Gospel (16 page)

Symenon mindlessly led the Nazirenes in prayer and in the lovefeast on Friday, and then to the Temple to sacrifice and worship on the Sabbath.
5
After being reminded that I was indeed one of the Master's original Twelve Disciples, Symenon welcomed me with kisses and touched my hands and pressed his tears to my hand, then streaked his tears across my feet, then wished to have our tears mingle—tears from my eyes that had seen Our Master with his tears, he who had never seen Him, and so forth, and this weeping and hystrionic continued for several minutes.

4.
My previous Nazirene mission possessed the aroma—let us be frank—of failure.

I had been mocked, run out of villages, and nearly stoned on one occasion in Hebron because we could not produce a miracle as if we were some market-day magus. A Macedonian, Epaphrodius, who whined and bickered with me for months, had been my assistant. He wasted no time in reviling me to Symenon and said I spoke over the heads of the Samaritans, which one can hardly help doing with the
Kuthim.
6
I begged Symenon to release me from further missionary work and allow me to go to Alexandria where I was better suited to evangelize and teach, to which he said:

“My most blessed elder, it is not for us to go where it suits us or where we might be comfortable. You can never know what Our Lord can do for you until you put yourself in a difficult situation for His sake.”

5.
I told this upstart that I didn't see how much more difficulty the Master of the Universe could expect me to endure, given our reception in Gedara, a place where Our Teacher Himself brought the evangel.
7
Yes, I was critical of the Gedarene congregation and its ostentation and false religiosity during the
agápe
service. Strange tongues and fits as in demonic possession overcame the women who were all but denuded as they spat out prophecies and warnings and ecstatic raptures—this sort of nonsense.

6.
Finally, I was done a violence at a wedding.

I remember from my youth weddings being holy and solemn affairs, but now it is considered fortunate if anyone is sober by the end of these things and the event is positively blessed by the Most High if at least five family members aren't carved up in the inevitable drunken brawling. Epaphrodius and I were invited and, to my disgust, we were not selected to preside over the ceremonies, though we certainly outranked anyone in that horrid, wealth-worshiping city.

The bride streamed forth in saffron, the orange veil and wreathes piled upon six ridiculous false tresses, exactly as the Vestals would prepare themselves. All but Zeus and Hera were invoked as the two babbled a number of vows and then, against my protests, a pagan centurion—for it is very fashionable now to have Romans at these affairs—was allowed to be auspex, and inspect the entrails of a tremendous ewe that was sacrificed with a scant line or two uttered to the God of Israel begging Him to align the intestines this way or that … can you imagine! Oh, these are Gedarene Jews all right—this is what we have fallen to in the outer provinces. The sordid bride's ring displaying the groom's family's newly minted wealth was shown to everyone, then came the feast, the orgy of flat, overwatered wine and bad entertainment—lewd dancing, of course, young men and young women together, a scene indistinguishable from camp followers after a battle! And finally, after much bawdy teasing, the groom took his young bride (I should die of surprise if she were undefiled) to their new house and lifted her over the threshold in a hail of nuts.

7.
It was during the hail of nuts, which, I don't have to tell you, resemble an aspect of a man's anatomy that is of some use to the more intimate union to come, that trouble began. Standing near the party, having made my moral reservations known throughout the evening, many of the boys thought it sport to pelt me with nuts and nearly did injury to my eye. As I chased them to reprimand, other youths joined in my persecution. I was tossed from the terrace of the mansion down a grassy hill, to the laughter of the throng, encountering ordure and dung before finally coming to rest in the reeking grainpile there to be consumed by the cattle on the morrow.

8.
The Nazirene community in Gedara compounded their ignominy by demanding that Epaphrodius and I depart. I responded like Jeremiah by decrying their sins, their great shows of being possessed by the spirit, which I suggested was more likely Belial than
Sophia.
(Though I have faltered in my faith in the Nazirenes, I still adore
Sophia,
and I believe She moves us to more practical and useful applications than frothing fits on the dusty floors of synagogues.)
8

9.
Upon our return to Jerusalem, the simpering Epaphrodius told Symenon, our child-hierarch, that he sympathized with these Gedarene impertinents. Symenon suggested that my faith was dry and in need of possession of spirit and this I rejected to his face, though I tell you now, my brother, it was somewhat true. Symenon looked at me for some duration and suggested I go to another disciple, Judas Didymus [Thomas],
9
who was ever-strong in the Faith and could counsel and revive my flagging hopes for the Nazirenes, and who could teach me the arts of evangelism.

Alas, Thomas never liked me nor I him. He was a boor and spoke before he considered what he had to say. He was, furthermore, against my inclusion as a Disciple, but more on that perverse sham in some future dictation [see 4:23–27]. Nonetheless, I decided I would go to Thomas, in part to complete my history that you are reading here. (Little did I know that my own little brother, not yet forty, would race first across the finish line with his own light historical work before my own treatise concerning the period!)

10.
About the time of Nero's ascension [ca. 54
C.E.
]—if it can be said one ascends to that squatting-place called the Roman throne—Thomas embarked on a journey to the Medians and the dread Parthians, savage peoples entrenched along the Tigris and Euphrates and the wastes beyond. There is an Arab trader, Duldul ibn-Waswasah from Sabaei, a dealer in essences, oils, and incense who had aided me on my previous travels throughout the Mediterranean. For a few shekels one could learn most anything one asks concerning trade routes and caravans, and for twice that one might even learn the truth.

After taking from me double the money I intended to pay him, Waswasah directed me to a community in Eleuph on the Gulf of the Arabs,
10
an endless trek across the Wilderness of Negev, through Nabataea where Thomas was known to be. I decided to employ an assistant to accompany me, and also decided to leave upon that Tebeth [December 66–January 67
C.E.
] when the deserts would be milder.

11.
To procure a traveling companion and scribe I decided to call upon a classmate from my youthful Grecian days
11
in Alexandria, dear Jason, who I knew had a surplus of sons. In fact, it was with Jason—a more beautiful youth did not exist in Judea—that I took my first journey as a man to Jerusalem without having to be accompanied by my tutor, Polycrates, who had developed a distaste for the Temple milieu and for the Teacher of Righteousness.

Jason and I were both in our seventeenth year [sixteen] and were determined to make this journey of twenty miles in the manner of grown men. We took enough weapons for a small army, which amused my father, as I recall. My father was more worried about our falling astray in the endless vice-filled alleyways of Jerusalem, that brothel, that once-great beauty prostituted from a lofty place, that multiplication of all harlotries.
12
However, no two purer young men ever rode more piously into Jerusalem.

Ah, and that was the fifth and final time that I witnessed the Teacher.… If I could only look in His face again, I am sure all my doubts would be as nothing, dispersed in the wind. There are so many questions I should have asked Him, so much He alone could tell me!

12.
Jason married a Nazirene maiden from a good family—you remember your own Essene friend Tobias bar-Tobias, fellow disciple of that madman Banus you adored, with whom you went to the Wilderness of Judah when the rest of us were busy with harvest?
13
Jason married Tobias's half-sister, Pontica, and they had six sons and only managed to find employment for four of them, and so they were delighted when I approached them about traveling with their youngest son, Xenon, as my assistant.

(It is a shame Jason felt he had to marry but better that than
Gehenna
—one of the few things I agree with the Great Heretic about, it must be said.
14
Jason would have made a great evangelist of the Nazirenes, and to look at him on his farm, harassed by quotidian cares and squawling children of numerous widowed daughters due to the wars, I felt happy that God has given me the strength to stay the course of virgin celibacy!)

13.
Jason directed me to the northern acres of his estate where I found the lad, a sturdy, square-jawed boy with dark-red hair, building a stone wall with some of the servants. I noticed immediately the rocks were piled thoughtlessly and against the grain of how they lay in the earth, so I mentioned that the wall was sure in time to fall.

Xenon with the confidence of one in his sixteenth year said to me, “When it falls I shall come back to rebuild it.”

I said to him, “But it is not likely to fall in your lifetime. It shall be for one of your brother's children to rebuild it.”

“All the better then,” he said to me.

I gathered this task was beneath him and his quick mind was in need of rigorous employment. I proposed my plan to take him as a scribe to foreign lands in search of the scattered fragments of the true Nazirene Church I longed to recover. I asked him, “You are a Nazirene?”

“My father is,” he told me.

Very well, I thought. Best that he not be too religious, since that has led Our Movement to its current troubles. I asked him next if he was brave.

“Not particularly,” he told me, “but I suppose I should rather die in Aethiopia than stack stones in this desert for my brother's children and my brother's flocks.”

14.
So it was agreed he should come with me and take my dictation. I soon learned on our journey back to my estate nearer to Jerusalem how inept his writing skills were, and upon seeing him render
π
νος
[laborious study] as the word
π
τος
[intense drunkenness], I nearly returned to Bethzur to abandon him to his wall-building, but he said he would improve with practice, and I allowed this. Had I known what was to befall us it would have been better for him had he never laid his eyes upon me! No, that is too strong, for he is alive and well, but what a sacrifice this young lad made for me! But more on that as my epic history progresses.

It is no wonder, in retrospect, poor Xenon had little use for Our Master and His teachings, for southern Judea, with its Idumaean taint, was filled with the most pernicious heresies. At the risk of repeating much in my comprehensive
All Heresies Refuted,
I shall describe some of the damnable movements afoot between Jerusalem and Eleuph:

15.
For one, there are the Children of Adam, who plague every decency by their insistence on nakedness. What commune of theirs has not been found to produce unmarried women-with-child by the score?

16.
A particularly egregious group of heretics, always rumored to have died out only to return in greater numbers, are the Opheisians, located outside of wretched Ekron. This sect took Our Master at His word concerning the good of serpents, that time when Peter threatened to kill one near the house in Bethany.
15
Our Master hated to see harm befall any living thing. From this innocent source they commemorate Our Master by passing around the deadly snakes, though it is not long before unpoisonous ones are procured and the snake becomes the center of the rite itself. From Cyprus, Crete, Clauda, and Cyrenaica
16
—where any filthy thing is raised up and glorified—the ancient heathen rites creep back in, championed as always by credulous women.