Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

The man Saul, who says that he should henceforth be called Paul, lays his case before them. Jochanan last saw him fourteen years ago. Back then Saul had the look of a wild, half-fledged creature; by now he must be the thing that he is. But what that thing is, Jochanan couldn’t say.

Paul states his case: that Gentiles must be admitted, because divine visions told him that he is the Apostle to the Gentiles. And it’s hard to refute him without calling him a liar. It’s hard to deny him when he has achieved so much, founded so many communities. When he has been stoned, flogged and beaten.

All the disciples carry a rock of guilt within them, a stumbling-stone suspicion that their belief at Gethsemane was not sufficient, that it was they who failed Yeshua; that it was they who betrayed him. Paul, of course, was not with them, but you need only to look at him to see that he does not share this burden of doubt. Faith floods from him. But does that mean he’s right?

He lays his message before them, the things he has been preaching. John-Mark once reported some worryingly odd beliefs in Paul, but John-Mark isn’t in Jerusalem at the moment: he has left on a solo undertaking, and Paul doesn’t mention any such things. He presents the gospel that he has preached among the Gentiles most respectfully to the Three Pillars. Wanting to be sure, he says, that he has not been in error, running his race in vain.

Jochanan and Cephas both tend to follow James’s lead — it is hard not to, when he is so much his brother’s brother — and James seems impressed by Paul’s stories. But Jochanan notices that Paul’s smile fades faster than it ought to as he turns away. It doesn’t linger quite as long as a smile should, but is instantly snuffed, like a candle flame.

James the Just tells Paul that the Pillars must discuss the matter among themselves and that he will be summoned when they are done.

Paul’s posture alters at the word ‘summoned’ and momentarily he looks as though he is about to say something, but then he doesn’t.

Through the slit window of the room where the three talk, they can see smoke sailing skywards from the Temple’s sacrificial pyre. It marks the spot where Yahweh gathered the dust to mould Adam. The same location as where Abraham, faithful to God’s command, would have sacrificed Isaac and where King David then built the first Temple. It is a strange thing to debate the admission of Gentiles in such a place.

‘But these are strange times,’ Cephas says.

‘More than strange: the times are treacherous,’ the Just One says.

Jochanan nods. The meaning is clear: even peace of the occupied, hostile form endured in Judaea seems to be coming to a close. Mere months ago, a Roman soldier on the Antonia battlements bared his hairy arse and waved his uncircumcised cock and swore obscenities down at the Temple crowds, gathered for the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The fiery youths of Jerusalem of course took up in revolt and the Romans charged into the very Temple plaza and the young men were hacked down and hundreds of innocent people died; butchered, or trampled in the stampede to get away from the violence.

Judaea but barely survived the threat of the placing of a statue of mad Caligula in the Temple. The catastrophe — which would certainly have meant open battle — was only averted by the emperor’s death. But the threat remains: a new emperor was heralded, as swiftly as a crow drops to a corpse, and if a blasphemous statue is installed, war will follow.

Perhaps the worst was in Alexandria, where Jews settled for three centuries were massacred by those they had lived alongside. Exterminated with a systematic horror for which a word does not yet exist. As if they were some vermin being rinsed from the city. Venerable men who had sat on the Alexandrian Senate, were flogged to death like criminals. Free men were sold into slavery. Whole families were burned alive in pyres of their own furniture, and scorched and tortured bodies were scattered promiscuously about the streets. The survivors were confined to one cramped and crammed quarter, with death the penalty for leaving it, even to buy bread. And the Roman governor not only approved it all, but crucified those who made complaint.

In Rome itself, this very year, many Jews have been expelled. Forced to leave the city they called home. In waves they have flooded to Jerusalem, in states of desperate hunger and poverty that the Nazarenes have done their inadequate best to alleviate.

Something is on the wind. Things have not got so bad that they cannot get worse. And the new age that is to come may well be birthed in blood, for what isn’t?

Which is why James finally rules: ‘Better that the Gentile followers remain separate than that men who will not die for Judaea are called brother. Hate against the nation is on the rise. We should be strengthening our blood, not diluting it. So, for those who don’t wish to convert fully to Judaism, let us not oblige them, at least for the present. We cannot deny what Paul has achieved in the communities he has founded, and perhaps they can help to fund our work with the poor ones.’

So Paul is called to hear the Pillars’ answer, standing before that window where the Temple smoke is visible, drifting up into the nostrils of the unknowable.

‘We have reached the decision that those Gentiles who are turning to God shouldn’t be impeded. You say that Greeks can’t rest on the Sabbath, or else they will lose their jobs, and that they balk at circumcision. Our judgement then is that, to begin on the path of The Way and have a share in the new age that is to come, they need only worship the Lord of Hosts, to the exclusion of all other gods, and follow the simple instructions given to Noah, before the times of Abraham and Moses, such as were once obeyed by foreigners who stayed in the land of Israel. Namely, that they of course do not commit crimes and that they also cease idolatry, sexual immorality, blasphemy and the eating of meat with undrained blood still within it. They must not consume blood! If you agree to these rules, then, since you believe that God told you to preach to the Gentiles, you can continue to do so and we will go to the circumcised.’

Paul smiles, a bright smile, close to laughter in its joy.

‘But one further thing,’ James says. ‘Just as all the Jews of the world send their silver shekel to the Jerusalem Temple, so your Gentile converts must make donation to The Way, to support the poor ones here in Jerusalem. And you, Paul, are charged with ensuring that this is faithfully carried out. Do you agree to all these terms?’

Paul agrees, cheerfully and readily, and crab-scampers out sideways, in bandy-legged haste to tell Barnabas and those others who came with him from Antioch.

Jochanan leaves too, to take a walk outside the walls. Noticing suddenly how confined the room is.

During his time following The Way, Jochanan has come to be good at reading faces, and it seems to him that Paul might have left believing something different from what James meant. Though maybe the fault was with James, because what does that really mean anyway? You go to the Gentiles and we to the circumcised ? In Antioch there were both, they were all mingled, surely that was the problem: God has forbidden wearing clothes of two cloths; forbidden working with beasts of different species yoked together; forbidden sowing mixed seeds in the same field; forbidden growing grain or herbs in a vineyard. What, then, is a community such as Antioch, if it is not just such jumbling as that?

But James must know best. Jochanan just needs to walk it off.