György Spiró - Captivity

“You might at least ask to be given back your tessera!” Uri would growl.

Marcellus would be offended:

“I endowed that on the congregation! I can’t ask for it back! It’s my gift!”

“Endowments are for the rich to make! You’re poor!”

“No, I’m not poor! I became rich through giving it to them!”

Uri was silenced; there was some truth in that dialectic.

“You’re just Jews who’ve gotten taken for a ride, my dear son,” he eventually grumbled irately. “You don’t even know what you’re scared of!”

“Of what, then?” Marcellus riposted insolently.

“Of Rome, my dear son!”

That was far over Marcellus’s head. He blinked at his father. The old fool! He’s a captive of the old, invalidated world, ripe for dying! Such a pity that he too would be resurrected.

Uri was quite sure that he had been invited back to the assemblies of the Nazarenes, but apparently they had sent their messages via Marcellus, who had chosen not to pass them on. Uri would not have gone among them another time anyway, but he was grateful to his son for making it possible to have visited the one time, and he pondered why it was that he viewed these pleasant, pure, noble-spirited people as frightening.

He tried to discount Marcellus, but even so they remained frightening.

Idolizing an emperor who is setting himself up as a god is very human because it holds out the promise of any number of advantages, and so everyone at least pretends to believe in it. An emperor is like his currency: a real object given in return for simulated belief.

It is superstitious to believe in the succor of a pagan deity, but what is a bewildered person, left on his own and terrified of death, supposed to do if he gets into trouble, or if a fatal disease afflicts him or one of those whom he loves? He will race over to a statue of the deity, embrace its feet, and whisper his wishes into its ear, and if by any chance these should be fulfilled, he will put up a plaque of thanksgiving.

Believing in an Eternal One who does not have a human face and demonstrably has had no hand in human affairs for millenia is also not foolish: a person thereby belongs to a community that protects him in direst need with the alms and pe’ah, nurses them in the event of illness, and does not even cast aside unwanted children, irrespective of whether a person is a Sadducee, a Pharisee, or an Essene. All these systems of belief, as Uri now saw it, were in fact mutually exclusive in a radical fashion, and it was merely out of laziness that believers in these various religions were all called Jews. They believed themselves to be the chosen people of a one and only God; fair enough, but so did the Samaritans, who slaughtered other Jews because they had in turn slaughtered them.

The religion of the Jews had long not been one religion; maybe there never had been just one, not even when Moses led them out of Egypt.

There were still Jews only among those living in minority communities, threatened and hard-pressed, like in Alexandria. Wherever they were in the majority — as in large parts of Judaea and Galilee — there were no longer any Jews, though no one had put it into words, and the Jews themselves were not aware of it either yet.

In the rural villages, Jews were still Jews, and there, they were ignorant of any other faith; although their naïve faith was not that of the priests, they were not aware of this and they were happy to offer ritual dues to the Temple.

The religion of the Jews of Rome was also faithless — like every Roman religion. Customs and ceremonies half-heartedly adhered to, strictly supervised. The Kahal as an institution operated in an earthly fashion, committing earthly crimes; just like any other community, its true god was Mammon. The Jews of Rome were wrong to protest that the ancient laws of crafts did not apply to them — the Jew-hating officials of Rome saw that much more clearly.

But to believe in a man who was killed and rose again from the dead, and to say that He is the Anointed, even though there had been no drastic change in the world — that was more grievous than any superstition.

Maybe it was a folly sprung from the general lack of belief.

He pictured the million-strong mass thronging toward Jerusalem, and all of a sudden being converted and becoming followers of the Anointed. He shuddered.

It was fortunate that the Judaean peasants were conservative; it was quite impossible to drive anything new into their skulls.

He had already encountered narrow looks like Marcellus’s; he had seen blind fanatics before. The ecstatic looks in Beth Zechariah as they had waited for the First Fruits to be collected had been like that; the expressions of the pilgrims going to Jerusalem had been like that; the faces of the Judaeophobic Greek rabble in Alexandria had been like that. He tried to picture who among his seemingly normal acquaintances he could imagine turning blindly irrational. He could not imagine such blindness in Kainis’s eyes, nor Theo’s — but in Narcissus’s, Claudius’s, and Philo’s he could. He wondered if Tija’s eyes could turn into those of a fanatic. Hardly: in his eyes there was a glint that from the outset had something inhuman, distant, cold about it.

He also tried to picture how Apollos, a skilled orator, would speak to a congregation of ecstatic believers. He just couldn’t; he could not see the new eyes, only the old, rational ones. Apollos did not believe in this folly; he just hoped that Greeks and Jews might be able to approach one another via this resurrected Anointed, in the same way that Philo had wanted this to happen, the hatred driven from their hearts and minds in the same way as wise men like Simon the Magus exorcised demons from the sick.

Priscilla’s eyes were rational eyes; she was no ecstatic believer, just pretending to be profoundly convinced of something that had no reality at all. She was lying. What was going on in her mind, he wondered? Was she resolving the loneliness of widowhood by extending hospitality to believers? Maybe she was unable to mourn her husband. Had she never loved him anyway, and so was feeling guilt on that account, persuading herself that he had not actually died? Had she committed serious offenses against her husband, and instead of being repentant was she declaring the offenses nonexistent because there was no wrong if there was no death? Why did they have no children? Were there never any? It might easily have been a dreadful marriage.

Otherwise nothing happened. Marcellus ate, drank, slept, and loafed around; Hagar cooked, with the girls helping her out of sheer boredom, and Uri did his job. The murals he painted were met with general approval. Construction work on a new house took them to Quirinal Hill, and while the walls were raised he worked on tiling the floor and, if any time was left, familiarized himself with the encaustic technique.

There were practitioners of this ancient Oriental technique in Rome, and it was possible to obtain the pigments and tools needed for it in their small boutiques, the most important tool being a metal implement, with a spoon at one end and a spatula at the other, offering a cold surface for applying the pigments to the molten binder without working away the thickness, thereby producing what were almost relief paintings, with it added the possibility of mixing all the primary colors — red, yellow, white, black — according to taste, on one palette, producing innumerable shades. A well-executed work was not just a colored drawing as it would have been made centuries ago but a genuine painting that almost vied with sculpture, with the advantage over tempera that there was no need to treat the finished surface, and air would not harm it.

In those same small boutiques it was also possible to obtain original Greek pictures, and Uri was fascinated by their depiction of perspective, which despite having been discovered long ago by the Greek masters had never become prevalent in Rome. Uri could see that the masters were guided by the painterly depiction of eminent buildings in that they came to realize that parallel lines converged in the distance to come together at a point on an imaginary horizon; in Nature there were no parallel lines, they were a construct of man, interfering in Nature, further elaborating on God’s work. Without man there would be no parallels. Perhaps there were many things not present in the Creation that man had introduced; the Creator may wonder as He pleases at what has come out of this creature’s imagination.