha.”

  “The Buddha? What do you mean, Jivaka?”

  “A man named Siddhartha Gautama lived in India about six hundred years ago,” Jivaka explained. “He taught much the same things that Socrates taught later, and many of my people believe he was the Buddha.”

  “But what is the Buddha?” Mary asked curiously. “I never heard the word before.”

  “An ancient legend among the Indian people teaches that Wisdom returns to earth from time to time in human form, called the Buddha.”

  “Then your people, too, believe in a god who sends wisdom to earth,” Joseph said triumphantly.

  “Perhaps our religion is the same as yours in principle,” Jivaka agreed. “We believe in the Buddha, you wait for a Messiah. Our Buddha might even have been your Messiah in a different form.”

  “But the Messiah will be a Jew!” Joseph insisted. “He is to be sent only to the Jews and will come in the fullness of glory, not through ordinary birth.”

  “Siddhartha Gautama did not claim to be divine,” Jivaka told them. “He lived and died like any other man. But some, refusing to believe that one so wise and considerate of man’s foibles could have been born of an earthly father, wove fanciful tales about his birth. They said he was miraculously conceived when his mother dreamed of a white elephant, which is also sacred with my people. Some even insist that Gautama was a god, but I have found no record that he so much as claimed to be the Buddha.”

  “What did he teach?” Mary asked.

  Jivaka smiled. “Nothing that even Joseph could not subscribe to as a physician, such as that the miseries and discontents of life come from our own selfishness. We see that often enough in our work with the sick.”

  “I remember Demetrius once said something like that in Magdala,” Joseph admitted.

  “The babblings of an old man are hardly worth remembering,” Demetrius objected. “He says one thing today and another tomorrow.”

  “We were talking of the mazzikim,” Joseph reminded him, “and you said, ‘The demons that possess man are born within himself, children of his own desires.’”

  “Truer words were never spoken, I suspect,” Jivaka agreed. “Thinking men everywhere seem to be searching for the same truths and often they arrive at the same conclusions by different routes. Gautama also taught that suffering is an inevitable punishment for greedy desire and an overpowering need to be greater than others,” he continued. “These are the cravings he listed: sensuousness, a gratification of the senses; desire for personal immortality; and the desire for property or worldliness.”

  “But no one wants everything to end with death,” Joseph protested.

  “To overcome man’s baser cravings, Gautama taught that he must no longer live for himself. Is the desire for eternal life anything but the wish to preserve self?”

  Joseph was silenced. No one could deny such a simple and fundamental truth.

  “Cannot a man so deny self that he would be worthy of eternal life?” Mary asked.

  “Gautama’s teaching is very close to that,” Jivaka admitted. “He said that when man has removed I from his thoughts, he reaches a higher wisdom called nirvana.”

  “But that is no different from our idea of heaven,” Joseph pointed out. “The Pharisees believe that those who love God and the law will live with Him there forever.”

  “The Nirvana of Buddha is achieved on earth,” Jivaka explained. “Through it life itself is so complete and full that there is no longer any need for a life after death. The good a man does thus lives after him, forever immortal.”

  Joseph shook his head. “It is hard to put away the things you have been taught since childhood, Jivaka. I am afraid I shall never be a philosopher.”

  The Indian smiled. “You think so now, but only because you Jews in Judea have so studiously avoided contact with those you call the ‘heathen.’ Philo and I have discussed this many times. He thinks the Jews in other cities of the empire than Jerusalem are losing the narrowness of thought that has kept your religion from being more widely spread. Both of us think your people will be the better for this emancipation. And the world will certainly be better off for being given a chance to worship the God of the Jews.”

  Joseph smiled. “I live in the center of what you call the ‘narrowness.’ And I can tell you there will be no revolution in our thinking without considerable turmoil.”

  “When was there not turmoil among the Jews?” Demetrius asked. “Sometimes I think they are bound to destroy themselves.”

  The color in Mary’s cheeks heightened then, and Joseph knew she understood that the barb in Demetrius’s observation was directed partly at her. The discussi
on broke up shortly afterward, for Mary had to get ready for the theater. But as Joseph was preparing to leave, she said, “Come into the garden with me a moment, Joseph. I have something to tell you.”

  It had rained that morning and the trees and flowers were shining with moisture. A stone bench stood beside a small pool and the sunlight had already dried it. “Sit here with me a moment,” she said. “I hardly see you anymore.”

  “You asked me to go back to Jerusalem, remember?”

  “It would still be better for both of us if you did. I am like your friend said of the Jews. Wherever I am, there is bound to be turmoil.”

  “I am also a Jew,” he reminded her.

  “But you are wise and tolerant, while my emotions are as fiery as my hair.”

  “The girl I knew in Magdala was loved by all who knew her, but her emotions were fiery too.”

  Mary laughed, the same cynical note he had heard more than once here in Alexandria. “You forget easily, Joseph. The women in Magdala hated me because their husbands stopped to look after me in the streets. They knew what was in the men’s thoughts, as I did.”

  “Does that give you a right to hate when men wish to possess you?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I suppose not. But I hate only Gaius Flaccus and the Romans.”

  “Remember what Demetrius said in there about Socrates?” Joseph reminded her. “Goodness is an end in itself. Our ancient prophets taught the same thing for thousands of years. You should remove hate from your mind.”

  “How can I as long as he is alive?”

  “Killing Gaius Flaccus and forcing Romans to ruin themselves because of their desire for you will never bring you peace, Mary,” he argued earnestly. “I know the real Mary of Magdala, and she is not like that. If you do this thing you will regret it always, if you do not lose your life in the doing.”