The Tongues of Men or Angels

Twenty-two Years after the Crucifixion

The tomb was empty. Of that there was no doubt. That was the unarguable fact. The women and James had seen the rich man’s servants put the body there, in a freshly excavated cave, where no one had ever been laid. The women had watched from a distance. They had marked the spot well. And all of them agreed which burial-crypt it was. But when the women returned, on the morning after the Sabbath had ended — very early, just after sunrise — they found the body gone. The new moon of the tomb cover had been rolled away and they could see the place where Yeshua had been laid. But he was not there.

Miriam from Magdala fetched Cephas and James, yelling: They have taken the Master out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!

So Cephas and James ran together, bare feet upon the hard ground. Fleet James, faster than Cephas, was crouched down staring into the glimless tomb interior by the time Cephas got there. But Cephas was first inside, squeezing through the narrow entrance hole. Cephas saw the linen cloths, sprawled as if shed on the stone niche, and the handkerchief, which must have been placed on Yeshua’s head, not lying with the shrouds, but rolled up in a separate place.

Cephas and James and all the women witnessed that the corpse had vanished. But they did not yet understand what that meant. So afterwards they went back to their lodgings.

The tomb was empty. Of that there was no doubt. That was the unarguable fact. No one could dispute the empty tomb. But the rest of it hadn’t been clear to begin with, not to Cephas.

And maybe things get even less clear with time. Memories are like bait-fish scattered in a lake, gradually drifting from sight, eventually to be consumed or just to disappear into the darkness.

At the end of the eight days of the Passover, the disciples wept and mourned and each one returned to his home, grieving for what had happened. Cephas had journeyed back to Galilee, slumped under a burden heavier than any pack-mule’s. Sleepless with grief in the small-hour paranoia of the silent roadside nights.

Cephas came home to a dingy room, lit only by the light from the wood-barred window; walls whitewashed with grey; floor of baked clay. He returned to the sorrowful but knowing embrace of his stoical wife. To his sallow, edgy children, grown fearful of him in his long absence, standing well back, tattered shawls and the rear wall making each other dirtier.

When his wife brought a basin to wash the road from him, Cephas saw his own face, looking not just lined but channelled, as if the numberless tears had actually eroded it.

In the weeks that followed, persuaded by the hungry stares of his children, Cephas resumed fishing. He launched his ramshackle little craft back onto the Galilee Sea. And he became like that great lake too, like a body of water: so sorrowful was he that the tears became him and he became the tears. He was wet with them and filled with them and composed of them.

But Cephas discovered that he didn’t love Yeshua any less, just because he was dead. If you can love a man enough to leave your work and family and wife and life, then that is a man for whom you have an ocean of love, wider by far than Galilee’s presumptuous lake. And Cephas’s love if anything grew even stronger, coloured by grief and guilt.

Neither did it feel like Yeshua loved Cephas any less, through being dead. It didn’t seem like mere death had conquered that love.

And sometimes, when out on the sea that isn’t, when letting his net drift or repairing a rent, Cephas would be quite certain that someone was sitting in the small vessel just behind him. And he knew that the someone was Yeshua. Cephas would speak to him; Cephas would say he was sorry, for his failure and betrayal, he would sob that his great love had not gone. And ask what he should do.

And sometimes Yeshua would answer.

If Cephas turned too suddenly, Yeshua would vanish. But if Cephas could be content to believe that Yeshua was there. If Cephas had faith sufficient not to look, but just to trust, then he could keep hold of Yeshua’s presence and even see him on occasion, reflected on a knife blade, or from a sunlit wave. And Cephas was sure that afterwards the nets curled in the stern were a little flattened and warmer to the touch, just as if they had been sat upon.

And Yeshua told Cephas that The Way was not over yet, any more than it had been after Baptizer John’s death. Yeshua told Cephas that he would come back. Yeshua said that soon the Lord God would wipe away the tears from all faces and swallow up death for ever. Just as the Prophet Isaiah said He would. Yeshua reminded his friend of a promise that this generation would not pass away before the dawn of the new age on earth. Before their lands would be free and peace would descend. Yeshua said that God’s Kingdom would still come and God’s will would still be done, just as he had pledged while alive.

And Yeshua said that Cephas was forgiven.

And among the followers of The Way, there were others who did not stop believing in Yeshua; many of those who had loved him at the first did not forsake him.

James and Cleopas were walking to a village called Emmaus, about sixty stadia from Jerusalem, when they met a stranger on the road and travelled with him awhile. The man was pious, wise and kind. And afterwards they came to realize that the stranger had been Yeshua. He had not looked like Yeshua: his face was quite different and he was older and his accent was of the south, but still, the two of them were close to certain that it had been him.

More and more of the disciples also came to believe that Yeshua lived on and would return to rule, though some had doubts. There were visions, through moisture-cloaked eyes, and there were those who searched the scriptures to see what these events meant. To see if somehow this might have been how it was all supposed to run. And there were those who pondered back on things that Yeshua had said and wondered if he hadn’t always known that these happenings would come to pass. Perhaps they had not only failed him at Gethsemane, but had failed to understand him all along.

It has been a strange and tangled path, which has led from those baleful days to here. In the disciples’ grief it was as though the very sky was darkened at the moment of Yeshua’s death. It was as if the veil of the Temple was torn. But it was not torn: the veil remains. The Temple remains. Life goes on. Not as it was, but nonetheless.

Twenty-two years have passed in Jerusalem, and The Way continues to attract believers, who celebrate the Jewish festivals and the sacrifices along with Cephas, Jochanan and James the Just.

Often the Three Pillars still spend Sabbaths together in the house of John-Mark’s mother, just as they did in those first years following their return to Jerusalem; after they were jointly persuaded that this thing had not ended.

John-Mark’s mother has long since passed away, so the building would now be more properly called the house of John-Mark, but he is seldom there and old ways of speaking linger like winter in middle-aged men.

James the Just, who always was lean as a wolf, now is also grey like one. But through his piety, his popularity among the people continues to grow.

When John-Mark comes back from his latest journey, he does so wearing the most threadbare cloak the Three Pillars have ever seen; rather than cloth, it is more like a series of connected holes.

‘You want to sell that cloak,’ Cephas says, with a smile, ‘before someone steals it.’

‘A memento of Corinth,’ John-Mark says. He is the youngest of them by some distance, but even so his black eyes have aged on this last trip alone and his shock of hair is beginning to winnow thin.

‘Corinth is a hideous place,’ John-Mark says. ‘Fish heads and faeces all over the streets, you’re happy when you step on a clamshell or a cornhusk. Even the icons stink of piss. And they practise sacred prostitution in a fashion worse even than the Canaanites: women giving themselves to strangers on the steps of the temple of Aphrodite, believing that they serve their goddess through that and their husbands’ revelling in it — I dare to say aroused by it. And this is the place that enemy Paul has made his latest base.’

‘I’m telling you, Paul does it all for money,’ Jochanan says, ‘so that he might trick wealth from those rich and impressionable women whom John-Mark tells us are led astray.’

But Cephas says that he doesn’t think this can be true. Paul must believe what he preaches, or how could he have suffered so much for those beliefs? He is not deceitful, just deluded.

‘Then wait until you hear this,’ says John-Mark. ‘Paul has made the final move into madness: he replaces the name of God in the words of the Prophet Isaiah and says that every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is God. He has at last made his Jesus fully equal to the Lord of Hosts and to be worshipped. And he now calls the Torah so much dung. He says that all who rely on the Torah are under a curse. He says we Jews have a veil over our eyes.’

‘This is the consequence of leniency,’ Jochanan says, not quite openly reproving James, but very nearly doing so. ‘We should never have countenanced the idea of Gentiles joining without full conversion.’

Even now Cephas wavers. The community at Antioch became once again a fine and loving place, after those errors instituted by Paul were corrected. Must the Gentiles really convert fully and be circumcised if they want to follow The Way?

It’s true that Yeshua said he was sent ‘only to the lost sheep of Israel’. But even still, it is not quite so simple as sheep and goats: there was one time that Yeshua almost approached non-Jews — you can’t really call Samaritans Gentiles, but they aren’t quite Jews either. Yeshua and the gathering had gazed down at a Samaritan village and the Samaritans didn’t look so different from Israelites, when you actually looked at them. They lived in the same houses: flat roofs of mud-packed reeds, walls built of bricks of sun-baked clay, with windows narrow and few, to keep out the glare and the dust. They wore the same clothes: half-sleeved ketonet; simlah with dancing fringes and tassels; leather girdles, to belt their skirts and hold their knives. And didn’t they all worship the one-God?

But the Samaritans say that the sacrifices should be made at their temple on Mount Gerizim, when right-thinking people know that they must be made in the true Temple at Jerusalem. And because of this the Samaritans wouldn’t accept Yeshua as the Messiah — though they, too, waited and prayed for one. Just because Yeshua’s face was set towards Jerusalem and not to Gerizim. And the messengers Yeshua sent ahead, who entered the village of the Samaritans to make preparations, came back and said they had been told that Yeshua was not welcome. The Samaritans had rejected the King, just because his face was set towards Jerusalem.

Perhaps that was a message then, Cephas reflects. Maybe this was the signal that all must convert and look towards Jerusalem.

But back then it was taken as insolence, not prophecy; when Jacob and Jochanan heard how their master had been scorned, they had wanted to burn the bloody village down. They had wanted to torch the fields and spoil the wells. They had wanted to bring fire on the Samaritans as if it were lightning from the heavens.

Only Yeshua had stopped them, with a laugh like rolling waves and a smile wide as a rainbow. Yeshua had said their zeal was good, but their target was wrong. Yeshua clasped the brothers to him and named them his Sons of Thunder.

Jochanan’s thunder has still not fled him in middle age. ‘We need to counter these colonies of blasphemy that Paul is founding,’ he says. ‘We must pursue his path like John-Mark has, but as an army, no longer like scouts. In every place where Paul has founded a community, we need to send loyal messengers of The Way, relentless men who won’t stop until the members of those churches embrace the Law of Moses and that polluter of waters is exposed.’

‘Agreed,’ James says.

They both look to Cephas: there must be consensus.

Cephas’s brow furrows, deep as the wrinkles of the ram’s horn that even now blows from the corner of the Temple. This decision cannot be left for ever.

‘Agreed, then. Let us pursue him.’