György Spiró - Captivity

They spoke about a new Melchizedek who would convert both Jews and Greeks in Syria, and the Anointed’s speaking had been written down and spread, and there was something about his life in these books.

“Get hold of them for me,” Uri requested.

“I’ve already tried,” Theo responded, “but they won’t hand them out to nonbelievers. They gather together in their homes, and someone reads them out and someone explains them, and in the meantime they eat in honor of him.”

Uri was amazed.

“Do they by any chance bury their shit with a trowel?” he asked.

Theo laughed in astonishment; they had said nothing about that to him.

“The new Melchizedek,” he related a few days later, “was not acquainted with the Anointed; indeed, he persecuted his brothers and disciples, but he went somewhere and all at once heard a voice, and the Anointed appeared to him, like the burning bush to Moses, to ask him what he was up to with his believers. And at this he had been converted, and now he went through the town proclaiming his word, saying he had been blinded; the persecutor had turned into a believer, and his eyesight was restored by his faith.”

Uri was dubious.

Melchizedek, high priest and king of Jerusalem in the time of Abraham, was a puzzling figure of the Scripture, it was not even clear that he was Jewish, but he had blessed the nomadic Abraham as Abram of the most high God, possessor of Heaven and Earth, who gave him tithes of all, as it was written in The First Book of Moses.

“What are they after? Are they after a rebellion?”

“I don’t know,” said Theo.

After a brief pause Theo asked:

“Father, are you able to believe in any of this?”

Uri smiled:

“No, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“Because if the Anointed were to come, then everything would change radically, and that would be obvious to us. If he came and was killed and yet everything did not change, then he can’t have been the Anointed.”

“And he didn’t rise again?”

“If he was the Anointed, then he would have no need to rise again because it would be impossible to kill him. If he was just a man, then he would not rise again — only at the same time as everyone shall rise again.”

“They say that he allowed himself to be captured and killed to set an example.”

“Surely not!”

“They say that he took our sins upon himself, that is why he died deliberately, in place of us, and anyone who believes in him shall become without sin…”

“That’s sheer paganism!” Uri spluttered in rage. “That’s not Jewish thinking! There’s something of the kind among the Greeks when Apollo is celebrated: two scapegoats are chosen and expelled from town, and they carry with them all the sins of the others…”

“I’ve read about them,” said Theo. “They’re what are called pharmakoi .”

“There you are, see! We don’t have anything like that in our sacred writings.”

Theo then added details.

“They proclaim that heathens and those who as heathens believe in the Crucified One are permitted to eat ritually unclean food, but those who are Jewish, or believe in him as Jews, are not permitted to eat ritually unclean food. If a heathen believes in him, he is not required to be circumcised and yet can still be Judaized.”

“That’s stuff and nonsense!” said Uri. “There have been uncircumcised God-fearers up till now, but they can’t eat unclean food.”

“They say that the Anointed was born in Bethlehem.”

“Not Nazareth?”

“No.”

“I was told it was Nazareth. Isn’t that what they’re called: Nazarenes?”

“That’s right… All the same, they say he was born in Bethlehem when the star appeared fifty years ago.”

“Is that so?”

Uri explained to Theo that people are superstitious and they like nothing better than to tie signs in the celestial Heaven to events here on earth even though they have nothing to do with each other.

“I know that,” said Theo. “That’s what astrology is about.”

Uri tried to recollect when it had been, according to the stargazers in Jerusalem, that a comet had last appeared in the southern firmament: it had been about twenty years before he was born. On that basis the supposed Anointed must have been getting on forty when he was killed. What had been his occupation, he wondered, if he was not changing the world?

Eventually Theo managed to borrow a sheet of papyrus on which the smiling missionaries had written down the essential things that had to known about the Anointed. His whole life and deeds fit onto that single sheet. The Anointed had been called Jesus, and his father was Joseph. He had become a carpenter, like his father, and John the Baptist had immersed him too in water. He had accomplished miraculous cures, shown much wisdom in what he said, and he had proclaimed love. He was killed but resurrected before rising up into Heaven.

Uri looked at the sheet with disapproval. It plainly served as a prompt for missionaries, who were able to explain all the short statements at great length. There were many in Judaea and Galilee who practiced cures by laying on hands, and the things the man had said were pretty much what the Pharisee masters said anyway: “Do not unto others that which you would not do unto yourself”; “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; “If someone smiteth thee in the face, turn the other cheek”; “Render unto the Lord that which is the Lord’s, and render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”; “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone.”

There was just one of Jesus’s saying on the sheet that Uri had not heard before: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither master nor bondman, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in the Lord. There is no family any more, only fellowship.”

That’s not a bad way of thinking, Uri deliberated; Philo would be pleased with that.

There was little on the sheet about torture, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven. It was odd who had noticed that he was not in the grave where he ought to have been: two women, both of them by the name of Mariamne, one of them from Magdala. At first the Resurrected One was not recognized, his external appearance having changed, but then they did recognize him, and the Anointed said unto them: “You are blessed because thou hast seen me and believed; but more blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

Those women must have adored that man to an extraordinary degree if they were so unable to reconcile themselves to his having died. He can have been no ordinary prophet, and no ordinary man. There were many who orated in Jerusalem in the Women’s Chamber, in the shade of the eastern colonnade of the Temple; maybe he was among them when I passed that way, Uri reflected. He could recollect none of the faces: he had not been standing close enough, and nothing was said on the sheet about his appearance.

He pressed the sheet into Theo’s hand, asking him to return it to whomever he had gotten it from. He should not copy it, or bring it into the house, because the house was subject to being searched at any time and it would not look good if they were able to turn up any evidence that could be used against them. Theo promised not to copy it.

Uri then chatted with his son about astronomy, about Ages, and about Mithras, who, legend had it, was likewise able to resurrect; he talked about the observatory in Jerusalem, which had been used more for spying on people down below than gazing at the skies up above, and he also talked about the astronomers in Alexandria. He spoke about how the earth was spherical and how its circumference had been calculated by a simple but superb method. Theo immediately grasped it: the deviance between the angles of incidence of the Sun in the two wells fascinated him, and the only thing that gave him pause was how it was possible to measure the distance between Alexandria and Syene, how it was organized, and who checked that they had not just made a guess at the result. Theo considered five thousand stadia to be a suspiciously round number, and Uri grinned happily to hear his reasoning. He remarked that a pedometer device had been invented at Alexandria, possibly at the very time of Eratosthenes’s measurement.