“Perhaps even as he breathed his last,” Paul said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was the middle of July a little more than thirty years since Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. Mark had spent a long night tossing and turning on his cot, throwing off his cover and wishing for some movement of the steamy air. He had finally dozed off just before dawn when he was startled awake by cries and shouts in the streets.
He squinted against the harsh light pouring through his window, stunned that the sun had already risen.
But it hadn’t.
As he rushed out he saw the source of the orange glow in the distance. In the area of the Circus Maximus, raging flames sliced the sky and black smoke billowed. The conflagration seemed to create its own windstorm, which soon brought fire racing into the most populated areas of the city. It appeared the whole of Rome would soon be ablaze.
Barefoot, Mark sprinted toward Peter and Esther’s apartment, only to meet them on the street. They looked terrified and out of breath, but Peter said, “The manuscripts! Rescue your manuscripts!”
“But are you all right?”
“We will be fine! Don’t worry after us. We will try to gather the believers in this area, but you must protect your writings!”
Mark hurried back toward his place, hearing Esther call after him, “And get your shoes on!”
At the end of the street on which Mark lived, buildings burst into flames from the heat alone. He charged into his place, dancing from foot to foot as he pulled on his sandals. He found the leather bag containing his papyrus and quills, and he was grabbing for other belongings when someone hollered through his door. “Get out now! The entire block is going!”
Mark dived outside as fire swept in, and his hair and even eyebrows were singed. But the writings were safe.
With the bag slung over his shoulder, Mark hurried to help children, the elderly, the infirm. All were seeking breathable air and open spaces where the fire would not kindle everything around them. After hours of exhausting work he finally reached a clearing and was able to reunite with Peter and Esther. “Any news of Paul?” he said.
They shook their heads and looked across the city. “His area will be laid waste within the hour. We should head that way to look for him.”
“He remains robust,” Mark said. “He will know what to do and be able to do it.”
“Fortunately,” Peter said, “many of our people come from the Transtiberum region of Trastevere, on the other side of the Tiber. It seems to have been spared. Perhaps we can find shelter there.”
Everyone else seemed to have the same idea, but as Mark and Peter and Esther slowly joined the long lines crossing the bridge, thousands seemed to have changed their minds and were heading back. “What news?” Peter said.
“We’re not seeking refuge with Jews!” someone spat. “Not even a spark in their region. They must have started the fire!”
Mark and Peter and Esther united with several other elders and believers and set about building a small tent city from whatever scraps they could find. Meanwhile, the fire would rage for more than a week, destroying almost all of Rome. Only four of the fourteen regions of the city were spared. While the loss of life was relatively small for the epic proportion of the disaster, homes, apartments, businesses, shops, livestock, and great works of art and architecture were lost. The cultural headquarters of the Western world had been decimated.
On the second day, word came that Paul was safe, and two days later he located Mark and Peter and Esther. “Already they are blaming the Christ followers,” he said. “We need to find someone in one of the surviving regions to hide us.”
“If anyone torched this city,” Mark said, “it is more likely to be Nero himself.”
“That’s what many are saying,” Paul said. “But he was not even here. He was reportedly at his villa at the seaside in Anzio.”
“Still,” Mark said, “this looks like his handiwork. He could have had it done. People around here say it started in a shop near the Circus Maximus in the perfect location to spread. Others are saying the city will be rebuilt and named for him.”
“Just as Julius predicted.”
The four Christians were carrying through the city their bundles of all they had left when Roman soldiers swept through, calling out for the identities of any Nazarenes. Mark and his friends kept their heads down and kept moving as soldiers on horseback cried, “The emperor sees the Christians as utter reprobates and aims to exterminate them! You will be rewarded for information! Do not offer succor to these incendiaries who have destroyed our city!”
Hidden on the spacious estate of a new believer who had not yet become known to authorities, Mark and Paul, along with Peter and Esther, busied themselves trying to keep abreast of the disposition of their various flocks. While many Christ followers wanted to help in the relief effort, Paul warned against this, as Nero seemed determine to ferret them out and kill them.
The owner of the estate reported that the emperor had delayed his return from his vacation home, further infuriating the populace. “Some say he immediately began planning the rebuilding and that he was happy for the opportunity at worst and indifferent at best. The people are calling for his neck. He is trying to turn the attention on us.”
Paul said, “We thought we had it bad years ago under Claudius when he banished some for creating a ruckus in the synagogues. Oh, for that kind of persecution now.”
Occasionally Mark disguised himself and made forays into the city to see for himself the unspeakable devastation. Once he followed an angry mob to the Forum, where they chanted and demanded answers from the emperor himself. One shouted, “Deny that you did this!” and to the amazement of the crowd, Caesar himself appeared on his balcony.
“Not only did I have nothing to do with the near death of my beloved city,” he cried, “but I know who did! My people tell me that this was the hideous work of the new religionists, the superstitious Nazarene sect, which we all know engages in all manner of the macabre in their pagan rituals. I pledge to rid this city, and indeed this empire, of all such infidels.”
The crowd suddenly roared, and Mark realized that—at least for a time—Nero had succeeded in taking the focus off himself and putting it squarely on innocent parties. “Death to the Christians!” they shouted. “Exterminate the infidels!”
“I shall do better than that!” Nero hollered, seeming all the more encouraged by their support. “I shall make a spectacle of their destruction!”
Now the crowd roared lustily.
“I shall have my people prepare my gardens and our arenas to host the executions of these rebels! They shall serve as examples to revolutionaries all over the world that no one is to trifle with the life and future of the Roman Empire, especially not its pagan enemies!”
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT for months, Mark toiled on his manuscript with Peter’s supervision. During the day he ventured into the city to witness yet more heinous crimes of the state against the followers of Christ. Hundreds had been rounded up and commanded to renounce their faith. Those who refused, and there were many, were put to death in horrible fashion, the creativity and bloodlust of the emperor himself seeming to know no bounds.
As Nero watched and laughed and cackled and roared, Christians were tortured to within inches of their lives, forced to tell where they had gathered and who else was involved, and offered their freedom for the renouncement of their faith. Some wilted under the pressure, some broke. But even those who gave up their compatriots were extended no leniency. They suffered the double blow of having crumbled under the pressure and still being put to death.
With almost every execution, the announcement of the crime included some offense against the empire other than arson, like “hatred of the human race.”
“No one loves the human race more than the followers of the Christ,” Paul lamented.
And yet every day Christians had animal skins attached to them and were set in the middle of an arena where packs of wild dogs a
ttacked then and tore them to shreds. Sometimes Nero would have dozens of such victims delivered at once to a vast gaming field, and as they desperately ran to elude the beasts, charioteers would run them down, to the delight of the emperor and the crowds.
Executions that took place near sundown involved dipping the condemned in vats of wax, nailing them to crosses, and setting them afire. Nero took pride in thus lighting his garden so more could be executed while the citizenry watched. Once, after impaling Christians on poles surrounding his garden, he had them set ablaze and crowed, “Now you truly are the lights of the world!”
The more he reveled in the torturous deaths, the more creative he became. It was as if he could not get enough of the carnage. When the dogs had had their fill, he brought in lions, and when the crowd grew weary of the repetition, he hung the victims on crosses and reenacted the death of Christ before setting them afire.
In the midst of all this, Nero took the time to push through a heavy tax on the workers and the wealthy, citing the need to rebuild the city. That, along with the unusual cruelty of his executions, resulted in the opposite of what he had hoped for. Rather than rallying the people around him and giving them what he thought they wanted—the massacre of nearly an entire sect—he succeeded in stirring their sympathy toward the victims.
Soon Mark heard Roman citizens claim they had seen the emperor dressed as a charioteer and himself riding about the execution scenes for a closer look. Many grumbled that he took too perverse a delight in these gruesome deaths and that this sect was being sacrificed because of his own brutality rather than for the good of the public.
Of course, by now the believers who survived were meeting in deep secret, protecting one another, some fleeing the city and many the entire country. Mark and Paul and Peter and his wife surreptitiously made the rounds of the meeting places, desperately, urgently teaching and preaching and trying to embolden everyone.
Meanwhile, Mark finished his gospel and told Peter he was ready to serve as his secretary for his mentor’s own letter to believers.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Devastating for the followers of Christ in Rome under the brutality of Caesar Nero was that they had few options. Hardly any had the means to flee, and some who tried—by bribing Romans to get them to ships—found that a Roman’s reward from the government for their capture was greater than what they could afford for the bribe. And so their “rescuers” wound up profiting from both the bribe and the bounty when they were arrested at the harbor.
Mark and Paul and Peter and Esther had to split up when word came that their protector had been found out and was on the list to have his estate searched. They cleared out in the middle of the night, promising to reconnect with one another when they had found shelter. Paul wound up in an enclave on the northern edge of the city, while Peter and Esther were able to settle beneath a shop that had somehow survived the inferno in the middle of one of the otherwise burned-out central districts. Over the next several months many peasants and slaves, Jews, and Christians slowly made their way back into the area, which was largely ignored by authorities.
No one trying to elude detection and arrest was able to move about freely, of course, so the old couple counted on Mark to ferry supplies in to them after dark. He had found shelter with the elders of a small congregation on the west side of the city. His life had come to consist of desperately making the rounds of terrified underground believers, teaching them and encouraging them, and motivating them to stay at the task of helping all the unfortunates in the capital.
Mark was conflicted, however, about what had become his life’s mission. Like Paul and Peter, he longed to preach regularly and to argue for the gospel in the synagogues and public squares. That was, of course, now suicidal. And he wanted to bear witness to the truth of the saving power of the gospel everywhere he went, to anyone with whom he came in contact. That was also verboten now.
The young men and women believers despaired for their lives and seemed paralyzed with fear. How could Mark blame them? They were cooped up behind closed doors, many underground, scavenging in the darkness for food, hearing horrid stories every day about friends and loved ones who had been arrested, tortured for sport, and executed, and wondering when their time would come.
Mark could only dread the same fate, but in his constant prayer and worship and seeking the face of God, he felt compelled to spend the rest of his days—regardless how many or few—doing all humanly possible for the sake of the gospel. No human, especially a despicable one of the ilk of Nero, should be able to do so much damage to the cause. Sadly, if the scant reports from the outside could be believed, the persecution was spreading throughout the empire, even as far as Jerusalem, where Christians were being crucified. Their crosses lined the roadways in and out of the city.
Strangest to Mark was that in his times of deep prayer and supplication, pleading with the Lord for some sort of relief—not just for himself but for all his brothers and sisters—it seemed God was nudging him about some future ministry of, in all places, Africa. It felt so bizarre to even think of a future, let alone somewhere else.
Mark could barely remember the last time he had seen the sun. The light of day had become the enemy of safety.
One night, after a particularly horrifying day of news of more executions, Mark made the rounds of all the believers he knew in the area and pressed them for money or goods he could use to keep Peter and Esther alive. Many resisted and said they had only enough for themselves and their families.
“We must all sacrifice. This man has been your spiritual father, and he is too old now to get about or work or even beg. And we should not expect him to. I do it gladly in his stead, for I feel I owe him so much.”
Mark put what he had been able to scrape together in the way of meager foodstuffs and cash in his leather bag along with his manuscripts and quills. He had learned to be sure to bribe different Roman citizens each time for food and goods, because he knew they would go directly from the transaction to a Roman soldier who would be on the lookout for him. And he never traded near where he was lodging.
The only hope for many in the underground church was being able to pass as a normal Roman citizen looking for work in the rebuilding of the city. The few who were able to secure such labor had to share their income with the rest.
When Mark had been able to buy meal and grain from a peasant, he stole into the district where Peter and Esther resided and found them meeting quietly with a half dozen other believers, including the prophet Silvanus, also known as Silas, who had traveled much with Paul. Only as he reached the door did he hear the low, beautiful humming of a psalm, and his heart tore within him at the sweet sadness of it. How he and these fellow believers had once enjoyed lifting their voices in praise to God, and now they were relegated to wordless humming just above a whisper to avoid drawing the attention of Nero’s minions.
Paul used the special knock that silenced the music and allowed him entrée to the tiny candlelit chamber. He greeted the brethren and Peter and Esther with a holy kiss, prompting Silvanus to mutter, “Don’t let a Roman see you and charge us with lechery.”
Mark urged the faithful to continue the meeting.
“Do you and Silas not need to meet with Peter?” a young man said.
“We do, but it is not as if we have other obligations,” Mark said, smiling sadly. “Please.”
“We were almost finished, Mark,” Esther said. “Perhaps after another tune you would lead us in prayer.”
Many wept as they hummed a familiar melody, reminding them of a favorite psalm of David. When the music faded they looked to Mark, then bowed their heads. He didn’t know why the Lord prompted him to think of the Shema, the traditional Jewish prayer, but he could not shake the urging.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
“And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You sha
ll teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Several looked up and whispered their thanks, but Mark held up a hand. “If I may,” he said. “Some of you know that years ago, around the time I met Peter, I was a diligent student of the ancient texts. Our Father God is urging me in my spirit to tell you what comes after this passage in the Pentateuch. Do not be alarmed by how it ends, but heed its counsel for the predicament in which we find ourselves.
“‘So it shall be, when the Lord your God brings you into the land of which He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, hewn-out wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant—when you have eaten and are full—then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. You shall fear the Lord your God and serve Him, and shall take oaths in His name. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are all around you (for the Lord your God is a jealous God among you), lest the anger of the Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.’
“Now I cautioned you against concentrating on that final part, because you might be prompted to wonder if God’s anger has somehow been aroused against us and He is using this evil regime to remove us from the earth. I do not believe that. I quoted this passage to remind us that we do right to ignore the gods of the people around us. Let us trust in the promise of the rest of it that there is a Promised Land for us as well. It may not be on this earth, but we shall again reach paradise if we remain true.”