The Tongues of Men or Angels

Twenty Years after the Crucifixion

Lydia knew little of love.

When she was thirteen, Lydia had still been a freckled child, with showers of auburn sunspots flocking over her shoulders and even down the gentle channel that was beginning to form on her chest. And when she was thirteen, Lydia was married off. And parts of her body that were barely budded, felt still new even to herself, became groped and opened and broken.

The man who bought her — or ‘wedded’ her, as her father referred to the transaction — was carelessly brutish. He treated Lydia as an object among his other objects, with her perceived value apparently lying not even at the upper end of those possessions. Sometimes he would have her in the way he would have a slave-boy and he didn’t care if afterwards she cried. He was vain and mannerless; full of sly gibes and cruel passions. But he did have two great virtues: he was rich and he died.

And so, while scarcely twenty, Lydia had become that rarest of things — in this world, at this time — a woman in charge of her own destiny. Lydia took over her husband’s slaves and his houses and even his business. Lydia became a dealer of purple, of dye and cloth. A seller of the secretions of predatory sea snails. Waxy juices discharged in such tiny amounts that ten thousand of the spiny-shelled snails barely suffice to dye the trim of a toga. But wealth flowed in the viscous form of this liquid. Freedom — the colour of blackish, brackish, clotted blood — pooled in Lydia’s vast vats of decomposing molluscs.

The mythology of the purple murex merchants was that their precious dye was first discovered by demi-god Herakles or, rather, by his dog, the mouth of which turned plum upon crunching the snails. But Lydia declined staid Herakles as her patron deity: she was a seeker after a more exotic religion.

She followed at first the cult of Attis: son of a virgin; sacrificed on a tree; resurrected from the tomb; whose body was eaten by celebrants in the form of bread. And Attis’s worship was entwined with that of his consort god: Cybele, the Great Mother — Magna Mater — Gaia, some called her. She was foreign and mysterious and alluring; bringer of dance, wine and misrule; rider of lions and ruler of emasculated men. Cybele was a fitting divinity for an independent woman like Lydia, pleased to be free of a virile tyrant of a husband.

The priests of Cybele and Attis were eunuchs, castrated that they might be chaste and celibate for a greater place in the heavenly banquet that was to come. But who nonetheless ran amok in celebration of the mysteries to which they were party, torchlight night-time ecstasies, which eventually became tiring and troublesome for Lydia, a woman with a business to run. And there was something more than a little untoward about the castrated priests with long bleached hair, cavorting in women’s clothing, with dangling earrings and flouncing pendants, made up like cheap flesh-peddlers, some with breasts of carved wood.

In gradually recoiling from the excesses of Attis and the Great Mother, but still on quest for spiritual meaning, Lydia fell into the embrace of the comforting conservatism of Judaism, which had much to commend it, with its rich and long history and its carefully codified morality.

But it was, for all that, a little bland. For those who travelled to the fiery splendour of the immense Temple at Jerusalem, covered with weighty plates of silver and gold; who saw the majesty of the high priest — in his mitre, breast-ornament of treasure stones and fringes of bells — attended by seven hundred lesser priests to make the ritual sacrifices; for those who marvelled at the Beautiful Gate of Corinthian brass, adorned with embroidered veils from India, interwoven pillars, and clusters of golden grapes larger than a man; who saw the altar awash, its gutters flowing, as if in summer flood, with the blood of countless thousands of slaughtered beasts; for those who smelled the pyre-sized piles of burning cinnamon, saffron and frankincense; who descended the steps to feel the cool, cleansing waters of the purifying baths and heard the linen-robed Levites sing; for those people it might be a different thing entirely. But in the humble, dusty little synagogue of Philippi, they read the sacred texts in Greek, prayed and debated, and Judaism was a rather plain affair.

Not that Lydia actually converted to Judaism, but she was a regular Sabbath visitor to the synagogue, outside the gates, next to the river. She was a ‘God-fearer’, as the Jews called them: fellow travellers, who recognized the God of Israel as an ancient and powerful deity, but were reticent of full conversion and unwilling to take on all the arduous dietary laws and proscriptions of Judaism. However, as Lydia was to discover, to her great pleasure, such things were no longer necessary for salvation.

Because one Sabbath morning a man came to Philippi’s synagogue. A man of perhaps fifty, his age was hard to tell, his face darkened like a field slave’s from decades of days on the road, wrinkled before time by the sun he walked under, or the Son he talked about. A man of short but sturdy stature, with crooked legs, crisp, scanty hair, a single thick eyebrow perched on a broad forehead like moss upon a rock, a bent and bowed nose, and teeth that seemed rather more an assortment than a set. The unkind might even say he was an unattractive man. But it seemed to Lydia that only those who glanced for an instant could ever say that. Not those close enough to feel his forceful eyes. Certainly not those who heard him speak. To Lydia, the man could at times seem like an angel, which perhaps he was, since, like an angel, he was a messenger of God.

And to Lydia, who had known so little of love, he sang a hymn of love.

‘If I speak with the tongues of men or angels, but have not love,’ he said, ‘what am I?’

And because no one in the synagogue answered this riddle, he answered himself: ‘I am just a clashing gong or a clanging cymbal. Even if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and render over my body to hardship, I may boast of my deeds, but if I don’t do it through love, I gain nothing.

‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not brag, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.’

And it seemed to Lydia that you could forgive a lot of a person who brought to the world such words as those. It seemed to Lydia that you could forgive him anything.

Lydia was baptized, there in the river, outside the walls. She took a deep gulp of air to prepare as the preacher held her by the crown and pushed her under. She released the air, as she burst free from the water and cried, ‘Abba.’ She released the air and so much more was released with it. She let go of envy and enmity and injury. She let go of a hate she had all this time harboured against a deceased husband. And a place inside her, the space cleared of all those toxins, was filled with love.

Man cannot live on bread alone. But without bread he cannot live at all. And Lydia begged the evangelist and his two companions to stay in her villa awhile. They did, and her whole household was baptized too, by the stranger-angel, whose name was Paul.

Paul’s message was an elegantly simple perfection of form. The Jesus he told Lydia about, though new to her, was a figure comfortably familiar from cults she had known before. And Paul’s faith was linked to the exquisite tapestry of the Israelite scriptures, but without their strictures. Being attached to those ancient texts added an authority lacking in other salvation-sects, but like them, Paul’s followers were promised eternal life. And Lydia retained the powerful sense of belonging that she had experienced from committing to belief in just one God; but rather than being an appendage in the synagogue, she was a fully fledged member of the mystes of Christ. More than that: a sponsor and founder; among the first of equals; though all were equal in the eyes of Jesus.

‘Should I give my slaves their freedom?’ Lydia asked Paul one day, having come to an obvious conundrum of equality. ‘If we are all united now, brothers and sisters in Christ and love, how can I keep them as slaves?’

‘Let those called as slaves remain as slaves,’ Paul said. ‘Slaves should obey their masters with fear and trembling. The new age will dawn at any moment. This generation will not pass away before these things take place, so it is best that everyone just stand as they are. Time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep. Because the world in its present form is passing away.’

Which is why, to Lydia’s great sorrow, Paul could not stay with her for long. He had to continue to spread the word, wherever the Holy Spirit would send him. And the Holy Spirit seemed to think the further away from Jerusalem the better. Travelling with only two disciples: strong-armed Silas, who had come with Paul from the community at Antioch — where Lydia sensed there had been some kind of discord — and Timothy, a half-Jew they had recruited en route.

Lydia pleaded that she be allowed to continue to send money for their work and Paul gracefully agreed that she could.

‘Because the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel. He who shepherds the flock drinks the milk of the flock. Just as those who serve in the temple share in what is offered on the altar. So give what you have decided in your heart to give. God loves a cheerful giver. If you sow generously, Lydia, you will also reap generously.’

And surely it was so because, as if by divine intervention, Lydia’s profits increased dramatically only shortly afterwards: one of her slaves discovered that there was another way to get dye from the sea-snails: they do not have to be crushed; they can be milked.