The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  He did not glance at the high priest Caiaphas, who was scowling behind his back at this change in procedural policy. But the others were nodding their heads in assent, so Joseph replied.

  “I thank you all warmly, from my heart. I’ve just arrived this morning before dawn, and as we sit here, my fleet will not yet have completed entry into port, nor have I had time to sleep or bathe or dress. That is the urgency with which I approach the matter before us. Indeed, I’ve had no time to learn what is the matter before us, only that Jesua, the Master—whom, as many of you know, I regard as my entire family—is in some deep and serious plight involving us all.”

  “Then we must tell you the story,” said Gamaliel, “and each of us must speak out in turn, for most of us have had a share in a part but not all. And the telling shall begin with me.”

  THE TALE OF THE MASTER

  He arrived alone last autumn in Jerusalem, at the Festival of Tabernacles. It came as a shock to everyone who knew him. The disciples had asked him three times to come down with them from Galilee, to spread the word of God as he did at all holy events, and to perform healings for the festival crowds. He refused thrice, and sent them off without him. But then he came down secretly by himself, arriving suddenly, unexpectedly, in the outer courts of the temple. He seemed strange and mysterious, not at all like himself—as if following some inner pattern of his own.

  The Festival of Tabernacles during the autumn equinox, celebrating that first tabernacle of acacia boughs ordained by God in our exodus from Egypt, also commemorates the crude tabernacles or tents constructed in the wilderness and lived in during that pilgrimage. At the festival last autumn, each garden, court, and private park in Jerusalem was filled as always with hastily improvised tents of boughs festooned with flowers, through which the stars can shine, breezes blow, and rain sprinkle upon our families and visitors that live and feast all week, until the festival ends with the last chapter of Torah, the death of Moses, being read aloud in the temple to mark the end of an old cycle, just as Moses’ death did for our people.

  At the close of the eighth night feast, when the host rises from dinner in each court or garden, the prayer he recites is the oldest in haggadic tradition, older than the festival itself. What does he pray for? He asks one favor from God for having “lived in a booth” for a week: that next year, he might be counted worthy to sit in the booth of Leviathan. And what does the booth of Leviathan signify? The coming of a new age, the age of the messianic kingdom that begins with the appearance of a mashiah, an anointed one who will defeat the sea beast, using its hide for the booth of the righteous and its flesh for the messianic banquet. He will release us from bondage, unite us under one kingdom, bring back the ark and glorify the temple like David and Solomon. As the natural successor of these mighty princes, he’ll lead the Chosen People to glory and bring about the golden dawn—not just of a new year, but of a new aeon.

  As you see, it could therefore be no accident that the Master came down from Galilee, alone, to attend this specific festival.

  It was in the garden of Nicodemus that he appeared that eighth night, for the Simchath Torah. Nicodemus’s park was large and well stocked with trees. As always on this occasion, there were many tents of boughs and flowers, and torches illuminated the feast so the gates might remain open for pilgrims and others to drop in.

  At the end of the feast, when Nicodemus stood to give the blessing and ask for the honor, next year at this time, to sit in the tent of the sea beast, the Master himself arose from his seat in one of the booths not far away. In his flowing white robes, his hair whirling wildly around him, he crossed to where Nicodemus was standing and, sweeping the platters and goblets to one side, he climbed onto the low brass table.

  He held up an urn of water and, holding on to the branches of the bower with the other hand to steady himself, he began to pour water everywhere—on the table, on the ground—splashing the guests still reclining there, who leapt to their feet in alarm. Everyone was amazed or flustered; no one knew what he meant by this action, or could even imagine. Then the Master tossed down the urn. His arms aloft, he cried,

  “I am the water! I pour myself out for you; whoever thirsts should come and drink from me! If you believe in me, rivers of living water will flow from you.…”

  And, as it was recalled afterward by those present, his voice was so rich, his command of words so inspiring, that it wasn’t until later that they realized no one had the vaguest clue what he was talking about.

  As the supper was adjourning and people drifted from the gates of his grounds, Nicodemus happened to overhear a conversation among a few of his fellow Pharisees. A clandestine council had been hastily called for later that night at Caiaphas’s palace across town. Nicodemus, though uninvited himself, resolved to attend, for it was clear that even the Master’s strongest supporters had been shaken and confused by his strange performance.

  The next morning, Nicodemus went early to the temple court seeking the Master before others found him. He wanted to protect him from whatever he might do or say, for his words were often misconstrued even by his own disciples. The previous night, despite heated objections by Nicodemus and others—even by his own temple police—Caiaphas had insisted that some pretext be created to secure the Master’s arrest as soon as he appeared in the morning.

  The Master arrived just after Nicodemus. He was wearing the same white robes as before. No sooner had he entered the temple court than a large circle formed about him—including many of those from the secret meeting. This time they were more prepared. At the prompting of Caiaphas, today they’d brought an adulteress with them. They shoved her before the Master and asked whether he thought they should stone her, as the law, of course, required. This was a trap: it was well known that—like Hillel, who was liberal about marriage rulings, especially with respect to women—the Master believed in forgiveness when there was repentance of such sins.

  But to the astonishment of all, the Master said absolutely nothing. Instead, he squatted in the dirt in silence and started to draw pictures in the dust with his fingertip as if he hadn’t heard a word. By then, a real crowd had begun to form around him to see what he would do and to jeer at the woman, whom they held just before him like a dangling piece of meat on a hook.

  When they’d pestered him for what seemed a very long time, he stood up and looked around at the crowd in silence—deep into each pair of eyes, as if in final judgment on each person’s individual soul. At last he spoke.

  “He who is without sin among you,” he told them, “then let him cast the first stone at her.”

  Again he squatted in the dust without a word and drew pictures with his finger. After a very long while, he glanced up and saw the woman standing there before him. She was all alone.

  “Go, and sin no more,” he told her.

  With those words Nicodemus, who had observed all this from afar, understood the importance of what the Master had done. He had risked his life for a woman he knew to be guilty as accused, for he’d said “no more.” The Master had forced each person present to judge himself—including the woman, for she too would have to recognize the magnitude of what had been done in her behalf.

  When the woman departed and the Master was left there alone, Nicodemus came up to stand beside him as he still drew with his finger in the dust. Nicodemus was curious to see what the Master drew. He looked down, and there in the dust was drawn a kind of knot—a very complex knot, for one couldn’t make out the beginning or the end; it just seemed to go round and round.

  The Master sensed Nicodemus’s presence and arose from the dust. With his foot he scraped out the image he’d drawn. When Nicodemus broached the topic of the risk taken by the Master in coming down alone from Galilee with no warning, the Master smiled and said only,

  “My dear Nicodemus, do I seem alone to you? But I’m not: I came here with my Father. Don’t forget, the shofar blows also in Galilee.”

  This of course referred to the Day of Atonement the wee
k before while the Master was still in Galilee, when the ram’s horn was blown as it was each year-end, signaling all men to reflect in the coming year on how they might act more in keeping with God’s will. But it was the casual way the Master mentioned this age-old tradition that gave Nicodemus the uncomfortable feeling that it might have taken on fresh meaning within the Master’s feverishly active and fertile mind. What was he really up to?

  Before Nicodemus could pursue the matter, the Master headed off briskly to the court of the money changers just within the temple precincts. Nicodemus had to puff to catch up with him. There, those who’d taunted the Master outside surrounded him again—as he might have expected and seemed to want—accusing him of bearing false witness. And that was when he did it, the thing that started the rumor he might be mad.

  When these men said they were descended from Abraham’s seed and didn’t require the Master to give them all this guidance he loved to hand out, and particularly they didn’t like his pretentious claims that he was the messiah and heir to the Davidian branch, the Master had the audacity to say he knew Abraham personally. Furthermore, he told them, when Abraham had heard of the Master’s mission here on earth, he’d rejoiced. They said the Master hardly was old enough to know a man who’d been dead, like Abraham, for thousands of years. The Master silenced them with a look. Then he told them that God Himself had introduced them, personally! He said that he, the Master, was himself the son of God—the flesh of God! But this was not the end. He told them, and many here in the chamber were present to witness it:

  “I and my Father are one. Before Abraham was … I am!” He used the sacred name to describe himself, a blasphemous act worth a lashing or even a stoning.

  But that was only the beginning. Just three months ago, long after the festival, the Master was called to Bethany, to the home of young Lazarus, brother of Miriam and Martha of Magdali, among the Master’s closest disciples. The boy was gravely ill and longed to see him before he died. But according even to the twelve, the Master behaved badly, refusing to go down from Galilee and see the family although the situation was critical and the women begged him to try to heal the boy, to save him from certain death. By the time he finally came, the child had been dead for three days. Miriam told them that the corpse was rotted and stinking, and she and her sister refused to grant the Master the access he requested to the crypt.

  So he stood outside. He stood outside and called to Lazarus—young, dead Lazarus—until he raised him. He raised him from the tomb of his fathers. He raised him in his decaying condition, wrapped in the rotted burial cloths with maggots already working on the corpse. He raised him from the dead.

  “Dear God,” whispered Joseph of Arimathea when this tale was over. As he stared at the others around the table with glazed eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. What could he possibly say? The Sadducees preached that death was simply the end of life; the Pharisees taught that for the good man, for the life well lived, there could be the reward of eternal life in heaven. But nobody believed in the concept of resurrection, of bringing a rotted corpse from the grave back to existence on earth. It was a horror beyond imagining.

  Many of those around the table, seeing Joseph’s consternation, tried to avoid his gaze. But the high priest Caiaphas, who’d contributed nothing to the story told by the others, now interjected a thought of his own.

  “It would seem your nephew, our beloved Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth, son of a humble carpenter, has developed delusions of grandeur, my dear Joseph,” he said in his annoyingly unctuous voice. “Instead of being the leader—the teacher, the rabh or master, the anointed king or whatever it was—that our companions here had hoped for, it seems he’s degenerated into a madman who thinks he’s genealogically descended from the one true God and can decide who shall live or die. I wonder how such an idea could have arisen in his confused brain?” He looked at Joseph with a sneering smile.

  Joseph knew full well that many there, though silent, must share the high priest’s opinion. For God was ineffable and intangible: He could not be incarnate. How could this have happened? thought Joseph. In one short year, his world had turned inside out.

  Joseph had to see the Master in person, at once. He knew him better than anyone—he always believed that he alone could see the purity of his soul. He had to see him before the others, before it was too late.

  FRIDAY

  Joseph’s own beautiful but wildly overrun estate on the Mount of Olives, which he rarely saw these days, owing to his travels, was called Gethsemane. He felt certain the Master would not take his disciples to Gethsemane, nor even go alone, without Joseph’s permission. So there was only one place he would stay in that part of the hill country, and that was in the town of Bethany—at the home of Lazarus of Magdali and his sisters, Miriam and Martha.

  At the very thought of the sisters of Magdali, Joseph always had to grapple with difficult emotions. Miriam of Magdali, or Maria as the Romans called her, brought back to him all the failures of his life, as a Jew and as a man. He loved her—there could be no question of that—and in every sense, he loved her as a man should love a woman. Though at forty he was old enough to be her father, if he had his way he would fulfill his infernal Jewish responsibility to God and litter the earth with the fruits of his seed—as Nicodemus might put it.

  But Miriam loved another. And only Joseph of Arimathea knew for certain, though many certainly suspected, that the object of her love was the Master. Joseph could not fault her for that, for he loved him too. Which was why he had never declared himself openly to her. Nor would he, for as long as the Master lived. But he did send a messenger to Bethany to invite himself to dinner.

  The Master would come down from Galilee on Thursday, and a formal dinner and a light supper were prepared for Friday when, according to Martha’s confidential reply, the Master would have something important to announce. Since the Master had raised the young head of the household from the grave upon his last visit, Joseph wondered with a kind of dark humor what he planned to do to follow that performance.

  On Friday morning Joseph drove out to Bethany, a few miles beyond Gethsemane. When he pulled up below the house, he saw the vision—or rather an apparition in white—coming down the hill with open arms. It was the Master, but he seemed somehow transformed. He was surrounded by as many as a hundred people, as usual most of them female, all dressed also in white and bearing armloads of flowers, and singing a strange but haunting chant.

  Joseph sat speechless in his cart. When the Master came up to him, his robes flowing like water over his limbs, he looked into Joseph’s eyes and smiled. Joseph saw him, just in that instant, as the little child he once had been.

  “Beloved Joseph,” said the Master, taking him by the hands and drawing him from the cart, “how I have thirsted for you.”

  Then, instead of embracing him, the Master ran his hands up Joseph’s arms, across his shoulders, over his face, as if examining an animal, or committing his features to memory to execute a pagan sculpture. Joseph scarcely knew what to think. And yet—he felt a kind of warm tingling deep beneath the skin, down in his flesh, his bones, as if some physical action were taking place. He drew away uncomfortably.

  The chanting people drifting about them were annoying to Joseph, who recognized none of them and longed to draw the Master away. As if he had grasped his thoughts, the Master said,

  “Will you stay with me, Joseph?”

  “For dinner, you mean, and the night?” said Joseph. “Yes, it’s all been arranged by Martha. And I’ll stay for as long as you like; we really must speak.”

  “I mean, will you stay with me,” the Master repeated in a tone Joseph couldn’t identify.

  “Stay with you?” said Joseph. “Why, yes, you know I’ll always be with you. That’s why we must—”

  “Will you stay with me, Joseph?” the Master asked again, almost as if repeating a mnemonic phrase. Though he was still smiling, a part of him seemed to be looking off into a deep distance. Joseph
felt a horrible chill.

  “We must go indoors,” he said quickly. “We haven’t seen each other for a very long time; we have much to discuss in private.”

  Shooing away the others, he ushered the Master up the path to the house. He would send someone down to tend to the horses. They reached the portico of the large and rambling stone building.

  As Joseph entered the dark recesses of the courtyard with its tree-shaded pool, he took the Master by the arm. His attention focused for a moment as his fingertips touched the cool linen sleeve—that new white garment he recalled having been mentioned by Nicodemus and several others. Joseph, as a knowledgeable importer of foreign wares, could recognize by touch that this was not the world-famous but affordable linen of Galilee, the production of which had built the fortunes of the Magdali family and so many other Galileans. Rather it was the far costlier Pelusian linen of northern Egypt—one might almost say precious, for its cost rivaled that of another fabric also made by some mysterious secret process: Chinese silk, a fabric sufficiently rare that in Rome it was forbidden to be worn by any but the imperial family. How on earth had the Master come by such a treasure? Stranger still, given his message of renouncing the trappings of worldly wealth, why had he kept the garment instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor, which had always been his policy even with far less extravagant gifts?

  They found Martha, the older sister, her braided hair covered by a cloth, her neck damp from perspiration, bustling among the servants around the clay hearths at the back of the house.

  “I’m making a real feast-offering for today,” Martha said proudly as the two men came to embrace her, carefully picking their way among servants bearing food-laden platters. “Pickled fish in wine,” she went on, “breads and gravies, chicken broth, roasted lamb, and the first spring vegetables and herbs from here in our garden. I’ve been cooking for days! Since the Master, as usual, has adopted this visiting crowd, I’ve had to prepare more food than planned. Though Pesach isn’t until next week, this is a special thanks offering from our family—not only for your safe return from the sea, Joseph, but also in gratitude for the miracle that the Master’s faith brought about only three months ago, as I’m sure you’ve heard, with respect to our young Lazarus.”