Philip Pullman: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Christ got up, ready to move away, but the man said, ‘Wait, sir, wait for me.’

Christ sat down again. He wanted to be alone, but he remembered the angel’s description of the good work that would be done by that church they both wanted to see; could he possibly turn away from this poor man? Or could the beggar in some unimaginable way be the ram that would be sacrificed instead of Jesus?

‘How can I help you?’ Christ said quietly.

‘Just stay and talk to me for a minute or two, sir. That’s all I want.’

The crippled man pulled himself up next to Christ and lay there breathing heavily.

‘How long have you been waiting for a cure?’ said Christ.

‘Twelve years, sir.’

‘Will no one help you to the water? Shall I help you now?’

‘No good now, sir. What happens is that an angel comes every so often and stirs the water up, and the first one in the pool afterwards gets cured. I can’t move so quickly, as you may have noticed.’

‘How do you live? What do you eat? Have you got friends or a family to look after you?’

‘There’s some people who come along sometimes and give us a bit of food.’

‘Why do they do that? Who are they?’

‘I don’t know who they are. They do it because… I don’t know why they do it. Maybe they’re just good.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said another voice in the darkness. ‘No one’s good. It’s not natural to be good. They do it so’s other people will think more highly of them. They wouldn’t do it otherwise.’

‘You don’t know nothing,’ said a third voice from under the colonnade. ‘People can earn high opinions in quicker ways than doing good. They do it because they’re frightened.’

‘Frightened of what?’ said the second voice.

‘Frightened of hell, you blind fool. They think they can buy their way out of it by doing good.’

‘Doesn’t matter why they do it,’ said the lame man, ‘as long as they do it. Anyway, some people are just good.’

‘Some people are just soft, like you, you worm,’ said the third voice. ‘Why’s no one helped you down to the water in twelve years? Eh? Because you’re filthy, that’s why. You stink, like we all do. They’ll throw a bit of bread your way, but they won’t touch you. That’s how good they are. You know what real charity would be? It wouldn’t be bread. They don’t miss bread. They can buy more bread whenever they want. Real charity would be a pretty young whore coming down here and giving us a good time for nothing. Can you imagine a sweet-faced girl with skin like silk coming and laying herself down in my arms, with my sores oozing pus all over her and stinking like a dungheap? If you can imagine that, you can imagine real goodness. I’m damned if I can. I could live a thousand years and never see goodness like that.’

‘Because it wouldn’t be goodness,’ said the blind man. ‘It’d be wickedness and fornication, and she’d be punished and so would you.’

‘There’s old Sarah,’ said the lame man. ‘She come down here last week. She does it for nothing.’

‘Because she’s mad and full of drink,’ said the leper. ‘Mad enough to lie with you, anyway. But even she wouldn’t lie with me.’

‘Even a dead whore wouldn’t lie with you, you filthy leper,’ said the blind man. ‘She’d get out of her grave and crawl away in her bones sooner than that.’

‘You tell me what goodness is, then,’ said the leper.

‘You want to know what goodness is? I’ll tell you what goodness is. Goodness would be to take a sharp knife and go round the city by night and cut the throats of all the rich men, and their wives and their children, and their servants too, and every living thing in their houses. That’d be an act of supreme goodness.’

‘You can’t say that’d be good,’ said the lame man. ‘That’d be murder, rich men or not. That’s forbidden. You know it is.’

‘You’re ignorant. You don’t know the scriptures. When King Sennacherib was besieging Jerusalem the angel of the Lord came down in the night and slew one hundred and eighty-five thousand of his soldiers while they was all asleep. That was a good deed. It’s righteous and holy to slay the oppressor – always has been. You tell me if we poor people aren’t oppressed by the rich. If I was a rich man I’d have servants to fetch and carry for me, I’d have a wife to lie with me, I’d have children to honour my name, I’d have harpists and singers to make sweet music for me, I’d have stewards to look after my money and manage my fields and livestock, I’d have every convenient thing to make life easy for a blind man. The high priest would call on me, I’d be praised in the synagogues, I’d be respected all through Judea, blind or not.’

‘And would you give charity to a poor cripple by the pool of Bethesda?’ said the lame man.

‘No, I wouldn’t. Not a penny. And why not? Because I’d still be blind, and I wouldn’t be able to see you, and if anyone tried to tell me about you, I wouldn’t listen. Because I’d be rich. You wouldn’t matter to me.’

‘Well, you’d deserve to have your throat cut, then,’ said the leper.

‘That’s what I’m saying, isn’t it?’

Christ said, ‘There’s a man called Jesus. A holy man, a healer. If he came here-’

‘Waste of time,’ said the leper. ‘There’s a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they’ll swear they’ve been crippled or blind for years and then stage a bloody miraculous recovery. Holy men? Healers? Don’t make me laugh.’

‘But this man is different,’ said Christ.

‘I remember him,’ said the blind man. ‘Jesus. He come here on the sabbath, like a fool. The priests wouldn’t let him heal anyone on the sabbath. He should’ve known that.’

‘But he did heal someone,’ said the lame man. ‘Old Hiram. You remember that. He told him to take up his bed and walk.’

‘Bloody rubbish,’ said the blind man. ‘Hiram went as far as the temple gate, then he lay down and went on begging. Old Sarah told me. He said what was the use of taking his living away? Begging was the only thing he knew how to do. You and your blether about goodness,’ he said, turning to Christ, ‘where’s the goodness in throwing an old man out into the street without a trade, without a home, without a penny? Eh? That Jesus is asking too much of people.’

‘But he was good,’ said the lame man. ‘I don’t care what you say. You could feel it, you could see it in his eyes.’

‘I never saw it,’ said the blind man.

Christ said to the lame man, ‘And what do you think goodness is?’

‘Just a little human companionship, sir. A poor man has got little to enjoy in this life, and a cripple even less. The touch of a kindly hand is worth gold to me, sir. If you was to embrace me, sir, just put your arms around me for a moment and kiss me, I’d treasure that, sir. That would be real goodness.’

The man stank. The smell of faeces, urine, vomit, and years of accumulated filth rose from him in a cloud. Christ leant down and tried to embrace him, and had to turn away, and retched, and tried again. There was a moment of clumsiness as the lame man’s arms tried to embrace him in return, and then the smell became too much, and Christ had to kiss him very quickly and then push him away and stand up.

A short laugh came from the darkness under the colonnade.

Christ hurried outside and away, breathing the cold air deeply, and only when he had passed the great tower at the corner of the temple complex did he discover that during their clumsy embrace the lame man had stolen the purse that hung from his girdle.

He sat down trembling in a corner of the wall and wept for himself, for the money he’d lost, for the three men by the pool of Bethesda, for his brother Jesus, for the prostitute with the cancer, for all the poor people in the world, for his mother and father, for his own childhood, when it had been so easy to be good. Things could not go on like this.