King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (28 page)

The fourth Messiah was to be a priest-king, with a Judaean general serving under him. The best text for studying his claims was the beautiful, if uncanonical, Testament of Levi. As a priest this Messiah must necessarily proceed from the tribe of Levi, not from either Judah or Joseph. He was to sanctify the conquests of his general, institute universal peace, reform the calendar, revise the Scriptural Canon, and cleanse the people from their sins. It was a concept difficult to reconcile with the others ; yet Zacharias as a loyal Son of Zadok could not reject it out of hand, as he rejected, however, the Pharisaic theory of a universal resurrection at the close of the thousand years, and a Last Judgement by Jehovah of all souls who had ever lived.

Last in the list came the Suffering Servant, whose claims to be the true Messiah were studied by a small pessimistic group of Pharisees. His justificatory text was found in Isaiah, the fifty-third chapter, and he would be no glorious conqueror like the Son of David or the Son of Joseph, but a marred, uncomely, despised man, the scape-goat of the people, reckoned as a sinner, sentenced to dishonourable death, dumb before his accusers and hurried by them to the grave ; yet somehow after death to be rewarded with the spoils of victory. There was also a reference to his death in the twelfth chapter of Zechariah : “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for his only son. They shall weep bitterly, as one weeps for his first-born.” Zacharias, who took the Suffering Servant to be a type of rejected prophet, could not regard him as in any true sense a Messiah, for his kingdom was to be posthumous, and a posthumous kingdom seemed a contradiction in terms. Yet, for the sake of completeness, he had felt obliged to include in his concordance the texts referring to the Suffering Servant, together with the relevant commentaries, in some of which it was suggested that as the prophet Elijah had revived the widow’s dead son at Sarepta or the prophet Elisha had revived the dead son of the Shunemite woman, so this Messiah was to suffer death but be raised from the dead by a special fiat of Jehovah.

The condition that the Messiah should be a royal heir, called suddenly from an obscure home and anointed by a prophet, was a remarkable one ; for, generally speaking, a royal heir is either housed in a splendid palace and accorded the respect due to his station or else he is confined by a usurping rival to the dungeon of his strongest fortress, where no prophet is able to visit him with the traditional acclamation and the horn of sacred anointing oil. In the case of Jesus, however, this condition of obscurity was strictly fulfilled. His existence was unknown to all but a very
few people, and of these none but his mother, her husband Joseph, and Simon son of Boethus, the former High Priest, knew his whereabouts. He himself, though aware from an early age that he was possessed of powers denied to other children of his acquaintance, and though subject to sudden visionary trances during which clear intimations of his fate came to him, remained in ignorance of his true identity until Mary confided it to him in his early manhood, and thereafter kept the secret even from his intimates until his thirtieth year.

At the age of seven he was the leader of a group of little boys, sons of the Jewish market women, who used to play in and out of the booths of the market-place at Leontopolis. He was small for his age, but hardy and broad-shouldered and had a pale face with large deep-sunken luminous eyes and reddish-black hair. The games that these boys played were for the most part dramatic versions of ancient Jewish history and were carefully planned and precisely carried out, for Jesus exacted obedience from his playmates by an exercise of authority which both awed and delighted them. As Moses, he led them out of Egypt into the wilderness laden with booty ; as Gideon, he laid an ambush for the Midianites and pursued them across the Jordan for two hundred miles ; as David, he fled from the Court of King Saul, the homicidal maniac, and communed in secret with Saul’s son, his blood-brother Jonathan. Always he gave them the illusion that they were taking part in the real events, for he would describe with a wealth of circumstance each scene through which he conducted them, until it rose up plainly before their inward eyes.

One day he was reproached by the little sister of one of his playmates because he would not play weddings or funerals or any of the other usual games of the market-place : “We have piped for you and you have not danced. We have mourned for you and you have not pretended to weep with us.” It was a reproach for which he could find no answer, except : “My games are better.” Presently he was sorry and said to the child : “Come now, Dorcas, at what game do you wish me to play ?”

“Let us play at Noah’s Ark and the dove that flew out in search of land.”

He sat down and made an ark with mud and little pieces of reed, and then animals of mud which went seven by seven, and two by two, into the ark.

Dorcas complained : “No, I did not mean a toy ark : I meant a real ark into which we can step ourselves.”

“Patience, first let me finish my birds and beasts.” His fingers worked quickly and she sat watching until he had done. Then he stood up, bowed to her gravely and said : “The rain is about to fall, Dorcas. Come into the ark with me. I am Noah and you are my wife ; and our sons and their wives are following behind with the animals. Come inside with me.”

She took his hand and they pretended to enter the ark. With her fingers tightly clasped in his, she seemed indeed to be stepping into a
real ark with three storeys, like the one mentioned in Genesis, and above the loud noise of rain drumming on the roof she heard the lowing, roaring, braying, screaming, bleating noises of the animals. At last the rain ceased, and she watched the mud-pigeon in Jesus’s other hand put on feathers and preen itself and fly whirring up through the skylight in the roof. She cried out for fear and he released her fingers, so that the illusion was broken. The ark was once more a toy ark made of Nile mud, and the toy pigeon lay broken-winged on the ground.

“Dorcas, Dorcas,” he said, “could you not have waited for the olive leaf ?”

Jesus was also possessed of a natural prophetic insight. When one day an Egyptian boy, playing at “camel broken loose”, came running at Jesus with his shoulder so that both fell together, Jesus picked himself up and said : “Alas, that camel will never finish his course.” This proved true, for the young Egyptian, resuming his play, ran bleating among the picketed market beasts ; they stampeded, and a mule kicked him to death.

On another occasion he was playing “Spies in Jericho” on the roof of his father’s lodging. He and a boy named Zeno were Caleb and his companion hiding in the stalks of flax on the roof of Rahab’s house, and the girl acting as Rahab was about to lower them to the ground by a cord. But Zeno’s foot slipped before he had firm hold of the cord ; he fell sprawling off the roof and struck his head on a mounting-block twenty feet below. The other boys, who were representing the men of Jericho, cried out : “He is dead! He is dead !” and ran away. Jesus remained on the roof with his feet dangling over the edge, lost in thought. The mother and father of the injured boy ran shrieking out from the opposite house, and began mourning him for dead. A crowd of neighbours gathered and the mother pointed upward to Jesus on the roof, crying : “Look, neighbours, look! There sits my son’s murderer, the Carpenter’s son. He pushed my innocent child from the roof. This is his second victim. The first was the Egyptian boy on whom he laid a curse for knocking him down.”

At this Jesus sprang from the roof in indignation and landed feet foremost on a heap of dust. “Woman,” he said, “I did not push down your son, nor did I curse the Egyptian boy !”

He thrust his way through the crowd, stood over his playmate, whose face had gone chalky white, and taking him by the hand, cried : “Zeno, Zeno, answer me, I did not push you, did I ?”

Zeno replied at once : “No, my lord Caleb, it was my foot that slipped. Quick, let us go up to hide in the mountain and after three days we shall return to our lord Joshua !” He leaped up unhurt, the colour flooding back into his cheeks.

About this time Joseph sent Jesus to school at the house of the nearest rabbi, not knowing that he had already learned to read Hebrew and Greek, the two languages of the market-place, at the booth of a professional letter-writer for whom he sometimes ran errands. Jesus was a child
prodigy of a sort not rare among Jews : what he had once heard or read, he never forgot.

He arrived early at the school, before the other scholars, and the rabbi patted him on the head and said : “It is written :

I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. By me kings reign and princes decree justice. I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me.

You have come early indeed.” Then he prayed :

Blessed art thou, God our Lord, King of the World, who hast commanded us to occupy ourselves with the word of the Law.

To which Jesus made the response that Joseph had taught him :

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us ; and establish thou the work of our hands for us.

Then the rabbi asked : “To what witty inventions, child, do you suppose Solomon to refer ?”

“First, I suppose, to the alphabet.”

The rabbi was delighted. “Let us make haste to begin our studies together. I will teach you all about the alphabet.”

He took a wooden stencil from his alphabet box and stamped a letter on a clay tablet. “This is
Aleph
, child, the first letter : say
Aleph
.”

Jesus repeated obediently : “
Aleph
”.

“Examine the character closely. It is
Aleph
; repeat the word.”

Jesus repeated : “
Aleph
”.

“And once again for good measure.”

“Aleph.”

“Excellent. Now we can proceed to the next letter, which is
Beth
.”

“But, rabbi,” cried Jesus in disappointment, “you have not yet taught me
Aleph
. What is the meaning of the character? The letter-writer told me that you would know.”

The schoolmaster was surprised. “
Aleph
means
Aleph
, which is to say, an ox.”

“Yes, rabbi. I know that
Aleph
means an ox, but why is the character shaped as it is shaped? It is like an ox’s head with a yoke on its neck, but why is it tilted at such a strange angle ?”

The rabbi smiled and said : “Patience, my son. First learn to recognize the letters and then, if you will, speculate on their shape. Yet I will tell you this much about
Aleph
. It is recorded that in the beginning of time there was a quarrel between the letters of the alphabet, each boastfully demanding precedence of the others. They pleaded their causes before the Lord at great length. Only the
Aleph
said nothing and made no claim. The Lord was pleased with
Aleph
and promised that he would begin the Ten Commandments with it ; and so he did with A
NOKHI
A
DONAI
—‘I am the Lord’. It is a lesson, child, in modesty and silence. Come now, this is the letter
Beth
. Repeat :
Beth
.”

“Since you order me to say
Beth
, I say it :
Beth
. But already I know the twenty-six letters and can write them out in their proper order both in the old style and the new. Will you not answer my question about
Aleph
? For surely every character of the alphabet, if it is indeed a witty invention, must represent some truth concerned with that letter? Is the ox tossing his head with impatience? Or has he fallen dead in his tracks ?”

The rabbi sighed and said determinedly : “Return home in peace to your father, little Jesus, before the other scholars arrive, and tell him from me that he must send you to a more learned schoolmaster than myself.”

Jesus went sadly back to Joseph with the message. Joseph asked : “But why in the world has the rabbi sent you back so soon ?”

“Because I asked him why the letter
Aleph
was shaped as it is shaped, and he did not know.”

Joseph consulted with Mary and decided to send Jesus to another rabbi with a great reputation for learning, who taught at the further end of the town.

Next day Jesus went to the second schoolmaster, to whom, as it happened, the first had meanwhile mentioned his experience with Jesus ; he resolved not to let the boy disturb the routine of the school by asking impertinent questions, as he called them.

“It is as clear as day,” said the second schoolmaster. “The child was playing a trick on you. That scoundrelly letter-writer must have put him up to it.”

“You may be right, but he seems to be an ingenuous child and I can hardly credit him with such naughtiness.”

When Jesus entered the new class-room and saluted his master reverently and joined in the response to the blessing, and then sat down on the carpet cross-legged with the other boys, he was sharply ordered to stand up.

He stood up.

“You have come to learn from me ?” the master asked.

“Yes, rabbi.”

“I hear from your former teacher, the learned rabbi Hoshea, that you already know your alphabet.”

“It is true, rabbi.”

“A learned child indeed you are! Perhaps you are already an exponent of sacred literature ?”

“By the race of our God I have made a beginning, rabbi.”

“How a beginning ?”

“I have begun with the letter
Aleph
.”

“Wonderful, wonderful! Doubtless you have found out why the character is shaped as it is ?”

“I pondered on the question all night with prayer, rabbi, and in the morning the answer was given to me.”

“Deign to enlighten us with your marvellous illumination.”

Jesus thoughtfully knitted his brows and then said : “It is this.
Aleph
is the first of letters, and
Aleph
is the ox which is the mainstay of man, the first and most honourable of his four-hoofed possessions.”