The Liars' Gospel

Iehuda from Qeriot

IN THE MARKETPLACE, during Passover, he hears two strangers saying that he is dead.

He is examining some clay oil lamps decorated with a blue inlay from Tarshish. At a stall nearby selling ripe melons, two women, their hair modestly covered, are discussing the rising in Jerusalem last Passover. It is not much discussed any longer, but the return of the season and the festival have brought it to mind. One woman, wearing a yellow scarf trimmed with fringes, knows more than the other. When he looks at her closely he thinks he remembers that she is the sister of the wife of one of the rabble who joined them in the last few weeks. Perhaps.

“It is sad,” she is saying, “so many of them fled. Or took on other names.” She lists several of his former friends whose faces he never expects to see again in this world. Mattisyahu the former tax collector fled south to Africa, young Yirmiyahu to Egypt, Taddai to Syria. Others she has not heard about, or has heard only vague rumors. He stops to listen. This is more news than he has had of his former friends for months.

The woman seems well informed. At one point she implies that some of her friends here in Caesarea send and receive letters from the dispersed disciples. He has heard that there are rebels here, still — Caesarea is a Roman town, the capital of the region, a waypoint for trade, so a good place for all kinds of conspiracy. But it is a mark of how little they accomplished that it is not dangerous for her to mention Yehoshuah in the market square. No one is now afraid of those who followed him.

The woman shakes her head: “There are still so many mothers who do not know what became of their sons. And Iehuda from Qeriot died, of course. He threw himself from a rocky cliff onto a field of stones. Or I heard someone else say that some of the others threw him off.” She shrugs.

“Where did you hear that?” he asks, before he has thought whether this is wise.

The women look at him curiously. He is dressed in a fine toga, his face is beardless, his hair neatly clipped. He is not a man who should pay them attention. They look modestly to the floor.

“I…” he says, “I was rather interested in the fellow at the time. Such amusing teachings.”

He has learned the lines well. They come easily to him.

The woman who was just now so full of gossip opens and closes her mouth but no sound emerges.

At last she says, “Just rumors, sir. My brother is a sailor, he tells us tales. We have no common cause with traitors against Caesar.”

Her tone is pleading.

He nods and smiles, allows his gaze to drift from them. He has no interest in scaring them.

The other woman has decided which melon she wants and buys it hurriedly. They move on, mumbling a good-bye, their eyes cast down. He wonders how many of their other snippets of news were outright lies or strange misheard half tales.

He turns the clay lamp over in his hand. He imagines throwing it to the floor, how the oil would spill forth, staining the hard earth with fragrance. It is a little time before he realizes that he is remembering the perfume bottle smashed on the ground, the room choking with its scent.

He wants to think about what he’s heard. None of what the woman said might be true, or a portion of it, but if this is the tale being told among those who knew his friends, perhaps it is time to leave his hiding place. Perhaps he should find them, tell them he is still alive, try to explain what he did.

He walks home slowly, taking the long route around, west towards the harbor. Here the boats are constantly working. Even on the Sabbath, even on the festivals, men from fifty nations load and unload cargo. There are baskets of fresh fish, figs from the orchards in the north, oil and perfume from across the ocean, bolts of expensively dyed cloth, pretty stones and jewels for women, even silver mirrors and ivory combs for those who can afford such things. Caesarea is rich.

The harbor too is one of the wonders of the world. Herod’s men slung it across the bay in seven years. They worked on the Sabbath, and in the seventh year, the year of rest. If he were still in Jerusalem, some preacher would even now be shouting to a crowd of followers that the harbor was cursed, that all who traded in it had earned God’s eternal anger. But this is not Jerusalem and the work goes on.

He wonders if this is the freedom he had sought all along. To be in a place where one could decide to care or not to care about the laws for oneself. The Romans had brought that freedom, together with their statues of their little arguing gods, and he had never noticed.

It is a kind of freedom, he thinks, to be dead. If he is dead, he smiles at the thought, perhaps even God has ceased to care what he does.

And as he thinks this, he finds that his feet have taken him wandering past the small Syrian temple to one of their goddesses. From inside the squat marble building comes the sound of laryngeal chanting, the soft cries of the worshippers in response.

He has never visited before, but he is suddenly curious to see what the nations do with their many gods. And he is not ready to go home quite yet — not to face the crowd of Calidorus’s perfumed friends with the smiling ironic face of a dead man. He picks up the hem of his cloak, ascends the dusty steps and, ducking under the curtain, enters the temple.

It is dark inside, and the smell of fragrant wood and oil is thick. Well-trimmed oil lamps are positioned in alcoves, but there are not enough of them to cast more than a glow. The people are tightly packed, crowding towards the altar, and for a while all he can see is an indistinguishable mass of humanity. But his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. At the front of the temple, on a raised marble platform, lit by the brightest lamps to draw the eye, the service is taking place.

It is not so different. They slaughter a pigeon and pour its blood onto the stone. Libations of wine are poured on the altar, prayers are uttered in Greek. The priests are women, of course, that is different. They are clad in white — he thinks he has heard that this symbolizes the fact that no man has had them. It’s been a long time since Iehuda last had a woman — nearly a year now — and his body often aches to hold soft, yielding flesh again. He is sure that the other men must feel the same rushing in their loins when the soft virgins bend to pour the oil — does it make the moment more sacred for them? He has heard that they believe their gods are pleased with sexual congress.

And there is the idol, of course, that is different to Temple services in Jerusalem. She is the best lit of all: a dozen lamps carefully placed on hand-shaped ledges jutting out from the wall surround her. She is a naked woman, large breasts, broad hips, round belly, beads around her neck — is this worship nothing but sex? They pour the oil on the feet of the statue as if it could feel, they waft the incense around its head as if it could smell.

At a certain point, some of the worshippers surge forward and ecstatically plant kisses on the feet of the statue, grabbing her ankles, mumbling prayers, placing pieces of clay with messages scratched on them and small coins into the sacred pool in front of her. As if, he thinks scornfully, this object they had made themselves could grant their wishes. He is unimpressed. All these years he had thought something terrible, even monstrous, went on in these temples. Like most Jews, he had never set foot inside a place of wicked idolatry and had imagined something much worse than children playing with a doll, pretending it could grant favors.

And then there is something else. There is a screaming ululation from the front of the crowd, where the people are pushing close to the statue. Something changes in the mood, he can feel it around him, the way that one can feel the change in the dry air of the desert when a sudden rainstorm approaches. People around him are breathing more rapidly, pressing closer and closer. He feels a hand at his back and a woman’s arm around his waist. He cannot see her properly — it is dark and her head is turned away — but he guesses she is about thirty, with pale skin and hair oiled and scented with pine resin. She is dressed like a respectable married woman and yet her fingers are clutching at his robe. He begins to wonder whether this will end with an orgy — he had heard rumors of something like this in Jerusalem. He finds he is both horrified and excited, half hard already at the thought.

But when the crowd parts momentarily, allowing him a clear view of the brightly lit area in front of the statue, he sees that it is something else. A woman with unbound hair, with eyes rolling back in her head, is dancing in front of the statue. Her skirts are hiked up past her thighs. She goes down into a crouch repeatedly and thrusts herself up. She is making guttural cries. She has pulled her robe off her shoulders and arms, it is slipping from her breasts, but what is happening is no love-dance.

She has a small silver knife and she is cutting herself, across her arms, across her chest. Other women are singing with her, clicking with their tongues, slapping their arms against their bodies in rhythm, and as he watches she presses the tip of the knife into her own breast by the nipple, cutting a bright blue vein. She leans forward and allows the blood to gush over the feet of the statue, like milk from the breast of a woman giving suck. She squats and thrusts her pudenda towards the statue. She slices at her own thigh, completing the impression that she is bleeding from her places of sex.

The woman next to Iehuda is still holding on to him, her fingers convulsively scrabbling at the fabric and the flesh of his side. He can smell her sweat. He is certain that some sexual rite is about to begin, or something more than that, something even more appalling than what he has already seen. He is afraid now of what may happen. But no one is moving. Only the bleeding woman at the front of the room continues to dance, to smear her blood onto the statue, to dip and sway until, suddenly, with a wild cry, she drops and falls across the idol’s feet, quivering, spent.

The woman standing next to Iehuda lets her arm fall away from his body. He catches her eye. She looks dazed, her lips half parted. She reaches for him again, fumbling at his robes. Her hand finds the warm flesh of his back, under his clothing. It moves lower, grasping his buttock, squeezing. At the back of the room, through the curtains, a few people are stumbling out into the light, but he sees that two or three couples are already pushed up against the walls of the temple. The woman’s skin is covered in a sheen of sweat. He can smell her; through the incense and the odor of two hundred bodies pressed tight against each other, he can smell the thick willing scent of her. He puts his arm around her waist and half lifts her from her feet, pushing men and women aside to gain the temple wall. She is already gasping as, between a pillar and rough stone, he lifts her up, presses her against the wall where her feet can find the pillar, swings her skirts aside and enters her. She is wet and hot and ready and she cries out and bares her teeth and her hands scrabble at his back as he thrusts. It does not take long. He has not even uncovered her breast before he is done and, shuddering, lowers her to the floor.

He wants to take her again. He feels already that it will not be long before he is ready to do so. He grabs at her waist. But she squeezes his hand, lets it go, and is now drifting towards the doorway. He follows as they exit, blinking, into the early-evening sun. He sees, with surprise, that her hair is red: it had looked dark, brown, in the dim light of the temple. He realizes in the same moment that she may be surprised to see his features, his own red-brown curls. He tries to speak to her.

“What is your name?” he says.

But she looks away, apparently faintly embarrassed, and says nothing.

He thinks: woman, I have felt the grip of your cunt.

But before he can find something else to say — something more uncomprehending, perhaps, or the thing he wants to say that she would not understand: did you know that you have just fucked a dead man? — she pulls her scarf over her head and hurries away.

At the top of the marble steps leading back into the street, a maiden is holding a wide flat dish. Her arms soon struggle with the heavy heaping of coins that worshippers place there as they leave. Iehuda finds a small coin for her and steps back down into the street.

Two older women pass him as they leave.

“She was Assyrian,” mutters one to the other, “the one who cut herself. I’ve heard about their rites.”

The other woman, dressed neatly and with the hairstyle of a respectable matron, sniffs and frowns. “A lot of fuss,” she says. “What’s wrong with a pigeon?”

He smells the banquet before he sees it: the sweet sticky smell of spilled wine. The smell of pomades, too, of the fragrant oils with which Calidorus and his friends anoint themselves before a feast. It is the smell of money, copiously spent.

He is late for the party. This is a mistake. He had not realized how long the temple service had gone on, he had stumbled back home dazed and would be grateful for a bath and a sleep. But although no one chides him, the anxiety of the slaves shows that he has made a bad error. One of the men hurriedly washes him with a wet cloth, another dresses him in a fresh robe and tries to touch his hair with the perfume. He grabs the man’s wrist as he approaches with the stone vial.

“No,” he says.

The slave, who has tended to him a hundred times, looks puzzled but places the perfume vial back on the table. “My master is waiting,” he says.

“Waiting” is something of an exaggeration. The feast had begun without Iehuda. In the dining room, six men are reclining on upholstered couches arranged around a low table. The table is well furnished. The men have silver cups of wine mixed with honey. There are dates, olives, bread, white cheese with herbs, dishes of lentils with fruit and in the center a huge ocean-fish with sliced citrons, dill and parsley. The men are drunk already and the meal is not even halfway over.

“Ah, Judas”—Calidorus pronounces his name in the Greek fashion—“we were beginning to think you had forgotten about us entirely.”

There is acid in his tone.

“Never,” says Iehuda. “I was detained by some business in the market, that is all. My apologies, gentlemen.”

Calidorus eyes him suspiciously.

“Business? I thought”—he puts on a laugh—“that all the business you would ever have is been and gone.”

“My apologies,” says Iehuda.

It is time for him to perform.

He is not exactly a guest at the banquet, just as he has not exactly been a guest in Calidorus’s house these past months. Not a slave, no certainly not that, but neither precisely a friend. He has been treated well, allowed to roam as he please, fed and supplied generously with wine, given clothes and two rooms of his own and even writing instruments and certain books. But there have been these parties. His presence has been requested in a way which is slightly firmer than an invitation. He has begun to wonder what might happen if he refused one of these generous offers of “an evening with some friends.”

He takes a stance in the center of the room. The other men hush each other loudly, one spitting into the fish with an excessively enthusiastic “shhhhh.” In a dark corner of the room, Iehuda notices, two slaves are standing almost motionless.

Calidorus introduces him with the usual flourish.

“Behold the man before you,” he says, “once a follower and close confidant of a man some called the King of the Jews, but now a guest in my house. Since the subject of debate tonight is the gods, whether they are wise or foolish, to be loved or to be feared”—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia since Iehuda came to stay—“his assistance will be invaluable!” He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. “Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!”

“We have heard,” says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, “that you Jews believe that your God lives in only one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?”

The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help him to some wine.

Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose to pass them on, unthinking?

He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.

“Ah,” he replies to the drunken fool, “perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his…favors.” He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.

But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.

“You’d do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn’t stray so much!”

The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and scowls and drinks more wine.

Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don’t embarrass important guests.

“Ah”—he fakes a little laugh—“perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god.”

He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.

“Yes,” rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, “you can’t trust women.”

Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.

“But now,” says Iehuda, “to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard.” He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.

“Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else’s.”

He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would never have occurred to him to be unfaithful to her. Perhaps they would not even believe that he had never eaten the flesh of a pig.

So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule. In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah — his friend, the man he loved best in all the world — becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule. Iehuda becomes the naïve innocent who says, “If you irritate their skin, they will swat at us all.” He paints himself as foolish, giving his friend up and believing that Pilate would do no more than scold him. The men laugh. They drink more wine. Calidorus is pleased.

And while he tells this liar’s tale, Iehuda reminds himself of how it really was. He does this every time, although it pains him, because he must know it, if only in his heart.

He had been so holy and abstemious that no Roman would believe it. His father had died when he was a boy. He had worked the farm, and attended the Temple on holy days, and cared for his mother and his two younger sisters, and only when they were fed, and wed, did he think of himself. He was a boy who loved the Lord too much, if such there is. Loved Him too much and thought of Him too much, and wanted only to do His will and know His words. The days in Jerusalem for the three festivals were his only respite from work, and they were joyous indeed, for then he was close to the place where God lived. And when he married — yes, at twenty-eight, and yes, a virgin, and yes, this had not seemed a special hardship to him — a thoughtful and hardworking and quiet man, when he lay with his wife that first time he thought of the deed as much a joining with God as with the shrewd and lusty woman, Elkannah, who had consented to marry him.

She worked in the fields by his side and spun wool and wove cloth and baked bread, and he felt lucky past imagining — though he was too serious a man ever to be freely joyful. His beard was long and full, though Elkannah used to sit astride him on the bed and trim it with the knife when he let her. He still remembers the curve of her behind and how neatly it fitted into his two cupped palms, and how his cock would rise to meet her while she wriggled on his lap and laughed and told him to hold still or she would end by stabbing him with this knife and who then would provide for her and the children they would surely have, would he think about that?

But when he was twenty-nine a hard fever passed through the village of Qeriot. It had been a long hot spring when they were taken down and water was short in the mountain streams. Only the well gave a good supply and some days they were too weak to lift and turn the bucket. It was a blinding fever, putting black spots in front of the eyes and then making it too painful to look out in full sunlight. But it was his fault, he knew, even though he had been as sick as her. He should have found a way to get water.

On the third day, he managed to leave his bed to walk to the well. He tottered like a newborn lamb all the way there and all the way back, with the black spots hovering at the edges of his sight, but when he brought back the water Elkannah was dead. Quiet in the bed, as if she had slipped out between one breath and the next. As if she had simply forgotten to take that next breath and might remember in a moment, wipe her hands on her apron, chide herself for her foolishness. But she was gone.

And then something else was gone, suddenly and without his consent.

It was not the sweet soft scent of his wife in bed in the mornings that he missed the most — though he missed her beyond enduring. He missed most the God who he had always felt watching over him, who in quiet moments he would speak to and imagine that he heard a comforting response. Who he had wept to on long nights after his father had died and who had placed a hand upon his neck and said, “I am your Father in heaven, and I shall give you strength.” He felt that the line joining him to heaven — like the cord that connects a baby to its mother — had been severed. Perhaps the Father was still there, but Iehuda’s face was turned so far away that he could not tell any longer.

He thinks now that it may have been a crime to feel as he did. To mourn for a God more than for a wife? But it is so.

Some time passed, but he did not measure it. A handful of seasons, and he worked still just the same, because what else was there to do, and the people of the village — who had themselves lost parents and children, spouses and siblings — said to themselves, “Before long he will take another wife, he will have sons and daughters and forget this first one.” They did not know that his heart was as cold as the earth and as empty as a dry wheat husk.

And then the man came to the village. Iehuda had heard nothing of him. The decision to go and listen to him speak was merely the choice between a long night alone in his home and sitting with the people to hear whatever foolishness they would hear. He had seen dozens of such preachers over the years, he and Elkannah had gone to listen to them sometimes and joked over their prattle or, occasionally, debated their wisdom.

This man had not been so much different, at first. Telling tales to illustrate his messages, talking about God’s love. At a certain point, he fell silent. Sifted the earth with his hand. Rubbed his forehead. Looked up, as if searching through the crowd, and with his eyes found Iehuda, and he held the gaze, and held it, and Iehuda could not look away.

“You are looking for God,” said the preacher, “but God is also looking for you. And He will find you. He has found you tonight.”

And Iehuda felt tears starting in his eyes.

“You have lost much.” The man spoke in a level tone, neither emphasizing nor attempting to persuade. He spoke as if he were hearing the simple truth from heaven.

“God has felt your loss,” he said, “and He has not forgotten you, although you have turned your face away from Him. He speaks to you today as a Father. Tell me whom you have lost.”

This was no secret. Any child in the street could have told him that Qeriot had been struck by the sickness. Every person had lost something.

Iehuda said, “My wife.” It was defiant, the way he said it. Challenging the man to impress him.

“And your father?”

It was a lucky guess, Iehuda told himself, nothing more, a guess from a preacher. How many men of thirty have not lost their fathers? The man could not have known that he had lost him especially young, that he had taken it especially hard.

But still he said, “Yes.”

And the man, whose name was Yehoshuah, unfolded his long limbs and stood up from the earth and walked over to Iehuda and gave him a hand to lift him up. He put his hands on Iehuda’s shoulders and said, “You think that your Father in heaven has forgotten you. But your Father in heaven is here. Now. Guiding me to you today. Listen,” he said, “this story is for you.”

And he told a story to the crowd.

There was once a man who had two sons. And because he had business both near and far, he sent one of his sons to do all his commerce in the city and kept one by him to learn the ways of the farm. That son who was sent away burned with rage, for he was kept from those he loved, and from his father. He sent angry letters back to his father, begging him to let him return, but the father left him there for ten long years, while his brother raised a family, and lived at home, and tended the fields. At last, after many years, the father brought the son home from the city.

“Father,” said the son, “why did you keep me away so long?”

And the father said, “My beloved son, you were always on my business, every moment you were away. And now that you have come to understand all my doings, this farm and all that is in it is yours.”

“So it is,” said Yehoshuah, “with men. It is those who suffer who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, and our Father in heaven has already picked out a golden seat for you, my friend. He loves you best of all.”

The man moved on with his talking and preaching. But it was as though Iehuda had been struck by lightning through the top of his head and into the ground, because he wanted it so much to be true. Not like Job’s suffering, a test. But as this man had said, a gift.

That night the man made camp near to the brook, with a small fire and some gifts of food for his trouble and three of his friends, for few men followed him then. Iehuda, with about eight or nine others from the village, sat with them in their camp and listened to them talk.

There were things the man said that filled Iehuda with fire, as if his blood had turned to flame.

There was a beggar among the group, and when the rest of them opened up their packs and ate their barley cakes and olives or dried fish, he had no food to eat. They each gave him a little of their own to make up a meal and he ate ravenously, gratefully.

Yehoshuah sifted the dirt under his hands and said, “Why do we give charity?”

Iehuda replied quickly, “It’s written in the Torah: ‘When your brother becomes poor, extend your hand to him, and strengthen him — even the convert and the settler.’ God commanded it.”

Yehoshuah nodded slowly. “Now answer me this. Why is it written in the Torah? Why did God command it?”

Iehuda blinked. This is not a question a man can hope to answer. To ask, “Why did God do so?” is as much as to say, “I can understand the infinite mind of God.”

“For our highest good,” piped up one of the others. “All God’s commandments are for our good.”

“But why?” pressed Yehoshuah. “Why is it good for us? Why did God lay this down for us?”

There was silence around the fire. The three men who had arrived with Yehoshuah must already know the answer, or the special point he was making. The others were dumb, afraid that they would give the wrong response. Iehuda, suddenly tired of the game and of this man trying to make them feel stupid, replied.

“It’s not given to us to know why God does anything,” he said. “Our job is to listen to His commands and obey them.”

The other men nodded. This is what it means to be a pious Jew: to learn the law and to obey it.

“Like the soldiers of Caesar?” said Yehoshuah, a smile on his lips. “Like a man bought for hire? To do without knowing the reason for what you do? Our God is not a tyrant. He would not have given us sharp minds if we were not meant to use them. Think. Why did God tell us to give charity?”

At this, two of the men quietly began to pack up their things to go. Yehoshuah did not try to detain them. He had compared their belief to the blind obedience of the soldiers; he must have known this would be intolerable to some.

Iehuda felt his mind stretch after the question, though. It was a good question. If he had to make a guess at the reasoning of God — and even the thought was faintly sickening, like looking down a long drop — if he had to guess, he might say…

“Perhaps God has commanded us to help the poor because He loves them.”

Yehoshuah clapped him on the back: “This is a good answer, my friend! See, we have been reasoning for but a few moments and already we have puzzled out who God loves! And from His commandments, who else does He love?”

“The blind and the crippled…” Iehuda began, thinking of the commandment not to put a stumbling block before the blind. “The widow and the orphan? For it says in the Torah, ‘Do not mistreat widows and orphans. If you mistreat them, I will hear their cries.’”

“Yes,” said Yehoshuah, “God has a special love for women without husbands, sons without fathers. Think more. Why does God say, ‘Love your neighbor’?”

Iehuda had it now. “Because God loves…” He paused. “He loves those who are near to us?”

“Has he not taught us all to love our neighbors? Is not every person the near neighbor of some other person? Even soldiers, are they not—”

“No,” said Iehuda, extremely irritated, “soldiers are not neighbors. If you go on this way you will have us sharing our food with the men who come to burn our crops and marrying our daughters to the men who raped our wives.” He paused.

Yehoshuah looked at him, interested.

Encouraged, Iehuda went on, “You cannot know what God had in mind for us. He told us to love our neighbors, that is enough. If we start adding to the law where will we be? Like the Romans, making little gods to tell us everything we want to do is right.”

“How if I say this?” said Yehoshuah. “The Torah says, ‘Love your neighbor.’ But since everyone is someone’s neighbor, I say, ‘Love your enemy.’”

“That’s nonsense. We could love them, but it would not make them love us.”

“But imagine if everyone did so. Imagine if we spread that word. Love your enemy. From village to village and town to town. What would happen? Imagine it.”

Trying to grasp it made Iehuda’s mind stutter.

“I cannot imagine,” he said at last. And then, because he yearned to understand, “Explain it to me, teacher.”

Yehoshuah put his rough palm on the back of Iehuda’s hand.

“If the world were filled with people who listened to these few words, only these words, we would build the kingdom of heaven on earth. That is why I travel from village to village. That is the work of my life. To teach people to look into the words of God until they see the heart of everything. Imagine it: the Romans and the Greeks and the Syrians and the Babylonians and the Persians, imagine if we all learned, together, to love one another.”

Iehuda allowed his mind to follow, across the map of the wide world, across the empires and kingdoms that fought and tried to rule and subdue each other. And he imagined what might happen if these words traveled from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next, if this simple message — love your enemy — were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it could happen.

“If one man went against it,” he said at last, “the whole thing would be broken. In a world like that, a world of peace, a world of soft people with no knives, one man could destroy everything.”

“Then we cannot rest until every man has heard it. Think,” said Yehoshuah softly, “what shall we use up our lives for? More war, like our fathers and their fathers, more of that? Or shall we use ourselves for a better purpose? Is this not worth your life?”

And Iehuda saw it, just for a moment. In this instant, the whole world was new to him.

He could not stop thinking after that. His mind was rattling like a cart on a rock-strewn road, picking up speed, heading downhill helter-skelter, jerking and bouncing. He wondered if he were going mad.

When the other men went home, past midnight, he stayed and talked with Yehoshuah, asking each question as it came to him, sometimes sitting silently for a long time.

“What about people who come to harm you? What shall we do if they try to hurt us?”

Yehoshuah stretched out his long body on the bedding roll over the stones. He put his hands behind his head, leaned back and looked at the dark, coruscant sky.

“What do you think, Iehuda,” he said, “what does your heart tell you?”

Yehoshuah had folded one leg over another. His simple brown traveling robe was stained with dust and sweat. The skin of his face and arms and legs was sun-worn and weathered. He was still so young, though. How had he come to know so much?

“I am trying…” he said, and came to a halt. He tried to think afresh, to imagine a world entirely new, with no certainties, but he could not make himself bend. “If we must love our enemies, and our enemy is the empire of Rome, would we not have to become their slaves?”

Again and again, all he could come back to was the single alternative he knew.

“Would we be like the priests in the Temple,” he said at last, knowing it was a kind of capitulation, angry with himself for not being able to think further, “bowing and scraping to Rome? Trying to please them?”

Yehoshuah sat up a little. “Come and lie by me,” he said.

He shifted position to make room for Iehuda.

Iehuda came and lay beside him.

“Look up at the heavens,” said Yehoshuah, “look at the stars.”

Iehuda looked. The sky was crammed with stars as a pomegranate is filled with honey-sweet seeds.

“We know that God is in the heavens,” said Yehoshuah. “He looks down on us all from there as from the top of a mountain.”

Iehuda felt it. God looking down on him. He had forgotten.

“God doesn’t choose his dwelling place by accident,” said Yehoshuah. “Look at the stars. Is any one of them raised a single cubit above his fellows? Has God placed a crown upon one of them? Do they rule one another?”

Iehuda shook his head.

“So, think.”

“If we cannot fight Rome, we must become their slaves…” he began.

“Must we?”

Iehuda thought about it. His mind was so clear now, it was as if he had removed the top of his head and the starlit sky was pouring through him, into his heart.

“Could we somehow love them and continue to live as we always lived before they came…? But they would kill us.”

“Do you think so? A whole country?”

Yehoshuah moved his arm slightly, so his fingers touched Iehuda’s. Iehuda felt the touch as a burst of warmth starting in his hand and radiating up through his arm, across his chest, blooming in great sunbursts along his body.

Yehoshuah said, “It is possible to love with dignity. Listen. If a man hits you on the cheek, give him your other cheek to hit. That is what he wants — give it to him freely. If a soldier commands you to carry something for him for one mile, carry it two miles. That is love — to show you are giving it by choice as a free man, not because of a command. If they demand you give them your coat, give them your shirt too.”

Iehuda imagined it. A rainstorm. A soldier demanding he give up his coat — such things happen. And him taking off his shirt too and standing bare-chested in the rain for this ideal of love.

“They will take us for madmen.”

“Seeing such love will change them. This is how we will bring the message.”

“You are talking about a new earth,” he said, “and then what?”

Yehoshuah smiled.

“I do not know. But I believe my Father in heaven will find an answer for us.”

“And what are we to do?”

“Now?” Yehoshuah’s voice dropped very low. “God came to me in the desert and He told me to spread this word. It is my holy duty. And you, Iehuda, He has told me that you will come with me and help me and be my friend.”

Yehoshuah patted Iehuda’s flank, like a man thanking a loyal and obedient horse, pulled his robe around him and rolled over on the blanket to sleep.

Iehuda lay down but his whole body was vibrating like the plucked string of a harp. He knew he had to join them. When they walked on from Qeriot, over the dusty yellow hills north to Hevron, he would go with them. This man, he thought, this fervent, righteous man, would change the whole world.

There were more of them soon. And more, and more. They walked from town to town and in each place there would be some men — and once or twice a woman — to whom Yehoshuah was especially drawn, for whom he seemed to have a particular message, a new parable or saying. And they would sit talking until the fire died low and in the morning one or two or three men would walk on with them.

They became something, and it was not clear precisely how it had happened. In Iehuda’s memory, one day they were walking dusty-footed into a town and the old women were spitting out their chewed-up leaves as they passed and people were only coming to hear Yehoshuah because at least he was a new thing, like a peddler or traveling musicians. And then suddenly, arriving at a new village, people came out to meet them. Young men and women, and children, tugging on their robes and saying, “Is that him, is that him?”

But when he thinks of it, it is not so strange. Because of course, there were also the cures.

He had not made any cures in Qeriot. He did not always do it. Only when there was a certain kind of person or, Iehuda noticed, an especially large crowd. He felt unkind and unworthy for noticing this, but he could not put it out of his mind once he had seen it.

In Remez, where there were five children gone blind with the same pox that had afflicted Iehuda’s wife, Yehoshuah touched them on the head and whispered that God would comfort them and make them strong, but made no cure. In Chidyon, where a girl who had lost both legs and pulled herself on a little wheeled tray by her arms begged Yehoshuah to help her, he wept tears at her suffering, and prayed with her for courage and for the blessings of God, but no new limbs sprouted where the old ones had been.

But in Kfar Nachum there was a great crowd, about two hundred people, and several had brought members of their family who had been unwell for years. From among them, Yehoshuah picked out a man who was wailing and shouting and ripping at his own hair and garments. He was possessed by a demon, they could all see it, the kind who attacks the innocent and the guilty, who will jump into a child if they can.

Iehuda had seen demons like these rip a man slowly apart, cause him to dash his own head against a wall, or to attack his wife and children or to throw himself from a high place and make an end of his life. There had been a man in Qeriot like this, so tormented by the things the demons shouted to him in his own head that he bit chunks of flesh from his arms and the wounds began to stink and so he died.

This man in Kfar Nachum was snarling like a dog when they brought him to Yehoshuah, pulling off his cloak to show his bum to the women standing in a half circle beneath the tree. He snapped and howled and made to grab the women and tear at them with his teeth, and many ran from him and Iehuda was not surprised.

But Yehoshuah was not afraid. Two of the man’s brothers held him steady. They offered to sit on his chest to keep him still, but Yehoshuah looked into the man’s eyes and said, “You will be peaceful for me. For you know I am your master.”

And the man stared at him like a frightened dog finally finding the leader of his pack. There was fear in his eyes but also relief and a quality of begging.

“Let his arms and legs go,” said Yehoshuah.

“But master,” said the brothers, “he will run wild and attack the women, he has done it before.”

“Let him go,” said Yehoshuah, in the same level tone, still looking into the man’s eyes.

They let go and the man did not move.

“Tell me your name,” said Yehoshuah. “Demon in this man’s soul, tell me your name.”

The man rolled his eyes back in his head, and whined and howled and gnashed his teeth, but he did not move.

“Tell me your name,” said Yehoshuah again, “in the name of God our Father I command it.”

And then the demon in the man spoke. Its voice was a growl like a wolf and a low hiss like a lizard and it said, “I am Ba’al Nakash, the Lord of Snakes, and this man is mine.”

The people were amazed, because this demon had never told them its name before, and everyone knew that a demon can be commanded by its name.

So Yehoshuah put his hand on the man’s forehead, and even though his eyes rolled and his teeth gnashed he remained still.

Yehoshuah said, “Ba’al Nakash, in the name of God our Father I command you to come out of this man!”

The man fell to the floor with a great gasp and a choking sound. His body began to shake and the people muttered to each other, “That is the demon, trying to hold on.”

Yehoshuah knelt down and put his hands on the man’s chest and shouted, “Ba’al Nakash, I command you to come out of this man!”

The man writhed and hissed and bit through his own tongue so that blood and spittle foamed from his mouth. He clawed at the ground until his fingernails broke and bled on the stones, and he writhed and threw himself against the rocks until great bruises began to show on his body. Yehoshuah took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then, with one hand on the man’s chest, he gave his order.

“By the name of Yahaveh!” said Yehoshuah, and the people gasped, because this is the true name of God, which is never to be spoken aloud, except by the High Priest in the holiest place in the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, but Yehoshuah spoke it in this backwater village for the curing of one demon-infested man. “By the name of Yahaveh, come out of him!”

And hearing this forbidden name of power, the man’s whole body stiffened, his back arched and he let out a wild scream. The people said afterwards that they had never been more sure they heard a demon in all their days. In neighboring villages, they said they had heard that scream, five miles distant.

It lasted for the time of ten breaths, and everyone heard that it was the sound of the demon leaving the man’s body. Some said they saw black smoke rise up from his mouth, but Iehuda did not see it, only the clouds of dust he raised from his thrashing. But when the scream ended the man was still and it was obvious that the demon had left him.

A boy at the back of the crowd suddenly called out, “A snake!”

And they turned, terrified, expecting a giant snake, a demon the size of a man. But it was just a mottled viper, lazily coiled behind some rocks.

“The demon has gone into it!” shouted someone, and another boy picked up a stone and threw it at the snake. Then more and more pelted it, and though it arched its back and bared its fangs just like the demon-haunted man had done, it could not win against so many and soon enough it was dead.

They brought the limp, crushed snake to the man, dangling it by its tail. He was sitting up now and blinking, probing his bitten tongue with one finger as the bloody saliva spilled from his mouth. Though the demon was gone from him, he was not as a normal man — no one could expect it — he seemed dazed, and frowned and muttered, but he did not growl or hiss any longer. He blinked at the snake as they laid it beside him.

“That was your demon,” said one of them. “Burn it and you will be free forever.”

But Yehoshuah smiled and clasped the man’s hand.

“Your faith in God and in His holy name has set you free,” he said.

That night the village killed three yearling goats to feed them. And the next morning, when they walked on, more than ten men and women of the village came with them.

There had been others traveling with Yehoshuah before Iehuda arrived, but Iehuda knew that he was special to him. Yehoshuah could tell him things the others could not understand.

After Yehoshuah had taken the snake demon out of the man in Kfar Nachum, they sat up talking long after the others were sleeping the sleep of those whose bellies are filled with roasted goat.

“How does God tell you,” said Iehuda, “which to cure?”

Yehoshuah thumbed the edge of his sleeping blanket.

“I can see,” he said, “which demons will listen to me.”

Iehuda lay back on his own blanket.

“I knew a man in Qeriot ran mad with a demon,” he said. “He would dash his head against walls.”

“Demons make men do such things,” said Yehoshuah.

“But when his mother spoke to him,” said Iehuda, “he became calm. For a while. It was only after she died that the demon would not let him be. He died of that demon, but while his mother was alive he could hearken to her voice and not the demon’s.”

Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire with a stick.

“Is it like that with you?” said Iehuda.

Yehoshuah shrugged. “I do not understand what you are asking me.”

“If a demon listens to a man’s mother,” Iehuda said, “it is not because the mother has power over the demon. The mother has power over the man. The name you spoke today has power over all men. Not just demons, but men as well.”

Yehoshuah threw back his head and laughed.

“This questioning is the wisdom I taught you,” he said. “Use it always with me. You are right. I do not know how I do what I do. When I speak, the demons may listen, but what happens next is in God’s hands.”

They walked on and their host became bigger. Mighty. A multitude. There started to be another group too, among those who came to hear Yehoshuah speak, or watch him doing his cures and casting out demons. They were the other rabbis. They were only to be expected. They came to wrestle with him.

Some met him boldly. In Emek, Ezra the Teacher challenged him to debate and after they had finished calling one another fools Ezra held Yehoshuah close to his breast and brought them all in for supper. In Me’etz, they set up two great piles of stones and had Yehoshuah and their own teacher, Nechemiah, preach atop them. In Refek, the people asked Yehoshuah questions in turn until his patience was utterly exhausted and he cried out that no man could bear such an assault without a cask of wine.

They tried to trip him up, and find the flaw, and winkle out his hidden assumptions and specious reasoning. For Iehuda, these were the most glorious days. Everyone knew that the debates were the “arguments for the sake of heaven” of which the sages speak with praise.

The more a man argues with you, the more he respects you. The more he tries to pick holes in your argument, the gladder is the Holy One Who is in All Places. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai argued with each other so fiercely that their followers attacked one another bodily — several of their students were killed in these fights. And though this is to be regretted, their ardor for debate is commendable. For how are we to hear the infinitely stranded voice of God except in the grappling voices of those who care about the Torah and seek out its never fully graspable truth?

Some rabbis were merely angry, of course. Lesser men and weak men. Every part of the world contains men who cannot bear to hear their words questioned. They are people who believe that only their purple robe or their silver chain gives them power over others. They forget that Moses had only a staff of wood and stuttered when he spoke. And there were such men in Yehoshuah’s camp too — some of his followers could not bear to hear him questioned, just as some of the rabbis could not bear to hear his criticism.

But the best men on each side rejoiced in the fight, chewing on the muscle of it, crunching at the bones of it. And when the arguments were done, in the light of early dawn, more men and more women walked on with them to the next village, and the next.

It was about this time that there started to be twelve of them. The closest ones, the inner circle. Iehuda would not have imagined that the group could grow so large as to need an inner circle, but it had done so. They needed to exclude the provocateurs in their midst sowing dissent or spying for Rome. There were spies, of course. Yehoshuah needed trusted men.

He came to each of them separately, whispering that he had need of their counsel, their eyes and ears. It took Iehuda a little time to work out who the other trusted men were. He noticed that, although there had been many questioners in the outer circle, he was the only one in that inner group who had been known to argue back, to challenge in open meeting.

There had been a time when they made no distinctions. At Beit Saida, when everyone had shared a single meal, Yehoshuah had seemed to be saying that all distinctions would be swept away. But now Iehuda was the only speck of dissent left in the inner circle. He could not speak to the others.

“Do you know what they are saying of you?” he asked.

Yehoshuah frowned, but said nothing. They were alone, by the fire. It was late at night and the others were asleep. It was like it had been at the start. There were not enough such nights now.

“They are saying that you are the Messiah. The one we wait for. The true son of David. The one who will end all disease and suffering. The one whose arrival we will know because there will be no more war and all the dead will rise from the grave.”

He wanted to carry on, to list all the different kinds of magic that the Messiah would do, to make Yehoshuah laugh. He wanted so much for him to laugh. If Yehoshuah laughed, then Iehuda could laugh too, and they could go back to talking about remaking the world through their work and struggle and not waiting for God to bless them with miracles when the true son of David was on the throne.

He did not laugh.

“Are you going to make a lion lie down with a lamb?” said Iehuda, and there was accusation in his voice. “Are you going to rebuild all the cities that have been destroyed?”

Yehoshuah spoke very low and quietly: “Who knows what may happen through God’s will?”

There was no argument against this. But still Iehuda knew what he knew in his heart.

“I think some of them already believe it,” he said. “You should tell them to stop saying it, even among themselves.”

Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire.

“It is not for me to stop them. They must speak the truth as they find it.”

And Iehuda wanted to shake him by the shoulders, to slap his face, to say: for God’s sake, man, all that we have worked for, all that we have talked about. But he saw that it was too late for that.

“You have begun to believe it yourself, haven’t you?” and his voice was angry and he could not stop it. “You’ve listened to what they’ve said about you. Like Herod, who could only hear the flattery of his sycophants, you have listened to it too much.”

Yehoshuah became pale and still. His nostrils flared, his eyes reflecting the dying fire, and he said, “Do you think that you know the will of God better than I?”

And Iehuda remembered the man who had taught him to listen to the knowledge of his own heart, and to think out each precept like a Greek, testing it for the signs of truth and for what could be learned from it.

“I think,” he said, very slowly, “that if God has chosen you, He will tell us in his own time, and until then we should not think of it.”

Yehoshuah smiled at that. His old, easy smile.

“Is this my own wisdom you are handing back to me?”

“Yes.” Iehuda smiled too. “If you cannot tell them ‘I am not he,’ then at least do not think of it until God makes it all very clear. Or,” and he laughed, “until the hour of your death. For if you die without becoming the king, we will know you were not the Messiah.”

“I shall have to repent of my folly on my deathbed, then,” said Yehoshuah, and chuckled, and leaned back on the heels of his hands.

It was a little time after that that he sent them out across the land to spread his words and to heal the sick. It did not matter that they said, “I cannot heal as you heal, I do not have the power as you have it”; he touched them on the brow and murmured, “Do what you can.” And they went to try to do what they could. They would meet again in three weeks and bring with them new followers or not as God willed it.

It was clever, also, to disband at this time. The group had grown too large. There had begun to be spies from the local authorities at the edges of the gatherings. A quiet cluster of them sometimes, listening to the words, watching the mood of the people. Any man who can lead a rabble is a threat to an empire. To love their enemies did not mean to submit to them. Rome was interested in anything that stirred people up. So they broke apart, for Rome would have broken them otherwise.

Iehuda set off in high excitement. Most of the other men had gone in pairs but he, and some others, had decided each to go alone. To see what God meant for him to do. And so he came to the place.

It was a village in the east. He does not remember the name now, and he will never go there again. A small place, perhaps eight or nine homes with fields all on hillsides, so that it was with effort that the seed was sown and with pain it was reaped. A place where the living was hard. He arrived in the evening, a preacher in the name of Yehoshuah, whom two or three of them had seen before in Galilee. They fed him soup of lentils and hard bread and he knew it was more than they could afford. When he was left alone in one of the shacks by the field he looked into an earthenware grain store. It was empty, save for two dead wasps at the bottom of the jar.

And there they brought him a boy. The child was perhaps ten years old and crippled. He had a misshapen leg: the bone of it was bent and the knee joint swollen and the skin sore and the whole leg crushed by the weight of his body, so that he had to support himself on a stick. His armpit was blistered from the place where the stick rested. His whole body was overturned by that leg.

Iehuda’s heart leapt out of his body when he saw that boy, and his spirit flew over to him and touched the boy’s heart. He felt it. This poor crippled child needed the love and mercy of God more than anyone he had ever seen. He felt the sore places as if they were on his own leg, and the crooked bone as if it were his bone, and the stiff, aching, oozing joint as if it were his own body crying out in pain.

He prayed to God as he had learned as a child, calling him “Father.” Father, he said, heal this child, take his suffering from him, make him whole as I am whole. Do not refuse, as a father would never withhold water from his thirsty child if he had it. Father, you have the healing of this child in your hands. He felt the power in him, the tingling in his fingertips, the heat in the palm of his hand, and he knew that when he touched the boy the power would flow out of him, and as he lowered his hand he was already saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

He thought of the men and women he had seen Yehoshuah heal with his touch, how the demons of pain fled from their bodies, how their backs unbent and their flesh became whole. And the boy on his mother’s knee, both of them looking at him with such trust because everyone had seen the power of God working through Yehoshuah to cure any affliction.

“Thank you,” said Iehuda under his breath as he lowered his hands onto the twisted limb, “thank you, Father, for making me your conduit to do this holy work.” And he grasped the leg with his hands so full of warmth, as if his arm were the outstretched arm of the Almighty, as if his fingers were the mighty hand of God.

Later, when they gathered again as Yehoshuah had told them, the disciples sat around the campfire and told their tales. Mattisyahu told how he had cured the boils of a man afflicted for ten years with this horrible skin disease. A good storyteller, he made them all imagine the suppurating wounds, the pus flowing out from every sore place, the stench of rot on the man’s clothes and the contortion of his face every time he moved and the cloth rubbed against one of his agonizing pustules. Mattisyahu said that he had called upon the name of God, that he had prayed as he had been taught, and when one of the women bathed the man’s legs they found that the sores came off as they washed and that the flesh underneath was new and whole and without pain. “Like the skin of a new-shorn lamb,” said Mattisyahu.

There were other stories like this. Netan’el had cast out seven demons from a woman in Be’er Sheva who had previously spat like a camel and cursed and screeched at anyone who tried to approach her. He had seen the demons rise from her like smoke, he said, like white ash flying up from a fire made of very old dry wood. The demons rose into a tree and went into a flock of birds nesting there, who shat mightily upon the people gathered to watch. But the people were handy with their slingshots and stones and brought the birds down, so then the demons were no more.

Yehoshuah listened to these tales calmly, nodding when one of the disciples mentioned a prayer he had used, or a way he had found to bring greater faith to the people watching.

When it came to Iehuda’s turn, he told his story quickly. He had none of Mattisyahu’s gift with a yarn.

“There was a boy,” he said, “he had a bandy leg, and I called on God by name as my father and the boy’s leg was healed.”

The others clapped him on the back and thanked God for the great miracle.

Yehoshuah looked at him shrewdly and said nothing.

Iehuda wondered how many of them had lied as he’d done. Was Mattisyahu’s tale, full of incident and detail, just an elaborate deception? Was Philip’s simple story of a blind woman given sight a sign that he, like Iehuda, was too embarrassed to say more than a few words?

Iehuda had laid his hands on the boy’s leg. He felt the power in him, in his heart and his hands, a warm tingling rush inside his whole body, the spirit of God moving him, so that he understood why God is called a terror as well as a love. He felt the power go into the boy, and praised the name of God, the one who is and was and will be.

And the boy smiled, and shivered, a shudder going through him. And the leg twitched. And the boy said, “It is so warm!” And he moved his leg and said, “It moves more easily.” But it was not healed. They could all see it. It was still bent, and the sore place in the skin was still raw and he could not put his weight on it.

The boy’s mother looked at Iehuda.

“You may be a man of God,” she said, “but there is no power in you.”

The boy’s father shushed her, and the boy protested that the pain was a little easier, that it would surely mend. But the mother, who knew her son’s body better than her own, knew that nothing had changed.

They offered him a bed for the night still, a place by the fire and a meal for his trouble. And in the morning, when he woke by the ashes of the fire in the lean-to, he saw the boy limping across the yard, dragging his leg. When the boy saw Iehuda, he tried to straighten himself, to smile.

“It is easier already!” he cried, and Iehuda gave a sickened smile in return.

But the mother looked at them both from the door of the house with dark and angry eyes. And Iehuda left, not stopping to break his fast.

He thought, on the slow, dragging walk back, of what Yehoshuah would have done. Had he been there he would have said, “The cure is not in me but in God,” or he would have said, “God has not chosen to bless you in this way, I am sorry for it,” and he would have told them a tale that proved that those who suffered were the most beloved, that God had them close in his heart. Yehoshuah would have told him that the power was not for him to command.

And if Yehoshuah had said those things to him, he still would have known that his faith had been weak, and that was why the boy was not healed. He had seen Yehoshuah do it. The other disciples said they had done it. And the worm chewed at his heart, because he knew that God had not favored him.

He could not sit with the others that night as they shared bread and oil and talked of the great miracles that God surely had in store for them in the future. He wandered down to the camp of the foreigners, where the non-Jewish people interested in the teachings of Yehoshuah slept. It was an accident that he happened to speak to Calidorus. It could as well have been another as him. He did not even know what he was looking for. Maybe only someone to whom he would not have to lie.

Calidorus and some of his friends were playing a dice game by a low-burning fire. When they saw Iehuda approaching, they stood up and offered him the place of honor, but he refused it, preferring to sit and watch them play for a time. “Venus!” called one, when he had thrown a specially lucky set of numbers, and the others cursed him good-humoredly and poured more wine from a leather flask.

As the evening wore on, more of the friends took their bedrolls and made camp, until only Calidorus and Iehuda were left by the last embers of the fire. And Calidorus spoke of his travels and the interesting people he had encountered. He was a scholar of the writings of the Greeks, spoke highly of the Roman Republic — this dream of government by the people had died when Julius Caesar took imperial power, and even to speak of it was to show a measure of trust. So Iehuda, in the end, told him his troubles.

“Ah,” said Calidorus, “I have seen this trick performed. By a man in Shfat, who seemed to plunge his hand into the center of a boy’s chest and pull out a piece of black sticky stuff which a demon had placed inside him. I paid him all the gold in my purse to show me how he did it and the coat on my back to sell me the mechanism.”

He said it matter-of-factly, so that Iehuda showed no surprise on his face. They were men of the world, discussing something everyone knew.

“Would you like to see how it was done?” said Calidorus.

Iehuda nodded slowly.

Calidorus sent a slave to fetch something from a leather bag in the back of his tent and had Iehuda turn away while he prepared. When Iehuda turned back, he showed him the trick. Calidorus concealed a sheep’s bladder in the sleeve of his robe, near the wrist. When he pressed it, a red liquid spurted across his arm and up to his hand.

“It is dyed water,” said Calidorus. “It is better if you use fresh sheep’s blood, though. And a piece of burnt wood resin — it goes sticky and black like this — concealed in the palm.”

He showed Iehuda the piece of tacky material. It looked like the sort of evil a demon might place in a man.

Calidorus shrugged. “If you’re willing to pay enough money, you will discover how a thing was done. I expect your friends did some trick like this, if they did anything at all.”

Iehuda felt afraid, suddenly, in the center of his chest. How many times can a man lose his faith before he ceases to believe in faith itself?

“I saw a holy man once bring a swarm of frogs out of a girl who suffered from the palsy,” he said.

Calidorus smiled.

“Did he lean very close into her?”

Iehuda thought on it. He had been only a child when that gray-bearded preacher came to Qeriot, but now he remembered it, yes, the man had embraced the girl, caught her up from her bed, and then when he let her fall the frogs had begun to swarm, seeming to come from every part of her.

“He had a bag of frogs concealed in his robe,” said Calidorus. “When he pulled her close he emptied that bag into her clothes, so the frogs seemed to come from her when he released her.” Calidorus looked at Iehuda’s face and made a wry half smile. “I was young once too,” he said, “don’t be ashamed. Children believe the stories.” He frowned. “Surely you must have thought this yourself already?”

Iehuda thought: I am entirely alone. Anyone like Calidorus who sought this knowledge out already disbelieved. Why else would one look to learn the truth, except to be proved right in unbelief?

“It hurts me,” he said.

Calidorus’s mouth twisted a little. He clapped a hand on Iehuda’s shoulder, but the gesture was immediately awkward and he withdrew it.

“Ah well,” Calidorus said, “he makes a fine spectacle, your friend.” He laughed. “I am certainly enjoying his story. And some of the things he says are fascinating.”

Iehuda felt a pain rising in the center of his chest. His heart was heavy and he thought: could I be like this man? Could I take it all as an entertainment, a pantomime? There were five hundred people in Yehoshuah’s encampment, some of them talking as if he was the promised Messiah, some of them debating his teachings and some, like Calidorus, simply enjoying the performance. Calidorus’s way seemed easiest — the man’s presence was like a cool spring of fresh water in the fires of Iehuda’s mind. He knew he could not be like Calidorus, but he also knew he could not now unknow the things he knew or unsee the things he had seen.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“What am I now?” he said.

And Calidorus seemed uncomfortable.

“Come and stay with me,” he said, “when you grow tired of following your prophet through this wilderness, come and be my guest in Caesarea. Ask anyone there for my house and they will tell you. When all this is done, come to me.”

He came back to the inner circle changed. He found that he listened differently. He watched differently. He noticed, again and again now, Rome. And how Yehoshuah’s words, and the words of his friends, were a provocation to Rome.

There was an angry tone to him now. Had it always been there? Had Iehuda only just begun to notice it?

On the road to Shomron, men and women ran out of their homes and across the fields to see Yehoshuah. In one place — a rich and fertile land, where the soil was tilled in great soft waves and the barley was growing high and strong — a man was kneeling by the side of the road, waiting for them. He was a prosperous farmer, one could tell immediately by the quality of his boots and the thick wool coat around his shoulders. But he was kneeling at the roadside, tears falling from his cheeks, mumbling.

Yehoshuah bent down to talk to the man. And Iehuda saw that old Yehoshuah, the one whose very presence soothed the heart.

Yehoshuah shook his head softly.

“Do not weep my friend,” he said. “God has told me that He has chosen you to walk with us. Come now.”

This was a great deal to ask. The farm behind them was good. On the hills, a flock of brindled sheep grazed, guarded by a shepherd boy. The boy was probably the man’s son, the sheep probably his flock.

“My father has died,” said the man, the tears still falling silently. “He died this morning, just as you approached. Teacher, give me a blessing.”

Yehoshuah placed his hands on the man’s shoulders.

“You are already blessed,” he said. “Our Father has blessed you with this call. Come and walk with me. We are traveling to Jerusalem. Come now and do not look back.”

The man stared Yehoshuah full in the face. A man who has lost his father is like a man felled by a mighty blow. The death of a mother is the loss of love, but the death of a father is the loss of certainty. The tallest tree that will ever stand in the forest is fallen.

“I must bury my father,” he said. He spoke, Iehuda thought, without hearing his own words. It was not an answer, it was a realization. He said it again. “I cannot walk with you now, for I must bury my father. Let me go and bury my father first.”

Iehuda heard one of the other men — he thought it was Jeremiah — whisper to his fellow, “Is this how he speaks to the son of David?”

If he could, Iehuda would have hit that man in the face, but he realized suddenly that if he did that, it would be dangerous. How had he not known that they had come to this pass, where dissent was dangerous? If he hit the man, the others would say that he did not believe that Yehoshuah was the son of David — that is, the rightful heir to the throne in Jerusalem. And then…he did not know what might happen.

There had been a fight, a week earlier, between some of those different factions. A man had been stabbed with a knife and they had left him in Rafa’at for his wound to mend. Iehuda had not thought of it after that day. But he found himself thinking of it now. What would happen if he argued with this crowd of angry men? He felt afraid. And ashamed of his own fear.

Yehoshuah knelt down and clasped the farmer’s hands.

“Are you dead?” he whispered softly.

The man, pulling one rough paw from Yehoshuah’s grasp to wipe away the tears from his eyes, looked bemused.

“I say again,” said Yehoshuah, “are you dead? For you say you must bury your father,” and then he turned to the crowd behind him, all straining to catch his words, “but I say,” and he raised his voice to a shout, “let the dead bury their dead. You must come with us to announce that the kingdom of God is here!”

The men standing behind Iehuda cheered, for they understood this to mean “nothing is important but our own work,” and the people far back in the throng who could not see what was happening cheered. The tenderhearted women did not cheer, for their hearts went out to the farmer, from whose eyes tears were falling like ripe fruit. And Iehuda did not cheer.

Yehoshuah stood up and walked on. Iehuda looked back at the man in the mud and dust at the side of the road, who would have to bury his father that afternoon.

There grew to be an inner circle within the inner circle. Iehuda was not part of that group. It was Shimon, and Jeremiah, and Jona. They had not been the first to join the wandering rabble, but they were zealous. Jona saw signs and wonders in every speck of dust. Jeremiah muttered darkly about the days that are surely to come when the Lord will destroy all those who do not hearken to his holy name. Shimon was a steady man: he was not enraged by doubters but filled with sorrow and pity for them.

There was a day when Yehoshuah took those three alone up into the hills to pray. They were gone for a night and a day with no food or water. Something happened there, but Iehuda could never root out exactly what it was.

Shimon, the most solid of the three, said that he had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed that Yehoshuah was standing with Moses and Elijah, and this dream had the marks of truth to it and he was convinced by it in his own breast. Jona said he had seen the gates of heaven open and the very voice of the Lord had spoken to him by name, but Jona had been known to hear the voice of the Lord in the honking of geese. Jeremiah would say nothing of what he’d seen, only that it had been vouchsafed to him that Rome would burn and the kingdom of heaven would come to earth, which was no more than he had always said.

The longer Iehuda asked, the less this tale became. And yet he heard in the camp that the three men had been taken up in a fiery chariot to the heavens, where the good Lord had spoken to them and told them Yehoshuah was His promised one. He found one man selling white pebbles which he said had been taken from the holy place where they ascended to heaven. Women were sewing them into the hem of their clothes to keep off the evil eye.

Iehuda wanted to discuss the matter with Calidorus, who continued to travel with them, waited on by his body-slave, even as it pleased him to walk like a pilgrim. But he felt somehow repulsed by the idea. He contented himself with imagining what Calidorus would say. Something Greek, he imagined, something from philosophy. Calidorus often quoted from the philosopher whose very name — Epikouros — was a byword for heresy among the rabbis.

He might say, “The gods, if there are gods, do not concern themselves with us. How can they, when we see the crippled and lame all around us? If it pleases your friends to think that they saw the gods, so be it. It pleases me to go to a play and imagine I have seen Helen of Troy or Agamemnon in his war cry.”

This answer, from an imaginary Calidorus, pleased him. He welcomed the worm into his breast.

An insanity came upon them. They argued over who could sit closest to Yehoshuah, like children fighting over a toy. As if he were already dead and they were arguing over his clothes or the scraps of flesh adhering to his body. Iehuda felt it too. He had always felt it, the desire to be close to the man. The sense that it was impossible to be too close, that he would allow himself to be utterly consumed by Yehoshuah and consider it an honor. This had always been why he struggled so hard to remain separate, to find a place deep in his breast which did not belong to Yehoshuah.

But those weeks, the thing began to tip over into madness. There were more of them every day and at the edges of the group there were more soldiers watching. They all knew that with a rabble this large there would be spies from the Prefect, there would be those who would report his words and deeds and the size of the crowd for a coin or two. But Yehoshuah did not tell them to disperse. It was unwise. They looked now like the kind of rebellious multitude which the Romans dealt with so swiftly and so successfully. They looked like bodies waiting to be nailed up along the road to Jerusalem.

None of the others would say this to Yehoshuah, so it fell to Iehuda again and again to say, when they ate bread together in the evening, “We should be circumspect. We should disband now and re-form in a few weeks, like we did before.”

Yehoshuah did not reply, except with a smile. The others hated Iehuda for saying it. He saw that they were enjoying the sense of danger, for it was also a feeling of power. He could not tell truth from lies anymore. He heard someone say that the priests at the Temple were plotting against them and this sounded like absolute insanity. He heard someone else say that King Herod Antipater in the north had paid for information on Yehoshuah and this also seemed madness. But there was such certainty in the group and he was embedded in it so completely that he could not see them from the outside any longer. Perhaps they really were the most important thing in Judea.

It was coming towards a hot, late Passover. The days and months had fallen out so that it was already full spring by the week before the festival. The air was ripe with the green scent of acacia trees and with the hum of hovering insects.

They came to the house of a friend — a merchant by the name of Shimon, whom people had called Shimon the leper because he was so unpopular. Shimon had been impressed with Yehoshuah’s teachings on the value of riches. The man had given much of his wealth to the poor and every day now the beggars of Beit Ani came to the back door of his home to receive bread. They were to stay there one night, with Yehoshuah in the bed of honor, and then walk on closer to Jerusalem.

The house was heavy with the smell of a great crowd of the sick and the dirty and the poor. The smells all mingled together: body odor and dirty clothes and women’s menstrual blood and a man with fetid sores on his leg and the animals and the tanned animal hides and the half-soured milk in the jars on the floor and the onions on the breath of the camel drivers.

People came for cures, but Yehoshuah performed none that day. His mood was merry and indulgent and he let visitors come with little gifts — a sheepskin, a basket of dried fruits, a silver charm — or to tell him, bowing and twisting their bodies in attitudes of worship, that his face was the face of a holy man, a true prophet of God. Every time they did this, Iehuda felt more uncomfortable.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a wealthy woman wound her way through the crowd. She was dressed in a fine silk robe, her hair elaborately turned in several plaits around her head, and she was mad. Either mad or drunk, as was clear from her unsteady movements, from the way her eyes darted around the room.

She was carrying a small alabaster jar of perfumed oil — the stone was thin, expertly worked, the jar much longer than it was wide, a cool narrow vial. The container alone would be worth a month’s wages. She stopped in front of Yehoshuah’s chair of honor, bowed low, ceremoniously but with a curious simpering smile on her face. She cracked the stem of the jar so that they could smell what she had brought. It was spikenard, a dense scent of mint and spices and a meaty richness. The smell traveled up and around the room, cutting through the sweat and garlic and sour milk with its scouring sharpness. This was a precious gift — people brought them valuable possessions now, she was not the first, but spikenard was one of the rarest components of Temple incense, brought from Kush in India.

The woman smiled lopsidedly. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Iehuda wondered where she’d got the perfume from, what she’d done to obtain this vial worth more than a year’s work for a laboring man. She held the jar in her left hand, and reached out her right to touch a lock of Yehoshuah’s hair. Yehoshuah smiled at the woman. She was breathing very quickly, her breasts rising and falling. A sheen of sweat coated her skin. Iehuda wondered if she was about to throw herself bodily onto Yehoshuah — this had happened before.

Instead, she spoke in a slow, slurred voice:

“May I anoint you?”

Iehuda waited for Yehoshuah’s easy smile, his way of turning a refusal into an honor. He would say no, but he would show her by his kindness that her offer had been accepted in the spirit if not on earth.

This was not what happened.

Yehoshuah’s glance met the woman’s eerie, glazed eyes.

He bowed his head before her for the anointing.

She tipped the vial. The oil began to flow out over Yehoshuah’s hair. It was enough, more than enough, plenty. Someone rushed to stop her — every drop that fell was a meal for twenty people, every thick glug was a pregnant goat, a pair of good shoes, a field golden with high waving wheat. She laughed and cracked the vial between her hands. The whole fortune of it poured out upon Yehoshuah, coating his head, his shoulders, filling the room with the thick, nauseating, choking scent.

There was no other smell now. The aromas of life — of bodies and animals and dirt and fermentation — all those smells were gone, as if the sounds of the world had been blotted out by the clanging of a terrible gong. This one, too-clean odor, the smell of new-cut pine wood, was all that remained. Beautiful, yes, in a way. But revolting, because it was too strong and because it had destroyed everything else.

The woman was giggling still, crushing the alabaster to smaller and smaller pieces in her oil-covered and now blood-streaked hands. One of the other women pulled out a rag to wipe those poor hands. It was not purely a charitable gesture. Even a rag soaked with spikenard would be worth something. The woman did not resist, even when they led her out to the well.

The house emptied quickly. No one could bear to be near the smell of too much goodness gone to waste. The floor was stained with the oil.

“The worms will enjoy their heaven-scented earth,” said Shimon.

There were only three or four of them left around Yehoshuah. Those who never left.

Something was building in Iehuda now. Like vomit, it would not be denied.

Iehuda said, “Why did you let her do it? We could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor people all around us. It’s worth a year’s wages to any of these men.”

He kept his voice low and spoke quickly. There was nothing to be done now about the spikenard. The oil was dripping still from Yehoshuah’s face and hair onto the floor, every drip a meal, a blanket, a handful of good seed. In the streets they would smell the intense foolishness which had been done in this house. Half the village would know it by walking past the door. The earth floor might smell of it for a year or more.

Yehoshuah looked at him, that bright burning look.

“Iehuda,” he said, shaking his sorrowful, dripping head, “Iehuda, why do you insist on seeing only with your eyes?”

I don’t, he wanted to say. I saw you with my heart, and you have led me here, to a place I do not understand.

Iehuda had heard it said: if the rabbis tell you that day is night and night is day, believe them. He thought perhaps he had once been capable of this. He did not know whether he was luckier then, when he could, or now, when he found he could not.

Iehuda tried to swallow it, like a Nile crocodile eating a new lamb. But he could not make it go down. Certain things cannot be right, no matter how you squint at them.

“We could have sold it,” he said again, “to feed the poor.”

“Do you think I will be with you for much longer?” said Yehoshuah. “When God himself lays waste to the whole world, do you think anyone will care that some oil was poured on the earth here?”

And Iehuda shook his head.

And Yehoshuah said, “If you cannot see, I cannot make you understand.”

He trailed behind the group as they walked on from Bethany, pretending to be tired, but he was muttering to himself and the words in his mouth made his pulse quicken.

He said, out loud, to the broken yellow hillside and the scrubby bushes: “Everything can be justified this way.”

He said it again. In different words:

“If the world is to come to an end, how can we know that one thing is right, another wrong?”

He thought of a dozen problems to ask his master. How if the woman had thrown chests of spices into the ocean for Yehoshuah’s sake? How if she had cut herself with lancets, as the Moabites do? How if she had sacrificed her own child? How much waste of wealth, and self, and life, would have slaked him, made him cry, “Enough! Too much!”?

In his mind, he asked him, “How much do you think is due to you? Have you not yet honor enough?”

He could not find it in himself to speak aloud.

They camped that night and he was quiet.

Yehoshuah said, “We have come away from Bethany, but the stink of that perfume is still on your head, Iehuda.”

And he thought: how dare you know me so well as this? How dare you use myself against me?

But he said nothing.

In those days, he saw Calidorus again. The man was getting ready to leave the camp, his slaves strapping boxes to the wagon and preparing a soft place for him to sit on the long journey.

“Well,” said Calidorus, “how goes the quest to overturn heaven and earth?”

Iehuda said, “There are men casting bones by the side of the road who say Yehoshuah will be king before New Year.”

Calidorus half smiled.

“Would he make a good king, do you think? Would he set appropriate taxes and negotiate successful trade agreements with Rome and array his forces to the north to keep off invaders?”

Iehuda shook his head.

“The man I first followed would never have wanted to be king.”

“You know, I believe that is what Caesar said when he first took power. It seems to be a pattern with them. In this time of special emergency, they say, I must take more power than usual, but this shall be given back in time to the people. Somehow it is always a time of special emergency. It is quite surprising how seductive a crown can be.”

Iehuda looked at him, frowning. Calidorus was a wealthy Roman citizen, in that sense more powerful than almost anyone Iehuda had ever met.

“Why are you here, Calidorus? Here in Judea, I mean. Why here?”

Calidorus shrugged. “I like the climate. The autumn rains in Rome would make you howl. Much of my trade is here. Interesting people pass through. And Rome is not…” He paused, thinned his lips. “I like to be able to speak my mind, Iehuda. That used to be the foundation stone of Rome, they tell me, but now anyone who opposes Caesar is swiftly found by spies to have been ‘plotting treason’ and apparently,” he said, laughing, “we leave poets in exile for writing saucy verse. I can speak more freely here than I could in Rome. Here I am no threat to anyone.”

Iehuda blinked.

“Even a Roman citizen? Even you have to calculate like this?”

“Even I, Iehuda, am subject to Tiberius Caesar, a man with all the power in the world and not much idea of what to spend it on.”

“If you could plot against him,” said Iehuda, suddenly bold, “would you do it?”

Calidorus looked at him very keenly.

“No man should be told he’s a god while he still lives,” he said at last. “It doesn’t promote good thinking.”

He knows now he had lost his mind. He thought himself above the others because he did not gather round, begging for a blessing, longing to sit at the right hand of the master. But he noted who sat where. His eyes did not cease from searching out who had received more favoring glances, who seemed momentarily to be the one most praised.

He tried again, in the evening, when the others were asleep. He had always slept lightly and not for long. Yehoshuah did not seem to sleep at all these days. He found him stirring the glowing embers of the fire, blowing on them to bring them back to life, lighting twig from twig and branch from branch.

He said, “Explain it to me.”

Yehoshuah shrugged. “The vessel was already broken. What could I have done? Only shamed her.”

“You could have stopped her.”

“Perhaps.”

“You could have spoken out against doing as she did. So that no one else will do it. Others will come with the same idea now.”

“And if they do, what is the harm?”

Iehuda felt that snake rising up in his throat, making him gag and cough. He thought: it is a demon. There is a demon in me and my friend cannot see it or cast it out.

“The harm,” he said. And stopped. And thought.

“We are not here for your glory,” he said at last.

And Yehoshuah smiled.

And Iehuda said, “We are not here to glorify YOU. Not your name but God’s name. Not your words but God’s words. Not you, not any one of us. Something bigger than us. The poor, the crippled, the broken. To help them, not to make you into a little god. An idol.”

It was the first time he had let himself think it. He had not known he thought it until he said the words. He was panting, his pulse beating very fast and loud in his ears, his chest aching.

“Are you jealous?” said Yehoshuah.

They had had this conversation before. And Iehuda had admitted his jealousy freely and felt cleansed of it. He wanted to say yes and to fall into his friend’s arms, and to be free again of everything.

He shook his head slowly.

“This is not because I want what you have,” he said, “but because you are using your possessions wrongly.”

And Yehoshuah shrugged and said, “What I own it is my right to use, as a master orders his servants to perform one task and leave another.”

“Like the love of those who follow you? Are we your possessions too?”

Yehoshuah looked at him, his eyes very brown and clear and fine.

“Only for as long as you wish it, my dear friend.”

Was there a command in this? A wish? A suggestion? Or just a piece of understanding, as two old friends have of one another? The way out is always simple. All it takes is courage.

Losing one’s faith is so very like gaining it. There is the same joy, the same terror, the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding. There is the same fear that it will not hold, the same wild hope that, this time, it will. One has to lose one’s faith many times before one begins to lose faith in faith itself.

Iehuda left the camp before dawn. He felt elated. The sky expanded overhead. The moon big and low nearing the horizon, the stars rejoicing in their dark sea. They had turned the stones of the hills of Jerusalem to silver, to opal, to bone. The air was clear and cool as well water and the whole of the house of Israel was sleeping the sweet predawn sleep with soft breaths and gently curled hands. He felt the world move under his shoes as he picked his way across the rocky hillside down towards the city, a gentle tug because the very land was with him, urging him on. It was a blessed night. God, he knew, was watching and smiling upon him.

It was God who had kept the other followers soundly asleep when he left, and God who made the night unclouded and the moon bright so that he could find his way. God had touched his head with a cool calm hand and said softly in his ear, so that no one else could hear, “It is time, my son, time for this to be at an end.”

He arrived at the Temple when the faintest hint of dawn was beginning to touch the sky. Like God had dipped his thumb in bright yellow pollen and run it around the edge of the vellum world. This would be a day like no other.

Men were sleeping in the courtyard, their heads on their full packs, or the sacrifice sellers under their tables, but the priests were already about their business. They were cleaning out the old ash from the last day’s sacrificial fires, and washing the steps and the flagstones. Every morning and every evening, a lamb. They would make the first sacrifice shortly. As they always did. How had he imagined that anything they did would overturn any one of these unchangeable things?

He felt suddenly like a child who had been playing a game all this time. What had they thought they would do? Dismantle the great Temple stone by stone? Defeat the Roman army? Overturn the traditions handed down from Moses? Had they thought that they could take the place of God?

Like a child coming in from a game, like a penitent returning to grace, like a servant yielding to his master, Iehuda spoke softly to one of the priests. He was a man of maybe sixty years, with a good full gray beard like Iehuda’s father.

Iehuda said, “I have come because I know you are looking for Yehoshuah of Natzaret.”

The priest nodded gravely.

“I know where he is,” said Iehuda. “I can take you to him.”

The priest nodded again, three times, and said, “Come with me.”

And as they walked towards the house of Caiaphas, the High Priest, Iehuda said to God,

“I have returned to you. I am sorry for my absence.”

And God, who is a loving Father said, “You are welcome in my house, my beloved son.”

Caiaphas was a bustling man, unexpectedly cheerful. Avuncular. He bobbed his little head and said, “I think we have enough influence with the Prefect that if your friend admits his crimes and declares that he has no claims to the throne, no more harm will come to him than a few lashes. You’ve all inconvenienced us a little, you know.”

And Iehuda thought: is this what we were? While we imagined that we could change the world, these men of high office thought of us only as irritating children, throwing stones and firing blunted arrows? And he thought: really? Men had been put to death for far less than this.

Caiaphas busied himself with sending messengers to the soldiers and to the Prefect. There was little enough for Iehuda to do. He sat quietly on a stone bench in Caiaphas’s study and felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from him. It was relief, at last, knowing that things would be put right now. Yehoshuah’s claim to the throne was at an end. They could go back to spreading his message, instead of putting everything in the storehouse of one man.

The sun was high in the sky when Caiaphas said to him, “It is time for you to go back now, do you not think?”

Iehuda blinked. Yes. He had not thought as far as this, not further than doing God’s holy work. But yes. Yehoshuah would miss him, would ask after him. No special alarm would be raised for him, but he might be in danger if his friends knew what he had done. He thought of the mad woman with the rolling eyes cracking the alabaster jar and bleeding and laughing. Followers like that would send a knife after him once the thing was done. Safer to go back now and pretend surprise with the others when the guards came.

“We will come tomorrow morning,” said Caiaphas.

This was longer than the matter needed to take.

“What if we move on from our camp before morning? Yehoshuah sometimes…” The truth was that he sometimes told them that God had commanded him to move them on. “He sometimes moves us on unexpectedly.”

“We will be watching you,” said Caiaphas mildly. “Just stay close by him now. Do not leave his side. And we will come and find you.”

He saw them on his way back across the hillside to the encampment. They did not even seem to be walking in the same direction as him. Sometimes they came directly towards him, sometimes they were far in the distance, watching him walk away. They were cunning and they were swift, and they watched where he went and what he did.

The encampment had not moved. Taddai greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks and a punch to the shoulder.

“Mattisyahu said you’d gone whoring,” he said, and some of the others round about laughed because they could not believe it of Iehuda.

“I took myself off to pray,” Iehuda said at last, and they all nodded.

Yehoshuah was speaking with some of the women under an open-walled canopied tent, and did not see Iehuda return and did not look at him with suspicious eyes or ask where he had been. And on the top of the ridge, behind Taddai’s head, he saw the faint smudges of the men waiting for him, and for Yehoshuah.

They ate together that night, as they often did. This was the first night of Passover, though — they went to the Temple to purchase a lamb, sacrificed it, brought it back for the meal — it felt significant. So many people were in Jerusalem for the festival. The atmosphere was febrile, still, every man wanting to be the one who prompted Yehoshuah to say words which they would all remember as long as there was breath in their bodies. They were excited, like children.

Shimon wondered aloud whether the High Priest in his home was wishing he was here in this room among those who truly cleaved to God. Yehoshuah frowned at him and said nothing. Netan’el ate his share of the Paschal lamb and spoke of how the rich priests like Caiaphas and Annas, close bosom friends of Rome, could not understand the meaning of the sacrifice — that some men would only eat the meat of a lamb on this night, that many beggars would fill their bellies to the point of sickness. He hoped thereby to encourage Yehoshuah to speak again about how the poor are close to God, but Yehoshuah merely smiled. One of the hangers-on shouted that when the Messiah came, Rome itself would burn like the charred flesh of the lamb and some others laughed and cheered.

They walked in the fields after the meal, the ones close to Yehoshuah. They talked of the great miracles God would surely make, and of how many in Jerusalem already longed to follow them. They were anticipating the end of days which God would bring soon, so soon the day of judgment. And in the corner of his eye Iehuda saw his tails always, a few men melting into the shadows. Enough to keep watch and to send word.

“They will come at dawn,” he said to himself. “When the world is quiet but they have light to see what they are doing.”

At some point between dusk and dawn he dreamed. Or thinks he dreamed.

In his dream, Yehoshuah came to learn with him, as they had learned together two years before, at the very start. They studied in the great hall of scrolls that is heaven, the kingdom of God. They read the words of the Torah from the stone tablets which Moses himself had carved and Iehuda saw that the letters were fire.

And in his dream he said to Yehoshuah, “Why me? Why did God send you to me, knowing that I could not accept you?”

And Yehoshuah kissed him on his forehead and on his cheeks and said, “God knew His business. Now we will see what that business was.”

And in the dream Iehuda knew that Yehoshuah had forgiven him. But when he woke, with the dew settling on him in a quiet orchard with his friends, he knew that the matter had not concluded yet and the serpent in him was a great sickness and he wished he could vomit it out. But the clatter of arms and shields was at the crest of the hill and it was too late.

They had not sent enough soldiers for a quiet surrender. There were thirty or forty of them, no more. Yehoshuah’s camp was five hundred men — although they were mostly still asleep and a little distant. The soldiers had their swords but the men had wooden staffs as cudgels, slings and stones, cooking and hunting knives.

“You shall not take him!” shouted out Shimon, and stood between Yehoshuah and the guards.

Yehoshuah’s closest men were awake and with him in the orchard. There were probably as many of them as of the soldiers. Several of the other men hefted their staffs meaningfully, shifting their stances to legs apart, knees slightly bent. The soldiers drew their swords.

“Give him to us,” said the leading soldier in heavily accented Aramaic. “He is accused of treason. He must be taken for trial.”

He nodded to two of his deputies, who came forward. One of them took Yehoshuah by the arm. And then it began.

One of Yehoshuah’s friends raised his cudgel and struck the soldier a glancing blow on the side of the face. Iehuda, hanging back, remembered Yehoshuah saying, “If a man strikes you on one cheek, give him the other to hit,” and thought: why, then, are they fighting? But they did fight.

The soldier fell to the ground. Shimon thrust Yehoshuah far behind him as the leader of the soldiers barked three words at his men and they advanced in formation, holding small shields before them, a forest of blades. Two of the soldiers lashed out with their weapons and two of Yehoshuah’s men fell — one with a gaping wound to his neck pumping rich red blood, the other clutching his side.

Yehoshuah’s men looked less certain now, but their anger was up and some ran forward, flailing and yelling. In a lucky strike Jeremiah pulled one of the shields forward and leapt over it, hacking at the face beneath the helmet with his knife, and suddenly blood was spurting from the soldier’s face, and Jeremiah was shrieking because he had cut off the man’s ear. It flopped limply in his hand. A piece of gristle cut from an undercooked joint. He brandished it, grinning. Another soldier hit him hard in the stomach with a shield and he fell to the ground.

They were outmatched, Yehoshuah’s men. They were dealing the odd blow to the soldiers, but more of them, five, six, had been felled already. There were awkward wrestling matches, soldiers attempting, as far as Iehuda could tell, not to kill if they could avoid it. Several men were knocked out by a heavy shield blow. One of them, a young man Iehuda did not know, was attempting to fight although he was wearing only a wrapped linen sheet. Two soldiers grabbed the garment, trying to throw him to the ground, but he wriggled out of it altogether and ran away naked.

Angry, the soldiers returned to using their swords, and more men would have been cut down if Iehuda had not raised his voice above the din and shouted, “No! More soldiers will come! They have told me! All of us will die if we do not give Yehoshuah to them.”

It was then that they realized.

“You,” said Mattisyahu, “it was you who brought the soldiers.”

The shock of it made them stare.

Ah, thought Iehuda, so there is no going back for me now. No returning to the person I was. Now they know.

He had to walk with the soldiers as they took Yehoshuah away. What else was he going to do? He could not stay with the other disciples. They would have torn him to pieces.

They walked as far as the Temple. There was a form to these things. First a hearing in the civil court of Israel, then justice at the hands of Rome.

Yehoshuah was quiet as they walked. They did not have to bind him or carry him or prod him with the points of their swords.

At the gate of the Temple, he clasped Iehuda’s shoulder and said, very softly,

“Now we will see.”

And as much as Iehuda has thought of that since, as much as he understands the world of dreams that spoke in those words, he cannot experience it as anything but courage.

They led his friend away through the dark doors. He tried to follow but Caiaphas, standing at the doorpost, shook his head. Thus far and no further. His job was done.

As he left the Temple, the head of the Levite administrators, kinder than the rest, pressed a purse into his hand. He shook his head, but the Levite frowned and said, “You cannot go back to your friends now. Use this to go home. Buy a piece of land and begin again. Forget everything that happened here. You have done a good service to keep the peace, remember only that.”

He had thought about it, what he would do if he were free. And suddenly he was more free than he had ever been or ever thought to be. What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

In the marketplace, he bought a sharp blade of the kind the Romans use to shave themselves, a jar of good sheep’s fat and a pail. And he walked out of the city to the north, until he came to a place he knew, under the shade of three fig trees, with a fast-flowing brook of icy water.

At first, he pulled great tufts of the hair of his beard out and cut them with the blade — remembering Elkannah wriggling on his lap and feeling that sorrow which would never now leave him. When the bulk of the beard was gone he filled the pail and let the water go still, so he could look at his own face in the reflecting surface. He looked different already. Not a pious man, not a good Jew. A madman, with sprouting clumps of hair on his face. No longer a person who believed in anything.

He rubbed the sheep’s fat onto his face. It smelled half delicious, like a good meal, but with a rancid edge. He massaged the fat into the coarse beard hairs with the heel of his hand, feeling the bristles and tufts scratch his skin. And then he began to scrape the blade slowly, carefully, down his cheek.

He had never done this to himself before, but he had watched with interest as some of the Greek and Roman hangers-on at Yehoshuah’s camp had made their toilet in the morning, so he had a rough idea of how the thing was accomplished. When he had scraped half a cheek of hair off and rubbed the bristle — sheep fat mixture on the dry grass, he looked at the smooth patch in the mirror of still water. It was like the skin of a woman’s face. Soft and pink, though a little raw in places from the blade. Suddenly, he desperately wanted a woman.

He shaved the rest of his face more quickly. He had the knack of the blade now, keeping close to the skin but not piercing it. He cut himself once or twice, but they were only small nicks. His face felt cold and the skin was stinging. And when he was done he stared at himself again in the water and saw a different man. He had not seen his own face thus since he was fifteen years old and his beard came in. But the face that looked back was not that of a boy. It was a Roman man. An idol worshipper. The man he had been was as dead as if he had cut his own throat with that razor. Good.

This new face did the work for him when he returned to the market. He had passed through the invisible veil separating Jew and Roman. The Jewish men scurried away from his gaze, the Romans met his eye approvingly. The whores by the market wall called to him as they had never addressed a word to him all those years when he was pious.

He paid one of the whores — a woman about his own age, with dark eyes and gray hairs streaked through the black — he gave her a small coin and had her in a small tented enclosure at the edge of the wall. She did not undress, just bent over the straw bales and flipped up the back of her skirts to show herself to him. The power of it was overwhelmingly arousing, the absolute lack of consequence, her lack of interest in him. As he fucked her, he remembered his wife and knew that what he had grieved for all along, when he thought he grieved for her and his God, what he had grieved for all along was the young man he had been who would never now return. The whore didn’t even see his circumcised cock, that young man’s last trace. He could be a Roman now, if he wanted.

He waited by the gates for news of Yehoshuah, and when he heard what had happened he went to the crosses. He wore a wrapped scarf like the tent-dwellers, shielding his face, and one of their cloaks bought for two small coins, more than its value. But he need not have bothered. Few of Yehoshuah’s friends were there, and those who were could not see him. Their eyes glided over his face as if he were just another Roman, or Jew-turned-Roman.

Even Yehoshuah gave no sign of knowing him. He was near death — the day was hot and several of the men around him had already died. Iehuda wondered whether, if he had come hours before, Yehoshuah would have berated him, or screamed at him. But by this point his eyes were glazed and the flies were settling at the corners of his mouth. He would not have recognized his own mother if she had come then.

Iehuda waited there until he saw the light go out of his eyes. Even till then, though it took until the sun was low in the sky. He squatted on his haunches and watched it out. And even till that moment he had thought that perhaps God would make some miracle. But he saw his friend die. And at the moment that the limbs went limp and the head slumped forward and the chest became still, he thought: well, then, now we know. The Messiah becomes king, he does not die as a traitor. So now we know.

He should have known the moment he saw the nails through the wrists. Or when he had arrived at the Temple. Or when the snake first began to twist inside him, he should have known that nothing was keeping his friend alive but the faith of those around him. And he went and slept in an apple orchard near the walls of Jerusalem.

He stayed in Jerusalem a few days after that. He went to his friend’s grave, hoping to take the body and bury it on that ridge where they had talked, but one of the boys playing with a spinning top at the side of the road told him that the body had been stolen. There was a trade in such things for magical purposes — the dried heart of a man who had died by violence, the fingers or toes, all these things could be used to cast spells. Or, he thought, to fool the gullible and line the pockets of one of Calidorus’s fakers.

He wept a little, thinking of his friend’s long bones and brown skin going to such a purpose. With the weeping, he touched the corner of his sadness inside his heart. It was like dipping his hand in the ocean, allowing the waves to run through his fingers, thinking for a moment that he had caught the whole sea in his palm, understanding at last that it was a sadness deep enough to drown in. He closed the box in his heart on that sorrow. It is the only way to continue.

He waited for the last possible day to leave Jerusalem safely, when the final pilgrims were returning home after the festival. And he struck west with a band of travelers — Syrians and Egyptians and Jews and Greeks mixed — heading for Caesarea. It was not hard to find Calidorus’s house. The man, to do him credit, welcomed him and sent a slave to wash his feet.

Nothing ever happens except that God wills it. This was the teaching of Yehoshuah which Iehuda remembers every day. It is the truth. Everything that happens has been willed by God.

This is not how he ends the story he tells to Calidorus’s guests. For them, he is witty and clever enough to make them feel vaguely flattered by the way he tells the story. He brings up Greek myth, tells them that he would have gone down into Hades to find his friend except — he winks — the Hebrew god frowns on such love between two men. The guests roar with laughter. They are in their cups now.

He jokes that perhaps, like the Emperor Augustus, his friend is already transformed into a god by his death. The men grow a little quiet at this — even to suggest that a criminal is on a par with Augustus is faintly seditious.

“But of course,” says Iehuda, “just as Augustus, who died in majesty, now reigns in majesty on high, I’m afraid my friend Yehoshuah will still be dragging his cross around with him in the heavens!”

This is the best joke of all. One of the men falls on the floor he laughs so hard and pulls himself up still wheezing. Pomponius chokes on his own laughter and has to take more wine, which sets him off in another fit of giggles.

When the men leave, they agree that it has been an excellent party. Calidorus smiles. Iehuda wonders how long it will be until he has told this story to all of Calidorus’s friends and business associates, and what his use will be then.

It is not long after this that the thing is broken forever.

Iehuda sees the woman again in the marketplace. Her red hair flames under the modest veil which covers the length of it. She is looking at some glass lamps — very pretty but impractical. He stands beside her, close enough to sense her body through her clothes and his. She does not notice him until he speaks.

“You could never light it,” he says, his voice low, pointing at the lamp. “The heat would shatter the glass.”

She looks up. Her eyes are green. She shows no surprise that it is him. A wry smile is on her lips and he remembers his wife, suddenly and with a sharp pain.

“Perhaps,” she says, “I do not intend to light it. Aren’t those the most beautiful things of all? The things that cannot be used without breaking them?”

She is poised. She holds her shoulders just so.

“Like a woman’s maidenhead,” he says, without thinking. It is a very forward remark to make to a woman in a public place.

She blushes a little, but her expression does not change.

“Like a man’s unwarranted faith,” she says. And pauses. And then. “I know who you are. My husband is a friend of Calidorus. Any man who has a fortune or wants one in Caesarea is a friend of Calidorus, you know.”

“Ah,” he says. “And who is your husband?”

“Pomponius,” she says. “He knows you and your funny little story.”

The thought of the arrogant self-satisfied prick of Pomponius thrusting inside this woman makes him hot and angry and, again, aroused. And the little smile playing on the mouth of the woman when she says “funny little story,” this stirs him too.

“Did you know it was me in the temple that day?” he whispers low in her ear. “Was it my funny little story that made you so wet?”

He grabs her arm, his fingers digging into her soft flesh so that she gasps, and this he finds even more exciting.

Her eyes flick to the stallholder, who is watching them curiously. They are in a busy marketplace. She has only to call out and a dozen men would be on him, for she is a respectable Roman matron and he, if they cared to examine him, would be found to be only a Jew.

She does not call out. She looks at his hand around her upper arm, at the place where the skin is white because his grip is so strong.

She says, “Yes.”

He fucks her in a disused stable not far from the market, where the musty smell of horseflesh is in the damp straw, and as she reaches her height she bites him on the shoulder so hard that her mouth comes away red with his blood.

She does not leave immediately this time. They sit together, leaning against the wall of the stable, listening to the sounds of the busy street outside: the vendors calling their wares, hooves striking stone, children playing and shouting, the mad-eyed preacher who stands at the corner of the market telling out the end of days.

She sits across his knees and fumbles with the garments at his waist until she has uncovered his exhausted cock. She cups it in her hand, thumbing the rim of the head where he is circumcised. She smiles.

“I heard that some Jews hang weights from it, to try to grow the foreskin back.”

He shrugs. “Some men plunge their hands into a nest of bees hoping thereby to gain honey.” His hand finds her, under her skirts. His thumb begins to work. She gasps. “Most men are not so foolish.”

“And what do you think Calidorus’s house is?” she whispers in his ear, leaning close to him.

After a little while he fucks her again: frantically, insatiably.

There is an evening when he sits drinking and talking with Calidorus. Everything now reminds him of something else, distorted and confused. Calidorus is a parody of Yehoshuah. Pomponius’s wife is a stirabout of his own wife. This evening with Calidorus is a broken tessellation of another evening, long ago. Once a man has lived long enough, every moment is a reflection of some other moment.

Calidorus says, “My father was a freed slave. He was over fifty when I was born, and his first forty-five years he was owned.”

Iehuda had heard something of this sort about Calidorus. It is not exactly a mark of disgrace, but neither is it a thing to boast about. Calidorus has drunk a little wine. So has Iehuda. The slaves have withdrawn. They are alone in a private chamber with a good fire and Calidorus’s little house gods lined up on a side table.

“The master freed him because he saved his life. From a fire. He ran into the burning building to save his master. He had scars on his face and his body all his life, because his clothes caught fire as he ran and he did not stop to put them out until his master was safe. A long tight patch of red raw skin from here”—Calidorus motions to his waist—“to here”—he touches his right temple. “The hair never grew back on the right-hand side. That is how he won his freedom. That is why he was permitted to take a wife and why I was born. But until the day he died, although he was free, he still called that man ‘Master.’”

Iehuda nods.

“And now I am a wealthy man,” says Calidorus. “If I were so minded, I could become interested in politics, take a seat in the Senate. An able man can rise and rise in Rome, with no one telling him he has not the right father to be a High Priest, or the right lineage to be considered for king. That is what makes us strong. You are still waiting for your ‘rightful king,’ the son of David. We take for a king any man who has the will and strength to govern. There is no law to say that a freed slave may not become emperor; it may happen one day.”

Calidorus clears his throat.

“I have heard from friends in Rome,” he says, “that the Emperor Tiberius has run mad. He spends all his days on the island of Capri, fucking children.” Calidorus raises an eyebrow, stretching the skin across his bony forehead. “If I uttered this in Rome, you know, someone would inform on me for a few copper coins and I would be taken and killed.”

“It is because every man needs a father,” says Iehuda slowly. Calidorus narrows his eyes. “Or a master,” Iehuda continues, “it is all one. Without a father we look for another master: a teacher to follow or a patron to please or an emperor to fear. A man like your Tiberius has his head open to the sky, with no master to obey. That is why he has run mad.”

“And what of you?” says Calidorus. “You have killed your master.”

Iehuda shrugs. “God alone is my leader and my master.”

Calidorus barks out a laugh.

“The gods will not keep you from madness. They have not helped the old goat of Capri.”

And Iehuda could not say what was in his heart: that his God was the true God, and those little statues of squabbling deities were just pieces of stone.

“Do you know what I have heard, Iehuda?” Calidorus leans forward, mock earnest. “I had it in a letter from a business associate in Egypt. There one of your old friends is preaching that Yehoshuah yet lives.”

“I saw him die,” says Iehuda.

“Oh,” says Calidorus, “certainly he died. But, as you say, every man needs a master.”

“The governors and prefects will kill them for saying it.”

Calidorus nods. “Most men would rather die, you know, than give up a master. In some kingdoms, the ruler’s slaves and wives die with him, entombed in his grave. Most men have not the flexible heart you have. They cannot turn from one to the next. They must remain steadfast, even unto death.”

“It is a little noble,” Iehuda says slowly.

“It is idiocy. Do you think I still call my father’s master’s family my betters? I could buy them a hundred times over. We cannot cleave to the same thing forever. In this life, eventually, one is either a traitor or a fool.”

It is easy to leave, once you are used to leaving. Easy to feel the moment of it approaching, to sense the loosening of the ropes that bound you to the earth. One becomes adept in noticing the absolute apex of love or belief from which it will inevitably decline. There comes a point when one can even begin to love leaving, the only constant we carry with us. The man who wanders forever is not cursed, he is blessed.

He leaves before dawn. He takes food for a long journey, and three rings Calidorus gave him freely when he had told a particularly good tale, which will pay his way or be stolen by bandits, only the road will tell him in time. A few other necessary things, including two good knives. A man with two fine knives, good shoes and strong arms is wealthy, or never far from wealth. He will thrive as he has always, somehow, thrived.

He says to God, “Are you there?”

And God says, as God always says, “Yes, my son, I am with you.”

The pious would like to believe that God does not speak to the sinners, that one has to earn the right to hear His voice. The pious are wrong. God speaks to Judas of Qeriot just as he spoke to Yehoshuah of Natzaret, just as he would speak to the Emperor Tiberius of Rome if the twisted king had the wit to listen.

“What shall I do?” he says to God.

“Go west,” says the Lord. “You are in a port. Take passage on a ship and sail away.”

And he thinks he will. Here, this story is the only story of his life, the only thing he has ever done or will ever do. But there is this to be said for Rome: a man can become something new. He is not tied to his birth or his ancestral lands. There are great kingdoms yet to be seen. In the west the debauched Emperor Tiberius sits on his golden throne. In the west the Greeks ply their trade in wisdom. In the west, he has heard, there are demons and witches and uncircumcised barbarians with beards down to their navels and patterns on their skins. He is ready for them. And let them think in Israel that he is dead.