King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (38 page)

“Since your barrenness was not of your own choosing, you have avoided one bitter herb only to eat of another. But I will tell you this : until the two sexes shall be as one, the male with the female neither male nor female, God’s Adversary will still walk abroad.”

“What of yourself? Are you not a true man? “

“I have come to destroy the works of the Female !”

“Would you destroy the work of your own mother ?”

“I acknowledge as my mother only the Holy Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters before the Creation. The Female is Lust, the First Eve, who delays the hour of perfection.”

“And are you proof against her beauty? Are you sterner of heart than our father Adam ?”

“May it be granted me to dispel the curse of which the Preacher, the Son of Sira, writes :

An heavy yoke was ordained for the sons of Adam from the day they go out of their mother’s womb till the day that they return to the mother of all things, from him who is clothed in blue silk and wears a crown even to him who wears simple linen—wrath, envy, trouble and unquietness, rigour, strife and fear of death in the time of rest.

For the First Eve, or Acco, or Lilith, or the Spinner, whom Solomon styles the Horse Leech, and whom the Preacher styles our universal mother, has two daughters : the Womb and the Grave. ‘Give, give,’ she cries. In the hour of perfection she shall be denied at last.”

One morning in the last year of the five that the Gadelian and Jesus continued in partnership they found a man lying naked and wounded in an alley close to their lodging. They took him in, though he seemed to be dying, tended him, bound up his wounds, gave him food, and clothed him. When he had recovered his strength, he asked them : “My lords, how may I recompense you ?”

Jesus answered : “We are well recompensed by seeing you live.”

“But you, Sir, are a Jew, and according to your Law I am unclean, being an eater of rats and lizards !”

“All life is precious.”

“Lord, I am sunk deep in your debt.”

“Here is my hand ; go in peace.”

“I am ashamed to be thought so far lacking in generosity that when my life is saved I give nothing in return.”

“Give us what you will to ease your heart : but, friend, your possessions are not great.”

“I have a word to give.”

“We gladly accept a word, if it is a good word.”

“It is a word of power over venomous serpents : for I am a Psyllian from the Great Syrtis.”

“The name of a demon of Libya? Then refrain : we may not use it.”

“No, Lord. It is a master-word in use amongst serpents by which they recognize one another and abstain from offence : its meaning is Love. By use of it you will have the power to handle all serpents without fear.”

“The word Love, spoken in love, is beautiful in any language.”

The Gadelian cried : “Can any man but a Psyllian or a black Indian speak lovingly to a venomous serpent? The serpent would not be deceived, and the man would die.”

“Let us make trial,” said the Psyllian.

He went out with them about a mile into the desert, where he crouched down and began to sing in a strange croaking fashion. Presently the
black snakes and asps came rustling through the sand towards him. He stooped, picked them up, one after the other, crooned over them and said to Jesus, who stood unafraid beside him : “Look, is this one not beautiful, and this, and this? Their sharp white fangs, their bright eyes, the pattern of their scales, their lissomness! Lord, now I will speak the word of Love ; repeat it after me.” He breathed the word gently and the snakes curled peacefully into whorls in the lap of his garment.

Jesus repeated the word after him, reached out his hand to an asp, took it up and made much of it.

“Let it coil about your neck, Lord !”

Jesus did so.

The Psyllian instructed the asp : “Brother, be off and tell your fellows that they have found a new friend, a Hebrew !”

The asp slipped away into the desert, and ever afterwards Jesus had mastery of serpents ; he communicated the Psyllian’s word to his disciples not long before he was crucified.

But the Gadelian refrained from following Jesus’s example. He said : “I have little need of the word. There are no serpents in my country since my ancestor Gadelos expelled them with his wand.”

When Jesus and the Gadelian parted, they exchanged tokens of love. The Gadelian went travelling into Africa, and Jesus returned to Nazareth to his carpentering, to meditate on all that he had learned. They had agreed that if either were at any time driven from his own land he would take refuge in the other’s.

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Nazareth Jesus found his mother in good health and lodged in her house for a while. She asked him no questions and he told her little of what had happened to him in Egypt. He learned from her that his brother Jose was prospering in trade at near-by Bethlehem ; but that James, grown more and more pious, had taken vows and gone to join an ascetic society in Lower Transjordania, called Ebionites or “the poor men”. The Ebionites were an off-shoot of the Essenes, from whom they differed chiefly in their abstention from the study of astrology, in never cutting their hair or drinking wine, and in not cloistering themselves in a compound. Their self-imposed task was calling the people to repentance and praying for them. They abominated blood-sacrifices and kept the Passover in the old style, as a festival of the barley-harvest, rejecting as spurious the passage in the Book of Exodus which orders the Paschal lamb to be ritually eaten at Jerusalem every year by all pious Jewish households. This was only one of many passages in the Books of Moses which they rejected : they accepted, for example, only a few
verses of Deuteronomy, the book first published in the reign of Good King Josiah, which gave a pretended antiquity and divine sanction to current Temple practices. They lived on alms, which they did not, however, solicit ; and the Transjordanians considered it meritorious to support such holy men, whose knees were as calloused as their bare feet, by constant prayer.

Jesus now went into partnership with one Judas, a carpenter from Capernaum, who resembled him in size, build and the colour of his hair. The sight of Jesus and Judas rhythmically sawing down a tree together with a two-handled saw gave Judas the nickname “the Twin” or, in the Aramaic, “Thomas” ; for every third man in Nazareth was a Judas and all had distinguishing nicknames. Jesus attended the synagogue regularly and took his turn as the attendant who presented the sacred scrolls for reading by the synagogue elders, afterwards returning them to the sacred coffer. He also sometimes led the prayers, but refrained from expounding the Law, or from making use of the great powers that he had acquired in Egypt. He was patiently awaiting a sign. He waited for another seven years, lodging now in Thomas’s house and giving most of his earnings to the poor ; for he took to heart the text from Tobit : “Alms deliver a man from death.”

The sign came at last during a visit from his brothers Judah and Simeon, who were now settled at Cana again. Almost the first words that Judah addressed to him were : “Brother Jesus, will you come with us down to Beth Arabah to be cleansed of your sins ?”

Taken aback, he answered : “I am grateful to you for your solicitude, brother. But of what sins do I need to be cleansed? Evidently you are offended in me.”

“What man is free of sin? And do you not commit a sin of presumption in asking me : ‘Of what sins do I need to be cleansed?’ ”

“If I have offended, may the Lord forgive me! Have you also invited our brother Jose ?”

“We have not. He is vexed with us over a small matter of a broken harness.”

“Because a harness breaks, should the bond of brotherhood break with it? But tell me, brothers, who is to cleanse me of my sins? The power to wash away sins is given only to certain Great Ones.”

“Why, brother Jesus, have you not heard of the wonders that are being done by our cousin John of Ain-Rimmon? He is assuredly a Great One! With a mouth like the vent of a furnace he preaches repentance to the four quarters of the world, and he dips into the swift stream of Jordan all sinners who come to seek him out. When they emerge they are like new men.”

“Tell me more about this baptist, and if your account pleases me I will come with you, perhaps.”

“He spent seven years at Callirrhoë with the godly Essenes, but has since been granted a dispensation to travel. He baptized at Ain-Rimmon first, but since at Beth Arabah. He is tall and gaunt. His food is carobs
and wild honey ; his drink, water. He wears a broad leather girdle and a white coat of camel’s hair.”

“Camel’s hair? The Essenes hold that whoever wears camel’s hair is either a fool, a sinner or Elijah himself !”

“How so ?”

“The very first prohibition in the Law against eating the flesh of unclean beasts is against eating that of the camel. The camel is no less unclean than the hare or the hog. Though our father Abraham accepted camels as a present from Pharaoh, it is not recorded that he touched or mounted them. We read that Laban, Jacob’s father-in-law, owned a camel, or at least the saddle of a camel ; but Laban was not of the seed of Abraham. Though King David possessed camels, they were put in the care of an Ishmaelite, not of a Jew, and were pack-beasts, used for trade with Damascus and Babylon. The Land of Uz, where Job lived, is not within the boundaries of Israel and doubtless Uzzites tended his camels. Brothers, a camel is a dangerous possession, since a hair from its hide may blow into a man’s food and defile him ; and how can he avoid defilement if he wears a coat of camel’s hair ?”

“Camel’s hair is not camel’s flesh !”

“If you found a hog’s bristle in your broth, would you not turn faint and pour away the bowlful? Then if John is neither a fool nor a sinner yet dares to wear camel’s hair, trusting that the angels will guard his mouth from hairs, he must be a man among men.”

“At least we can tell you this : Doctors from the High Court at Jerusalem have questioned him and he denies that he is Elijah. He claims to be the prophet foretold in Isaiah : the outrider who clears the way for the King, preaching repentance.”

“That same repentance which every prophet has preached since prophecy began ?”

“He declares that it is not enough for us Jews to boast : ‘We are sons of Abraham’ ; for our God can transform desert stones into sons of Abraham, if he so pleases. He also declares that the days of trial are upon us, that the axe is already laid at the root of every unprofitable tree. And now that the path of the Phoenix has crossed the path of the Dove (but this is a dark saying), he is preparing the way for one greater than himself.”

Here was the sign at last : the Phoenix and the Dove! Jesus asked in the calmest tones that he could muster : “For another greater even than this Great One? For the Messiah, Son of David ?”

“We suppose, rather, that he means the Son of Man foretold by the prophet Daniel, who is to ride up to Jerusalem seated on a storm-cloud. He says : ‘His winnowing fan is in his hand and he will blow away the chaff from the threshing floor and burn it in unquenchable fire ; but the grain he will save.’ ”

“Your account pleases me. I am ready to come with you to see whether our cousin is a prophet, a madman or such a pretender as Athronges was. But first, pray, make your peace with Jose.”

“We will not be the first to speak ; the fault was his.”

“He declares that it was yours.”

“He lies.”

“I will come with you as mediator and cast the fault upon God’s Adversary.”

The three of them went to Jose’s timber-yard at Bethlehem. All agreed to cast the fault of the quarrel upon God’s Adversary. They kissed and were reconciled ; but it was left to Jesus to replace the broken harness with a new one, for they were proud men.

Jose also consented to be baptized, and all four brothers set off together on the next day for Beth Arabah, which lies in the gorge of the Lower Jordan, close to where it enters the Dead Sea : a gloomy and desolate place, overhung by tremendous rocks. They found a crowd of people waiting to be baptized, women as well as men ; some had even brought their children with them. John stood straddle-legged in midstream, as if at a sheep-shearing, and dipped under the water all who came to him. If they struggled, he held them by force until their breath rose in great bubbles, and prayed loud and earnestly over them. When they had regained the bank, choking and spluttering, they presently began to laugh, shout and dance, glorifying the Lord for the new vistas of holiness that opened for them.

As Jesus and his brothers watched, John cried out suddenly : “I baptize with water, but after me comes one who will baptize with fire. What sins I have not washed away, he will burn away. He will burn them, I say, to white ash and clinker !”

Jose, Judah and Simeon entered the water with a rush, not waiting their turns, shouldering men aside zealously. John baptized them, and coming out glorified, they began to dance and shout on the river-bank with the rest, though they had the reputation of being staid men. They cried to Jesus, who sat on a tree-stump apart from the crowd : “Go in now, laggard, and be cleansed! Oh, what a joyful thing it is to feel the burden fallen from the back! Go in now, brother, and be freed of your black crusted sins! Why do you dawdle there ?”

“I await my turn.”

“Well, well, as you please. But we are busy men and must return at once. The joy of sinlessness wings our heels.” So off they went.

Jesus waited until everyone had been baptized and had turned for home. Then he advanced towards John, who, hurrying out of the water, embraced him and cried : “At last, at last !”

“My brothers urged me to accept your baptism, Cousin,” said Jesus.

“Let it wait until it may serve as a lustration when I anoint you King.”

“Who put the word ‘King’ into your mouth ?”

“The Watchman of the Mountain, who is your former tutor Simeon.”

“Of Mount Horeb, the navel of this earth ?”

“The same.”

They forded the Jordan and skirted the eastern shores of the Dead Sea,
passing by Callirrhoë and the fortress of Machaerus, counted next to Jerusalem in strength, and crossing the River Arnon into Moab. Then they turned towards the south-west, past the sites of the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and began to ascend the foothills of the mountain-wilderness of Seir. A weary journey took them to the Ascent of Akrabbim, the winding path linking Petra with Hebron, and there above them towered the splendid limestone peak of Madara, which, under the names of Mount Horeb, “the Mountain of the Glowing Sun”, and of Mount Hor, appears in the Book of Exodus as the sacred seat of Jehovah. The Zadokites denied that Madara was Horeb, resenting that it should lie in Edomite rather than Israelitish territory ; and, concluding that Moses led his people out of Egypt by way of the Red Sea rather than the Sea of Reeds—the lagoon that lies eastward from Pelusium—they attached the name of “Horeb” to Mount Sinai, which rises colossally above Cape Poseidon, between the two arms of the Red Sea. However, the Essenes have preserved the true tradition. Kadesh Barnea, the tribal centre of the Israelites during their later wanderings in the wilderness, lies a day’s travel to the westward of Horeb ; there Jehovah first appeared to Moses.