The Tongues of Men or Angels

Nineteen Years after the Crucifixion

Inside the Jerusalem Temple complex, the initial tiled precinct — twice as large as the Forum of Rome — is open to all people. Here, dilated-eyed animals for sacrifice are sold and money is changed and trinket-sellers peddle. But an elegant low balustrade separates this area from the holier courtyards of the Mount and from the Temple proper. And around this easily crossed but symbolic guardrail, there are numerous near-identical notices, each one stone-carved in a different tongue, and in every language the signs state: No Gentile is to enter beyond the balustrade into the forecourt around the Sanctuary. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for his subsequent death. That is how it has always been in Judaism: Gentiles are welcome to admire from a distance but they are not allowed in through the Beautiful Gate, clad with golden vines, where the Levites sing, unless they first convert.

Which is why Jochanan can’t really see how they got to this present problem with The Way. It’s not even as if Yeshua left any doubt over his views. He was always saying that The Way was strictly for the lost sheep of Israel. And when the Messiah sent out his Sanhedrin council to spread the word, he explicitly told them — though it hardly needed saying — Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. When a Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter that time, Yeshua more or less called her a dog — about the strongest insult there is among the Jews — and told her that dogs couldn’t eat the children’s food. Yeshua was no lover of Gentiles. So why must there now be a debate about Gentiles joining?

When Jochanan and his brother Jacob joined The Way, they stumbled into it. They emerged from forty days hidden in the caper scrub — sharing caves with the sand cats and tuft-eared caracals — onto a bend of the Jordan river, to discover a multitude gathered there. An orderly line of a people who ordinarily know no queues. All waiting on the silt banks to be baptized, apparently unafraid of crocodiles, drifting timber with eyes as old and cold as flint. But, then, there were too many fearful things in that land for anyone to be afraid of them all. There were countless dangers in the wilderness nights, and Jochanan and Jacob were two.

Though Jochanan was still weakened from his wound at that time — he was led by his brother, riding on a stolen camel. A beast still clear in the realm of memory: draped in a colourful collage of blankets, the wooden pommel of a baggage-saddle barely visible from beneath them. Its eyes watery and weeping, lashed like a harem girl’s. Petulant lower lip, and knees dry and cracked as parched earth. How it used to scratch its neck with a split-toed front foot, in a way impossible for a mule or a donkey. They named the camel Herod Agrippa because it was gangling and stupid, yet arrogant and wilful, like some entitled young royal.

But it wasn’t the theft of the camel that led to the brothers’ flight: Herod was merely the means of escape. Jochanan couldn’t have made it a mile on foot at the time. He barely survived as it was.

The act itself was a quarrel with a tax-farmer, a publicanus. Jochanan and Jacob had been two-thirds of the way across a thin footbridge and in plain sight when the tax-farmer set off. Yet still he expected them to turn back, to make way for him and the two legionaries who accompanied him. He said that the camel carrying their chattel couldn’t turn around. And, in that at least, he was probably correct. With the wisdom of reflection, perhaps the brothers should have retreated and sucked up their pride. But they didn’t. They were both cursed with fierce tempers, though that wasn’t why they were called the Sons of Thunder.

There was yelling and swearing in at least three languages, maybe more. But the brothers didn’t turn back and they couldn’t make way, and it eventually became apparent that, on a narrow and strangulated bridge, fishermen’s knives were of more use in a fight than long Roman spears, which could be caught in hand and stepped inside. And Jochanan and Jacob, bred and raised in hauling nets, had arms and shoulders more powerful than any soldier’s. So the tax-farmer had a smile slashed across his haughty, traitorous mouth and he was tumbled into the creek, with a screech like a goat-kid torn from its mother. And the first legionary had an iron blade, sharpened that morning with Galilee stone, thrust up under his leather breastplate into the clutch of amorphous organs that men need just as much as fish do. But the second Roman let go of his spear and drew his sword and put a wound across Jochanan’s throat, before Jacob could force him to the ground. The cut was already made, before Jacob could put the Roman to the floor of the bridge and beat him to death with his own shield. Repeatedly slamming it into the man’s head until first his helm came off and then the crown of his head came off, like the lid of an amphora, revealing grey furls like crab gills. But even though Jacob killed a Roman with his own shield — caved in his face and carved off the top of his skull — plastering with blood the shield’s blasphemous Thunder Bars, that wasn’t why the brothers were called the Sons of Thunder.

Jochanan was amateurishly patched, by a fisher-brother who knew a lot about knots and nets but little about bandages. And they fled then, Jochanan camel-carried like a sack of spice, into the hills. Jacob led them on foot, leaving a deliberate trail at first, outside inhabitation, so that their crime — if killing traitors and invaders is a crime — would not be blamed on others. Only when they had left civilization behind did he start to choose paths across rock and through streambeds. Only then did he start to leave false clues and dust their true tracks.

Jochanan was cut across the throat — he could hear his own breath whistling through the wound — and carried far into the wilderness. And yet somehow he survived. It was a miracle. But then, as Jochanan realized when it began to seem possible that he would not die, what isn’t? The sun and the clouds and the ants and the words. They are all miracles. Every life and every day is a miracle. There is nothing so special about not dying, except that it allows you to witness every other miracle as if for the first time. It rapts you with awe at the overbearing wonder of everything and teaches you what it means to love, to truly love. To love your life and your family and your land and your brother Jacob and your God.

And weeks later, on a path they thought to lead them home again, among the silver of tamarisk and willow, the brothers stumbled upon The Way.

And now The Way has led Jochanan here, to this meeting of leaders. Jacob is not in attendance: The Way led Jacob to his death, seven years back. Beheaded, angry until the end, a true Son of Thunder. Though the trial court, if you could call it that, called him Son of Zebedee.

Zebedee their father is dead, too, of course. He was a big man, in a small way, Zebedee. I’m world famous, in Galilee; that was his joke. It’s important to be someone’s son. And Jochanan was always proud to be Zebedee’s. Then suddenly Zebedee was gone and so was Jacob; and Jochanan was a singular Son of Thunder, but one of Three Pillars. The Three Pillars of The Way, who now apparently must rule on the admission of Gentiles.

The man Saul, who says that he should henceforth be called Paul, lays his case before them. Jochanan last saw him fourteen years ago. Back then Saul had the look of a wild, half-fledged creature; by now he must be the thing that he is. But what that thing is, Jochanan couldn’t say.

Paul states his case: that Gentiles must be admitted, because divine visions told him that he is the Apostle to the Gentiles. And it’s hard to refute him without calling him a liar. It’s hard to deny him when he has achieved so much, founded so many communities. When he has been stoned, flogged and beaten.

All the disciples carry a rock of guilt within them, a stumbling-stone suspicion that their belief at Gethsemane was not sufficient, that it was they who failed Yeshua; that it was they who betrayed him. Paul, of course, was not with them, but you need only to look at him to see that he does not share this burden of doubt. Faith floods from him. But does that mean he’s right?

He lays his message before them, the things he has been preaching. John-Mark once reported some worryingly odd beliefs in Paul, but John-Mark isn’t in Jerusalem at the moment: he has left on a solo undertaking, and Paul doesn’t mention any such things. He presents the gospel that he has preached among the Gentiles most respectfully to the Three Pillars. Wanting to be sure, he says, that he has not been in error, running his race in vain.

Jochanan and Cephas both tend to follow James’s lead — it is hard not to, when he is so much his brother’s brother — and James seems impressed by Paul’s stories. But Jochanan notices that Paul’s smile fades faster than it ought to as he turns away. It doesn’t linger quite as long as a smile should, but is instantly snuffed, like a candle flame.

James the Just tells Paul that the Pillars must discuss the matter among themselves and that he will be summoned when they are done.

Paul’s posture alters at the word ‘summoned’ and momentarily he looks as though he is about to say something, but then he doesn’t.

Through the slit window of the room where the three talk, they can see smoke sailing skywards from the Temple’s sacrificial pyre. It marks the spot where Yahweh gathered the dust to mould Adam. The same location as where Abraham, faithful to God’s command, would have sacrificed Isaac and where King David then built the first Temple. It is a strange thing to debate the admission of Gentiles in such a place.

‘But these are strange times,’ Cephas says.

‘More than strange: the times are treacherous,’ the Just One says.

Jochanan nods. The meaning is clear: even peace of the occupied, hostile form endured in Judaea seems to be coming to a close. Mere months ago, a Roman soldier on the Antonia battlements bared his hairy arse and waved his uncircumcised cock and swore obscenities down at the Temple crowds, gathered for the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The fiery youths of Jerusalem of course took up in revolt and the Romans charged into the very Temple plaza and the young men were hacked down and hundreds of innocent people died; butchered, or trampled in the stampede to get away from the violence.

Judaea but barely survived the threat of the placing of a statue of mad Caligula in the Temple. The catastrophe — which would certainly have meant open battle — was only averted by the emperor’s death. But the threat remains: a new emperor was heralded, as swiftly as a crow drops to a corpse, and if a blasphemous statue is installed, war will follow.

Perhaps the worst was in Alexandria, where Jews settled for three centuries were massacred by those they had lived alongside. Exterminated with a systematic horror for which a word does not yet exist. As if they were some vermin being rinsed from the city. Venerable men who had sat on the Alexandrian Senate, were flogged to death like criminals. Free men were sold into slavery. Whole families were burned alive in pyres of their own furniture, and scorched and tortured bodies were scattered promiscuously about the streets. The survivors were confined to one cramped and crammed quarter, with death the penalty for leaving it, even to buy bread. And the Roman governor not only approved it all, but crucified those who made complaint.

In Rome itself, this very year, many Jews have been expelled. Forced to leave the city they called home. In waves they have flooded to Jerusalem, in states of desperate hunger and poverty that the Nazarenes have done their inadequate best to alleviate.

Something is on the wind. Things have not got so bad that they cannot get worse. And the new age that is to come may well be birthed in blood, for what isn’t?

Which is why James finally rules: ‘Better that the Gentile followers remain separate than that men who will not die for Judaea are called brother. Hate against the nation is on the rise. We should be strengthening our blood, not diluting it. So, for those who don’t wish to convert fully to Judaism, let us not oblige them, at least for the present. We cannot deny what Paul has achieved in the communities he has founded, and perhaps they can help to fund our work with the poor ones.’

So Paul is called to hear the Pillars’ answer, standing before that window where the Temple smoke is visible, drifting up into the nostrils of the unknowable.

‘We have reached the decision that those Gentiles who are turning to God shouldn’t be impeded. You say that Greeks can’t rest on the Sabbath, or else they will lose their jobs, and that they balk at circumcision. Our judgement then is that, to begin on the path of The Way and have a share in the new age that is to come, they need only worship the Lord of Hosts, to the exclusion of all other gods, and follow the simple instructions given to Noah, before the times of Abraham and Moses, such as were once obeyed by foreigners who stayed in the land of Israel. Namely, that they of course do not commit crimes and that they also cease idolatry, sexual immorality, blasphemy and the eating of meat with undrained blood still within it. They must not consume blood! If you agree to these rules, then, since you believe that God told you to preach to the Gentiles, you can continue to do so and we will go to the circumcised.’

Paul smiles, a bright smile, close to laughter in its joy.

‘But one further thing,’ James says. ‘Just as all the Jews of the world send their silver shekel to the Jerusalem Temple, so your Gentile converts must make donation to The Way, to support the poor ones here in Jerusalem. And you, Paul, are charged with ensuring that this is faithfully carried out. Do you agree to all these terms?’

Paul agrees, cheerfully and readily, and crab-scampers out sideways, in bandy-legged haste to tell Barnabas and those others who came with him from Antioch.

Jochanan leaves too, to take a walk outside the walls. Noticing suddenly how confined the room is.

During his time following The Way, Jochanan has come to be good at reading faces, and it seems to him that Paul might have left believing something different from what James meant. Though maybe the fault was with James, because what does that really mean anyway? You go to the Gentiles and we to the circumcised? In Antioch there were both, they were all mingled, surely that was the problem: God has forbidden wearing clothes of two cloths; forbidden working with beasts of different species yoked together; forbidden sowing mixed seeds in the same field; forbidden growing grain or herbs in a vineyard. What, then, is a community such as Antioch, if it is not just such jumbling as that?

But James must know best. Jochanan just needs to walk it off.

The Kidron valley is so thick with growth that it is hard to picture it as charcoal and cinder, as it was that blackest night. The emerald grass has dried to amber in the sun’s heat, bleached almost to hay while it still grows, but poppies survive amid it, even if a little bowed. A sparrow balances on the stalk of one, which cannot possibly hold its weight. And yet it does. A small miracle for Jerusalem.

Jochanan picks a blade of the grass and sniffs it, as if it might be new. Feels the texture of it in his fingers. It’s all a miracle. God created all of it. Maybe that’s all that matters. But Jochanan knows that isn’t all: God told them what they must do and what they must not do and how they must worship Him and He was extremely precise about it. And Yeshua agreed: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish the Torah but to complete. I tell you the truth: until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter, nor the least stroke will pass from the Torah until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks the least of the six hundred and thirteen Torah commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses even the Pharisees and the teachers of the Torah, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom.

That was what Yeshua said, and Jochanan can’t see how that left a single strand of doubt, not even sufficient to perch a sparrow.