Great Lion of God (82 page)

“Surely God will raise up other generations like him,” said Saul.

Lucanus shook his head. “Who knows? Rome is dying, and all the spirit of Rome.”

Though Saul, all his life, had been given to deprecating men’s opinions and impressions of the world—as too subjective—he found, to his dismay, that Antioch was somewhat worse than Lucanus had described, and he sympathized with the Roman Legate, Diodorus Cyranus.

The Romans, of course, were as ubiquitous there as they were in Israel, and their swarming bureaucrats were equally obnoxious. Everything was regulated, supervised, ordered and meanly inspected by those bureaucrats, and their minute records, as Lucanus had ruefully remarked, kept account of every man’s defecations and every new tunic or animal. They had buildings heaped with orderly records, and the bureaucrats toiled among them like ants. To them, men were not men. They were sheets of parchment, a number in a book. Imperial nations,” said Lucanus, “become cumbersome and weighty, and finally fall under the sheer massiveness of their regulations. When a nation no longer has respect for individuals but only for masses, its day is done.” He smiled his cold Grecian smile. “That is what my father always declared, and he was correct.”

“We have the Roman bureaucrats in Israel also,” said Saul. “However, they are cautious not to trespass too far. We are a people of temper.”

“The people of Antioch prefer to brawl, feast and lie with women,” said Lucanus, and his smile broadened somewhat as he regarded Saul. “Therefore, they do not openly fight the taxgatherers and other bureaucrats. It is a game: They choose, rather, to outwit them, and I find it a gayer custom.”

He had encountered Saul but twice before, and on each occasion he had seen a different vivid aspect of him, and since his visit to Tarsus Saul had often baffled him by the presentation of still other aspects, many of them contrary to those once glimpsed. There was a protean quality to this man, apparently bold and courageous and open though he appeared, and without dissemblance. Leonine in appearance and in character, he was yet subtle and versatile, changeful and the same. In comparison with the merry and simple Barnabas, he was like a strong man beside an amiable and tender child. It was apparent that he loved Barnabas, but often when the three would be conversing together and Barnabas made an artless remark Saul did not appreciate the artlessness as did Lucanus and accept it as evidence of a gentle and crystalline nature. He would frown in quick irritability, which wounded Barnabas. Seeing then that he had hurt his friend, Saul would be immediately contrite, but he would change the subject hastily as if he thought the matter too obtuse for Barnabas, which further wounded the latter.

The three, so dissimilar in all things, were bound together with bonds stronger than flesh and blood or mere friendship or human affection. The bonds were invisible, but they were as mighty as rock and iron. They were evidence of a love greater than man’s, and a faith more invincible than death. They lived and had their being in the Messias. As Saul was to write in a letter later he also said, “To me to live is Christ.—I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20) Therefore Lucanus and Barnabas were, to Saul, not men separate from himself but men inextricably joined with himself in the love and salvation of God. And so they regarded him also. To these men others who did not believe so deserved their tears, prayers and compassion, for did they not live in a darkness from which God intended them to be rescued?

For the first time, and in Antioch, were Nazarenes called “Christians,” and they were so named by the bantering Greeks, for the word “Christus” in Greek means “the Anointed.” The name was given not always with respect, but sometimes with Greek humor, for they considered that the Nazarenes took themselves and their mission too seriously, and Greeks regarded the gods as beautiful symbols, when they regarded them at all, and at the worst they considered them not only nonexistent but risible. As the Nazarenes in Antioch—as elsewhere—seemed concerned only with an everlasting life beyond the grave, and anxiously sought to draw others to them below the Crucifix—a dire symbol in itself—and did not appear to be happy in the way of ordinary men, and did not sensually pursue pleasure and beauty, I the Greeks either pitied them as men without the capacity for enjoyment and delight or impatiently shrugged and left them. Moreover, they were almost invariably Jews, and the Jews had a reputation for staring beyond the limits of the world and contemplating God, a dreary occupation.

With the same attitude, but with somewhat less tolerance, the pragmatic Romans also regarded the Christians. They, to the Romans, had but one virtue: They paid their taxes in full, an astonishing phenomenon which even Romans did not practice. Beyond the puzzling virtue they seemed passive, too gentle, too peaceful, to not only the Romans but to the myriad races in Antioch, including Persians, Syrians, Egyptians and Indus, and thousands of dark-skinned, fierce-featured men of unknown desert tribes and to barbarians. True, there were not many Nazarenes, or Christians, in Antioch, but in some incredible manner they also seemed to be everywhere at once, inoffensive but insistent—lovingly insistent—and concerned, not with themselves or trade or gain or feastings or laughter, but with unworldly matters too bizarre and strange for the mind of a sensible man to understand. Their very inoffensiveness, their very soft and tentative smiles, annoyed those about them. Therefore, they were often publicly insulted, or cheated openly in their poor little shops, or exploited in many other ways. A slave who was also a Christian served with eager humility, thus earning the detestation of fellow slaves and the greater contempt of the master. It was known that a man might impetuously strike a Christian and the wretch would not even defend himself!

But the gentle water was beginning, in some slight measure, to make a matrix in the stone of humanity.

To this eastern city, then, this lusty, noisy, clamorous, dirty and heated city, had come Saul of Tarsus, to inspire and encourage the infant Church. He was something new to the Romans, and to the Greeks. He was a Jew with an impetuous aspect, contained but visible, a man of hauteur and pride and impatience, with a blazing blue glance, beardless, emanating a mysterious strength, and he was not a man of the lowly places but a man of learning and riches and power and urban confidence. His mane of red hair, now streaked with gray, commanded attention, as did his manner and his voice. There was something military about him, in his abrupt gestures, and in his assurance. It was rumored that he was a tentmaker and a weaver of goat’s hair, something which the Romans rejected as absurd, as did the Greeks.

Here was a man neither meek nor mild, a man who would not retreat a foot from another aggressive man, a man who could roar, a man capable of his own violence of speech and act. He was a Christian, but, of a certainty, not the sort of Christian extant in Antioch!

The Romans and others were not the only ones of this opinion. The Christians discovered this for themselves also, and not with entire happiness.

He came to the young Church in Antioch—that urinous city, that motley city of thieves and wayfarers and rascals and riches and slaves and opulence, as filthy as it was uproarious—and it was evident that he intended to take charge of the Church, and not merely to preach. It was first in Antioch that he said to the Christian community, “Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?” (I Cor. 4:15-21)

His first quarrel with the community came as a result of his insistence that Gentile converts need not become Jews to accept Christ. The Jewish Christians, vastly in the majority, were vocally outraged, and in the presence of Gentiles who were drawn to them. To these Gentiles Saul said, “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” He was not less sarcastic to those Christians who insisted that to be a true follower of the Christ one must live as meekly and inoffensively as a slave, for, as he later often and furiously repeated, “You gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves! For you bear it if man makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face!” (Cor. 11:19-21)

To Saul, many of the Christians of Antioch were even more exasperating than some of the Nazarenes of Jerusalem. Too, the elders of the Church were offended by his short manner of disposing of their dissensions and intense scrupulosities. Young though the Church was it was already beset by a multitude of interpreters who shouted that they had received divine inspiration and that their opinions must be accepted or the offender suffer hell-fire. Saul attacked these with a passion as devastating as it was ruthless.

He said to Lucanus, on the eve of the Greek’s departure for Philippi: “In Jerusalem many of the earlier Nazarenes were of distinguished family and learning and education and erudition, men of travel and intellectual stature. But in Antioch we draw but the simple and illiterate and the dully obstinate.”

Lucanus had had much more experience than Saul with the ignorant and humble, and knew, more than did Saul, that once these were given a petty authority they were more arrogant than a man born to great authority. He was also more compassionate, though less inclined to uncritical love. When Saul roared, alone with his friends in their miserable little rooms in a poor inn, Lucanus said, “Speak more gently with more conciliation, my Saul. And more slowly and in less learned terms. The humble mind is easily offended and fragile and inclined to unreasonable rages, and does not follow an intricate and rapid argument. Rather, it resents and derides the speaker because it does not understand him. Speak as if to unlettered children, in simple language and with less haste.”

It was rumored among the Christians that Saul and Lucanus were men of considerable riches. Why, then, did they live so meagerly? Lucanus was a Greek and a Gentile, and Gentiles were often incomprehensible, but Saul was not only a Jew but a Pharisee. Therefore, he baffled the other Christians. It was known that both men gave lavishly of their money to the young Church and sent tithes to the Church in Israel, which was doubtless exemplary. But the charity of Saul did not excite affection among the Christians nor gratitude. They had a communal society, did they not, where every man shared with his brother, and were not the poor, by the mere fact that they existed, entitled to the treasures of a rich man, earned or unearned? They believed this in all righteousness, though it was contrary to the teachings of some of the elders. They took umbrage when Saul shouted at them, as he had shouted before, “He who does not work neither shall he eat!” (The Christians of Antioch, however, were less inclined to sit and wait for the imminent arrival of the Messias, and were more inclined to earn their bread.)

As for Lucanus, they were awed by him and his cool and aloof manner, for he was a “stranger.” Many of the Jewish Christians still harbored a conviction that a Gentile was to be treated with restraint and some wariness, even if he was a Christian, too. “Respect but suspect,” their simple forefathers had said of the Gentiles, and those descended of them were inclined to agree, still. The few Greeks and Syrians and other “strangers” among them were, on the other hand, given to wondering if gentle contempt for their fellow Gentile, who was rich yet did not condescend to them, the poor, but gave them of his purse as well as of his skill. They recalled that in Christian love he was impelled to do this, but as they were human as well as Christians it was somewhat incredible to them. The poor shared with the poor, but for a rich man to do so unsettled the simple and naive, and decreased their respect.

Antioch was not only a city of seemingly unending heat and sun, where the black cobbled streets were as hot as fire at noon, but it was a city of walls in the Oriental manner, and secluded gardens and courtyards, behind those walls, and winding roads and stinking gutters and blazing white skies and dogs and camels and sheep and goats loose even on the streets, accompanied by geese and doves. It was also a city of markets, even more so than Jerusalem, and the rabble here was more turbulent and blasphemous and ribald in a dozen tongues, and impudent beyond endurance. It never slept at night; the night clamored with the flutes and harps and zithers and drums and wild laughter and yells and shrieks and barkings, and the taverns never closed and roisterers roamed the street all night in garments of a score of other nations. Roman guards never walked alone; there were always two or three or four of them at least. The men or Antioch spat at them and cursed them, but cheerfully and in a comradely spirit, and if the Romans smiled indulgently they were often, and immediately, invited to visit the nearest tavern with those who had just insulted them, and. all entered with arms over shoulders. It was also an important port, on its broad river, and ships of many countries were always at anchor there, loading and unloading.

“You must admit it is a colorful city, even zestful,” said Barnabas, who was somewhat inclined to find mitigating features no matter how deplorable the man, the town or the customs.

“It stinks,” said Saul.

“I have heard it does not stink worse than Rome,” said Barnabas.

The Christians met in abandoned ruins, on the outskirts of the city in fields, in quarries, in barns, in miserable little houses. When Saul suggested a House of God some of the elders, careful now of his temper, mentioned that the Lord had spoken of “a Temple not built of hands.” That was another source of Saul’s vexation: These people confused metaphor with reality. When the Lord had said that those “who hunger and thirst for justice would be satisfied,” that was the clear reality He had promised in the world hereafter and after His Second Coming. But when He spoke in mysterious parables—however simple they appeared on first hearing—and in metaphor, many were confused and it was only the wise who could interpret to them, sometimes to their mutiny. Saul had less trouble with his fellow Christian Jews, for they were acquainted with the mysteries and the symbols of the Scriptures and the elusive words of the prophets, which required commentators. It was the converted heathen who obstinately clung to the word and not the spirit.