King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (48 page)

The Pharisees’ enlightened point of view is perhaps best exemplified in their attitude to the observance of the Sabbath. They were scrupulous to prohibit on the Sabbath day the performance of any work that might be done on a week day ; yet if the Commandment, attributed to Moses, that a man should love his neighbour as himself, seemed to be invalidated by scruples of Sabbath-breaking—if, for example, a neighbour’s house collapsed on a Sabbath and he was heard shrieking for help from under the ruins—why, then the work must be done, Sabbath or no Sabbath. Hillel’s own life had been saved by the breach of a Sabbath : as a young man he had been found one Sabbath morning standing frozen in four feet of snow outside the window of an Academy lecture-hall where he had been listening to a debate, prevented by extreme poverty from paying the janitor the few coppers which he demanded as entrance fee. The Doctors of the Law worked hard to restore him to life, saying : “This is a man for whom the Sabbath may well be broken !” Jesus similarly was a scrupulous keeper of the Law, but he is recorded to have told a man whom he saw breaking the Sabbath in order to perform some small service to his neighbour : “If you do not know what you are
doing, you deserve a reprimand from the President of your synagogue ; if you do know, you deserve his praise !”

Jesus was not only a king and a teacher of ethics : he was a prophet—a healer and miracle-worker in the line of Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Zechariah, Zephaniah, Micah, Enoch and the rest. Throughout his missionary tour of Galilee he carried a pastoral staff and wore a shepherd’s “rough garment” or hair mantle, as habitually worn by these ancient prophets ; and later required his disciples to do the same. Many of his prophetic utterances have been wilfully misunderstood by the Gentile Chrestians. The prophet, as the word implies, regarded himself as the mouthpiece of Jehovah : what he spoke under prophetic influence was not his own utterance, but Jehovah’s. Such an utterance was always prefaced with : “Thus saith the Lord”, or “The word of the Lord came to me, saying” ; and to keep his mouth holy he was bound to abstain from wine—a source of false prophecy—except when a royal marriage gave him dispensation. When Jesus is reported to have said : “I am the Resurrection and the Life”, or “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, he must be understood as speaking in Jehovah’s name and the prefatory words must be restored to the text. Any other interpretation is historically unthinkable. His usual preface was the twice-repeated Hebrew word
Amen
, which literally means “He was firm”, and which he used in the sense of “Jehovah has firmly declared”. The Gentile Chrestians, wishing to exalt Jesus into a God, translate the irksome
Amen
merely as “Verily” and often omit it altogether. They also attribute to him several well-known sayings of Hillel, Shammai, Simeon the Just and other celebrated Jewish moralists, by the simple trick of suppressing his humble acknowledgement to them, as for example : “
Have you not heard what Antigonus of Soko received from the lips of Simeon the Just? For Simeon used to say
: ‘Be not as slaves who serve their master in hope of reward, but as slaves that serve without hope of reward ; and let the fear of Heaven be upon you.’ ” Or : “
Have you not heard what the learned Hillel—his memory be blessed—told the scoffer who asked to be taught the whole Law while standing upon one foot
? ‘Do not to your neighbour what you would not have him do to you! This is the whole Law ; the rest is gloss.’ ” “
And the converse of his judgement is found in the Letter of Aristeas
: ‘Do to others as you would be done by.’ ”

As a courteous king he suited his speech to every class of his subjects. To prophets, such as John the Baptist, he spoke as a poet ; to Doctors of the Law he spoke in their own learned language ; to merchants and tradesmen more familiarly ; to the mass of the people who were not subtle enough to understand either deep poems or complex religious theory, he sang songs and told fables.

Some of his songs survive. Most of them contain simple advice to men and women not to allow social ambition or preoccupation with the routine of daily life to draw their minds away from contemplation of the Kingdom of God. For example :

Consider the ravens

That neither plough nor reap,
Nor build them a store-house

Their stores wherein to keep :
For God tends them well,

As a shepherd his sheep.

 

Consider the wind-flowers

That neither sew nor spin,
Yet Solomon’s sister,

All glorious within,
Won never such beauty

Of dress as they win.

In the prose-translation offered in this Acts and Sayings of Jesus, “Solomon” is written for “Solomon’s sister”, I suppose because the Queen of Sheba admired Solomon’s magnificence ; but this emendation spoils the poetic balance between the ravens as the men and the flowers as the women. It also obscures the reference to the coronation psalm : “The King’s daughter is all glorious within” ; for the King here is Solomon’s father David and his daughter is Solomon’s “sister and spouse”, the Shunemite of the Canticles. This version unaccountably omits the two explanatory verses of the song :

God remembers the ravens

That lightened the distress
Of Elijah the Tishbite

In the wilderness,
Though the rulers of Israel

Denied him their mess.

 

God remembers the wind-flowers

That reddened all the sward
When the pure blood of Abel

Was spilt by Cain’s sword—
Every spring-time they greet him,

Renewing their Lord.

It is possible that Jesus’s strange commendation of the unclean ravens conceals a reference to the well-known enmity between the raven and the owl ; as we say in Greek : “The voice of the owl is one thing, and the raven’s voice another.” For the raven was the bird of Elijah the healer and poet, and though unclean was regarded as of lucky omen, whereas the owl was the bird of Lilith the First Eve whom Jesus was set on destroying.

Simpler even than this raven and lily song is one which begins :

Do not sigh, do not mourn,

I will lighten your cares :
For blessèd are the poor—

God’s Kingdom is theirs.

 

Blessèd are the merciful—

Merciful is he.
Blessèd are the pure—

His face they shall see.
Blessèd are the meek—

His carpet is spread.
Blessèd are the hungry—

They shall be fed….

and another that concerns divine mercy :

Ask, it shall be given.

Seek, you shall find.
Knock, the door shall open—

God’s heart is kind.

The song,
When Your Right Eye Offends You
, recommends meek acceptance of external oppression combined with proud resistance to internal oppression. And
Judge the Tree
lays down a standard of moral judgement :

Judge the tree by the fruit,

Judge not by the leaf….

Jesus put some of his fables into rough ballad form, such as the one about the rich man and the beggar and how they fared in the other world ; and the one beginning :

The farmer trudges out to sow,

The leathern seed-bag slung at his side.
Along the merry furrows watch him go

To scatter the good seed far and wide.

He is credited with having also composed poems of a quality to compare with those of Isaiah and Ezekiel ; but none of these has survived.

He sometimes impressed a moral judgement on his disciples by the performance of a symbolical act—as, for example, at Cana when he attended the marriage of his nephew Palti and at a late hour the wine gave out and no more could be procured. The master of ceremonies, distressed and ashamed, came to him for advice. Jesus instructed the servants to fill up the wine-jars again with the lustral water which every pious Jew uses for cleansing his hands before and after meals, and to serve it with the same ceremony as if it were wine. They hesitated to obey until his mother, as the senior matron, insisted on their doing so. He then himself accepted the first bowlful of water, praised its delicious bouquet and colour and sipped it like a connoisseur. “Adam drank such wine as this in Eden”, he said. The master of ceremonies followed his example and swore that never had he tasted such good wine. He meant that he approved Jesus’s message : “Cleanliness, that is to say ‘holiness before the Lord’, is better than excessive drinking. For Adam in the days of his innocency knew purer joys than his descendant Noah, the inventor of wine ; wine is good, but wine taken to excess led Noah
to shamelessness and his son Ham into sin and slavery.” However, according to my Ebionite informant, Jesus was saying even more than this : he was saying that Adam and Eve in the days of innocency abstained from carnal love—of which the emblem in the Canticles is wine—and that when they succumbed to it after the Fall the fruit of their union was Cain, the first murderer, who brought Death into the world. Only by a return to that love between man and woman from which the dangerous joys of carnality are banished can mankind return to Eden.

Jesus and the master of ceremonies played their dramatic parts with such gravity and verisimilitude that they persuaded a few of the drunken guests that they were, in fact, drinking wine ; and Jesus is therefore credited by Gentile Chrestians, who abstain neither from wine nor from marriage, with a vulgar and purposeless miracle of the sort performed by Syrian jugglers at fairs! They have made a similar miracle out of another of his symbolic acts—the pretended feeding of a great number of his followers with five loaves of bread.

He performed this act by the Lake of Galilee one afternoon, after taking refuge in a boat from a crowd of people, estimated at some five thousand, who came rushing about him near Taricheae. He coasted slowly in the boat for several miles along the south-eastern shore until all but a thousand of them, growing hungry and weary, returned to the city. Then he disembarked, satisfied that those who remained were not idle sightseers but sincere seekers after truth. “Of five thousand, four thousand are gone, one thousand remain. What shall we do with them ?”

Peter said : “Lord, the four thousand have returned to eat bread ; let the others do the same.”

“No. I will feed them ; for the sake of the saying : ‘Let your right hand repel, but your left invite.’ ”

“Two hundred drachmae would not buy bread for them even were a baker’s shop suddenly to spring up in this deserted place.”

“I will give them living bread.”

The sequel is recorded in the Acts and Sayings of Jesus, but the original meaning of his performance seems to have been forgotten, because the description is confused and vague.

Jesus sat on a rock and ordered the people to sit down on the grass. “Five loaves will suffice,” he said, “for six full companies. Afterwards I will feed the rest.”

“Who among you has loaves ?” bawled Peter, and presently a boy came forward ; he had five loaves in one bag and a few broiled fish in another.

Jesus gave his disciples their instructions : “Quartermasters, take a basket each. You are to distribute the rations. Number me six companies of men and women, and let them sit down in a circle facing me, with a gap at the southern end. But first let everyone wash his hands in the Lake !”

When this was done, he began to preach about the living bread, the
word of God, how it is good to feed upon, day after day, all the year round. He also reminded them how Elisha the prophet had satisfied the hunger of a hundred men with only twenty loaves, after pronouncing : “Thus saith the Lord, they shall all eat bread and have bread left over !” For Elisha’s loaves were not common ones, but first-fruit loaves baked from grain of the first sheaf threshed at Beth Shalishah, grain thankfully dedicated to God, living bread in which the spirit of the harvest was immanent, bread from the House of Bread. “Bring me the five loaves for sanctification !”

They brought him the loaves. Jesus sanctified them with the formula used by the priests in dedicating the first-fruits, then broke them in fragments which he distributed equally among the baskets. “Quartermasters,” he said, “take up your stations, each on the right hand of a half-company !”

They obeyed.

“To each one a loaf !”

Then, starting from the gap, he moved sunwise round the circle, taking each basket in turn from the disciple who held it, dealing out a phantom loaf to everyone, and returning the basket again when he had done.

“Eat heartily !” cried Jesus. “Tastier and more strength-giving bread was never baked.” He set them an example by tearing at a phantom crust with his teeth and munching with relish.

Merrily or gravely, everyone followed his example.

When he came to the gap he paused and called his disciples to him. They came running. He cried : “Here is bread remaining. Turn it out on the grass.”

They did so, and he said : “Look, as much as would make five whole loaves. Call five more eaters to fill the gap !”

Five more men were called, and each of them received his phantom loaf. After this he sanctified the broiled fish and distributed them among all, as if it were a fish to everyone.

“Four thousand are gone, one thousand remain. Whoever has eyes to see, let him see !”

Having said this, he instructed everyone in the circle to yield his place to someone who had not yet fed. When the circle had been re-formed he preached again about the living bread. He told how Joseph, when he foresaw a seven years’ famine, built seven great granaries in Egypt, one of which he filled in every year of plenty as insurance against a year of famine.

He continued : “Joseph’s father Jacob and his eleven sons came down to Egypt to be fed, and Joseph appointed his brothers and his sons to deal out the bread to the people, each in turn doing duty for a week, and drawing in turn from each of the seven granaries.” With that, he divided the heap of broken bread into seven small heaps and put them into seven baskets. “Here are the granaries,” he said, and named each of his twelve disciples after a patriarch ; but since one more person was
needed to act as Benjamin, he called out of the circle the boy to whom the loaves and fishes belonged.