At Nazareth, Mary wept and said to Jesus : “My son, when you come to die, may you be permitted to leave behind you something of the same fragrance that will ever cling to the name of Hillel.”
“May I always be permitted to find the door of which he spoke, Mother, and wrench it open !”
Chapter Fifteen
The Slur
JESUS came to Jerusalem again with his parents for the next Passover. This time Joseph permitted him to remain behind, after the Feast, to attend the public debates and lectures.
After saying goodbye to his family outside the City walls, he went up to the Temple. A rheumy-eyed man squatting inside the East Gate recognized him and said with an ingratiating smile : “Well met, learned Jesus of Nazareth! I expected to see you come walking in to-day. I have an invitation for you : to arbitrate impartially on a nice point of the Law which is being disputed between two patrons of mine. Each protests that he is right, and they have a wager on the matter.”
“To make the Law the subject of a wager is unseemly. Besides, I am no Doctor of the Law.”
“There is nothing unseemly in the argument itself ; and you are well on the road to your Doctorate.”
“By the favour of the Lord,” said Jesus hastily. “Who are the disputants ?”
“Teachers in an Academy.”
“Then let them choose as arbiter the head of their Academy.”
“I was to wait at the Gate until you came in ; my patrons insist that you are the only one who can decide the point.”
Jesus resisted the impulse to tell the old man to go about his business ; there was something evil in his manner. But he remembered what patience the learned Hillel had always shown when asked to settle trivial questions—and on one occasion at least a wager had been concerned. “I will do as you ask,” he said reluctantly.
He was led to a gloomy room overlooking the Court of the Gentiles. The old man said to a tall stupid-looking Levite who was gazing out of the window : “Detain this boy for a short time, friend, while I fetch the two persons of whom I spoke.”
Jesus asked indignantly : “Did I not give you my word that I would arbitrate in the dispute ?”
But the old man had already gone.
He said to the Levite : “By your dress, Sir, I take you to be a Levite of the Temple Watch. Can this be the guard-room ?”
The Levite nodded without speaking.
“A strange place for a debate.”
The Levite nodded sagely and then said after a long pause : “Very strange !” and after a still longer pause : “You must tell the truth, you know. It will be better for you to make a full confession and restore what you took. The Captain of the Watch does not lay on very hard. He deals with boys himself, you know.”
“I do not understand. Who was that smiling old man who brought me here ?”
“He? He is Hophni the Toad. He never forgets a face. You are the boy who was nearly caught at the Feast of Tabernacles, are you not? The one who robbed Meleager the money-changer, but managed to dodge out through the Gate and hide in the crowd ?”
Jesus laughed. “I was not in Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles.”
“So you say! Well, then, what is your crime ?”
“I am not accused of any crime. This is some witty fellow’s jest at my expense. Let me go now !”
“I am instructed to detain you.”
The Watch returned at that moment from their morning’s round. The Captain asked : “Who is this boy ?”
“Hophni brought him in, Reverend Sir.”
The Captain frowned. He asked Jesus : “Are you by any chance the son of Joseph of Emmaus ?”
“My father once lived at Emmaus. His name is Joseph son of Heli. He is now registered as of Nazareth in Galilee.”
“Yes, that is the man. Then I am sorry to say that you must consider yourself under arrest.”
“Sir, here comes Hophni with the witnesses,” said the Levite.
The First and Second Doctors entered, followed by a younger man with an ink-horn and pen-case dangling from his belt. The First Doctor slipped four drachmae into the hand of Hophni who went back, chuckling, to his post at the Gate.
The Second Doctor, who looked ill at ease, said : “You understand, Captain, that we do not wish this matter to be made public—there must be no scandal. May we withdraw into your private room ?”
“It is at your disposal, learned Doctor.”
When Jesus was brought into the private room the Captain said gently to him : “You are no longer a child. Do you already understand something of the Law ?”
Jesus bowed.
“You are styled Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth, formerly of Emmaus, and of his wife Miriam? “
“I am.”
“You have always lived with them ?”
“From birth. I was born at Bethlehem of Ephrath.”
“How did you come to be born there ?”
“My father took my mother to Bethlehem when she was nearing her account. Being of the House of David, he wished me to be born on family ground. That was the year in which King Herod died—about four months before his death.”
“Who were your mother’s parents ?”
“She was a daughter of Joachim of Cocheba, one of the Heirs, since deceased in poverty ; but a Temple ward.”
“You can read fluently ?”
“By the help of him who made me.”
“Read this !”
It was a page detached from the Temple Treasury account book, recording a marriage contract between Joseph son of Heli, of the House of David and the tribe of Judah, a native of Emmaus, and Simon son of Boethus, High Priest, guardian of the Temple ward Miriam, daughter of Joachim the Heir, a native of Cocheba, and his wife Hannah. The instrument was dated ten months before the birth of Jesus, but the receipt for ten shekels was not recorded until four months later, and to the receipt was added in very small, very faint letters : “There is wanting one half-shekel.”
The accountant said : “The words written small are in the hand of the then High Priest. It is a most unusual case. I have searched the records and found a receipt for the payment of the missing half-shekel ; it was sent from Alexandria by the High Priest after his deposition by King Herod and has been glued to a later page. This receipt is dated a month after the King’s death.”
Jesus, very white now, asked : “You mean that my father Joseph did not marry my mother until after she was with child by him ?”
“Either by him or by another,” said the Captain of the Watch. “I have been making private inquiries, and I hear a rumour that your mother was carried off by bandits immediately after the drafting of the contract and held by them for some three months. This may well explain why Joseph was unwilling at first to put down the last half-shekel of his contract. Well, my boy, I do not wish to distress you, but I must explain the legal position. There is a rule which Moses, not I, made and which I am ordered to enforce : it is that nobody born out of wedlock is permitted to enter the sanctified Courts of this Temple. The penalty for a breach of this rule is death. You acted in ignorance—I can see that you acted in ignorance—and therefore I shall make no report in writing on the matter, in order not to bring scandal on your House, though I am obliged to inform the High Priest Annas of the action that I have taken. But unless you can satisfy me that you are mistaken as to the date of your birth and that you were born in legitimate wedlock, I have no alternative but to forbid you to enter. Mind you, I do not call you a bastard, and indeed cannot do so because I have no clear evidence as to the date of your birth.”
“Though I condemn myself from my own mouth,” said Jesus, “I know that I was born four months before the death of King Herod ; on the day of the winter solstice. My mother has often told me so.”
The Second Doctor said passionately to the First, who was smiling triumphantly : “Take my new embroidered cloak, for you have won your wager. Grin like a dog and run about the city in it. Yet I would rather freeze to death than accept you
rs in exchange, for you have done a worse day’s work than you know, and if I never see your face again it will not greatly grieve me.—Come with me, boy, to my house and be my guest until you return to your parents in Galilee. For you are a good boy, and was it not the learned Hillel (his memory be blessed) who justly said : ‘A wise bastard is better than an ignorant High Priest’ ?”
But Jesus had toppled and fallen to the ground with his limbs rigid and his features distorted with pain. A terrible cry rang through the building.
The next day Jesus said faintly to the Second Doctor, who was tending him with remorseful care : “Learned man, it would be a kindness if you were to send one of your servants to fetch me a block of olive-wood, a chisel and a mallet.”
“For what purpose, boy ?”
“To see whether my hands have forgotten the trade upon which they must now depend for a livelihood ; for a Doctor of the Law, it seems, I can never be. Yesterday a great white mist rose up over my mind and I find now that I cannot remember simple Scriptural texts that I thought were burned deep in my memory. A chisel, a mallet, a block of wood.”
They were brought him, and finding that he could still manage his tools in workmanlike fashion, he gave thanks to his God. Then he said : “Add to your kindness, learned man, and send one of your servants with me a part of the way home, for I am not sure whether I can remember the road.”
“He shall go the whole way with you, if you will.”
Jesus returned to Galilee and parted from the Doctor’s servant when within sight of his home. He said nothing to his mother or father about what had happened. He could not bring himself to do so. Nor did he need to absent himself from the synagogue on account of his bastardy, for the generous rule was that no man should be debarred from religious communion with his neighbours on account of some fault of his ancestors or parents. The chief sign that he gave of his spiritual disquiet was that he ceased to read more of the Scriptures than the ordained daily texts and would no longer discuss them with anyone at all. He worked all the more diligently at his trade and was more punctilious than ever in his behaviour towards his elders. Everyone noticed the change in him. On the whole, the people of Nazareth and Bethlehem agreed, it was a relief that he had ceased to be a boy prodigy and become an ordinary carpenter’s apprentice. He had frightened them by his learning, his independence and the critical acuteness of his mind. “We have seen this before,” the elders said. “The change comes with puberty. The visiting spirit flies off, never to return. There was a boy at Cana in our grandfathers’ day, an Issacharite, who confounded by his knowledge all the Greek professors of astronomy and mathematics at Gadara University. Figures, figures, figures—they served him like a witch’s familiars! But with puberty, off the spirit flew, and the boy, overcome by melancholy, disgraced his father’s house by taking his own life.”
Four years went by, and each year when the Passover or the Feast of Tabernacles came round again, Jesus told Jose and James : “No, brothers, go up yourselves to Jerusalem, and the Spirit of the Lord be with you! I am the youngest of us all—this time I will stay at home and mind the beasts. Next year, perhaps, I will go.” It was at the Passover of the second year that a party of Samaritans broke into the Temple one night and, entering the Court of Priests, strewed it with human bones to make it unclean ; for which the Samaritan nation was publicly cursed in the synagogues and forbidden entry for ever into the Court of the Gentiles.
In the fifth year old Joseph died. Jesus’s grief was great and he fasted for three full days. Afterwards, Mary took him aside and said : “While he lived, I could not tell you a secret about your parentage which you have a right to know. I feared that you might look on him with different eyes. Even now I shrink from hurting you.”
“Mother, you could not hurt me now, even if grief for the dead did not so numb my senses that I can hardly tell hot from cold. For I was struck to the heart five years ago when I read the Temple records of a certain marriage contract, and the knife is still plunged in the wound. You are my mother, and I am commanded to honour you, and I do honour you. Yet I honour you the less for knowing that the man whom I called father was not my father according to the flesh ; as I honour his memory the more on that account, having been treated by him as a well-beloved son. Mother, what have you to say? At Jerusalem I am written down as a bastard and you are accused of having wronged my father between the day that he undertook to marry you and the day that he came to fetch you away to his house. Why did you not tell me in good time of the flaw in my citizenship? You feed me with hopes, you send me to a learned rabbi, you persuade my father to introduce me into the synagogue of Nazareth ; thinking, I suppose, that the truth will never come out. Did you even dare to take me to the Temple to be circumcised? Were you making me a partner at eight days old to a wicked breach of the Law? And how did Joseph find it in his conscience to humour you in this? Yet I dare not reproach the beloved dead.”
Mary asked softly : “Jesus, little son, am I a woman who would sin, do you think? Do my eyes meet yours steadily? Do my cheeks show the guilty flush of shame ?”
“Since the day that I was shown the Temple records by the Captain of the Watch, and warned never again to enter the Inner Courts until I could prove my legitimacy, a cloud has overhung my mind. Questions which once I had the power of solving quickly have become enigmas. Especially, your look of innocence and the written record of your shame stand in contradiction ; I cannot reconcile them. If I could, perhaps the cloud might lift, for night and day this question tears like an eagle at my soul. I love the Lord still with all my heart, but among the torn shreds of my former learning a saying of the gloomy Shammai flaunts like an ensign. ‘The same is true of every man alive : “It would be better for him that he had never been born.” ’ This view Hillel attempted to confute, but Shammai for once won the debate. Every man, he said, is necessarily born into error ; and error leads into sin ; and sin to divine displeasure ; and when a man displeases his Maker, it would be better that he had never been born. As heirs of Adam we pay for the sin of Adam. In my childhood, Mother, I could see myself a Doctor, a prophet, a king—surely it is this failure in humility which our God has now punished in me.”
“It is written : ‘Whom he loves, he chastens.’ My son, listen to me. I swear to you, as our God lives, that I have never in my life sinned with any man, either willingly or unwillingly ; I swear that you are no bastard, but born in royal wedlock. I did not marry the generous Joseph until my husband the King was dead, and then it was a marriage in appearance only, the one means by which your life could be preserved from your enemies.”
Having said so much, Mary waited calmly for Jesus to speak, watching his face attentively.
At last in bewilderment, he asked : “Who am I, then, Mother ?”
“You are the uncrowned King of the Jews, the secret heir to the throne which has stood empty since the days of King Herod !”
He gazed at her horror-stricken and incredulous. “Do you mean ?” he began.
“Do I mean what, little son ?”
“Almost I should have preferred bastardy to this,” he said, groaning. “You mean, Mother, that you were the secret bride of King Herod the Wicked ?”
“The Lord forbid !” she cried. “Your father was the noblest and gentlest and most unfortunate prince in the history of our race.”
Slowly the mist drew off, the sun shone out. As Mary told Jesus the story of his birth, he felt the lost powers of his mind flooding back, with nothing lost or impaired ; on the contrary, he knew himself capable of thought hitherto beyond his scope. He had not wept before, but now the tears flowed and he cried : “Oh, Mother, if only you had spoken before! If Joseph were alive, and I could fall at his feet and thank him for his great love !”
“You were the best of sons to him,” she reassured him.
Then she told him of his adoration by the three astrologers, and of the massacre at Bethlehem, and how Kenah’s nephew had conveyed Joseph and herself safely across the desert to On
-Heliopolis. She ended : “And the learned Simeon who taught you at Matarieh : he was not the old schoolmaster that he pretended to be. He was Simon the son of Boethus, your father’s friend, who was High Priest. Two months after his deposition he took Nazirite vows for a year and went out into the Arabian desert as a hermit. When he returned, gaunt and burned and unrecognizable, it was not to his luxurious home at Alexandria but to Matarieh and the mean lodgings where Joseph sought him out. As your spiritual guardian, he felt it his duty to watch over you in those days of hardship and danger, and educate you in a manner worthy of your destiny.”
“How did he know that we were at Leontopolis ?”
“Joseph and I took you to Alexandria with us soon after our arrival in Egypt, before he left for Arabia. We went there to pay the half-shekel which completed our interrupted marriage contract. But Joseph feared to show himself in the Jewish quarter because of Herod’s agents, who were now active in the service of your uncle Archelaus the ethnarch of Judaea. So it was I who carried the money to Simon and told him how we were situated. I said nothing to Joseph and he never guessed Simeon’s identity. The High Priest Simon was supposed to have died in the desert.”
“Is he dead now ?”
“He is still with the Essenes at Callirrhoë. I have news of him once a year.”
“And what became of the gold crown that the three astrologers brought for me to the stable at Bethlehem ?”
“It is at Ain-Rimmon in the care of my Aunt Elizabeth. One day you shall claim it—one day you shall wear it.”
“I wear it? The Emperor has abolished the Jewish monarchy.”
“He has not abolished it. He has only withheld the royal title from unworthy and murderous claimants to it. The throne is yours by Roman Law, as your father’s only surviving heir. King Herod’s Will, by which it was conveyed to you, is laid up with the Vestal Virgins and cannot therefore be either overturned at law or set aside.”