Great Lion of God (91 page)

The Christians were still accepted in the Jewish community, for the majority were former Jews, and they worshiped together in the synagogues, keeping all the Holy Days as in the days of their fathers, and celebrating together. When the deacons and the priests spoke of Yeshua of Nazareth and His Resurrection, the unconvinced Jews listened politely and many finally accepted Him and His Mission, and among them were some rabbis. Those yet unconvinced watched with indulgent tolerance the consecration of the Host, and those who partook of the Sacrament, and when the Christians sang the Psalms of David in their native Aramaic, or even Hebrew, the Jews joined in with deep reverence. To them, still, the Christians were but an aberrant sect in Israel, which would survive or not survive, depending on the truth they proclaimed. Those who came in the Name of the Lord should be respected, even if their message were in error.

Though all was not completely calm between young Jewish hotheads of deeply traditional beliefs and the self-righteousness and equal hotheadedness of Jewish Christians, it was generally admitted that the Christians spoke in love and a desire to save the souls of men and so they should not be despised or attacked. But it was irritating to be told that unless even the most holy and pious of men accepted the proclaimed Messias they were doomed to spend eternity in hell, and that all their faithful forefathers were now burning in that dolorous place, including blameless infants and the prophets and King David, and virtuous maidens and dutiful matrons. All the devotion and faith and love and obedience to God which the Jews had observed over the centuries, they were told, availed them nothing. They were damned; they were still damned; they would continue to be damned. Their love and faith and obedience and devotion might just as well have been given to Devil or to Moloch. To the Jews, this seemed outrageous and an insult to God. But the more wise among the Christian deacons soothed their ire, and so the Christians were still admitted to the synagogues.

The Gentile Christians were another matter. They were excessively zealous, and their zeal was in no wise reduced by the fact that they knew nothing of the Root from which their Faith had sprung. Therefore, they spoke of the words of the Messias as “mysteries” unaware of the Hebraic context in which He had spoken. When He had referred to Elias and Isaias and David and Moses and Solomon and Abraham, they thought these mighty men faintly mythical angels of glorious gods briefly inhabiting the earth to lift up the souls of men, very like their discarded sons of the gods and the goddesses, or their former sylvan deities. In truth, many of them blithely incorporated the beautiful deities in their new religion, and quite a number confused Mary of Nazareth with Artemis or Diana—for were not all these holy virgins? Jesus began to take on the adumbrance of Apollo, the aspects of Zeus. They could not understand the protests of the Jews and the Christian Jews, and were annoyed by them, and when the old gods and goddesses and dryads and nymphs were referred to as “demons” something uneasy stirred in them, born of past memories. Many had been adherents of Isis, and they were bewildered when the Christians refused to give her attributes to the Mother of the Messias.

Some of the Christian Jewish deacons and priests set themselves the laborious task—in love and tenderness—to enlighten the Christian Gentiles about the Faith from which the Messias had sprung, and told how He had declared that He came not to overthrow the Law but to fulfill it. Therefore, the converts must know about the Law or they certainly would never be able to encompass the teachings of the Messias. They must know about Moses and the patriarchs. But some of the new Christians said disdainfully, “That is past and gone. We need only the Messias.” “But if you do not know of what He spoke, then how can you comprehend His words and His mission?” The deacons and the elders did not have notable success, for their words were incomprehensible to the converts who found it all a little tedious and had nothing to do with the immediate Second Coming, and their own glorification and their splendor and their rule over the earth, and the consignment of unbelievers to an eternal hell, which they would contemplate from the battlements of Heaven in happy justification and complacence. This made the priests and deacons shudder.

“But you know all these things. You have encountered them, yourself,” said Lucanus to the intently listening Saul.

“Alas, yes,” said Saul. “I often wonder if Peter were not wiser than I.”

“Perhaps it is enough to accept the Messias as Lord and God and Savior,” said Lucanus. “These poor ignorant people are faithful, at least, and I do recall hearing that not all the ancient Israelites honored the prophets, either,” and he smiled ironically, and Saul smiled in answer.

“Shall only the wise and the cultured inherit Heaven?” asked Saul. “Heaven forbid! For the controversies they would provoke, even in Heaven, would make it a hell. No one is more insistent and intolerant than those who called themselves intellectuals, as I observed, myself, in Israel, among the Sadducees and the Pharisees.”

In spite of his apparent calm, he was beginning to pant and his eyes had fixed themselves with mingled terror and fortitude on Lucanus, awaiting the blow of the sword. He sat upright now in his bed, his arms embracing his knees.

The controversies would have remained in the Christian Tarsus community without danger—except from militants and defectors and self-interpreters and schismatics and dissenters—had it not been for the over zealous who were convinced that they had a mission to destroy every faith they encountered except theirs. They scorned the teachings and the persuasions and the reasonings of the mild and the gentle and the loving. The heathen world must be converted immediately, its idols overthrown, or God would not hold them guiltless. So, as had done their brethren in Rome, they openly attacked religious processions, rushed into temples and overthrew the statues of gods and goddesses, shouted on the street corners that all men were doomed if they continued to honor the ancient inhabitants of Olympus, and that those who did not accept the Messias immediately were accursed and condemned to everlasting torment—when He returned, which would probably be tomorrow—and that the obdurate were unclean, vile, anathema and to be avoided by all good men. Worse still, the laws and the lawgivers of Rome, or any other local authority, were to be disobeyed passively or openly, as a “sign” of the withdrawal of the Christian community from other men. “We are the Witness!” they cried in the marketplaces and the fori and in “heathen” temples. “Believe us, or you must die and writhe forever in the flames of hell! Who is Caesar, that we must obey him? He represents the decadent, the past, the passing, the wickedness, the unjust, licentious, voluptuous, worldly, the depraved, the established evil. We bring to you freedom from Caesar and his monstrousness and his laws! We are another world, ruled by the Messias—who is surely expected even in the days in which we live!”

The Roman military, honoring the greatest of their generals, Augustus Caesar, and having conferred on him the mantle of divinity, raised a temple to him in Tarsus—as they had done in many other cities—and established therein a gigantic and glorified image of their dead Caesar, whom many accounted greater than Julius, himself, who had also been declared a deity. Priests had been appointed to serve him and to receive sacrifices, and retired captains and centurions and soldiers haunted his temple, sighing over these decadent days wherein military prowess was less honored than a mean politician with a snake’s tongue and crafty businessmen and bankers and merchants and stockbrokers. Though many of them, being “old” Romans, did not believe in the divinity of Augustus Caesar, they delighted in honoring a symbol of integrity, arms, pride in Rome, Rome, herself, and the glorious days when Rome had stood among lesser nations like a Colossus of law and honor and order and probity.

It was into this temple that a number of Christians roared one sunset, when some of the rheumatic old captains and centurions were paying honor to Augustus and their nation, and not only screamed “Woe!” to those present before the altar, but seized and hurled down the statue of the dead Caesar. The translucent alabaster, beautifully chiseled, smashed to fragments on the gold and black marble of the floor, carrying the altar with it in the sound of thunder and destruction, and the altar lights leaped up amid the tangle of silk like veritable flames out of Hades, perfumed with incense and burning flowers. The priests rushed in horror to survey the ruins, and they lifted their hands and cried to the aghast worshipers, “Let this infamy be avenged, or we are not Romans, but only asses and dogs!”

The Romans, being tolerant and cynical toward their gods, had overlooked the former excesses of the Christians, despite protests from local inhabitants of Tarsus. Who cared about Isis and Cybele and Osiris and Horus and the multitude of other Eastern gods? But when Caesar Augustus had been attacked the patience and tolerance of the Romans came to a cold and vengeful end. Religion might be attacked, for every priest—as every one knew—believed that only he had the truth. But an attack on Augustus was an attack on Rome herself, a flouting of her authority and rule and law, a display of enormous contempt for all that was Rome. The centurions and the generals and the captains and the soldiers came in a body to the legate and demanded justice and vengeance on that “Jewish sect,” including all the other Jews in Tarsus, Had they not wrought infamy on Rome? Were Romans meek donkeys that they should be openly defamed and ridiculed? Dishonor demanded to be washed out in blood. The noble history of Rome had been spat upon, reviled, and with it all her sons. Worse still, if the desecraters were not apprehended at once, and punished, then Rome might as well furl her banners and slink back behind her walls and surrender to the barbarians, and let the orderly world collapse into shrieking chaos.

The legate, a fat and peaceful man, hated controversy, so he deftly asked the soldiers what they would suggest. They suggested that the Jewish-Christian community be fined a sum sufficient to replace the holy statue, and that they then be commanded to adore it. This seemed eminently reasonable to the legate who called the leaders of the Jewish and Christian community to have an audience with him. He said to them, “Rome is a mighty and pacific city and her legions roam the world to maintain her Pax Romana and her law. Members of your sects have defiled and destroyed a sacred statue to the divinity, Augustus Caesar, in defiance of the ordinances of Rome that all religions must be respected and revered. You must pay in gold for the restoration of this statue and the other destruction wrought upon the temple, and then after that your people must adore the divinity one day a week, man, woman and child, cripple or aged, and make a just sacrifice in his name on the day designated.

The Jewish Community and the Christian agreed to the restoration of the statue. One rabbi and one elder pleaded, “These were delirious youths and we disclaim them and their shameful violence, and if they become known to us we shall punish them. It is very possible that these malcontents are not true believers, for if they were, they would have honored the law of respect for others and their religion and their opinions. It is also possible that they are haters of mankind and wish to incite brother against brother for their own obscure and evil purposes.”

“I have heard,” said the legate, “that the Christians are haters of men.”

“We are lovers of men,” said the Christian elders, turning very pale. “It was so commanded by God, blessed be His Name, under the Mosaic Law, and by His Messias.”

“We have lived in peace with Rome,” said the Jewish rabbis, turning even more pale. “It is true that we have our Zealots and our Essenes, as the Christians have their excessive malcontents, but we have not approved them.”

The legate was becoming impatient. “I do not understand the Jewish sects, nor do I wish to understand,” he said. “As a Roman, however, I honor your religion. But in turn you must honor mine. You must adore the statue of the divine Augustus Caesar when it has been procured with your money. I have spoken, and will speak no more.”

The Jewish and Christian leaders frantically assured each other that with the restoration of the statue the legate would forget that he had commanded public adoration of it by the Jewish and Christian communities. But their hope was in vain, as all hope of man must be, for the Roman soldiers would not permit the legate to forget, for the honor of Rome must not be humiliated lest all subject nations should hear of this and be defiant also. So a day was proclaimed when the Jewish and Christian communities must adore the statue, and those refusing to do so would be severely punished as rebels against Rome, and traitors.

Those wealthy enough among both Jews and Christians quietly departed for long sojourns in other countries, for their health, and those who had no firm faith at all accompanied them, or decided that their religion was worth a simple reverence to the statue, with interior reservations, for the sake of peace and safety and tranquillity. “After all,” they said to each other, “have we not been forced through the centuries to worship Baal and Moloch and other heathen gods, and have we not, on the Day of Atonement, disavowed those vows which we were forced to utter, and were forgiven by God, blessed be His Name?”

But the men of stronger faith, both Jews and Christians, declared that they would prefer death to the worship of false idols, and they let their resolution be well known throughout Tarsus. They were vehement in their public utterances, and in the synagogues. This inflamed the soldiers, and the populace also who had never loved the Jews and particularly despised the Christians, the alleged haters of joy and gods and life and men. To them there was no distinction at all between the orthodox Jews and the Christians. They were Jews together, and everyone knew that the Jews were a contentious people. That there were Christians who were Greeks and Syrians and Cilicians and Egyptians and Persians and even Romans was either ignored or unknown to the rabble.

So on one hot Sabbath evening when the nearest and largest synagogue was filled to the doors with both Jews and Christians, worshiping their one God together, the foot soldiers and scores of slavering incendiaries and lusters after blood gathered before the synagogue and set it afire, first barricading the doors so that none could leave. The windows were mere slits in the thick stone walls, so escape there was impossible. The dome of the synagogue became incandescent and from beneath it rose desperate cries and agonized prayers.