Testament (21 page)

I went to Yeshua directly in his quarters, the first time I had ever done so, and said, Those who condemn you will say that you too are a sorcerer if you take up with one. But Yeshua said, in a tone he had never used with me, Woman, be careful who you accuse lest you reveal your own treachery, and I knew then that he had understood what had happened between me and Simon.

At once my tears came, and my confession of what I had done.

My lord, I said, and fell on my knees in front of him, I’ve sinned against you and against God, and he took my hands and lifted me up and said, There’s nothing you’ve done that can’t be forgiven.

In that moment it was as if a veil had been lifted from me or as if the evil that had poisoned me was flowing away with my tears, and I understood then what it was to be forgiven, and how much evil clouded our vision until what was white was made black and even the simplest things could not be seen clearly. For now all the time of my plotting seemed like a darkness I had fallen into or like the delirium that came of a fever, though when I had been in the midst of it I had imagined, even as evil filled me, that I would be justified.

It was only because I was frightened for us, I said to Yeshua.

But he answered me, I was to blame. I held Yihuda too closely.

And he took me in his arms to comfort me in a way he hadn’t done since he had first come to us. My heart gave in to him then. For many days afterwards I still felt the press of his arms against me like the bodily mark of his forgiveness.

When all of this had come to pass, it was as if after much struggle and despair I had suddenly reached the pinnacle of some high mountain, from where everything was visible. I saw now how the Lord had sent Yihuda as a test just as Shimon had said to me, and how in his mercy he had used him to save not only me but even Simon the Canaanite, who otherwise would surely never have been led to the one God. Then, because I had told Yeshua of my threat to Aram, he summoned him to reassure him he wouldn’t be betrayed; but Yeshua had not so much as opened his mouth before Aram broke down and repented of everything he’d done, saying that from the time he’d left us he hadn’t known anything except misery and ill fortune, and had every day feared arrest.

You only had to ask for forgiveness and we would have granted it, Yeshua said.

And Yeshua arranged among us to find him lodgings and work, since his family, by then, had long turned him out into the streets.

I would never have believed that the matter could have ended so auspiciously, seeing that even Aram had been brought back to us. But I soon saw that the twelve didn’t understand the thing as I did, since they hadn’t passed through my ordeal nor indeed, thanks to Yeshua’s silence, did they know anything about it. Thus, while they were willing, for Thomas’s sake, to suffer Aram’s return to us, they
couldn’t bring themselves to countenance the Canaanite, whom they considered beneath them. Secretly they went to Simon and said that unless he be circumcised, they wouldn’t accept him among us, at which Simon, however, grew mortally afraid. He asked if there wasn’t some other way that he could show his loyalty to our god. But the others mocked him, saying he hadn’t understood what it meant to be a Jew and to follow the Lord.

They went to Yeshua and said they couldn’t accept Simon because he had refused circumcision. But Yeshua, seeing their contempt for Simon, grew angry.

You only talk about the outer man and not the inner one.

The law tells us there’s no inner faith without the outward sign, Yaqob said.

Tell me who is more true to God, Yeshua said, the one who as an infant has done to him what he doesn’t know or understand or the one who freely chooses God as a man.

No one knew how to answer him. Finally Shimon, who was deeply troubled by the matter, said, But without circumcision there’s no covenant. Without circumcision we aren’t Jews.

Sometimes you have to be more than Jews, Yeshua said.

Because of his anger the men wouldn’t press him any further. But afterwards they argued amongst themselves. I wanted to speak in Simon’s defence but felt ignorant of the law, nor did I think the men would listen to a woman on the issue.

Philip said of Simon, He’s like a child, so how can he follow the master’s teachings. But Shimon rightly reprimanded him, saying, Weren’t we children when Yeshua came to us. Yet we’ve come to understand him.

Indeed we saw with our own eyes how, except in the matter of circumcision, Simon had abandoned all his old ways and embraced those of the Jews. He had gone to his old home and smashed all the idols there and made a fire of the shards, burning even his house; and he had taken a horde of coins that he had saved from selling his cures and given them in to our common purse. With the twelve, though they still held him in suspicion, he was open and honest, so that in his innocence he indeed seemed a child, as Philip had said of him. But in being a child, he showed more truly than the others the love Yeshua had taught us.

Thus I thought that in time even the matter of circumcision would come clear to us, as had so many others, along with whatever message Yeshua hoped to teach us through Simon’s example. And so it might have been had not Yihuda returned to us suddenly, with as little explanation as when he’d gone, saying only that he had been to the protest at Caesarea, though a good deal of time had passed since it had ended. We were all amazed that he had dared to show his face again, but considered it beneath us to question him, waiting to take our lead from Yeshua. Yeshua, however, though distant with him, did not turn him away.

If you’ve come back, I hope it’s to be one of us and not to divide us, was all he said, and even Yihuda seemed surprised at this, as if he’d hoped for an argument.

In the next days we all saw how Yeshua no longer raised Yihuda up as he once had, but was rather at pains to give each of us our proper place. This had the effect of bringing out a servility in Yihuda that had never been much below the surface, and of making him vie for Yeshua’s attentions. Having learned, no doubt, how Yeshua had publicly praised
the Jews’ actions at Caesarea and the peaceful manner in which the protest there had ended, Yihuda was keen now to claim his own part in the thing, and to say how much further he had come in his understanding of Yeshua’s teachings. But if that was the case, it was still no mark of distinction in him that with all his learning he had thus merely done what so many others had accomplished more quickly with none.

Out of Yeshua’s hearing, however, it was soon clear that Yihuda hadn’t reformed, because he wasted no time now in spreading dissension. He had taken an instant dislike to Simon the Canaanite, no doubt because he feared he had replaced him among the twelve; and so, learning of the controversy surrounding his inclusion among us, he seized the chance to prey on our confusion.

Aren’t you afraid of people’s anger, he asked, warning that this was a matter over which the crowd might strike Yeshua dead. And he said it was only the fact that Simon had been a sorcerer that people could see, and that he remained uncir-cumcised, for they were too ignorant to understand when Yeshua spoke of what was outside and what was inside a man.

The rest of the twelve pretended not to mind him. But privately they began to wonder if he had spoken rightly, and to fear for our master’s life. Then it happened once in Akhbara, beneath Tsef, that some of Yeshua’s old enemies sent their men to trouble him.

Is it true that you teach the end of circumcision, they said to him.

But Yeshua, knowing who had sent them, would say only that just as all things would one day end in judgement, as their own teachers taught them, so too would circumcision come to an end.

None of them had any answer to this. But not admitting their defeat, they said, Even after the judgement there will be circumcision, since that is how the Lord will continue to know those who have kept his covenant.

Now Yeshua lost patience with them.

Do you think the Lord requires a mark of faith inside his kingdom, he said. Doesn’t he see into our hearts, and know us more fully than any mark can show. It was only because of the weakness of the Israelites that God gave them a mark to bind them to him, because if they’d been strong, their faith alone would have been enough.

At this the men had their excuse and began to stir up the crowd against him, saying, See how he insults Abraham and our fathers, and calling for him to be punished. Some of them went so far as to throw stones, and one of these struck him. But because Yeshua did not turn and run as they’d expected but held his ground, they lost courage.

Shimon, however, was made very concerned by these events and afterwards took Simon aside and explained to him how he had brought his master’s life into danger, which until then Simon hadn’t understood. In this way he convinced him to receive the mark, for the good of us all. To avoid those who hated us and spare from criticism those who loved us, Shimon wouldn’t go to the teachers in our towns to have the matter looked to but only to the priest in Tiberias. Simon balked at this, thinking he wouldn’t come out alive from that place, since it was believed even by the pagans to be cursed. In the end I was enlisted to accompany him to bring him comfort, for because I had been present at his cure, he showed a deep trust in me, unwarranted though it was.

So it came about that I entered Tiberias, whose gates I had never passed through though as a child I had watched the city rise up from nothing in the slopes beyond Migdal. Shimon and Simon came for me by boat but we went the rest of the way to the city on foot, to avoid the harbour tax and the risk that the boat would be stolen or ruined, as often happened there. I was under orders from Shimon to keep my face covered and my eyes downcast, and so my impression of the city was only of the noise of carts and passersby and of the blinding glare of white stone, so different from the black of our villages. I felt a double disgrace in being there, because it was Herod’s place, and built over the bones of the dead, and because I knew we didn’t have Yeshua’s sanction for what we’d undertaken, though I had gone along with the thing because, like the others, I was afraid for his life.

Simon didn’t speak a word from the time we entered the city and indeed looked even more terrified than I was at the confusion and noise, like an animal who had been brought in from the wild. Shimon led us quickly through the streets to the quarter where the Jews lived, passing by the palace, which was heavily guarded and gave onto a vast open square. There was a view out over the lake there that made it seem utterly alien from the lake I gazed out to every morning from my own front stoop, framed as it was within the city’s strange white monuments and colonnades and forbidden icons.

The assembly house that we finally arrived at, though faced in limestone, was hardly much grander than the one at Kefar Nahum, with a small portal that came out to a street where merchants had their shops. Further on, however, off a courtyard covered in white paving stones, was a larger building that we were told was the home of the Levite under
whose patronage the assembly house was held. The doorway was framed by two massive animals carved from rock—lions, as I imagined them, or bears, though I had never seen them—which I was astonished to see in the house of a priest and a Jew. Then a servant came to the door and I saw that the floor of the entrance hall was covered in bits of coloured stone that also formed images.

The servant was dark-skinned and spoke with the clipped accent of a Judean.

What is your business, he said, and when he learned what we wanted, and where we had come from, he at once reprimanded us for presenting ourselves at the front gate.

He sent us around to the servants’ courtyard, which smelled of offal and waste. After we had waited a long while and made many enquiries among the servants who passed through there, an acolyte of the priest, a boy who could not have been much beyond my own age, finally came to us and offered his service, naming a price, however, of five denarii. Shimon, seeing the nature of the place we had come to, and how we had been treated, and the child who had been sent to tend to us, was ready at that moment to abandon our mission and return home. In the end it was Simon who bade us remain and go through with the thing, for the fact was that the grandness of the priest’s home had inspired confidence in him, and so he seemed suddenly ready to suffer any chastisement for the sake of Yeshua’s safety.

We required wine for Simon to drink. The acolyte said that that of the house was too fine for us, and so we were sent back into the street to purchase some, which Simon drank down undiluted. He and Shimon then followed the
acolyte to an inner room from which I was forbidden. I heard Simon’s screams, and a short while later he and Shimon emerged from the house alone. There was blood on Simon’s tunic and Shimon had practically to carry him, for he was faint from the surgery and from the wine. It was getting towards dusk and we ought to have remained for the night in the city, to let Simon rest. But we were afraid of making our way in that place, and of the cost, and that my father, who didn’t know what mission I’d undertaken, would be sorely distressed if I didn’t return.

It was well past dark before we reached Migdal. Simon by then was feverish, and had not ceased to bleed, and indeed we had got him as far as Migdal only by dint of carrying him in one manner or another, either draped over the back of Shimon or with Shimon at his arms and me at his feet. We managed to put him into Shimon’s boat and then I told my father that Simon was unwell and I would need to accompany him to Kefar Nahum, without however explaining to him what had happened. It was clear by then that we would need to go to Yeshua, even at the risk of his displeasure, for Simon had taken on such a pallor and was in such a delirium that we believed him close to death. I was enlisted to row along with Shimon, because the wind was against us. But even still it was midnight before we reached Kefar Nahum, and Yeshua had to be raised from his bed.

As we’d expected, he was angry with us beyond measure at what we’d done. He didn’t however waste time to chastise us but looked at once to Simon, making a proper bandage to staunch his bleeding and setting me to brew an infusion of honey and bitter rose, as we called it, to give him strength. By morning, the threat to him seemed to have passed. But
when we had gathered together for our morning meal, Yeshua did not mince his words.