Great Lion of God (77 page)

Barnabas might be merry and cheerful and he might rub his hands in anticipation, but he was not obtuse. He saw the new thoughts fluttering over Saul’s tired face like restless moths, and he saw the stern mouth beginning to smile faintly. Ah, Saul, Saul, he thought with deep love, the Messias brought enchantment to us, and not only raptures and faith and hard toil! For, was He not Joy, Itself, the glory and the jubilation? He was Man, as well as God, and had an affection for innocent pleasures, and never rejected a bright face. In truth, He had inveighed against the dolor of the more rigorous Pharisees, who thought that a melancholy countenance and grave and irksome ritual pleased God. They had thought that the lawful pleasures given to man to soothe and rest him were evil, and in that they most surely must have offended Him. Had He not spoken with approval of feasts and wines to the old prophets?

Seating himself and smiling with wider delight, Barnabas thought, “What patience God must have with us, that we despise His gifts, or interpret Him, the Unknowable, in the terms of our little minds, and bind the Incomprehensible to the measures of our small natures!”

Joseph was pleased that Saul, the austere, was actually enjoying this meal, goaded as he was by the laughing Barnabas, who was surely one of God’s merriest saints. Saul even remarked on the flavor of the wine. Toward the end of the meal, which was leisurely and full of happy if inconsequential chatter—Barnabas’ desire—Barnabas said to Saul, “I have a message for you.”

For some reason, Saul’s heart bounded and his soul expanded, and he looked into the black and beaming eyes of his friend, and Barnabas nodded gaily. Immediately Saul began to tremble, and tears came into his eyes, and he bent his head over the jeweled cup he held and drank of it deeply to conceal his emotion, for he knew that Barnabas would tell him when he chose, and would not be pressed, and he also knew that the message was not trivial.

“It may not please you,” said Barnabas, “but you have no choice. Yet, as you are Saul of Tarshish, it may indeed please you, for the reason you have no choice.”

He then resumed his jests, and Joseph laughed and Saul forced himself to laugh. They returned to the atrium after dining, and then Joseph turned to Saul with a grave face and said, “You must forgive me but we have another visitor who will be here. He demanded to see you at my house, and as he is an old friend and of many tribulations I could not refuse him.”

He gazed hesitantly at Saul, as if imploring his pardon, and then the visitor was announced. Saul, to his anguish and shame and sorrow, saw that it was Tobias ben Samuel, and instantly his vision was suffused with moisture and it was as if a sword had struck him. Joseph embraced his friend, who replied absently. His cold and bitter eyes fixed themselves on Saul and he gazed over Joseph’s shoulder, and Saul saw his silent hatred and suffering, and could feel no resentment.

Tobias did not greet him. He stood before the younger man and looked at him with slow and contemptuous reflection, as if studying and rejecting each feature, each hair, each limb and garment. The haughty Saul felt himself coloring in spite of his own pain, and he thought, I am of a nobler house than his, yet he surveys me as if I were the basest of slaves! Then at once his anguish and sorrow returned, and when Tobias had concluded his inspection Saul fell on his knees before him, clasped his hands and said in a voice shaking with torment, “Forgive me. I knew not what I was doing. My excuse is that I believed I was accomplishing the will of God—”

Tobias interrupted with such loathing and scorn that Saul winced: “Is it possible that one such as you could believe that God was working His will through you?”

“I believed. I was in error. But I believed.” Never had Saul so abased himself before, in humiliation and remorse, and Joseph felt a pang for him and made a gesture to Tobias who, however, waved aside that gesture.

“You believed,” said Tobias to the kneeling man whose head was bent over his clasped hands, “that you were just in murdering my son, my only son, my beautiful and beloved son, my gentle and devoted son? You believed that God desired that innocent blood? You believed He was as monstrous as you, Saul of Tarshish?”

Saul raised his proud red head but did not rise from his knees. He looked Tobias in his face, and controlled his voice. “Tobias ben Samuel, you know the ancient penalty for heresy. I believed Stephen was a heretic; I believed it with all my soul. I was wrong. I have wept and prayed for forgiveness. I would have spared your son; I attempted to spare him. No matter. I have spent years in the desert, contemplating the Messias and learning of Him, the Messias your son so loved, and for Whom he died—at my hand, yes. And now I know that God has forgiven me, for I did not do what I did in malice, but only what I thought was ordained in law. That is my only plea: That I believed I was an instrument of God—”

“And so you, in fervent pursuit of your wicked error, also bound and imprisoned and caused the death of others of the innocent, Saul of Tarshish?” Tobias’ voice was so full of contempt that it was heavy and weighted.

“I did not believe it an error. I would that I had a thousand lives, that I might give up each one in torture to atone! God has accepted my penitence—”

“And, who informed you of that, Saul of Tarshish?” Tobias stepped back from him as if he carried a fetid contagion.

“I saw Him, on the desert floor, on the way to Damascus. If He had not forgiven me, if He had not known that what I had done I had done in honest and fervid error, and not in wantonness and cruelty, He would not have shown Himself to me.”

Tobias regarded him for a long and bitter moment. Then he said, “It is my opinion that you are mad, Saul of Tarshish. You had no revelation. You did not see Yeshua ben Joseph, except, perhaps, in His lifetime. Your dream was your own demented conscience calling to you! That is, of a certainty, if you possess a conscience, which I believe you do not.”

“I saw Him,” said Saul, and struck his breast with his clenched fists, and his face became brilliant with both pain and ecstasy. “I saw Him! None can take that from me! And I have heard His voice, calling unto me, and it was not a voice of wrath!”

“Then surely you dream, for otherwise He would have struck you dead for your crimes against my son, and the other Nazarenes!” Tobias pointed his finger almost into Saul’s face. “Do you know what you have done? I have tried to believe as my son believed. I have talked with many Nazarenes. But I cannot become one of them, for my son’s murderer remains unpunished, and surely if Yeshua of Nazareth were the Messias He would not permit you to profane His Name, and claim that He had appeared unto you! The fact that you exist, and live, is proof to me that Yeshua ben Joseph was not the Messias!”

Saul’s eyes became stricken and filled with tears and Tobias nodded with satisfaction. “So hundreds of others believed. You are anathema both to the Jews who do not believe in the Messias, and those who do. You are a calamity in this city, Saul ben Hillel. You bring doubt to those of the old Faith, and those of the New, for they say, ‘Is this not the merciless persecutor of the innocent, and is he not a spy, who would destroy us? Even if he is sincere, then he is mad, for a man does not persecute one day and lift up and embrace the next. And who but the mad would listen to the mad?’”

Barnabas had been listening to all this also, at a little distance, and he felt deep sorrow both for the embittered and bereaved father, and for Saul, and he prayed that both might be comforted.

Tobias continued, “I believe that my son lives, for I have been offered proof, and none can deny that proof. But when I dream of him his eyes are tearful, though he smiles. He does not speak. I think he remembers how he was murdered, and would have me avenge him.”

“Ah, no!” cried old Joseph. “Once you believed that he would have you join him in faith, and accept, and would have you know that he was happy in the company of the Messias!”

Tobias’ pink lips thickened and paled with venom as he looked at Saul, though he replied to Joseph: “I know only that I hate this man, and will have no peace so long as he is in this city. And so I have paid scores of taunters, and have had them whisper among the people, and he will make no converts—or victims—here! He stands alone. Neither Nazarene or old Jew will hearken to him, no, not even a priest even in charity. He is without arms or armor. He is despised and rejected. His name is accursed, and it is a noble name and as a man of a noble house I am ashamed for him. Saul of Tarshish! Shake the dust of Jerusalem from your feet and leave the city of your people, for you are less than a rat in the gutter to us, and lesser than a jackal!”

“Forgive, forgive,” prayed old Joseph, advancing on his friend and laying his hand on the other’s silken arm. “The Lord was crucified, and He was innocent, and His last words were addressed to the Father, that He pardon those ‘who know not what they are doing.’ Are you less forgiving than God, and is that not a blasphemy?”

Tobias flung out his arms in a gesture of hopeless despair and agony. “I am not the Messias! I am not God! I am only a suffering father, deprived of his only son by this monster, and before God, blessed be His Name, I will have his blood if he does not depart from this city which is cursed by his presence!”

“Tobias, Tobias,” Joseph pleaded. But the agonized father could only weep and cover his face with his hands.

“Forgive me,” said Saul, weeping also. “In the Name of God, forgive me, Tobias ben Samuel.”

Tobias spoke from behind his fat, ringed hands, and his voice was muffled, “Let me have peace. Let me know you are no longer here, and I will strive to forgive, though I shall never forget. In the Name of God you have asked my forgiveness, and it is written that when an offender pleads so one must forgive or be accursed, himself. But, you must go. I must hear the same of my son’s murderer no longer.”

He turned, and though Joseph would have accompanied him he shook his head and left the atrium and was borne away in his litter.

Saul fell on his face and wept and uttered incoherent cries of torment and sorrow, and pleas for forgiveness. And Joseph and Barnabas were helpless against such tremendous pain. They could only pray. But finally Saul was more composed and he rose to his feet, staggering, and his face was ravaged.

It was then that Barnabas said, “Saul, my dear friend, I must give you the message, which Our Lord conveyed to me in a dream through one of His angels. You must depart from Jerusalem and return to your home in Tarshish, and there await His Will.”

Saul started. He wiped away his tears frankly with his hands. “I must return to Tarshish?”

“Yes. There are Nazarenes there, but whether they will accept you or not I do not know, for alas, your fame has spread wherever the Nazarenes are spread, and also among the Jews. You must wait in patience. God has a great destiny for you.”

“I feel He has abandoned me,” said Saul, in the accents of his early youth and with the same anguish.

“No, never will He abandon those who love Him,” said Barnabas, and put his arms about his friend. “He has accepted your penitence. You have gazed upon His transfigured Face. But you must leave Jerusalem, for your destiny is not here.”

Two days later Saul stole from the city of his fathers at dawn, and looked behind him at the walls and the towers and the spires, and the golden dome of the Temple, and his pain was almost more than he could bear, for he was leaving behind him all that he loved and adored, and he knew not if he would ever see them again. Worst still, he had failed God.

Chapter 38

“I
HAVE
taught you since you incontinently dropped your feces and your urine in your father’s garden,” said old Aristo. “Shall the student now teach the teacher? Gods! What teachers must endure, and without true appreciation! We surely shall inherit the Blessed Isles! Or, there are no gods.”

The face of Aristo resembled an old Pan’s countenance, full of shrewdness and dry crevices and subtlety, and the eyes were as young as ever. “To me, you are still my childish student, as insistent as always, and as obstinate, and, I must admit, as belligerently eloquent. But, my Saul: I am an old man, and I have some wisdom, and I am a Greek, and I know the philosophies, and I find your determined teachings no more elevating nor wiser than the words of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cimon, Aristotle, Demetrius, or Theophrastus, or others I could name.”

“I do not claim to be wiser nor nobler nor more intellectual than those men,” said Saul. “I only attempt to speak the truth. I am not in competition with Socrates! I do not propound conundrums, nor present enigmas.”

“Listen to me,” said Aristo, as they sat in Saul’s garden in the heat of the day, under striped awnings and drank cooled wine and ate small cakes. “Truth has a thousand faces and voices, and speaks through poets as well as through sages, and has many aspects. I believe that a miracle of some mystery was performed for my father-in-law in his lifetime, but I know neither the how nor the why. We say that it is safer not to be too inquisitive about the gods and their actions, for they can become petulant. My wife is a Nazarene, and I do not jest with her concerning it, nor object to her peculiar devotions and beliefs and practices. I only ask that your God’s attention not be drawn to her too minutely, for there is danger in that also! I am content to let the gods mind their own affairs, and hope that they will let me mind mine, in peace. If that seems to you the philosophy of an impudent man, and a lazy one, so be it.

“While there is a strange light in your eyes and frequently on your countenance, my dear Saul, you do not seem happier than in your youth. You fume; you appear restless and vexed. Ah, you have told me! You await the call of your God. Good. But do not force him upon me, and I shall refrain from mentioning Zeus, who seems to me handsomer and more robust.

“My childhood and youth, until I was rescued by your father, and may the gods not pursue him now as they pursued him in life, were not years of happiness and caperings. But since then I have known the pleasures of living such as only Greeks can know, in the contemplation of the world’s beauty, in women, in poetry, in noble statues, in fine buildings, in harmony, in music, in painting and in textures and colors. Greeks are surely the wisest of men, for they love the day and the hour, and the felicity and glory of them, or even the dark sadness, and they do not ponder much concerning the gods, who are our invention. (You must admit, my Saul, that they are prettier than your God, who seems to me a dolorous Being concerned with duty.) We praise good viands and enjoy wine and song, and the loveliness of women and congenial companionship. I do not know who created this world, nor do I care. But to That which created it I give my obeisance, and I admire Him, for He is the greatest of Artists, surely, and all artists are pleased by appreciation. Greeks are the tasters of life, the rejoicers in it, the devotees of it, though sometimes we flog ourselves with meditations on tragedy, just as a man takes a laxative when his bowels are costive. Nothing so gives an edge to life as thinking about death, and that is why we have Greek tragedians.