“No, but it sounds like he knows how to get the word out.”
We rode into Nazareth a half hour later.
I suppose we expected more upon our arrival. Cheering maybe, little children running at our heels begging for tales of our great adventures, tears and laughter, kisses and hugs, strong shoulders to bear the conquering heroes through the streets. What we’d forgotten was that while we were traveling, having adventures, and experiencing wonders, the people of Nazareth had been living through the same old day-to-day crap—a lot of days had passed, and a lot of crap. When we rode up to Joshua’s old house, his brother James was working outside under the awning, shaving a piece of olive wood into a strut for a camel saddle. I knew it was James the moment I saw him. He had Joshua’s narrow hooked nose and wide eyes, but his face was more weathered than Josh’s, and his body heavier with muscle. He looked ten years older than Joshua rather than the two years younger that he was.
He put down his spoke shave and stepped out in the sunlight, holding up a hand to shield his eyes.
“Joshua?”
Joshua tapped his camel on the back of his knees with the long riding crop and the beast lowered him to the ground.
“James!” Joshua climbed off the camel and went to his brother, his arms out as if to embrace him, but James stepped back.
“I’ll go tell Mother that her favorite son has returned.” James turned away and I saw the tears literally shoot out of Joshua’s eyes into the dust.
“James,” Joshua was pleading. “I didn’t know. When?”
James turned and looked his half brother in the eye. There was no pity there, no grief, just anger. “Two months ago, Joshua. Joseph died two months ago. He asked for you.”
“I didn’t know,” Joshua said, still holding his arms out for the embrace that wasn’t going to come.
“Go inside. Mother has been waiting for you. She starts every morning wondering if this is the day you’ll return. Go inside.” He turned away as Joshua went past him into the house, then James looked up at me. “The last thing he said was ‘Tell the bastard I love him.’”
“The bastard?” I said as I coaxed my camel to let me down.
“That’s what he always called Joshua. ‘I wonder how the bastard is doing. I wonder where the bastard is today?’ Always talking about the bastard. And Mother yammering on always about how Joshua did this, and Joshua did that, and what great things Joshua would do when he returned. And all the while I’m the one looking out for my brothers and sisters, taking care of them when Father got sick, taking care of my own family. Still, was there any thanks? A kind word? No, I was doing nothing more than paving Joshua’s road. You have no idea what it’s like to always be second to Joshua.”
“Really,” I said. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” I said. “Tell Josh if he needs me I’ll be at my father’s house. My father
is
still alive, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and your mother too.”
“Oh good, I didn’t want to put one of my brothers through breaking the painful news.” I turned and led my camel away.
“Go with God, Levi,” James said.
I turned. “James, it is written, ‘To the work you are entitled, but not the fruits thereof.’”
“I’ve never heard that. Where is that written?”
“In the Bhagavad Gita, James. It’s a long poem about going into battle, and this warrior’s god tells him not to worry about killing his kinsmen in battle, because they are already dead, they just don’t know it yet. I don’t know what made me think of it.”
My father hugged me until I thought he’d broken my ribs, then he handed me off to my mother, who did the same until she seemed to come to her senses, then she began to cuff me about the head and shoulders with her sandal, which she had whipped off with surprising speed and dexterity for a woman her age.
“Seventeen years you’re gone and you couldn’t write?”
“You don’t know how to read.”
“So you couldn’t send word, smart mouth?”
I fended off the blows by directing their energy away from me, as I had been taught at the monastery, and soon two small boys who I didn’t recognize were catching the brunt of the beating. Fearing lawsuits from small strangers, I caught my mother’s arms and hugged them to her sides as I looked at my father, nodded to the two little ones, and raised my eyebrows as if to say,
Who are the squirts
?
“Those are your brothers, Moses and Japeth,” my father said. “Moses is six and Japeth is five.”
The little guys grinned. Both were missing front teeth, probably sacrificed to the squirming harpy I was currently holding at bay. My father beamed as if to say,
I can still build the aqueduct—lay a little pipe, if you know what I mean—when I need to.
I scowled as if to say,
Look, I was barely able to hold on to my respect for you when I found out what you did to make the first three of us; these little fellows are only evidence that you’ve no memory for suffering.
“Mother, if I let you go will you calm down?” I looked over her shoulder at Japeth and Moses. “I used to tell people she was besought by a demon, do you guys do that?” I winked at them.
They giggled as if to say,
Please, end our suffering, kill us, kill us now, or kill this bitch that plagues us like the torments of Job.
Okay, maybe I was just imagining that’s what they were saying. Maybe they were just giggling.
I let my mother go and she backed off. “Japeth, Moses,” Mother said, “come meet Biff. You’ve heard your father and me talk about our oldest disappointment—well, this is him. Now run and get your other brothers, I’ll go fix something nice.”
My brothers Shem and Lucius brought their families and joined us for dinner and we all lay around the table as Mother served us something nice, I’m not sure what it was. (I know I’ve said that I was the oldest of three brothers, and obviously, with the squirts, it was five, but dammit, by the time I met Japeth and Moses I was too old to have the time to torment them, so they never really paid their dues as brothers. They were more like, oh, pets.) “Mother, I’ve brought you a gift from the East,” I said, running out to the camel to retrieve a package.
“What is it?”
“It’s a breeding mongoose,” I said, tapping on the cage. The little scamp tried to bite the pad off of my finger.
“But there’s only one.”
“Well, there were two, but one escaped, so now there’s one. They’ll attack a snake ten times their size.”
“It looks like a rat.”
I lowered my voice and whispered conspiratorially, “In India, the women train them to sit on their heads like hats. Very fashionable. Of course the fad hasn’t reached Galilee yet, but in Antioch, no self-respecting woman will go out of the house without wearing a mongoose.”
“Really,” said Mother, looking at the mongoose in a new light. She took the cage and stowed it gently away in the corner, as if it contained a delicate egg, rather than a vicious miniature of herself. “So,” said Mother, waving to her two daughters-in-law and the half-dozen grandchildren that loitered near the table, “your brothers married and gave me grandchildren.”
“I’m happy for them, Mother.”
Shem and Lucius hid their grins behind a crust of flatbread the same way they did when we were little and Mother was giving me hell.
“All the places you traveled, you never met a nice girl you could settle down with?”
“No, Mother.”
“You can marry a gentile, you know. It would break my heart, but why did the tribes almost wipe out the Benjamites if it wasn’t so a desperate boy could marry a gentile if he needs to? Not a Samaritan, but, you know, some other gentile. If you have to.”
“Thanks, Mother, I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mother pretended to find some lint or something on my collar, which she picked at while she said, “So your friend Joshua never married either? You heard about his little sister Miriam, didn’t you?” Here her voice went to a conspiratorial whisper. “Started wearing men’s clothes and ran off to the island of Lesbos.” Back to normal nudging tone. “That’s Greek, you know? You boys didn’t go to Greece on your travels, did you?”
“No, Mother, I really have to go.”
I tried to stand and she grabbed me. “It’s because your father has a Greek name, isn’t it? I told you, Alphaeus, change the name, but you said
you were proud of it. Well, I hope you’re proud of it now. What’s next, Lucius here will start hanging Jews on crosses like the other Romans?”
“I’m not a Roman, Mother,” Lucius said wearily. “Lots of good Jews have Latin names.”
“Not that it matters, Mother, but how do you think they get more Greeks?”
To my mother’s credit, she stopped for a second to think. I used the lull to escape.
“Nice to see you guys.” I nodded to all of my relatives, old and new. “I’ll come by and visit before I go. I have to go check on Joshua.” And I was out the door.
I threw the door open at Joshua’s old house without even knocking, nearly coldcocking Joshua’s brother Judah in the process. “Josh, you’ve got to bring the kingdom soon or I’m going to have to kill my mother.”
“She still plagued by demons?” asked Judah, who looked exactly as he had when he was four, except for the beard and the receding hairline, but he was as wide-eyed and goofy of smile as he had ever been.
“No, I was just being hopeful when I used to say that.”
“Will you join us for supper?” said Mary. Thank God she had aged: gone a little thicker around the hips and waist, developed some lines at the corner of her eyes and mouth. Now she was just the second or third most beautiful creature on earth.
“Love to,” I said.
James must have been home with his wife and children, as I guessed were the other sisters and brothers, except for Miriam, and I’d already been apprised of her whereabouts. At the table it was only Mary, Joshua, Judah, his pretty wife, Ruth, and two little redheaded girls that looked like their mother.
I expressed my condolences for the family’s loss, and Joshua filled me in on the timing of events. About the time that I spotted Mary’s portrait on the temple wall in Nicobar, Joseph had taken ill with some disease of the water. He started peeing blood, and in a week he was bedridden. He lingered only a week longer before he died. He’d been buried for two months now. I looked at Joshua as Mary related this part of the story and
he shook his head, meaning,
too long in the grave, there’s nothing I can do
. Mary had known nothing about a message calling us home.
“Even if you two had only been in Damascus you’d have been lucky to get here in time. He went so fast.” She was strong, had recovered somewhat from the loss, but Joshua appeared to still be in shock.
“You have to go find Joshua’s cousin John,” Mary said. “He’s been preaching about the coming of the kingdom, of preparing the way for the Messiah.”
“We’ve heard,” I said.
“I’ll stay here with you, Mother,” Joshua said. “James is right, I have responsibilities. I’ve shirked them too long.”
Mary touched her son’s face and looked in his eyes. “You will leave in the morning and you will find John the Baptist in Judea and you will do what God has ordained you do since he placed you in my womb. Your responsibilities are not to a bitter brother or an old woman.”
Joshua looked at me. “Can you leave in the morning? I know it’s soon after being gone so long.”
“Actually, I thought I’d stay, Josh. Your mother needs someone to look after her, and she’s still a relatively attractive woman. I mean, a guy could do worse.”
Judah aspirated an olive pit and began coughing furiously until Joshua pounded him on the back and the pit shot across the room, leaving Judah gasping and staring at me through watery red eyes.
I put my hand on Joshua and Judah’s shoulders. “I think I can learn to love you both as sons.” I looked at the pretty but shy Ruth, who was tending the little girls. “And you, Ruth, I hope that you can learn to love me as a slightly older, but incredibly attractive close uncle. And you, Mary—”
“Will you go with Joshua to Judea, Biff?” Mary interrupted.
“Sure, first thing in the morning.”
Joshua and Judah were still staring at me as if they’d both been smacked in the face with a large fish. “What?” I said. “How long have you guys known me? Jeez. Grow a sense of humor.”
“Our father died,” said Joshua.
“Yeah, but not today,” I said. “I’ll meet you here in the morning.”
The next morning, as we rode through the square, we passed
Bartholomew, the village idiot, who looked no worse or less filthy for the years gone by, and who seemed to have come to some sort of understanding with his doggy friends. Instead of jumping all over him as they always had, now they sat quietly before him in a group, as if listening to a sermon.
“Where have you been?” Bart called to us.
“In the East.”
“Why did you go there?”
“We were looking for the Divine Spark,” Joshua said. “But we didn’t know that when we left.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Judea, to find John the Baptist.”
“He should be easier to find than the Spark. Can I come?”
“Sure,” I said. “Bring your things.”
“I don’t have any things.”
“Then bring your stench.”
“That will follow on its own,” Bartholomew said.
And thus we became three.
I’ve finally finished reading these stories by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These guys make the whole thing seem like an accident, like five thousand people just showed up on a hill one morning. If that was the case, getting them all there was the miracle, let alone feeding them. We busted our asses to organize sermons like that, and sometimes we even had to put Joshua in a boat and float him offshore while he preached, just to keep him from getting mobbed. That boy was a security nightmare.
And that’s not all, there were two sides to Joshua, his preaching side and his private side. The guy who stood there railing at the Pharisees was not the same guy who would sit around poking Untouchables in the arm because it cracked him up. He planned the sermons, he calculated the parables, although he may have been the only one in our group that understood any of them.
What I’m saying is that these guys, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they got some of it right, the big stuff, but they missed a lot (like thirty years, for instance). I’ll try to fill it in, which is why, I guess, the angel brought me back from the dead.
And speaking of the angel, I’m about convinced that he’s gone psycho. (No, psycho isn’t a word I had back in my time, but enough television and I’ll have a whole new vocabulary. It applies. I believe, for instance, that “psycho” was the perfect term for John the Baptist. More about him later.) Raziel took me to a place where you
wash clothes today. A Laundromat. We were there all day. He wanted to make sure I knew how to wash clothes. I may not be the sharpest arrow in the quiver, but it’s laundry, for Christ’s sake. He quizzed me for an hour about sorting whites and colors. I may never get this story told if the angel keeps deciding to teach me life lessons. Tomorrow, miniature golf. I can only guess that Raziel is trying to prepare me to be an international spy.
Bartholomew and his stench rode one camel while Joshua and I shared the other. We rode south to Jerusalem, then east over the Mount of Olives into Bethany, where we saw a yellow-haired man sitting under a fig tree. I had never seen a yellow-haired person in Israel, other than the angel. I pointed him out to Joshua and we watched the blond man long enough to convince ourselves that he wasn’t one of the heavenly host in disguise. Actually, we pretended to watch him. We were watching each other.
Bartholomew said, “Is there something wrong? You two seem nervous.”
“It’s just that blond kid,” I said, trying to look in the courtyards of the large houses as we passed.
“Maggie lives here with her husband,” Joshua said, looking at me, relieving no tension whatsoever.
“I knew that,” said Bart. “He’s a member of the Sanhedrin. High up, they say.”
The Sanhedrin was a council of priests and Pharisees who made most of the decisions for the Jewish community, as far as the Romans would allow them, anyway. Aside from the Herods and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, they were the most powerful men in Israel.
“I was really hoping Jakan would die young.”
“They have no children,” Joshua said. What Josh was saying was that it was strange that Jakan hadn’t divorced Maggie for being barren.
“My brother told me,” I said.
“We can’t go see her.”
“I know,” I said, although I wasn’t sure why not.
We finally found John in the desert north of Jericho, preaching on the bank of the Jordan River. His hair was as wild as ever and now he had a beard that was just as out of control. He wore a rough tunic that was
belted with a sash of unscraped camel skin. There was a crowd of perhaps five hundred people there, standing in sun so hot that you had to check road signs to make sure you hadn’t accidentally taken the turnoff to hell.
We couldn’t tell what John was talking about from a distance, but as we got closer we heard him say, “No, I’m not the one. I’m just getting things ready. There’s one that’s coming after me, and I’m not qualified to carry his jockstrap.”
“What’s a jockstrap?” Joshua asked.
“It’s an Essene thing,” Bartholomew answered. “They wear them on their manhood, very tightly, to control their sinful urges.”
Then John spotted us over the crowd (we were on camelback). “There!” said John, pointing. “You remember me telling you that one would come. Well, there he is, right there. I’m not kidding, that’s him on the camel. On the left. Behold the Lamb of God!”
The crowd looked back at Josh and me, then laughed politely as if to say,
Oh right, he just happened along right when you were talking about him. What, we don’t know from a shill when we see one?
Joshua glanced nervously at me, then at Bart, then at me, then he grinned sheepishly (as one might expect from a lamb) at the crowd. Between gritted teeth he asked, “So am I supposed to give John my jockstrap, or something?”
“Just wave, and say, ‘Go with God,’” Bart said.
“Waving here—waving there,” Josh mumbled through a grin. “Go with God. Thank you very much. Go with God. Nice to see you. Waving—waving.”
“Louder, Josh. We’re the only ones who can hear you.”
Josh turned to us so the crowd couldn’t see his face. “I didn’t know I was going to need a jockstrap! Nobody told me. Jeez, you guys.”
Thus did begin the ministry of Joshua bar Joseph, ish Nazareth, the Lamb of God.
“So, who’s the big guy?” John asked, as we sat around the fire that evening. Night crawled across the desert sky like a black cat with phosphorus dandruff. Bartholomew rolled with his dogs down by the riverbank.
“That’s Bartholomew,” Joshua said. “He’s a Cynic.”
“And the village idiot of Nazareth for over thirty years,” I added. “He gave up his position to follow Joshua.”
“He’s a slut, and he’s the first one baptized in the morning. He stinks. More locusts, Biff?”
“No thanks, I’m full.” I stared down at my bowl of roasted locusts and honey. You were supposed to dip the locusts in the honey for a sweet and nutritious treat. It was all John ate.
“So this Divine Spark, all that time away, that’s what you found?”
“It’s the key to the kingdom, John,” Josh said. “That’s what I learned in the East that I’m supposed to bring to our people, that God is in all of us. We are all brothers in the Divine Spark. I just don’t know how to spread the word.”
“Well, first, you can’t call it the Divine Spark. The people won’t understand it. This thing, it’s in everyone, it’s permanent, it’s a part of God?”
“Not God the creator, my father, the part of God that’s spirit.”
“Holy Ghost,” John said with a shrug. “Call it the Holy Ghost. People understand that a ghost is in you, and they understand that it goes on after you, and you’ll just have to make them believe that it’s God.”
“That’s perfect,” Joshua said, smiling.
“So, this Holy Ghost,” John said, biting a locust in half, “it’s in every Jew, but gentiles don’t have it, right? I mean what’s the point, after the kingdom comes?”
“I was getting to that,” said Josh.
It took John the better part of the night to deal with the fact that Joshua was going to let gentiles into the kingdom, but finally the Baptist accepted it, although he kept looking for exceptions.
“Even sluts?”
“Even sluts,” Joshua said.
“Especially sluts,” I said.
“You’re the one who is cleansing people of their sins so they will be forgiven,” Joshua added.
“I know, but gentile sluts, in the kingdom.” He shook his head, assured now by the Messiah himself that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Which really shouldn’t have surprised him, since that had
been his message for over ten years. That, and identifying sluts. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”
Shortly after I had met him on the road to Jerusalem, John had joined the Essenes. You couldn’t be born an Essene, because they were all celibate, even in marriage. They also refrained from intoxicating drink, adhered strictly to Jewish dietary law, and were absolutely maniacal about cleansing themselves, physically, of sin, which had been the big selling point for John. They had a thriving community in the desert outside of Jericho called Qumran, a small city of stone and brick homes, a scriptorium for copying scrolls, and aqueducts that ran out of the mountains to fill their ritual baths. A few of them lived in the caves above the Dead Sea where they stored the jars that held their sacred scrolls, but the most zealous of the Essenes, which included John, didn’t even allow themselves the comfort of a cave. He showed us accommodations near his own.
“It’s a pit!” I screamed.
Three pits, to be exact. I suppose there’s something to be said for having a private pit. Bartholomew, with his many canine pals, was already settling into his new pit.
“Oh, John,” Josh said, “remind me to tell you about karma.”
So, for over a year, while Joshua was learning from John how to say the words that would make people follow him, I lived in a pit.
It makes sense, if you think about it. For seventeen years Joshua had spent his time either studying or sitting around being quiet, so what did he know about communicating? The last message he’d gotten from his father was two words, so he wasn’t getting his speaking skills from that side of the family. On the other hand, John had been preaching for those same seventeen years, and that squirrelly bastard
could
preach. Standing waist deep in the Jordan, he would wave his arms and roll his eyes and stir the air with a sermon that would make you believe the clouds were going to open and the hand of God Hisownself was going to reach down, grab you by the balls, and shake you till the evil rattled out of you like loose baby teeth. An hour of John’s preaching and you were not only lining up to be baptized, you’d jump right in the river
and try to breathe the bottom muck just to be relieved of your own wretchedness.
Joshua watched, and listened, and learned. John was an absolute believer in who Joshua was and what he was going to do, as far as he understood, anyway, but the Baptist worried me. John was attracting the attention of Herod Antipas. Herod had married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodia, without her obtaining a divorce, which was forbidden by Jewish law, an absolute outrage by the more severe laws of the Essenes, and a subject that fit well into John’s pervasive “slut” theme. I was starting to notice soldiers from Herod’s personal guard hovering around the edge of John’s crowds when he preached.
I confronted the Baptist one evening when he came out of the wilderness in one of his evangelical rages to ambush me, Joshua, Bartholomew, and a new guy as we sat around eating our locusts.
“Slut!” John shouted with his “thunder of Elijah” voice, waving a finger under Bart’s nose.
“Yeah, John, Bartholomew’s been getting laid a lot,” I said, evangelizing for sarcasm.
“Almost,” said Bart.
“I mean with another human being, Bart.”
“Oh. Sorry. Never mind.”
John wheeled on the new guy, who put his hands up. “I’m new,” he said.
Thus rebuked, John spun to face Joshua.
“Celibate,” Joshua said. “Always have been, always will be. Not happy about it.”
Finally John turned to me. “Slut!”
“John, I’m cleansed, you baptized me six times today.” Joshua elbowed me in the ribs. “What? It was hot. Point is, I counted fifty soldiers in the crowd today, so ease up a little on the slut talk. You’re backed up or something. You really need to rethink this no marriage, no sex, no fun, ascetic thing.”
“And the honey-and-locust living-in-a pit thing,” said the new guy.
“He’s no different than Melchior or Gaspar,” Joshua said. “They were both ascetics.”
“Melchior and Gaspar weren’t running around calling the provincial governor a slut in front of hundreds of people. It’s a big difference, and
it’s going to get him killed.”
“I am cleansed of sin and unafraid,” said John, sitting down by the fire now, some of his verve gone.
“Yeah, are you cleansed of guilt? Because you’re going to have the blood of thousands on your hands when the Romans come to get you. In case you haven’t noticed, they don’t just kill the leaders of a movement. There’s a thousand crosses on the road to Jerusalem where Zealots died, and they weren’t all leaders.”
“I am unafraid.” John hung his head until the ends of his hair were dipping into the honey in his bowl. “Herodia and Herod are sluts. He’s as close as we have to a Jewish king, and he’s a slut.”
Joshua pushed his cousin’s hair out of his eyes and squeezed the wild man’s shoulder. “If it be so, then so be it. As the angel foretold, you were born to preach the truth.”
I stood up and tossed my locusts into the fire, showering sparks over John and Joshua. “I’ve only met two people whose births were announced by angels, and three-quarters of them are loony.” And I stormed off to my pit.
“Amen,” said the new guy.
That night, as I was falling asleep, I heard Joshua scrambling in the pit next to mine, as if a bug or an idea had roused him from his bedroll. “Hey!” he said.
“What?” I replied.
“I just did the math. Three quarters of two is—”
“One and a half,” said the new guy, who had moved into the pit on the other side of Josh. “So John’s either all crazy and you’re half crazy, or you’re three-quarters crazy and John’s three-quarters crazy, or—well—actually it’s a constant ratio, I’d have to graph it out for you.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Nothing,” said the new guy. “I’m new.”
The next morning Joshua leapt out of his pit, shook off the scorpions, and after a long morning whiz, kicked some dirt clods into my pit to thunk me from my slumber.
“This is it,” Joshua said. “Come down to the river, I’m going to have
John baptize me today.”
“Which will make it different from yesterday in what way?”
“You’ll see. I have a feeling.” And off he went.
The new guy prairie-dogged up out of his pit. He was tall, the new guy, and the morning sun caught on his bald scalp as he looked around. He noticed some flowers growing where Joshua had just relieved himself. Lush blossoms of a half-dozen vibrant colors stood surrounded by the deadest landscape on the planet. “Hey, were those there yesterday?”