Two

What follows is what Matthew read to David from the diary.

Note: (from Judas) I have endeavored to make this into a connected narrative, rather than leave it as diary entries. It involved a good deal of planning, since I did not necessarily have a fixed time every day for writing down my thoughts. I flatter myself, however, that I have succeeded in making it readable. But that is for posterity to judge.

I, Judas, known as Iscariot from my birthplace, write this for posterity. I have always believed, from my earliest youth, that I would be an important person, and a recent event gives me some evidence that this will indeed be the case. I decided, therefore, to keep a record of the event and what happens afterwards, so that future generations may know the facts, and might be aware of my role in shaping them.

The event concerns an assignment I had as a member of a delegation to investigate one John, who was standing by (and sometimes in) the Jordan river and bathing people "for a change of their way of thinking."

My colleagues, of course, were not enthusiastic about changing their way of thinking, unless it meant developing it along the lines they had mapped out, and so we went to see what this mountebank was up to. I myself, however, was open to new ideas; I had done extensive studying in Greek philosophy, and found the ideas of Plotinus, among others, very similar to what had been conveyed by those Hebrews who have been in close contact with what Plotinus would have called "the One" and Plato "The Good." There are some obvious differences, but once one strips away the legendary and mythical accretions to the Biblical accounts, the similarities are all but astounding.

But this is to be a report of what happened, not a lecture in philosophy or an exegesis of Scripture; and so let me leave the topic there. Suffice it that I was not so rigidly locked into what had been taught in the schools here in Jerusalem.

Things did not start off in a promising way. John, who was a hermit, fresh out of the desert, was given to ranting, and proceded to alienate those in our group for what he considered the "hypocrisy" of the tassels of our cloaks, among other things.

The others were indignant, but I dismissed this, especially when we questioned him and he admitted that he was not the longed-for Messiah, the Prince who was prophesied. The others tried to shame him into silence if he was no one special, but he claimed that he was the forerunner of someone, and his duty was to announce his coming, so that we could prepare for him.

The others left in disgust, but I remained. Though he said he was not Elijah, it was conceivable that he spoke in the spirit of Elijah; the Power that created and sustains the universe doubtless was capable of such a thing, and so his inspiration might well have been that of Elijah, and therefore, the one he was announcing could conceivably be the one we had all be awaiting for so many centuries. After all, for the Power that made us, a thousand years are like a day after it has passed.

At any rate, I stayed behind, and listened to John, whose rhetoric, though inflated, was certainly forceful and worth listening to, and after a while a single man--an ordinary-looking man until one looked closely, and saw that he was a man in complete control of himself and apparently of everything around him--came up to him, as so many did, to be bathed in the Jordan. Interestingly, when he approached, there was no one with him or near him, in spite of the fact that people tended to throng toward John. The two were quite alone for some time.

I approached as near as I dared--the two together presented a formidable aspect, which was perhaps why they were alone--and I heard the alleged penitent ask to be bathed.

John, who evidently knew him at least indirectly, said, "I should be being bathed by you, and you are coming to me?" From this I deduced that the "penitent" was in fact either the Prince, or the one John suspected was the Prince.

He answered, "Allow it for now, so that all of the formalities will be fulfilled," and John led him a little way from shore, where he could be easily immersed in the river, and, somewhat reluctantly, put his hand on his head, and pushed him under the surface.

He emerged immediately, and suddenly the sky, which was clear as usual in the desert, seemed to open as if the clear sky was a cloud mass, and a bird flew out of what seemed the hole in it, and alighted on the man's shoulder.

And then, out of that clear sky, came a thuderclap, which seemed to say (though one wonders whether words as we know them were used), "This is my Son, the one I love." or something to that effect. As I say, they were not actual words, but the sounds meant, or seemed to mean, what I quoted just above.

It was in many ways a terrifying experience. For the only time in my life, I felt my hair stand on end. I had heard of this, but this is, as I say, the only time I actually experienced it.

The phenomenon lasted only a few moments, and then everything reverted to normal. Needless to say, however, I took it that the cosmos was telling me (and anyone else who heard) that this was the Prince, who if he was the "Son" of the Cosmos, was greater even than Moses.

I immediately saw my opportunity to make a difference in the world, though him. With no very clear idea of what I was going to do, I approached him as he paced up and down on the shore to dry himself off, and said that I had experienced an extraordinary event connected with him, and I wondered if he would take me on as a follower of his, to learn from him. I thought it more politic to say that I wished to learn rather than "assist" him or some such word, since conceivably he might take it ill if I presumed to instruct him in any way. Dealing with him would require considerable diplomacy.

But I judged that, whether he was aware of it or not, dealing with him might be necessary. If he was the Son of the Cosmos--or rather, the Creator of the Cosmos, whatever "He" is (doubtless this Creator is beyond personhood)--his main contact with the Force that coursed though him as it did though Moses, Elijah, and others, would be by way of inspiration, and might very well be erratic. He would need a rational guide to help him distinguish what in fact he was inspired to do, and when, and how. Too close a contact with this Force seemed to lead to madness, not to reshaping the world. It was my hope that my considerable rational--and diplomatic--skills could direct him in the practical implementation of what he was inspired to do.

This was reinforced by the fact that the thunderclap was intelligible, but, not being actual words, could be interpreted in many ways. So his inspirations might be open to various ways of being implemented, some of which might be destructive and not beneficial.

All this flashed before my mind as I approached him and asked if I could follow and learn from him. He looked at me and stroked his beard for several moments--a habit of his, I later discovered, when an inspiration came to him--and finally said that if I wished to join a group that he was about to form and help in changing the course of history, then I should be in Galilee in some forty or fifty days or so, by the Sea of Tiberias (which, as everyone knows, is actually a very large lake) on the north-western shore, and I would find him.

As I left, the number "forty or fifty" intrigued me. It seemed he had something private to do, now that he had been named by the thunder, so to speak (I thought of the psalm, "you are my son; today I have begotten you."), and needed, perhaps, forty days to accomplish it. And Moses was on the mountain forty days, and Elijah made a forty-day pilgrimage to Horeb also.

I suspected that this man (who, I learned, was named Jesus) was going to do something similar, and so I undertook to follow him. It was not an easy task, but he did go some few days' journey into the desert, and there knelt down and simply prayed or went into a kind of trance, not moving at all. I came back in a week, and he was still there, apparently not having moved, and thirty days later, he was in the same position.

I took care to be insomewhere where I could watch on the fortieth day, and he did indeed at that time begin to move. I expected he would go and fetch food and water, but it seemed that some Presence met him. He spoke aloud to it, as if it were another person; but I could hear nothing of what it said. Evidently, it gave him some means of obtaining bread, but he answered, barely loud enough for me to hear at my distance, "Man does not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God," which was a quotation from Moses. Later, he seemed to look down at the ground, but as if from a great height, as if he were on the edge of a cliff, and told the Presence, "You are not to challenge your God--"and he gave the divine Name. And still later, he explicitly said, "Begone, Satan. You are to worship your God YHWH (I replace the name with its letters) and serve only him." After this, other Presences provided him food and water. I hastened back to Galilee, so that I could be there to meet him.

I was, of course, by this time convinced that I had met the man who was to be the pivot of history, and it seemed as if I would be admitted into his entourage. With my experience of the Judean priesthood (I am a priest), I was sure I could be one of his most trusted advisors.

At the shore of the "sea," I met no one, except some insignificant fishermen, whom I greeted politely enough, though I spent no time with them because of the odor they unfortunately exuded. So I wandered around, and after a day or so, I saw Jesus approach two of them and ask if he could borrow their boat as a platform to speak from; it seems a number of people had gathered to listen to him.

He gave a little speech or sermon from the boat to the effect that the Reign of God was about to begin, which excited me considerably, and when he was done, he asked the oarsman to put out into deep water "for a catch." The man with the net objected that they had spent the whole night fruitlessly doing just that, but at his command they would make one more try.

Suddenly, the nets were bursting with fish. They came to the shore with astonishment--since apparently, they had thrown the nets out merely as a matter of form, to a place where there would be no fish--and immediately busied themselves with taking the fish out of the net and putting them into vats they had in the boat, all the while exclaiming that it was a miracle.

Indeed it seemed to be; and another interesting thing I learned from their remarks was that they had seen Jesus earlier "in Judea," and had apparently had uncanny experiences there also. Possibly, they had heard the thunder speak, as I did.

But Jesus left them and went on a bit to another boat, where two others were trying to untangle a net. One--hardly more than a boy--had taken out a knife to cut it, and the other had put himself behind him and pinned his arms until he calmed down. At this point, Jesus came up to them and told them to follow him--and then remarked that they would have to hasten to their house, for their father had suffered a severe accident, and seemed about to die.

They ran off, and I followed as well as I could while still keeping aloof from them, and Jesus, with the two young men, entered the house, and exclaimed loud enough for me to hear that he had been cured. At any rate, he soon strode out on legs that gave no sign that a hay cart had run over them. Jesus came out with him, saying, "As I say, I would really prefer that this not be known."

"How did you do it?" answered the father. "How could you have done it?"

"Well, I am aware that John has told you a bit about

me-"

"You mean that what he told me was actually true?"

"Come, now, Zebedee; you know your son is not a liar."

"But--but he was spouting some nonsense about the sky opening up and a voice from heaven, and you being able to read his thoughts, and--and I know not what!"

"As I say, he is not a liar."

"Those things actually happened?"

"John was not the only one who saw them. Andrew and Simon did also--and that was before I had a chance to speak to them and 'befuddle' them, as you said. I waited two days, in fact, before I spoke to them."

"And now you have made my legs whole by simply touching them! It is beyond belief!"

So apparently what he did was touch the legs, and they were healed. The Force that coursed through his soul inspired him to perform this miracle, as I found out later, because the father--Zebedee--was adamantly opposed to having his sons and his partners going off as members of Jesus's entourage, and It (or "he," as I said) devised a means of rather forcefully persuading him that he should allow Jesus to have his way.

It promised to be a very exciting time.

But an enigmatic one. Granted, he had accepted me (at least it seemed that way), but so far all I saw was these rather noisome fishermen, people one would not favor with even a passing glance. Evidently the Force directing him had singled them out for some inexplicable reason--or he had misinterpreted what It had intended. True, the mere fact that one was a fisherman said nothing of one's intelligence or one's leadership abilities, since fathers, as in this case, trained their sons in the occupation; but still, it was not the most promising of all beginnings.

It turned out later that young John, the lad who had the knife and was going to cut the net, had spent a week in Jerusalem, in the house of Annas, no less, to see if he wanted to be a rabbi, since he had learned to read on his own. From the little I saw of him, he was an attractive sort, with curly hair and rather bulging muscles from rowing the boat so much, so he may have had qualities that would suit him, with the help of the Force, to greatness. Well, we would see. The others, however, did not give the impression of being promising.

I mentally held my nose and joined them as they stood there chatting, and met a few others, one, named Simon, like one of the fisherman in the other boat, who had been a member of the Zealot party, and who immediately tried to recruit me into trying to persuade Jesus into staging a revolution à la Judas Maccabeus. Granted, I knew a good deal of swordsmanship, and had also studied hand-to-hand fighting (my attractive appearance tended to induce bullies larger than I to pick on me, and I had to be able to teach them a lesson or two), but fielding a military force to overthrow Rome seemed the very worst way, in my opinion, to gain control over the world, if that was Jesus's goal--and from his remarks it did seem thus.

My own view is that if this is to be done, it will be done by persuasion, and not violence. Regimes have been toppled in the past by astute advisors, and I was eager to see if I was indeed as astute as I thought I was.

Jesus had begun saying that we had to change our way of thinking, and I believe this applied to most, if not all, of the people he was gathering around him. One was even the son of a wine-merchant, and, as far as I could see was, if not stupid, as simple and literal as a fool. I could see no use for him anywhere. Nor could I see how a man named James, like the elder brother of the one who had cut the net, would be of much use. He had a most annoying habit of clearing his throat after every half-dozen words; it made one not able to pay attention to what he was saying, because one was waiting for the "hem, hem" and gritting one's teeth.

I mentioned that Simon (not the revolutionary) was the one in the boat that caught the huge number of fish; and his brother was positively enormous, Andrew, also well-muscled from rowing; either of them might be suitable for great things, if properly trained. But there was another, named, like me, Judas, that people began to call Thaddeus, who was dreadfully shy, intimidated by being in a group of people who were, whether they deserved it or not, apparently quite confident of themselves.

When one considered that they were to be the intimate companions of the Son of the Cosmos, who was even greater than the mythical gods and demigods of the Gentiles, their self-confidence was positively astounding, and spoke rather of their ignorance than anything else. I myself sometimes trembled at the thought of the person I was involving myself with.

He was, however, extremely easy to like, because he gave himself no airs at all. It seemed that until just before that day in which the thunder spoke, he had been nothing but an ordinary carpenter, though those who knew him even then said that there was something about him that set him apart, in spite of the fact that they could not say what it was, exactly.

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