The Tongues of Men or Angels

Twenty Years before the Crucifixion

Saul grew up in Tarsus, no mean city, named for its ancient patron god: Baal-Taraz, the dying and resurrected saviour. Tarsus was the metropolis of the province of Cilicia, blessed to be sited in the region of Smooth Cilicia: a place of bounteous fields and abundant grazing plains, the fertility of which was guaranteed by the tree-hanged god Attis, whose flayed, eternal frame dripped blood upon the land. A plenty to be contrasted with that of Rough Cilicia, where mountains descended right to the sea, an inhabitance of rock and scrub and scavengers.

Tarsus was a great port and a great portal to the world: to the east lay Syria, Egypt and Judaea; to the north and west, Asia Minor and Macedonia. Traders and seafarers from all these regions shouted in strange-accented but comprehensible Greek across Tarsus’s river docks. It had fallen to Roman rule as a result of Pompey’s ruthless, scorched-shore campaigns against piracy. But, though staggeringly successful, Pompey’s victory cannot have been complete, because some of the scarred ruffian seamen, who spent clipped foreign coins in the Tarsean brothels and tent-taverns, were surely nothing were they not pirates. But the majority of native Tarseans were good people, law-abiders, given to philosophy and piety.

Only thirty miles behind the city, the cold, snow-cowled peaks of the Taurus Mountains towered like white bull horns. Tarsus was a territory of bulls. Bulls and blood. Like most significant cities of the day, Tarsus’s foundation myths claimed links to the Greeks and their gods. Who knows if it was mystics or the linen workers who first spun the incredible tale that came to be credited? But Herakles, adventurer demi-god, it was wholeheartedly accepted, had founded Tarsus.

Herakles was said to have been fathered by God. Zeus, god of gods, had sired him with a mortal woman. And so Herakles — part man, who could suffer and die like us, part god, who could not — roamed the earth for a time, performing mighty works and giving hope to those who came across him.

The Tarseans worshipped Herakles — slayer of the Cretan bull — by sacrificing bulls in his honour. But the Herakles of Tarsus was also entangled with crops and harvests, the death and rising of Baal-Taraz, the vaguer, earthier god, who predated the unifying conquests of Alexander the Great and his Greeks. So every autumn Herakles died and a giant pyre, flower-garlanded and sacrifice-stocked, was burned while Herakles descended to Hades. Every spring, he rose again, like the sun, and the virgin girls who had come to marriageable age through the winter danced. Lithe, slight, girl legs sprited — in what finery their families could afford — to honour Herakles and to celebrate renewal and to be watched, while they did so, by the men who hoped to be suitors and the men who just enjoyed watching virgin girls dance. Then bulls, cloth-draped and painted, were pulled through cheering streets. And the people ate grapes and drank them and roared their devotion in the warming sun, a festival offering to Herakles and to the fecund vegetation spirits they no longer remembered.

The Jews did not give offerings, not to spirits or to Herakles and especially not to bulls. They had been punished in their past for honouring golden calves, and they would not be fooled again. Only in the distant Jerusalem Temple could the Jews make sacrifice to their God. Saul’s father, as citizen Jew, occupied a curious position. He could not thoroughly take part in the life of the metropolis, as his Tarsean citizenship entitled him and almost obliged him. Yet he had paid the required 250 drachmas — more than a year’s wage for most men — so citizen he was, among the elite, and citizen his son was by inheritance. Citizenships to great cities, and the privileges and protections they bestowed, were bought and sold across the civilized world. Though that rank most sought after, which few could afford, was, of course, to be Roman. A Roman could not be flogged or fined or executed, except by order of Rome.

There were few Romans in Tarsus. But those there were, soldiers and traders, brought their own cult of the bull with them: Mithraism. Its doings were secret, but the Jewish boys whispered to one another about what was known. Gleanings of what went on in the Mithraeum temple were more scant and secret than those about sex, since the latter acts — in cramped, city-walled dwellings — were frequently performed by their parents and others within earshot, when not in plain sight. Mithraism, on the other hand, was alien: a mystery religion; an initiation religion; a thing of brother-bonded devotees and shared sacred meals, with foreign concepts of everlasting abundance in heavenly eternity. On holy dates, or upon induction of a wealthy neophyte, it was said that a blindfolded bull — cloth wrapped about its eyes to make it compliant — was led aloft a scaffold and its jugular was cut to drench the new devotee below in a tide of blood. They would wash with it, rubbing the hot life force into themselves, lapping it from cupped hands, caressing it frantically into every crack and crevice of their naked flesh. All the followers of Mithras drank the blood of the bull when they could; an idea anathema to the Jews, for whom the consumption of blood had been prohibited by God. But bulls are costly and blood is messy; it was said that outside festive events, the gatherers in the Mithraeum chamber would symbolically pass a chalice of wine, a surrogate that became blood, and just as effectively blessed them with immortality.

‘They say that devotees of Mithras will live for ever,’ Saul told his father once, as they passed the Mithraeum’s descending stepped entrance.

‘Well, it’s nonsense. And we don’t believe in such upstart muck,’ his father said, looking for a moment as if he might cuff Saul, but just as suddenly softening again. ‘We believe in an ancient God. Not all that is new is good. And ours is a jealous God. Remember that, Saul, and remain faithful to Him.’

Saul did so, though he still saw the passion in the eyes of the worshippers of Mithras, as they left their vaulted cellar temple; he saw that they believed and with what fervour. And he heard the revelling, on the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month, when they celebrated the birth of their god, born in a manger. But righteous Jews didn’t believe in frivolous rituals, heavenly hereafters, or wine that turned into blood, so he hardened his heart against it all. And he thought no more either of the civic ecstasies of Herakles-Taraz, who arose from the dead each spring. Or of the hanged god Attis, virgin born, who died for the sins of others and was resurrected three days later, whose followers ate his body in the form of bread. Such fripperies were put right to the back of Saul’s mind.