Peter drew Jesus aside and reported in indignation that Simon was using the healing formula which Jesus had given them ; but he replied that nobody could claim a lien on these words, which were not a secret charm of the sort used by sorcerers. However, he did not trust Simon and sent back this message : “Tell him no more than this, that I preach the mercy of God to the poor, and that I shall be happy if he is not offended by me.”
(Simon of Gitta later broke away from Judaism altogether, and took over from one Dosithens the leadership of a new syncretic cult based on that of Hercules-Melkarth and the Moon-goddess his mistress. He had twenty-eight disciples, arranged in four weeks ; and the extra day and a half that compose a lunar month were represented by himself and a woman. The woman was Jezebel, a priestess of Hierapolis, whom he married and who was thereafter known to his followers as Selene the Moon, while he was known as Simon the Telchin, or “the Abiding One who stands, stood and shall stand”, both titles making him appear an incarnation of the Sun-god. Simon claimed the power to control the weather, to bless or blast with his eye, to fly through the air on wings, to assume any shape he pleased. But none of John’s disciples followed him, and his pretensions were far greater than his capacities.)
Two synagogue elders of Chorazin visited Jesus one night, forbade him ever again to preach in their city, and at the same time advised him to leave Galilee as he valued his life. They told him that Antipas, at the request of Chuza his estate-steward, was on the point of issuing a warrant for his arrest.
“From whom have you heard this ?”
“From Joanna, Chuza’s wife. She dared not send one of her own servants to you.”
“Hating me as you do, why have you come with this warning ?”
“We are Israelites and would never let a fellow-Israelite fall into the hands of Edom if we could save him by any means in our power.”
“Yet you have forbidden me to preach in Chorazin ; and this prohibition overlies a threat.”
“Chorazin is not all Galilee.”
Jesus thanked them ironically and said : “If that fox inquires after me in your hearing, tell him that I shall preach wherever it pleases me ; that I have no fear of the demon which possesses him ; and that we two shall meet one day in Jerusalem.”
Yet it was not Jesus’s custom, as he said, to throw pearls to the hogs ; and he never returned to preach in any town or village that had once officially rejected him. He removed from Chorazin, and crossed the Jordan to New Bethsaida, or Julias, the capital city of Philip’s tetrarchy, which adjoins Old Bethsaida. There he preached for a while, but though he had forbidden the new converts to come after him, a great many of them disobeyed and raised such an enthusiastic clamour about him that he was requested by the local magistrates to leave the city. He symbolically shook the dust off his sandals after passing through the city gates, and declared that on the Day of Judgement it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah, the Dead Sea cities which had been destroyed by fire from Heaven, than for New Bethsaida, Capernaum and Chorazin.
Undeterred by his rebuff, he called his disciples together and required each of them to choose out six of the new converts and send them out, two by two, on missionary journeys throughout the country. Having given this order, he went alone into Lower Transjordania to consult with his brother James the Ebionite.
When he returned and found that the disciples had performed their missions creditably he sent them down to Jerusalem to keep the Feast of Tabernacles, but told them not to expect him, since he might be prevented from coming. He reached Jerusalem on the last day of the Feast, the Day of Willows, when the Great Altar was decorated with willow boughs. Every evening of the seven it was the custom for a priest to go down to the Pool of Siloam, at the head of a festal procession, carrying a golden pitcher of the capacity of three logs. He filled it and brought it by torchlight up the hill to the sound of trumpets, then through the Water Gate of the Temple and into the Court of the Gentiles. There other priests received the pitcher from him, intoning the words of Isaiah : “You will draw water with joy from the wells of salvation”, and all the people took up the refrain. Then, while the trumpets blew again and the Levites sang psalms, waved the thyrsus and danced around the Great Altar, the water from Siloam was poured over it simultaneously with a libation of the new wine. From the altar the water ran into a silver basin and disappeared down a pipe which communicated with the Kidron brook. The authority for this rite was the ancient tradition : “The Holy one, blessed be he, said : ‘Pour out water before me at the Feast, that the rains of the year may be blessed to you.’ ” But on the evening of the Day of Willows the Levites danced not once but seven times around the Altar, to commemorate the seven days’ encompassing of the walls of Jericho.
This Day of Willows was marked by an interruption : at the moment when the priest stooped at the Pool with his pitcher, a loud sweet voice broke the customary religious hush. “Amen, Amen : Ho, everyone that thirsts, come to the waters, whether he has money or none. Listen, and come to me! Hear, and you shall live !” Then every pious man found himself continuing in his mind the quotation from Isaiah : “And I shall make an everlasting compact with you—the sure mercies of a David. Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander of the people.”
In order not to mar the sanctity of the occasion no attempt was made to arrest Jesus, who was surrounded by a crowd of his Galilean followers, and when the procession had moved forward on its way towards the Water Gate, he was not to be found.
The incident was brought up at a meeting of the Great Sanhedrin on the following morning. It was not doubted that Jesus had uttered the cry, but nobody could positively swear to this, since it had been evening and he was not a tall man whose head could be distinguished above the crowd. Annas, the former High Priest, proposed that he should be summoned before the Court for a breach of the solemnities, not so much because he had given way to an ecstatic impulse, as because his quotation was a provocative one : a direct promise to the people of a revolutionary leader. “Himself, no doubt,” said Annas dryly, and his colleagues laughed as he added : “A David who does not need to feign madness and let the spittle run down his beard.”
Nicodemon warmly opposed the motion as inconsistent with the dignity of the Court. Even if it could be proved that Jesus, or any other person, had uttered the words, they could not be construed in a provocative sense. Isaiah was quoted at the reception of the water in the Court of the Gentiles ; why should he not be quoted at the drawing of the water outside the Temple precincts?
Annas asked him jocosely : “What? Are you also a follower of this mad Galilean ?”
Nicodemon’s intervention was decisive, since he was the accepted authority on all questions concerned with libations and lustrations ; but Annas had startled him by his question and he regretted that he had not spoken with a more careful show of disinterest.
Jesus returned with his disciples to the Lake of Galilee. He preached on the outskirts of Magdala, centre of the fish-curing industry, but did not enter the market-place or any synagogue. Because of the notoriety that he had acquired as a sponger on prostitutes and tax-gatherers, a Sabbath-breaker, and a man cast off by his family, only the dregs of the populace came to listen to him. His audiences were indeed now so thin that the police, though instructed to keep a watch on his movements, did not molest him in any way, and said to one another : “He seems an honest enough fellow. That the synagogue elders hate him is a clear proof of his friendship for Rome.”
From Magdala he sailed with his disciples across the Lake to Old Bethsaida, where they hauled their boat ashore and went on foot along the Upper Jordan until they reached Mount Hermon, the immense mountain which marks the northern limit of the ancient Land of Israel. Here they visited the grotto of Baal-Gad, famous as the source of the River Jordan ; it lies at the water-reddened base of a high limestone cliff crowned with the city of Caesarea Philippi. The grotto is sacred to the Lord of Gad, the goatish god of good fortune, wh
om the Greeks identify with Pan. Judas of Kerioth read a Greek inscription carved on the rock-face : “To Pan and the Nymphs.” He asked Jesus : “Did John the Baptist ever inspect the source of the water in which he baptized us ?”
“This water, which the Lord has blessed for our uses, would be clean though the jaws of a dead dog were its faucet ; as, at the synagogue lectern, the Law of Moses still flows clean between the lips of a sinner.”
They sat on the rocks idly tossing pebbles into the water. He suddenly asked them : “Who do the people say that I am ?”
“Some say that the mantle of John the Baptist has fallen on you, as Elijah’s fell on Elisha.”
“Some say that you are Elisha ; but others that Elisha is dead and that you must be Elijah.”
“I have heard you named Enoch.”
“And Isaiah.”
“But who do you say that I am ?”
Peter spoke in tones of conviction : “You are the Messiah, of whom our God spoke through the mouth of David : ‘My Son, I have begotten you to-day.’ ”
Jesus prayed aloud : “Father in Heaven, if you have revealed the truth to this child, I thank you ; if he has spoken foolishly, let him be forgiven. Anointed though I am, my destiny is known to you alone. With King David I cry : ‘Keep me from the sin of presumption, lest it master me. Keep me undefiled and innocent from the great offence.’ ” He charged them all to silence in the matter.
He took Peter, James and John climbing up the southern slope of Mount Hermon, while the others went off to preach in the neighbouring villages. They started before dawn and by noon had reached a place near the summit where the wind blew cold and snow lay in drifts under the bright sun, dazzling their eyes. There he stood still, and his face became transfigured as he conversed aloud with two invisible persons, who gradually took on substantial form : a majestic white-bearded elder spirit, robed in light and wearing a golden mitre, and a red-bearded younger spirit, in pastoral dress and with a lamb under his arm. The disciples could understand only a part of what was said, because the voices came to them as if in a dream ; but the spirits were clearly warning Jesus against going to Jerusalem.
The red-bearded spirit was saying : “Brother, that road does not lead to the gates of the Kingdom but is swallowed up in the marshes. Avoid it !”
And the white-bearded : “Beware of the fourth beast, my Son, lest it catch you on its horns and toss you into the bottomless abyss !”
“Should I shrink from my task ?” Jesus asked. “Should I flee to the Wilderness as Elijah fled from Jezebel the harlot? Or temporize with evil as Moses did at Meribah when he humoured the rebels and struck the rock with his staff of kerm-oak ?”
The red-bearded again : “Worse things even than my father suffered you will suffer! Be warned : the Female’s snares are already laid.”
And the white-bearded : “Abtalion’s judgement : ‘Wise men, guard your words ; for if you are exiled to the place of corrupt waters—as clear streams flow into the accursed sea and are mingled with it—those who come after will drink of them and die, and the Name of Heaven will be profaned.’ ”
Jesus cried in a loud voice : “What Israelite except only Enoch the pure ever paid the uttermost farthing of his debt to our God? Yet I will pay mine. Only at Jerusalem can it be paid. A word of Hillel’s—his memory be blessed—‘If not now, when?’ ”
He was not to be deflected from his course. The dispute continued less and less intelligibly, until Peter broke the spell by babbling the first random words that entered his head. “Master, this is a pleasant place, but the wind is wild and houses are few. Give us leave to build three snow huts ; one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah.”
Immediately the vision faded.
Judas, when Peter told him the story later, divined that the spirit whom he had mistaken for Elijah was John the Baptist, and that the spirit whom he had mistaken for Moses was Simon son of Boethus. He began to grow anxious on Jesus’s behalf, because spirits of upright men appear only to the upright and do not deceive.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Debt
HE did not make directly for Jerusalem, but first took the westward road to the province of Sidon, where he visited the scattered Jewish communities that lie just inside the border. At Sarepta a Phoenician widow, under whose fig-tree he was sheltering from the rain, implored him to heal her cataleptic daughter. He refused, on the ground that his duty was only to the Israelites, and asked : “Woman, what have I to do with you ?”
“My fig-tree has given you shelter.”
“For that I thank you, but bread from the children’s table may not be thrown to the dogs.”
The widow was importunate. “Do not grudge the dogs the fallen crumbs,” she pleaded.
Then, remembering Elijah who, some seven hundred years before, had performed the miracle of the inexhaustible oil-cruse and flour-barrel for a Phoenician widow in that very town, he relented and cured the girl. She was the only foreigner for whom he ever relaxed his exclusive rule.
It must be understood that his capacity to perform cures was limited. As experienced physicians are aware, the act of healing by faith, even though performed in a divine name, is physically exhausting and when too often performed dulls the spirit. Once at the height of his popularity Jesus was jostled by a crowd outside the synagogue doors of Chorazin. Sensible of a sudden drain of power, he cried out : “Who touched me ?” A woman confessed that she had touched the sacred fringe of his praying-robe in the hope of a cure ; she suffered from a menstrual discharge which made her perpetually unclean. “Would you make a magician of me, thievish one ?” he cried in indignation, then hastily spoke the words which would dedicate the cure to God.
As the winter drew on he left Sidon and made for Samaria by way of Galilee. In order to distract attention from himself he dispersed his disciples in twos and threes. As he and Peter passed through Capernaum, the synagogue treasurer whose duty it was to collect the Temple-tax stopped them and demanded payment of their arrears. The amount authorized in the Book of Deuteronomy was half a shekel, that is, two drachmae, for every adult Jew throughout the country ; it was the one tax which nobody dared to evade, and which therefore cost nothing to collect. Although in Jesus’s view the Temple priesthood grossly misused the enormous sums of money that the tax brought in, he did not refuse payment. But he was at the end of his resources, Joanna and Susanna having been forbidden by their husbands to continue their support of his mission. He told Peter : “Collect the shekel from the fish, while I wait here.”
Peter thereupon borrowed a line, hook and bait from a friend and, going down to the Lake, swam out to a rock some distance off-shore. There he had extraordinary luck, soon landing a huge fish of the sort called mouscos that the surly fishmongers would bid against one another to buy. In the market he held out for four drachmae, got his price and brought a four-drachmae piece to the treasurer’s house within the hour. He told the treasurer with mock gravity : “I baited my hook with prayer and let it down. Look what sort of a stone I found in the mouth of the first mouscos that I pulled up !” For this fish is alleged to open its mouth as a refuge for its fry when enemies are about, and close it with a stone chosen from the Lake-bottom.
But Peter’s luck did not hold. He returned to the rock and caught nothing at all.
The disciples were beginning to be disheartened by the shifts to which they were reduced for obtaining food, and most of them had not eaten a good meal for weeks. Their clothes were stained and ragged and their sandals worn out. “Anyone might mistake us for the Gibeonites on their visit to Joshua,” complained Philip, who had been something of a dandy in his day.
At Shunem Jesus comforted them with the promise that any man who abandoned home, family and trade for the love of the Lord would not go unrewarded in the Heavenly Kingdom. As they munched locust-beans in a fallow field he said : “It is written in the Apocalypse of Baruch : ‘The day shall come when vines grow with ten thousand branches on each stock, and with ten thousa
nd shoots on each branch, and with ten thousand clusters on each shoot, and with ten thousand grapes on each cluster, and when every grape when pressed yields five-and-twenty measures of wine. As soon as a citizen of that rich land reaches out his hand to a cluster, another cluster will cry out : “No, take me, I am juicier, and praise the Lord with me.” ’ ”
“We shall not lack for wine, then,” said John, “unless the jars give out.”
“It shall be the same with the corn. Every grain planted shall grow into a plant of ten thousand ears, with each ear of ten thousand grains ; and each grain, when milled, will yield ten pounds of fine white flour. The date-palms and fig-trees and quinces shall yield in the same prodigious manner.”
“And will butter and honey be as plentiful ?” Thaddaeus asked in his high voice. His real name was Lebbaeus, but he was nicknamed Thaddaeus (“Bosoms”) because of his matronly figure. “My belly wearies of locust-beans and stale crusts.”
“Isaiah prophesied butter and honey for the Messiah in the Kingdom ; they shall be as plentiful as sour looks and harsh words are to-day.”
“That is difficult to believe. How will the soil support such growth ?”
“You will see.”
Then he said : “When the Son of David is seated on his royal throne, twelve men shall be seated on twelve lesser thrones judging the twelve tribes. Whatever they have renounced to-day shall be restored to them a hundredfold.”
Their eyes glistened with hope. “May those twelve kings prove to be your twelve disciples !”
“The thrones are not in my giving ; and even the humblest citizen of the Kingdom must first drink the bitter cup, the Pangs of the Messiah. Dare you set it to your lips ?”