Testament (6 page)

“Fools!” Yeshua said. “Haven’t you learned anything from Yohanan’s death? Don’t you understand it’s the same road we’re on?”

Everyone was taken aback at this. There was an awkward silence and then someone timidly asked if he thought
then that they should follow Yaqob’s advice and protest to the governor.

“What’s the governor to us, who wouldn’t have been fit to touch Yohanan’s sleeve? Try to think what I’ve taught you when you say things.”

He was out of patience. It was clear Yohanan’s death had unsettled him.

There was another long silence.

“Teacher,” one of the men said, and you could see it was what they were all thinking, “will Herod come to arrest us now?”

Yeshua relented.

“No,” he said, “no. We have no fight with Herod.”

Not long afterwards the group broke up. Kephas and I were left alone with Yeshua on the beach.

“Are you so sure of Herod?” I said to him.

“We’re nothing to him. You can see for yourself.”

And it seemed true enough, seeing him there with his little band of peasants. Yet he talked like someone who would bow to no one.

Kephas was busy clearing away the remnants of our meal.

“You think I’ve surrounded myself with simpletons and cowards,” Yeshua said to me, though it wasn’t clear if Kephas had heard.

“It’s not for me to judge.”

“When you look at us, you probably imagine only how we would seem to your friends in Jerusalem. But in the end the people you’re trying to save are these same ones you might look down on. And without them, who is left? Without them, what is the point?”

He said this although I hadn’t spoken to him in anything but the most guarded terms of my work. Yet he appeared truly to believe what he was saying, though in my experience it had always seemed that the vast mass of men were expendable, and had little to redeem them.

Yaqob and Yohanan had brought a boat out from the harbour up near the shore where we were sitting, apparently setting out for a day’s fishing despite their mourning. They called out for Kephas to join them.

“You’re welcome to stay with us for a time if you wish,” Yeshua said to me. But I couldn’t tell if he meant this merely as an offer of refuge.

Kephas was still lingering nearby.

“I have affairs—” I started.

“Of course.”

And yet I knew in that moment that I would stay. The truth was I had no other plan, nor could I bear the thought then of returning to Jerusalem to the fear and distrust I was certain to find there.

Only now did Kephas finally take his leave, giving his respects to Yeshua and me and then hiking up his tunic and wading out to the awaiting boat. In a matter of minutes the boat was already far out onto the lake and I could make out merely the dark speck of its hull amidst a dozen others. So I had thrown my lot in with fishermen, it seemed. But it appeared honest enough work, something to put against all the empty gestures and talk I had left behind in Jerusalem.

From the outset it was clear that I was not well accepted by the others in Yeshua’s inner circle. My education marked me, and my accent; but chiefly it was my willingness to challenge
Yeshua’s views, which Yeshua applauded, saying it kept his mind sharp for his critics, but which in the men of the group brought out a brooding discomfort and in the women a fairly open hostility. The women—there were several of them who hovered around Yeshua like the Greek furies, and whom I could hardly tell apart—were in fact not much more than girls, and were a source of considerable dissension, as I learned, within Yeshua’s following. But because he treated them with a measure of parity with the men and suffered them to be among his intimates, they imagined themselves his protectors, and showed me an arrogance I would never have countenanced in them if not for Yeshua’s sake. There was one of them, a plain thing thin as a reed who was the daughter of a fish merchant, who seemed to make it her sole work to resist any competing claim I might make to his attention, travelling several miles from her village every morning at the crack of dawn to make sure she was present the instant he rose from his bed. It did not always appear to me that Yeshua quite understood the effect he had on these women; otherwise he might have taken greater care to keep a distance from them, which, as it later fell out, would have saved him much grief.

Apart from Andreas, then, whose artless attachment to me even the women had been unable to undermine, only Yohanan showed me anything like friendliness. He had apparently taken to me on our trip in from Tyre, and his natural liveliness and curiosity made him see in me a window onto the world. He often asked me about my travels and about life outside the Galilee, the wonders I had seen and the different customs and beliefs; he was a bright young man, and the only handsome one of the lot, and I suspected that if Yeshua hadn’t taken him in, he would have found a way to
make a name for himself in Tiberias or Jerusalem. His father was a successful fisherman in the town, with one of the larger residences; and eventually, unable to bear any more the congestion at Kephas’s house and the tension that my presence there seemed to arouse, I took up Yohanan’s offer to repair to his, where I had a little canopy of my own off the courtyard and was left more or less to myself.

There was something else that set me apart from the rest of the group: I was one of the few who carried a purse. I was never certain how the original injunction against money had come to assert itself among them—with some of the group I was sure it was mere superstition, and predated Yeshua, since I’d heard there were still many in those parts who believed that demons lived in coins. But Yeshua, it appeared, had some program in mind. It was nothing so plain, say, as the simple eschewing of greed; it seemed rather a kind of surrender, a means of stripping away the usual barriers between people. Often enough we would arrive in a town with not a scrap of food with us and not a penny in our purse, and then somehow it would seem that exactly because we had nothing, what we needed would come to us, and a meal would be offered and a roof put over our heads.

As time went on it happened more and more, however, that we could not exist entirely outside the usual systems of exchange. For one thing, as Yeshua’s popularity grew, a few of his wealthier patrons were forever urging donations on him, to help with the purchase of medicines or to distribute to the poor; and even before I came to them they had appointed one of their number, Matthaios, who worked at the customs house, to carry the common purse. Gradually, however, that role came somehow to devolve upon me, partly, it
seemed, as Yeshua’s way of showing the others that I could be trusted. The others appeared happy enough to let me have the thing—I was their scapegoat, bearing the taint of lucre so they needn’t. In fact, not a little of the money that we took in came from the most dubious of sources, publicans and collaborationists and the like, people shunned by the local populace but openly welcomed by Yeshua, who neither refused their money nor asked them where it came from. If it had been taken from the poor, he said, then all the better that we should have the chance to return it to them; and if from the rich, then we would surely put it to better use than they would have themselves.

It seemed to me that Yeshua was often in danger of contradicting himself in this way, championing the poor in the morning, then sitting down to supper with the local tax collector at night. Coming from Judea, where we were in the habit of seeing every act as a political one, I was shocked at first by such vacillations. But many of Yeshua’s notions, I came to learn, were not the sort that could be reduced to simple principles; rather they had to be felt, as it were, and lived out, so that it was only the experience of them that could bring you to understanding. In the beginning I often lacked the patience to follow him in this logic, particularly as regarded his talk of God’s kingdom, a notion he had borrowed from Yohanan but had adapted to his own ends. He had developed many analogies and stories to explain the nature of this kingdom; yet each seemed as obscure as the next, nor was it clear if the place was in heaven or on earth, or if it had a governor or was ruled solely by God, the way the Zealots preached. The first time I heard him speak of the thing to his followers I imagined he might be a secret ally,
and taught revolt, and only cloaked his message to escape arrest. But then in private it grew clear I’d been mistaken. As far as I could gather, his kingdom was of an entirely unpolitical nature, a philosophical rather than physical state, requiring no revolution. I complained to him that it seemed then a mere salve to make more bearable the yoke of an oppressor.

“You want to change things yet you’re incapable of changing such a simple thing as your own mind,” he said to me then.

And indeed there was that part of me that felt he was right in his assessment of me, and that it was the rigidity of my own notions that made it hard for me to follow his. For if the kingdom, in my way of reckoning things, was merely a sort of dream he had invented, yet he seemed to live in it; and I often had the sense with him that where I saw the world in shadow and grey, he saw it rich in colour.

Though not overly given to ritual like many of the cults, Yeshua had nonetheless established a routine with his followers that he stuck to fairly closely, perhaps because it provided a level of stability and order for what was otherwise a somewhat amorphous movement. Generally he met with his inner circle every morning at Kefar Nahum, except when his travels had taken him too far afield; and there we would take our meal together, either on the beach or in Kephas’s house. Afterwards, if he did not go out on the lake with his men, he would take a small group of us and make his visits to his disciples in the surrounding towns, usually following the schedule of the rotating market days of the region. Given the terrain of the Galilee with its deep valleys and precipitous hills, so that sometimes a dozen ridges separated towns only a stone’s throw from one another, it often amazed me the
ground he covered and how far afield his followers were spread. Nonetheless, the Sea of Kinneret remained the heart of his ministry, and it was rare for him to travel further than Sennabris to the south or Cana to the west. I noticed that he avoided Tiberias and Sepphoris, the only cities of note in the region, though perhaps this was because of the cool reception he had had in Tyre. At any rate, Antipas had so Hellenized these cities and so packed them with foreigners that for the mass of Galileans they might as well have been in different countries; and indeed they were generally regarded as cursed, Tiberias because it had been built on the site of a burial ground and Sepphoris because for many years Jews had been all but banned from it, on account of the revolt there at the time that Antipas came to power.

Yeshua’s usual practice when he arrived in a town was to go to the house of one of his disciples and share a bit of food or wine there while word of his presence was sent around to any other followers he might have in the place. When people began to gather he would tend first to any sick who had come, then settle in his host’s courtyard to do his teaching or perhaps repair to some field outside of town. His methods were very informal—usually he simply sat in amongst his disciples and answered the queries they put to him, often turning the question back onto the questioner in the manner of the ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what he conveyed in this way was no more than what one heard in the assembly houses: follow the commandments; give alms to the poor; believe in the one true God. But he had a way of making these notions seem new again, and vital, while most teachers intoned them as if they were the remotest arcana of a forgotten era.

What truly struck me in these sessions, however, was how he did not condescend to his pupils, or consider anything above their understanding; and this amazed me, for when it came to the core of his teaching, and to those notions that were distinctive to him like that of the kingdom, it often seemed to me that not Hillel himself could have followed the nuance of his thought. Like the Pharisees he subscribed, or so it seemed, to the idea of resurrection, believing no god would have set us to suffer on this earth, where the wicked prospered and the just were punished, without the chance of a final reckoning. Yet he would not say it was the body that rose into the heavens at death, when clearly it went to the worms, nor would he say the soul, as the Greeks did, but rather that we must not think in such ways as life and death, or body and soul, as if one was distinct from the other; for in that way we would only come to value one at the other’s expense, and live as gluttons and libertines, not thinking of death, or live as ascetics, and so miss our lives. For my part, I thought it coyness at first that he did not put the thing more clearly, or a sign that he himself had not worked it through. But over time I came to see a wisdom in his approach, and the folly of putting into words notions that by their very nature, like God himself, must exceed our understanding.

It was not surprising, however, that such views, which were easily twisted, should lead him into conflict with some of his counterparts, and indeed I soon learned that he had already amassed an impressive group of enemies. At Kefar Nahum, for instance, I had wondered from the start why he did not avail himself of the assembly house to meet with his followers, avoiding it even on the sabbath, when instead we met for our prayers on the beach; and it came out he had
actually been barred from the place by the town’s teacher, an old Sadducee named Gioras. No doubt Gioras had felt provoked by Yeshua’s preaching resurrection, which was anathema to the Sadducees. But it was a different question that had brought them to public confrontation—it seemed Yeshua had treated a sick child on sabbath day and Gioras had accused him of breaking the sabbath, since the illness had apparently not been life-threatening.

The matter might have ended there except that Yeshua had insisted on confronting his accuser in the assembly house the following week. Instead of broaching the matter directly, he told the story of two teachers who were each visited on the sabbath by a man in extreme hunger. The first, believing the man who’d come would survive until the following day, sent him off, saying he could not break the sabbath by preparing food for him. That night the man died, but the teacher was deemed by the scholars and priests to have acted correctly, since he could not have foreseen the death. The second teacher, however, finding at his door a man who was clearly suffering, invited him in and made him a meal. But this one was deemed to have sinned, since he could not have been certain the man’s hunger was life-threatening, and so was sentenced to death.