The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene
Read The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene Online
Authors: Frank G. Slaughter
Tags: #Frank Slaughter, #Mary Magdalene, #historical fiction, #Magdalene, #Magdala, #life of Jesus, #life of Jesus Christ, #Christian fiction, #Joseph of Arimathea, #classic fiction
FRANK G. SLAUGHTER
The Galileans
A Novel of Mary Magdalene
Published by eChristian Publishers
Escondido, California
Of all the women who appear in the pages of the Bible, few have aroused so much interest as Mary of Magdala, usually called Mary Magdalene. That Mary loved Jesus deeply is self-evident, for Luke tells us quite early that she was among the women who ministered to Him and to the Twelve. What seems equally self-evident is that the Master Himself felt a special bond of affection for this woman from whom He had “cast out seven demons,” for He singled her out from among the entire body of His followers as the first witness to His resurrection from the dead.
When in the closing chapters of
The Road to Bithynia
I introduced Mary of Magdala quite by accident as a minor character, a strange thing happened. It was as if this magnificent Christian woman of Jesus’ day stood before me in the flesh, demanding that her story be told. This is the story of Mary of Magdala and her fellow Galileans, who left homes, work, security, and friends to follow a Man who taught a wonderful new thing: that every individual is important in the sight of God, whether black, white, or red, rich or poor, thief or saint. It is also the story of how these Galileans except Mary, who seems to have known from the start who Jesus really was, came to recognize Him as the Christ.
Many legends have come down through the ages about the woman of Magdala. Of some of them, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
says: “Mary of Magdala has been confounded (1) with the unnamed fallen woman who in Simon’s house anointed Christ’s feet (Luke VII:37); (2) with Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha.” A number of so-called “biographies” of Mary Magdalene are in existence, most of them based upon this false assumption that she is identical with Mary of Bethany. Actually they are fiction, for nothing is known about this woman who loved Jesus, except the few references to her in the New Testament.
Wherever Jesus speaks in this novel, His words are taken directly from the text of the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. I am deeply indebted to the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches for permission to use this text. Portions of the Song of Solomon and the Book of Ruth which appear in the body of the novel are used with the kind permission of the publishers of
The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature,
Messrs. Simon 6 Schuster. I learned of the legend of Pilate’s crippled son, Pila, while reading Catherine van Dyke’s delightful little book,
A Letter from Pontius Pilate’s Wife,
published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. According to the author, it is “from an old traditional manuscript first found in a monastery at Bruges, where it had lain for centuries.”
The description of Jesus given by Nicodemus in Book Three is from an ancient Latin manuscript in the form of a letter written by one Publius Sentulus, presumably a contemporary of Pontius Pilate, to the Roman Senate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. I am indebted to the Reverend Carl Dobbins of High Springs, Florida, for bringing it to my attention.
Comparative studies between the Gospel of John and the three Synoptic Gospels make it evident that Jesus visited Jerusalem several times during his ministry, and not just once, as a superficial reading of Mark, for example, makes it appear. For the chronological sequence of those last months of Our Lord, I am deeply indebted to the article, “The Life and Ministry of Jesus,” by Vincent Taylor, in the
Interpreters Bible,
published recently by the Abingdon Cokesbury Press, Vol. 7, pages 114–44.
My continued thanks go to the staff of the Jacksonville Public Library and the Library of the Florida State Board of Health for invaluable assistance. Most of the information on the fascinating culture and civilization of first-century Alexandria was placed at my disposal through the kindness of Dr. Lawrence S. Thompson, librarian of the Margaret I. King Library of the University of Kentucky, and many knotty problems were unraveled personally for me by him, for which he has my heartfelt thanks. My court of last resort, as always, was the staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Research Service.
To those who read this book it is my sincere wish that the times, the places, and the people of Jesus’ ministry may come alive for them as they have for me. And that they, too, may come to know Jesus, the Risen Lord, as did my friends, the Galileans, on the road to Emmaus.
Frank G. Slaughter
Jacksonville, Florida
May 28, 1952
The Galileans
This best-selling book was originally published by Frank G. Slaughter in 1953.
This edited version of the book still contains the author’s vivid pictures of the world of first-century Palestine and Alexandria in Egypt, a decadent, dark world into which Jesus brought light. This version also still contains the well-crafted characters of the original version—a mixture of men and women described in the Bible as well as fictionalized characters developed from Frank Slaughter’s imagination. It all adds up to create a compelling story of what might have happened.
We realize that the average Christian reader today has access to much of the study material about Jesus’ final week before His crucifixion and resurrection, something Slaughter did not have available. So we have adjusted portions of this book to better match the historical timeline of Jesus’ life.
Our hope is that you enjoy this old book with new eyes and that it sends you back to read the firsthand accounts of this time period as recorded by the Gospel writers.
All revisions to this text come from the publisher, eChristian, Inc. Although Frank G. Slaughter is no longer alive to give us his approval, his two sons have graciously given us permission to bring new life to this best-selling book.
ITo the young man hurrying his mule through the streets of Tiberias late one afternoon, the voice borne across the city on the breeze from the lake was so startlingly beautiful that he stopped the animal to listen. It was the voice of a young girl singing in purest Greek, soft, gentle, sweet, and clear, with a bell-like quality that held the listener spellbound.
Joseph of Galilee had been studying Greek in the university of Herod Antipas’s newly-built city of Tiberias here on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, called by fishermen the Lake of Gennesaret, so he easily understood the words of the love poem first sung by the Greek poet Meleager to his beloved Heliodora of Tyre:
I’ll twine white violets and the myrtle green;
Narcissus will I twine, and lilies’ sheen;
I’ll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue;
And last I’ll twine the rose, love’s token true:
That all may form a wreath of beauty, meet
To deck my Heliodora’s tresses sweet.
Joseph was only twenty-one, but tall and slender, with dark eyes and a mobile, expressive face already marked by a seriousness beyond his age. His high-bridged nose and cheekbones showed the purity of a bloodline that went in uninterrupted sequence back to the time of David and beyond. Living with his mother in the city of Magdala, only a few miles away on the heights overlooking the lake, he was close enough to attend the new university at Tiberias. There Greek teachers instructed students of all nationalities in the lore of medicine and science developed by Hippocrates, Thales, and other great minds when Greece had been the center of the world of knowledge.
To earn bread for himself and his mother, Joseph was apprenticed to the famous Jewish physician of Magdala, Alexander Lysimachus, while working also at the more lowly occupation of leech, draining poisonous humors from the besotted Romans whose villas lined the waters of the lake here at Tiberias. Being a devout Jew, he could not live in the new city, labeled unclean and cursed when Herod’s builders disturbed the rest of the dead in the cemetery that now lay beneath its streets, but there was nothing to prevent him from taking good Roman gold for applying his leeches. Even now two of the dozen or so in the bottle hanging from the mule’s back were fat with the plethoric blood of Pontius Pilate, for the Roman governor of Judea spent as much time in his pleasure villa at Tiberias as he did in his capital at Caesarea on the seacoast, ostensibly because of the climate, but also to keep an eye on wily Herod Antipas, Jewish tetrarch of Galilee.
Drawn to the girl’s voice as iron was attracted by the black stone called
magnes,
Joseph moved closer to the source of the music along the granite-paved street of Tiberias. So new was Herod Antipas’s city that the dirt was not yet packed hard between the stones of the pavement, and the pedestrian must walk carefully lest he stumble over rough edges and uneven stones. Turning a corner, Joseph came into the open square before the magnificent new Forum. A crowd had gathered there and was still applauding the singer, showering coins at her feet as tokens of their praise.
Joseph climbed upon the pedestal supporting one of the granite Roman eagles adorning the Forum. His pious Jewish father, had he been alive, would have cried out against this action as blasphemy, since it was unlawful for a Jew to make any graven image such as the Romans used to adorn their buildings, or even closely to observe it. Herod the Great, grandfather of Antipas, had earned the marked displeasure of his people by thus flaunting the emblems of his Roman masters in order to curry favor. Only by building the beautiful new temple in Jerusalem had he partially expiated the crime. Now this later Herod, more Roman than Jew, had assumed his grandfather’s arrogance without his intelligence. From where he stood, Joseph could see the great citadel of the king’s palace upon the acropolis, rising from the black basalt cliffs of the mountainside and dominating the whole shoreline as a grim symbol of military might and kingly power.
The singer sat on the curbstone, holding a lyre against her breast as composedly as if she were in her own home. The crowd, largely Greeks and Romans, was arranged around her in a circle. She was young, perhaps eighteen, Joseph thought, and tall for a Jewish woman. Although her body was slender, it was already filling out with the promise of a womanly beauty that could not be denied. Her hair was covered with a shawl, as befitted a Jewish woman in the open air, but no mere fabric could hide its lustrous beauty. As red as the copper dug from the mines of Cyprus and burnished in the forges of Paphos, it shone in the afternoon sunlight, framing her face in a halo of rich color.
The girl’s features were a curious mixture of Greek and Hebrew lines, giving her face an almost stenciled perfection of classic beauty. The cheekbones were moderately prominent, the chin pointed slightly, and the forehead high, marking an intelligence that shone also in the cool glance of her deep violet eyes. They searched the crowd now, as if she were estimating just how many more coins could be extracted from the men applauding her so vigorously. Her skin was clear, almost translucent in its smoothness and its beauty, and lit with a faint tinge of color as she responded with a smile to the plaudits of the crowd.
To Joseph’s observant eyes, the pallor of the girl’s skin was further evidence of the mixture of Greek with Hebrew in her blood, as was her daring to sing a love song, however beautiful, before a crowd like this in a city shunned as cursed by the Jews. Her dress was of good material and beautifully made, but although neat and clean, it was worn and frayed, as was the leather of the sandals upon her lovely slender feet.
The four musicians with the girl seemed to be Nabateans, for their skin was dark and their profiles sharp and hawklike. Their dress, too, was the long flowing robe worn by the sons of the desert who roamed the sandy wastes to the south and east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where lay the great city of Petra. The leader, taller than the others and with a striking face and graying beard, held a large cithara in his hands.
One of the other dark-faced musicians held a long pipe of Egyptian reed and another a trumpet of brass. A fourth carried cymbals strapped to his hands, and upon his feet were the resonant boards called
scabella,
which were stamped in rhythm to the melody. It was an odd group, more like the bands of itinerant musicians sometimes seen with dancers than the accompaniment one would expect for a singer. Such bands were not at all uncommon in the thriving, populous cities around the lake, but Joseph did not remember one before with a girl singer, and certainly not a girl whose voice was itself a more perfect instrument than those of the musicians and whose beauty made her stand out like a lily among thistles.
“Who is she?” Joseph asked a Roman who was standing by, a fat man in a grease-stained toga threatening to burst at its seams.
The Roman looked at him scathingly, as if it were a sacrilege for a young Jew in a cheap robe to speak to his betters. “She calls herself Mary of Magdala,” he volunteered grudgingly. “A
meretrix,
no doubt.”
Joseph knew the Roman word. The
meretrix,
or prostitute, was common wherever the Romans gathered, and women entertainers usually came from this class. A considerably higher group on the social scale, if not a moral one, was the Roman version of the famed Greek
hetairai,
courtesans who wielded a powerful influence upon their admirers and were highly regarded in Roman society. Devout Jews applied the word
Jezebel
indiscriminately to the women of their Roman conquerors, whether wives, daughters, or mistresses.
But to Joseph the girl of Magdala did not look like one of the women of the streets who thronged this beautiful new city. No paint or antimony whitened the translucent pallor of her skin. Nor could the henna of Cleopatra’s Egypt have added anything to the natural luster of her hair. She was beautiful enough to be a courtesan, it was true, but something about her manner, notably the quiet dignity with which she sat there holding the lyre and accepting the plaudits of the crowd, told a different story.
“More! More!” the crowd began to chant now, and others took up the cry.
Mary of Magdala smiled and drew her fingers across the lyre, drawing a melody from the strings like the soft murmur of water flowing over rocks in some hidden place of beauty. Then she began to sing the melancholy lament of the poet Philodemus to his beloved Xantho. Joseph wondered how this girl knew so classical a poem and where she had learned her skill with the lyre, but never, he was sure, had it been sung by so beautiful a voice, not even in the palace of a king.
White waxen cheeks, soft scented breast,
Deep eyes wherein the Muses nest.
Sweet lips that perfect pleasure bring—
Sing me your song, pale Xantho sing . . .
Too soon the music ends, Again,
Again repeat the sad sweet strain,
With perfumed fingers touch the string;
Of Love’s delight, pale Xantho sing.
While she was singing, Joseph looked over the crowd. Only a few were Jews, for most of them avoided Tiberias. Actually Herod had been forced to import the scum of other cities to populate this gleaming new town. They had come eagerly, however, for much gold could be earned, and stolen, while serving the Romans whose pleasure villas lined the shore of the amethyst-green lake. From where he stood Joseph could see several of the elaborate villas, with terraced green lawns enclosed by high masonry walls and graceful marble stairways descending to the water’s edge, where ornate barges awaited their masters’ pleasure. The largest of the villas, except the palace of Herod Antipas himself upon the acropolis, belonged to Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judea.
All the emotions of man were betrayed in the eyes of those watching the girl. Some were lost in the beauty of her voice, the liquid notes of the lyre, and the contact with the sublime that beautiful music can bring to those who love it. Others had forgotten the music in admiring the youth and loveliness of the singer. But in a few there burned only a fire of lust for the slender body of the girl, and the most noticeable of these was a Roman officer standing to one side. He wore the purple-dyed uniform of a tribune, and Joseph recognized him as Gaius Flaccus, favored nephew of Pontius Pilate and commander of the procurator’s personal troops. Already the whole region of Galilee buzzed with tales of the cruelty of this hated Roman to those who were unfortunate enough to come under his hands, his fondness for the wine-cup and women, and the saturnalian revels that were often held at the palace of his uncle.
Gaius Flaccus was tall, with a superbly proportioned body and a classic beauty of features almost feminine in its perfection. He could be an incarnation of Apollo or Dionysos, Joseph thought, then hurriedly erased the idea from his mind, since it was a sacrilege for a devout Jew even to think of such hated pagan deities, still worshiped in Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and many other cities of the empire, with orgies and revels said to be scandalous in their abandonment.
The song ended and the musicians lifted their instruments. Then on a crashing chord from the leader’s cithara they began a wild barbaric dance of the mountains and deserts beyond the Jordan and the Dead Sea. The flute wailed in the strange melody of the desert people, while the strings and the cymbalist took up the rhythm, set to the throbbing beat of the
scabella.
Stamped by the cymbal player against the stones of the pavement, the resonant boards produced a booming sound like the beat of drums heard afar off. Above this heady rhythm came the clear, commanding call of the long trumpet.
Mary of Magdala put down her lyre and stood erect upon her toes, poised with her arms uplifted, as if in adoration of something unseen. The music seemed to caress her body, creating in its lithe beauty a fluid rhythm in cadence with the clash of the cymbals, the throbbing beat of the
scabella
and the strings, and the wail of flute and trumpet. Slowly at first, then faster as the rhythm quickened, she began to move in a dance that, while not consciously provocative, set the onlookers to breathing hard with the grip of its allure. Like a musical instrument in itself, her body, slender and girlish yet already seductive, seemed to vibrate in a wild melody all its own.
As she danced, the shawl about the girl’s head came loose and was tossed aside, letting the glorious mass of her hair stream about her shoulders, enveloping them in a cascade of coppery gold. She was like a spinning torch, a veritable pillar of flame, and a roar of approval came from the audience. With an effort of will Joseph tore his eyes from the girl and studied Gaius Flaccus. Naked lust and a calculating light were in the Roman’s eyes, and Joseph wondered if the girl had any conception of what her dancing could do to the souls of men, or of the dangers that might come to her because of it.