Gospel (57 page)

“You are Matthias bar-Matthias?” he asked.

Yes, I said, ashamed to have been discovered in this wretched circus.

He asked of me, “You knew the Nazirene, the Scion of David, did you not?”

Not one to commit the errors of Peter the Disciple, I answered loudly that yes, I knew and held My Teacher to be of the One True God and not to be a cheap carnival magician.

9.
“A Nazirene,” cried one spectator. “You bring the Romans down upon us. Curse you!”

“Where is your Messiah now, Nazirene?” yelled another ruffian. “Dead in the ground? Or secreted away by one such as yourself so that you might say he lives again?”

Another man called out: “I heard Your Deliverer went back to heaven like Elijah, leaving us no better than we were, still under the Roman lash! You call that a Deliverer?”

10.
The Magus, incarnate of Hell, lovingly stroked his accomplice, the Whore Helen. “Come, learned Disciple! Come sup from the Breast of Life!”

I answered defiantly (while grasping Xenon closer to me lest there be violence) that I had no intention of participating in this devil's rite. But some in the crowd demanded that I should, my brother. Some roughly took me by the arms and shoulders and forced me toward the platform.

Then Helen, to the goading of the mob, began to perform an exotic dance of obscene writhings—and as I looked up she whisked away the strip of cloth and revealed to me the very maw of Hell! It was, my brother, the first time that I had confronted the female sex, this abyss of mankind. That my decades of virgin celibacy (which I've always felt to be essential for the refinement of the soul, indeed, the very engine) should be subjected to this!

11.
But whereas my martyrdom was short-lived, I saw that Menander had grabbed Xenon and directed him to the Magus's table of libations.

“Unhand that virgin lad!” I said, while others laughed, such being the respect that chastity enjoys in this era. (Perhaps, upon reconsideration, the blessed state of my scribe might have been better left unannounced.)

“Magus!” cried one of the braying louts, “can you work a miracle? Can you change the lad from a virgin?”

Yes, I assure you, Menander intended to sacrifice me as well to this plot, but bravely Xenon said he would thrust himself in my place. Such stature in one so young! Menander and the Magus forced upon Xenon a phial from which he drank an admixture combinated to enflame the male member with the blood of passion. (Indeed, one may buy this elixir from many an Arab master of medicines for the assurance of a successful wedding night, or to enable further issue of late-marrying widowers.) Well, my brother, I need not relate the details of poor Xenon's disgrace under the effect of this diabolic poison. Some of the rowdies lifted him on their shoulders and carried him a few houses away to the brothels of Tyre—that
pornopolis!
—where his purity was sacrificed upon Satan's own dais.

12.
“Perform a miracle like the Magus!” demanded one of the mob, clutching me by my robes.

“If your god is the real god,” yelled another bucolic, “defeat the Blessed Magus in a contest!”

I answered them, “Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God!”

“Heal this infirmity then,” cried out one man, who held up a pus-filled stump where his hand once was. “I have seen Cephas,” he said to me, “Apostle of the Judean, heal the blind! What say you?”

And then the crowd fell quiet as if I might be capable of such a miracle. O Josephus, I tell you, I prayed in my heart that the God of Abraham might work a sign through the Son of Man, Our Master, My Teacher! Come forward, I beckoned to the cripple.

13.
With the purest of intentions and greatest of hopes, I looked squarely at this Phoenician criminal, who had obviously been caught stealing, had been punished by the exaction of his right hand, and was now left with a wound that would not heal, festering as the work of demons still within his body. I touched this injury with my walking stick to no avail. Then, I imagined that God would have me show my own faith by touching it with my own healthy hand, which I did.

“Place a kiss upon it,” said the Magus to the crowd, “as I saw Your Master do many a time.”

And this too the mob cried out for. What rigors! And I did kiss this abomination though nothing was changed! The power that is in other Disciples is not in me!

But I said to him, “Your heart is not pure, my friend. You have no love for your fellow man or for the Lord your God. Why should He heal you?”

14.
Ah, but I was not listened to, instead I was lifted by the mob and deposited in a trough that the village women use for their laundry. (I was lucky not to be put down a well or thrown into the sewers, all of which I imagined quite likely, though yea, I was willing to endure that precious martyrdom and win for myself a Crown!)

However, it was not to be.

Wet and on the verge of illness, despairing, and bitter—yes, bitter, Lord, for Thou did not come to my aid when I was to do Thy work!—I made my way to the ship and the seafront. I recovered Xenon after his experience and threw myself upon his mercy, begging his forgiveness, for if it had not been for the Magus's recognition of me, then the perdition experienced by this young saint would not have occurred.

15.
O fragile virginity!

But an evening's carelessness, an hour's indiscretion—and in Xenon's case—a few moments of villainy, and then all is lost! I had rather, I told him, that this martyrdom had happened to me, rather than to one so young and undespoiled. Xenon was moved by my tears and supplications and begged me to rise and speak no more of it. But I insisted on a prayer by which we asked the Most High for pardon and expiation from sordid and carnal deeds and asked He Who Will Judge Us All to examine our hearts where our every intention is chaste.

We remained in Tyre one more night, to my chagrin, and I felt it best to imprison, as it were, Xenon upon the ship so no further disgraces might befall him. It was only at the insistence of our captain, a noble Greek of great bearing and judiciousness, that I allowed Xenon, accompanied by our able captain, to go into the port for a meal and some harmless entertainment. I had told the captain about the tragedy that had befallen my charge and he proposed an evening of mild diversions in his care to remedy these depravities, far from the presence of women, where the captain assured me none but men would lay a hand on my young apostle.

16.
At last, we sailed from Tyre, our ship landing in Seleucia, a lesser repeat of Tyre, and we moved upriver to Antioch on foot. Being inland, it is spared the worst abuses of race-mingling and cosmopolitanism, and is in fact a pagan place with more virtue than most; the scene, I recall darkly, of the Jews' first denial of Grecian ways and customs. Would that our race had become Greek and spared ourselves this last century!

Antioch possesses one of the loveliest synagogues I have ever seen, brightly furnished and floored with marble; while the Nazirenes still meet in a cave north of town, grubbing about like miserable Cappadocian cave-dwellers.
7
No care or interest seems to be taken there, and a numbing laxity characterizes the congregation, with Nazirenes as soon going to a Pharisaic sabbath as to Mithra, Attis, Adonis, the Great Mother, as if their souls were shoppers in a marketplace, seeking some momentary distraction. One need only meet the hierarch of Antioch to understand everything else—Peter, the First Disciple, himself.
8

17.
Peter was expecting me for I had written him several times to warn him of my arrival. In fact, a bit must be said concerning my own history with Our Master's primal acolyte:

I had written a missive soon after the reading and circulation of
All Heresies Refuted
a year after Nero's installation [55
C.E.
], inquiring as to Peter's health, his mission, and whether I might visit and lecture upon the tractates I had composed for his congregation. I did not receive a reply. I found this discourteous since it was I who displayed supreme magnanimity after he threw my first evangel, some years earlier, into the fire.

Next, I heard from passing Nazirene tradesmen that Peter's shrew of a wife had finally died. I sent a short epistle of condolence and received a reply from his lap dog Evoath, confirming what I suspected, that Peter could not write a cipher himself, having availed himself of no education. “Illiterate I was when Our Master chose me for the mission,” he once said, “and illiterate I remain,” as if that state were the result of divine promulgation and not remediable.

John Mark, once settled in Damascus, wrote to me about the time of the monster Nero's decade celebrations [64
C.E.
] relating that Peter had married again, a much younger woman, who now commanded most of his attention and had her say in the finances. Peter, I learned, had also purchased two slaves for his growing fleet of fishing boats in Seleucia. Those worldly gains were but the uppermost, visible signs of Peter's failings that I had always observed. (I admit to being lost on many matters, but none more so than the mystery of Our Master's having chosen Peter and raised him up as First of the Disciples.)

18.
Finally, in the final year of Florus [66
C.E.
] I wrote from Gedara to Peter again at Antioch, having heard he had made a successful tour of Rome. One can easily imagine the excess he gave himself to in the Rome of Nero, where no bodily vice went unassuaged. John Mark wrote back saying that Peter appreciated my correspondence but wondered whether I had “anything better to do”!

I had merely suggested that Peter might set an example, now that he was a widower, by steering a course of continence and celibacy, for as I have earlier explained, I feel virgin celibacy to be of dire necessity to the soul. So, our unhappy correspondence ended upon this, and I imagined that but twenty months hence [67
C.E.
] I should get a cold welcome from this Disciple.

19.
But not for the first time did Peter surprise me.

Upon recognizing me, the old man, unwashed for eons, flung his arms around me and breathed wine-breath into my face, nearly weeping with emotion—a quality not unknown to older men who indulge in the vice of wine. He showed me and Xenon around the chaotic river port of Antioch and proudly showed us his many sons mending nets and gutting fish (for it was the season when the Orontes was high) and discussed his plans for a fourth boat in Seleucia.

Peter said to me, “I hope to pass my ships on to another evangelist, since I am too old for much more travel. Though I have been a last time persuaded to return to Rome.”

I prompted him to recall his adventures there. Did he speak before the Senate? Did he engage in discourse with the academies? What followed was a catalogue of great meals, haunches of venison and young calves fatted for his benefit, the hospitality of Rome's elite, afternoons observing gymnastics, bevies of dancing girls dangling grapes before his toothless mouth in senators' houses, pastries and sweetmeats, fine fowls stuffed with shellfish!

20.
“You shall poison yourself,” I said to him regarding the shellfish, which we are forbidden to consume.

He said to me, something of the sort: “Ooh, my friend, but an oyster in the oil of olives, salt, and lemon.” He brought his fingers to his lips. “Oysters, my friend, harden the heart and that's not all they harden … Besides, I had a dream in which the Lord commanded me eat what I pleased.”
9

How convenient! It is a wonder your fine new Jewish wife will cook a cut of swine in all its uncleanliness for you. How she must love you! Peter confided in me that swine should be cooked over an open fire to let the fat drip away, then swathed in mustard seed and the must of white-wine cask—a dish, he reported, worthy of the Most High Himself. I risked an unkindness by suggesting he was more devoted to his own body than to the Body of Our Church. But he took no offense.

21.
Peter said to me, “Our Teacher did not say we were forbidden to eat and drink and laugh and love our women and enjoy the gifts of God, my friend. I have told the same thing to John and his half-mad ascetics! Our Teacher indulged with us in all these things, save marriage. And perhaps, with Mary…”

The lewd suggestion that Our Savior, most Pure and Holy of Incarnations, stained himself with foul earthly lusts was more than I could bear. As I raged at Peter—a familiar scene, as we never did but argue thirty years ago—he laughed at me, more amused the more upset I became.

He went on in this vein, “Who is to say what passed between Mary and Himself? I noticed He spent a lot of time with Maryam, sister of Lazarus, yes? Though she's become an old frump in Arimathea, and it's my contention she would lay with a woman before a man, like the Greek ladies, you understand? And Johnnie, dear Johnnie, offered himself up to the Teacher countless times.”

(I record this foul exchange, so that one might gauge the unnaturalness of this worldly man, so wrong for leadership of a new ethical and moral order.)

He said as such, “Did a week go by that John did not anoint himself with Mary's sweetwaters and go into Our Master's chamber to sleep by His feet? Ah, the old queen ['аνδρογυγοζ] is in Ephesus now where he can sate himself with painted Asian boys, if he will. Tonight, my friend, I shall have Esther find us some lamb, lamb cooked in the fat of pork and broth of chicken, crowned with fresh olives and ground mint, sprinkled with car-doman!” Again he kissed his filthy fingers. “Ah, we shall eat tonight!”

22.
And so to his home he, Xenon, and I went, accompanied in the street by his two slaves from Urartu [Armenia] as we traversed the alleys of Antioch. Esther, his young wife, was among the most fetching of Jewish women I had ever seen, and I pitied her having—no doubt in trying circumstances—to be married off to this old ruin. Alas, Aphrodite is always to Hephaestus wed! The wineskins were brought in. Peter was of that older, rural generation that preferred to suck from this teat of wine than transfer it into a civilized amphora and kylix, and it repulsed me to drink wine from the same orifice that Peter pressed his unclean snout upon.