The Kingdom of the Wicked (39 page)

       'Wait. If you do that the guards will be in trouble. They'll have to fall on their swords. You know the law.'

       'Let the guards be shagged to death by Pluto and his wife for all I care. I don't give a rat's turd for the law, it's the law that put us here.' But at that moment two guards came in in relief, seeing their charges present and intact. Paul said:

       'You see how it is. Our God looks after his own. He's released us from our bonds and opened the door to our freedom. But we thought of what your plight might be and declined the proffer. Now you see the strength of our religion. Join the line of converts we're going to have when we get out of here.'

       As it happened, it was not long before Paul and Silas were released, though the two good thieves, whom Paul duly taught that men of their kind had special niches reserved to them in the Christian heaven, had to see out their term. Paul and Silas were brought up once more before the praetors who, in a pose of Roman magnanimity, said they trusted they had learned their lesson and they were now to be booted out of town. But Paul said:

       'Wait. My colleague and I are Roman citizens. Cives Romani sumus. Yes, easy enough to make the claim without being able to substantiate it, but our status is on record in, respectively, Tarsus in Cilicia and Caesarea in Palestine. We demand that you seek confirmation of our claim. We are prepared to wait. We have much to do here in the way of teaching the new faith. You know the penalty for (a) whipping Roman citizens, (b) imprisoning them without trial and (c) making them leave Roman territory under constraint. You will be removed from your praetorships and punished according to the provisions of the Valerian and Porcian laws. Very well. We will say no more about it. But if you do not accord proper tolerance to the discreet practice of the faith we profess, you, gentlemen both, to say nothing of your lictors, will be in grave trouble. Good morning.'

       Thus a church was established at Philippi with little opposition either from the Jews, of whom there were fewer than ten, or from the Romans, who saw the value of discretion. Luke elected to stay on at the house of Lydia, allegedly for the purpose of medicating the girl Eusebia, who was covered in sores and vilely undernourished. Also, he said, the town was not rich in physicians and he wished to set down in the cool comfort of the room he had been given some details — in prose — of Paul's missionary journeys. Paul, Silas and Timothy set out west along the Egnatian Way which linked the Aegean to the Adriatic. They came at length to Thessalonica, the Macedonian capital, where there were plenty of Jews, mostly with Hellenized names, and a thriving synagogue. A hired mob tried to have Paul, Silas and Timothy brought up before the politarchs, or city magistrates, on a charge of setting up one Jesus Chrestos, a Palestinian criminal who became a Greek slave, as a rival to Claudius. But Paul, Silas and Timothy were speeded out of the town at night, and the only adherent of the treasonous conspiracy they could get hold of was a Jewish merchant named Jason (his real name was Joshua), who was acquitted by the politarchs for lack of evidence. This infuriated those who had hired the mob, and the mob turned up in the town of Beroea, whither the evangelists had travelled. Silas and Timothy went into hiding, but some of the Beroean converts got Paul to Methone or Dium, or some other port, and so he took ship alone to Athens.

       Athens. Here now Paul faced the most difficult task of his career, that of persuading intellectuals learned in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus to give ear to a religion not well founded in reason. The Greeks were under the Romans, a proud people colonized, but the inventors of the science of government were, for the most part, allowed to go their own way. Thus Paul met no opposition to his preaching, either from the Jews, who were too rational to be bigoted, or from the governing body, which tolerated every kind of intellectual or religious novelty. To Paul, who lodged in an inn under the Acropolis, the whole city was a seductive affront to his faith, whether as Jew or Nazarene. For here were all the gods and goddesses which, under changed names, the Romans had appropriated, limned in fine marble with a skill and sophistication the Jews, whose only art was literature, could never hope, if they ever took their horny paws from plough or nannygoat's udder to assume the chisel, to touch. The temples to these demons, as he considered them to be, were of a superb elegance. These people had everything but God. And, he almost added, good wine, for the resinous urine they sold ensoured his stomach. He was lonely: Silas and Timothy were supposed to follow him here but they had not yet arrived and he feared somewhat for their safety. They would be safe enough in Athens, where the new faith provoked not opposition but yawns.

       He went daily to the Agora, a kind of marketplace west of the Acropolis, where he met Stoics and Epicureans. They did not deny that there might be a God or world soul, but this being was too lofty to concern himself with the affairs of men. The Stoics went in for morality and duty without eschatological sanctions, the Epicureans believed in pleasure and tranquillity and the conquest of the fear of death. 'But,' Paul said, 'there is nothing to fear in death. Death is the gateway to the fuller life. Duty and the moral life have their reward, and terms like pleasure and tranquillity hardly suffice to describe the eternal elation of unity with God.' How do you know this? Who told you? Where is the evidence? 'In the appearance of God made flesh in the world, in the resurrection of his fleshly Son after death.' Many misheard the name Jesus as iasis, meaning healing, and Ieso, the name of the goddess of healing in the Ionic dialect. They interpreted anastasis, which signifies resurrection, as a restoration of health, and soter, meaning saviour, as the physician who so restores. They were not impressed. Nothing new here. No rationality in it. They called Paul a spermologos or seed picker, a pecking gutter sparrow, a purveyor of scraps and trifles. 'But look here,' said a serious teacher of rhetoric named Cratippus, whose homonymous father the peripatetic philosopher had obtained a professorial post in Athens through the influence of Cicero and was less inclined than many to scoff at what was not Athenian, this Cilician Jew has come a long way, he's evidently intelligent and learned in his own theology, and his Greek isn't bad. He's wasting his time here in the Agora. He ought to go before the Areopagus.'

       'The Areopagus?' Paul repeated. 'But I haven't committed any crime that I know of.'

       'Oh, they're not justices in the Roman way. They're supposed to look after our religion and morals. The best way of getting these ideas of yours over to Athens is to speak to the Areopagus. They'll listen. They're not like the Romans, who won't listen to anybody, as my father always used to say. And they'll pronounce on what you tell them. They'll let you know whether there's anything in it or not.'

       'But I don't need this Areopagus to confirm what I know to be true in my very blood and bones and guts.'

       'There speaks the Jew. You're a very physical people. We go in more for the soul. Prepare your brief carefully. I'll arrange things for you. Shall we say this time tomorrow?'

       The Areopagus had used formerly to meet on the hill of Ares, which is what Areopagus means, but now they met in the Royal Portico northeast of the Agora. Paul, brought thither by Cratippus, found a number of grave men, some very old, all of magisterial appearance. Cratippus said: 'I bring before you one Paul, who has come all the way from Palestine to propound the principles of a new religion very active in that province and, indeed, well beyond it. Athens has still to hear of it. Here is the man who bids you hear.'

       So, in a clean Greek free of the pollutions of Cilicia, Paul spoke. He said: 'Citizens of Athens, in my brief stay in your noble city I have observed your concern with matters of religion, even though it may be termed a negative concern, for I have seen many altars inscribed to an unknown god. This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God, not one of many but the only one, who created the world and all things in it, who, having made man as well as the earth and the heavens, is much concerned with the ways of man. He is especially concerned that men seek him. He is not remote from us, he is easily found. Why, even one of your own poets, Epimenides the Cretan, says that in him we live and move and have our being. We are the offspring of God, creatures made of his substance, and it is absurd to think of him as a mere thing, an object of silver or gold or stone, which occurs when his unity is split into mere personifications of human needs and motives. For a personified quality is no more than a lump of metal. Now, God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or to a thing, he came to earth himself, and that recently, to a particular place, Palestine, and in a particular time, that of my own generation, in the form of a human being. We may use the metaphor of the father sending down to the son, so long as we regard this as a mere similitude. So the Son of God taught the way of righteousness, showing human goodness as an aspect of eternal goodness enshrined in the godhead, and taught also that righteousness would lead men to dwell eternally with the fountain of righteousness, or, to change the metaphor, that human water should at the last be shown to be part of the divine ocean. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. This, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message.'

       There was a kind of rumbling and squeaking silence. Then a very old man squeaked: 'You quote a minor poet, or rather you make a very doubtful attribution to a minor poet. I would quote a major poet, our own Aeschylus, who, in his Eumenides, says there is no anastasis. The man dies, he says, and the earth drinks his blood, and there is an end of things. Words attributed to the god Apollo himself, alleged to have been spoken when this very Areopagus was founded by our patroness Athene. The Epicureans, true, speak of the indestructibility of the atoms of which we are made, along with all things in the universe, but the notion of physical human survival is a mere undemonstrable supposition.' Another, younger, man boomed out boredly:

       'We require that a proposition be reduced to its first principles. We Athenians do not take things on trust.'

       'The first premise of a logical statement,' Paul said, 'has always to be taken on trust. We all have to begin with the evidence of our senses.'

       'You actually saw this man rise from the dead?' a man so emaciated as fancifully to seem pared down to pure thought said.

       'I have lived with those who did and are still living to recount the experience,' Paul said.

       'Well, then, send them to us. Not that their testimony would necessarily be credible. The world is full of madmen and liars. I think we have heard enough.'

       The president of the Areopagus, a discreet legal-looking man in late middle age named Demetrios, said: 'We will hear you again, if you wish. Not tomorrow, nor the next day, but sometime. It interests us to know what new fantasies are being entertained in the great world outside Athens.' He lightly hammered great with irony. 'For the moment, thank you for your attendance and the evident sincerity of your discourse.' Then the Areopagus rose, leaving Paul alone save for an old man who announced his name as Dionysius. Dionysius said:

       'Interesting. And it has the charm of the exotic. Are there books on the subject?'

       'Not yet, alas. It is too new to have settled itself into books.'

       'Yes, a novelty. Well, you must come to dinner and tell me more.'

       The invitation was vague, but Paul, sensing that he was about to drown in a thalassa of unconcern, determined to hold on to this flotsam of possible persuasibility and persuaded Dionysius to fix a date and a time. Thus, three days later, Silas and Timothy not yet having arrived, Paul dined with him, very frugally, and met at the table a hetc'ra, as he took her to be, named Damaris. She was a little too enthusiastic about the new doctrines, and Paul's heart sank into his stomach, where it met a wave of acidity induced by the resinous urine. Athens, he knew, was a failure. He received a message the next day from Silas and Timothy, brought by a travelling Beroean, which said they were staying in Macedonia a little longer, pursuing the good work already initiated. He was very much alone.

       On his journey to Corinth he pondered the problem of spreading the word to the rational and educated. The Jews, most of them, opposed it because they were satisfied with what they had, and the pagans drank deep of it because they had nothing else. First principles. Credibility. Seeing, on the outskirts of Corinth, a temple with a many-breasted goddess transfixed on its facade, he felt the resurgence of hope. Eros once more to be transformed into agape. He greeted Astarte or whoever she was almost as an old friend. He went, after a light meal bought with his remaining coins of the Empire (he must find work soon), to a corner of the marketplace where, like any cheerful mountebank, he offered the secret of eternal life. It cost nothing, he eventually said, except everything. One man at the front of the crowd, loaded with larder provisions, maintained a faint smile of appreciation for the clarity and rhetoric but said nothing. Paul said he would say more at the synagogue in two days' time, where pagans would be welcome to usurp the seats of the regular attenders, and, as he had no money for a night's lodging, he slept in a public park, under a bronze effigy of the goddess, who held a detached phallus over him in, he thought he might fancifully think, a gesture of protection. This goddess must have put erotic images into his sleeping mind, for he woke polluted with a nocturnal emission. Not his fault, though he prayed that God might protect even the untracked regions of his brain in this city so well known for its erotism that it had given the verb korinthiazo as a synonym for I fornicate to the Greek language. For breakfast he drank fountain water and, without shame, begged a bit of bread from one of the gardeners. Then he walked towards the marketplace again. On the main street, however, a voice hailed him with a welcome. It was the faintly smiling man he had seen yesterday, sitting before a shop in the morning sun and stitching at what seemed to be a tent. Paul stopped and, with a nostalgia for that work, sat down next to him. The man said: