‘My mother,’ Timothy said with a slight Galatian lisp, ‘is named Eunice, and she is Jewish. My father was a Greek Gentile. I carry his name.’
‘Ah. That makes you a Jew.’
‘The Jews don’t think so. They call me the uncircumcised son of a Greek. They make it sound like an insult.’
‘No trouble about getting you circumcised.’
Timothy was appalled. ‘At my age? Besides, you wrote a letter, didn’t you, about there being no need. It was read out in the Galatian churches.’
‘Yes, but that was before we received this letter from Jerusalem. The one about Gentiles trying to conform to the Jewish law as much as they can. For the sake,’ smiling kindly, ‘of quietening dissension. Circumcision. You’re just the man for it. They’ll be pleased in Jerusalem.’
‘But,’ Timothy frowned, ‘it’s painful and it’s dangerous.’
‘Nonsense. You’ll feel like a new man after it. We’ll see about having it done this afternoon.’
So poor Timothy had his foreskin tweaked and pulled by the strong hard fingers of the mohel, whose primary trade was that of blacksmith, closed his eyes, felt the bite of the razor, opened his eyes to see a part of his body lying on a white cloth, bled, recovered, and sorely walked off with Paul and Silas to places Paul already knew in Galatic Phrygia, went north to Philomelium, and then north-west through Asian Phrygia, where Paul did no preaching. This area was not yet ready for the word of the Lord. At Dorylaeum or Cotiaeum (my informants are not sure which) they ventured west and smelt the sea at Troas. This was a Roman colony but it remembered that it was a Greek town. Paul breathed deeply of the ozone and said: ‘Thalassa.’ Then he heard a voice behind him say:
‘Or thalatta, according to the dialect you prefer.’ Paul turned and saw Luke the physician. They were at a small open-air wineshop on the main quay. Luke smiled at Paul, swinging his small leather bag of medicines. ‘I said I’d be here. It’s better than Antioch. More sickness. Well. Introduce me.’ He sat down and another cup was brought. ‘Sore is it still?’ he said eventually to Timothy. ‘It’s the swinging against the legs as you walk. Try this ointment.’
‘Macedonia,’ Paul suddenly said. ‘Plenty of ships going there, I see. Philip of Macedonia. Alexander the Great. The land of the conqueror conquered. You’re coming with us?’ he said to Luke.
‘As your medical consultant? I can’t preach. I’m in the faith but I’m not learned in it.’
‘How does your poem go?’
‘I abandoned it. I’m not cut out for verse.’
‘Try prose.’
In the lodgings of Luke, where Paul was granted the privilege of the bed and the rest lay on the floor, Paul slept heavily and had several dreams, some of them trivial but one of them, he thought on waking, significant, indicative, authoritative. He saw Alexander coming into his tent and taking his armour off. He sat at a table and conferred unintelligibly with his commanders. Then he looked out of the picture straight at the observing dreamer and said: ‘I’ve drunk everybody else’s blood. I may as well drink his.’
So the four of them took ship next day across the north Aegean, got to Samothrace at sundown, felt the waves of the immemorial cult of the Cabiri beat out at them from its mountain, and the next day arrived at Neapolis on the Macedonian shore. ‘Philippi,’ Paul said, having discovered from one of the sailors that it was ten miles away from the coast, give or take a furlong.
‘You realise,’ Silas said as they walked, ‘that we’re now in Europe? We’re on the Roman continent. Antony and Augustus, Octavian as he was then, beat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. We’re into Roman history now.’ Interesting, Paul said, though distractedly. More interesting was their failure to discover a synagogue in Philippi. No Jews? ‘Augustus settled his veterans here,’ Silas said, ‘not only after his defeat of Brutus and Cassius but after the battle of Actium when he trounced Antony and Cleopatra.’ Interesting: all Gentiles, not a Jew to be seen. Ten men the minyan for a synagogue, so there must be at most nine. The four of them sat down by the river Gangites and ate the bread they had bought on the way. Some women were washing clothes, beating them against stones in a manner too vigorous to conduce to their longevity, as Silas put it. Timothy suggested that he go and look for Jews, though without much enthusiasm. Paul said:
‘No. Gentiles will do for the moment. Leave this to me.’ And he raised his voice at the women. ‘You’ve heard of the Christians? We’re here to speak for them. Carry on with your linen-thumping, ladies, and listen or not, as you please.’ Some listened. One woman, who was not washing clothes but enjoying the cool of the willows, listened very attentively. Her name was Lydia, she said, and she was from Thyatira, part of the old province of Lydia which had given her her name. She knew the Jews of Thyatira, where was a Jewish colony, and she was by way of being what was known as something of a Godfearer. In Lydia they fished up the murex, a spiky creature out of which they made purple dye. She was unmarried, and she made her living by importing the dye from Thyatira. Interesting. Did she wish to be baptised? Later, she said, let us not rush things. Have you gentlemen anywhere to stay? Just arrived, they said. I sometimes take in lodgers, she said. I have two spare rooms.
So they stayed with Lydia, who seemed to have done rather well out of the business of importing purple dye, and they sat at a table where a servant brought in broiled riverfish with a sharp sauce, after the manner of the Philippine kitchen, in a ceramic pourer. While they were eating (the sauce was of crushed garlic and mustard seeds in wine), they heard outside the casement which gave on to the main street a girl’s voice yelling what sounded like nonsense. Lydia sighed a sigh of habituation and said: ‘I consider this a sin and a shame. That poor girl is not right in the head, and a couple of men have got hold of her, her being an orphan, and they use her as a kind of fortune teller. She says such nonsense that it’s taken by some to be the voice of the god Apollo, and they ask questions and these men say what her mad answers mean. They take plenty of money and keep the girl locked up in a cellar like a prisoner, feeding her nothing but stale bread. I call it a crying shame. Have some more fish.’ While she was serving all except Paul, who said thank you he had had enough, the house shook and the earth rumbled. An interesting place, Philippi. ‘We often get tremors,’ Lydia said. ‘Those two men who have that poor girl say it’s the anger of the god Apollo not being paid enough for his prophecies. Some people will say anything for their own profit.’ Silas said that there had been an earthquake during the battle of Philippi and that it had discomfited Brutus and Cassius though not Octavian.
Paul and Silas went out alone the following morning, leaving Luke and Timothy, who had no Roman citizenship and had best be prudent in a Roman town, to recover from the sharp sauce in the house of Lydia. They saw the poor demented girl at her imposed trade in the market place, crying out nonsense like alaba alaba arkkekk and having this translated as ‘The god says you may make the journey but do not be away longer than three days.’ The earth trembled. ‘There is the voice of the god himself confirming that statement and ordering you to be generous to his servants.’ The two men were middle-aged and wore greasy robes, shifty-eyed; Paul guessed that they took more than pecuniary advantage of the girl. The girl herself had eyes too widely set apart and had filthy hair but a clean blue priestess’s garment. Paul and she looked at each other; if she was feeble-minded then so was he, Paul. He said to her very clearly:
‘What is your name, girl?’
‘Arg werb forkrartok.’
‘I’m not having this nonsense. You’re frightened of these two men who are your jailors and exploiters and they’ve turned you into a voice that speaks gibberish under the guise of prophetic truth. Even by the standards of pagan Rome this is an abomination. Come with us and we’ll look after you. We serve the true God, which is to say truth and kindness and decency. Leave these vile men and we’ll take you to a place of comfort and safety.’ The girl began to weep bitterly, and the two men hurled abuse at Paul, calling on
the bystanders to witness the blasphemy of these two foreigners, though Silas had as yet said nothing. The weeping girl responded differently. She got up from the three-legged stool on which she had been sitting, a Pythonian tripod, and cried:
‘It’s right enough. I’m sick and tired of it all. They make me do it. This one’s right when he says it’s all nonsense.’ And she joined herself to Paul and Silas, who hurried her away towards the house of Lydia. They did this with some difficulty for the common sort do not like to lose contact with what they consider the numinous and some of them threw pebbles. Lydia was pleased to have the girl, who permitted herself to be embraced by the older woman and sobbed and howled as though her heart would break. Paul nodded and said:
‘Let her. She’s discharging the foul stuff within. Ah, we have visitors.’ These were the masters of the girl, who now hammered on the front door and yelled that they had brought the lictors with them. Paul opened and nodded pleasantly at the uniformed officials, who carried rods which were both a symbol of authority and a device of punition. One said:
‘Foreigners? You’ve got a charge to answer. Come with us.’
Paul and Silas shrugged and suffered themselves to be led off to the courthouse, where the duumvirs or praetors were called out to examine them. One of the plaintiffs said:
‘It’s like this, your worships. These two are foreigners and Jews by the look of them, and they’re here interfering with good Roman religious practices as well as good Roman trade.’
One of the praetors, a man with crumbs on his jowls from a meal interrupted, said to Paul: ‘Are you the men who were preaching some outlandish superstitious mumbojumbo contrary to the laws of Rome yesterday by the riverbank?’
‘If by that you mean the Christian faith, yes. That, however, does not seem to be the charge. These men have brought my colleague and myself here to answer a plaint which they have not yet preferred.’
‘Never mind about that for the moment. You’re Jews, are you?’
‘Jews, yes.’
‘And also—’ Silas began, but Paul kicked him to enjoin silence. ‘Why?’ Silas frowned, puzzled.
‘We don’t like foreigners coming here,’ the crumbed praetor said, ‘causing disturbances and interfering with the Roman way of life. You lictors,’ he said, ‘use those rods of yours to some purpose and then shove these two big-nosed gentry into jail.’
‘But,’ one of the mountebanks said, ‘they’ve been interfering with our business, which is the holy invocation of the oracle of the god Apollo. That girl we have, your worships, they’ve interfered with her so she can’t do the holy work any more.’
‘As I said,’ the praetor said, getting up from the bench, ‘lay the rods on hard and not only shove them into jail but fix them in the stocks so they can’t move for a bit. That will cool their foreign hot-blooded interferingness. Go on, get on with it.’ The other praetor, following the first, added:
‘You heard what we said.’
So the lictors, who were out of whipping practice, kicked and shoved Paul and Silas to the marketplace, where they added to the day’s entertainment by stripping them down to their clouts and thwacking them with the rods. ‘They can’t do this,’ Silas gasped, ‘not to – It’s against the law.’
‘Let them put themselves in the wrong,’ Paul winced. ‘That sort of thing can be – ow – useful sometimes.’ Lydia witnessed the flogging, leaving the girl, whose name appeared to be Eusebia, back home to have her hair washed and protected by Luke and Timothy against the reappearance of the men who alleged they owned her. Lydia was respected in the town and got some of the women to join her in her cry of ‘It’s a disgrace to Roman justice, as they call it.’
There was an earth tremor, variously to be interpreted as the god Apollo’s approval of the flogging or else the disapprobation of the god of those two who were being flogged. The flogging over, Paul and Silas refused to put back on their robes, saying sensibly that they did not wish to have these glued to their backs with blood and that the heat of the sun (or the blessed god Apollo) was good for their wounds. And so they were led off to a cell where incarceration was compounded with the immobilisation of their limbs in an ingenious Roman machine called the stocks. Lydia and another woman bullied the guards into letting the prisoners be fed by hand, which the two women took care of, shovelling in broiled fish and bread. ‘None of that sharp sauce, please,’ Silas stipulated. And pouring wine down. Then Paul and Silas were left. The earth tremors resumed and made a bourdon to the loud psalms that they sang, interspersed with the odd ode of Horace recited by Silas. They were not alone in the cell. There were a couple of thieves to whom Lydia and her companion had fed the remains of the fish and wine, plenty left over. They were appreciative of the psalms, both Paul and Silas having loud but melodious voices, and they liked the erotic Horace, a poet they had to confess to not having heard of before. ‘Here we are, proper Romans, and we have to learn about one of our own from a couple of Jews. You don’t have to be in those things,’ said the burlier of the two thieves, whose name seemed to be Parvulus, examining the mechanism of the stocks. ‘I mean, you’re not going to get out of here in a hurry, are you. Injury to insult, I call it. Here Calvinus, give us a hand.’ These two hard men, used to breaking into houses, wrenched slat from slat, though with difficulty, and not helped by the earth tremor, which made the stone floor as unsteady as a ship’s deck at times. ‘There,’ Parvulus said in triumph, and Paul and Silas rubbed wrists and ankles with relief. ‘Not well made that thing. Foreign workmanship.’ And then the tremor, like a strong man underground who had been trying to break a set of stocks and merely exhibiting the strains of his exertion, now achieved what it was after, which was to disrupt the smug stasis of Philippi’s architecture. ‘Castor and bleeding Pollux,’ went Parvulus with awe, as the cell seemed to descend into an ocean trough and the door was detached from its hinges. Then, the tellurian message having been delivered, the earth settled to the sleep denied to its immediate dwellers. ‘We’re getting out of here,’ Parvulus said, making for the welcoming doorway. But Paul said:
‘Wait. If you do that the guards will be in trouble. They’ll have to fall on their swords. You know the law.’
‘Let the guards be shagged to death by Pluto and his wife for all I care. I don’t give a rat’s turd for the law, it’s the law that put us here.’ But at that moment two guards came in in relief, seeing their charges present and intact. Paul said:
‘You see how it is. Our God looks after his own. He’s released us from our bonds and opened the door to our freedom. But we thought of what your plight might be and declined the proffer. Now you see the strength of our religion. Join the line of converts we’re going to have when we get out of here.’
As it happened, it was not long before Paul and Silas were released, though the two good thieves, whom Paul duly taught that men of their kind had special niches reserved to them in the Christian heaven, had to see out their term. Paul and Silas were brought up once more before the praetors who, in a pose of Roman magnanimity, said they trusted they had learnt their lesson and they were now to be booted out of town. But Paul said:
‘Wait. My colleague and I are Roman citizens. Cives Romani sumus. Yes, easy enough to make the claim without being able to substantiate it, but our status is on record in, respectively, Tarsus in Cilicia and Caesarea in Palestine. We demand that you seek confirmation of our claim. We are prepared to wait. We have much to do here in the way of teaching the new faith. You know the penalty for (a) whipping Roman citizens, (b) imprisoning them without trial and (c) making them leave Roman territory under constraint. You will be removed from your praetorships and punished according to the provisions of the Valerian and Porcian laws. Very well. We will say no more about it. But if you do not accord proper tolerance to the discreet practice of the faith we profess, you, gentlemen both, to say nothing of your lictors, will be in grave trouble. Good morning.’
Thus a church was established at Philippi with little opposition
either from the Jews, of whom there were fewer than ten, or from the Romans, who saw the value of discretion. Luke elected to stay on at the house of Lydia, allegedly for the purpose of medicating the girl Eusebia, who was covered in sores and vilely undernourished. Also, he said, the town was not rich in physicians and he wished to set down in the cool comfort of the room he had been given some details – in prose – of Paul’s missionary journeys. Paul, Silas and Timothy set out west along the Egnatian Way which linked the Aegean to the Adriatic. They came at length to Thessalonica, the Macedonian capital, where there were plenty of Jews, mostly with Hellenised names, and a thriving synagogue. A hired mob tried to have Paul, Silas and Timothy brought up before the politarchs, or city magistrates, on a charge of setting up one Jesus Chrestos, a Palestinian criminal who became a Greek slave, as a rival to Claudius. But Paul, Silas and Timothy were sped out of the town at night, and the only adherent of the treasonous conspiracy they could get hold of was a Jewish merchant named Jason (his real name was Joshua), who was acquitted by the politarchs for lack of evidence. This infuriated those who had hired the mob, and the mob turned up in the town of Beroea, whither the evangelists had travelled. Silas and Timothy went into hiding, but some of the Beroean converts got Paul to Methone or Dium, or some other port, and so he took ship alone to Athens.
Athens. Here now Paul faced the most difficult task of his career, that of persuading intellectuals learned in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, to give ear to a religion not well founded in reason. The Greeks were under the Romans, a proud people colonised, but the inventors of the science of government were, for the most part, allowed to go their own way. Thus Paul met no opposition to his preaching, either from the Jews, who were too rational to be bigoted, or from the governing body, which tolerated every kind of intellectual or religious novelty. To Paul, who lodged in an inn under the Acropolis, the whole city was a seductive affront to his faith, whether as Jew or Nazarene. For here were all the gods and goddesses which, under changed names, the Romans had appropriated, limned in fine marble with a skill and sophistication the Jews, whose only art was literature, could never hope, if they ever took their horny paws from plough or nannygoat’s udder to assume the chisel, to touch. The temples to these demons, as he considered them to be, were of a superb elegance. These people had everything but God. And, he almost added, good wine, for the resinous urine they sold ensoured his stomach. He was lonely: Silas and Timothy were supposed to follow him here but they had not yet arrived and he feared somewhat for their safety. They would be safe enough in Athens, where the new faith provoked not opposition but yawns.