King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (49 page)

Then began the second distribution. Each pretended patriarch in turn came forward and distributed bread to seven men, to each man a loaf from a different basket. Peter, playing the part of Reuben, began the distribution, and when he and his companions had each dealt out bread exactly four times, they came to the gap from which the boy had been called.

Jesus said to the boy : “Return to your place in the circle, Benjamin. The five loaves in these baskets are yours by right, for it is written : ‘Benjamin’s portion was five times as much as theirs.’ And the Psalmist also says : ‘There is little Benjamin, their ruler.’ ” Then he cried in a loud voice : “Whoever has eyes to see, let him see. Four thousand are gone and one thousand remain. And another Joseph is at hand !”

When all members of the crowd had been fed, and had washed their hands, he blessed them, dismissed them and returned to his seat in the stern of the boat. The sail was hoisted, and as they drew away from land he asked his disciples : “How many loaves of bread did I divide among the crowd on the first occasion ?”

“Five.”

“And how many baskets were there ?”

“Twelve.”

“And how much bread was left over ?”

“Enough for five more people.”

“And on the second occasion ?”

“The same number of loaves, but distributed in seven baskets. Five loaves were left over, which were all given to the same person.”

“You have answered well. The first occasion concerned the four thousand that went away ; the second, the remaining fifth thousand. Who understands my reckoning ?”

Only Thaddaeus and Matthew could claim to understand it.

“Thaddeus, expound the four thousand who went away !”

“The four thousand years, of which you have taught us, that have elapsed since Adam’s day.”

“And the twelve baskets ?”

“The twelve signs of the Zodiac and the twelve Egyptian months of thirty days apiece, of which you have also taught us.”

“And the five loaves ?”

“The five seventy-two-day seasons of which you have also taught us ; which together make three hundred and sixty days of the Egyptian public year.”

“And the five loaves left over ?”

“The five days added to the public year, each a day of power.”

“You have answered well. Matthew, expound the other riddle !”

“The thirteen overseers are the thirteen months ; each a month of four weeks, as you have taught us. The year has three hundred and sixty-four days, as may be read in the book of the prophet Enoch. One
merciful day is added, the day of the Chrestos, the Propitious Child. To him all the five powers yield to whom the five days were formerly sacred.”

“Who is the Child ?”

“The seed sown in good soil who, as you have also taught us, is reaped at the first-fruits and sanctified to God’s use.”

“And the thousand that remain ?”

“The thousand years of the approaching Kingdom of God.”

“You have answered well. Who will expound the fish ?”

Peter said : “It is written : ‘We remember the fish which we ate in Egypt.’ ”

Jesus said reproachfully : “Peter, Peter, bold in your errors !”

After a silence, Philip spoke : “Joshua was the son of Nun, which is to say Son of a Fish. You are Joshua, for Jesus is the Greek for Joshua ; and the son of a fish is a fish like his father. Joshua means : ‘Jehovah will save.’ You, a fish, distributed Joshua among the hungry, meaning that God will save them if they listen to your words and obey the Law of Moses ; for Moses was also a fish.”

“How so ?”

“He was drawn out of the water.”

Jesus was pleased with Philip ; and to this day the secret password among Chrestians is to draw a fish with one’s toe in the dust or to form a fish’s head with the fingers of the left hand.

According to my informant, however, this was not yet all. What Jesus had done was, in the manner of a poet, to convey a plain meaning and a difficult meaning simultaneously. The plain meaning was that the God of Israel would feed his people daily with the staples of life if they dedicated themselves to his service all the year round, feeding on the words which he had delivered to Moses and the Prophets. But the difficult meaning was this, that Moses followed the Egyptian calendar, which ran by thirty-day months, each divided up into three ten-day weeks, with five days over ; but that neither in this system nor in the system which had been substituted for it during the Captivity—a year of twelve months regulated by the moon, and a period of eleven days for intercalation at regular intervals—was the sacred seven-day week an exact division of the month.

Among the many great deeds prophesied for the Messiah son of Joseph was the reform of the calendar. Jesus had not yet revealed himself as the Messiah, so that though his plan for its reform was now delivered he had been content to make the demonstration without publicly drawing the moral. By dividing the year into thirteen months, each of twenty-eight days—which was the system followed by the ancestors of the Jews before they entered Egypt—each month would have four weeks, and only one day be left over from the count, namely the day of the winter solstice, the day of Jesus’s own birth, the day on which the sacred corn is sown ; and then the last seven-day week would be enlarged into an ogdoad, or eight-day week. Eight is the traditional number of plenty,
for which reason an eight-pointed cross was marked on the Temple shewbread. In the new calendar, instead of the five days left over, which in Egypt were sacred to Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys, only one would be left over, sacred to the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel. To him all the seasons of the year would pay tribute. For Benjamin means “Son of my Right Hand”, and the Son of Man was to sit on the right hand of his Father, the Ancient of Days ; and the right hand among the Jews also signifies the south, where the boy had his station in the circle of listeners.

That Jesus abstained from an explanation has misled the Gentile Chrestians into thinking that he meant : “I am the fulfilment of all prophecies which refer to Tammuz the Corn-god.” For he was born on the birthday of Tammuz at Bethlehem, the “House of Bread”, in the cave of Tammuz and was cradled in the harvest-basket of Tammuz. And they also hold that he had hinted at Cana : “I am the fulfilment of all prophecies which refer to the Vine-god, Noah or Dusares or Dionysus. I am from Nazareth, the ‘House of Wine’.” For, later, he told the disciples : “I am the Vine, you are the branches” ; but on that occasion he was speaking of Jehovah, not of himself, and prefaced the prophecy with a doubled
Amen
. Later still he gave them far more solid grounds for their misunderstanding, as will be shown in due course. So far have some Chrestians gone in this mystical cult of Jesus that they wear thumb-rings inscribed with the letters
Iota Eta Sigma
, the well-known initials of Dionysus as “Disposer of the Waters of Life’ ; for these are also the first three letters of Jesus’s name when spelt out in Greek.

Jesus’s concern with the coming Kingdom of God is revealed in a prophetic intuition which suddenly came to him in a boat on the Lake of Galilee. He advised Peter and Andrew, who were with him and had caught nothing all night, to shoot their nets in a certain place and count their catch. They did so, and the catch was one hundred and fifty-three fish. This is a story hardly worth recording—for foolish and stupid people are often granted more remarkable intuitions—unless it is understood that one hundred and fifty-three is a symbolical number, representing all the distinct languages of the known world. Jesus was saying : “When the Kingdom comes it will include men from every nation in the entire world.”

M
ATTHEW
son of Alpheus had been a customs official of Capernaum. Though he resigned his post when he answered Jesus’s sudden call to discipleship, he was not the man to forget his former associates, and Jesus, who often resorted to his house before he sold it and settled his affairs, came through him to know most of the tax-gatherers of the district.
Theirs was the most hated profession in all Palestine : they were classed with thieves and highwaymen not only by the common people but by the High Court itself. No money that they offered to the Temple or to religious charities might be accepted, because it was almost certainly acquired by fraud ; nor might their evidence be accepted in any Jewish court of law, because of the judgement : “No tax-gatherer is capable of truth.” In both of these respects the tax-gatherer was the male counterpart of the prostitute ; and indeed fashionable prostitutes and tax-gatherers were often profitably related in business which included blackmail and brothel-keeping.

Taxation in Galilee was a source of general misery. Antipas the Tetrarch followed the example of his father King Herod by taxing land, cattle, fruit-trees, houses and every sort of marketable merchandise, besides imposing a poll-tax, a road-tax and a tax on exports and imports. His tetrarchy measured little more than fifty miles in length by thirty miles in breadth, yet he leased the farming of taxes to a ring of contractors for no less than two hundred gold talents
¹
a year, and the ring subleased it profitably to smaller men, who employed paid collectors. The collectors relied on the police to support their demands and paid them a handsome commission on their takings, and the police employed spies to inform against evaders of taxation ; and the spies prospered on blackmail. Thus a tax of nominally five per cent. of the national income was increased to ten, twelve and fifteen per cent. as contractors, sub-contractors and collectors rewarded themselves for shouldering this unpopular burden ; and the cost of police protection brought it up to nearly twenty per cent. Thus, since the incidence of taxation is always heaviest on the poor man and lightest on the rich, at least half the earnings of a manual labourer or small farmer were taken from him under one pretext or another ; and the cost of living was higher even than at Naples, famous for its high prices.

Matthew was a sub-contractor, and, like every Israelite who had either adopted this profession voluntarily or inherited it from his father, was disabled by the odium it entailed from close observance of the Law ; though a Levite by birth, he had become half-Greek in his ways. But he was a man of such sensibility and shrewdness, and so whole-hearted a convert to Jesus’s teaching, that he soon outdistanced all the other disciples in his understanding of the finer points of the Law.

The synagogue elders of Capernaum were astonished to hear that Jesus was cultivating the friendship of the tax-gatherers. Two of them came as a deputation to him and begged him to stop the mouth of scandal by discontinuing his visits to Matthew’s house. They had been fishermen, but were now living on the proceeds of a wholesale fish-business in which they were partners and which their sons managed for them.

Jesus explained that he regarded tax-gatherers and prostitutes as sick people in need of a physician—a physician must not shrink from the loathsome diseases and injuries of his patients—or as lost sheep for whom
a good shepherd must go in search, leaving the rest of his flock securely penned in their sheep-cote.

“But it is whispered of you in the porch of our synagogue : ‘He visits a certain house either to take part in some impure Greek cult, or because he counts on the fraudulent contractors and thievish prostitutes who make this house their rendezvous for money to support him in idleness.’ ”

“Is that how they whisper in the porch? What else do they whisper ?”

“That, aided by Matthew the tax-gatherer, you are leading your other disciples into the same way of wickedness.”

Jesus smiled and ironically addressed his disciples : “Sons, keep well in with the fraudulent contractors and the thievish prostitutes, for perhaps when your own business fails they will persuade the prophet Enoch to admit you by a side door into the Kingdom of Heaven, where they have already reserved comfortable suites of rooms for all eternity. These children of darkness are more shrewd by far than those who live by the light of the Law.”

They roared with laughter. Then he addressed the synagogue elders again, asking casually : “Did you hear the tale of the land-owner of Tiberias and his fraudulent estate steward ?”

“The rumour reached our kitchens, and our wives chattered, but since the steward was a Greek we stopped our ears against it.”

“It is a tale worthy of your attention. The steward was called upon to show his accounts, and knowing well that he would be instantly dismissed when he did so, with no hope of finding another employer, decided to provide against poverty by further frauds. While he still had authority to speak in his master’s name he made a round of all the creditors of the estate and reduced their debts by a quarter, or a half. You can well imagine the land-owner’s delight when he discovered what had been done !”

“What is this unjust steward to us ?”

“The stewards of the Lord’s house of Capernaum not only mismanage his estate but discourage his creditors—the tax-gatherers and prostitutes and those whom misfortune has made unclean—from paying their full debts of love to him, and dare to do this in his name. You have read the prophecy in the Testament of Moses ?”

“It is not in the Canon.”

“Nevertheless listen : ‘And in their time’—the time that is now— ‘destructive and impious men shall rule, declaring themselves righteous. They shall devour the goods of the poor, in the name of justice ; they shall be complainers, deceivers, impious men, filled with sin and lawlessness from sunrise to sunset. “We shall have feasting and good cheer, eating and drinking,” they shall say, “and esteem ourselves princes.” They shall touch what is unclean and think what is unclean, yet they shall say : “Away, Sir, away—you will pollute me with your very shadow !” ’ ”

One of the elders cried out : “Have a care, Sir! Some of your disciples are members of our synagogue. You do ill to weaken our
authority. If we have sinned, the sin must be laid at the door of Heaven, for no one can accuse us of breaking the Law that has been delivered to us by our fathers ; and we are strictly enjoined to separate ourselves from the company of the unclean man and the sinner.”