A Rope for Judas: A Novel

By Robert S. Turner

Judas Iscariot. The ultimate traitor. It was his kiss of greeting that signaled the temple officials to arrest Jesus of Nazareth and send him to his death. We all know the story: in exchange for a paltry sum of money--thirty pieces of silver--Judas agreed to hand over his rabbi to the religious authorities in Jerusalem, who put Jesus on trial and ultimately ensured that he would be crucified. When Judas saw what was about to happen to Jesus, he was seized with remorse, gave back the money, and went out and hanged himself.

That's the story as we have it in the New Testament Gospels. But what if, before he hanged himself, Judas took the time to write a suicide note? What would he have had to say?

That question lies at the center of this novel. A Rope for Judas is Judas Iscariot's suicide note, and it delves into the complicated inner life of this most despised of disciples in an effort to find out what motivated him to do what he did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532686023

Robert S. Turner

Robert S. Turner is the interim pastor of First Baptist Church in Cooperstown, NY. An ordained American Baptist minister since 1996, he has served in campus ministry, parish ministry, and as a human rights lobbyist in Washington, DC. Turner lives in Cooperstown with his wife Sarah and daughters Natalie and Rachel.

Book preview

1

Last Will and Testament

Dear Whomever (I don’t even know who would read this now without chucking it straight into the fire, but if such a person still exists, dear you):

If you’re reading this, I’m dead.

Even if you’re not reading it, I’m dead. For me there’s no future, my present is an inferno of guilt and shame, and the past is a torturer that draws blood with every tiny prick of its thousand sharpened knives. After I finish this letter, after I submit myself one last time to the cruel hands of memory, that artist whose medium is pain, I will cease to be. Like Ahithophel, who, when his betrayal became known to David the king, went down to his home and ended his life at the end of a rope, his last act a fond attempt to restore a semblance of his former honor, I too will hang myself. Not that I have any honor to restore; I am well past that and every other illusion.

It’s not as though I have a home to go back to, for that matter. The Galilee is no longer an option for me. And I long ago said good-bye and good riddance to my hometown of Karyot, and I haven’t been back since. Now that I think of it, I couldn’t have left there more than two or three years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. Or more. I am not the man I was when I shook the dust off my feet at the town gate and gave them all my back forever. Sometimes these yokels, Kefa and the rest, used to try to get my goat by calling me Ish-karyot, Man of Karyot, because they knew of the disdain I held for the place. It got to be a sort of nickname after a while: Youdias Ish-karyot. Funny guys.

What they didn’t know (or maybe they did, I neither know nor care at this point) was that I held them in the same low regard. Still do. That uncouth band the rabbi inexplicably kept around him earned little but my disdain, and I will carry that disdain to my fast-approaching death. Why he would sell himself short like that was and is the puzzle. He could have been great. With the right people around him, who knows what he could have become? With the right advisor—

Like Ahithophel. Right.

Ahithophel, advisor to both David and Absalom, when his good counsel was ignored in favor of faulty advice that would lead to Absalom’s destruction, left Yerushalem, returned to his home, set his house in order, and hanged himself. This letter, I suppose, constitutes the setting in order of my own house. Such as it is.

I have little to leave to anyone, and few to leave it to if I did. I had a sister once, Rachel, but I don’t know now if she is living or dead. She married that fool Stephanus over my objections, and that was part of what sent me away from Karyot in the first place. For a daughter of Israel to yoke herself to a Hellenist that way, what a scandal! Especially when I, as the head of the household after our father’s death, had arranged a perfectly good match with a townsman who bore a strong Israelite name, Aaron. But Rachel would not listen to my sound advice, choosing instead to bind herself to that Greek, and for what? For love, she used to tell me, mooning over Stephanus and stopping her ears to my wisdom. Well, if you choose to be bound in that way . . . I leave to my sister Rachel, if she yet lives, the rope they will take from my broken neck.

My good leather shoes and the tunic that was always too big for me I leave to my fat friend Yakov, practically the only one of the rabbi’s band that I truly cared for and the only one who ever looked at me simply and honestly and not with jealousy, mistrust, and dissembling. (There had been another at one time, but that ended last night.) They called my friend Yakov the Less, because he was both younger and shorter than Yakov Barzebedee, but he was twice the man of that other Yakov, not just in girth but in character and heart as well. Friend Yakov, may you wear these gifts, and remember me with some of your old kindness.

The rest of my clothing and meager possessions I leave to be distributed among the poor of Galilee. I know the rumors: that I never cared for the poor, only for power. But what no one seemed to understand was that I only wanted power—and not even power for myself, but for the rabbi!—in order to help the poor among my people, all the crushed and bled-dry peasants and laborers, all the great trampled mass of humanity, whom the elites considered mere tools to increase their own wealth and power or obstacles preventing them from doing so. My poor brothers, these rags and sundries, such as they are, now belong to you. I have at least one cloak that is in decent repair; it will keep somebody warm on a winter’s night. I wish now I had not thrown the priests’ silver back in their faces even though the shame of it burnt my hands as if the coins had just been taken out of the fire. I could have left those thirty pieces of silver for these poor ones, for they are like shepherdless sheep, and that money, though a pittance for what I sold for it, could have done some real good . . . for a time.

For a time. For only a brief respite that will soon come to an end, and then back you go to the drudgery, the penury, until merciful death comes to free you. Ah, how young and wide-eyed I used to be when I still believed in a time beyond this age, a time when the kingship would be restored and the Kittim driven out, when the bottom would be on top, and the ones on top would be pushed down to the bottom of the ladder. Now I know that’s just a dream, a fairy story we tell our children to keep up their spirits, a fable to strengthen the hands that falter, the hearts that despair. Well, now I welcome despair. It seems the only honest way to approach life in this fucked-up world.

As I say, I didn’t always feel this way. At one time I had hopes. More importantly, I had hope. I believed the fables and fairy tales enough to hitch my wagon to a number of different stars over the years—stars that always flamed out and fell to the earth. I had been the disciple, the student, the foot soldier to several reformers and would-be messiahs from the southern part of Iudaea around Karyot and later up in the Galilee, which was where I met Yeshua and where I thought my restless journey had found its end. I guess in a sense I was right.

After a series of disappointments in business, in family—besides my sister’s defiance, my wife Elisheva failed to give me any sons (or daughters, even) in four years of marriage—and with some bush-league Iudaean prophets, I left Karyot, shaking off the aforesaid dust on my way through the town gate. I had written Elisheva a certificate of divorce, escorted her (she would say dragged, and that is probably more accurate) to her father’s house, turned my house and my few animals into silver, and headed north. The Galilee was the place for somebody like me—the people there were known for their vigorous resistance to the Roman occupation. To be called a Galilean was an epithet that meant, depending on whom you asked, guerrilla, troublemaker, or freedom fighter. The Galileans were known for their irascibility and an independent streak as wide as the Salt Sea is long. I thought I would fit right in up there.

I was mistaken. Just like in my provincial hometown, anyone with a sharp mind, a ready tongue, and even a modicum of curiosity about the world got treated with suspicion. The rubes up there were just as bad as or worse than the Iudaean hicks I had left behind, and I learned to mask my intelligence and temper my words. I felt as though I were some kind of spy, playing a part to make those people accept me into their ranks. I don’t think that ever really happened—they continued to hold me at arm’s length—but they did grant me what passed for a grudging welcome.

When I arrived in the region I gravitated toward the two major cities, Tiberias and Sepphoris. It may have been easier to find work in Tiberias, as that was Herod Antipas’s administrative capital, but I ruled it out when I heard the rumor that the tetrarch had built the city over a cemetery, rendering any Jew who lived, worked, or visited there ritually impure. So I opted for Sepphoris and before too long found work as a scribe. Anyone who could read and write in both Greek and Aramaic (I even knew a smattering of Latin) was in high demand in those days, and I became a sort of freelancer offering my services to attorneys, government officials, and ordinary citizens needing documents prepared and notarized. In this position I became acquainted with the mood of the place, and I soon discovered that the rumors about the Galileans were largely untrue. They were on the whole no more revolutionary than anyone else; the great mass of them wanted nothing more than to go about their lives, raise their children, hang onto their fathers’ land for one more generation, and escape the notice of Herod’s thugs and tax gatherers. Sure, there were a few hotheads who talked big after a night of drinking, but they were just as meek in the light of day as everyone else. Few thought of the Kittim unless a detachment from the Syrian legion passed through the city on their way to Caesarea or Yerushalem or some skirmish on the frontier. Then the people for the most part just kept their heads down and waited for them to finish their business in Sepphoris and get on down the road.

There were some, of course, who did more than that. Some, like a few of my fellow scribes and most of the merchants I knew, bowed and scraped for legionary and centurion alike, and if some minor functionary from Damascus or Ankyra or Ephesus should pass through town, they would practically drop to their knees and—well, some of my rougher compatriots among the rabbi’s crew had some delightfully crude turns of phrase to describe what they would do once they were down on their knees. I quickly came to despise these scrapers, as I called them under my breath, and added their names to my enemies list, the ones whom the faithful must not forget once the Son of David was back on the throne of a united Israel and it came time to dole out rewards and . . . shall we say, demerits. Having one’s neck stretched at the end of a hempen cord like the one on my lap as I write this would be an appropriate demerit, don’t you think?

I kept my counsel, of course. I had learned the hard way not to entrust myself too easily to others, not to divulge my secret thoughts to just anybody. Even when I began to earn the trust of the few I would call agents of the resistance, I did not open my secret heart to them. Only to the rabbi, and look where that got me.

2

Galilee

I met Yakov (not friend Yakov, but the other one, brother to Yohanan and son to Zebedee) before I met the rabbi. In fact, I met Yakov before even he had joined the rabbi’s band. Yakov and Yohanan were fishers, junior partners in their father’s fishing concern, which was successful enough for him to have bought two additional boats and hired crews to take them out on the lake. As a result, the brothers were in line to receive an inheritance and a relatively secure future, so I guess it was quite a sacrifice for them both to give it all up for the precarious life of a disciple of an itinerant rabbi. But they always seemed—Yakov in particular—to think they were somehow entitled in a way the rest of us weren’t. Yakov had the casual arrogance of the highborn, yet he was nothing more than the son of a fisherman who had made good. Yohanan and he really pissed off the rest of the crew once when they went in stealth to the rabbi and asked for guarantees of high positions of state when he came into his kingdom. The rabbi told them no dice—they should have known he didn’t play those games—but when the rest of the guys found out, they tore into the brothers like hyenas. I think they were mostly envious because they hadn’t thought of it first. Yohanan eventually repented and apologized to the group, but Yakov just shrugged it off as if he had done nothing wrong. Entitlement.

I came to know Yakov when we were engaged in the same resistance effort. Antipas had just put in force a policy of taxation and permitting that for all intents and purposes turned Lake Gennesaret into his own personal pond. Anyone who wanted to fish those waters had to get a license from the tetrarch’s administrators, and violators faced stiff fines. This all but wiped out the smaller commercial fishing industry. Only the bigger concerns, such as Zebedee and Sons, were able to handle the new fees, levies, and bribes and stay in business, but even for them it took a big chunk out of their profits. The resistance decided on a plan of strike and sabotage. The fishers banded together in a pledge not to harvest any fish until Antipas withdrew the policy, and small groups of men would go out late in the night dressed in dark cloaks, their faces and arms blackened with mud from the lake, and knock holes in the boats of those who opted to collaborate with the tetrarch.

I was one of the organizers of the strike and a lookout for the sabotage teams. That’s how I met Yakov; he had come to join the effort to scuttle the scabs’ craft. I took an immediate dislike to him. He had a big mouth and a wide streak of braggadocio, two traits that could be dangerous in a resistance operation. I had to give him some grudging credit that he and his family had thrown in their lot with the struggling small concerns when they could have simply looked after their own interests and kept their business afloat. But the way he went about his work, as though he took more pleasure in destroying the boats than in sticking it to the tetrarch, annoyed me. There was cruelty there, and I didn’t like it.

Drinking ale one night in a taverna after a sabotage operation, Yakov took an unaccountable interest in me. He started peppering me with questions about Karyot and Iudaea and Yerushalem. Especially Yerushalem. It turned out that he had never been anywhere. His father Zebedee was something of a taskmaster, and the family was never given leisure to travel outside the environs of the lake. Not even for Pesach or Sukkot, I asked? No, not once since he was a small child. The only thing he could remember from that trip was the brilliance of the temple—the sparkling white of the walls and the way the gold glittered in the unremitting sun.

I was surprised by this laxness on the Zebedee family’s part. The Torah dictated that all Jewish men were to present themselves before the Holy One in Yerushalem three times a year: at the festivals Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. None but the most devout managed to fulfill that expectation, and it was especially difficult for those who lived a fair distance away to get to Yerushalem that often. But not to have made the pilgrimage even once in one’s adult life? It was scandalous!

I soon found that Yakov and his family were not alone in their failure to fulfill this obligation. Most of the am ha’aretz, the people of the land, were non-observant when it came to the pilgrimage festivals. At first I was shocked and offended by this brazen flouting of divine command, but when I learned the reasons for it I was somewhat mollified. A great many of the inhabitants of the Galilee lived a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. Those with land had a tough row to hoe just keeping their heads above water and paying their share of taxes and tribute, and taking two or three weeks to walk with their families to Yerushalem and back was a luxury they could not afford. For the landless, the situation was even more dire. Most of them hired themselves out every day to perform manual labor or farm work. They needed their daily denarius just to put food on the table and keep their children clothed. Going up to Yerushalem for Pesach or Shavuot was for them not much more than a pipe dream. If they made it once every decade they considered themselves fortunate.

By contrast, I had been to Yerushalem many times. In fact, I had stopped there on my way north just a few months earlier. Yakov became very excited when he heard this and wouldn’t stop pestering me until I told him everything I could remember of the place. I did not harbor the same romantic notions about the city as he did, not by a long shot, so I told him about the fires of Gehenna, the garbage dump outside the gates of town, where the smoke and the stench never stopped rising. I told him about the lavish mansions of the aristocracy and the flamboyant lifestyles of the elders, while not a mile away destitute people just in from the country begged in the streets. I told him about the garrison of Roman soldiers always stationed at the Antonia Fortress overlooking the temple and the way the prefect would come into town in a show of force before every major festival and how then the legionaries would be everywhere—in the streets, at the bazaars, atop the Royal Portico of the temple—scoffing at our customs, profaning our laws, and propositioning the sisters and daughters of our people.

I told Yakov all these things, but it did no good that I could tell. He still had stars in his eyes when it came to Yerushalem, and it was the goal of his life to see the holy city. Well, Yakov, my comrade, you have seen it now. How do you like it?

Herod Antipas cracked down hard on the saboteurs, scourging a couple of them to within an inch of their lives, and the protest to his fisheries policy fizzled out. Yakov went back to Zebedee and Sons, and I continued my work as a scribe for hire, but destiny had it that our paths should cross again.

†

I had been hearing rumors of the young rabbi from Nazareth for a couple of months. He was creating quite a stir down in Kepar Nahum, Korazin, and the other fishing villages along the shores of the lake. They said he was a powerful healer and exorcist, and that he taught with authority. A charismatic teacher with healing gifts and power over unclean spirits? I had to look into this.

As far as I knew, Yeshua never set foot in Sepphoris, so I took it upon myself to seek him out. I simply followed the gossip until I located him in Tabgha, where he had set up shop for a week or two, as was his practice in those days. He was teaching when I found him, sitting in the shade of a sycamore with a gaggle of men and women seated around him, listening intently and often talking back in a lively way. I was taken aback by the presence of the women. It was highly unorthodox for a rabbi to accept women as students and almost unheard of to teach a mixed group of males and females. But if any of the men or the women or Yeshua himself felt any discomfort in the arrangement, their expressions and words did not betray it. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I was only there to observe, so I let it go.

I thought I was only there to observe, but Yeshua changed that. I came up stealthily to the outskirts of the group as he was telling one of the riddles or short stories I became so familiar with over the ensuing weeks and months. When he finished, he waited as his listeners pondered his words in what looked like a dazed silence, and as they puzzled out a response, he raised his eyes and met mine. I had meant to remain anonymous, but as I would have occasion to learn, Yeshua was almost preternaturally aware of his surroundings. It was damn near impossible to sneak up on him or catch him unawares. Sometimes I was sure he even slept with an eye half-open.

When he looked at me, I had the curious and terribly unsettling sensation of being naked. Not naked of my clothing, but of my pretenses. I was stripped bare—flesh, bones, bravado, and all the things I habitually used to disguise myself or make myself presentable to the world. The only way I have been able to explain it, even to myself, is that Yeshua’s eyes saw my soul. My exposed, shriveled, goose-pimply soul stood there quivering in his gaze. Almost involuntarily I reached to tighten my belt and crossed my arms in front of me.

He must have seen that reaction before in others he had looked at in this way because he smiled knowingly and looked away. I immediately felt as though I had been released from a tight grasp, and I felt an unpleasant tingling all over. It was like when your foot comes back to life after falling asleep, but in this case it wasn’t just my foot but rather my entire being that was coming back to life. I didn’t even know it had been asleep.

Apparently all this took place in only a moment because all at once I heard the group of disciples begin clamoring to offer their responses to and interpretations of Yeshua’s story and arguing with one another and him about it. I couldn’t possibly tell you the content of their arguments, I felt so scalded by my brief encounter with the rabbi, but I do remember his patience and calm demeanor as he answered their questions or, more commonly, asked questions of his own in return.

I was just about to turn and go, hoping for another chance later to catch Yeshua on his own for a private word, but I stopped when he said, We have a guest with us.

He spoke quietly, but with such a commanding tone that the clamor of a moment ago ceased almost immediately. He looked my way again, and his students followed his gaze to where I stood, supremely uncomfortable now that I had become the focus of all this attention. I really wanted to get away now, but then a voice I recognized boomed, Hey, I know that guy. He’s been to Yerushalem! Yakov pointed at me, rather unnecessarily, I thought, since every eye was already trained on me, and I knew now that I could not leave.

Hello, Yakov, I murmured. I did not expect to see you here.

Hell, he said, laughing, I could say the same about you. My brother and me just fell in with the teacher here—what, two, three days ago? He looked over at a man who appeared to be an only slightly smaller version of himself for confirmation. The other man nodded. Oh, yeah, this here’s my brother Yohanan. Another nod, this one in my direction. And this is the teacher. Yeshua.

I felt a sense of foreboding—shame, even—as I turned my eyes to the rabbi once again, but this time it was just a normal gaze I met. Intense, probing, yes, but it did not penetrate all the way to my marrow this time.

Yakov was still talking, making introductions. This guy here is Youdias. He’s from— He looked at me quizzically. What’s the name of the place again?

I was puzzled. Sepphoris?

No, no, Yakov bellowed, the other place! Where you’re from, down by Yerushalem.

Oh. Karyot.

That’s right, Yakov affirmed, Carry out. That’s Youdias, the man from Carry out. Again he added, as if it were the most important element of my CV, He’s been to Yerushalem. Like . . . I don’t know, a bunch of times.

Everyone looked at me again, including Yeshua, and I could tell that even he was impressed. These people were clearly peasants—probably uneducated—who had never enjoyed the luxury of travel. They may have been to Yerushalem, like Yakov, once or twice in their lives for one of the festivals, and so for them the mystique of the place remained. I carried no such illusions about Yerushalem. Not anymore. But I did feel a little bit proud that I cut such a cosmopolitan figure among these simple Galileans.

I wish to speak with you at more length, friend Youdias, Yeshua said in that calm, even tone of his. I am intrigued by your background. I see you are a scribe.

That startled me for a moment, until I realized I had my tablet, pencil, and small collection of parchment scraps in a leather pouch hanging from my shoulder. Um, yes, Rabbi. I do some scribal work now and again.

Then you can read, obviously, Yeshua said.

Yes, I can read and write Aramaic and Greek as well as the Hebrew of our forefathers. I said it with some pride, not caring how arrogant it sounded. I had worked hard for my education, and I would not hide my lamp under a bushel, to use one of Yeshua’s metaphors.

That is well, he replied. I should like to speak to you, as I said. Perhaps we could meet by the lakeside this evening. I know a place.

Yes, certainly, I said, hoping I did not sound too eager. I wanted to present a cool, collected exterior, but my insides were agitated. There was something about this fellow—a magnetism, a fascination—that drew me to him in a way that almost made me uncomfortable. Over the months I would see the same attraction in others, both women and men. It couldn’t have been his physical appearance that drew people to him. He was not particularly handsome or virile. In fact, when you got right down to it, he was kind of homely. Short and scrawny, with unkempt hair and beard and some of the ugliest toes I have ever seen. But his gentleness and intelligence and ready smile all so far outweighed his appearance as to render it completely inconsequential. And then there were those eyes, and their capacity to hold you spellbound, almost like a cobra with its prey. But that’s not the right metaphor. There was nothing predatory about the rabbi. His eyes were kind, and they spoke to me of acceptance, warmth, and friendship. They told no tale whatsoever of condemnation or recrimination for anyone. I suppose that’s why so many people loved him. I suppose it’s why I came to love him with a ferocity that sometimes scared me.

How then could one who loved Yeshua so much have done what I did, you ask? That’s a question with a complicated answer. Perhaps once I have told my tale the answer will become clear. Perhaps it won’t, but the only way I know to give an answer is to tell that tale, so I will continue.

†

That first night we met in a tiny grotto overlooking the lake. I remember the way the reflection of the moon off the ripples of the water played over his face in wavering bars of light and dark and the way our voices, even at low volume, reverberated off the stone walls. We had to speak in secret, Yeshua explained, because if word got out that he was abroad, even in the dead of night, people would stream to him with their ailments and sick relatives and deep unmet needs, and he found he could never turn them away. The curse of the compassionate, he said with a sigh, but with a joyous gleam in his eye as well.

What Yeshua wanted to talk about was Yerushalem. He had an intense interest in the city, but I soon found it was of a different nature than Yakov’s. Although he too had only made a handful of visits, he was not taken in by the mythological allure of the place. He had what I would call a guarded sense of respect regarding Yerushalem—he understood it to be the center of our nation’s life, but also the epicenter of many of our ills. I found him to have an incisive irreverence about the myths of our people: about the notion of the Jews as the one and only chosen race; about the tendency to set the laws of Moses ahead of every other concern, even human welfare; and about the unimpeachable dignity and honor of the hereditary priesthood. He had visited the city a few times over his young life, and he had come away with a similar attitude toward it as I had. He held Yerushalem in esteem because it was the ancient seat of David’s monarchy and the home of Solomon’s temple, but he decried, as I did, how far it had fallen since those halcyon days.

It had been some years since his last pilgrimage, so he was looking for an update on the state of things there. Did Gratus still ride in on the eve of Pesach with his legionaries? Did the soldiers still occupy the Fortress of Antonia? Were the chief priests as corrupt as rumored? Did I know of any among their number who could be trusted as allies in a movement of reform? What was the mood of the people? Was there unrest? Was there a place I would recommend as a staging area for strategic inroads into the city?

I tried to answer his questions the best I could. I reminded him that Valerius Gratus had been replaced as prefect a few years ago by Pontius Pilatus, and that, yes, he continued his predecessor’s practice of using intimidation and force of arms to quell demonstrations at festival time. Many of the chief priests and elders were quite as venal as he had heard and, in fact, probably more so. I remarked on their lavish mansions in the upper city and on the way they appropriated peasants’ lands down in Iudaea and the Galilee to support their luxurious lifestyles—a practice I found Yeshua was already well aware of; even in the dark I could see the way his eyes burned when I talked about it. And, in a fateful moment, I told him about a place on the Mount of Olives opposite the city, an old abandoned olive press called Gethsemane that would be ideal for staging an assault on the city and regrouping afterwards.

I recall that he looked at me strangely when I used that word assault, but he didn’t say anything then. He thanked me for my time, gave me a quick embrace, and slipped away to return to his lodgings for the night. As he was leaving the cave, he turned and gave me another one of those penetrating looks and said, Join my band. Follow me. And he was gone.

†

That’s how it began. I returned to Tabgha the next day, found Yeshua and his disciples under the same sycamore, and found myself part of the crew. Yakov and Yohanan were there, as were two others who had been missing the day before, brothers named Andreas and Kefa. Andreas was quiet but friendly, but his brother was by turns bombastic and brooding, thoughtful and impetuous. He fancied himself the leader of the group, and he had a natural charisma that lent itself to leadership. But I found him a little too rough around the edges for my taste. Like the sons of Zebedee, Kefa and Andreas were employed in the fishing trade, or had been before Antipas instituted his new policy, and Kefa brought the same clumsy strength that he had used with his nets and tackle to his relations with people. At his core, I suppose he was a good man but utterly lacking in subtlety and without much of a filter on his words and actions.

Andreas for his part was faithful, generous, and friendly, and I liked him immediately. Despite his Greek name, he was a Hebrew through and through. I was surprised to find others in the group, however, who were indeed Hellenists. Not Gentiles, of course, but with more of a Greek bearing than I was comfortable with at first. Philip, Didymus, and Bartholomeus. I grew used to them over time, but I never really entrusted myself to them, nor they to me. Another Hebrew there was, Levi, but he came with his own set of baggage: he had been a tax gatherer. One of Herod Antipas’s agents and a collaborator with the Kittim. He came across as very apologetic about his former life, but I can’t say I ever warmed to him. Another Youdias and my fat friend Yakov rounded out this motley band, except for one more surprise. Simeon, a sly fellow who may or may not have been a freedom fighter from the Iudaean hills, now counted himself among the disciples of the young rabbi. What was even more remarkable is that he had struck up a friendship with the unlikeliest of people, Levi. A collaborator and a subversive. That was the kind of combination that Yeshua’s company fostered. I was to see even stranger things than these.

It was not lost on me that this central group of disciples whom Yeshua called apostles numbered twelve. It was a clear reference to the twelve sons of Yakov—the fathers of the tribes of our nation. Yeshua was reconstituting Israel in his own little band. It was a foretaste of the kingdom to come and one that I relished being a part of.

Besides the men, a number of women traveled with Yeshua, their children in tow. Some were wives or sisters of the men, but there were others who, to my shock, had no such patronage. A number of wealthy women followed him—widows, mostly, but also some who had left their husbands’ or fathers’ houses to go with Yeshua. Yohanna was one of those, and Miriamne. They bankrolled the group, and Yeshua and some of the others ignored the scandal of it all and refused to send them back to the men whose responsibility they were. Yeshua shrugged off the ire of those outsiders who protested this infamous behavior, and I found pretty quickly that the rules were different inside Yeshua’s circle than they were outside it. The roles of men and women were jumbled, status ranks were turned on their heads, slaves and children were treated with honor. It was no accident, either. Yeshua consciously set up his little community as a model for the reforms he wanted to enact all throughout the land, and he didn’t seem to care whom he offended. The rumors had said that he taught with depth and originality, and I found it to be true even in the way he structured his band of disciples. He was a maverick to be sure.

Then there was the Magdalene. I don’t know what her real name was; we all called her Maryam, and she seemed content to let it go at that. Any probing into her past she discouraged in no uncertain terms, and so the rumor mill ground away with a vengeance. Some held that she had been a harlot (the less charitable suggested that she still was). Others claimed that she had been possessed by seven unclean spirits, and that Yeshua had cleansed her. Some said she was Yeshua’s kinswoman, but this was a minority opinion because the prevailing assumption was that he and she enjoyed carnal relations. At certain times we would look around and