King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (31 page)

They took the northern road around the Lake, through the towns of Capernaum and Chorazin, and crossed the Jordan into Philip’s tetrarchy by a ford, where there was a customs station. On the eastern side of the Lake the mountains rise steeply and villages are not numerous. Joseph found Judah and Simon at Gergesa. They were surprised to see him still alive, since he had not written to them for twelve years and had gone away without bestowing the customary blessing on them. They were poorer than he had expected, having lately suffered severe losses from a fire in their principal timber-yard. Their greeting was respectful rather than cordial, and Joseph guessed that they did not welcome the notion of having to house and feed Mary, Jesus and himself, especially since Mary as their stepmother would now become the ruler of the kitchen. Perhaps they also resented the appearance of Jesus as a claimant to a fifth share in the inheritance that had already been divided among them. But they said no more than that they had recently been put to great expense in setting up their brothers Jose and James in business at Bethlehem—the little-known Bethlehem of Galilee—which lies a few miles to the south of the Sepphoris highway.

Joseph said peaceably that his visit to Gergesa would be only a short one : he would go to Bethlehem and try to find a house there. Their brother Jesus was a good workman, and the two of them could set up their trade together again as in Egypt. As for the inheritance, he would leave to Jesus only the little that had been earned since it had been divided, and when he was gathered to his fathers the support of Mary could safely be entrusted to her son.

When Jesus had seen the principal sights of the Garden, which is inhabited by a motley race of Jews, Greeks, Phoenicians, Arabians, Syrians, Persians and Babylonians, the three of them returned westward and came to Bethlehem. “In Bethlehem,” it is said, “only the dead live in stone houses.” This is true, for all the houses there are of timber lined with wattle and daub and thatched with reeds ; but on the hill facing west stand a few ancient tombs, among them that of Ibzan, a celebrated Judge, whose innovation it was to settle the family inheritance on the sons rather than the daughters. Joseph found his sons Jose and James living in a small clearing in the middle of an oak-wood : their trade was to fell timber, shape it roughly into logs and sell them to the building contractors of Sepphoris. Though they welcomed him more kindly than the other two, Joseph decided not to trespass on their filial affection, for they were miserably poor. They told him of a house for sale in the hamlet of Nazareth, five miles to the east, with a cave at the back providing convenient cellars and store-houses. Joseph bought the house cheaply, and within a fortnight he and Jesus were back at their carpentering.

This is how Jesus came to be called a native of Nazareth. Quirinus, the new Governor-General of Syria, had ordered a census to be taken that year and Jesus was registered soon after his arrival as “resident at Nazareth, in the district of Bethlehem of Galilee ; son of Joseph, a carpenter of the same hamlet ; born at Bethlehem, now aged twelve years”. The census officials naturally supposed that the two Bethlehems were identical and he was listed as a Galilean, not a Judaean. This census was memorable for its disorders. The Galilean peasantry opposed it vigorously, not so much because it implemented a small poll-tax as because, according to an ancient Jewish superstition, a census of Jews, unless ordered by Jehovah himself, is considered unlucky ; it is recorded that when King David, provoked by God’s Adversary, ordered the unwilling Joab to number the twelve tribes, Jehovah was incensed and destroyed seventy thousand men with a pestilence. The synagogue officials of Nazareth visited Joseph and asked him to refuse the summons of the census official, as they themselves proposed to do. He replied that had the census been designed to number all the Jews in the world, and none but Jews, he might have considered it his duty to absent himself ; but since it was merely a census of the inhabitants of Syria, with Jews and Gentiles mixed, and did not apply to Jews living outside the Roman Empire, in Babylon and elsewhere, he could see no harm in it. Though his argument vexed them they could not deny its logic, and therefore
contented themselves with confusing and misleading the census official instead of putting up armed resistance.

From the spring at the limestone summit of Nazareth hill, where Jesus would climb every morning with his pitcher to draw drinking-water, a most extraordinarily wide view could be seen. To the south the great plain of Esdraelon, backed by the hills of Samaria ; six miles to the east the tremendous bulk of the holy mountain Tabor ; to the north the white houses and temples of Sepphoris, and behind them, in the remote distance, the snowy peaks of Hermon. He began at last to understand parts of the Scriptures which had been unintelligible at Leontopolis ; for Egypt was the level land of origin and of death, but this the hilly land of life and love. Here one could not shuffle along flat-footed in the level sand ; one must always either ascend or descend. Soon the muscles of his legs ceased to ache, and before the year was out he could run confidently downhill, leaping from rock to rock like a wild goat.

He read the Scriptures as assiduously as ever, but in a new light, and the neighbouring countryside provided, as it were, a supplementary text. He visited the site of the battle-field of Harosheth where Sisera’s chariots had been bogged in the Kishon valley and swept away by a sudden flood ; and Gilboa, where King Saul fell in battle with the Philistines ; and Jezreel (or Esdraelon) where Ahab’s palace had been, and Naboth’s vineyard which Ahab coveted, and where the usurper Jehu had encountered Jezebel, Ahab’s bedizened widow.

He proposed also to make the ascent of Tabor, which the Greeks call Atabyrion, but his mother would not allow him to go, even in the company of his elder brothers.

“It is a dangerous place,” she said, “for those who are not afraid of wild beasts as well as for those who are.”

“What is at the top ?”

“A town to be avoided, bare rocks, evil spirits and a moving rock which they call the Heel Stone.”

“Why do they call it the Heel Stone ?”

“The story is not for children !”

I
N
the spring that followed his arrival in Galilee, Jesus went up with his parents and brothers to Jerusalem for the Passover. The journey was a pleasant one, across the plain rich in tall green corn to Shunem and Jezreel and thence by the mountain road which runs through Samaria, into Judaea ; and every halting-place was a chapter of the Scriptures, or several chapters. Shunem, a village famous for its beautiful gardens and orchards, lies on the south-western slopes of Little Hermon ; it is also famous for its women. Abishag, the loveliest girl in Israel, was
chosen from Shunem to warm David’s old bones through the cold Judaean winter—this was the Abishag on account of whom David’s eldest son Adonijah was debarred from the succession. In Shunem, too, lived the “great woman” who entertained Elisha ; and from Shunem came the beauty to whom Solomon is said to have addressed his famous love-songs. The mountain road begins at the frontier town of En-Gannim, which is to say “a fountain of gardens”. This is a village of the same sort as Shunem, rich in pomegranates, figs and quinces, through which rushes a torrent, diverted into a hundred rivulets ; Solomon compared the Shunemite to this place. Here Joseph and his family rested for the night.

The next morning they entered the region of Samaria, and by evening had passed between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim and watered their asses at Jacob’s well, outside the holy city of Shechem, now inhabited by the Samaritans. Thence they continued a mile or two to Gilgal, where they passed the next night. This was the site of the first camp built by the Israelites after they had crossed the Jordan under Joshua, and the first place in Canaan where they celebrated the Passover. But the stone-circle which gave the place its name had been removed centuries before, during the reforms of Good King Josiah, because of the rites which were performed there in honour of the Goddess Ashima. Josiah had for the same reason hewn down the ancient terebinth grove of Moreh, where Abraham and Jacob had both worshipped ; it had been one of the most famous shrines of Ephraim, but nothing of it survived now but the name.

The next day they came to Bethel, a former sanctuary of which the prophet Amos had written ironically : “Come to Bethel and transgress, and at Gilgal multiply your transgressions !” Here the patriarch Jacob was recorded to have dreamed of the ladder with angels ascending and descending and to have raised an altar to Jehovah ; but Good King Josiah had visited this place too and broken down the altar, and cut down the ancient terebinth-oak under which the priestess Deborah had judged Israel. What had once been a royal city, beautified by King Jeroboam, who set up the golden calves there, and a rival sanctuary to Jerusalem itself, was now a dirty village with not even a market-place : as poor as any other in the unfertile territory of Benjamin. Jesus saw cornfields here bearing the poorest crops he had ever seen, and asked Joseph why the peasants troubled to plant the grain. He answered : “To provide the seed-corn of the following year. It suffices for that in a good season.” Jesus’s brothers had brought a sheaf of Bethlehem wheat with them for a thank-offering, every ear of which contained a hundred plump grains.

By rough roads thronged with people in holiday dress they came to Ramah, which lies four miles north of Jerusalem. There the grave of Rachel was shown them and the inhabitants pretended not to have heard of the other grave of Rachel at Bethlehem of Judaea ; and scornfully denied its authenticity. However, the truth was that Rachel had been
a Canaanite goddess, not a mortal woman, and what was now called her sepulchral pillar had been her altar, of which she owned several in different regions.

So they came to Jerusalem, which was now the only place where the Passover sacrifice of a lamb might legitimately be slaughtered and eaten. Joseph and his family crowded into the house of his daughter Lysia, and there, as the custom was, hastily ate the feast, as if on a journey. With the lamb, which had to be roasted and left unjointed, went endives and unleavened cakes dipped in a sweet sauce, and the meal began with a cup of sweet wine blessed by Joseph.

It fell to Jesus, as the youngest son, to ask Joseph the meaning of the feast. He received the traditional answer : “It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover. For he passed over the houses of the Children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the first-born of the Egyptians and delivered our houses.” Then Joseph read—or pretended to read, for he knew it by heart—the account in the Book of Exodus of the institution of the feast. Next they sang the two Psalms of David :
Praise ye the Lord
and
When Israel went out of Egypt
, and drank the second cup, with which the meal ended ; and what little meat had not been eaten was put aside to be burned. But after grace came a third cup, and a fourth, while they sang four more Psalms of David :
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, O Lord, but unto thy name give glory
, and
I love the Lord
, and
Praise the Lord, all ye nations
, and
O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good
. It was wonderful to Jesus to have left Egypt, “the house of bondage”, and to be performing this ceremony at Jerusalem, the goal of the Israelites’ hopes. Soon he began to brood over details of the ceremony, and to ask his brothers difficult questions about them ; but Jose roughly told him that the wine had gone to his head and that he had better keep silent. Undeterred, he asked Joseph whether he might presently be taken to hear one of the public debates in the Temple.

Joseph answered : “You are too young.”

“And when will I be old enough ?”

“When you are a man. You are not yet a man, though you do a man’s work in the shop, and you will not be a man by the next Passover either. It would be unseemly to attend a public debate at your age, even if you could secure permission to attend.”

A year went by, and another year, and one day when Joseph was lying sick with a swollen throat and could speak only with difficulty, Jesus was permitted to read the daily prayers for their small household ; so that he could now reckon himself a man and wear the prayer-garment which is the Jewish equivalent to the “virile toga” of the Romans. It is a strange moment in a mother’s life when she ceases to be responsible to her husband for the safety and good behaviour of her child—who suddenly becomes responsible to his father for hers. Yet the Jews do not signalize this change by a public ceremony as other nations do. It was sufficient that Jesus should kneel down before his parents and receive
the blessings of both, and a kiss from each on his brow. Joseph then asked him whether he wished to make a “sacrifice of prosperity” at the Temple—a goat perhaps?

Jesus answered that his tutor Simeon had discouraged him from offering sacrifices not particularly demanded by the Law, and quoted the fiftieth Psalm :

If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine with all its fullness.

Will I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

Instead, offer thanksgiving and vows, and call upon me in the day of trouble.

That year, when they went up to the Passover, he remained behind in Jerusalem after the seven days of the Feast, and was not missed by Joseph and Mary until, on reaching the end of their first day’s journey, they found that he was not in the company of his elder brothers, who had set off before them. They turned back and searched Jerusalem for him, but he was neither at Lysia’s house nor at that of Lydia, his other sister, and nobody could give them news of him.

Meanwhile Jesus had obtained admission to a series of public debates in the Temple precincts, conducted by well-known Doctors of the Law for the enlightenment of provincial students. The porter at the barrier was amused to find so young a seeker after knowledge, but after testing him with a few questions to see whether he were worthy to enter, pushed him in with a friendly shove, saying : “May the Lord increase your wisdom !”