Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

James suffers from no such indecision. James is known as James the Just. And a few weeks into Cephas’s stay at Antioch, certain men of James’s come up from Jerusalem. At the head of them John-Mark. They wear black travelling cloaks and they bring black news.

‘I’ve spent the last year and more passing through all the communities of Paul’s I could find,’ John-Mark tells Cephas in private. ‘I back-tracked along the route he took in founding his groups. And things are not as he told you they were.’

Burdened with the news, Cephas begins to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles of Antioch. He no longer eats with them. The other Jews follow his lead. The hall divides into two. Split and separated, like the shell of a forbidden oyster.

Paul is energized and angered. He doesn’t even take Cephas aside. He confronts him publicly.

‘You are rending our community, Cephas. You’re a hypocrite: you were eating with the Gentile brothers contentedly and suddenly you break with them just because certain men have come from James.’ His face is puce with rage, the whole of it turned the same shade as the self-made bruise on his forehead.

‘But I didn’t know what I now do,’ Cephas says. ‘You haven’t been telling us the truth. With lies you might get ahead, Paul, but you can never go back. Yes, I sat with the Gentiles, but I presumed we were not eating forbidden foods. But now I hear you have been telling your followers to eat anything that is sold in the meat market without raising any question about it on the grounds of conscience . So how can I trust in what you serve us? How can I know it is not pork? How can I know that the meat was not strangled, or sacrificed to idols, or boiled with the blood still in it?’

‘You have lived like a Gentile in the weeks that you have been here, Cephas, not like a Jew. How is it that you suddenly remember to follow Jewish customs only when John-Mark comes? You told me yourself how with Yeshua you picked and ate corn on the Sabbath. Why was it all right to break the Torah then but not now?’

‘Yes, we did one time. We were starving and we were on the run. The Sabbath does not apply to men on the march. But in any event, like the Pharisees say, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And there was precedent: King David’s men ate the consecrated bread, so why shouldn’t King Yeshua’s men have picked corn? It wasn’t that we wanted to break the Torah, we had to and it was allowable. It is not the same thing as in a period of plenty to eat meat sacrificed to idols, as I might have in your Lord’s Supper. Can you tell me with any surety that I haven’t?’

But John-Mark interrupts before Paul can reply. John-Mark’s dark eyes are as cold as those of Paul are on fire. ‘Why do you even call it the Lord’s Supper?’ John-Mark says. ‘Those are the words they use in the rituals of mystery religions. They have no meaning in Judaism.’

‘Who was speaking to you?’ Paul says. ‘You who deserted us at Perga and I hear have since been spying on our fellowships, following our path, like a jackal hoping to poach the prey of a lion. How can you of all people confront me, John-Mark, you who witnessed the miracle of my blinding the false preacher Elymas?’

‘I saw a man taken from the room, struck sick. But I couldn’t say that I saw you do it and I couldn’t say it was a miracle. There seem to be a lot of false preachers around of late, there seems to be a lot of blindness … James the Just told you that your converts must follow at the least the simple restrictions given to Noah, especially not to eat blood. You have not only broken this, but you are telling them the very wine they drink is transformed into blood. Turned into Yeshua’s blood! What insanity is this? If it were true, it would be cannibalism, it would be akin to human sacrifice, but since it is not true, it is blasphemy and lies. Deceits have no place in this movement. Leave rites of wine turning to blood and food turning to flesh to the magical papyruses and the devotees of Dionysius and Mithras. These things are abhorrent to Israelites and would have been to Yeshua.’

‘But that is the whole point. You do not know Him. Your Jesus was a fleshly man. Mine is the resurrected Jesus. He has spoken to me directly. You cannot presume to know Him better. You know only the things that He was, not what He is.’

‘What he is,’ John-Mark says. ‘What he is! You have been telling your followers that your Jesus is a pre-existent being, a god-spirit-thing formed from before the creation of the world. The Son of God, not as all Israel’s kings were known, but as quite literally the birth child of Jehovah. After the fashion that pagans believe Alexander the Great to be the son of Zeus and Caesar Augustus the son of Apollo. Do you deny it?’

‘Give up this madness, Paul,’ Cephas says. He is pleading, but from a person of his size even petition can seem like a thinly veiled threat. ‘Yeshua was something more than other men, of course he was. He was a prophet and a king, the anointed one. But he was not a god. I knew him. I saw him spit. I saw him shit. I saw his feet scabbed from brush and stone; hard though they were, they were mortal feet. I saw his skin blistered with mosquito bites from sunsets spent hip deep in river baptisms. I saw him eat, I saw him piss. He was no god. There is only one God.’

‘Yet you can believe this very mortal Jesus is still alive and returning to earth to bring the new age?’ Paul says.

‘Yes, he is now with God and will be back,’ John-Mark snaps. ‘Like Methuselah, King Hiram, Bithiah, Serach, the sons of Korah, Eved-Melekh, Elijah, Enoch and Eliezer. They did not die, but they were not gods.’

‘But you know your scriptures better than any of us, Paul,’ Cephas says, trying to be conciliatory. ‘Reread the Prophets and the Torah. Don’t trust only in these voices that you think you hear.’ Cephas opens his arms. There is still time; he would hug Paul and end this fray. But Paul shrinks from him.

‘Come to me, Paul,’ Cephas says. ‘Embrace me once more as a friend and we will forgive and forget your errors. These have been confusing, uncertain years for us all, but we must follow James the Just and the path that Yeshua laid in his lifetime. Return to your brothers and to the Torah.’

‘The Torah of Moses was never intended to be permanent. It came only through the tongues of angels, through imperfect mediation, and now it has been superseded by the new gospel given to me directly by God.’

John-Mark folds his arms in such a way as to push out the muscles, perhaps unintentionally but with inherent menace. ‘You say our laws came only through the tongues of angels. Only! Well, I say your words are only the words of a man. You’re a liar, Saul of Tarsus, and you should leave.’

Paul looks about the hall; the Antiochenes stare at the floor, at their dust-dragged toes, at the cracks in the walls and the holes in the surfaces of things. They are not with him.

‘Leave I will,’ Paul says. ‘I’ll be glad to, happy to have you gone from my sight. And the Lord long since decreed that mine is to be a missionary existence. Come, Barnabas, old friend, let’s get our things. The pilgrim road is calling us once more.’

Barnabas the Cypriot has tears not just in his eyes but down his cheeks and dripping into his beard. He looks like a cloth torn in two. But he shuffles to stand with Cephas and John-Mark.

‘I love you, Paul,’ Barnabas croaks, struggling to speak at all. ‘You know that I do. But Cephas was Yeshua’s right hand, his hearth guard, his chamberlain. James was his most beloved disciple and his brother. How can I go against them and still say that I follow The Way?’