The Liars' Gospel (12 page)

The man rolled his eyes back in his head, and whined and howled and gnashed his teeth, but he did not move.

“Tell me your name,” said Yehoshuah again, “in the name of God our Father I command it.”

And then the demon in the man spoke. Its voice was a growl like a wolf and a low hiss like a lizard and it said, “I am Ba’al
Nakash, the Lord of Snakes, and this man is mine.”

The people were amazed, because this demon had never told them its name before, and everyone knew that a demon can be commanded
by its name.

So Yehoshuah put his hand on the man’s forehead, and even though his eyes rolled and his teeth gnashed he remained still.

Yehoshuah said, “Ba’al Nakash, in the name of God our Father I command you to come out of this man!”

The man fell to the floor with a great gasp and a choking sound. His body began to shake and the people muttered to each other,
“That is the demon, trying to hold on.”

Yehoshuah knelt down and put his hands on the man’s chest and shouted, “Ba’al Nakash, I command you to come out of this man!”

The man writhed and hissed and bit through his own tongue so that blood and spittle foamed from his mouth. He clawed at the
ground until his fingernails broke and bled on the stones, and he writhed and threw himself against the rocks until great
bruises began to show on his body. Yehoshuah took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then, with one hand on the man’s chest,
he gave his order.

“By the name of Yahaveh!” said Yehoshuah, and the people gasped, because this is the true name of God, which is never to be
spoken aloud, except by the High Priest in the holiest place in the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of
the year, but Yehoshuah spoke it in this backwater village for the curing of one demon-infested man. “By the name of Yahaveh,
come out of him!”

And hearing this forbidden name of power, the man’s whole body stiffened, his back arched and he let out a wild scream. The
people said afterwards that they had never been more sure they heard a demon in all their days. In neighboring villages, they
said they had heard that scream, five miles distant.

It lasted for the time of ten breaths, and everyone heard that it was the sound of the demon leaving the man’s body. Some
said they saw black smoke rise up from his mouth, but Iehuda did not see it, only the clouds of dust he raised from his thrashing.
But when the scream ended the man was still and it was obvious that the demon had left him.

A boy at the back of the crowd suddenly called out, “A snake!”

And they turned, terrified, expecting a giant snake, a demon the size of a man. But it was just a mottled viper, lazily coiled
behind some rocks.

“The demon has gone into it!” shouted someone, and another boy picked up a stone and threw it at the snake. Then more and
more pelted it, and though it arched its back and bared its fangs just like the demon-haunted man had done, it could not win
against so many and soon enough it was dead.

They brought the limp, crushed snake to the man, dangling it by its tail. He was sitting up now and blinking, probing his
bitten tongue with one finger as the bloody saliva spilled from his mouth. Though the demon was gone from him, he was not
as a normal man—no one could expect it—he seemed dazed, and frowned and muttered, but he did not growl or hiss any longer.
He blinked at the snake as they laid it beside him.

“That was your demon,” said one of them. “Burn it and you will be free forever.”

But Yehoshuah smiled and clasped the man’s hand.

“Your faith in God and in His holy name has set you free,” he said.

That night the village killed three yearling goats to feed them. And the next morning, when they walked on, more than ten
men and women of the village came with them.

There had been others traveling with Yehoshuah before Iehuda arrived, but Iehuda knew that he was special to him. Yehoshuah
could tell him things the others could not understand.

After Yehoshuah had taken the snake demon out of the man in Kfar Nachum, they sat up talking long after the others were sleeping
the sleep of those whose bellies are filled with roasted goat.

“How does God tell you,” said Iehuda, “which to cure?”

Yehoshuah thumbed the edge of his sleeping blanket.

“I can see,” he said, “which demons will listen to me.”

Iehuda lay back on his own blanket.

“I knew a man in Qeriot ran mad with a demon,” he said. “He would dash his head against walls.”

“Demons make men do such things,” said Yehoshuah.

“But when his mother spoke to him,” said Iehuda, “he became calm. For a while. It was only after she died that the demon would
not let him be. He died of that demon, but while his mother was alive he could hearken to her voice and not the demon’s.”

Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire with a stick.

“Is it like that with you?” said Iehuda.

Yehoshuah shrugged. “I do not understand what you are asking me.”

“If a demon listens to a man’s mother,” Iehuda said, “it is not because the mother has power over the demon. The mother has
power over the man. The name you spoke today has power over all men. Not just demons, but men as well.”

Yehoshuah threw back his head and laughed.

“This questioning is the wisdom I taught you,” he said. “Use it always with me. You are right. I do not know how I do what
I do. When I speak, the demons may listen, but what happens next is in God’s hands.”

They walked on and their host became bigger. Mighty. A multitude. There started to be another group too, among those who came
to hear Yehoshuah speak, or watch him doing his cures and casting out demons. They were the other rabbis. They were only to
be expected. They came to wrestle with him.

Some met him boldly. In Emek, Ezra the Teacher challenged him to debate and after they had finished calling one another fools
Ezra held Yehoshuah close to his breast and brought them all in for supper. In Me’etz, they set up two great piles of stones
and had Yehoshuah and their own teacher, Nechemiah, preach atop them. In Refek, the people asked Yehoshuah questions in turn
until his patience was utterly exhausted and he cried out that no man could bear such an assault without a cask of wine.

They tried to trip him up, and find the flaw, and winkle out his hidden assumptions and specious reasoning. For Iehuda, these
were the most glorious days. Everyone knew that the debates were the “arguments for the sake of heaven” of which the sages
speak with praise.

The more a man argues with you, the more he respects you. The more he tries to pick holes in your argument, the gladder is
the Holy One Who is in All Places. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai argued with each other so fiercely that their followers
attacked one another bodily—several of their students were killed in these fights. And though this is to be regretted, their
ardor for debate is commendable. For how are we to hear the infinitely stranded voice of God except in the grappling voices
of those who care about the Torah and seek out its never fully graspable truth?

Some rabbis were merely angry, of course. Lesser men and weak men. Every part of the world contains men who cannot bear to
hear their words questioned. They are people who believe that only their purple robe or their silver chain gives them power
over others. They forget that Moses had only a staff of wood and stuttered when he spoke. And there were such men in Yehoshuah’s
camp too—some of his followers could not bear to hear him questioned, just as some of the rabbis could not bear to hear his
criticism.

But the best men on each side rejoiced in the fight, chewing on the muscle of it, crunching at the bones of it. And when the
arguments were done, in the light of early dawn, more men and more women walked on with them to the next village, and the
next.

It was about this time that there started to be twelve of them. The closest ones, the inner circle. Iehuda would not have
imagined that the group could grow so large as to need an inner circle, but it had done so. They needed to exclude the provocateurs
in their midst sowing dissent or spying for Rome. There were spies, of course. Yehoshuah needed trusted men.

He came to each of them separately, whispering that he had need of their counsel, their eyes and ears. It took Iehuda a little
time to work out who the other trusted men were. He noticed that, although there had been many questioners in the outer circle,
he was the only one in that inner group who had been known to argue back, to challenge in open meeting.

There had been a time when they made no distinctions. At Beit Saida, when everyone had shared a single meal, Yehoshuah had
seemed to be saying that all distinctions would be swept away. But now Iehuda was the only speck of dissent left in the inner
circle. He could not speak to the others.

“Do you know what they are saying of you?” he asked.

Yehoshuah frowned, but said nothing. They were alone, by the fire. It was late at night and the others were asleep. It was
like it had been at the start. There were not enough such nights now.

“They are saying that you are the Messiah. The one we wait for. The true son of David. The one who will end all disease and
suffering. The one whose arrival we will know because there will be no more war and all the dead will rise from the grave.”

He wanted to carry on, to list all the different kinds of magic that the Messiah would do, to make Yehoshuah laugh. He wanted
so much for him to laugh. If Yehoshuah laughed, then Iehuda could laugh too, and they could go back to talking about remaking
the world through their work and struggle and not waiting for God to bless them with miracles when the true son of David was
on the throne.

He did not laugh.

“Are you going to make a lion lie down with a lamb?” said Iehuda, and there was accusation in his voice. “Are you going to
rebuild all the cities that have been destroyed?”

Yehoshuah spoke very low and quietly: “Who knows what may happen through God’s will?”

There was no argument against this. But still Iehuda knew what he knew in his heart.

“I think some of them already believe it,” he said. “You should tell them to stop saying it, even among themselves.”

Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire.

“It is not for me to stop them. They must speak the truth as they find it.”

And Iehuda wanted to shake him by the shoulders, to slap his face, to say: for God’s sake, man, all that we have worked for,
all that we have talked about. But he saw that it was too late for that.

“You have begun to believe it yourself, haven’t you?” and his voice was angry and he could not stop it. “You’ve listened to
what they’ve said about you. Like Herod, who could only hear the flattery of his sycophants, you have listened to it too much.”

Yehoshuah became pale and still. His nostrils flared, his eyes reflecting the dying fire, and he said, “Do you think that
you know the will of God better than I?”

And Iehuda remembered the man who had taught him to listen to the knowledge of his own heart, and to think out each precept
like a Greek, testing it for the signs of truth and for what could be learned from it.

“I think,” he said, very slowly, “that if God has chosen you, He will tell us in his own time, and until then we should not
think of it.”

Yehoshuah smiled at that. His old, easy smile.

“Is this my own wisdom you are handing back to me?”

“Yes.” Iehuda smiled too. “If you cannot tell them ‘I am not he,’ then at least do not think of it until God makes it all
very clear. Or,” and he laughed, “until the hour of your death. For if you die without becoming the king, we will know you
were not the Messiah.”

“I shall have to repent of my folly on my deathbed, then,” said Yehoshuah, and chuckled, and leaned back on the heels of his
hands.

It was a little time after that that he sent them out across the land to spread his words and to heal the sick. It did not
matter that they said, “I cannot heal as you heal, I do not have the power as you have it”; he touched them on the brow and
murmured, “Do what you can.” And they went to try to do what they could. They would meet again in three weeks and bring with
them new followers or not as God willed it.

It was clever, also, to disband at this time. The group had grown too large. There had begun to be spies from the local authorities
at the edges of the gatherings. A quiet cluster of them sometimes, listening to the words, watching the mood of the people.
Any man who can lead a rabble is a threat to an empire. To love their enemies did not mean to submit to them. Rome was interested
in anything that stirred people up. So they broke apart, for Rome would have broken them otherwise.

Iehuda set off in high excitement. Most of the other men had gone in pairs but he, and some others, had decided each to go
alone. To see what God meant for him to do. And so he came to the place.

It was a village in the east. He does not remember the name now, and he will never go there again. A small place, perhaps
eight or nine homes with fields all on hillsides, so that it was with effort that the seed was sown and with pain it was reaped.
A place where the living was hard. He arrived in the evening, a preacher in the name of Yehoshuah, whom two or three of them
had seen before in Galilee. They fed him soup of lentils and hard bread and he knew it was more than they could afford. When
he was left alone in one of the shacks by the field he looked into an earthenware grain store. It was empty, save for two
dead wasps at the bottom of the jar.

And there they brought him a boy. The child was perhaps ten years old and crippled. He had a misshapen leg: the bone of it
was bent and the knee joint swollen and the skin sore and the whole leg crushed by the weight of his body, so that he had
to support himself on a stick. His armpit was blistered from the place where the stick rested. His whole body was overturned
by that leg.