Great Lion of God (63 page)

Worse still, many members of the Sanhedrin, it was reported to Saul by Pilate with enjoyment, were secretly questioning those of Peter’s followers who were apprehended, and a number of them had been enormously moved and impressed by Peter’s eloquent dissertations, and some, it was rumored, were being baptized in the name of the Nazarene and so becoming heretics. Though the law was plain, that the heretics were enemies of the Romans and of Israel, and were inciting mobs to rebellion and to bloody riots, and so must therefore be delivered up to the justice and discipline and punishment of Roman law, and that they were blasphemers, tales were being whispered that the Sanhedrin were not obeying the law, except for a few members, and that they were advising the criminals not be overt in their proselyting but to employ discretion, and then dismissing them with mild admonitions. It was said that after one such confrontation Peter, famous for his effrontery and rebelliousness and lack of respect, had actually exclaimed to the merciful Sanhedrin: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, decide for yourselves! For we cannot be but speak of what we have seen and heard.” Apparently the members had decided that he had spoken from what he believed was the truth, or his courage had aroused their admiration and his piety had moved them, so they had not held him for justice.

Saul sought out confirmation of this, for he was incredulous, but everywhere he had met only raised eyebrows and silent smiles and shrugs. This, intended to allay his suspicions, only increased them and his anguish of mind and his bafflement. It was as if hell had opened and had disgorged demons who were driving even the most erudite and pious insane, and inspiring them with heresy and treason. He thought of Israel as under siege by internal enemies who had become demented and lustful of death. He would hear that the blasphemers were preaching and exhorting in the Portico of Solomon in the Temple, and he would hasten there with his soldiers to arrest them. But when he arrived he discovered that they had fled, as if mysteriously warned, and only confusion and shouting and emphatic voices remained among those who had listened, and those of the sick of whom it was reported that the Apostles had healed in the last hour. He would disperse the clamoring and insistent mobs, the Romans using the flat of their swords against the most recalcitrant, and he would seek out some of the priests to demand their explanation as to why they had permitted these fools to gather in the Portico and had not driven them out.

The priests would smile at him helplessly and respectfully and remind him that Jews had access to the holy Temple at any time, and that disputations among sects were quite common not only in the Portico but among the columns and the gardens and in the halls and the courts, and it was not forbidden. It was even encouraged by the elders, who believed that disputations and argumentations and searchings for truth were salubrious and enlightening, and a guard against error and heresy. If this were forbidden, said the priests, then commentators on the Torah and all the Scriptures—the holy commentators—should be forbidden also, for did they not often offer novel interpretations and comments? To this argument, which seemed to Saul enragingly meretricious, he would reply: “But the commentators and the elders did not advance blasphemy, nor did they encourage the proscribed and permit them to spread heresy and confusion and disorder.” The priests would then remind him of many wandering rabbis, even of the near past, who had inflamed the people also in the Temple purlieus for a short time, but later their teachings were shown to be manifestly false and the people quieted. This would, doubtless, happen to the followers of Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth, T patience were expended. After all, were not these men Jews also, and were they not extremely charitable and kind, and mild of speech, and did they not exhort the love of God and obedience to the Law and the Commandments? They lifted their hands against no man. They were not wild like the Essenes and the Zealots and other denizens of the desert. They obeyed established laws meticulously, and flouted none, save the one that they must not spread their error—which, it was admitted, they did not obey. But time would cure them, and what was false would be winnowed from the wheat and that would be the end of it.

Saul saw that the humbler priests and many of the elders despised and distrusted him as an arm of the hated Roman, and that they took some malicious pleasure in thwarting and maddening him, for all their elaborately respectful manner and their reasonable voices. He could have gladly murdered several when they said to him, making large and innocent eyes at him, “Naught occurs without the Will of God, blessed be His Name, and let us trust in His wisdom, for always He has smitten His enemies and rescued His faithful. To believe He will not do it again is to flout and question His power and His love for His people.”

Saul seethed with rage at this mockery disguised as respect for himself and his authority, but he, always ready with flaming words, could find no adequate words in answer, except threats. The law was plain: The heretics were proscribed both by the High Priest, Caiphas, his father-in-law, Annas, and Pontius Pilate. To permit them to speak in the Temple was not only blasphemous but seditious, and an affront to God. The priests smiled humbly and bowed, and were silent.

“These rebels breed like locusts,” said Pontius Pilate with manifest pleasure at Saul’s frustration and fury. “One day there are ten and the next day there are thousands! What are we to do with them?”

Saul suspected what Pontius Pilate would like to do to all Jews, including the heretics, and he inwardly shrank. Sometimes he pondered as to whether or not he was endangering all of his people by his pursuit of the heretics, but he would immediately put this appalling thought aside as a temptation of Lucifer. He could only go on, daily becoming more despairing yet more resolute, in the service of God. Before multitudes in the Temple he would shout, “By protecting the blasphemers and hiding them, or keeping silent about them, you are invoking the wrath of God, blessed be His Name, for He will not much longer endure the heresy of so many of His people! Therefore, deliver the malefactors to me, that they be punished and silenced, and peace return to us, and the delight of God in His holy land! To do aught else is to invite ruin and death for all of us, and the destruction of Israel.”

They would listen in silence, some with dark and assenting faces, some mutely and blankly, and Saul would leave, groaning in his soul.

There was a rumor that several of the disciples and preachers, being imprisoned on orders of Saul, were miraculously delivered one night and were again at large, preaching what they called the Gospel, the Good News. Saul ordered the guards seized for drunkenness and carelessness, despite their protestations that the prisoners had disappeared from their cells though the doors remained locked. To this absurdity Saul replied with a spate of his rare obscenities and anger. He delivered the guards to Pilate for proper punishment. Pilate said, watching Saul with open amusement, “My men swear that divine creatures clothed in light opened the gates of the prison and delivered the malefactors, and that my soldiers could not lift a hand.” He laughed at Saul’s enflamed expression, and shook his head. Verily, he was not so bored these days, and for that he thanked the gods, in whom he did not believe. He would say to Herod Antipas, that capricious and gloomy man, “Your Paul of Tarsus is very redoubtable. It is sad that he does not accept your invitations to dine with you.” Herod would bite his lip and his pale eyes would glow, but he would not reply. His dreams these days were frightful.

Then Pilate summoned Saul to him one evening, and his clever face expressed vexation and displeasure. He did not offer Saul wine, which was an ominous signal, and one not overlooked by the young Jew.

“You have spoken to me often of your famous teacher, the Nasi of the Temple, Rabban Gamaliel,” said Pilate. “I know him well. I have entertained him in this house and have been entertained in his. He is a man of wisdom, wit and erudition and I have enjoyed his company, and have rejoiced in it, for this is a tedious country and not to be understood by a worldly man. So few men of cosmopolitan tastes and understanding!

“Have you not wondered, yourself, Paul of Tarsus, why you have not seen him nor have heard from him?”

“Yes, lord,” said Saul, and immediately an icy chill enveloped his spirit and he felt ill with premonition.

“It is suspected that he is a new heretic,” said Pilate.

Saul sprang to his feet, trembling, swollen and scarlet of face. Lord!” he cried, “that rumor is not to be borne, to be suffered! You know Rabban Gamaliel; you know that he is chief of the Sanhedrin, the Nasi of the Temple, a man famous in Israel and even in the world beyond for his piety and his wisdom, his devotion to God, his writings, his lectures, his dissertations, his influence!” Saul began to shudder. He had thought that he had endured all he could endure, yet now he was faced with this horror, this blasphemy, this terror and shamefulness. “Lord,” he stammered, sweating in his extremity though the autumn evening was cool, “those who spread such evil tidings should be mercilessly punished—and destroyed, for the Rabban is a holy man before the Face of God, and God should not be so flagrantly insulted in the powerful person of His Rabban! It is a plot to crush the very foundations of our Temple, our holy land, our belief, our very survival! If this can be said of Rabban Gamaliel then none is safe in Israel, all are exposed to lies and blasphemies and traducers, all are suborned!” He stopped. His voice choked in his throat. His eyes had reddened with blood. He feared that he would have a seizure, that he would die on the spot of his agony and his abhorrence and dread. It was as if, before his very sight and presence, that the Veil of the Temple had been torn away and the Torah seized and desecrated and befouled by beasts, and that animals had defecated in the Sanctuary. He pressed his hands convulsively to his temples, holding there the roaring cataract that swelled within, threatening to break loose and smash him to fragments. His heart screamed with pain; he could not breathe. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth; he saw fire and sparks before him and felt a heaving beneath his feet.

Pilate watched him with curious interest and reflection, then seeing that Saul was indeed in extremity he finally called for wine and himself stood and pressed the goblet into one of Saul’s rigid and shaking hands. “Drink,” he commanded, “or you will surely die! Gods! What exaggerations, what extravagances, you Jews display, out of proportion to the cause! I have said it is a rumor, only a rumor. But you sprang to your feet like one who has been seized by the furies, by Hecate, herself, or as if Charon had appeared before you! Let us be calm. Drink. I command you.”

Convulsed with tremors, hardly aware of Pilate, Saul obeyed. He could not speak. Tears like burning acid rushed into his eyes. He feared that he would burst into violent weeping and be undone before this Roman, who would only laugh at his agony. For how could Pilate comprehend the awfulness of the lie against the Rabban, the holiest man in Israel, the most learned? Saul was taken by a direful I fear. He had not striven hard enough. He had failed his Lord, his that such a shameful rumor dared to be started in Jerusalem, felt himself pushed into a chair by Pilate, and he sat there in a state of collapse.

He whispered finally, and in a hoarse voice, “You do not comprehend the monstrousness of this accusation!”

Pilate shrugged. He said, “I can believe anything of the Jews, my Paul. You are an incredible people. But, be calm, I implore you. I dislike excesses of emotion. They are uncivilized. I thought you a cultivated man, a man of restraint.” He put his tongue in his cheek.

A little control came to Saul. He stared at Pilate with hatred. “What I gave utterance to a rumor that your Emperor, your Caesar Tiberius, was a pederast?” he asked.

To his amazement Pilate laughed. “I would put nothing past the Caesars,” he said. “I have heard worse.” He regarded Saul with smiling derision. Then he said, “Let me tell you what I have heard of Gamaliel, but, in the name of the gods, discipline yourself.”

Chapter 30

“I
T
is well known,” said Pontius Pilate to Saul ben Hillel, “that the High Priest, Caiphas, and Rabban Gamaliel are not the most affectionate of friends, for the Rabban has little respect for Caiphas and Caiphas is embarrassed before the Nasi. Annas, the father-in-law of Caiphas, is a subtle and malicious man and delights in the discomfiture of his son-in-law, and therefore cultivates the Rabban who has regard for neither.

“In the matter of your heretics Caiphas has been relentless for many important reasons, as you know, my Paul, and not only out of fear of me and Rome. He had taken it upon himself to hear their trials in the Temple, and before the Sanhedrin, even in the case of the least of them, including simple old women. He is the High Priest. He is concerned with the consideration of heresy, he proclaims, and would Keep the faith of his people pure and unshaken. He appears, however, to have an almost demented hatred for the Nazarene which he cannot fully explain himself. No matter.

“As Nasi of the Temple the Rabban is concerned with the immutability of the Law and all learned matters, and teachings, connected with that Law. As chief of the Sanhedrin he is rarely called to listen to accusations against those who infringe the Law, for that is the concern of lower judges. He was not, for instance, present when Jesus of Nazareth was brought before a handful of the judges, for, who was this man? A mere traveling teacher, who spoke only Aramaic, an unlearned man, a carpenter, penniless and homeless, with followers as undistinguished as himself. Such as Rabban Gamaliel would not be called to judge so poor a creature, so humble and without consequence.”

“I know of these things!” said Saul, with impatience. He was still trembling with shock. Pilate again regarded him thoughtfully. He did not like strong and emphatic men; he considered them barbarians.

“Ah, yes,” he murmured, playing with the stem of his goblet and leaning backwards in his cushioned lemonwood chair. “Do you not know of these things! But my spies have been informing me of late that Rabban Gamaliel, who has matters of grave moment on his mind every hour, has taken to appearing silently and quietly in the Sanhedrin when the followers of Jesus of Nazareth are brought before the Court, and he has listened to them acutely though never intruding a question or uttering a reprimand, he the chief of the Court. He has neither affirmed nor set aside the opinion of those meeting in the Court, though it is more than his privilege. He has merely listened, and then has departed, without a word. So the High Priest has told me. He finds the presence of the Rabban disconcerting.”