King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (29 page)

“Justify that statement. Why is not the ass the most honourable ?”

“The ox is mentioned before the ass in the commandment against the use of the evil eye.”

“Impudence! And why not the sheep? Have you considered the sheep ?”

“I have considered the sheep, though it is not mentioned in the commandment ; and clearly the ox is the more honourable, as is shown in the allegory of Jacob’s two marriages : for first he married Leah, which is to say the cow, and then Rachel, which is to say the ewe.”

The schoolmaster bottled up his growing rage and said : “Proceed, Hiram of Tyre !”

“
Aleph
, as I understand the character, is an ox lying sacrificed, the yoke still on his neck ; which signifies that the study of literature must begin with sacrifice. We must dedicate to the Lord our first and most precious possession, which is emblemized by the yoked ox, namely, our obedient labour until we drop dead. This was the answer given me.”

“Tell me, have you come to this school as a pupil or as a Doctor of the Law ?” cried the schoolmaster, speaking the slow ironic drawl which his pupils had learned to fear more than his roar of passion.

Jesus replied simply : “I have heard it said : ‘Scatter where you gather, gather where you scatter.’ You asked me why the first letter of the alphabet is shaped as it is shaped, and I gave you the explanation that came in answer to my prayer. This was my scattering. As for my gathering, I should like to know, if you will scatter in return, why the last letter of the alphabet is so shaped ?”

The master grasped his rod of storax-wood and advanced towards Jesus with menacing grunts. He asked, his face pale with anger : “The last letter of the alphabet! Do you mean the letter
Tav
, Rabbi Jesus ?”

“I am not the rabbi, you are the rabbi ; and it is
Tav
that I mean.”

“
Tav
is the last letter, and the reason for its shape is not far to seek. For
Tav
is shaped like a cross, and the shameful cross is the destined end of shameless scholars who presume to chop logic with their teacher. Jesus son of the Carpenter, beware, for its shadow already falls across your path !”

Jesus faltered : “If I have offended, rabbi, I am truly sorry. I shall ask my father to send me to another school.”

“Not before I have dealt faithfully with you, spawn of folly. For it is written : ‘Folly is found in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.’ With the foolish and presumptuous child I have no patience at all ; and the wise child stands in awe of my rod.”

Boldly Jesus answered : “Rabbi, consider well what you are telling us. Do you not know the judgement of the learned Hillel : ‘A passionate master cannot teach, nor a timid child learn’ ?”

This was more than the master could bear. He brought the rod down with all his might on Jesus’s head, where it flew into pieces.

Jesus did not flinch or defend himself, but stood gazing fixedly at the angry man, who presently returned to his chair and tried to resume his teaching. But suddenly he clutched at his heart and fell forward dead.

So for a while ended the schooling of Jesus, for no other rabbi in Leontopolis would accept him as a pupil. For months afterwards passers-by in the street would point at him, shaking their heads and muttering : “The boy who killed his master by asking shameless questions! Yet they say that the learned man answered him witheringly before he died and prophesied that he would hang on a felon’s cross.”

O
NE
of Joseph’s customers, a retired schoolmaster from Alexandria, took a liking to Jesus and volunteered to undertake his education. Simeon was a learned, lonely old scholar who, though no longer capable of managing a class of boys, was ready, he said, to give his undivided attention to one of more than usual promise. He lived a few miles away from Leontopolis at Matarieh, a pleasant village, renowned for its figs.

Joseph was pleased and decided to move his business to Matarieh, where there was a small synagogue ; and hearing that Simeon’s wife had recently died invited him to share their house. So it was arranged. Jesus studied with Simeon every morning from dawn until two hours before midday ; the rest of his day he spent in the workshop with Joseph, except for an hour of leisure in the cool of the evening. From Simeon, Jesus learned in three years as much as few children learn in ten years of ordinary schooling ; for in a large class it always happens that the dull boys delay the intelligent, and that the schoolmaster cannot unbend lest the bad-hearted take advantage of a kindness suitable only for the good-hearted. Moreover, unless he treats every child with equal attention and equal severity, jealous parents will abuse him and charge him with favouritism. But in a class consisting of a single eager pupil, anything is possible.

Simeon’s method was not to say : “Such-and-such is the meaning of this text”, but “This text the Sadducees interpret in such-and-such a sense, whereas the Pharisees of the school of Rabbi Shammai interpret it in this other sense ; and those of Rabbi Hillel’s school, again, in this. The Essenes interpret it in still another sense, as follows….”

Since Joseph was growing feeble and slow, Jesus was obliged gradually to take over a large part of the carpentry business from him, but never worked at his bench except with a chapter of the Scriptures close at hand
for memorization or study. His work was sound and graceful, and he left to Joseph’s spokeshave and emery file only the subtler curves of yoke and plough, curves which no craftsman can master until he has spent a dozen years at the bench.

Those were happy years for Mary ; she would have been content to live in their small neat house with Joseph and Jesus and Simeon for the rest of her life, had that been possible. Though she felt troubled at being the cause of Joseph’s sudden departure and continued absence from his elder family and constantly told herself that he must somehow contrive to see them all again before he died, he appeared not to miss them greatly and assured her more than once that these last years of his life had been the sweetest of all. But Jesus : his was an altogether different case. Jesus, she knew, had a royal destiny to fulfil. He was preparing himself for it : one day it must lead him out of Egypt and back to the City which to her was the centre of the world. He had been there only once, as an infant, when she had brought him to the Temple to make the customary thank-offerings for her safe delivery, and had shown him to Anna the daughter of Phanuel.

One afternoon Simcon said to her, out of Jesus’s hearing : “Your son is a good boy, a very good boy. He is modest, pious, courageous, prodigiously industrious and intelligent ; yet he has one grave fault.”

Mary asked in surprise : “Why, Simeon, what fault can that be ?” In her heart she thought him perfect.

“That his extreme generosity of heart always draws him where his spirit suffers the most hurt.”

“And is that a fault ?”

“Do you know where he goes in the evenings between the end of his work and our supper ?”

“What is he hiding from his mother and father ?” she cried anxiously.

“Every evening he goes out to the Shame of Israel, as it is called, or the Camp of Lost Souls.”

“I cannot believe it !” Mary had heard of this camp, which was a group of filthy hovels on the fringe of the desert, inhabited by the outcasts of the Jewish congregation of Leontopolis and the villages near by. Thieves, beggars, maniacs, worn-out prostitutes, men and women entirely lost to shame, most of them suffering from loathsome diseases, eaters of crows, rats and lizards, people whose very existence offended the soul : for when Jews fall into the mire, they plunge down deeper than members of any other race—I suppose from having been stationed higher at first.

“It is true ; I followed him there last night.”

“Oh, Simeon, tell me, what takes him to that loathsome place ?”

“He goes there to persuade the lost souls that they can still be found by the Lord’s mercy. In one hand he holds a roll of the Scriptures, in the other a baton : he preaches to them from a hummock of sand and they listen, though the Lord alone knows what they hear when they listen. Last night I ventured out there to watch him and hid behind a
ruined wall. The ragged and stinking crew squatted around him in a half-circle while he read to them from the Book of Job. This was a Jesus whom I had not hitherto known. For all his generous mind he spoke no soft words of comfort to them but boldly accused them in the words of Elihu the Jebusite of having hard and stubborn hearts, and ordered them to turn again with tears to their Creator before it was too late. They squinted up at him with eyes of rage and fear, snarling threats and blasphemies or irrelevantly whining for alms ; but held there by some power which he possesses, the nature of which I do not altogether understand. As I watched, a madman made a rush at him, but he drove him off with the baton and beat him over the head ; at which the madman brayed horribly and went dancing away. The boy wept, but continued with his preaching. I came quietly away.”

“I fear for the child. I know that I have no cause, but the fear steals over me in spite of myself.”

“I do not blame you. He is far too young to undertake spiritual burdens as great as these.”

“Have you told him that the Camp of Lost Souls is no place for him ?”

“When I told him so this morning, he asked me : ‘What of Job with his boils and blasphemies? Was Elihu the Jebusite at fault when he reasoned with Job?’ I replied : ‘Elihu was a grown man ; you are a child. You are not yet of lawful age to read family prayers in your father’s absence, and do you undertake to preach to those wolves and hyaenas?’ He said : ‘If I have sinned from presumption, may I be pardoned. Yet unless you forbid me, I will continue at the task that I have set myself, since it is one that no other Jew of Leontopolis is impelled to undertake.’ I could not forbid him to go there again, and, indeed, I felt his words as a deserved reproach ; for, may the Lord forgive me, preaching to the Shame of Israel is a task from which my own soul shrinks.”

When Jesus was twelve years old, Joseph awoke from sleep one morning and said : “Once at Emmaus, just before we set out on our journey to Bethlehem, I dreamed that I was reading in the Book of Genesis : ‘Arise and get you into the land of Egypt!’, but the remainder of the verse was hidden by the finger of the priest who held open the scroll. To-night in my dream I have read the same verse of the same chapter, but this time the priest’s finger moved and covered up the first part of the verse, so that it read : ‘For those who sought your life are dead.’ Soon I expect to hear news.”

They waited for a few days, and then news came, not of the death, but of the deposition, of Archelaus—for dreams are not always accurate—and of the conversion of Judaea, with Samaria, into a Roman Imperial province. In the division of his father’s kingdom Archelaus had chosen unwisely. He should have been content with the tetrarchy that he had bestowed on his brother Philip : for in Upper Transjordania Philip had no political problems to handle comparable with those of Judaea, where
three times a year the passage through the countryside of foreign pilgrims, including bands of wild, proud Edomites, excitable tribesmen from Lower Transjordania and Galileans with knives concealed in their long sleeves, made the country seethe with unrest and spill over like an untended cooking-pot. In Philip’s tetrarchy Jews were greatly outnumbered by Greeks and Syrians : he could even dare to strike copper coins with his own head on them.

Everything had gone wrong for Archelaus from the very start : first came the Passover disorders, next the poisoning of his Samaritan mother, and then, while he was still at Rome purchasing the goodwill of leading Senators, Imperial secretaries and Livia’s maids-of-honour, and showing the utmost obsequiousness to Livia herself, rioting had broken out all over the country. The immediate cause was the return of the High Court embassy with the news that their plea had been rejected by Augustus. Varus, foreseeing trouble, had moved a regular regiment down into Judaea from Antioch, but unfortunately its regimental commander decided to overawe the civil population by the violent methods sanctioned in other provinces under direct Roman rule ; and in a few weeks piled up a very large fortune by the loot of public buildings. At the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, which falls fifty days after Passover, the Roman garrison at Jerusalem was suddenly attacked by three large bodies of armed men, recruited from the pilgrims that had come up from the provinces, who besieged them in the Tower of Phasaël, the fortress adjoining Herod’s palace. The people of Jerusalem took little part in this revolt, having more cause than the pilgrims to fear reprisals, but the Romans made no distinction between metropolitan and provincial Jews and killed a great many innocent people during sorties from the Tower. They also plundered the Temple Treasury of an enormous sum, a thousand talents or more, which was robbery of Jehovah and incited the insurgents to greater fury than ever. The beautiful gilded cloisters which enclosed the outer Courts of the Temple were burned to the ground and a great number of Jews perished in the flames.

Herod’s private army went over to the Romans, three thousand of them standing a siege in the Royal Palace, and this action so divided the insurgents’ forces that both the Romans and the Herodians were able to hold out until Varus, marching down from Antioch with two regular regiments and a large force of irregulars, raised the siege. He had paused on his way to crush a simultaneous revolt centred at Sepphoris in Galilee, which was destroyed in the course of the fighting, and another in the Judaean hills to the west of Jerusalem, and when his leading patrols reached the City, the insurgents broke camp and fled. His cavalry pursued and captured a great many of them, of whom he crucified some two thousand. His troops, for the most part Syrian Greeks from Beyrout and Arabs from the eastern desert, behaved with a savagery and indiscipline that disgusted Varus, who disbanded them as soon as possible : they had sacked and burned villages and farms by the score.