“There is no family any more, only fellowship,” he muttered.
Marcellus gave a start.
“This Messiah of yours preaches fine ideals,” said Uri, “and I have no doubt he was a good healer.”
“A fisher of souls,” Marcellus proclaimed.
Uri was startled by this combination of words, so he asked his son to explain. Marcellus gathered his wits and related that the Jesus of Nazareth in question had converted fishermen as his first disciples, and they had then been sent out to heal the souls of others.
The Nazarene evangelists fish for suitable souls, Uri supposed, and Marcellus was one such. Quite probably any second-born son had a soul that was suitable; it would be interesting to know if there happened to be any firstborn sons among them.
Uri tried not to think of Theo, and he regarded as a success any day at the end of which, before falling asleep, he could tell himself that he had not thought once about him the whole day, as he was thinking of him now. He thought it unlikely Theo would join a sect to be loved; Marcellus had joined one. It’s because I have shown him no love, Uri reflected, and however nit-witted he may be, he has sensed that.
He felt a strange prickling on the nape of his neck: relief. Let Marcellus’s new family take him away, along with his tessera; his half-baked, hangdog features would not be missed. What would the loss of him be compared with the loss of Theo? He would somehow scrape along with just Hagar and their unsightly daughters.
No one could have been more amazed at himself than Uri when he heard his voice sounding sympathetic, almost affectionate:
“Well, now! And is property communal with your people?”
There was a sincere expression of interest in his tone; Marcellus could sense that his father’s exasperation had melted away, and he was taken aback because he could not fathom what had happened in a few brief moments.
“Communal property?” Uri repeated, smiling at his son.
It was a dispassionate, distant smile.
Marcellus snorted and shook his head:
“No, not that.”
“So, they didn’t actually ask you for your tessera?”
“No, they didn’t, I offered it myself. But they loved me before I did that!”
Uri was moved to genuine pity for his son.
“A vow of poverty?”
Marcellus shook his head.
“A vow of silence?”
Marcellus did not understand what he was driving at.
“Where is it that you gather?” Uri asked, tacking on after that to reassure him: “I don’t want to know the address or the names of any individuals. I’ve got no desire to inform on them, but do they live in Rome?”
“Of course, they do,” said Marcellus. “They live in Far Side: after all, they’re Jews.”
Uri shook his head.
“But for them, as best I know, there is nothing to choose between a Greek or a Jew.”
“Nor is there! No such thing a man or woman, Greek or Jew, master or servant…”
“There are also women?”
“There are! My own priest is a woman…”
Uri was staggered.
“A woman? As a priest?”
Marcellus elaborated in his relief:
“Any of us can become a priest! Man or woman, servant or master, provided their soul is pure enough!”
He recounted that at the supper that was put on every Saturday in honor of the Messiah (the Friday evening they would devote to the Sabbath like regular Jews) water would be served but it would be partaken of by way of wine because the Anointed had turned water into wine, and that miracle was repeated in all places where His faithful gathered together, and the supper itself was also consecrated to him.
Uri dimly recalled hearing something of the kind before; possibly Philo had mentioned that cranks of a similar stripe had arrived in Alexandria. They had presumably made a start on their evangelism earlier there than in Rome; it would also have been more fertile ground after the Bane.
“Do you have supper and pray?”
“Yes, we do!” exclaimed Marcellus enthusiastically. “We drink water on which the priestess has given the priestly benediction and through that it turns into wine, becomes holy water, and we partake of that, thinking of Him, and his Spirit invades us, and we pray to Him, who was killed but rose again from the dead to come among us a second time, and the Lord will surely come again because he has promised to do so!”
Uri nodded. Holy water was used by Greeks in their rites; the Jews had nothing equivalent, and it was forbidden for anyone who was not a born Cohen to utter the priestly blessing. This was some hybrid of Greek and Jewish religious notions in much the same way as in Alexandria Serapis was a blend of Greek and Egyptian traditions.
Out of that could only come a religious war of Jew against Jew.
“Did your Messiah who rose again from the dead have twelve disciples, by any chance?” Uri asked.
Flabbergasted, Marcellus said: yes, there had been. The twelve were his first apostles.
“Have you already been snooping on us?” he asked mistrustfully.
“No, I haven’t,” Uri replied. “It’s just that Mithras had that number of disciples. Well, and don’t you suppose that the Anointed happened to be born to a virgin? Mithras’s disciples make that claim about him.”
Marcellus protested: no, of course not, what nonsense! He had a regular father, Joseph by name, and his mother was Mariamne.
Uri helped himself to a dumpling, whereupon Marcellus resumed with a will. They peacefully dug in, and Uri meanwhile asked whether there were any Greeks in the group. Marcellus said there weren’t — just masters and servants, men and women. However, there were already Greek believers in Asia, and a lot of god-fearing Greeks in Syrian and Greek towns had converted to belief in the Messiah, who in any case believed in the God of Israel, only they had not been circumcised, and now did not need to anyway. Indeed, his own priestess had become a Nazarene there because both she and her husband were Roman, but they too had been driven out of Far Side under Claudius; they too had traipsed around in Italia but then sailed to Corinth, where had found employment in tent-making. It was then that the Holy Ghost had touched them, and since then, they were happy. The priestess’s husband had died shortly before; he had died happy, and Priscilla, the widow, was also happy in the knowledge that her husband was sitting in Light on the right hand of the Creator, next to the Anointed, who had expunged death for evermore.
Expunged death! God in Heaven!
Sitting in Light! The light of Enoch!
Priestess!
Uri gazed at the broad, flat face and the long, down-turned hook of the nose under which a straggle of black wisps of hair had begun to arise. The child not only had no father but no mother either, or so he felt.
Hagar and the girls cautiously edged in from the stairwell and were witnesses to the miracle that Uri and Marcellus were peacefully eating and conversing with each other; they did not know what to make of the transformation.
Uri looked at them.
If they understood, Uri reflected, I would say that I could finally be through with humanity.
Uri requested that Marcellus ask his priestess if he could also take part in a supper on Saturday. Marcellus was reluctant, but it was clearly something he could not refuse: they were willing to make a convert of anyone, Uri thought, and that was explicitly laid down.
The priestess sent word that the congregation was willing to accept Uri.
The believers did not seem any more lunatic or wretched than people do generally; indeed, their dress betrayed a degree of affluence, which came as a bit of an unwelcome surprise to Uri, though he himself could not have said why. They assembled in a secluded cottage, not far from the southern border of Far Side; it was where Priscilla had lived since she lost her husband. They had purchased the cottage with the money they had made in Corinth, with Priscilla explaining to Uri, as the newcomer, that they had made tents for nomadic tribes, since all the Jews there lived in towns and had nothing to do with agriculture.