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CHAPTER 1
A scroll recollecting Jesus of Nazareth, in good faith put to parchment by me, his friend, Matia
By most, on less familiar terms, I am called Matthias. In the same manner they denounced him, you who read this may well accuse me of wanting to shape your world — of even believing I can. You will accuse me of thinking myself God's equal. And your inclination will be to silence me, just as Jesus' enemies did to him. So I will start by saying what I am thinking. Simply, I am the only one who will tell you about his life. Many of you will go no farther. Having heard me say this, I am certain you will exclaim, "Here's another one!" Still, if you want to know what happened, then listen to me. I was his friend, and I conversed with him about the events which follow, or I knew of them as a witness.
Having him as a guest in my house on various occasions, and having been at his side through the brightest hours and those of ensuing darkness, I was pleased his circle of students never had any jealousy of me which might accrue to a younger man, but regarded me as safely aboard those advancing years which sooner or later run their mortal course. Among Jesus' circle of twelve disciples, all but one were deeply devoted to him. That fellow, named Judas Iscariot, was gone from the group after a cruel betrayal, a subject which shall await its appropriate telling farther along. Soon after Jesus' death, Simon took a vote of the others, and, so-authorized, invited me to become their twelfth – filling the vacancy of Judas.
As a Sanhedrin scribe, I hoped to bring them the expert ability to elevate their recollections of Jesus to a rhetorical eloquence matching scripture itself. Indeed, even as I write this, I am still in that role of their episkopos, overseeing and recording their memories of his teaching. I concord with their sentiment there can be no greater monument to him than the Jerusalem Center, that old Roman house they have recently purchased to promulgate their cherished recollections. Indeed, my own purpose in joining the disciples, has been to brandish a sword of words, saving his memory as I never could, his life.
Of this secret scroll, which they know nothing, you may wonder why I am writing it as a separate document. In the following entries, that will become clear. As I accompany Jesus on his journey across these parchment leaves, no obeisance will be made to any false reverence. Should their devout hopes become a misguided faith, I swear to perpetuate Jesus' teaching and life–as he would have remembered it. On that you have my oath.
Currently, as I commence this account, I would have whoever reads it know this: My intent is not clouded by suspicion towards Simon–or any of the others. I accept my role and take down their many recollections of Jesus' activity in good faith. Only recently, because so many of Simon's exaggerations are turning fantastical, has my demur led me to undertake this private record.
Therefore, unbeknownst even to Jesus' brother James, who shared so much with him, I have begun this tract of memories.
What shall become of the other scroll–that which is now being transcribed at Simon's direction? If it has survived, you may well hear of it as a "new testament" to Jesus' divinity. But if what I put down equals my purpose, it will be the true portrait of his life– and death, which have understandably raised the most profound questions, and doubts about his, and even our, purpose on this earth.
If the disciples succumbed to the possibility Jesus had been teaching them to believe in a God who had turned out to be his murderer–their own souls would be sunk in the mire of utter inconsequence. Therefore, among them now, foremost Simon who proposed me as the twelfth, just after the crucifixion, has arisen a burning determination to exalt Jesus, declaring they who are worthy among them may know he never truly died, and so be guided by his heavenly spirit from a realm over which he presides alongside God, his proclaimed Father. And, I have been accommodating that testament to his divinity, taking down their recollections.
Despite my age, six decades and two years, my record is not tainted by descriptions typical of age, which those souls no longer influential must over-dramatize for anyone to even notice they are speaking. Jesus' life does not require my embellishment; his death even less so.
But here I should convey my surprise that some followers of Simon appear to have an unshakeable certainty Jesus only feigned the life of an ordinary Jew, indeed even circumcised by his parents and observant of Torah's statutes to disguise the truth he was -they now proclaim -come to earth as God's son to save mankind. Jesus' altogether contrary view of himself shall herewith unfold both in his own words and with my describing the stormtide of circumstance engulfing his every step.
I admit it seems impossible he's gone–but, in this summer season not two months after his death, nothing has changed. Turbulent conflicts continue to heat passions much as the sun still beats down. Romans occupy our land and collect taxes, imposed on us as a province of the empire. Jews are as divided as Jews will be, only with more than ample reason these days to either patiently– or impatiently–await God's intervention. Only we all agree on this: One way or another God's Day is coming.
Little more than three decades ago, as a scribe and new member of our Jerusalem legislature, the Sanhedrin, though it feels like a lifetime, I became a colleague and friend of many who endured King Herod's carnage towards his own family. Truly, most Jews were consoled by his miserable death, and witnessed, with near-equal satisfaction, nine years later, the banishment of his son Archelaus, who had then served a tumultuous term as ethnarch over Jerusalem and Judea until the Romans replaced him with their own governor and ordered a census be taken.
A member of the Sanhedrin, whose views were especially collegial to my own, similarly shaped by throes of change, was none other than Joseph, a grumpy man my own age, and an arkhitekton of God's expanded house, our majestic Temple. When he referred to himself as a carpenter, those many subordinate builders, mostly priests constructing the enlarged courtyards under his direction, were put at ease by his humor, which they knew better than to mistake for bona fide humility. One errant inch in measuring a block, and their ears would ring from his loud abuse.
But when he courted his young niece Miri, or Mary in the Roman, Joseph changed. That man glowed like a morning cloud with the sun behind it. Joseph, whose deceased wife had been Mary's aunt, the sister of her mother, was blessed by her youthful countenance, as if his wife's presence was again with him. And so, she, the daughter of Yoakim and Anna, a priestly family from Tzipori, and he were betrothed. Mary was in the same generation as his sons, three decades younger, having celebrated her sixteenth year, when she became pregnant. Afraid because she had not conceived by Joseph's seed, Mary sought refuge with her aunt Elizabeth in Ayn Kerem. Elizabeth was herself with child, being six months pregnant. Her son would one day be known as John the Baptizer.
Both were born in the reign of Augustus, just eight years before Tiberius became emperor.
In a determined effort to prevent scandal, Joseph had played the husband, providing his Nazareth home as a setting for Mary during the last part of her pregnancy, and he brought her to his house in Bethlehem to be officially counted in the census.
Jesus was born in a manger, in a protected area outside the house, and eight days later was taken to the Temple for the brit milah, his circumcision. As resentful as he was of Mary for ending any prospect of an enduring future together–for he did love her–Joseph still never gave a thought to accusing her of adultery; besides, she was his deceased wife's kin. Jesus too, the offspring born of a seed not his own, reminded him constantly that he was an older, if not old man, who foolishly dreamt of a new start in life when that chance was shrunk like a late fall fig.
For twelve years, blaming himself for playing the fool, and determined to protect the family from scandal, he acted the role of Jesus' father even teaching him the rudiments of carpentry to insure his future self-sufficiency. Deeply confused by his own fondness for the boy, he was nonetheless endeared by Jesus' remarkable insights during those childhood years.
As often as he could, Joseph would afford time from the Temple construction to spend in Nazareth. There, even more than with his sons and daughters by his late wife, he went with Jesus to the Nazareth synagogue to study and pray, recognizing the boy's natural gift for Torah.
However, Joseph's time of playacting his paternity was drawing to a close. When he and Mary returned from the ceremony of Jesus reaching his "majority," as we call the twelfth-year Torah reading and interpretation before rabbis in the Temple courtyard, he asked me a favor.
Their time together, he explained, was a matter of increasing distress. He wanted me to understand he would hardly see Jesus again in the coming seasons.
Exactly what made Joseph think I suspected he was not Jesus' father, I cannot imagine, but I harbored no such notion. Immediately, I reassured him that sons often rebel against their fathers. "If I can do something ..." was all I said, thinking my intercession, and Jesus' fondness for me as a Torah scribe, might enable me to bring them together as father and son, bridging whatever rift there was.
Joseph seemed not to have heard me. "If I continue my stays in Nazareth," he replied, his voice a steady drone, "I can only perpetuate the lie of my pretended paternity until I am forced socially to make it known he is not my son."
Stunned is not half what I felt. My mind was swimming.
"But ... Jesus. Does he know?" I asked, as if I had always been aware of the truth.
"I have come to love him so much," Joseph managed. "No. He must never know. He is recorded in the Roman census, taken under Coponius, as my son."
Circumstance, always useful to the intelligent mind, had it that my own home, situated in Ephraim, was closer to the Nazareth house than his Beit Lehem domicile. My proximity, Joseph suggested, would enable me to look in on Jesus, for me, a natural courtesy toward Mary whose father Yoakim, a priestly Levite, I had known. Truth-be-told my visits would be more owed to fondness for Jesus, whose company I enjoyed even at his young age.
In the years that followed, Jesus saw little of Joseph but spent much time with James, his favorite brother, and I saw for myself how he matured in wisdom.
Here, then, begins my account of his last years of life, beginning in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Pontius Pilate was procurator of Jerusalem and the surrounding territory, and Herod Antipas governed as tetrarch of the Galilee, the Decapolis, and Perea, with his brother Philip as tetrarch of the other regions north and east. Caiaphas was high priest at this time.
At about the age of twenty-five, Jesus gathered his group of local young fisherman to study with him. One, to whom I have alluded, was Simon, and there was his brother Andrew, as well as two who worked with them, named James and John, the Zebedee brothers. They lived in the lakeside fishing village, Beit Zaida.
After attending the synagogue on a certain Shabbat, Jesus went with the Zebedees to Simon's house in Beit Zaida, where he and his brother Andrew greeted them. Simon's mother-in-law, in bed with a recurring fever, found the strength, upon his touch, to sit upright, and with his help, she stood from the bed. Immediately feeling better, she then waited on them, serving food.
In the evening, as sundown ended the day of rest, people of the area came to the door seeking cures for various diseases. It may have been one of the Zebedees who had boasted about Jesus' curing Simon's mother-in-law. When the number hoping to be healed amounted to a crowd, Jesus decided to leave and did so long before dawn, but rumors about him had begun to swirl.
While visiting the different lakeside villages, he taught his four disciples in outdoor places, and onlookers increasingly asked him to cure their afflictions with a compassionate touch and blessing, as is the usual practice of our rabbis. Though he was doing what others did, people who had heard about Simon's mother-in-law whispered he was even able to heal those with lifelong infirmities. When he overheard several gossiping he was the holy one sent by God, he beseeched them not to say such things about him, but they continued to do so.
About that time, the number of his circle came to include eight more, by name: Philip; Bartholomew; Matthew (who had been a tax collector); Thomas; another who called himself James bar Alpheus, adopting the middle nomen "bar" to proudly certify his lineage as a son of his deceased father, Alpheus; another Simon (whom Jesus called C'nani or the Zealot, owing to his hatred of Roman occupation); as well as Thaddeus, and Judas — Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus. These were his inner circle of twelve disciples.
Jesus encouraged the twelve to act in accordance with custom, determined they be regarded as fellow Jews by congregants of the lakeside synagogues. But there were obstacles. Although they moved their lips in prayer, echoing the words they heard around them, most were unable to disguise their Galilean babble which poorly resembled Hebrew. Even the few words they knew, "Sh'ma Yisrael" — Listen, Israel, there is only one God – came out of their mouths in the poor Aramaic dialect common to locals. When they tried feebly to recite, "V'ahavta et Adonai Elohecha B'chal l'vavcha ..." — you shall love God with all your heart, Jesus made a decision.
After leaving the synagogue he finally told them not to babble like non-Jews. "I will teach you a prayer, but for now, you should say your prayers in private," he instructed. Jesus was aware their ignorance could arouse suspicion they were mouthing magical incantations of Beelzebul, a satanic false god. Popular belief had it that before the Kingdom of God commenced, an army of evil would follow a false teacher, one who twisted Torah to achieve Beelzebul's purpose.
Despite his effort to be less conspicuous, Jesus was increasingly subjected to scrutiny, especially for imparting Torah interpretations to a circle of unobservant students. Then, a few weeks later, again on Shabbat, an incident in the small Chorazin synagogue caused a stir. A woman in the congregation, bent over from years of infirmity, approached him. The rabbi conducting the service called out to her to stop, saying that all those seeking healing should come on a different day of the week, because healing was considered work and therefore a transgression of the sacred day. And Jesus replied to the rabbi, "Aren't you hypocrites! You untie your animals in the manger, your ox or donkey, on Shabbat to give it water but would deny this woman, one of our own people, healing from her torment!" When they could find no response, he touched her arm, and many said she straightened up and was better.
Again, not many weeks later, another Shabbat episode caused controversy. Following the morning service, one of the congregation who happened to be Matthew's Galilean neighbor, invited him and Jesus to share a meal in his nearby home. As they went toward the house, an individual afflicted by dropsy, with belly distended and arms twice the size they should be, ran in front of Jesus, pleading to be healed. Other congregants well versed in Torah were on the same path and watched to see what Jesus would do. Not healing the man immediately, he asked the gathering much the same question he had on the prior occasion. "Is it contrary to Torah to heal a person on the Shabbat or not?" If they admitted the Torah had no such prohibition, while plainly commanding aid to a suffering animal, how would they interpret its law to be less merciful to humans?
As the sick man stood waiting, silence was their answer. Nowhere in the Torah did it say healing on Shabbat was prohibited. And Jesus laid his hands on the man, and moments later, the fellow went his way, helped in spirit if not in body.
The first treacherous slander: Jesus forgave sin
Of course, they did not say everything they were thinking. What if that man's dropsy was punishment from God? Or, the bent-over woman was cursed with her suffering for wrongdoing? People had begun to whisper Jesus was playing God, pretending he could heal such afflictions by forgiving their sin!
As they sat down to eat, Jesus was concerned that rumors about him were burgeoning, and chose an inconspicuous seat far from the host.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Matthias Scroll"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Abram Epstein.
Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
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