Gospel (58 page)

23.
Emboldened though, as this wine rushed to my head on this tiring afternoon, I confronted Peter with the information that Thomas claimed that my election to the Disciples was unfairly manipulated.
10
Peter remained a man who could never lie, but I attribute this to a lack of political art rather than any virtue.

He said to me, “Ah, Matthias, it is true. But what could it possibly matter now?”

I was on the verge of weeping to have this confirmed. I angrily suggested that Barsabbas be found and installed in my place, if he were the rightful Twelfth Disciple.

Peter said to me, “To limit our number to twelve hardly concerns us now. We have hundreds of disciples throughout the world, my friend!”

Exhaustively, I explained to the simple man how important the number twelve was, it having many significances. Whereas the number of man was six, we, who are to serve man, are twice that, twelve. Twelve for the tribes of Israel, for the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, there are twelve ribs in the body, just as His Disciples form the ribs of His Body, His Church, not to mention the zodiac and its twelve signs.
11

24.
Peter waved this aside. He said to me, “None of this intellectual stuff, please. As I have said, it hardly matters now. I suspect we have, say, 53 proselytes here in Antioch. What do you make of that number?”

I said it is not for us to interpret every mystery of God, but that as sure as there is a God, the number has some significance and that value pertains to the situation at Antioch, and if we only knew how to read such things we would be well on the way to emulating God's knowledge. Forgive me, Josephus. I hardly need belabor the self-evident glories of numerology, as any street-sweeper of Alexandria could likewise report.

Peter said to me, “I leave these things to you, since your mind is tailored to these higher pursuits. Here, follow me.”

25.
We went into a small room, randomly cluttered with fishing tools, broken pottery yet to be mended, and a dank net mouldering upon other refuse in the back. From a small pouch he removed two dice and asked me to wager. I, of course, replied that just as God did not intend us to be usurious with one another, so did he not approve of gambling or profit without an investment of honest labor.

Peter said to me, “I do not recall any scripture in which gambling is proscribed, my brother. Furthermore, I remember amusing Our Master with these very dice, and telling him they were quite able to do the devil's bidding, to cheat for profit. Then Our Master looked at me and said, ‘Truly, Simon, I say unto you that these dice will yet do God's will, for much that is bad in the hands of man finds purpose with God.' Watch this…”

Peter threw his dice and continually they came up the highest number of twelve. Peter said to me, “Ah, there's a twelve for you! Do you recall what you said when you first rolled them, thirty-seven years ago?”

26.
Then it occurred to me that these trick dice were the very dice that decided my election to the Disciples!

Yes, steadfast Barsabbas and I were the choices to replace Judas who left our band,
12
and these very dice Peter brought out in order to decide fairly between us. At the time it struck me as odd that I should be competing with the older Barsabbas, who had accompanied the Twelve for the entirety of Our Master's ministry.

Peter explained to me, “You see, when you let these tumble free they invariably show twelve or eleven. When you throw them against a board or a wall, like this, ah, you see that any random number can come up. We have a four now. By these dice we assured your election.”

27.
Peter put his hand upon me in comfort. “Dear fellow Disciple, it is in any event impossible to give your mantle to Barsabbas now, for he is martyred in Cyprus, land of his birth, some years back. He is most beloved of God.”
13

It was the first I heard of this!

“He spoke too loudly against a governor, which Our Master was never foolish enough to do. Like John the Baptist and James—this impractical streak in so many Nazirenes … Nothing is a surer footpath to the cross!”

Poor Barsabbas, it was he that should have been among the Twelve, not me! If I took his earthly crown he surely wears a crown more radiant now! Among the legends and inaccuracies of Our Church, there had been a real martyrdom, a noble and brave one. How much more it displayed my worthlessness and folly! I took from Barsabbas his precious seat only to waste my days in indecision, to shirk the task of organizing the Nazirenes as I, the only one with a thorough education, was singularly qualified to do.

28.
Peter said to me then, “As for you, we feared that your faith would fall away as its novelty wore thin, book-learned and young as you were. But not a one of us Disciples had a gerah to spend upon our mission, as you recall, and we had bankrupted ourselves and our trades in those years with Our Master. And you, of course, were terribly wealthy, and your father was blessedly indulgent. You could write, you could speak rhetorically in Greek, you understood some Latin … how could we turn away such as you? When it came time to decide, we wished Barsabbas to feel it was God's will, and we wished to spare his feelings.”

29.
And so my Discipleship was a sham!

Rather I was a fool who had been deceived for his money and influence. It gives me no pleasure to write this, Josephus, and confess these things before you, so I hope you have the humility to treat my distress seriously, just as I did not scoff or amuse myself at your expense when you spent your youth searching for a movement you could believe in, trying on Essenism as if it were a moth-eaten cloak.

Peter then said to me, “I shall give you these dice. I can feel sure you will never cheat anyone with them, and I'm not sure I can say the same for me. They are temptation, so take them.

“An odd history these dice have. I gave them to Our Master since they amused Him and He gave them to Marcellinus, the centurion whose house he entered—very risky in those days, to enter a Roman's house. Anyway, the centurion, a rough and gaming man, lost them to another soldier, the one who was on duty when Our Lord was executed. In fact, he used these very trick dice to acquire the robe of Our Lord, for they cast lots for all criminal's garments, you see; it was foretold in the Psalms.”

I didn't bother to correct Peter that the passage he referred to was in the Prophet Isaiah.
14

30.
Peter further related, “It was another centurion, Octavius, one of my first Gentile Nazirene converts, a companion to the monster Pilate himself! O, dear friend, you should have seen the scandal when he came to call! Simon [the Zealot?] almost had his head. Octavius knew the soldier in the crucifixion detail and acquired the dice from him and then passed them on to me. Thanks to him, a piece of Our Master's robe is now in James's marvelous collection of relics in Ptolemais.”
15

I have no use for these wicked dice, I said, or for James's sordid collection.

Peter seemed unoffended, and said, “Very well then, I shall keep them. Besides, now that I think about it, I think in some way Our Master would wish me to keep them. For both Our Departed Master and myself have some love of gambling.”

How dare he impute such venality to the Teacher!

31.
But Peter said to me, “Man gambles with such as these dice, but Our Master gambled with us. We are His ‘twelve,' His trick dice! He had all the world to choose from and yet he asked an unworthy like myself to follow him.”

He held my arm and beseeched me:

“Will Our Lord win his wager, Matthias? Are we another lunatic sect from this Messiah-hungry shore? Or is it entrusted in us to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to this world, to convert it to a place of love and charity and peace for all mankind?”

I could not answer these questions.

32.
Peter went on, “Yes, I shall keep the dice. Each time I waiver, and I waiver often, my friend, I shall decide by these dice, yes? ‘Twelve' means I go into the lion's den, into the arena, into the home of lepers and criminals and those who hate me. Any other number means I won't.” Here the old man became weepy and sentimental as I remembered him. “God's love is like a loaded dice, is it not? No matter what our circumstances, His love shows on the roll time after time…”

33.
Momentarily he recovered and surprised me by inquiring if I would accompany him to Rome. I said I had little interest in the capital of all evils and heresies, despite the talk of its many wonders. Instead, after leaving Xenon with his uncle and doing my researches in Ephesus, I intended to travel farther into Greece and among the Nazirene churches of the Aegean.

Peter said to me, “My, but we could use you in Rome. And you must see it: buildings four and five houses tall, I joke not! Flowing water and fountains, and palaces and arenas like you've never seen!”

Arenas, I said, for slaughtering Christians.

Peter said to me, “I see, indeed, you have been to see James. But Paul has written me and Rome is perfectly tolerant of us. We are one religion among hundreds. Servants in Caesar's house are under Paul's sway.”
16

34.
I despaired of the repeated recourse to the Great Innovator, the interloper. Is it Saul of Tarsus or Saul of Tartarus?
17

Peter said of him, “No, I didn't like him at first one bit, but he is filled with
Sophia,
my friend. And I tell you, he would not have denied Our Master as I did—no, he would have fought the whole garrison, and likely won! Have you heard his missives read aloud? He has written twice to our synagogue at Antioch and takes me to task so horribly, I don't dare have them read to the congregation! I've hidden them actually … but I'm sure there will be more. Paul is staying at a senator's house
18
and has invited me to come and teach and reminisce about Him Who Taught Us, and that I am always willing to do. And a senator's house! Think of the food and wine!”

Peter then embraced his young bride and she giggled as a girl while he told her of the things that awaited her in Rome, promises of a new cloak and fineries that only such a hoarding place of rapine can provide. Esther kissed him unashamedly in front of me, then scurried to the kitchen to supervise the slaves in the making of our meal.

35.
How I would have reached out to Peter had I but only some point of shared experience with one such as himself, a former fisherman who means well but thinks not of the implications of the multitude of rules he breaks and the paltry excuses for his own weakness, put forward with the assurance of doctrine. How convinced he was that Our Master cared little about sins of the flesh or lapses in ritual, dogmas, and doctrines. That is fine if one has met the Teacher of Righteousness, but what of later generations who shall never know Him as we did? We must get to the business of strictures and codifying rules to live by, I explained to him, for our children and their children. Are we to found a Church without a single tradition?

36.
Peter, I recall, began to look oddly at me. He asked me, “Matthias, dear brother, how stands it in the faith with you? Ah, I suspected as much. You have lost it, have you not?”

Here, I confess, though only some twelve years—ah, our number again—separate Peter and myself in age, I honored him as an avuncular presence, and wished to be comforted by him.

“You have healed people, have you not?” I asked of him.

“Why, yes,” Peter said to me, “we all have. Lepers, invalids, lame people, blind people. But not always, no. It is odd when it happens and when it doesn't. Perhaps, it is like Moses at Meribah, his heart was not pure when he tried to perform the miracle and God knew it, yes? Although, there have been days when I was sure my laying on of hands would fail—days where I felt no love for the complaining old women I was to heal, and it worked nonetheless! So powerful is Our God.”

I confessed I had never known even one healing, adding to my humiliation by telling him of my failures at Tyre.

37.
Peter said to me, “Simon the Magus proved too great a match for me as well.” He laughed, patting my shoulder. “God would not have us waste our time there, battling fruitlessly with circus demons.”

I protested, God would not have us triumph over abominations?

“Of course,” said Peter. “The abominations of hunger and disease, the abominations of being orphaned or alone and old. The world is full of abominations over which we may safely triumph. If we but would!”

A moment later, upon reflection, Peter volunteered a confession to ease my feelings: “My brother Matthias, I've never spoken in tongues. Yes, John gets to jabbering and I nod along pretending I understand. I'm frankly embarrassed; it looks so silly. Even at the Pentecost, I didn't learn anything that I already didn't know. Some people get some gifts and others others. Like Paul. He's never healed a sore joint, to my mind—ah, but the difference he has made to us! A Roman and fine scholar that he is!”

38.
And then I understood.

O bitter my revelation!

I saw clearly that it was to be
my
lot to teach and evangelize, to take my fortune and travel with the Nazirene message to the Gentiles, to dictate epistles like Saul's to be read throughout the Church, to be revered and studied. And I did not do it! And therefore Our Lord and Master, impatient but resolute, appeared by the grace of Our Father and recruited someone else—Saul of Tarsus! Mine enemy! The man I reviled! He was but fulfilling the mission that I did not complete!
19

I found myself weeping hopelessly before Peter. “I am a failure in the eyes of God,” I told him.

“But so are we all, dear friend,” he replied.