The helpless wrath against the Romans and their unbeatable legions must have growled black in the dead eyes of every survivor, when Yeshua was a boy. Must have echoed from the hollow begging bowls of every widow and orphan. Prayers that God would save His people from this horror must have been shared and shouted in Nazareth’s small synagogue. We cannot blame Yeshua, because he did not grow up to be entirely a man of peace.
Yeshua and Saul both would come to be men who changed the world for ever, for better or other. And each would find himself in Jerusalem at the same time, although they never met.
Saul arrived first: he came to the holy city with dreams of becoming a great Pharisee. But possibly he found Pharisee learning too much, struggling as he was to study in another tongue. Though he had excelled in his memory and scrutiny of the holy books in Greek, the Pharisees taught and debated in Hebrew. Saul began first to dislike and then despise the faction of the Pharisees, with their liberalizing and constant scrutinizing of the law. He came to conclude that he would better serve his God in the Temple Guard, on the side of the aristocratic Sadducees. And so he abandoned his education, but he did not return to Tarsus. Saul was equipped with stories about not looking back, from his Greek heritage and his Jewish: from Herakles’ and Orpheus’s descents into the underworld and from Lot’s flight from Sodom and Gomorrah. And so Saul did not look back, after that first journey to Jerusalem. He never looked back again. The past to him became nothing; a thing to be spoken of only when needed; a thing whose memory is malleable.
When Yeshua came to Jerusalem, he arrived as a rebel king, a rival ruler to the Roman emperor, a rival leader to the high priest. He came with his brothers and his disciples. With the Zealot Simon and the Sicarii dagger-man Judas. With Cephas or Rocky. With the brothers Jacob and Jochanan, so fierce they were named the Sons of Thunder. Just as the charge laid against him would later be recorded: Yeshua arrived in Jerusalem to oppose the paying of taxes to Caesar and to declare himself the anointed king, the Messiah. He came to incite a rising, as Judas the Galilean had done in his youth; as Phinehas had done in the scripture. He came to free his people as Moses and David had done. He believed that he and his followers would suffice to defeat the might of Rome. Because the scriptures prove that God helps those who are His chosen ones, if they are faithful and prayerful and prepared to fight like fuck.
Three Years after the Crucifixion
Saul and the guards leave by the Damascus Gate, the opposite end of Jerusalem’s walls to where they murdered Stephen. No, not murdered: executed, righteously and lawfully executed.
The four ziggurat towers of the Antonia Fortress — named for Roman warlord Mark Anthony — obscure the sky as they pass by. Beneath its guileless fortifications — each stone-carved block as heavy as a hundred hungry urchins — are lines of spread blankets, baskets and handcarts of the traders who sell to the legionaries. There are also scarlet-canopied whore tents, sweaty delights hidden beneath cloth that sieves the daylight. Even now soldiery laughter erupts from one. Some trooper probably cups a pomegranate breast and strokes the wet pelt of a Judaean girl. The Romans snatch the best of everything from this life. But what is this life? Is it just a prelude or a waking dream? Is a new age soon to dawn, as the Nazarenes say? Saul no longer feels he knows these things; he feels his certainties slipping away from him, along with a once hopeful future. There is a hole in the fabric of things, a gap that can be filled only with blood.
The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, the Torah says, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Blood sacrifices, blood circuses, blood feuds, blood libels, blooded warriors, bloody hands. Blood marks us and keeps us. With blood we end and start. And only in blood is there absolution: For the life of a creature is in its blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls …
Saul will have his atonement from the Nazarenes; Saul will have his blood.
A knot of Romans sit, proudly polishing their armour. Dark-eyed boys stare at them from a distance, loathing them, yet longing to be like them. A feeling Saul knows something of.
Saul has learned much about the Nazarenes through his persecutions of them. People of The Way. Mystical, ignorant, nonsensical followers of a self-evidently failed messiah; believers that the end time will shortly arrive. They must be eradicated. That much is clear. Surely that at least is clear. The rest of their beliefs are indistinct, like looking through a veil.
These streets around the Antonia Fortress are little Italy. The Romans are visibly in control here. But they only ever traverse the dense and narrow alleys of lower Jerusalem mob-handed. Too many quarter-turn stairwells and alley doorways where Sicarii daggers can lurk. Too many flat roofs for collecting rainwater that can become ambush platforms. Dead ends that can be barricaded in an instant, leaving seven-foot spears and armour impotent. Where the mightiest soldier can be killed by dropped building blocks. Go in too light and Roman soldiers might die. Go in too heavy and they might provoke a riot. So day-to-day patrolling of Jerusalem is still best left to the Temple Guard and the vestiges of self-rule, the pretence of self-rule. A pretence that fools no one, but is nonetheless a mutually beneficial fraud. A lie that almost everyone can take part in trying to believe. Isn’t it better at least to try to believe in what you cannot change in any case? You have to attempt to hear some harmony in the clangs and crashes of the world.
Not everyone subscribes to this view. As Saul and his men leave Jerusalem’s walls behind, some of the non-subscribers are visible: those who think that this land must be changed. They hang, part-rotted, from a row of crosses. Flesh turned shades of rancid green. Heads lolled forwards, as if at rest. But eyes long since pecked free by the hooded crows. The hooded crows are black-cowled and dark-winged, but tabarded in grey, like Temple Guards. They prize the eyes, moist and globular; the eyes and the genitals are always the first to go. The hooded crows caw and hop their springing half-flight lope between the wooden scaffolds that uphold the dead. The crows stay off the ground; the ground belongs to the dogs. The dogs yelp as they dance and stagger, unstable on hind legs, trying to reach ever higher up. The flesh and bone that dogs and jackals could readily stretch to have gone already; the ankles of the dead are jagged. The bodies are cut-offs now: footless, faceless and emasculated, like damaged statues from some abandoned Alexandrian town. This is the fate of those fools who oppose Rome. And Deuteronomy says that anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed. How can the idiot Nazarenes believe that a man who ended like this could be the Messiah? Those of The Way are wrong, like Stephen was. They deserve to die, like Stephen did.
Saul has a scroll from the high priest to give him legitimacy for the extraordinary rendition on which he is embarked. Annas has no legal jurisdiction outside Jerusalem, but he is still a high priest, so the letter should impress the Jewish population of Damascus, where some of the leaders of The Way have fled. The Jewish population may be swayed, perhaps, but the authorities won’t. So Saul and his men are dressed like traders, daggers at their belts, their swords secreted in packs on the mule that carries their provisions. Mules are mixed creatures, prohibited by Torah, but the high priest seems happy to overlook this instance. Saul has the high priest’s scroll tucked safely inside his tunic, the stiff parchment pressing into his side, like a comforting wound. How can there be such a thing? How can a wound be comforting? How can the freaks and fools of The Way think that a dead man can be a messiah? It makes no sense. And yet so many of them refuse to recant the belief. So many of them take the whippings and beatings with smiles on their faces. Smiles like those of the idiot child who sits in the midday sun on the Temple steps: unconflicted; contented.