Gospel (80 page)

I persevered. Even when Our Master spoke as no man before or since spoke, He was there, in the room before us—we could reach out to touch His flesh and feel the warmth of His body!

But John did not listen. “Too much has been revealed to me, some of which I can share, some of which was vouchsafed to me alone.”

(What, one wonders, was the point of the revelation then?)

13.
John said to me, “First, as Our Master has said, Jerusalem will be no more, salt sown into the fields, the wells poisoned, the walls breached, and not one stone will be left standing of what once was the Temple. Already the signs are in place. Indeed, here in the synagogue in Ephesus, before a sacrifice, a cow was seen to give birth to a lamb, and a ewe to a calf. A sign of the abominations that await us!”

John further said to me, “I can tell you that in my time in the wilderness on a barren rock with nothing but the sun and air to eat,
12
I saw the final conflagrations and sufferings in the Woe to come, the destruction of all things, no soul not in anguish, no measure of our skin not seared with the heat of a thousand burning coals. A hunger will be visited upon the land such as has never been seen and man will turn on man; men will be as beasts consuming their neighbor's children.”

I asked John if this would be before or after the searing of the hot coals.

14.
He said to me, “All sufferings will be concurrent; we shall turn away from one but to see the visitation of another torment. And how much worse it shall be for those who cast doubt upon the Resurrection of Our Master.”

I mentioned, nonetheless, that I indeed had doubts concerning this resurrection, not being of the party that saw Him, and furthermore, that no two Disciples seemed to have the same memory of it.

John merely said to me, “Having assumed the sins of all generations unto this one, having assumed within his Divinity all error and abomination, He fell through the many Hells until the seventh beneath Abadon, where for three days a worse ordeal than the Cross transpired.”

15.
Do you honestly believe, I asked of him, that God hurled his Greatest Prophet into a lake of fire with the fallen angels and Lucifer, Nero, Herod, and the like?

John said to me, “It has been revealed to me, my brother. I have seen but a fraction of this torment that when divided endlessly, and subdivided again by a number equal to all the grains of sand, that even this small portion of misery revealed was more than I could endure. I would have torn my eyes from my head, had not Brother Zossima rushed to prevent me.”

I turned again to see Brother Zossima, all of eighteen, emaciated and red-eyed from perpetual crying, a beardless castrate, I surmised, as well.

16.
It was here that wearily I determined not to spend any more time in Ephesus with John and his ilk.

I commenced next a tour of our churches in Asia, Sardis, Pergamum, Thyatira, numerous small outposts in rural Lydia, decrying the abuses and misinterpretations the Nazirene Church had undergone in each of these towns. (Of course, I was following in the footsteps of Saul, who pelts our churches with all-knowing epistles, and though I was shown due respect, it was made clear that Saul and his seductive tracts were foremost in their hearts. As the year proceeded—let's see, Tesmegan, the glorious year in which the wretch Nero took his own hell-destined life [68
C.E.
]—I composed a series of moral exhortations and diatribes I delivered in each of the Asian churches. I will try to recreate some of it here …

(On second thought, our time is limited. As Tesmegan reminds me, he must soon leave me, so let us move ahead to my return to Judea and the main mission at hand. Quite right, young man, but it would not have done you harm to hear my moral exhortations. Yes, write all this down—all that I say.)

17.
Very well then.

Late in the second year of the revolt [ca. January 69
C.E.
] I returned by a tortuous route to the family estate to wait out the fighting and serve as a heroic leader to my Nazirene commune.

Repeatedly when I traveled through our ravaged land I heard tales of the Romans, always the Romans, how they are at war with us, what atrocities are committed in Jerusalem, only to arrive at the purported place of these outrages to find once again that it was merely we Judeans fighting ourselves, Jew against Jew once more. As for the Romans, it is only our national stupidity that prevented us from outlasting them: Florus, you will recall, demanded more taxes for his unceasing personal squalor and discovered some Jews had mocked him by giving him alms money, as if he were a beggar. Thousands died for this! The Romans marching through Jerusalem did not return the Jews' salute. To war! cried Judea. Nero and the brood of recreants requested a small sacrifice in his name and, naturally, could we Jews simply pay some pagan to conduct perfunctorily this meaningless rite and oblige the emperor? Of course not! We preferred to fight among ourselves and see our Jewish capital, greatest city of the East, razed than to endure these paltry, empty trifles!
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18.
Around harvest time, naturally, your Roman compatriots marauded the countryside, took what they wished, and set torches to our father's estate. My reduced band of Nazirenes, now down to twenty, marched off across the Jordan to hideous, provincial Pella where no Roman would trouble himself. Our father, Josephus, as you know, never liked life upon the estate and preferred to live in his residence in Jerusalem; your mother, his second wife, insisted on the pleasures of the city. I sent a message for them to leave Jerusalem before the siege and join us in Pella but they had hopes that your newfound influence with the Romans would protect them. As we heard reports of the siege, I gave up hope that our father in his eighth decade [his seventies] could be alive.

19.
In fact, it was to discover the whereabouts of my father and, of course, to communicate with you, my brother, that I ventured from Pella after Jerusalem had fallen [September 70
C.E.
] and, it must be admitted, partially for curiosity (being a historian of my repute).

So many reports of utter ruin and desolation had circulated that I thought it impossible such a grand and fortified city as Jerusalem could have been so annihilated. But indeed, standing at the gates, I beheld it was so—destruction unknown, I am sure, since the most ancient times of the Assyrians when vanquished cities were taken apart stone by stone until the ground was level!

No hill or horizon was spared row upon row of crosses and gibbets. Indeed, downwind from the Mount of Olives there was no air that could be breathed and the night was tortured by the howls of hyenas and jackals as they leaped for the carrion hanging from cross and scaffold. Below the execution grounds there wailed a group of young scribes and rabbis, walking about in rags, flagellating themselves, cursing the Romans and then cursing themselves, making such an unworldly din that the Romans made frequent trips to silence them by sword. These shrieking rabbis would never make properly contrite slaves, and so they were killed rather than dragged back to Rome to march in chains in Titus's triumph, to be targets for Roman excrement and rotten foodstuffs. (Ah, such enormities your much-lauded history refused to observe lest your Latin patrons be embarrassed.)

20.
In the bloodstained creekbed of Kidron I happened upon the fearful visage of the son of the Rabbi Yochanan bar-Yehoshua (who had not gone with the rabbis to Yavneh), his hair torn from his head by his own hands. He said that the Messiah would appear any moment upon the Mount of Olives in a host of angels descending and ascending and with a blast of the trump the earth would open and swallow the Romans, and then the Jews, butchered and decimated, would rise bodily from the ground and avenge this defiling. When shall we be weaned from these follies?
I turned you to ashes upon the earth! All are appalled at you; you have come to a dreadful end and shall be no more forever!
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How weary I have become of Messiahs appearing to enact revenge for all man's evils! Sullen at the sight of fallen Jerusalem, I said to this tortured man that God has no interest in who gets what piece of land in His world. On this earth, we are surely our own Messiah and to wait for another mob-proclaimed one is to dwell fruitlessly on an unwaking dream, an unending tale, an unanswerable question. How much more difficult the question Our Master sought to answer!
How then, Lord, should we live together in peace with our fellow man?
Yes, how hard we must work for the answer to that!

21.
So now we come to a piece of my history you know quite well. Through bribes and pretending that I was Greek (which I can speak as a native, as you know), I received a pass to the innermost depths of the Roman camp, near Titus's quarters where you, as if some favorite kept animal, could be found slavishly waiting upon his excellency's pleasure.

Our exchange was not pleasant. You seemed offended that I had not seen you when you were imprisoned, and my being out of the country seemed not a good enough excuse for you. As you won your freedom by fighting against our people with the Romans, I reminded you how my own (and our family's) standing and respect in Judea were ruined. It was in this, our last conversation, that I learned that the family estate was to be transferred to you and I was to become, for all you cared, one more of the impoverished refugees of Jerusalem.

“Go to your Nazirene friends,” you goaded me. “See what charity you receive after having given to the Nazirenes all our family ever owned.”

22.
Am I wrong to say of our last meeting that in your eyes was something pained? Was there amid your sordid triumph some feeling for the wandering brother that you had not counted upon? That was surely the last time you will see me, the one who adored you, who gave you as untroubled a childhood as was ever had in Judea. How painful that our last encounter should have been such as that … Ah, but this path has no profit, let us forget it. Tesmegan, let us move on.

(We shall strike out all this later.)

23.
Our father, badly shaken by the siege and malnourishment, as you know, passed away in this period.
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You might expect that I hold you accountable for this, but, dear brother, among the many injustices done to me by you, this I have never claimed. No, he was an old man on the verge of not being able to care for himself. With Jerusalem razed and his estate plundered, I am glad that he could no longer think clearly and passed his last days like a child, fondly remembering his first wife and, in the end, calling out to his own mother as if she were in the room.

However, for the disasters that have befallen me, I am less forgiving. In the months following the fall of Jerusalem, dispossessed of my brother, my property, all my money, and shunned by the movement that I would have be my home, I threw myself on the mercy of Apollo, son of Erechtheus of Lod, who had a farm in the neighboring hills.

24.
He was as destitute as I, but we were once schoolmates as boys in Jerusalem. Two of his daughters had starved in Jerusalem; his only two sons had rushed off to Masada to fight and meet the Messiah who would drive Rome from our land! How my heart broke for him. Apollo had no room with a roof over it for me (the Romans, your beloveds, had torched his estate) but I was content to make a place in the stable, cushioning myself upon the only straw not damp with blood, for the Romans had killed any animals they could not use for food or haulage.

For the winter months, I worked there as his accountant and tutor for his daughters' children, as I wrote you. You had fled to Alexandria where Jewish sentiment against you was not so high-pitched, and I heard you married also—a woman I have never met or could give sanction to. Again, I wrote you of my unease but you did not send monies to help me. It was not enough to displace and impoverish me: I heard from others that you were busy working on a history of your own treachery, writing frantically to better your older brother, and of course to clear your name and render your own behavior exculpable.

At that, dear brother, cursed as Tiberias Alexander by our people, you did not succeed.
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25.
I decided early the next year [spring 71
C.E.
] to petition you in Alexandria and try again to redress my grievances. And
again
you did not consent to see me. (Yes, my scribe wonders that I write you even now subsequent to your former cruelty. Observe, Tesmegan, my insuperable Nazirene spirit of forgiveness!)

However, God was able to find a subsistence for me, His mercy be praised. It transpired for the next five years [71–75
C.E.
], I gave myself passionately to teaching Greek in Alexandria. First to private families, to the children of former school friends of mine who took pity on me; and then for the last three years I taught in the Academy of Alexandria itself.

O Alexandria! Where beauteous Alexander bestrode the port

His pharos huge and aflame for all to see!

26.
Yes, but to mention Alexandria, that paradise, greatest of cities! And of course, it is no small pleasure to be so well known and received in such a town.

Between the ubiquitous Roman raids, I more than once had opportunity in a series of outings to the famous baths near the Serapium to recite from my own
Cosmos Explained
(an immature work, yes, but not without its supporters for its many precocious passages!) at many a
tepidarium
to great acclaim. It was all I could do to leave the fine tables and company of the capital—where, yes, even wives and serving girls are educated—and again set out upon the banks of the Nile to uncharted barbarities.

27.
But set out again I did.

I had once hoped to end my life in the docile fashion I describe above, but it returned, you see: my sadness, my familiar emptiness. My curiosity! What of the Teacher of Righteousness and the entire phenomenon that had played itself out within my lifetime? Was I witness to God Upon This Earth or to my own illusions?