Poisoned Honey: A Story of Mary Magdalene (4 page)

James was slighter than Matthew, as well as younger, and Matthew looked after him when they were away from the house. At the private school, the other boys taunted them for being the tax collector’s sons. Sometimes they even threw shards of pottery at them, and Matthew would step in front of James to shield him.

The rabbi who taught the school at his house was a mild man, patient with the younger boys. The only time Matthew saw him get really angry was when he’d caught the other boys bullying James. The rabbi ordered the ringleader, Alexandros bar Tobias, to copy a proverb over and over: “A fool’s lips bring strife, and his mouth invites a flogging.” But finally, because of the other parents’ objections, the rabbi asked Matthew and James to come for their lessons at a separate time.

Alphaeus had an office near the docks, where he could keep a sharp eye on all the goods that came into the market, as well as the goods (salted sardines and dyed cloth) that were loaded onto boats leaving Magdala. Whether the goods came in or went out, the shippers and receivers had to pay Alphaeus the harbor tax. Exactly how much they had to pay was up to the tax collector, Alphaeus explained to Matthew. The Roman overseers let the tax collectors decide how much extra to charge to cover their own salaries. So a tax collector had to make quick judgments in each case:

—How much could the trader afford to pay?

—How much of a fuss would he make if you overcharged him?

—Did he have connections with powerful people?

“You might think I’d make the most money on the wealthiest merchants,” said Alphaeus, “but actually, I have to go easy on them or they’ll complain to the council. The smaller traders have to pay whatever I ask.”

One day, Matthew was out on the black stone wharf with his father when the owner of a sardine-packing business received a shipment of salt. Matthew recognized the man as Tobias, the father of Alexandros bar Tobias, the bully.

However, Tobias seemed different from his son. Respectfully and sincerely, he asked Alphaeus for a deferment of the customs tax. “It’s been a hard month,” he said. “We lost a boat in the last storm. Three fishermen drowned, and I’ve been helping out their wives and children.”

Matthew was impressed with Tobias’s matter-of-fact manner. He was giving the widows and their families more than he could afford, but he didn’t seem to think his generosity was anything out of the ordinary. Matthew looked to see his father’s reaction.

“A sad story,” said Alphaeus with a straight face. “My Roman supervisor would be moved to tears, if I were foolish enough to tell him.”

Tobias flushed, but he kept his tone even. “I see your point. I’ll pay the Romans’ portion, but if you could see your way to letting me defer your cut … I can pay you just as soon as my buyer in Sepphoris pays me for the last shipment.”

Alphaeus shook his head and folded his arms. Tobias hesitated, then drew out his money pouch and counted the full amount of coins into the tax collector’s hand.

As the sardine packer left, followed by dockworkers carrying his salt, Alphaeus turned to Matthew. “What did you learn just now, son?”

Matthew said slowly, “I learned not to pay attention when they try to make you feel sorry for them.”

“Good boy!” His father beamed and rumpled his hair. “They’ll tell you anything to try to get out of paying.” Matthew said nothing, but he wondered: Was the sardine packer just trying to get out of paying the harbor tax? Or was he really short on money because he was helping his fishermen’s families?

“Another thing you should understand,” continued Alphaeus, “is that the Romans rule the world. All the lands around the Great Sea, from the Pillars of Hercules to Damascus. That’s the one big fact you have to know in this life: keep on the good side of the Romans.”

“What about Herod Antipas?” asked Matthew.

His father nodded. “Herod Antipas … oh, we have to give him all due respect. The Romans let him rule over Galilee like a rooster on a dung heap and peck the maggots out of it. But he’ll go too far one of these days, and then …” Alphaeus made a gesture of wringing a rooster’s neck.

Matthew didn’t like to think of Galilee—their homeland—as a dung heap, but he didn’t protest.

While Matthew worked hard to learn Alphaeus’s business, his younger brother, James, was a disappointment to their father. James would rather hang around the rabbi’s house, reading and talking to the teacher, than learn how to collect taxes. In fact, James began to quote Scripture that criticized Alphaeus’s teachings. One day he recited to his father, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. ‘What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’ says the Lord God of hosts.”

Matthew, amazed and horrified, thought their father might throttle his brother. But Alphaeus only cuffed James on the side of the head. “Don’t you quote Scripture at me! Who do you think paid for you to take lessons, you insolent brat?”

James sullenly learned to do the accounts for Alphaeus, but he never learned to stomach the tax collector’s business.
Alphaeus hoped James would come around sooner or later, but Matthew knew he wouldn’t. James was stubborn as a donkey. He told Matthew, “I’d rather be a common laborer than a tax collector. Haven’t you noticed the way people shun us?”

“You mean the holier-than-thou folk in the synagogue?” said Matthew.

“I mean righteous Jews, like Elder Thomas and the rest of the council,” said James. “They’d rather welcome lepers into the congregation than someone who helps the Romans to oppress us.”

“Abba says the Romans have the right to collect a harbor tax because they’re the ones who built the lighthouse,” argued Matthew.

“Yes—they built it by forcing our people to do the construction work,” said James. “And where do you think the fuel for the beacon comes from? They make the peasants on Mount Arbel take time out from tending their vineyards to deliver wood. Better for all the harbors in Galilee to be dark than to be lit by Roman fires!”

Matthew could see, without James’s pointing it out, how the Jews of Magdala felt about Alphaeus and his sons. At the Sabbath meetings, Elder Thomas was more gracious to the Gentiles who came to listen, standing respectfully in the back
of the hall, than he was to the tax collector. Other members of the congregation would glance at Alphaeus, then pointedly turn away. Once, as Matthew, James, and their father walked into the meeting hall, Matthew heard someone mutter a line from Scripture at their backs: “‘If one turns his ear away from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.’”

One day, when Matthew was eighteen and James was sixteen, news came from Tiberias that Herod Antipas had executed a popular traveling preacher, John the Baptizer. At dinner, James was trembling with outrage. “John only spoke the truth: Antipas should not have divorced his wife to marry his brother’s wife. It’s against the Law.”

“It’s not our concern, is it?” asked Matthew in surprise. “We don’t live in Tiberias.”

“But we’re all Jews,” exclaimed James. His eyes were blazing. “Either we’re a faithful nation or we aren’t.”

Alphaeus waved his hand, dismissing the question. “A wandering preacher has no right telling our ruler what to do. He should have left that up to the Jewish council of Tiberias. Insulting the ruler and his wife is … why, it’s close to treason.” He dipped bread into the dish of stew and chewed.

“How can you eat, Father?” James burst out. “It’s a day
for fasting and mourning. Our ruler has murdered a holy man. As it is written, ‘How the faithful city is become a harlot, she that was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers.’”

Matthew laughed, almost choking on a mouthful of food. “Are you calling Tiberias, Herod Antipas’s capital, a faithful city?”

“The ‘faithful city’ is a poetic symbol for the Jewish people, as you’d know if you paid any attention to the rabbi,” said his brother. Matthew had never seen James so grim; it was frightening.

Alphaeus scowled. “James, eat. There’s no reason to mourn the death of a fool. What did this John expect? Herod Antipas is always on edge about rebels. John talked like a rebel, and he got crowds of people to follow him. Antipas had to have him killed. Even if the tetrarch wasn’t personally offended by John’s insults, he had to show the Romans that he was in control.”

That made sense to Matthew, but he could see that James wasn’t listening. Under his father’s eye, James pretended to eat a little, but he sat through dinner staring at the carpet. In the morning, he had disappeared.

James left a note on his bed, scribbled on a piece of broken clay pot. Matthew had never learned to read as well as
James, but he could make out that his brother was quoting the prophet Ezekiel. And the message was simple enough: “‘The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father.’”

Alphaeus stormed into the synagogue and complained to the elders, accusing the rabbi of turning James against him. He demanded to know where James had gone. The elders questioned the rabbi, a quiet, scholarly man; he was distressed but claimed to know nothing. When Alphaeus began to shout, Elder Thomas called the guards and ordered him to leave.

Later, they heard that James had made his way south to the Dead Sea and joined a religious sect. Alphaeus ordered that his name never be mentioned again. Matthew could see that his father was more hurt than angry, but that made Matthew all the angrier at James. He wanted to shout at his absent brother, “If you’re so fond of Scripture, why didn’t you remember ‘Honor your father’?”

Alphaeus stopped attending Sabbath prayer meeting at the synagogue, and so of course, Matthew didn’t attend, either. He was relieved not to have to walk into that hall full of unfriendly faces anymore, but he missed hearing the Sabbath readings. Sometimes on a weekday, he’d stop by the synagogue and listen to the scholars who gathered on the porch to debate points of Scripture. He’d wonder, What would
James say about that prophecy? or How would James interpret that law?

One morning several months after James disappeared, Matthew started to leave the house for his father’s tax office. Opening the courtyard door, he noticed several wet globs on the doorstep. He just had time to recognize them as spit when he saw the two girls on a donkey paused in front of the house. The girl in front, about thirteen, was leaning over, but she raised her head and looked straight at him for an instant.

Before the girl could also spit on his doorstep, Matthew slammed the door shut. Somehow, the scorn of this maiden, with her fresh, passionate face, upset him more than censure from Elder Thomas. Matthew admitted to himself a shameful secret: he wished he were not the son of Alphaeus the tax collector.

At first, I thought often about the night Miryam appeared to me. It seemed urgent to honor the vision, but what
was
the path that no one could choose for me? How should I follow it?

It must have to do with the way I saw and heard things differently from others. Miryam had found a well in the desert for her people, water that they needed but couldn’t find for themselves. So maybe I, too, could find something precious for others—with the eyes and ears of my soul.

Meanwhile, to my relief, my father did refuse old Eleazar’s offer for me. I heard my uncle reproach Abba for losing the profitable sardine business with the palace in Tiberias. Evidently, that would have been part of Eleazar’s offer, or at least Uncle Reuben thought so.

My mother had no doubt about the path I should follow, or that it was her duty to push me along it. Now that I was old enough to marry, she watched me all the time. I’d always been a fairly well-behaved girl, except for flights of imagination, and I wasn’t used to being scolded.

But these days, it seemed, my mother’s eyebrows drew together every time she caught sight of me. “Don’t run up the steps, Mariamne.
Walk.”
Or “When you speak to your father, don’t meet his gaze but cast your eyes down. Likewise with Alexandros.”

“Alexandros?” I said in disbelief. “He’s my brother, and he’s only three years older than I am.” With growing indignation, I added, “Why should I respect him, when he never even learned his lessons properly?”

“But Alexandros is a man,” said my mother sharply. “And you are a maiden. You need to get in the habit of being more modest with
any
man.”

One afternoon, after my mother had corrected me six times in a row, I ran to my grandmother to complain. “Imma hates me! Nothing I do is right!” I paced in front of her with clenched hands. “Why should I treat my brother like a prince? He doesn’t deserve it.”

“Soften your voice, Mari dear!” My grandmother caught one hand and straightened my fingers, stroking them.
“Tabitha is only worried for your sake. You know your father is looking for a suitable match for you, don’t you? When he finds one—before long—there will be a meeting of the families. The groom’s family will watch your every movement, and if your behavior isn’t perfect, they may call the match off. You have to do your part, you know. You can’t do just as you please and expect to get a good husband.”