The Tongues of Men or Angels

Two Childhoods

Saul was set apart right from his mother’s womb, as one untimely born. He was near enough two months premature. And back then, that was as good as a death sentence. That was as good as to say a swift kick goodbye to the world you’ve never known. His mother kept him in a little woven reed box, padded and blanketed with scraps of cloth. Resigned to his departure, she did what she could anyway, almost as a child might for a swallow chick, nest-tumbled from a rooftop: just to comfort and give it love, even if it would near certainly be in vain. She coated Saul with pig lard, to keep him warm; she knew Yahweh would forgive her that. She never washed him for fear that even heated water would spell the death knell. She fed him with breast milk, dripped from a whittled stick down his tiny, silent throat. He didn’t cry. Perhaps he was too weak to cry. He was too weak to suckle. Too weak to do anything, except to lie in a little woven reed box, covered with a thick wax of fat, padded and blanketed with scraps of cloth. One stray spark from the fire she kept him by and Saul would have gone up, like a dropped oil lamp. But he didn’t die, from fire or from anything else: pneumonia; or heart failure; or sickness; or just from being an insufficiently finished creature to live. He didn’t die and eventually he was too big for a little woven reed box and too hungry to be fed with drips from whittled sticks and his mother began to be more scared than she ever was at the beginning, because that was sad certainty, but afterwards she had to deal with the mustard seed of hope. But still Saul didn’t die. And the elders said it was a miracle and the healer said it was a marvel of medicine. But Saul’s mother said it was just lard and love.

So, from the very beginning Saul was blessed, but any boy who grew up in Tarsus was in some sense blessed: he could bathe in the salmon-scale silver river in the summer and watch the sun turn the snow on the sharp crenulations of the Taurus Mountains salmon-flesh pink in winter. A boy born to a family of reasonable means could be educated. Indeed, Tarsus was famed for its education: some said that the schools of Tarsus were comparable even to those of Athens and Alexandria.

Saul was tutored in the philosophies of the Greeks, and he was taught the Israelite religion and law from The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. But more than this: he was lectured in love because loved he was. A boy who is the unquestioned object of his mother’s adoration will go through his whole life feeling like a champion. Saul had just such a mother: a gentle, doting mother, with brown eyes that shone in lamplight and daylight both.

Saul had a younger sister, and there had been other siblings, others who had died, a dark seam of parental anguish running through the years ahead of his. But Saul had survived, the boy his parents had sought and cherished. Not that his sister was not loved. She was loved, in a way. Just a different way. Though it is hard to measure the loves of other people, never mind other times. For many Greek families back then, love meant leaving a child out for exposure: sacrificing the latest comer entirely in order to feed those who had come before. Or selling them as a slave to a good master in good times, lest fear of starvation force them later to be given to a cruel master. Some families considered it dangerous to love at all: even on average five or six children born alive would see just two reach adulthood; occasionally, ten would mean none. Some Tarseans feared to name their children until they were grown enough to gather kindling. Before that they were called only ‘the baby’.

Even past thirteen, when he could follow the Torah as a man, Saul remained his parents’ baby and he was loved in the straightforward sense of being adored, indulged, maybe even spoiled. He was never beaten, as his sister was sometimes beaten. This was not by regulation. It was simply something that did not occur. Because Saul was the son that his parents had prayed for and Saul gradually became a son any Jewish family would be proud of: learned in his scriptures and devoted to his God.

And yet Saul was not greatly happy. Or at least he did not know himself to be. Perhaps we need some element of sadness to make a judgement on our happiness, just as a cold face measures the warmth of the body beneath a blanket.

Sometimes the boy Saul wondered if other people really existed at all: could they think as he could think? Were they truly separate beings, or was this whole world constructed as a thing to test him? Was he at the centre of a giant dream, which revolved around Saul as the sun revolved around the sky?

There were other people, of course, most of them in other lands. In Galilee, for example, there was a boy of approximately the same age as Saul. Yahushua he was named, though his friends called him Yeshua and many who didn’t know him would come to call him Jesus.

Yeshua lived in a squat, single-storey home, part hollowed into a limestone hill. Its packed dirt floor was smeared with clay, so that manure could be more easily swept away because animals — a couple of goats, a milk sheep, possibly a donkey — were brought in at night. The walls were of stacked rock, with mud joints. The flat roof was also made of mud, layered with sticks and straw. When the nights were warm, the family would sleep up there; at colder times they would share the sole room below with the beasts. They cooked on a clay oven, fuelled with animal dung. They lived mostly on millet, emmer wheat and barley, in the form of gruel, bread or flat cakes. But also pine nuts, coarse horse beans, almonds, olives, sycamore figs, lentils and dandelion leaves. Occasionally they ate salted fish. The zenith of every year was lamb — an unblemished year-old male lamb — for the Passover festival.

Yeshua, like Saul, was devoted to his study of the Torah and the love of the one-God. In Judaea and Galilee, the Pharisees ensured that even the poor could have some education. Yeshua had four brothers and at least two sisters, of whom he was probably the eldest, although there is no definitive reason to suppose this. Someone would later write — a century later — that Yeshua was born in distant Bethlehem to a virgin; but this doesn’t seem very likely. That’s the sort of thing a mother would remember and Yeshua’s mother quite clearly did not. Or else why would she later think he had gone insane and needed restraining when he started preaching? And why would she be amazed at a level of boyhood precociousness that would seem very underwhelming in one who began life announced by angels and implanted by God? The narrator of this nativity tale would say that the parental travellers must have come to Bethlehem — where it was commonly believed a messiah should be born — because of the census. This wasn’t the case, but such mistakes are easily forgiven, because the storywriter spoke a different language from Yeshua and had never been anywhere near Judaea and wrote only after fables and tall tales had taken root, in an age when miraculous nativities were competitive and ubiquitous.

What little is known to be true is that in the year of Yeshua’s birth there were riots in Jerusalem at the Passover and more than three thousand people were massacred, cut down by horsemen. The troops rode through the tent villages outside the Temple, slashing people to the ground and trampling them beneath hoofs. And following this barbarity, tens of thousands of Judaeans rose up, the garrison of the Antonia Fortress was attacked and long battles were fought for control of the city. Fire blackened the streets; Romans tumbled the cloisters of the Temple and looted its treasure; sieges were thrown up and destroyed again. And at the finish another two thousand of the defeated Israelites were crucified at a single time. It is impossible even to speculate as to how many men must have lost their lives in combat or fled into the deserts and the diaspora, if two thousand were taken alive, knowing they would face the agonizing state-terror of crucifixion.

Two thousand men were hanged and nailed from beams and trees, many surviving the suffering for days, cursed to cling to life without hope of release, in delirium and pain beyond measure. But large numbers conceal rather than express true horror. It was not two thousand men who were tortured to death, it was one man: a man who liked to stroke the palm of his wife’s hand, to touch a little thimble of flesh, which remained soft, though all the rest was calloused by work; a man who knew just how to make his imp children squeal like goslings when he tickled them; a man who spat pips for accuracy with his father when they ate fruit, and pissed for distance when he drank too much wine with his friends; a man who didn’t sing out of tune, only because he never knew what the tune was; a man who sobbed with joy on his wedding night, because he had not fully understood how great the gift he was to receive would be; a man with a laugh funnier than any joke and eyes warm as simmering soup. It was one man, only one man, to each family who lost one man; but this murder was repeated two thousand times.

And in the year of Yeshua’s birth, at least three Israelites declared themselves to be a messiah; declared themselves to be an anointed king, that is.

There was Simon of Peraea, who temporarily took the royal palace at Jericho and was crowned with a diadem. His men were eventually slaughtered by Roman soldiers and Simon himself beheaded in battle. Though some of his followers believed that, at the command of the angel Gabriel, Simon rose from the dead three days later.

And there was Athronges the Shepherd, who had four brothers, like Yeshua had, and was a tall man, like Yeshua would become, and was put to death by the Romans, as Yeshua would eventually be.

And there was Judas bar Hezekiah who seized Sepphoris, which lay just a sunset’s walk from Nazareth, where Yeshua and his family lived, their closest town. Judas spread the arms captured there among the multitudes that followed him. And in revenge the Romans burned Sepphoris to the ground and sold into slavery every surviving man, woman and child who dwelled there, perhaps twelve thousand souls. Doubtless the families in Nazareth all had friends and relations in Sepphoris — barely three miles away — who were massacred, or incinerated alive, or sold into slavery. The hills all about and humble Nazareth itself must have harboured that fraction who managed to escape alive.

In the year of Yeshua’s birth, two whole Roman legions with auxiliaries — twenty thousand war-brutalized soldiers — marched unstoppably through Galilee, destroying towns and villages and killing in such swathes that the soil itself wept blood. The night sky of Yeshua’s nativity was lit not by guiding stars but by burning flesh. Yet all this is curiously absent from the book called the Bible, with its strange tales of virgins and journeys and censuses.

There was a census; that much is true. But it was held when Yeshua was about ten years old. So it did not, of course, affect the place or the manner of his birth. The memory of it as an important event must have lingered, though, because the census was resented bitterly by the trampled people. It was conducted to assess the level of tribute the Judaeans would have to pay and it represented subjugation and humiliation, as well as fear of the crippling taxes that would inevitably fall heaviest on the poor: head tax; land tax; income tax; salt tax; meat tax; house tax; road tax; boundary tax; bridge tax; water tax; market tax; town tax. Roman levies were legion and the tax-farmers cruel, and the monies taken were shipped to the distant blasphemy of a demi-god emperor in a foreign state; there was no pretence that the funds were for the benefit of those people who were bled white. Rome was not big on pretence: its origin myths were of fratricide and rape; its first citizens, criminals and outcasts; its sacred animals, the wolf and the vulture; its murderous founder, a son of the god of war.

Another Judas: Judas the Galilean — a countryman of Yeshua — began the rebellion against the census. This Judas was a rabbi, learned in scripture and resolved to call no one master but Yahweh, even should that mean death. With a Pharisee, he founded the Zealots and once again the Israelites rose in vast numbers, against the census and against the Roman domination it represented.

They did not fail utterly, because they started a movement that survived. And they knew from the beginning that the odds were incalculably against them. Judaea was not a land Imperial Rome could ever allow to be free, sited as it was between the breadbasket of Egypt and the vital cedar forests of Syria. To push the Romans from Judaea, you needed almost to push them from the world. But the Zealot rebels were pious and righteous men and they fought in expectation that God was with them. They took their name from the Prophet Phinehas in the Book of Numbers who was ‘zealous’ for his God and defeated the entire Midianite army and five Midianite kings without losing a single comrade, because the God of Israel was on Phinehas’s side.

So the Zealots fought with every hope that their God would help those who helped themselves, as they were convinced that He had in the past. They believed that their bravery and piety would prevail, if God willed it.

They were, of course, annihilated.

Decimation is a term inadequate: it means just one in ten stolen, when probably some villages of Galilee were left all but devoid of men of fighting age after the Zealot rising. Perhaps in Yeshua’s little Nazareth there was a generation virtually missing as Yeshua was turning into a man. Many, maybe all, of the adolescents Yeshua had looked up to as a small boy were killed in battle or nailed alive.

Yeshua’s father might well have been an old man by the time of his birth — too old to fight — but many of Yeshua’s friends must have grown up fatherless from the rebellions that arose in that year. And all of them would have had kin and friends butchered in Sepphoris. And then another constellation of men was wiped out when Yeshua was ten, crucified in such numbers that, for years afterwards, carpenters built doorframes and well-hoists from trees that had once upborne convulsed and broken patriots.

The helpless wrath against the Romans and their unbeatable legions must have growled black in the dead eyes of every survivor, when Yeshua was a boy. Must have echoed from the hollow begging bowls of every widow and orphan. Prayers that God would save His people from this horror must have been shared and shouted in Nazareth’s small synagogue. We cannot blame Yeshua, because he did not grow up to be entirely a man of peace.

Yeshua and Saul both would come to be men who changed the world for ever, for better or other. And each would find himself in Jerusalem at the same time, although they never met.

Saul arrived first: he came to the holy city with dreams of becoming a great Pharisee. But possibly he found Pharisee learning too much, struggling as he was to study in another tongue. Though he had excelled in his memory and scrutiny of the holy books in Greek, the Pharisees taught and debated in Hebrew. Saul began first to dislike and then despise the faction of the Pharisees, with their liberalizing and constant scrutinizing of the law. He came to conclude that he would better serve his God in the Temple Guard, on the side of the aristocratic Sadducees. And so he abandoned his education, but he did not return to Tarsus. Saul was equipped with stories about not looking back, from his Greek heritage and his Jewish: from Herakles’ and Orpheus’s descents into the underworld and from Lot’s flight from Sodom and Gomorrah. And so Saul did not look back, after that first journey to Jerusalem. He never looked back again. The past to him became nothing; a thing to be spoken of only when needed; a thing whose memory is malleable.

When Yeshua came to Jerusalem, he arrived as a rebel king, a rival ruler to the Roman emperor, a rival leader to the high priest. He came with his brothers and his disciples. With the Zealot Simon and the Sicarii dagger-man Judas. With Cephas or Rocky. With the brothers Jacob and Jochanan, so fierce they were named the Sons of Thunder. Just as the charge laid against him would later be recorded: Yeshua arrived in Jerusalem to oppose the paying of taxes to Caesar and to declare himself the anointed king, the Messiah. He came to incite a rising, as Judas the Galilean had done in his youth; as Phinehas had done in the scripture. He came to free his people as Moses and David had done. He believed that he and his followers would suffice to defeat the might of Rome. Because the scriptures prove that God helps those who are His chosen ones, if they are faithful and prayerful and prepared to fight like fuck.