‘I became more fired up by the day. The hate grew in me and over me, like a carapace. It enveloped me until the part inside was almost hollow. I had loved learning and it was gone. I had loved a girl and she was gone. All that was left in the space was hate. Hate for The Way and its leaders, so-called Holy Men and lore-taught Pharisees, lauded by the people as if they were some great things. Saying that the Sadducees and high priests, whom I served, were nothing. Saying, by their implication, that I was less than nothing.’
Even now, so many decades on, Paul’s face drains as he speaks, as if his anger has been brought back to life by this memory. Resurrected, like all things will be soon.
‘Word reached me that The Way was growing in strength among Jews in the diaspora, especially in Damascus. So, breathing threats and murder against the disciples, I went to the high priest and asked him for authority over the synagogues at Damascus, that if I found any leaders of the Nazarenes, I might bring them in bondage back to Jerusalem. And Annas gave me his permission for their rendition and a letter, which ordered the elders and priests of the synagogues to aid me by any means they could. The letter was sealed with red wax, round, like a wound.
‘So we departed, my Temple Guards troop and me, with letter and provisions, cloaks and swords. We took the road to Damascus. And that was where it happened: where the fate of the whole world was changed for ever; where I was chosen for glory and for hardship. On the road to Damascus.’
Two Childhoods
Saul was set apart right from his mother’s womb, as one untimely born. He was near enough two months premature. And back then, that was as good as a death sentence. That was as good as to say a swift kick goodbye to the world you’ve never known. His mother kept him in a little woven reed box, padded and blanketed with scraps of cloth. Resigned to his departure, she did what she could anyway, almost as a child might for a swallow chick, nest-tumbled from a rooftop: just to comfort and give it love, even if it would near certainly be in vain. She coated Saul with pig lard, to keep him warm; she knew Yahweh would forgive her that. She never washed him for fear that even heated water would spell the death knell. She fed him with breast milk, dripped from a whittled stick down his tiny, silent throat. He didn’t cry. Perhaps he was too weak to cry. He was too weak to suckle. Too weak to do anything, except to lie in a little woven reed box, covered with a thick wax of fat, padded and blanketed with scraps of cloth. One stray spark from the fire she kept him by and Saul would have gone up, like a dropped oil lamp. But he didn’t die, from fire or from anything else: pneumonia; or heart failure; or sickness; or just from being an insufficiently finished creature to live. He didn’t die and eventually he was too big for a little woven reed box and too hungry to be fed with drips from whittled sticks and his mother began to be more scared than she ever was at the beginning, because that was sad certainty, but afterwards she had to deal with the mustard seed of hope. But still Saul didn’t die. And the elders said it was a miracle and the healer said it was a marvel of medicine. But Saul’s mother said it was just lard and love.
So, from the very beginning Saul was blessed, but any boy who grew up in Tarsus was in some sense blessed: he could bathe in the salmon-scale silver river in the summer and watch the sun turn the snow on the sharp crenulations of the Taurus Mountains salmon-flesh pink in winter. A boy born to a family of reasonable means could be educated. Indeed, Tarsus was famed for its education: some said that the schools of Tarsus were comparable even to those of Athens and Alexandria.
Saul was tutored in the philosophies of the Greeks, and he was taught the Israelite religion and law from The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. But more than this: he was lectured in love because loved he was. A boy who is the unquestioned object of his mother’s adoration will go through his whole life feeling like a champion. Saul had just such a mother: a gentle, doting mother, with brown eyes that shone in lamplight and daylight both.
Saul had a younger sister, and there had been other siblings, others who had died, a dark seam of parental anguish running through the years ahead of his. But Saul had survived, the boy his parents had sought and cherished. Not that his sister was not loved. She was loved, in a way. Just a different way. Though it is hard to measure the loves of other people, never mind other times. For many Greek families back then, love meant leaving a child out for exposure: sacrificing the latest comer entirely in order to feed those who had come before. Or selling them as a slave to a good master in good times, lest fear of starvation force them later to be given to a cruel master. Some families considered it dangerous to love at alclass="underline" even on average five or six children born alive would see just two reach adulthood; occasionally, ten would mean none. Some Tarseans feared to name their children until they were grown enough to gather kindling. Before that they were called only ‘the baby’.
Even past thirteen, when he could follow the Torah as a man, Saul remained his parents’ baby and he was loved in the straightforward sense of being adored, indulged, maybe even spoiled. He was never beaten, as his sister was sometimes beaten. This was not by regulation. It was simply something that did not occur. Because Saul was the son that his parents had prayed for and Saul gradually became a son any Jewish family would be proud of: learned in his scriptures and devoted to his God.
And yet Saul was not greatly happy. Or at least he did not know himself to be. Perhaps we need some element of sadness to make a judgement on our happiness, just as a cold face measures the warmth of the body beneath a blanket.
Sometimes the boy Saul wondered if other people really existed at alclass="underline" could they think as he could think? Were they truly separate beings, or was this whole world constructed as a thing to test him? Was he at the centre of a giant dream, which revolved around Saul as the sun revolved around the sky?
There were other people, of course, most of them in other lands. In Galilee, for example, there was a boy of approximately the same age as Saul. Yahushua he was named, though his friends called him Yeshua and many who didn’t know him would come to call him Jesus.
Yeshua lived in a squat, single-storey home, part hollowed into a limestone hill. Its packed dirt floor was smeared with clay, so that manure could be more easily swept away because animals — a couple of goats, a milk sheep, possibly a donkey — were brought in at night. The walls were of stacked rock, with mud joints. The flat roof was also made of mud, layered with sticks and straw. When the nights were warm, the family would sleep up there; at colder times they would share the sole room below with the beasts. They cooked on a clay oven, fuelled with animal dung. They lived mostly on millet, emmer wheat and barley, in the form of gruel, bread or flat cakes. But also pine nuts, coarse horse beans, almonds, olives, sycamore figs, lentils and dandelion leaves. Occasionally they ate salted fish. The zenith of every year was lamb — an unblemished year-old male lamb — for the Passover festival.
Yeshua, like Saul, was devoted to his study of the Torah and the love of the one-God. In Judaea and Galilee, the Pharisees ensured that even the poor could have some education. Yeshua had four brothers and at least two sisters, of whom he was probably the eldest, although there is no definitive reason to suppose this. Someone would later write — a century later — that Yeshua was born in distant Bethlehem to a virgin; but this doesn’t seem very likely. That’s the sort of thing a mother would remember and Yeshua’s mother quite clearly did not. Or else why would she later think he had gone insane and needed restraining when he started preaching? And why would she be amazed at a level of boyhood precociousness that would seem very underwhelming in one who began life announced by angels and implanted by God? The narrator of this nativity tale would say that the parental travellers must have come to Bethlehem — where it was commonly believed a messiah should be born — because of the census. This wasn’t the case, but such mistakes are easily forgiven, because the storywriter spoke a different language from Yeshua and had never been anywhere near Judaea and wrote only after fables and tall tales had taken root, in an age when miraculous nativities were competitive and ubiquitous.