The Gospel of the Twin (2 page)

Chapter Two

Verse One

When I was about twelve years of age, we went to the fishing village of Bethsaida across the Jordan River for the funeral of my mother's aunt. Mary seemed to have kin in every miserable crevice of the region, and when news of some cousin's death came to us two or three times a year, she would ask Joseph to take her to attend the funeral or, if the news was too late (as it usually was), ask us to visit to console the family. He invariably refused. “How can I afford a week away from work when the Romans take half my wages for taxes?”

Once, when news arrived of a third death within two months, Joseph asked, “Why do so many of your family die young, when Joachim and your mother are exceedingly long in years?”

Mary took this to mean that he wanted her parents dead. The dough she was kneading—it seemed as if she was always baking bread—fell from her hands and smacked onto the floor. She turned her face up and wailed. Her arms hung by her side, and she shook as if she had to put all her strength into the effort to stand.

Joseph felt pity for her and, to everyone's surprise, said we could go this time. Perhaps he thought this was the only way to silence her. He wiped the flour from her hands and face. When he performed such a rare act of tenderness to my mother, I could forgive him all his typical gruffness. He borrowed a couple of donkeys and a cart from Joachim. We packed up, left that afternoon, and walked much of the night.

Our cousin Judas and his family traveled with us. Judas' father (Mary's brother) was fairly successful, about as much as any shepherd was in Nazareth. Judas was my and Jesus' age, but as he tended sheep each day while we were working in Sepphoris, we did not see him very often. Judas mostly sat in the shade and dreamt himself a warrior, visions he enacted by running around town throwing rocks and aiming insults at travelers. To keep tabs on him, his father enrolled him in Greek lessons with Jesus and me, but Judas showed up only some of the time. He was an ornery boy who would fight any who crossed him, adult or child, and he angered easily. If he decided that you were his friend, however, he would take on a legion for you.

Among the people who came to visit the home of the deceased was our cousin John, whom we had met only once before: An intense, unforgettable personality, he had a way of speaking, even as a child, that made every utterance sound urgent.

Another cousin who lived in Bethsaida was named Ephraim. We had never met him before, but he took us for a walk about the village, proudly pointing to the cloth shops, bakeries, and houses that were, admittedly, straighter built and more colorful than those of Nazareth; nevertheless, I found the tour tiresome. Besides, many of the streets were so narrow that two goat carts could not pass each other, and the houses lining them blocked the sunlight. In one of these streets, I was about to suggest that we should return to our dead relative's home because the mourning was more interesting than the shaded alleys, when a group of older boys came towards us and blocked our path.

“The big one with the scar on his chin is Simon,” said Ephraim. “He's a tyrant who wants only trouble. We should turn around and leave.”

The group of thugs clumped together like a wall when they were a cubit away and would not turn to let us pass. The clothes of the oafish Simon fit poorly, and he wore no sandals. Tiny eyes showed hardly any white around his gray irises, which were like dusty tiles pushed into the plaster of his cubical head. “Do you have money?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” said Judas. “But if so, it is not yours.”

Simon laughed. “This is our village, and what's in it is ours.”

“And it is our village, too,” said John. “You are right—we should share all belongings.” Then a cross-eyed boy in Simon's group pushed John to the ground.

Jesus opened his empty hands to Simon and said, “Friend, we are poor like you and of the same people. We are not enemies. If we had anything, we'd indeed share with you.” Again, my brother showed his belief in the inner goodness of even the hardest hearts, and his view that kind words were enough to soften them.

“Yes,” said John as I helped him up. “Even now our fathers and brothers plan uprisings against the Romans, and they are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice to reclaim our land. What would they think of us, brothers, fighting each other when we're on the same side? We should band together, a proud force of the Lord against Rome.”

“Who are you to talk such shit?” asked Simon. He spat onto the ground near John's foot. “If we must, I myself shall lead the attack upon Rome, and I need money for arms. Now, give it to me.”

“Here are your arms!” said Judas, drawing from his cloak a small dagger Jesus and I had not known he carried. He held the knife low at his side, for he had no doubt seen Roman soldiers do the same when they sparred. He took a quick step toward Simon.

“No!” shouted Jesus.

Judas thrust the knife in an upward arc as if trying to slip it between the large boy's ribs, but Simon lurched back faster than I would have guessed such an ogre could. At the same time, as if in a practiced combination of motions, Simon swung his heavy fist down at the back of Judas's forearm, knocking the dagger to the ground.

Simon grabbed the knife. “This will be payment enough.” He and his group lurched away, laughing.

Judas lifted a large rock from the ground, but Jesus clasped him about the shoulders. “No, Judas. Did you not hear John's words?” The bullies were out of earshot. “Listen to me: Simon may be just the sort of person we shall need.”

“What?” I asked. “Can't you see he's nothing but a thug? You don't seem to understand that some people are just no good.”

“John and Judas and I were talking about the state of things this morning while you went with Mother to see the boats on the lake,” Jesus said. “We're making plans for a new movement.”

We squatted under olive trees as Jesus spoke about the Romans and the collaborating Temple leaders. As boys, we'd all overheard the wild conversations of our fathers, and we'd imagine ourselves with swords and spears and chariots, playing Davids to Roman Goliaths. Perhaps because of lingering excitement following the confrontation, Jesus seemed to have a new urgency this time, and I realized that the discussion was serious. John and Judas grew increasingly animated and talked about insurrection.

“The Romans have covered the land of the Lord since before our fathers and their fathers were born,” said John. “They make our own rulers into puppets, they take our cattle and sheep whenever they wish, they execute us without trial, and, as my father says, they tax us to the bone. Last week, soldiers marched through here and took away six young men. They might make them soldiers, or they might sell them as slaves. Who knows? Before we know it, they'll make us sacrifice to their gods.”

He rubbed the elbow that had slammed into the ground when he was pushed. “Some of our people are cowards and pretend that nothing can be done. Our neighbor argued with my father the other day, saying that our people have always been poor and oppressed by somebody, so what difference does it make if now it's the Romans? Then we have the ignorant, like Simon and those thugs, who prefer to live in the shadow cast over our land. I've heard that their empire covers the entire world: Egypt and Greece and Persia and everywhere! The Lord will not allow this much longer. He'll send us a new Joshua to drive them back to their lairs.”

“Yes,” Ephraim said. “A new Joshua to split the Jordan River and drown the Roman legions.”

“That was Moses, you fool!” John said. “Joshua cleansed the Canaanites from our land after Moses died.”

“Didn't he do a miracle, too?” asked Ephraim.

“He stilled the sun to make time to finish a battle,” I said. “But John's point is the Lord will lead us out of this, too.”

“The Lord?” said Judas. “
We
shouldn't allow it any longer. Will the Lord return the land to a nation of cowards? Will he anoint a deliverer who can't wield a sword? We must prove that we are worthy of remaining his people. Let us walk about the wilderness speaking to the brigands. We'll say, ‘Come. Act as one body. And we'll be an army.'”

“Cousins,” said Jesus, “you are like the farmer who, angry that he's lost his ox, breaks his plough.” Jesus peeled a strip of bark from a green twig and sniffed it. “I'm talking about a new way of life, not the old way of death.”

We were just boys, but we had watched our parents often try to eke out meals from fish heads and ox hooves they'd found in trash heaps, and we knew that poor people get nothing unless they take it. I wasn't sure, though, what Jesus planned to take.

Later at supper, Judas leaned over to me and said, “You and Jesus may look alike, Thomas, but inside you are different.” He tore me a piece of bread, raising it up to catch my eye. “Then again, Jesus is different from everyone else, too.”

Chapter Three

Verse One

My mother had never been to Jerusalem and begged Joseph each year to take the family there for Passover. Having grown up in Judea, Joseph had attended many Passovers, but like most in Nazareth, he would instead pass a few coins to some neighbor, who went to the annual festival in Jerusalem and paid for a sacrifice for us. He would say that we couldn't afford the trip, that the children (particularly our two little sisters) were too young, and that he'd heard that the Romans and the Temple guards were especially nervous and cruel during the festival.

After all, it was a celebration of our ancestors' escape from the shackles of the Egyptians, and when too many of our countrymen got to Jerusalem inspired by wine and the crowds, they often thought the moment had come for a new revolt. The slightest misstep would result in arrest.

Despite her insistence, Mother was ambivalent about making the pilgrimage. As scornful as any Galilean of the leadership in Jerusalem, she nevertheless maintained—again, like most people in the Galilee hellhole—that the Temple still belonged to the people. By “the people,” of course, she meant the poor. I doubt, though, that she ever really cared about partaking in the Temple rituals as much as she simply wanted to visit the exotic land she imagined.

She thought that everyone in Judea wore cotton robes dyed bright purples and deep greens with massive gold necklaces. In her mind's eye, they never walked, but were carried on cedar berths by half-clad Egyptian slaves. This was a woman who hung her head at the approach of any stranger, acting as if she were not fit to cast a shadow on the same dirt. How did she think she would survive a day in the land of the Levites?

Jesus and I were thirteen or so when our father decided that the younger children were old enough to make the journey. James was so eager to go that he fasted and hardly said a word to any of us for the week before we set out. He spent hours reading Torah in a circle he'd raked out in the backyard, mumbling and rocking like a boat. He wanted to show the priests how smart he was and hoped they would declare him a scriptural genius and put him to work polishing scroll handles.

Jesus and I were excited, but not for any religious reason. Before this, little Bethsaida was the largest town we had ever visited. While we had seen Romans, Greeks, and even a few Persians in Sepphoris, we had always thought of Jerusalem as a magical land of far more wondrous sights. One of the older Nazarene boys told us that during Passover, whores came from Ethiopia, wearing only tiny loincloths of lion hide.

I heard that Ethiopians had skin as black as dung beetles, and eyes as red as blood, and women had hair like grape vines and smelled of fig blossoms. If you lie with them during the festival week, he said, you need only to make an offering to the Temple in the same amount you paid the whore, and you would be cleansed. This information was useless for a poor Galilean boy like me.

As we neared Judea and prepared for the final day's walk to Jerusalem, the roads became increasingly clogged with pilgrims. I had never seen so many people. At first, I was joyously expecting a series of grand ceremonies with these Jews, who had trekked from much more distant foreign lands than I, with their strange dress and dialects that sloughed warmly in my ears. Opportunistic merchants from Arabia and Ethiopia lined the roadside hawking all manner of goods: fresh and dried fruits with thick skins of reds and purples; unrecognizable animals (how could we know if they were clean?) turning on spits, skinned and coated with savory herbs; beaded jewelry made of stones that glistened like tiny lakes; and clothes of unknown fabrics stacked in piles higher than a man's head. The shouting vendors, trying to make their odd tongues intelligible, sounded as if their mouths were swollen from bee stings.

I was eager to be swept into the swarming masses, to wander within the great city that David had built; to gaze at the massive, fabled Temple where the Lord himself dwelt; and to hear the dying cries of the sacrificed animals.

My sense of anticipation, however, soon departed. When we were several hours from the city, a pall of desperation loomed over the din of travelers, traders, and donkeys. Excited voices slurred to murmured warnings to try not to be noticed. Parents drew children to their sides. Women pulled shawls over their faces. These dusty pilgrims' souls were darkened and their bodies exhausted, and I knew their pockets soon would be as well.

As they shuffled like herded cattle toward the gates of the city, I wondered if any of them asked themselves why they had joined this perverse parade. The people seemed to transform as figures do in a dream. At once, they were swept by fate and became willing actors, prancing like horses, swirling into fluid, tumbling and screeching and writhing toward some behemoth Rome or Temple that squatted on matted haunches behind city gates waiting to devour them.

I must have slid along in a trance for most of that final hour, for when Jesus gripped my arm—he surely noticed my inattention—Jerusalem was within sight. Many of the pilgrims mumbled prayers. Some shouted praise to God. When I saw the crowd clumped at the gate and the Roman soldiers prodding and cursing, I felt relief tempered by fear. The soldiers flanked the entrance and funneled pilgrims into a gate that no more than two or three persons could fit through at once. I could hear yelling coming from just inside the city wall.

“Look,” Joseph said to Mother. “They're treating us like animals. Didn't I warn you?”

For a moment, I feared that Joseph would immediately make us turn around, but Mother did not even acknowledge his comment and continued toward the gate.

I hoisted my youngest sister Deborah onto my back. She loved the straw dolls that Jesus and I made for her, and I had one in my pouch that I'd fashioned during the trip. I handed it to her to try to distract her from the shoving and noise.

We wedged our way through the gate like sheep into a pen. Our blended voices even sounded like bleats. I reached out to take Mother's hand but Joseph, who was jerking about trying to keep Joses and Simon near him, yanked her ahead. James and Jesus were behind me, laboring to keep the donkey cart upright. A Roman by the entrance yelled something in Latin (a language I had yet to learn) right by my ear, and I heard the
whump
of his pike across James' back. James grunted as if a cry of pain stuck in his throat. Deborah buried her face into my shoulder and clutched her little arms around my grimy neck as we hurried into the city.

Inside the gate, with hundreds of others lurching about in confusion, we felt somewhat safer but were unsure where to go. I turned about and stared in awe at the enormous throng of people and the many houses built against each other like stalls in a barn. Joseph grabbed my sleeve and snatched me from my daydream. We sidled our way to a vacant spot by a fruit vendor and sat. Joseph opened a skin of water and wine, took a swallow, and passed it to us. I eyed the bright fruit.

“Are you hurt?” Jesus asked James, but James only pressed a hand to his stomach and did not answer.

This should have been the trip of a lifetime for a boy my age, his first time in the city of the Lord, but the Roman soldiers slapping the flats of their swords against their armguards kept us all on edge. One soldier struck a pilgrim across the neck and said in fair Aramaic, “On your knees, Jew! Have you forgotten this is a holy city?” The other soldiers nearby roared with laughter, their fat tongues quaking behind broken teeth. While others watched this horrid display, I grabbed a yellow fruit and slid it beneath my cloak.

Joseph led us toward a part of the city where he said we could find an affordable inn. Jesus and I kept a watch on Mother, expecting her to spin into a seizure any moment. Joseph stopped at one of the merchants' tables by the street and held a blue scarf up to Mother's face. She stepped away impatiently, but her eyes bulged, as did ours, when Joseph handed a coin to the vendor. Joseph removed the faded rag from Mother's head and tied the scarf around her face like a frame. Even Deborah cheered up when she saw Mother smile and roll her teary eyes at Joseph.

Verse Two

For Passover, the largest festival of the year, pilgrims swell Jerusalem to perhaps ten times its ordinary number of residents, and the locals have many schemes to profit from the crowds. Joseph found us a room in what he called an inn, but I think it was a barn that some Jerusalem dweller had cleared out to make money off poor travelers like us. We crammed together on the floor of a tiny room, or perhaps a stall, that we shared with two other families. As the others settled into soft drones of sleep, I peeled my stolen fruit and nudged Jesus.

“Here,” I whispered. “Look what I found.”

“You didn't find it,” he said. “I saw you.”

I divided the segmented fruit and gave him half. We bit and spat it out immediately. We suppressed our laughter, fearing we'd wake the others. We spoke not of the bitter lesson of stolen fruit.

The next morning we went to the baths for the ritual cleansing. Locals lined the entrance, saying that bathers must wear a special linen gown that they would gladly rent to you. The purity laws are so myriad and complex that no one, probably not even the priests, knows them all; yet the sheep-eyed pilgrims, afraid of drawing some contamination upon themselves, agreed to nearly everything.

Men and women went to separate baths. Joseph told us the prayer we were to recite as we descended into the water, “Lord, cleanse me of my stains,” or some such gibberish. White-robed priests ringed the pool and told us to sink under the water and then move out quickly.

Joseph walked stiffly, afraid that his limp might be noticed by a priest, who might deem him, like those crippled or missing fingers or eyes, unfit to enter the Temple.

James made a spectacle of himself quoting scripture in Hebrew and immersing himself seven times.

My little brother Joses wrapped his arms around my neck while Jesus took hold of our even younger brother Simon. We splashed water and dunked them as if we were playing in a river until Joseph scolded us, and we hurried out the other side of the bath. James remained, probably believing that the priests would suspect him a prophet and take him straight to the Temple and set him upon a special chair. The priests indeed noticed him. One prodded him with a staff and yelled at him to leave as Jesus and I laughed. Joseph just clenched his jaw and walked away.

Joseph said that, according to the laws, we had to wait a day after the bath before we could go to the Temple. After another night in the crowded inn, we had nothing to do but amble through the city with the other gawkers, careful not to get too close to the Roman patrols. Like us, most of the pilgrims were peasants whose weathered faces rippled with mixtures of awe, humility, and fright. Grown men, their neck and arms thick and sinewy from a lifetime of hard work, shuffled along the streets like guilty children fearing a beating. The women dipped their faces into their shawls and tried to keep the children quiet.

Joseph grew increasingly grim and began to walk faster, as if he had a destination in mind. Mary mumbled what sounded like prayers in an unfamiliar language. Her hands darted in front of her chest like moths, probably tracing some superstitious Galilean diagram. James prayed, the Hebrew words in cadence with his steps. My younger siblings were fascinated by the crowds and the sounds. I looked in vain for anyone who looked Ethiopian, and I certainly saw no women wearing only lion-hide loincloths.

Jesus moved about at ease, sometimes stopping to speak with strangers. He would ask what their villages were like, how they made their living, whether they conducted religious rites in the same way as we did, and if they thought their visit to the Temple would hasten our deliverance from Roman oppression. Most would look at him in confusion or call him impudent. I had to pull him away several times so we could run and catch up with the others.

In a less crowded part of the city, Joseph seemed calmer, and we stopped at one of the large tents where many poor travelers slept on the ground. We were invited to share a fire to cook our flat bread from the same sack of flour Mary had used for all of our meals since leaving Nazareth. By the time we returned to the inn, the children were exhausted and complaining, Joseph and Mother were silent, and I began to wish we had never come.

The next morning, we went to the Temple. The outer walls must have been twenty cubits high, taller than any building in Nazareth, and enclosed an area not much smaller than my village. The entire world, I doubted, contained so much stone. Even more astonishing to a young stonecutter like me was the size of the stones. I had not known that slabs of more than fifteen cubits long and ten cubits high could be quarried and transported. To add to my awe, the pure, spring sunlight reflected off the white stone that was at once painfully bright and undeniably beckoning. Great numbers of people gathered agape, filled with awe and humility beside a structure unmatched in size and splendor. Some fell to their faces and wept; others turned their heads and hands skyward and babbled in ululating tongues. Jesus took my hand and gave it a slight squeeze. He nodded, as if to indicate his resolve about a grave mission.

I could see the tops of massive buildings beyond the towering walls, and I was eager to get inside the complex. We took our places in the lines, then ascended the south stairs through the double gates up to the Temple Mount. The stairs rose on a gentle slope, led through the wall, and emerged just before a long building with tall marble pillars before a deep stoa. People moved about the portico, pitching from table to table and bickering with the currency changers. Only Temple currency was allowed for the purchase of doves and lambs to be sacrificed, and travelers haggled with the many vendors over exchange rates and prices of the animals for sale. “Not enough!” some vendors shouted, while would-be buyers yelled, “Too much!”

“Let us hurry, Joseph,” Mother said. “I fear the children may be swept away by the crowd.” She bent and drew a sign in the thin layer of dust on the floor, and quickly brushed it over with one sandal, then the other.