Desire of the Everlasting Hills

  Though we know much of Paul’s personality, we know no more of his sexual life than we do of Jesus’s.13 Murphy-O’Connor speculates, as others have done, that he was a widower whose wife had died in some tragedy, this because of pretty good circumstantial evidence, such as that rabbis had to marry by the time they reached the age of thirty (or so). But this undoubted rabbinical obligation cannot be firmly dated to the first half of the first century. We just don’t know much of anything about what today would be called the man’s “personal life.”

  Paul’s supposedly oppressive judgments on women have been taken out of context (such as when he is asking the Corinthians to consider being just a tad more conventional) or are ironic statements misinterpreted by casual readers (what comes of having your letters, written for occasions long forgotten, circulate for two thousand years). The worst instances of Pauline “sexism”—such as the infamous remarks in First Timothy forbidding women to speak in church and telling them to stick to childbearing—belong to letters attributed to Paul but written forty years or more after his death.14 Women were as free to speak, to evangelize, and to administer the Pauline churches as was any man. First Timothy belongs to the period of the patriarchalization of the Christian churches, when bishops began to emerge as the only legitimate leaders and, surveying the disorder (or, more simply, lack of uniformity) they saw before them, endeavored to put all the “excessive” enthusiasms of the Pauline churches back into the box. Paul is actually the New Testament’s ultimate democrat; and it is a pathetic irony that the first person in history to exclude consciously all social grades, isms, and biases from his thinking, believing that nothing—not birth, nor ethnicity, nor religion, nor economic status, nor class, nor gender—makes anyone any better than anyone else, should so often be made to stand at the bar accused of the opposite of what he believed so passionately.

  He was a man under pressure, a sometimes contentious overreacher, who accomplished more in one lifetime than most of us would achieve in ten. If he had his continuing disagreements with the Rock, the lives of both men took in the end an unexpected turn that has kept their memories forever entwined. Both showed up in Rome in the 60s and were martyred there during Nero’s anti-Christian persecution, the empire’s first. It was not the fact that Rome was the center of the empire but this twin martyrdom—this double act of state barbarism—that gave the city its centrality in the newly emerging Christian world. Peter was crucified upside down (because he beseeched his executioners not to crucify him as his abandoned Lord had been). Paul of Tarsus, Roman citizen, could not be dealt this ultimate humiliation reserved for non-Romans. He was beheaded. Peter is thought to have been buried where he died on Vatican Hill and where the most magnificent of all Christian churches rises above his humble bones. Despite the monumental San Paolo fuori le Mura, the shrine raised to Paul beyond the city’s ancient walls, we are less than certain where Paul’s bones may lie, an appropriate uncertainty perhaps for the most itinerant of all apostles.

  But one can well imagine the old gymnasion boy, the sweat-streaming long-distance runner and winner of many a laurel crown, now going to the block in his grizzled sixties and thinking, as he wrote (in Second Timothy): “As for me, I am now being poured out as if I were a libation, and the time has come for me to depart. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. All there is to come for me now is the crown of justice that the Lord, the just judge, will give me on that Day, and not only me but all those who in their hearts have longed for his return.” “For of this I am certain,” he wrote to the Romans. “Not death nor life, nor angels, nor princes, nor anything present, nor anything to come, nor any power, whether of highest heaven or deepest abyss, nor anything else in all of creation, shall ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

  Encountering Evil

  Some years after the Neronic executions of Peter, Paul, and many other unfortunate members of the Jesus Movement, a believer named John, exiled for his beliefs to the distant Aegean isle of Patmos, was the recipient of a revelation. Like a great film, John’s revelation, recorded in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is full of potent, troubling images that are impossible to erase from the memory once they have played before your eyes. John finds himself addressed by “one like a Son of Man,” whose eyes burn like flame, out of whose mouth comes a two-edged sword, and who tells John: “I am Alpha and Omega [the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet], the Living One, who was dead—but, look, I live forever and ever, and hold the keys to death and Hades.” This initial vision, obviously of Jesus, instructs John to write to the “seven churches of Asia” (among them Paul’s Ephesus) and tell them what he will be shown. If the figure of the Son of Man is easy to identify, the symbolic visions that follow sometimes seem to defy interpretation.

  John is vouchsafed a vision of heaven, where an immense number of angels are gathered around God’s throne and where there hover “four living creatures, all studded with eyes” and twenty-four elders, all worshiping in song “the One-seated-there,” who is described not physically but in terms of light—“like jasper and carnelian,” encircled by a rainbow “like an emerald”; and before the throne is spread a “crystal sea.” To the right of the One is a scroll “inscribed front and verso and sealed with seven seals.” John weeps “disconsolately because no one has been found worthy to open the scroll and read it.” One of the elders tells him, “Do not weep. Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed, so he can open the scroll, breaking its seven seals.”

  The “Lion of Judah” who is worthy to read the scroll turns out to be a lamb that has been sacrificed. At this point, we are still able to interpret the symbolism with some confidence. The twenty-four elders may represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the Twelve Apostles who followed Jesus. The four living creatures are borrowed from the Book of Ezekiel, where they appear in a prophetic vision not unlike this one. They are, like the massed angels, part of the heavenly court, all participants in the ineffable heavenly liturgy. The scroll is perhaps the deep truth of things or a narration of future events (or a mixture of both). The Lion-lamb is Christ, the Lion King who allowed himself to be sacrificed as a lamb.

  The seven seals are broken and seven trumpets blown, each occurrence precipitating a new symbolic event. The breaking of the first four seals, for instance, brings forth in succession four horsemen who, riding horses of different colors, ravage the world. The first horse is white, and its rider, who holds a bow, is Conquest; the second is red, and its rider, who carries a gigantic sword, is Slaughter; the third is black, and its rider, who holds a pair of scales, is Famine; the fourth has the gray pallor of death, and its rider is Plague, with Hades “hard at its heels.” I leave to the reader the unsettling pleasure of reading the full Revelation (or Apocalypse, after its Greek title, meaning a “laying bare” or “revelation of hidden things”).

  One after another, cosmic disasters are hurled upon the earth.15 There appears but one respite: “I shall send my two witnesses to prophesy … the two olive trees and the two lamps in attendance on the Lord of the World.” These prophets, however, are not welcomed:

  When they have completed their witness, the Beast that comes up from the Abyss will make war on them and conquer them and kill them. Their corpses will lie in the main street of the great city whose spiritual names are Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days will people from every race, tribe, tongue, and nation stare at their corpses and refuse them burial, and the people of the world will gloat and celebrate and exchange gifts, because these two prophets had so tormented the people of the world.

  There is a bitterness in these words that seems to spring from personal experience. Are the visions mixing past, present, and future? Could John have known these “prophets,” and could he have been, like Peter following anonymously behind the arrested Jesus, mute witness to their mortal humiliation? Could the “prophet
s” be Peter and Paul, and could the “great city” be neither Jerusalem (where “their Lord was crucified”) nor Rome, but the corporate culture of Roman administration, the frame of mind that makes such executions possible? And, if so, who is the “Beast that comes up from the Abyss”?

  The visions all at once leave the ground and take off in a more phantasmagoric direction: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and crowned with twelve stars,” who gives birth to a child, which a huge red dragon tries to devour. But the child is “taken up to heaven,” where war breaks out between the forces of the Dragon and the angels led by Michael, whose name means “Who is like God?” At this point, we are told directly that the Dragon, who falls with “his angels” from heaven to earth, is “the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who has led the whole world astray.” The Dragon pursues the woman, who has hidden herself “in the wilderness” and continues to escape him with the help of heaven and earth. The Dragon, frustrated and enraged, resolves to “make war on her other children, those who keep the Commandments of God [the Jews] and treasure the witness of Jesus [the Messianists].”

  The Dragon, thus resolved, takes his stand at the edge of the sea, invoking fresh horrors:

  Then I saw a beast rise from the sea: it had ten horns and seven heads, a coronet on each of its ten horns, and on each head a blasphemous title.… The Dragon handed over to it his own power and his throne and his immense authority. One of its heads seemed to have sustained a death blow, but this mortal wound had healed so that the whole world had marveled and followed the Beast. They worshiped the Dragon because he had given the Beast his authority; and they worshiped the Beast, saying: “Who is like the Beast? Who can stand up to him?” The Beast was given a mouth to boast and blaspheme and was allowed free range for forty-two months;16 and it opened its mouth to blaspheme God, desecrating his Name, his home, and all who shelter there. It was allowed to make war against the saints and to conquer them, and was given sway over every race, people, tongue, and nation; and the people of the world will worship it, that is, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.… This is why the saints must persevere in faithfulness.

  Then I saw a second Beast, rising from the earth, having two horns like a lamb but shrieking like a dragon. This one exercised all the power of the first Beast, on its behalf making the world and its people worship the first Beast, whose mortal wound had healed. And it worked great wonders, even calling down fire from heaven onto the earth while people watched. Through the wonders which it was allowed to do on behalf of the first Beast, it was able to lead astray the people of the world and persuade them to put up a statue in honor of the Beast that had been wounded by the sword and still lived. It was allowed to breathe life into this statue, so that the statue of the Beast was able to speak, and to have anyone who refused to worship the statue of the Beast put to death. It compelled everyone—small and great, rich and poor, freedman and slave—to be marked on the right hand or on the forehead, so that no one could buy or sell without the mark of the Beast or the number of its name.

  This calls for insight; but anyone with discernment may figure out the number of the Beast. It is the number of a man, the number Six Hundred Sixty-six.

  In other words, despite the apparently esoteric nature of the narrative, the code behind it is meant to be easily cracked, as was the case with the symbolic stories and films created by Poles and Czechs during the Soviet oppression; and with this number we can work out the allegorical scheme as if it were a crossword puzzle. The writer, like all the ancients, knew nothing of Arabic numerals. In his world, letters were used as shorthand to represent numerical values, as is the case with the Roman numerals we are still familiar with. So we need only find a well-known historical figure (the writer implies clearly that this is “a man” known to everyone) whose name “adds up” to 666. The Hebrew alphabet contained no vowels. The name of the emperor under whom the Jesus Movement’s two greatest “prophets” were executed was Nero Caesar, in Greek Neron Kaisar, in unvoweled Hebrew nrwn qsr or, giving these consonants their conventional numerical value, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200, which equal 666. The Beast is the Roman empire—more precisely, all the cruelties of Roman political domination—personified by Nero Caesar. The Devil-Dragon, unable to devour the Messiah, who has been “taken up,” and unsuccessful in his pursuit of the “mother,” that is, Israel, which gave birth to the Messiah, calls forth the Beast, the political power, to harass this mother and, if possible, destroy her and “her other children.”

  Nero came to the imperial throne in 54 as a spoiled sixteen-year-old, a lyre player, athlete, and Hellenophile, who intended to raise Roman artistic and cultural standards. After some moves in the direction of justice, probably inspired by his tutor, the respected Stoic philosopher Seneca, the young emperor turned increasingly arbitrary and self-indulgent. Bristling under the influence of his advisers, he at length had his mother murdered and “invited” his old tutor to commit suicide. (The customary invitation to suicide was a short note from the emperor, “Amicitia nostra dissoluta est” [“Our friendship is dissolved”]. This was your cue to run the warm water and open the veins.)

  During Nero’s reign much of Rome was destroyed by fire, giving the emperor the opportunity to rebuild the city along the lines of his own quirky esthetic ideas, which included the never-completed Domus Aurea (or Golden House) for himself, which—with its artificial lake (where the Colosseum now stands)—occupied an enormous chunk of central Rome and displaced the unsightly dwellings of the poor. The grandeur of it all, coupled with the economic toll that it exacted, encouraged the rumor that Nero had set the fire himself. No, retorted the emperor, it was, um, the Christians, who as everyone knows hate humanity. Thus did the Neronic persecutions begin as a spectacular strategy to point the finger elsewhere. Tacitus, in a lighthearted vein, describes the scene, incidentally leaving us the first recorded instance in pagan literature of the term Christian:

  Nero … punished the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called) with every refinement.… Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in the skins of wild animals, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or [making the punishment fit their supposed crime] turned into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight. Nero provided his Gardens for the spectacle, where he exhibited these displays in the [Vatican] Circus, during which he would mingle anonymously with the crowd or take his place in a chariot, disguised as a charioteer.

  What fun. But Nero’s increasingly arbitrary behavior began to erode his support; and when at length the Senate, believing that Nero had fled abroad, declared for Galba, Nero’s short-lived successor, it also declared Nero a public enemy. Thus was Nero himself, Savior and Son of God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords—all the “blasphemous titles” of his station—forced to hide in the house of a former slave and there at the age of twenty-nine to commit suicide, dying with the fey exclamation “What an artist dies with me!”

  Nero was the last emperor who could claim descent from Augustus; his death and its consequences precipitated a new round of civil wars, lasting two years. During this period a legend grew among the common people that Nero, whom they had rather liked for his panem et circenses—the “bread and circuses” by which he kept the plebeians distracted from more basic grievances—had not died but, like Czar Nicholas of a later day, was only wounded and would return. It is this legend that John’s Apocalypse refers to when it says that “one of [the Beast’s] heads seemed to have sustained a death blow, but this mortal wound had healed so that the whole world had marveled and followed the Beast.” The wounded head is the Beast’s fifth, and Nero was the fifth emperor in the line that began with Augustus. The Beast’s name may be Nero, but the Beast is also Rome, for, as we are told later, “the seven heads are the seven hills; the seven heads are also seven emperors.”

  If th
e symbolism is elastic, so is the chronology. It ranges across the ages, borrowing allusions from the Jewish sacred books (especially Daniel) and treating readers to a veritable time machine of possibilities: sometimes we are in the past, sometimes the future, sometimes the present. Christ, the slaughtered lamb, is first seen in heaven, after which the Savior is given birth by Israel; the four horsemen, creatures of the diabolic powers, are introduced before the Dragon and the Beast—all subverting normal chronology and expectable sequence. The author employs the “logic” of dream and nightmare to allow the reader to see into the deeper reality of the human situation.

  A cosmic battle is raging between heaven, the realm of God, and earth, which is under the power that Jesus called “the Prince of this world.” He is Satan, the devil, evil personified. It is he who animates the earthly “powers”—all those who on this earth claim authority over others. The Beast is both Nero and the Roman empire, not because John is confused in his symbolism, but because he wants us to see that all exercise of power is bestial and all domination is of the devil. John’s symbolic scheme is many-layered. If the Beast is the Dragon’s deputy, the second Beast is a sort of cheering section for the first, his diplomatic corps, his publicity department—all the toadies and time-servers necessary to the vast and subtle mechanisms of domination. The talking statue is the image that the Beast presents to the world, an image that encourages mass adoration (long before television or fanzines were thought of). But behind the image, behind the publicity department’s spin doctors and media consultants, behind the bureaucracy’s many ministers and ambassadors, behind the great statesman, behind the distinguished bank president, behind the all-powerful CEO, stands the ultimate power—the insatiable Dragon, breathing his foul life into the whole complex edifice of human affairs and its structures of oppression. The Dragon, the enemy of God and therefore of all justice, has called forth the Beast, who calls forth the second Beast. They are a ghastly parody of the Trinity: the Dragon as the ultimate power; the Beast, the anti-Christ, being given the Dragon’s power throughout the cosmos; and the second Beast, the anti-Spirit, “inspiring” humanity with its tricks. But, deprived of their distracting fireworks and the goodies bestowed selectively from their political pork barrels, they would be just repulsive beasts.