Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (13 page)

T
HE
HORRIBLE
THING
that was going to happen, which Jesus told his closest followers about—at first gently and indirectly, then by ever stronger and more troubling allusions—was his own hideous execution, carried out in the Roman tradition of exquisite cruelty for all
Jerusalem to see. This was no way for a prophet to end. Except for a few women, courageous to the point of foolhardy loyalty, his followers—the tax collector, the fishermen, the crowd-control experts, indeed the whole raft of self-important male strategists and thunder-thinkers who had attached themselves to the prophet—fled as far from the scene as their uncertain legs would carry them.

Simon Peter’s betrayal carried special opprobrium, because he had been the friend of Jesus’s heart. Jesus, knowing well what a tinderbox Jerusalem was, had never openly claimed to be the
Messiah, only “a prophet”—and, most commonly, “the Son of Man,” that ambiguous title borrowed from the apocalyptic passages of the
Book of Daniel. But he was delighted to hear Simon the Fisherman say the dangerous word out loud. Drawing near the Roman city of Caesarea
Philippi, the name of which was meant to call to everyone’s mind both the emperor Caesar Augustus and the local tetrarch
Herod Philip, Jesus had asked the disciples who surrounded him: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They answered variously
John the Baptizer come back to life (John had been executed by
Herod Antipas),
Elijah,
Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets.
“But you,” asked Jesus, “who do you say I am?” Simon, always the one to blurt things out, spoke up immediately, seeming to speak for all: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Simon bar-Jonah, happy man. Flesh and blood could never have told you this, only my Father-in-Heaven. You, too, have a part to play, for you are Rock,
¹
and on this rock will I build my synagogue, which the gates of Hades will never conquer. To you will I give the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

The strong bond of affection between the two men is palpable; and because of this, Jesus’s heart was heavy when, his
arrest but an hour away, he told
Simon Peter of his impending betrayal: “I tell you solemnly, this very night before the cock crows, you will have disowned me three times over.” The impulsive fisherman swore up and down that this could never happen: “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you!”

An hour later, when the Roman guard arrived at the little olive grove outside the city where Jesus had gone to pray, their clanging metallic entrance and the invincible brutality of their faces drained all courage from even his best friends, who took off quickly enough, leaving Jesus alone in custody. Peter did try for a while to follow at a distance, loitering in the courtyard of the high
priest while Jesus was interrogated, till, because of his Galilean accent, he was identified as a follower of Jesus by serving girls and other bystanders. As they pressed him to own up, Peter became more and more indignant, at last cursing Jesus in order to make his denials credible. “And at once the cock crew,” and Peter recalled Jesus’s words to him, “and he went outside [beyond their scrutiny] and wept his heart out.”

Peter, like all the disciples, was traumatized by Jesus’s sudden reversal of fortune. Less than a week before,
Jerusalem had given him a royal reception, welcoming him as the true “king” of the Jews. Now, in short order, he was flogged, pushed derisively through the same streets that had so recently exulted in him, stripped naked, nailed to some boards in a public place, and left to bleed to death in slow agony.
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who condemned him after a hasty “trial,” meant to have a little fun of his own with this execution and so had ordered a trilingual sign affixed to the top of Jesus’s cross, proclaiming him to be “The King of the Jews.” Yes, smirked the prickly governor, here was as much of a king as the annoying Jews would ever get: a pitiable, shuddering worm of a man, covered in bruises and rivulets of his own blood, his silly circumcised penis swelling for all to see, as he moaned incomprehensibly and died. The Temple priests, who had collaborated in the tortured man’s condemnation, were not amused by Pilate’s joke. The inscription
only inflamed the crowds (who can always be expected to gather for the gorily diverting spectacle of a public execution): they spat on the dying man and mocked him, making lewd references to his sexual inadequacies and to his parentage, and generally convinced themselves that this thing they were ridiculing had never really been a man, only the ugly deformity that he now appeared to be.

The psychology of crucifixion had a profound political purpose. This was the end that awaited every enemy of the absolute Roman state: the opposite of the peaceful death that all good men hoped for at the last; instead, an end in which one’s dignity and pride were torn away, then all shreds of one’s identity in life, and finally the last semblance of one’s humanity till one died the comic gargoyle of the moment. For Jesus’s disciples, the crucifixion hit like an earthquake, destroying in a moment their entire world. No matter how many times he had told them that the Son of Man would have to suffer and die, they had not really listened: they had pushed it aside as the one part of Jesus’s message they didn’t want to hear.

If the crucifixion left the disciples utterly desolate, the news that Jesus was risen came on them like a tidal wave following an earthquake. They knew, as do we all, that death is the end and that there is no possibility of reversing its finality. If their world had been destroyed, would nature now play tricks on them, upending the only things they still knew to be true, the constant and reliable laws of the cosmos? If one has just suffered a tragic loss that sucks life dry of all its joy, one may somehow find the dull courage to go on—but one doesn’t want to open one’s door two mornings after such a tragedy to find that earth and sky have changed places.

This is what happened to the disciples, which is why they
were not so receptive to the seemingly meaningless news that “he is risen.” For the first disciples to hear this, the loyal women who had stood by him in his final agony, these words constituted one shock too many. Mark, in the most primitive account left to us, paints a vivid picture, despite his wobbly grammar:

I took this passage from Reynolds Price’s fine translation, which has the rough, unrehearsed quality of Mark’s Greek. Even readers long familiar with the gospels may themselves be stunned to learn that Mark’s original ends right here with the shuddering and wild fear of the women. (A later scribe, feeling that this was no way for a gospel to end, added to one manuscript of Mark’s text some resurrection appearances borrowed from Matthew, Luke, and John; Mark’s Gospel is usually printed with these additions.) Some scholars have seen this abrupt ending as proof that Jesus was not “raised” and that Mark is merely recounting a wild rumor. But it would make no sense for Mark, having so painstakingly assembled a story that presents Jesus as a true prophet, indeed the promised Messiah and God’s “beloved son,” to pull the rug out from his entire narrative with a final “Fooled ya!” Mark means rather to depict for us the utter confusion and even terror that the news of Jesus’s resurrection evoked in his dejected, disoriented disciples. As Nick Cave, lead singer of the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, has written: “Mark’s Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy, and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence.” This gospel’s open-ended conclusion should invite the psychologically astute reader not so much to skepticism as to credence: the shuddering women, afraid to tell anyone what they’ve seen and heard, make for a far more likely story than would some bogusly triumphant finale.

From the other gospels, however, we do learn of Jesus’s
post-resurrection appearances and last teachings to his disciples, which included the promise of “the Spirit” of God, the divinely prophetic presence that will remain with them after Jesus leaves them and returns to his “Father.” Certainly, after Jesus’s final disappearance the disciples felt themselves imbued with a courage they had never known before, a courage that enabled them to communicate to their fellow Jews a new vision of a Judaism that no longer awaited an unknown Messiah but that had already received God’s Anointed One in the fullness of time and that now, living in the last age of the world by the breath of the Spirit, awaited only the end-of-time return of this Son of God and Man. This new Judaism traveled from
Jerusalem along the many trade routes of the ancient world, so that within a few years of Jesus’s death, groups of his followers could be identified as a subset within many of the communities of
diaspora Jews that were to be found in major cities throughout the far-flung Eurasian empire of the Romans.

J
ERUSALEM
, where several of the chief witnesses to Jesus’s life and teaching had taken up residence—men like the repentant Peter and Jesus’s brother
James—became the obvious hub for broadcasting the Good News. And it was at the door of Peter’s humble house in Jerusalem that a man knocked one evening about seven years after the tumultuous events of Jesus’s last days. He was a smallish, balding man in his late thirties, as intense, lean, and quick as the curly-haired Peter was tender, bearlike, and lumbering. Though both men were of an age, Peter appeared the older because his hair and beard had gone white as the result of a sudden shock; and with his hulking
fisherman’s frame, his wide shoulders, and pronounced upper-body musculature, he towered over the man at the door, whose neat figure, tight muscles, and corded forearms gave him the appearance of a gymnast or even a long-distance runner. Peter had good reason to be suspicious of the fellow before him, whose Jewish name was Saul, though he was also called by his Roman name, Paul.

Saul-Paul was a Pharisee, one of the party of rabbis who had gradually grown suspicious of Jesus and set themselves against his teaching on the Law and who were now beginning to speak of him not as the promised Messiah but as an unworthy renegade from
authentic Judaism. Some of their number had gone from public opposition to Jesus’s followers in the synagogues to active persecution, attempting to have the
Messianists expelled from the synagogues, shunned by other Jews, and, when possible, arrested (and sometimes even executed) by local Jewish authorities. Some
Pharisees seem to have tried to get the Messianists in trouble with the Romans, who were always on the lookout to eradicate any group that might be about to foment political instability.

Paul was known to be one of the persecutors and relentlessly effective. How far he went—whether he simply hounded the Messianists out of the synagogues or collaborated with the hated Romans—is not clear from the records of the New Testament, but we know from Paul’s own words that he “persecuted God’s Gathering [or Church]” and that he did not confine his efforts to Jerusalem but, in his zeal, pursued the new sect as far and wide as the limitations of ancient travel permitted. So the man was a constant worry to the leaders of the Messianic movement and had among them the reputation of a canny enemy whose sharp vigilance made him hard to
outwit. Now the enemy himself stood before the Rock asking acceptance.