“Lord, the cedar is felled and I see the sapphire of the sky.”
“It is the throne of our Father. Now go in peace ; and tell no one but the priest what has been done.”
The man promised and ran off happily, but the priest spread the report of the cure, and Jesus was presently beset by lepers begging to be healed, some of them with their faces eaten away by true leprosy. He spoke kindly to them but would not undertake to cure them. His position had become difficult : if he attended to all the sick who came to him he would not have time to eat, sleep, pray or meditate. His disciples grew weary of turning people away from the boat-house, and of saying : “Our master cannot attend to you.” Some even came knocking after midnight.
One evening Jesus stood preaching behind bolted doors in the synagogue where he had healed the corn-factor. The mob shouted and whined and murmured outside, and suddenly his privacy was invaded from above. Someone began ripping the roof off, and down in the middle of the circle, lowered by cords, came a mattress-bed on which lay a paralytic. Everyone but Jesus was astonished and angry. Jesus smiled. He said to the paralytic : “My son, your sins are forgiven !”
The Doctors of the Law who were present gasped.
Jesus knew that they were thinking : “Only the Lord God and the Messiah are empowered to forgive sins.” He asked : “Would you have me say merely : ‘Roll up your bedding and take it away, Shameless One?’ Would he be able to do so? He is paralysed, and his paralysis is caused by a sense of guilt. Until he knows that his sins are forgiven he must lie there rigid and you must remove him on your own shoulders. I did not say : ‘I forgive you your sins.’ None but our God can forgive sins. I told him only what he knows is true : that God has forgiven his sins, having now chastened him sufficiently. For ‘Pain cleanses sin’, as our fathers tell us. Come, Sir, roll up your bedding at once and take it away! This is no place for you to be lying sick.”
The man climbed out of bed, rolled up his bedding and carried it out. Jesus continued unconcernedly to preach, though the congregation were so astonished by what they had seen that they lost the thread of his discourse.
He left Capernaum before daylight and went to pray in a lonely place some miles from the town ; but he was followed by a company of sick people who interrupted his devotions. He did for them what he could, and then, making a wide circuit, crossed the Jordan and entered the town of Old Bethsaida, where he had been invited to preach at the synagogue.
His fame had preceded him there, and he found so large a crowd waiting for him at the door of the synagogue that he hurried into an alley, which led him to the house of the president of the synagogue. The hue-and-cry was soon raised again, and the mob began to besiege the house, battering on the doors and windows to demand admittance. Trampling noises were heard from above and the president grew alarmed : “They will tear off the roof if you do not prevent them, and lepers will come leaping down by the score to defile us.”
Jesus went to an upper window and addressed the crowd. “Open a lane for me to come out ; and who touches me does so at his peril.” They obeyed him. He came out, walked down to the quay, climbed into a small boat and pushed off. From the boat he preached to the crowd for some hours.
At night he told his disciple John : “The devil that possessed the man in the synagogue challenged me to return to Nazareth. It is a trial that I cannot evade. Let us go there to-morrow.”
They rowed down the Lake, disembarked at a deserted spot, and set off for Nazareth. Nobody in the towns through which they passed recognized them, and they reached Nazareth unmolested ; there Jesus rested in Mary’s house.
He found his fellow-carpenter Thomas still working at the bench and invited him to become his sixth disciple. Thomas accepted the invitation with the words : “Certainly I will go with you. It is my trade to go with you. Where are you bound now ?”
“This Son of Adam must make a journey up the hills and down into the valleys and through the waters and across the plains, a journey that will last until the Passover of next year.”
“And where will he be then ?”
“Where Adam’s journey ended.”
The news of Jesus’s extraordinary progress through the Garden of Galilee had reached Nazareth. His neighbours were astonished, and one said : “It surely cannot be the same Jesus, Joseph the carpenter’s son, the one whom we used to call the Egyptian ?”
Another said : “Who knows? There was always something strange about the fellow. He could handle poisonous snakes with impunity, and wild birds used sometimes to fly down and perch on his shoulder.”
And a third : “He has brought great credit on our village. If he can perform cures in Capernaum, why not here? For my part, I have hopes of ridding my shoulder of the rheumatism that wears me down every winter.”
And the first one again : “If it comes to that, I suffer from constant biliousness after food, and if Jesus can cure it for me I do not greatly care how he does it, though they do say that his charms are not strictly in accordance with the Law.”
Then scandal started. “They say that he learned his magic in Egypt when he was studying there, and managed to bring out the secret charm, written on a scrap of parchment, from the magicians’ college.”
“How did he do that ?”
“They say that before he entered the college he made an incision in his scalp and kept a little pocket open there, and slipped the parchment in. He managed to take it out between the golden dogs at the entrance.”
“It sounds a likely story. Of the ten measures of magic, Egypt took nine.”
“On the other hand, it may be pure fiction. After all, he was invited to expound the prophet Isaiah in the fishermen’s synagogue at Capernaum and acquitted himself creditably. We should be unwise not to ask him to do the same. If the man has an evil spirit in him, it is unlikely that he would have ventured to handle the sacred scrolls.”
After long consultation a messenger was sent to Jesus, informing him that he had been honoured with the invitation to read and expound the Second Lesson on the coming Saturday. Peter, as porter, told the messenger to wait while he consulted the Master, who was resting ; and presently returned to announce : “The Master will be pleased to do as you ask.”
When the Sabbath day came, Jesus entered the synagogue with his six disciples. His mother remained behind ; she was still vexed with him for his treatment of Mary Cleopas. The people of Nazareth were astonished to see their former village carpenter limp in painfully, with the muscles of one leg bunched at the hip, his face thin from fasting, drawn with pain, and more pallid than ever. A murmur and a titter rose about him. Jesus said nothing but joined in the opening prayers and listened while seven elders in turn read the portions of the Law of Moses and while the Meturgaman, or interpreter, translated them into vernacular Aramaic. Then came the time for the Second Lesson. Jesus called for the scroll of Isaiah, turned to the sixty-first chapter, which was the set passage, and began to read aloud the first three verses :
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek. He has sent me to bind up broken hearts, to give liberty to the captives and open the prison doors for them ;
To proclaim the year acceptable to the Lord, and the time of his vengeance, and to comfort those who mourn ;
To give those who mourn in Zion the gracious oil of joy instead of mourning ashes, the festal garment instead of the spirit of heaviness ; so that they may be called “Trees of Righteousness” planted by the Lord for his own glory.
Then first he spoke of the trees of righteousness, the seven trees from which Wisdom has built her temple. He named them in order and described their several qualities, and also named the seven guardian archangels, explaining that each day of the week has a tree proper to it, from the first day, the day of the broom, to the seventh, the day of the pomegranate.
He asked : “Where is wisdom to be found ?” and answered : “Where but under the love-apple, that is to say in God-loving meditatio
n.” And he said : “Feed on these apples in your heart. For one has been sent from the grove to preach good tidings to those of you who are meek, to bind up your broken hearts, to set free those of you who are prisoners and captives. Not captives bound with visible bonds, men incarcerated in jails of stone—to these other messengers are sent—but men and women bound by the chains of their own guilt and imprisoned in their own hardness of heart. Under the love-apple their sins shall be forgiven them : they shall rejoice in light and freedom.”
He paused and a murmur arose, a murmur of impatience, but nobody dared to speak what was in the hearts of all.
He laid down the scroll. “This prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled to-day. What more do you ask of me? I know well what is in your hearts. Two days ago I heard you discussing me in this very room, though the doors were locked. I heard what every man said. What? Do I need Egyptian magic to do works in Galilee? Egyptian magic is potent only in the Land of Egypt. In the Land of Israel the power of the Lord alone avails. Nor have I come here to set up as a village physician ; you already have one in Nazareth. Have I come back here to steal his trade? Pay him well and he will prepare you medicines to ease your aching shoulders and bilious bellies—though not your broken hearts. As for myself : I was strange to you once. I am still stranger to you now. You despised me when I was one of you ; now that I have gone from you, you hate me. You look at my twisted leg, and ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ you sneer. Shameless ones, is this not a taunt against our great ancestor Jacob who, in wrestling with the Adversary, suffered the same injury at Penuel? Is it not also a taunt against Moses, who, in Jacob’s honour, ordained that the flesh of the thigh should be a sacred portion, as it is to this day? You ask : ‘Why does he not perform in Nazareth what he performed in Capernaum?’ Because in Capernaum he found belief, and not only among Jews. A Sidonian captain of police asked this Son of Adam : ‘Pray, heal my servant Stephen, for he is a good man, a Jew of Jerusalem, and too sick to come to you himself.’ This Son of Adam answered : ‘If I went to heal the sick in every house of Capernaum, when would I be done? I have come to the whole, as well as to the sick!’ He answered : ‘Only speak the word and my servant will be healed, though you speak it at a distance of a mile.’ So Stephen was released from his sins and healed.”
Then, breaking off, he cried aloud : “Kinsmen and friends! No prophet is accepted by his own people until their jealousy is abated by his death and turned into a boast. Therefore I will tell you this : that in the days of Elijah, when famine oppressed all Israel for three years and a half, many starving widows were found in Israel. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them with his inexhaustible cruse of oil and his inexhaustible barrel of meal ; he was sent only to the widow of Sidonian Sarepta. And of many Israelitish lepers in the days of Elisha not one was healed by him ; he healed only Naaman the Syrian.”
The officers of the synagogue were raging at these words and the six disciples began to fear for Jesus, Nazareth being notorious for its rough justice. In Jerusalem or the large cities of the Garden a man might inquisitively speculate on the nature of God, might interpret the Law of Moses in so free a way that only the shadow of it remained, might give himself out to be this Great One or that, and for his boldness earn no more than a reprimand or, at the worst, a beating. But in Nazareth, as in many of the hill villages of Upper Galilee, the old ways were still followed. They called a cliff above the village the “Cliff of the Meddlers”, and the tradition was that any person who preached dangerous new doctrine, meddled with magic, or claimed to be what he was not, must be toppled from it to his death.
As soon as the service ended and Jesus came out of the synagogue he was seized upon by the villagers and hustled up the hill. He calmly ordered his disciples : “Return to the house, my sons. Inform my mother that I will be with her presently.”
He did not struggle with his captors, but walked unconcernedly forward with them. Presently they released their hold of his arms because they found their fingers growing rigid with cramp. Jesus began to talk to them quietly about indifferent matters—the fruit crop, the high price lately paid for a certain field through which they passed, the habits of the lapwing. Everyone fell silent as he talked, his voice growing louder and louder until it rose to a shout which rang in their ears and made the drums tingle, but then gradually died down to conversational tones again. They soon ceased to have any sense of what he was saying. Each man caught hold of his neighbour for support, and arm was linked in arm. His voice came to them in broken waves, like distant singing down the wind, as they continued drowsily up the hill. Nearer and nearer to the cliff they stumbled, every man asleep on his feet like an old mule in the shafts of a market cart.
Suddenly a loud cry rang through their ears : “Halt! Halt, Meddlers of Nazareth, or you are all dead men !”
They obeyed and stood in a long row, stupidly gazing down over the steep cliff-face. Another three steps and they would have perished. From a thicket on their right hand came the voice of Jesus again, ordering them to return in peace to their homes.
They turned and fled away in terror as if the Shedim were in pursuit.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Poet and Sage
THE Acts and Sayings of Jesus originally written in Aramaic but circulated in Greek translation among the Gentile Churches, should not be read without careful critical reserve. Several variants exist. The editing is often ignorant, sometimes disingenuous and occasionally fraudulent, yet it is a handbook which serves conveniently both to attract converts and to disarm the suspicions of those civil authorities for whom Chrestian is merely another name for Jew. Being no more than a skeleton of the full story of Jesus, it is supplemented by a secret oral tradition communicated stage by stage to initiates as they are judged worthy of the revelation.
It was by chance that I first became an authority on Chrestianity. An old sick Ebionite bishop who took refuge in my house at Alexandria during the persecutions volunteered to make me the repository of what he claimed was the only pure Chrestian tradition.
“Why do you propose to honour me with your confidence ?” I asked. “I am not a Chrestian.”
“Because, though no Chrestian, you have shown me Chrestian loving-kindness ; because you have studied our Law and Prophets more closely than many Jews ; and because to-day, like the prophet Elijah, I can justly complain to our God : ‘I only am left, and they seek to take my life also.’ ”
“What do you mean by Chrestian loving-kindness ?”
“You risked denunciation and looked for no reward.”
“May I prove worthy of your trust,” I told the poor fellow.
Yet I could see that he had fearful qualms about revealing the secret tradition to me, and would never have done so had he not feared that it would otherwise be lost for ever. He cried bitterly : “The traitors of Rome and Syria defile the holy truth and make a monster of him whose memory I honour above all others and whom I would have the whole world likewise honour.”
I could not agree to this condemnation of the Gentile Chrestians as a whole, and the investigations that I have since undertaken prove that the present members of the Church, being unaware on what insecure historical ground their doctrine rests, cannot fairly be characterized as traitors. They have, moreover, shown remarkable fortitude under imperial persecution, and when it is considered from what dregs of society many of them are recruited—here at Alexandria few of them would be eligible for initiation into the Greek Mysteries and not all of them could even qualify for membership of an ordinary drinking-club—it is wonderful what a reputation for decency and fair dealing they have built up. Yet clearly the trend and end and scope of Jesus’s preaching cannot be properly understood except in the light of the authority by which he preached ; and clearly, too, the founders of the Gentile Churches so strangely misunderstood his mission that they have made him the central figure of a new cult which, were he alive now, he could regard only with detestation and horror. They present him as a Jew of doubtful percentage, a rene
gade who abrogated the Mosaic Law and, throwing in his lot with the Greek Gnostics, pretended to a sort of Apollonian divinity, and this too on credentials which must be accepted on blind faith—I suppose because no reasonable person could possibly accept them otherwise. But, as has already been shown, Jesus was in fact not only royally born but as scrupulous in his observance of the Mosaic Law as any Jew who ever lived, and spent his entire life in trying to persuade his fellow-countrymen that there never had been, was not, and never could be, any other true god but the God of Israel. He once even refused the title “good master”, addressed to him by a courteous stranger, on the ground that only God is good.
As a sacred King, the last legitimate ruler of an immensely ancient dynasty, his avowed intention was to fulfil all the ancient prophecies that concerned himself and bring the history of his House to a real and unexceptionable conclusion. He intended by an immense exercise of ) power and perfect trust in God the Father to annul the boastful tradition of royal pomp—dependent on armies, battles, taxes, mercantile adventures, marriages with foreign princesses, Court luxury and popular oppression—which King Solomon had initiated at Jerusalem ; and at the same time to break the lamentable cycle of birth, procreation, death and rebirth in which both he and his subjects had been involved since Adam’s day. Merely to resign his claim to temporal power was not enough. His resolute hope was to defeat Death itself by enduring with his people the so-called Pangs of the Messiah, the cataclysmic events which were the expected prelude to the coming of the Kingdom of God ; and his justification of this hope was the prophecy in the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah : “He shall destroy Death for ever.” In the Kingdom, which would be miraculously fertile and perfectly pacific, all Israelites would be his subjects who acknowledged him in his threefold capacity as king, prophet and healer, and under his benignant rule would live wholly free from error, want, sickness or fear of death for no less than a thousand years.