Testament (7 page)

The story was such an obvious parody of Gioras’s charge that Gioras had been outraged, and had rallied the other leaders in the town to have Yeshua banned from the assembly house. By the time of my own arrival, the town was polarized between Gioras and his camp and Yeshua and his, with the mass of people, however, letting caution guide them and giving open allegiance to neither. The story was the same throughout the region: in any given town there seemed
always a handful among the leadership who truly despised Yeshua and worked actively for his downfall. All manner of accusation was levelled against him—that he encouraged the young to turn against their parents, that he was possessed of demons, even that he was not a Jew at all but a pagan trying to trick the people into following a foreign god. Because he had lived in Egypt, he was everywhere dogged by the charge of magic, on account of his cures; and because he would not hold his tongue but always spoke his mind, it seemed he had more than once come close to stirring violence. At Tsef, for instance, he had apparently intervened in a land dispute on the side of those whom the Galileans mistakenly called the Syrians, the descendants of the line that dated back to the Assyrian conquest and that had been forcibly converted under the Maccabees. A good deal of enmity still existed between this group and the Jews whose ancestors had come to the Galilee as colonists, as well as many disputes over property; that Yeshua had taken the Syrians’ side had nearly got him stoned. Some said he had done this merely to increase his following among the group, which indeed had been the result, for there were many Syrians now who were among his fiercest supporters.

So Yeshua had gained a reputation as a rabble-rouser, though in his teachings he counselled disarming one’s enemies with kindness and forgiving even those who flogged you, the way the Cynic philosophers did. I had at first discounted this type of statement as mere rhetoric or even a calculated sort of insolence, just as some of the Zealots, when they were arrested, would at once confess their crimes as a way of showing their contempt for their captors. Yet I had heard that early in his ministry there was a faction, led by one
Aram of Kinneret, that had split with him precisely over the issue of force. For my part, I had never quite been able to bring myself to broach this particular subject with him. I told myself it was simply that I did not wish to start down a road that must inevitably lead to a break between us should we disagree. But that was not quite the whole of the matter—there was also that part of me that did not wish to expose to his scrutiny views that defined me so deeply.

Once it happened that we argued over his friendliness towards the tallyman at the docks in Kefar Nahum, a stunted half-pagan they called Rakiil, the Babbler, who worked tabulating the catches the fishermen brought in so they could be assessed for tax. In Galilee, it seemed the tax collectors were not nearly so hated as in Judea, where they worked directly for the Romans; yet neither were they embraced, nor free from corruption. Rakiil was a figure of ridicule at the docks, because of his deformities and his work—the local boys tormented him, intoning his name in a mocking cry like a gull’s that would send him chasing after them red-faced with anger. But he had a streak of petty baseness in him that made it hard to feel any sympathy for him, seldom missing a chance to inflate a tally or to set a fine, if he could find the excuse for one.

Yeshua, however, had somehow got it into his head to make Rakiil his friend, and never neglected to greet him and exchange a word with him when he passed through the docks. Now, if Rakiil had responded to his overtures by becoming suddenly merciful and fair, I might have been the first to see the wisdom in his actions. But in fact he continued as mean-spirited as before, regarding Yeshua’s friendliness with suspicion and going out of his way to impose the
stiffest possible tallies on Yeshua’s men, to show he had not been duped. I could not fathom, therefore, why Yeshua continued in his kindnesses and did not simply condemn him as an ingrate and a churl, who took pleasure in extorting from the poor rather than simply doing his job, as even Yeshua’s master Yohanan had taught.

When I made this argument with Yeshua, however, he said, “How honest would my kindness to him be if it were only a means of seeking more favourable treatment from him?”

This sort of logic infuriated me.

“By that reckoning we might just as well embrace even the Romans, and make an end of it.”

“You hate him because he’s a tax collector,” Yeshua said.

He was trying to bring the thing around to my politics, so that he might say, Did not even Solomon collect taxes, so why take it out on miserable Rakiil, and what did it matter what yoke you were under since there was always a yoke. But this was not an argument I cared to engage.

“I hate him because he’s vile.”

“Will your hatred make him any less so?”

“No more than your love will.”

I knew that to follow him to the logical end of his reasoning must lead where I could not go, for if I must love even my oppressor, then how could I ever muster my forces against him. Yet the fact was that there was something in Yeshua’s stance in this matter that I admired, perhaps because it reminded me of my own youthful contrariness, that he seemed always to embrace exactly those who were universally despised, as if to show how little he cared for the opinions of the world. Indeed, it was almost axiomatic with him that he reverse the usual order of things, giving the smallest
heed to those of highest standing while always finding the way to raise up those whom no one else took into account. In this he showed himself exactly the opposite of a collaborationist, since he did not profit in any way from his behaviour, but rather often opened himself up to censure.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the matter of the lepers. The Galilee was even more hopelessly backward than Judea in its treatment of lepers, subscribing to the usual Levitical proscriptions and refusing to acknowledge any medical basis to the condition; and since none of the towns had any adequate authority for sorting the more serious cases from common boils or sores, they turned people out at the first hint of an eruption, with the result that the leper colonies were filled to overflowing and that many who entered them with some minor ailment ended up condemned along with the rest. Yeshua had apparently understood this situation and addressed himself to it, going out to the colonies to sort out the curable from the truly diseased and treating the former so that they might be allowed to return home.

All this might have been seen as a great public good if not for the outcry of his detractors, who claimed that it was nothing more than devilry to attempt to cure an affliction that the Lord had ordained and that Yeshua’s true intention was rather to render unclean the whole of the population. The situation was compounded by the lepers themselves, who began to hear rumours of miraculous cures and so stole out from their colonies, which were poorly guarded, to mass outside the towns that Yeshua was known to frequent. For the local townspeople, the sight of dozens of lepers huddled outside their gates, people who heretofore had taken all necessary care to hide their uncleanness from the world, provoked
great concern, and indeed made them fear that perhaps Yeshua had come to visit a pestilence on them.

It was at Korazin that we were first turned away on this account: we arrived there one morning from Kefar Nahum, half a dozen of us, to find several armed men already warned of our approach, standing at the gate to bar our entry. What surprised us was that they were not the henchmen of the local leader, a landowner named Matthias who held most of the townspeople in thrall in one way or another and whose avarice Yeshua had often publicly ridiculed, but rather common peasants, men who a week or a month before had no doubt been among those who had come for Yeshua’s sermons or cures. They looked awkward barring our way, refusing to meet Yeshua’s eye.

“Why are you coming with weapons against me?” Yeshua said, though the truth was they had only a few sticks among them and maybe a dagger or two, still in their sheaths.

“We have to think of our families,” one of the men said. “We don’t say you mean us any harm. But you’re always with the lepers. The law tells us that makes you polluted like them.”

“It’s what’s inside you that pollutes you, not what’s outside,” Yeshua said.

But the men held their ground.

Kephas was with us and seemed ready to come to blows with them.

“Has our master ever lied to you?” he said to them. “Has Matthias ever told you the truth?”

But Yeshua merely bid the men good morning and motioned us on our way.

Clearly Matthias had found the way to turn the townspeople against us. But from the sullen stubbornness of the
men at the gate it seemed he had done so more by persuasion than coercion. When the word spread that even the common people of Korazin had gone against Yeshua, his reception in other towns grew cooler, and it began to happen from time to time, coming to a new town, that the authorities had heard of his reputation and did not permit us to enter. Some of his followers began to beg him then to cease visiting the lepers, lest he end up barred from every town in the region. But their arguments only hardened him.

“What kind of a doctor ignores the sick?” he said. As for being barred from the towns, he said if it came to that, then he would preach in the wilderness the way Yohanan had done.

I was inclined to agree at first that he abandon his missions to the lepers, since for the handful he saved among them, he risked losing his entire following. But when I put this to him, he said that if I could make such an argument then I’d understood nothing of his work. The following day, to make his point, he took me with him to visit the colony at Arbela. Normally he made these visits alone, or took along a group of us but left us outside the walls while he went in to do his rounds. But on this day he passed me off as a fellow doctor to the guards and brought me in with him, assuring me that there would be no risk to me. Such was the faith I had begun to put in him by then that I believed him.

The camp was not nearly as ramshackle a place as I’d expected, having been built not by Antipas but by the Romans, with their typical efficiency and precision. They had been motivated in this less by philanthropy than by strategy: the colony was set on the promontory that stood over the Arbela caves, and was a way of keeping the caves, which were accessible only from above, out of the hands of the
rebels and bandits who normally inhabited them. Several barracks-style dormitories ran along the length of the promontory, with a courtyard and common kitchen at the centre of them. Apparently before the Romans had turned the place over to Antipas, as they eventually had, they actually supplied food for the residents and encouraged large communal meals and a sharing of tasks as a way of maintaining some sort of discipline and order. Now, however, the residents were dependent on the generosity of their relatives in bringing food and on the honesty of the guards in delivering it.

What was surprising in the camp was its air of normalcy: people went about their business, cooking and cleaning, carrying water, even farming a bit of field there, with only the slightest sense of hush and shame at their afflictions. Clearly Yeshua had brought an air of hope to the place. He encouraged cleanliness and had set up special areas of segregation to monitor various ailments and work towards a cure; and he treated people from an entirely medical point of view, with none of the condescension that the priests in Jerusalem showed in sending the afflicted off to their quarantine, nor indeed with the least concern for their uncleanness. When I asked him how he reconciled his approach with the proscriptions of the scriptures, he said merely that our forefathers had found their own way of expressing things that could not otherwise have been understood then.

When he had finished his rounds in the camp proper, he led me down to the caves. This was where the worst cases took refuge, those without hope. The whole mountain face at Arbela was riddled with these caves, which were accessible only by a steep footpath, one that here and there required you to scrabble against the rock face; already as we neared
the end of it there was an overwhelming stench of putrid flesh, people moving like wraiths against the caves’ darkness. It was from here that Antigonus, the last of the Maccabees, had fought Herod the Great, Herod finally resorting to swinging grappling hooks down into the mouths of the caves from above in order to drag his enemy out from them. But for the lepers who had now retreated to them, the caves had become their permanent homes, not because they had been forced into them but because shame had driven them there. So it was that once their disfigurements had rendered them hideous they repaired from the barracks above to this forsaken place, where they lived out their final agonizing years wondering what sin of their fathers or themselves had brought this horror on them.

Yeshua was surely the first visitor from outside the camp whom many of these people had seen in months or years. He told me they had shunned him when he’d first come, out of shame and their concern for his own purity. But now at his approach they came together quite openly, gathering on a little rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff face. It was an astounding sight, these dozens of lepers congregating there, men, women, and even some children, many of them so gnarled-limbed and deformed they were hardly recognizable as human. But what was surprising in lepers was that as putrid and corrupt as their outward form might be, their mental faculties were not affected in the least, so that you were suddenly astounded to hear from out of their mass of rotting flesh a perfect human voice. Thus it was that Yeshua did a most simple and amazing thing: he sat himself down amongst these lepers and conversed with them as if their affliction counted for nothing in his eyes.

This was no doubt what Yeshua had wished me to wit-ness—the utter contrast in these people between the outer person and the inner one, a theme he returned to again and again in his teaching. He liked in particular to tell the story of the pious man and the sinner who went to the temple to pray: the former used the occasion as an opportunity to list all his virtues, while the latter, not even daring to look up to heaven, merely begged the Lord’s mercy. The sinner, of course, was the hero of the tale, for his inner humility made him more worthy of God’s love than the other’s outer piety; and the story always went over well with people, who saw in it, I imagined, a sanction for their own laxity. I, however, always felt sorry for the poor pious man, who was stuck with the rigour of his discipline and self-denial while the sinner was left free to sin again.