The Tongues of Men or Angels

Thirty-four Years after the Crucifixion

When the Praetorian Guards finally strike, they come with the wrath of Mars. Wooden bolts are shattered as strapped boots kick in doors. Those who protest are hacked down where they stand. The delay in the round-up was not through mercy but efficiency. The black cloaks draw up plans, before drawing their long knives.

They take the congregations as they meet for their communal meal on the day of Solis. Those house churches not destroyed in the fire are encircled, dark sharks around a raft; the Christianoi who assemble together in the camps are even easier to take captive. Most of the arrests are made within a single evening.

Paul needs no tracking down. Manius hands over his prisoner to his comrades with an unapologetic shrug, then rubs his wrist and stretches his arm as though his predominant sensation is one of pleasure at finally being rid of an encumbrance.

Aristarchus tries to make escape, sliding on his belly beneath the back flap of the group’s marquee. When half his body has passed, he gives a dog-yelp of pain and his legs go limp. They are wrenched out of sight from the other side and that is the last Paul will ever see of his friend.

Paul thanks God that Useful and Timothy at least will be safe enough at Colossae. The boy was sent away in plenty of time, back to his old master, Timothy with him to ensure Paul’s letter would be publicly read and Useful forgiven.

Epaphras, Demas and Luke, if God wills it, will also evade capture: they left just days ago, armed with epistles to continue the ceaseless argument against those false apostles who would Judaize and circumcise the whole world if they were able.

But for Paul and Silas, it is gaol. And the imprisonment is truly that this time: no house arrest or manacled wrist, but a black and barred pit of filth. Floor slick with piss and faeces from stinking slop pots knocked over in the dark. A reeking dungeon into which new prisoners are lowered by rope. One of the ropes has a seat attached, for those who are too disfigured and broken from torture to hold on.

Roman citizens cannot be tortured, but many of the captives are immigrants, freedmen and slaves, and they are put to the rack as a matter of course. They return to the pit prison with their spines twisted and their arms dislocated, without fingernails, sometimes without fingers. They find it hard to speak when they come back, with their broken jaws and holes from pulled out teeth; but, by the rate at which the Praetorians find more Christianoi meeting places after each questioning, it seems they speak enough at the time. And to look at those misshapen, bloodied creatures, it is not possible to hold them responsible for anything they might have said.

Silas is taken away one morning. If morning exists in the murk of the prison cavern. He walks away as a broad, proud son of Adam; he comes back two days later as a shuffling beast, sightless and tongue-less. Paul weeps.

It is becoming clear that the Christianoi are not even to be scapegoats for the fire. Because the lot of the scapegoat is not so bad: on the Day of Atonement it is prodded and spat at and driven out of town and poked with reeds and heaped with scorn and maybe in the wilderness the wolves will one day catch it. But the other goat is taken straight to the altar to be held down and cut through the jugular. Perhaps it would be better to be the scapegoat.

Many of the Christianoi are resolute: they take first the fire and now this persecution as final evidence that the end of days is here, just as they have been told to expect. Paul encourages them in this belief and they are greatly lifted by his presence among them. He seems to emit a field, like the change of air around a fountain, a force invisible, yet tangible. To be with such a figure of the movement at this time of horror is a poultice of great comfort. Paul draws strength from the solace he gives to others and endeavours to be stoical and strong. If this is how the trumpet is to sound, he will not be found wanting. If this is the shape that battle must take, Paul will still wear faith as a breastplate and salvation as a helm. He will not thrice deny the Christ, like Cephas did.

Some prisoners do break, though, and can hardly be blamed for it. Some wail — whenever guards appear at the heaven of the ceiling hole — shouting that they are not of this sect, never were really of this sect, or in any case they recant. Lips spittle-flicking in their desperation, they cry that they still pray to the good gods of Rome. They say they know not who this Christ is.

The guards are immune to such pleas for clemency. Innocence is in any case irrelevant. The crime of the condemned is not that they are members of a newly arrived initiation-religion, but that they razed Rome; it is beyond improbable that any were genuinely involved, therefore all are equally guilty. Much of the city is in cinders, but the prison remains and must brim with criminals. The plebeian mass must be sated, with death and bread.

In the pit there is not even bread. For those whose gag reflexes have adjusted to the stink sufficiently to allow them to eat, there is only puls, a mashed-up corn gruel. As watery as fish-piss. But Paul performs his rites on it nonetheless. Paul tells those hallowed to share suffering in this persecution that even this gruel can become the body of the Christ and through it they will have immortality.

Some of the few Christianoi Jews prefer to eat their thin porridge without a magical blessing. But that aside, there is little separation between them and the Gentiles in this cavern-prison. All observe the Sabbath, if nobody works. Everyone keeps the dietary laws, when the only thing to eat is runny puls. And not the fiercest Judaizer would suggest a circumcision in this pit of cess and infection: it would be a death sentence. Although it has come to seem near certain that this is the fate they all now face.