The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

We knelt in the dirt and lifted our hands in the dwindling light, and Paul prayed for my soul, for his soul, that we might tell out our souls, summoning a new world into being. “We must create the Kingdom of God,” he said. “In him, by him, and for him.”

  I repeated these words slowly: “In him, by him, and for him.”

  “You will go out with me soon,” he said. “I hear the voice of God in your voice. I see him, our Christ, in your eyes.”

  I had not felt such happiness since before my wife and son died. But now a flood of joy passed through me, and I shook with joy. I would go with Paul wherever he saw fit. I would do the Lord’s bidding with him.

  Chapter Eight

  PAUL

  The work that Luke and I would accomplish lay ahead of us, but I resolved to test the missionary waters first with Barnabas. Peter had suggested I go with Barnabas to his native Cyprus, where opportunities for the Way of Jesus could be found. This appealed to me, as I was an apostle to the Greeks and this would make an appropriate beginning. I could test these waters, formulating our message. Barnabas and I would circulate through the island, pushing ahead into Asia, then return to Antioch, where I would join forces again with Luke, who was making preparations for a more ambitious journey into the western provinces.

  Luke had impressed me in Antioch. He was meticulous where I was casual, a man of quiet passion, his mind as still as the bottom of a well, which I found calming. He had convinced Phoebe (with encouragement from Chloe) that she must finance an elaborate mission to the West among the Greeks. We would delve into virgin provinces, bringing the Good News with us. The Kingdom of God must be discovered on earth, and preparations made for the arrival of our Lord. The more I searched the holy scriptures, the more convinced I became of the sanity of the task before us. God spoke through me and, most important, through Jesus. It was only left for us to deliver this message of transformation, allowing the spirit would pick up where we left off.

  Let it be said: I did not from the outset find Barnabas an easy companion. We met briefly in Antioch to discuss our journey, and he insisted that we bring along John Mark, the immature son of a woman from Jerusalem who had become a leading presence in the Way there (and, I thought, something of a nuisance).

  “You will like John Mark,” Barnabas said. “His mother—I believe you know her—is a force.”

  “We should, in this case, enlist his mother,” I said.

  He shook his head, disliking my little joke. Barnabas was a tubby fellow with rippling jowls, fond of colorful tunics, although he often walked with bare feet. He wore many rings on his fingers. He chose to finance this particular mission himself, and so the logic of our partnership was sound—if I could tolerate his companionship. Not being stupid, he sensed my hesitation, although he misunderstood my reservations.

  “We have a clear mission, do we not?” Barnabas asked.

  “The path of our journey is well-defined, and this is something.”

  “That is nothing,” he said. “What spiritual energies we bring to the task, this is what matters.”

  I nodded, and found him difficult to oppose. He had a soft quality that made arguments pointless. He blundered ahead in his own fashion, insisting that we should travel with John Mark, who would be my scribe. I didn’t see that I had much choice in this.

  Barnabas was a Jew with strong connections to the Pillars, and he supported the Jesus movement passionately, having sold a large quantity of family land in Cyprus and donated these funds to the Way. He struck me as self-serving, but perhaps this is true of anyone who pushes forward in life and lifts his head above the parapet. He was only five years my elder, but I regarded him as an old man. Certainly the premature grayness of his beard radiated age if not sagacity. He was neither agile nor fit, and his belly jiggled ahead of him as he walked on precariously skinny legs.

  He might well become a liability on this mission.

  At least John Mark was lean and quick. He had the slightest wisp of a beard yearning toward manhood, which to me suggested an innocence I liked. His soft brown eyes widened with intelligence and curiosity about the world, and his skin smelled of sea salt. I liked the pale smoothness of his brow, like a robin’s egg, and his delicate fingers.

  I preferred to travel with a slave as my attendant and scribe whenever I could find a suitable man to take my dictation on commercial trips. I wasn’t foolish, of course, and knew that Peter and James wished to surveil me from a distance, and that Barnabas and John Mark would become their eyes and ears, reporting back to the Pillars in Jerusalem. My past as a persecutor of the Way still troubled many in that city, and they wondered if I could be trusted. My behavior in Cyprus would confirm their view of me, in one way or another.

  It made good sense to begin the search for Greek converts in Cyprus, and Barnabas knew the island well. He still had relatives in both Salamis and Paphos, the port cities, and one close childhood friend served on the staff of Sergius Paulus, the Roman governor, and Barnabas thought he could secure an invitation to his palace.

  “Paulus has a mystical bent,” he said, “but he’s under the sway of some magus. A vile and dangerous man.”

  “Magus?” asked John Mark.

  “Sorcerer,” I said.

  “I have never met a magus,” he informed us.

  “Life is full of possibilities,” I said.

  John Mark had come to the attention of Peter because of his penchant for note-taking. Like Tiro, the Roman scribe who took near-perpetual dictation from Cicero, the boy had perfected a style of abbreviation that allowed him to get down anything I said. This was convenient, as I took great care with my letters and often rewrote them. I found it useful to formulate and refine my ideas in this way, proceeding without caution. With so little time left in the world, it was important to think fast, to gather thoughts quickly. And John Mark worked with a kind of scrupulous vigor, writing down my words with his tongue pushing through moist lips, occasionally slurping. As my scribe, he carried a quantity of soot in a leather pouch, which he mixed with gum arabic to create an ink that adhered nicely to vellum or papyrus. He packed a quantity of thin sheaves, acquiring more along the way, which were plentiful if expensive. It was necessary for us, however, to record the key moments of our journey and send reports to Peter and James. I also planned to write to our gatherings in Antioch and Tarsus and elsewhere.

  To my dismay, Barnabas wished to compete with me as the narrator of this journey. “I will have my own record,” he said.

  History exists only in competing narratives, much as in “real life,” that oddly compelling and parallel narrative that absorbs most people like a colorful dream. And so Barnabas would have his own dream, although he probably didn’t see that what is written is just as real as life, perhaps more.

  “Remember, John Mark is not a slave,” said Barnabas. “Be careful what you ask of him.”

  “In Jesus there is neither slave nor free man,” I said.

  Barnabas flinched, as he often did when I would separate the thinking of Jesus from traditional Jewish thinking. He tried to adjust my musings, alert to any divergences from what he considered sound judgment in all things. I didn’t mind so much, as I never worried that my own thoughts could be tainted by his, or anyone’s.

  He liked to quote the original Hebrew scriptures at me, and this was intimidating because my slight unease with Hebrew remained a flaw, one that I would labor (with more or less success) to erase. But at least we had the splendid Greek version, a product of Alexandria, now three centuries old. It’s the version of the scriptures I knew as a child, and I still preferred it.

  “I know you much prefer the Greek to the Hebrew,” said Barnabas.

  “The translation was a miracle,” I said.

  A slight exchange of glances between John Mark and Barnabas followed, but it didn’t pay to acknowledge such slights, as I would learn in decades on the road with Luk
e, who invariably questioned my version of a story or, if he didn’t, kept an even more offensive silence on the topic.

  So we set off, the three of us, from Antioch, with its crawling markets, clamorous streets, with the clash of commerce and races that is part of any major port. It was the city where, not long before this, I had made a spectacle of myself before Phoebe and her gathering, and where I had come to know Luke as a brother. I was only beginning to find my footing as an apostle and preacher.

  “I shall recall your life and work in a book,” Luke said to me, bidding me farewell.

  “You will make them up,” I said.

  I only said that to annoy him, but I knew that—being a physician—his methodical nature would limit his inventions. And he wrote so well. To be sure, his Greek was gloriously rich, full of images and apt turns of phrase, and I envied his fluent style, being one who struggled to make my thoughts lucid and persuasive. God does not always apportion talents in ways that are comprehensible or seem fair.

  I loved dear Luke and yet on one hand wished for a wider range of thoughts in him; on the other side, his dependability proved indispensable in the long run, as did his good humor. I certainly preferred him vastly to Barnabas and John Mark, who might well diminish the effectiveness of our present journey.

  We set off one morning from Seleucia, with its long green slope to the sea. The harbor lay below, where ships from Cyprus, Egypt, Sicily, and faraway places anchored offshore. Merchant vessels making for Ostia and Rome huddled in the docks, most of them heaped with staples—wheat and olive oil as well as scents and spices, dyes, jewels, glassware, silver, gold, ivory, and silks. I marked the wealth afloat below us, and it reminded me of Tarsus.

  “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven,” said Barnabas.

  His solemnity was offensive.

  This remark by Jesus—which I think had an edge of impishness to it, a wish to shock—had been included in most of the books of sayings. Peter had, I was told, explained that our Lord had simply transposed an old Persian saying about elephants, substituting camels, which had more currency in Palestine. It was certainly one of the more arresting things that Jesus either said or was supposed to have said, and it retained a certain irony, given that so many of our leaders in the Way, such as Phoebe or Chloe or, if truth be told, myself, even Luke, had ample wealth.

  Perhaps the point was to give it away but with clarity and direction, aware that everything belongs to the Lord at last.

  We had brought a good deal of money with us on this journey, as it often made travel easier. One could bribe officials, pay for ferries or rides on the backs of donkeys or horses, and hire a room for the night in a large and comfortable house. Food was always expensive, and walking made one hungry. Moreover, it made no sense to preach on an empty stomach.

  John Mark sensed my unease with Barnabas—I was never much good at disguising my feelings.

  “I don’t like it when you disagree,” he said to me, within earshot of Barnabas.

  “You’re an innocent,” I said.

  John Mark wrinkled his brow, unhappy. He was an earnest fellow, almost like a girl with those searching and moist eyes, with hands that showed no sign that he had ever lifted an ax or mallet. The hair on his skinny legs was pale, hardly visible.

  We came down into the harbor and boarded a small ship bound for Cyprus. I stood in the stern, my hands on the rail, facing east as the thin brown line of Syria faded, listening to the wind as it caught and cracked the sails. The sea was radiant, a sprawl of diamonds.

  Barnabas sat in a cross-legged position on the foredeck, praying, while John Mark was preoccupied with the activity of the sailors, these tightly muscled dark men who worked briskly about us, untangling lines, rearranging crates on deck in preparation for our departure.

  “In my next life, I would like to be a sailor,” he said to me.

  How could one respond to such a remark?

  We set off briskly and sailed through the night under a full moon, a time of gentle rocking and sweet air with only a slight tinge of salt. I knew from experience that we should be grateful for these passages, as they were hardly the norm. But it seemed pointless to mention such a thing to John Mark. It actually pleased me to keep his illusions about life afloat.

  That morning we trolled a seine net, gathering a catch of silver fish—mostly sardines—which we grilled on the deck in the late afternoon. Each one seemed sweeter than a fig or date, but salty as well. Such a delectable crackling morsel, and I enjoyed watching John Mark as he devoured them. There was wine, too, rich and dark, almost granular in texture, from the vineyards in the low hills beyond Antioch.

  That night I slept beside John Mark on a straw pallet, in a soft wool blanket that I carried, while Barnabas found a quiet spot of his own below. “I like shelter, when possible,” he said. “What if it rains?”

  “We would hate to see you melt,” I said.

  I knew the heavens and understood that rain was impossible that night. But I didn’t want him to sleep near me, and so it pleased me to see his head dipping below the deck.

  On that first night out, on the open foredeck but nestled against the starboard bow rail, it soothed me to lie beside John Mark. We talked of Jesus under stars that seemed to fall like snowflakes and whiten the deck. He knew so little about our Lord, but this was, for me, an opportunity to hone the message I hoped to take forward into the world. I told him about the Kingdom of God and explained that the Christ principle had been uncovered within himself by this spirit-saturated man from Nazareth, and it had consumed him—“a holy fire obliterating selfhood.” I surprised myself with this phrase, knowing I must use it again. And I could hear Musa talking as I talked, his quiet way of gathering ideas into phrases as he fished for, and found, meaning.

  “You have such a peculiar way of talking,” John Mark said. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  It was wonderful, the way he said that. I found his manner delightfully innocent and wondered if, some years ago, I might have seemed quite so simple to my elders. Perhaps Gamaliel had simply tolerated me as well as my classmates while we blundered our way toward a knowledge of the scriptures or an understanding of Jewish Law in its rich complexities and historical contexts.

  The boy fell asleep heavily beside me, perhaps bored by my talk, and I watched with pleasure as his chest rose and fell, his lips slightly parted. Occasionally he mumbled to himself, though I could not understand what he said.

  Once, very lightly, I touched his forehead as one might do with a beloved child. He winced slightly and rolled over, with his back to me.

  * * *

  In the morning we came ashore. I loved islands but only visited them briefly when I traveled with my father on business. Cyprus was isolated, cut off from the larger empire, being a clutch of fishing villages and port cities with a tiny population of Greek-speaking natives whose dialect I liked to hear, especially with their elongated vowels and explosive consonants, which made it seem like they were spitting in your ear as they spoke.

  The port of Salamis impressed us, the entry to this bright city crowned by a temple to Zeus—the king of Greek gods. My father had known a Cypriot merchant and middleman in this city named Schemuel, to whom over many years we had shipped large, rolled tents in crates, which he sold in remote parts of the empire, where he had many contacts. My father used to say, “If Schemuel doesn’t know the man, the man doesn’t know himself.” We found him in his expansive house overlooking the harbor, and he seemed delighted to see me, inviting the three of us to remain with him as long as we liked.

  I quoted my beloved Ion of Chios: “A visitor should stay only long enough to clean the larder.”

  This amused him, and he patted my back.

  Schemuel understood from me that we had come on behalf of a special rabbi, and he asked sensible questi
ons about Jesus, neither approving nor disapproving of our answers. The following day he took us to a synagogue near the center of the commercial district, where we discovered a pious, polite congregation. I was introduced as a student of Gamaliel and a Pharisee. This drew the usual nods of approval, and the rabbi invited me to read from the Torah. It was the opening passage from Isaiah where the prophet envisioned God on his throne, with angels—the seraphim, with their fiery wings—singing: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, and the whole earth fills with his glory! Isaiah was struck dumb at first by his own sinfulness before such splendor, and remained speechless until the Lord asked who would go for him among the people. Isaiah cried: I will go! Send me forth!

  God led me to read these words on that day, which marked the true beginning of my life’s work of going among the people of the wider world with God’s word on my lips. And it seemed fitting that I began with a passage that Jesus himself had read when he began his ministry in earnest in Nazareth.

  “I bring news of a great rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth,” I said, taking the occasion to speak, as was customary after a reading. “I met him on my way into Damascus. He called to me from heaven, as the angel had called to Isaiah: Your sins are forgiven!”

  There was a hush in the room as heads tipped forward. I had exceeded the usual boundaries of such commentaries, and they probably wondered where this might lead.

  “Jesus was crucified,” I told them, “sacrificed at the hands of the Romans. But death failed to silence him. He rose from the dead after three days. And he lives within me now. He will live within you as well, the only Christ, a true son of God.”

  One had to be careful using that phrase, as every emperor since Augustus had laid claim to that title. Yet the Romans had a natural tolerance for cults and what they considered wayward pieties. Earthly power alone concerned them, and they would suppress anyone who challenged their authority. And so I frequently maintained in public that Jesus had no wish to overthrow the imperial government. Only the Kingdom of God concerned him. And when he returned, as soon he would, history would come to its natural end, at which point his rule could begin.