The Kingdom of the Wicked
On the outer fringe of the crowd that filled the Temple precincts, whipped away from the path of the procession by guards in newly polished breastplates, Peter stood with James the son of Zebedee. James said: ‘This should quieten the Zealots. They have what they want at last.’
But it was like a dissatisfied Zealot that Peter spoke. ‘Don’t you believe it. It’s only Rome in fancy dress. The worst of both worlds, if you want my opinion. Roman arrogance and priestly intolerance. At last he gives our enemies an official whip.’
‘Do we wait for the whip?’ James asked. ‘Or do we travel?’
‘Some of us travel. Some of us stay where we are.’
The royal procession was mounting the streetwide steps to the great portal. The musicians had ceased to play. Voices of men and boys intoned an anthem within. Herod Agrippa I was carried to his crowning. He would be glad when it was all over.
The Jews had not yet been driven back from Rome to their royal homeland. The expected act had still to be promulgated. But those Jews who had official if lowly positions in the state – treasury accountants, municipal functionaries – were being summarily dismissed. Some of these had pretended to be indigenous Romans, ready to prove their respectable paganism by sacrificing to the gods, but there was much grim lifting of kirtles; certain things could not be dissimulated. In one of the imperial gymnasia Caleb alias Metellus looked sadly for the last time as he believed on wrestlers and gladiators in training. He snuffed the lively sweat and heard the thump of falling bodies as the games editor kindly broke the bad news.
‘It’s like this, Metellus – or do you want to be called by your real name?’
‘There’s no further point in pretence, is there?’
‘If you were rich, like one of those fatbellied usurers, well, you know what you could do. Buy it. Not officially, of course. But it’s being done. Her whorish majesty the Empress Messalina is making a quiet fortune. It’s never been known before – citizenship for sale.’
‘Well,’ Caleb said, ‘so much for a promising athletic career.’
‘I’d keep you on, you know that – Greek, Jew or blackamoor makes no difference to me. You have the qualities, boy – but it’s more than my job’s worth. They’ve got it in for you people.’
‘You know why I came to Rome,’ Caleb said.
‘To half-throttle the Emperor. Well, you did that. No, I know. Do you know the name of the man?’
‘An army man, that’s all they could tell me. Talk about – what’s the word – pollution they’d call it back home. A Roman marrying a Jew.’
‘That turns her into a Roman. She’s safe anyway. And don’t start this talk about clean and dirty blood with me, son. All blood’s the same. I’ve seen enough of it to know. I’m as good a Sicilian Arab Roman as you’ll find anywhere. There’s nothing wrong with being a Roman. So there it is. Sorry. Good luck.’
He shook hands with Caleb, a decent nut-brown man with a nose like a beak, his former muscle settling to middle-aged fat. Then he shuffled on his worn sandals through the sand towards the new Pannonian giant, seven feet if he was an inch, who was waiting to be taught how to gouge out eyes and break fingers. Caleb sadly left.
He walked sadly through the lively streets, set in the habit of hopelessly looking for her. Women. Roman matrons of the patrician class on curtained litters, beggars cawing for alms, the occasional white-bangled wrist revealed from the curtains, throwing a coin. Crones selling figs. Pert Roman girls giggling among themselves. He passed through one of the lesser markets, where mimosa was on sale and crocuses in small tubs, and lowly housewives did their own shopping for carcases of young lamb, wine-red joints of beef, little birds, palm grapes and fat gourds. There was a woman chaffering with a vendor much in the lively manner of Jerusalem. He could see her only from the back; her black hair flowed. A lump like hard bread filled his throat. He was ready to call ‘Sara!’ but it was not Sara. What was he to do now? Join the beggars? He was sturdy, young, employable, but he was a Jew. Perhaps outside the city, in the farmlands where a man could work as a day-labourer and nobody was interested in checking on the covenant with Jehovah, he might find dull work with plough or hoe. As well take ship for Palestine if he were to abandon his quest in the city. He saw and heard a tuneless street-singer. Sing us one of the songs of Zion. He tried a limp: old soldier, lady, hacked at by dirty Jews in a far place, serving the Empire. But he was not old. He was hungry, though. When a loaf-seller turned his back to take two-pound loaves from his basket behind the stall, Caleb snatched a plain bun from the pile unattended. He shoved it beneath his Roman cloak. There was plenty of free water spurting from the Roman fountains. A few streets away he sat in the mild sun not far from a tentmaker who seemed to be of his own race, though neither spoke greeting to the other. Caleb munched his dry bun and later had a couple of mouthfuls of spring water. God knew what he was to do about the future.
Paul’s future began. He sat in the sun stitching at his tentwork on the main street of Tarsus and saw a man he was sure he knew looking lost in the crowd. He sightlessly stepped into an ample mound of camel dung, cursed soundlessly, removed his sandal and hopped to the wall, where he began scraping off the ordure with a bit of shard. Paul thought the man had been thinner when he knew him in Jerusalem. He could not remember the name, but then the word encouragement swam into his head. That was it: son of encouragement. ‘Barnabas,’ he called. Barnabas smiled and hopped towards him, his sandal not yet wholly clean. ‘I wondered,’ Paul said, ‘when somebody would come.’
‘It’s been a long time,’ Barnabas said, shaking the proffered hand, the fingers hard from the pressing of the bone needle.
‘Not too long to learn. Read. Think. Preach a little. But I have to confess to a certain impatience. Life is not long, even when it’s everlasting.’
Barnabas nodded. Epigrams, subtleties, paradoxes. He would have to shed all that when he—‘I made the mistake of going to your parents’ house. They turned the dog loose. I’ve come from Antioch. You and I are to work together there. You know the place?’
‘I’ve been there twice. But not in my new incarnation. A town full of prostitutes.’
‘They prefer to call themselves servants of the goddess. But believe it or not, it’s the Gentile pagans who want conversion. Not the Jews.’
‘I believe it. Pagans don’t have prejudices.’
‘Well, there’s no trouble about preaching the coming of a messiah when they don’t even know what a messiah is. They understand Kyrios and they understand soter and they understand Christos. They call us Christianoi. That’s our name now, Christians.’
‘You look well fed. I see no bruises. The work goes well, does it?’
‘I need help.’
Paul made a vague noise of discontent. ‘No arguments, no theological engagements. Clay, not stone. Like that, is it?’
‘We preach to the Jews first. That’s laid down. But there are a fair number of halfway Jews – you know, those who want God without having to have their prepuces torn off to get him. A lot of those come to the synagogue and when they hear about Christos they see that’s the answer.’
‘I never thought of the new way as a compromise,’ Paul said. ‘What do you preach – redemption from sin and the need for brotherly love?’
‘I preach the essence of the faith,’ Barnabas said. ‘And love is the essence. Of course, you have to redefine the word. For a lot of them it’s tied up with the goddess and what the Romans call Daphnici mores.’
‘I don’t think I know the expression.’
‘The morality of Daphne, Daphne being this place about five miles out of the city where they worship Astarte or Artemis or Diana or whatever she’s called. I can’t see much difference between her and Venus or Aphrodite. You worship fertility and you have a big-breasted earth mother, but then you leave fertility to nature and worship what they call the act of love. You’ll see the place.’
‘I’ve seen it already. Do you preach the resurrection?’
/> ‘The resurrection of Christos? Well, that’s the cornerstone, isn’t it?’
‘I mean our resurrection. If he rose again we rise again. If he took his flesh to heaven we take ours. And I don’t mean cart our bones and guts up to the sky. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, Barnabas. It’s a subtle business. The flesh is transfigured. We don’t join the angels, who’ve never known the flesh. We’re a new order – those of us who are saved, of course.’
Barnabas sighed. ‘They’re simple people. They understood about sin and love and redemption. I don’t think they’re ready for anything deeper. Not yet.’
Paul had been stitching away, his eyes on his thoughts, his fingers displaying a skill independent of their master. ‘When do we leave?’ he asked.
‘As soon as you’re ready. I have passage money. It’s a big city, Antioch, third biggest in the world. There’s plenty of wealth there. No trouble about money.’
‘We don’t trudge overland then. A quick boat across the bay.’
‘You’re ready?’
‘Spare sandals and a spare gown. I’ve been sleeping over the shop here. I must make my farewells. Pedaiah, the man I’ve been working for, he has a rather good young apprentice. I won’t be missed.’
At Daphne, on the borders of the Syrian desert, there stood a pagan temple well endowed with pagan money. It was dedicated to the goddess Astarte, whose effigy in gold, an opulent bas-relief twenty feet high, was nailed to the brickwork of the façade. This effigy was fanciful, and the ample body of the deity was studded with breasts supernumerary to the bountiful pair which linked her to her mortal votaresses and, indeed, to the blessed virgin Mary mother of the Christ. All round the building, twelve feet above the eye of the beholder, were incised representations of the erotic act, man with woman but never man with man nor woman with woman. The holiness of the act in its generative aspects might seem thus to be proclaimed, but only one image showed the frank thrust of male sword into female scabbard, the others glorifying a variety of fancies whose end was not natural fructification – anal, buccal, axillary, intercrucial penetrations, kisses of gross ingenuity, appetites bordering on the cannibalistic. This was Greek and Syrian work, and it pointed the large difference between the Hebrew concept of the purpose of the divinely implanted sexual urge, which was to people the tribes and fill the land with soldiers and herdsmen, and the more sophisticated impulses of the cities of Asia and the Mediterranean, where the means was exalted over the end and the means was encouraged to exfoliate in a diversity of forms bounded only by the restrictions of anatomy. So that the goddess of many breasts, who had once stood for fertility, stood now instead for ecstasies unrelated thereto. She could not be Venus, who is, as Lucretius reminds us, the divinity of rutting beasts as well as of philoprogenitive humanity, and beasts know nothing of ecstasies which transcend the simple needs of biology. So the goddess was Astarte or Ashtaroth or was Hellenised to Artemis and Romanised to Diana. Diana, of course, was a virgin goddess, but virginity could be glossed as a state disdainful of the generative end of love. Love, as Barnabas had said, needed, in the Christian dispensation as Antioch now bids us call it, to be redefined. Paul, he thought, was just the man to redefine it.
One day, a month or so after the arrival of Paul and Barnabas in Antioch, a young physician named Luke, a pagan Greek, dismounted from the horse he named Thersites (perhaps because of its ugliness and bad temper) and entered the sacred edifice. He was dark, small, well knit, not unprosperous, and he wore a golden bangle or two to proclaim the modest success he had achieved in his profession. He entered the temple soberly, a doctor called to the treating of a patient, and he sniffed the perfumed air, on which nard and sandalwood smoked, without even the faintest stir of erotic enchantment. A priestess tended the fire from which delicious scents arose to a smiling ivory icon of the goddess. All about the temple, whose floor was cunningly embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis (for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance, on which an Asiatic mysticism had been imposed), were booths closed for delicacy’s sake with silken curtains, and the priestess, a handsome dark woman past her first youth, pointed to one of these. Luke nodded and entered the booth thus indicated. On a bed he found a young girl lying in some distress. She was a temple prostitute, her favours available to such as would or could pay a handsome tribute in gold to the goddess whose power she evoked: initially these favours had been available to all and freely, but complaints of the secular professionals of the town, as well as the healthy acquisitiveness of the ruling priesthood, had imposed a rational limitation of availability. This girl, whose name was Fengari, was ink-haired, pale as her lunar namesake, exquisitely shaped, straight-nosed and with her great black eyes set well apart. She was naked and unashamed. Luke treated her nakedness as a clinical necessity and examined closely the brown blotches that, like mushrooms about a tree, encircled her pudenda.
‘They hurt when touched?’
‘Like fire.’
‘You’ve been in contact with a dirty man. This is not a clean occupation. Take this ointment, rub it in freely. Take this draught in water. And,’ Luke added, ‘give up this trade.’
‘It’s not a trade. I’m a servant of the goddess.’ She was indignant.
‘I’m not impressed. I call this no more than a high-class brothel.’
‘The goddess will strike you down.’
‘It’s you she seems to have struck down.’ She pointed, pouting, at a couple of silver pieces laid ready for him on a cedar press. He took these and empursed them. ‘Your service to the goddess is temporarily intermitted,’ he said with mock gruffness. ‘I’ll call again in a week’s time.’
Riding back to town, he recited to the warm air the verses he had written that morning. Like many physicians, he desired to produce a book. He was not satisfied with what he had been writing: a kind of epic poem in Homeric hexameters about an Odyssean wanderer around the Greek islands who was searching for the Ithaca of philosophical truth. Where was reality? Did it lie in the invisible world of ideas or was it the crass tangibility of the natural order? He had read Plato. Plato would not have approved of the poem simply because it was literature, but could literature, meaning tales of wondering and strange adventures, properly encompass philosophy? Entering the town, he saw philosophy curl in the air like smoke and then get lost on the wind. For the material world shouted its primacy – traders and beggars and dirty naked children tumbling in the dust, above all women and girls with thrust breasts and haunches aware of their role in the world of pleasure, Daphnici mores. Juvenal had, in one of his satires, the third Luke thought it was, complained of the sewage of the Syrian Orontes, Antioch’s river, polluting the Tiber. He read Latin as much as he read Greek. As though to provide a ready emblem of pollution, the horse Thersites stopped, as was his habit, to dung heavily on the cobbles. Finished, he responded again to the bit and clopped towards his stable. The stable was a rented one, two hundred yards from the little house which Luke also rented and where he lived alone. It was also on a lane at whose shady end, a four-storey warehouse leaning over it, stood the synagogue which Luke, an uncircumcised seeker of the truth, sometimes attended. Clutching his satchel, he walked to it, having spread hay for Thersites and locked the stable door, intrigued by the crowd outside it. They apparently wanted to get in but could not because of the many already congregated there. He knew the two Jews who complained to him. Amos, who had a hump like an ingrafted near-empty mealsack, said:
‘When a reverent believer can’t get into his own place of worship – crammed with Gentiles – no offence, doctor – catchpenny eloquence – foreigners too.’ The other, who was one-eyed, they were brothers in deformity, cackled:
‘Keep out, you Greek heathen, if you don’t want your innocence ruptured. Preaching resurrection and curing the sick. You’ll be losing some of your patients.’
‘Who is it?’ Luke asked.
‘The bald-headed runt f
rom Cilicia.’
Luke pushed through politely and saw a bald pate and pair of waving hands. He heard: ‘He leaves us the truth of his immortality and that of all who believe in him. Our spirits came to earth and joined with our bodies even at the moment of conception. The spirit cannot be extinguished as the body can, but when it departs this life with our death it leaves in a changed state. We live eternally through him, who took back to heaven the transformed lineaments of man. If he returned pure angelic spirit he would not be one with the father, his substance would be indistinguishable from that of the father and hence could he not properly be termed the son. It was through his taking on of flesh that he became the son, and the son he remains. But we too are the sons of heaven, of an unangelic substance. He has conquered death and we are his partners in that conquest. You seek renewal, we all seek it. The beginning of renewal is the acceptance of a covenant with the divine whose symbol shall be the act of baptism. And what is baptism? Let me explain.’
The one-eyed one was named Eliphaz. To Luke, leaving, he said: ‘Impressed?’
‘He’s powerful.’
‘Powerfully wrong. Why can’t these people leave well alone? Why can’t things stay as they are?’
Why, thought Luke to himself, cannot all the world be one-eyed? He went home to his simple meal of boiled beans and broiled riverfish. He took out his much punished manuscript from its press – all deletions, rescrawlings, interlineations. He studied it, sucking his teeth free of an enrobing beanskin. ‘I sing the search of one who, despised of his fellows, / Sought in the seas and islands, beneath an indifferent sun / That gave no answers, answers to a single fevered question …’ Perhaps he was not cut out to be a poet. Poetry was more than versification. Nor cut out to be a philosopher. And again, to write of a voyager when he himself had hardly moved ten miles from the Orontes. He needed to make the search himself. He was glued to a trade not over-respected in a city where magic and superstition paid better. He was growing stale.