Testament (11 page)

He rowed us out in silence a little ways from the shore. In darkness that lake had something of the oppressive to it,
since you were still somehow aware of the mountains pushing in on every side, with only the small light of lamps here and there from the shore.

He said to me, “We did not expect you back from Caesarea.”

I did not know how to respond.

“And yet I’m here,” I said.

It seemed some matter weighed on him but he wouldn’t broach it.

“You didn’t go down to Jerusalem.”

“No.”

“Is there a warrant for you there?”

I was surprised at this. So it seemed that was his concern, that I would compromise him should I travel with him to the city.

“Surely if there were a warrant,” I said, somewhat arrogantly, “they would have made the day’s journey to fetch me here.”

We were silent. I was angry now, and had lost the will to warn him of what I knew. There seemed something unreasonable in this and yet I thought surely he knew what I was when he asked me to join him.

Finally I said, “I hadn’t planned to accompany you on your pilgrimage,” which was the truth, given my situation then.

After this he tried to make light of the matter. He asked me about Jerusalem, but only to flatter me, I felt, broaching subjects that I thought were of no concern to him—who the power-brokers were in the council, what the mood of the people was. But then he asked about the troubles in the city, of which he’d heard, and I could not feign ignorance.

“They say the rebels are killing their own,” he said.

“Whatever the killing,” I said, “there’s sure to be more of it soon enough.”

But I didn’t go on, nor did he press me, rowing us back to shore in silence.

In the night I repented that I had not given him a clearer sign of the danger to him in Jerusalem, since whatever anger I bore him, I couldn’t wish on him the massacre that might result should there be an uprising. But the following morning he surprised us all with the announcement that he would not be going to the city for the feast after all but rather into retreat, giving as his excuse his wish to worship free from the crowds. He would be taking with him only his usual retinue, Yaqob, Yohanan, and Kephas; the rest of us should feel free to celebrate in our own homes, since, as he said, God didn’t live only in the temple that he could only be worshipped there.

His followers didn’t know what to make of this, and were greatly disappointed, while his detractors were quick to denounce him and to say he preached sacrilege against the temple. But I wondered if he hadn’t understood more than I had thought, and had taken my warning without however pressing me into betrayal. It occurred to me now that perhaps it had been concern for my own safety rather than his that had made him ask after the warrant against me. But still I couldn’t find the way to make amends to him before his departure, so that when he left there remained the same strain between us that there had been ever since my return from Caesarea.

As it happened, the feast passed with no report of insurrection. But when Yeshua and the others returned to Kefar Nahum I learned in secret from Yohanan that Yeshua had led
them into Jerusalem after all. They had put up in Bet Aniah with one of Kephas’s cousins, and any time they had gone into the city Yeshua had made them cover themselves with their cloaks lest they be recognized by any of his followers. All this might have seemed sensible enough, and in line with whatever warning he’d understood from me, except for some peculiarities in his behaviour that Yohanan described to me. For instance, there were many parts of the city Yeshua avoided as if he had enemies there; and then at the temple he had refused to inscribe himself in the rolls for the temple tax, claiming exemption because he carried no coin. On that occasion he had argued so fiercely with one of the temple priests that they had nearly come to blows, and Yohanan and the others had had to spirit him away to save him a beating from the crowd. Afterwards he had not entered the temple grounds again, and it had been left to Yohanan and the rest to bring the lamb for its blessing.

I had no idea what to make of this behaviour and wondered why he had travelled to the city at all, or why, after the pains he had taken to conceal himself there, he should then have risked a public argument. As it was, a number of his followers who had gone to the city on their own had recognized him and could not understand why he had deceived them. But Yeshua held to the story of his retreat, saying he had been to Mount Tabor. As Yohanan told me, there was at least some truth in this—they had spent the night there, on their return.

All of this seemed the sign of a creeping strangeness in Yeshua, one that was all the more alarming because it appeared finally to have attracted the attention of the authorities to him. Until this point he had seemed protected by the
relative insignificance of his following and the apparent respect in which the Roman captain Ventidius held him. But now it grew clear that someone had taken note of him, whether because of his altercation in Jerusalem or simply on account of his increasing brazenness, because it happened that certain narrow-eyed sorts who had obviously been sent out from Tiberias began making appearances in Kefar Nahum, asking questions here and there or lingering at the edges of the crowd when Yeshua preached wearing an air of innocence that seemed exactly to trumpet their sinister intent.

In Jerusalem such matters were handled much more delicately, the knife already inserted and removed before the least suspicion was aroused. But these men seemed hardly to bother to mask themselves. Indeed, when I slipped a few coins to one of them, he admitted at once that he had been sent by Herod Antipas, to keep an eye on the upstart Yeshua. Clearly what had happened was that Antipas, who was not known for keeping an eye on the happenings of the Galilean countryside, had finally got wind of Yeshua’s ministry, and was anxious now to head off the rise of another holy man whom the Romans might later compel him to kill.

For my part, I believed there was a real danger from Herod’s men. But Yeshua played with them in a way that seemed unwise, saying any number of things that could be used against him should someone have a mind to twist his words. Antipas was not some village elder, whom he could get the better of by a clever turn of phrase; and Pilate and Rome stood behind him, who not all the peasants of Galilee could stop should they decide to remove him. It had been easy enough, after all, to do away with Yohanan, who had had a greater following and not so many enemies.

But when I brought these concerns to Yeshua, he dismissed them.

“They hire scribes to write down what you say so it can be used against you,” I said, which I had seen one of them do.

“Should I stop telling the truth, then?”

“The truth has nothing to do with it. You provoke them.”

“Why are you so timid,” he said, “when you are the one who wants to chase them all into the sea?”

So he made the thing appear simply a matter of staying true to his beliefs. But the fact was the more he was threatened, the more he became reckless. This seemed especially the case since his return from Jerusalem, so that I suspected there was more to what had happened there than Yohanan had been able to tell. I remembered Yeshua in Tyre, how ill at ease he had been with the crowd, and thought perhaps he had travelled to Jerusalem on his own so that he might again test himself outside the world of fishermen and farmers. But it seemed he had fared even worse in Jerusalem than he had in Tyre.

As part of their strategy, Herod’s spies spread many calumnies about Yeshua, some of which had a sufficient element of truth to take hold. So, for instance, they began to cast aspersions on his morals, on account of the women in his group. I had often warned Yeshua of the ill-advisedness of going about like some desert chieftain, with all his wives in tow, and he had laughed off my criticisms as if it did not matter to him what people made of these women. Yet it was exactly the accusations against them now that seemed the thing he took most to heart. In his typical way, however, he did not simply counter them but rather raised the flag higher, and ensured that the women were always with him now
whenever he appeared in the streets. This had the odd effect of once more increasing the size of the crowds who came to see him, as many were anxious to catch sight of the eccentric holy man and his concubines; and again, in the unpredictable way of these things, the rumours of his indiscretions seemed only to raise his authority with much of the peasantry, particularly the Syrians, who apparently had begun to see in him some remnant of the fertility cult they had had in their Asherah before the Jews had forced them to abandon her.

All this was a matter of great irony, I thought, for though Yeshua had always been happy enough to eat and drink well when the occasion arose and to surround himself with young women, he had often struck me as someone almost entirely lacking in desires, as if his physical nature was merely so much baggage he carried, that he might slough off at its first inconvenience to him. Though he did not encourage fasting, for instance, he himself sometimes did so for days, as if simply by oversight; and though I had never heard him advocate sexual abstinence, which was the case with many of the cults, he had never shown any particular favour to one or the other of his women or given reason to believe he might choose one as his wife, so I might almost have wondered, if it were not so uncommon among Jews, whether his desires did not run in another direction. For these reasons, I felt no cause to believe there was any substance to the rumours against him. But exactly because there was so little in his teaching that reflected this ascetic side of him, it went unnoticed. Instead people made much of the feasts he went to at the homes of his wealthier patrons and how he never refused a glass of wine, so that it seemed entirely reasonable to believe as well that he kept his women with him for his pleasure.

Thus many who had followed him before, and who counted themselves pious, now grew uneasy with him; while others who had ignored him suddenly thought him a Bacchus come to life, and began to come to him to bless their crops or cure their infertility, which appalled him. Sometimes a dozen or more would already be awaiting him at Kephas’s gate when he arose; sometimes at his sermons above the town he could hardly be heard for the clamour people made to be attended to. In the midst of these there were the usual ill who continued to come, and whose numbers had grown, so that more than once it happened that seeing the crowds waiting in ambush of him he would steal away with a few of us and leave them in the lurch.

“If someone comes with only the truth, it’s not enough for them,” he said, growing bitter. “They have to have wonders.”

So he grew increasingly reclusive, and even those times when he tended to the sick he appeared worn out by the effort, as if his healing had become a drain on his own vital force; because while at the outset his healing had appeared the natural complement to his ministry, it now began to seem an obstacle to it, and so he lost the heart for it. In this matter as well, however, logic was confounded: rather than diminishing his reputation, Yeshua’s growing reluctance to cure seemed instead to have the effect of enhancing it. As what had once been freely offered became more inaccessible and rare, so did the stories grow of the wonders that Yeshua was capable of and of the miracle cures he had brought about. Thus the blind and the lame appeared at the gate, and those close to death, filled with hope; and thus we were forced to turn them away. For Yeshua, there seemed no way out: the less he appeared in public, the more the rumours of
his potency grew; but if he should come out and simply tend to people in the usual way, they felt disappointed, as if some sin of theirs or some failure of faith had kept him from using his powers to the full.

On one occasion an old cripple who had had his relations bring him across the lake from Sennabris was so insistent on being seen that he had himself lifted up on his stretcher to the roof of Kephas’s house and lowered down by ropes into the courtyard. Kephas was ready to chase him and his people away at the end of a stick. But Yeshua was impressed by his persistence, though the man freely admitted it was skepticism and not belief that lay behind it: he wished to put to rest the rumours of Yeshua’s abilities.

“You’re right to be skeptical,” Yeshua said. “Only God has that sort of power.”

“Then why do you allow such lies to be spread about you?”

“I can’t control what people say.”

“Ah,” the old man said, “you’re like the ugly girl who to hide her ugliness never leaves the house, so the rumour spreads she’s in fact very beautiful and the suitors begin to line up at her door. When her sister accuses her of deceit, she says, ‘I can’t control the lies people tell about me.’ But in the meantime she doesn’t mind being thought beautiful.”

Yeshua took all this very well and indeed seemed enlivened in a way he had not been for many weeks. He and the old man ended up talking together at great length, and parted friends. The man promised to return to Sennabris saying he had found not a miracle worker but something much rarer, a man of wisdom.

This was the sort of thing that most pleased Yeshua: a reasoned discussion that ended with his interlocutor won over
to his point of view. In this he revealed himself to be at heart a teacher—not a mystic, not a cultist, not even a healer per se, but merely what he had presented himself to me as from the start, someone with a few plain truths he wished to impart to people. Indeed, this was the Yeshua that I had been drawn to, and that I now missed. If things had been different, if the need of people hadn’t been so great or if he himself hadn’t had that special air to him, the quality of being chosen or marked that seemed almost to stand outside him like a second person, then he might have simply lived out his life in Notzerah or Kefar Nahum with his little following and his bit of renown. As it was, however, the mood of the times went against him, so that though he preached peace, yet he would not be left in it.

It was around this time that one of the women in our group, Ribqah, from Migdal, took seriously ill. She was a girl of little means and of questionable virtue whom Yeshua, however, no doubt exactly because the world held her in such low regard, had always kept very close to him. He had suffered much criticism on this account even from his own people, and Herod’s spies had been quick to make use of the thing to further discredit him. Thus when she was struck down it was taken as a sign, in the way the peasants did, and the matter assumed a much greater importance than it merited.