Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

Paul was sentenced to forty lashes, the maximum the Torah allows. But, as practice dictates, the punishment is stopped at thirty-nine. The missing blow is a sympathy, and a surety against accounting error.

Barnabas and some other brothers have procured a handcart and they lay Paul in this, face against the grain, and wheel him to the house of a supporter, where his wounds can be dressed and he can recover. At every jolt of the wheels into a rut or hole, Paul groans, louder than any noise he made during the punishment itself, as if he used up the last of his resources in that demonstration of resolution.

Three buckets of water are made red in the cleansing and still the bandages bleed through. Paul sits hunched, the pain squeezing everything but itself out of his mind. When finally the exhaustion draws him to sleep, or he passes out, Paul looks almost contented. And he whispers something as he drifts away, a word that might be ‘atonement’.

The elders’ warning is finally heeded, though, and once Paul is sufficiently recovered, he and Barnabas move on. A two-man odyssey of wandering Jews. But they leave behind them a nascent group of believers. Men and women newly convinced by the fearful yet thrilling message that this very generation exists on the brink of the Kingdom of God: that the day of reckoning is coming and now — thanks to their salvation — they will be transformed from vile bodies into imperishable, indescribable, everlasting splendour when it does.

Many Jews — not only the Sadducees — do not believe in resurrection or immortality. Though it is perhaps a creed of the wealthy and the blessed: to trust that God gives men their just deserts during life. A majority of Romans, too, think we come from nothing and return to it. The maxim I Was Not, I Was, I Am Not, I Care Not is carved on Roman tombs so frequently that it is reduced to acronym. Romans make offerings to their gods, but for many this is akin to a transaction, performed through civic duty, rather than a truly spiritual exercise. Those Gentiles more mystically inclined may gravitate to the elective initiation sects of the mystery religions, which promise individual, intimate relationships with loving gods, as well as eternal life. Sects that are distinct, yet similar to each other, and perhaps also to another faith, currently still some way from achieving a finished form at its journey’s end.

Road systems designed for the rapid deployment of Roman armies serve just as well an itinerant missionary like Paul. Built of dense-packed gravel, atop a bed of rock, crested in the middle to encourage water runoff, paved with hewn stone, bound with kerbs and drainage ditches, they are a marvel of efficiency.

Back in Judaea, paths are still flowing things, living things; if a tree falls, or boulder tumbles, or a stream moves its course, or a succession of people simply change the route to take in a vantage point, a path can shift. Here roads are laid and constrained by the Roman machine. And it is easy to feel appreciative of that machine, with a new Roman name and a scroll of recommendation and the realization that, were it not for Rome, there would not exist roads as fine as these.

The second time that Paul is sentenced to the forty lashes less one, he shows those who condemn him that letter from Sergius Paulus, in hope that fear of Rome may stay the punishment. But the enforcers only laugh and say that if they were in Cyprus then a letter from the governor of Cyprus might very well hold weight. But this is Galatia, friend, go back to Cyprus, if that is where you are loved. And one of them says he has a letter from his brother in Sardis and they are still laughing as the whip hand falls. And Paul knows they are right — not to laugh, not to reject his revelation, but they are right that a letter is not sufficient. If he were a Roman citizen, then they could not do this. If he were a Roman he would have the right to appeal to Caesar himself. A Jew caught whipping a Roman citizen would find himself beaten with Roman rods. But only at vast expense can such citizenship be bought and Paul has little enough left of the money the community at Antioch gave them to live on. New believers provide a bed for him to recover upon, face pressed into the pallet, and they buy balms for his wounds and donate money for his onward journey, but funds sufficient for Roman citizenship are as distant as the drifting griffon vultures.

Paul’s back is time-healed and strong once more, when — outside another synagogue in another city — he receives his third set of the thirty-nine. The pain is not a thing to which anyone but a madman could become accustomed, but Paul is getting somewhat habituated. He knows by now that he can take such scourgings and survive them, so his fear is lessened. He finds anger rather in its place. Fury that these Jews who flog him reject the gospel he brings them. And something — the Holy Spirit or the delirium of laceration — sends the text of Jeremiah into his pain-addled mind: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the Gentiles .

The realization comes as quickly as the lash descends. Of course: if the scriptures held well-hidden foretellings of the coming of Jesus, why would they not also predict the coming of Paul? And was not Paul set apart from birth, just as Jeremiah wrote? Then Paul must be that prophet to the Gentiles. The leather strikes and proves the truth of it. The scars of earlier rejections by Israelites interlace with the stripes of blood on Paul’s back, which criss-cross in a fisherman’s net. For Paul is a fisher of men: Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles. The fact is scored into his body, as if in a script of blood. Paul is carried once more to a haven, to be nursed by friends and followers, too agonized and bewildered even to know which way his spit would fall, if his mouth wasn’t too dry to spit. But he remembers those words; a man can hardly forget being chosen by God.

I appointed you as a prophet to the Gentiles.

Twice more Paul is flogged, before his first epic journey is done. Five times in seven years he is publicly whipped by diaspora Jews, who think he is a perverter of the Torah, or a troublemaker, or both. It is understandable, perhaps, that a man so brutalized should begin to see each torturer not as a person but as a people. And it would be a mighty man indeed who would not, at least subconsciously, start to withdraw the great good that he has, the secrets he thinks he has been shown, from such a people.

Two old men — beards of bone-grey — circling one another, like stiff-legged gladiators. Though wrinkled, withered and diminished from who they once were, they both look of a type who might have wielded a weapon when in their fluorescence. They are unarmed now, though, nothing to battle with but their wits and perhaps arthritic fists, should it come to that. Their arena is just the main chamber of an apostle’s apartments, but followers and servants and a Roman guard have nonetheless formed intuitively into a girdle of spectators around their master and the man he argues with. If he even is a man, this eternal pursuer, for their master has called him more than once a Servant of Satan .