Gospel (35 page)

I record this brazen speech in part to show you her nature, but in part to concur with this humiliating appraisal. The Chosen Disciples indeed proved a paltry lot. Need I punish myself by reminding you, Josephus, how none of us, save John, went to see the Teacher at His place of execution? (Mind you, John was twenty years of age but looked fifteen, and it was not the risk for him to be there as it was for others, so I weary of hearing about John and his sentinel at the Cross.) No, perhaps Our Most High Father trusted too much in Our Redeemer's judgment, just as the Redeemer trusted too much in the fallible, insufficient men he chose to keep the Light of Truth aflame in His absence.

13.
Maryam said to me further, “Since I have been here in Arimathea, I have heard that Nathanael
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was roasted over a spit, and we sisters prayed accordingly for God to forgive those responsible. Then some years back we heard he was in Greece and was lowered into boiling pitch. Consequently we prayed again. Then a year ago he passed through here on the way to Media and was quite alive and unsinged. Now there is word that he is delivered to his glorious martyrdom yet again, this time being eviscerated by the Parthians. You yourself, brother Matthias, have added to this sick-making obsession with martyrdoms and relic-cults with your
Catalogue of the Martyrs.
”

(One is forced to express a certain amazement at the erudition and well-read nature of this remarkable woman.)

14.
However, she with some justice excoriated my youthful book, saying to me, “Half of what you record is total nonsense.”

I let this remark stand because I have come to learn that my sources were dubious, though at the time I had no cause to doubt them. Certain sufferings, as I made clear in this work, won the Laurels of Heaven, others more complete and ghastly a Crown, with particularly horrid sufferings earning a Diadem in this Crown.
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Some men, such as James, our first martyr, are allowed to be in the presence of the Throne upon which Our Master now sits preparing to judge each of us.
11
I fear a certain enthusiasm overcame me as I recorded these gradations of martyrdom, and now older, I am not sure the mystical sources and rabbis who helped me compile this compendium are to be trusted. As for the long tracts of martyrdoms of our Church, I had James [bar-Alphaeus] to thank for that.

15.
Maryam further pronounced, “Why is it this way with men? Is it not enough to do what Our Lord bade us do that you must construct these fantasies upon His Truth, a truth that could not be more plain and unadorned?”

I mentioned, as she well knew, that the Disciple James was the source of most of my accounts.

“You should go to Ptolemais then,” she instructed, “for that is where the son of Alphaeus writes his tracts. What Church is so small or Nazirene community so insignificant as to escape the missives of James? And copied out by his own hand, I suspect! He produces martyrologies by the firkin, alternating with invitations to martyrdom, though we sisters observe he manages to live quite well and grow quite fat as the decades pass! He luxuriates in a fine estate inherited from a wealthy widow in his thrall.”

Maryam concluded, “Were that not enough he has collected endless relics and scraps of Our Master's history and charges tribute for the privilege of kissing or touching these abominations to one's wounds and infirmities.”

16.
I determined then and there that I should go to James, if only to deliver a moral exhortation! But secretly I desired to know if, like myself, James had lost his initial fervor in the Faith, and whether his cynical industry was the result.

17.
I attempted to find Xenon, who had disappeared. Only after a search of many moments did Xenon appear, coming up from the stables with two of the sisters, himself rather humorously covered in hay, he having met some youthful accident therein. I asked him if he enjoyed his tour and requested a report upon the salient characteristics of the commune, which he could not do. (I am appalled at the inattention to detail in the young. They are not trained as they ought to be; I wonder if there will be a historian in their entire lazy generation.) Nor could he quickly recall what they had fed him to eat, or the names of the sisters that devoted so much time to his amusement while I talked with their superior. I had hoped their example of perpetual virginity—O insuperable triumph!—would have made an impression upon him but he blushed deeply as I referred to such things.

So innocent are these country lads!

18.
By the next evening, we arrived in simple Apollonia and stayed with Nazirenes there for much of the next week.

Early in Tisri [September 67
C.E.
] we caught a vessel that landed us in Ptolemais, which was amok with Romans newly arrived from Cyprus, ready as ever to crush the Jewish rebellions once and for all. You, my brother, had abandoned the priestly robes for the tunic of a general.

The Nazirene synagogue of Ptolemais was filled with hysterical old people convinced the End Times were beginning, for Our Master said His generation would see the destruction of Jerusalem and one imagined in those days that God would end His world rather than see the Temple fall to the pagans.
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Tales of the earth opening to swallow the Great Sea were put forward by the elders; every mountain was suspected of being a volcano, every thunderstorm harbored fire and brimstone. It was said the week the Roman legion came, a calf was born to a ewe and a sheep was born to a cow, and both abominations were killed immediately and their heads sent to the son of Alphaeus for his collection of signs, wonders, and relics.
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19.
Looking down from the most prominent hill behind Ptolemais is a vast estate; it seems to be several houses amid the cypresses and cedars. A Roman widow who had married a Jew, we were to learn, bequeathed it as a Nazirene meeting-place, and each Friday it became such. But otherwise it was merely the lavish personal home of James bar-Alphaeus, the most industrious and cunning of the Disciples.

Whereas many of the Twelve were rough men, such as Thomas or Simon or, for that matter, bumbling old Peter himself, James bar-Alphaeus belied his humble background and had made quite a private study of the Holy Scriptures. It is certain his mother wanted him to be a Pharisee but she underestimated the chasm between a man of his station from Galilee and the elite of Jerusalem.
14
Still, he had nonetheless found for himself the life of wealth and ease, as his slack form and acquired limp from gout betrayed. His eyes, however, remained as I remembered them, beady and observing, as if they contained his sense of hearing as well.

20.
Xenon was tired and ate in the kitchen, fed by servants, and seemed to be enjoying coarse discussions with boys his own age. I left him to their care and their chambers in the cellar of James's estate. (I reminded myself that one's scribe must have some amusement on long voyages or he shall think ill of mission work.)

Meanwhile, James allowed me a view of his collection of relics. He had a variety of cloths that soaked up Our Master's blood during His execution, including an actual phial of blood that, though dried out, had healing properties when remoistened. Sandals, bits of robe, a walking stick grown from an offshoot of the branch of the tree that yielded the Cross
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as well as Moses' rod, and an array of clippings of hair and garments from Our Master's mother, whose relics are appealed to by desperate, barren Nazirene women hoping for a miraculous infusion of fertility.

21.
James produced a tin container that he said contained the hand of the other, martyred James, the former leader of Jerusalem. He asked me, “Would you like to see it, dear brother, and kiss this precious remainder?”

This amputation had been soaked in a perfumed balm so as not to reek, but in its liquefaction I believe the fetid aroma of this new amalgam was worse. I informed James that the Law makes such unclean—one wonders if the Law ever conceived of such a profanation! I said I would not consent to look at the hand, and exhorted him to cease this grave-robbery.

“Ah,” James then said to me, “I see this is not what moves you, my friend and Great Disciple. But for some this is a joy only less than entering Heaven itself.”

22.
James took no offense at anything I had to say to him, no matter how harsh. We moved past his household staff—young Syrian women, all!—and we talked of his writings and his scriptorium and assemblage of Nazirene texts. I noticed an inevitable collection of John's irrelevancies, of Janus-faced Paul, who lives to fill shelves with his exertions, and then James showed me my own missives and scrolls in his cabinet, which somewhat softened my polemic. I questioned, however, if he knew the dubiety of some of the sources for his, and later, my accounts of blessed martyrdoms.

“My source is the arena across the way,” James said to me. “The more gruesome the finish, the wilder the crowd, the surer the legend. My letters and accounts are circulated throughout the lands of the Great Sea, dear fellow scholar. I feel it is no exaggeration to say I have brought many to our way of life. No, I shall claim something more: I have brought more souls to our Nazirene Church than any of the other Disciples, and I cannot be refuted on this.”

Indeed, having traveled much, I would sadly admit that this is likely true.

23.
There in Ptolemais, the international city of the Phoenicians outside the reach of Judean jurisdiction, innumerable impieties and wickednesses flourish, none worse than the holding of gladiatorial games, the torturing of prisoners, the feeding of holy men to beasts, all to satisfy the unslakeable Roman thirst for blood. James told me there were several accused Nazirenes among the criminals to die that next afternoon.

He said to me, “You, dear brother Matthias, should attend one of these games and see what passes as entertainment for our conquerors.”

I said that my presence would merely allow them to make a quick martyr of me.

And James answered, “On the contrary, you are a man of wealth and prestige, and your brother is a favorite of the Empress.
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Indeed, he was virtually the beloved of Nero Caesar.”

(Despite your faint military efforts for our people, this sort of comment should show you how you were viewed, my brother.)

24.
James continued: “No, it is safe. Metilius
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only wishes to make an example of a few Nazirenes, not ignite the province in the hundredth internecine war. Besides, he thinks he can count on the Nazirenes, like the Samaritans, to fight against their Judean cousins who go to such lengths to despise them. And he may be correct.”

What befalls our Nazirene brethren in the arena tomorrow?

He said to me, “It is bound to be quite tame compared to how I shall write it, that much is sure. The Romans have captured the thief Palidoros, an unlovable Syrian ruffian. The crowd should not side with the boy. I visited him this very morning and collected many relics from him, in return for some coins that shall be left to his mother.”

His poor mother!

James said to me, “On the contrary, she is the worst drunkard and procuress on this coast. Neither of them is a true Nazirene, but they have been to the house a time or two. And there is a woman, the virgin Rachel.”

I expressed outrage that they should put to death a virgin. Surely she would wear the Crown of Martyrdom bedizened with a Hundred Diadem!

25.
But James told me, “Rachel, my brother, has been hoping to be martyred for some time now. They threw her to the beasts in Tyre, but the beasts refused to chew upon her.”

In this do you not find miraculous designs?

James did not. He said to me, “Rachel is a woman past her bloom, well beyond her twenty-fifth year.” He added the next as if it were some jest that we might laugh: “Traditionally the Romans take our virgins to a house of prostitution and let the legion desport themselves, but with Rachel they intend to move straight to the Arena wherein she will be unwound upon a spool.”
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26.
James then said to me, “You make a great show of disapproving of my martyrologies now, but in years past I sent you my martyrologies to circulate and evangelize upon. Were they not of service to you? What of Mariamne who was encased in a stove, her head free, as the metal confinement was heated up slowly? What of young Jonathan, not fifteen, staked to the ground, covered in rotting flesh and then seized upon by hungry birds of prey?

“Did you not see that it is by these executions that Our Church of the New Covenant grows by springs and leaps? I promise you, dear Matthias, that if you were to offer yourself up for martyrdom like Onias the Just and the Pharisees of earlier days
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you should be the subject of many prayers. I predict that there would be lines of pilgrims here to mingle their tears with your blood-soaked cloak, yes? Or perhaps you do not believe what you wrote in your
Catalogue of Martyrdoms.
Do you not believe your own martyrdom, my friend, would enable you to sit at the Sixth Throne and cherish a perfect Crown of porphyry? Or was it chrisolite?”

(I could not, by this, determine whether James was mocking my earlier, youthful book, which I myself have taken pains to discredit, though some sections still have some merit and it is well admitted that the style of the Greek is exceptional in one whose adopted language is Greek.)

27.
As for James's writings, I do not possess them here with me, but nonetheless, you have surely read the like of his tales:
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A young woman is led naked to the stake and exposed to the roar of the crowd, the very thing that arouses today's demeaned tastes. A bull is released from a pen, which threatens to gore her. “Be gone from me, O bedeviled beast,” she sings out—or some such nonsense—and the bull licks her wounds. Then a lion is sent out, ferocious and hungry. “Be gone from me O noble beast and defy not the will of He Who Madest Thou,” et cetera. And the lion turns on its Roman keepers and five guards die. And then a soldier is sent out to comb her flesh with hot irons. But upon looking in her eyes, the soldier is overcome and asks her, “Where, brave lady, drawest thou thy strength?” And she says, “From a higher love that is the God of Abraham and through the Son of Man of the House of David, Who waits to judge us all, Jew and Gentile.” She delivers a homily until the executioner is converted and begs for martyrdom as well. The Emperor—and it is always someone important like the Emperor in these stories, not the second-rank clerk of the procurator that usually is drummed out to these affairs—in a fit of pique orders her beheaded. And there are more prayers before she is bravely, unflinchingly despatched.