Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine Read online

  “Nice of you to offer to help,” I said with pronounced irony, “but we’ve got the situation well in hand.” The barb bounced right off them.

  “We come not to help but to observe,” said the eldest pompously.

  “Suit yourself,” I shrugged. Bartholomew, the blind man, and I started off once again, with them dogging our steps whispering among themselves.

  “Are you not,” came a question in a accusatory tone, “you two, followers of the Nazarene?”

  “Yes,” said Bartholomew simply.

  “Depends on what you mean by followers,” I replied more moderately.

  “Do you believe that he is the Messiah? The Holy One of God?”

  “Yes,” Bartholomew said for the second time. I kept my peace.

  “And you?” they demanded of me.

  “I believe,” I answered slowly “in the things I can see.” To my surprise, Bartholomew exploded.

  “Then, friend Lightfoot, by that way of thinking, the man whom we are now guiding can believe in nothing, for he can see nothing.”

  “That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I shot back angrily.

  “I have listened to the words of Jesus long enough to know that there is more than one kind of blindness,” Bartholomew said sadly, looking first at me, then at the Pharisees. An uneasy silence fell between us, one that wasn’t broken until we reached the pool.

  We carefully led him down the steep and narrow steps, and all of us held our collective breath as he knelt and began to wash the mud off his eyeballs. His sudden scream echoed off the damp walls.

  “I can see! I can see! I can see!” The Pharisees and I all looked at each other in confused amazement, while Bartholomew threw his head back and laughed in joy. Then the blind man turned to look at us with his new eyes. It was a sight I shall never forget. Not as long as I live. I was standing only a yard away, and I looked into the clearest brown eyes I’d ever seen, with the exception of Jesus! The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the involuntary words that came out of my mouth were, “My God.”

  “Exactly,” Bartholomew beamed.

  The term “devil’s advocate” comes from the Latin advocatus diaboli. In the Roman Catholic Church, the devil’s advocate is someone who is appointed to be a type of prosecuting attorney in canonization proceedings. He is the one who attempts to dig up all the evidence he can to disprove the candidate’s alleged saintliness, involvement in miracles, and so on. It was in the days following this incident that I began to see the value of the Pharisees in this role. They knew full well that all they had to do was to find a single incident that wasn’t what it appeared to be, the most insignificant miracle that Jesus worked that could be explained away in terms of natural causes, the slightest utterance that they could trap him into making that could be twisted into blasphemy or treason against Rome, anything, anything at all that could be used against him. They knew that in such a turbulent land in such troubled times, it wouldn’t take all that much to turn the admiring crowds into a single howling mob. The people had been disappointed and misled too many times in the past. It would take little to turn them into a lynch mob.

  But it took something; they had to find something. And I’ve seldom seen men try harder. Their efforts in this particular case began at the very moment I’ve just described.

  When I’d recovered sufficiently from the sudden shock at the pool, I turned to the Pharisees. “What do you think of that?” I asked more or less rhetorically. The rest began to gulp and stammer, but the eldest didn’t blink an eye.

  “I think that it is a clever ruse, but clearly this man before us now was never blind in the first place.”

  “Are you crazy?” I thundered. “You’ve been with us the entire time since we left Jesus!”

  “I’ll grant you that it was a very skillful and crafty maneuver.”

  “Maneuver?” I echoed in disbelief.

  “Yes, switching the genuinely blind man for this look-alike as we were passing through the crowd. Very clever indeed, but you are not dealing with credulous country bumpkins or with children. We are Teachers of the Law and know full well how to spot deception.”

  “You are crazy! You have been watching us the whole time! The whole time since the Nazarene put mud on this man’s eyes! I’ve not let go of this man’s right arm, nor my friend let go of his left since!”

  “The man whom this … substitute purports to be has been blind since birth. This is not he,” he said with an air of finality, then, he turned and began to walk away.

  “Wait! What would it take to convince you that this is not a sham?” He and his companions continued walking away. I yelled a challenge that echoed off the damp dark walls as they began to ascend the steps.

  “Are you sincere seekers of the truth or not? You are not! You are afraid to face the truth! You are intellectual cowards, all of you! Go then and hide from things your little and narrow minds cannot or will not accept!” (Some objective witness I had turned into.)

  My words had the desired effects though. Their leader stopped dead in his tracks. After a long moment, he turned. He was a proud man. I had banked on that, and it had paid off.

  “Very well. Let it never be said that justice was not done. What would you have us do?”

  “Do you admit that this man can now see?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we need only prove that he could not before the healing he received at the hands of the Nazarene. If we can do so, you would be forced to reevaluate your opinion of the Nazarene, isn’t that so?

  He looked very uncomfortable, even trapped. He knew better than to answer my question directly.

  “But you have no such proof.”

  “What about witnesses? This man must have friends, family, neighbors. Why don’t we find them and talk to them?” At this, the blind man broke in excitedly.

  “I have been begging at the same gate to the city since I was a young child, and I live no more than a half an hour’s walk away from the spot where we now stand. Since childhood, every day my father has guided me to the gate at sunrise, and come to bring me back home at sunset. Let us now surprise him! Let me guide you all to my home! I want to see … yes, to see the expressions on the faces of my father and mother when I walk through the door!”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” I said, staring at the Pharisees, who began to look even more uncomfortable. The former blind man, whose name was Ezra, bubbled on, oblivious to the charged, hostile atmosphere that was developing.

  “Not only to see the expressions on their faces, indeed to see their faces, for the first time! What God has wrought!”

  At this, the eldest Pharisee placed both hands on the high collar of his tunic, screamed, and made about a six-inch tear in the fabric. The others followed suit. “Blasphemy!” They wailed like banshees. “We will not stand by and see the Almighty’s Name taken in vain!”

  “Come,” said the eldest, wheeling away, “brothers, associating with the ungodly has already defiled us enough. Let us go to the Temple to present offerings.” Once more they began to walk away.

  “Now it is you who are being clever,” I said. “It seems you will do anything to avoid coming with us to face the truth.” Again they stopped and turned, and again my eyes and those of the eldest Pharisee locked on each other.

  “We will go with you,” he finally said softly.

  The stir that our little procession caused once we arrived in the man’s neighborhood is hard to describe. When people saw him leading us, a crowd quickly gathered. “Look, it’s Ezra!” some cried. Others, quite understandably, said, “That’s ridiculous! It can’t be! This man can see. It must be a man who looks like Ezra.” The closer we got to his home, the denser the crowd became. “Is it really you, Ezra?” a woman called. Others took up the refrain. Ezra just kept beaming and embracing people. “Yes,” he answered, “it is truly me, Ezra. Jesus of Nazareth has healed me.”

  His parents ran out to meet us, and he instantly recognized
them by their voices. Ezra kept repeating to his parents and the crowd the story of his healing, and the complexions of the Pharisees grew more empurpled with each retelling. Finally, we were all in his home. His mother just kept weeping with joy.

  “I charge you to tell me in the Name of the Almighty, the Everliving God,” said the eldest Pharisee in sonorous, majestic tones, “is this man your son?” The parents were nonplused.

  “Of course,” answered his father. Ezra’s mother stopped weeping and stared at the Pharisee as if he were a creature from another planet.

  “There can be no mistake?” persisted the Pharisee.

  “Sir,” she said, “with all due respect, may I ask why you ask such a strange question?”

  “Because we were given to understand that your son was born blind.”

  “He was,” she nodded.

  “This man is not blind.”

  She nodded again.

  “Therefore, this man cannot be your son,” said the Pharisee, as if he were patiently trying to explain an obvious fact to a moron.

  “Sir, all I know is that this is my son, that he was born blind, and that now he can see,” she said in a tone that matched his.

  “Do you know that your son, I mean this man, has blasphemed? That he claims that Jesus of Nazareth, a false prophet, has healed him?”

  “Well, somebody had to have healed him,” the father said reasonably, while he stroked his beard thoughtfully. “It may as well have been this Jesus.”

  “Are you then saying that Jesus of Nazareth healed your son?” thundered the Pharisee.

  “We weren’t there,” the father shrugged.

  “Our son is thirty-one years old and is standing right here,” said the man’s mother. “Ask him yourself.”

  “We already have,” said one of the Pharisees. “He claims that Jesus, whom he considers to be a prophet, healed him. That he was born blind, but Jesus gave him his sight.”

  “We have even seen it happen,” chimed in the youngest among them, who promptly received a baleful look from the eldest and two others. The fifth spoke up.

  “As for me and my friend who has just spoken, the question is not so much the matter of whether there was a healing or not, for we had,” he paused before going on judiciously, “perhaps a better vantage point than did our colleagues and so saw more clearly. As for us, the concern is that he violated the Law by healing on the Sabbath. This makes him a sinner.”

  “But how,” interjected the younger, “could a sinner perform a miracle?”

  The eldest, correctly surmising that the situation was getting away from him, wrested control again. He turned to the blind man.

  “I solemnly adjure you,” he said with feeling, pointing his quivering index finger at Ezra, “in the Name of the Living God, to tell us exactly what happened and who this Jesus, whom we know to be a sinner, is.”

  “Whether he is a sinner or not, all I know is that he gave me my sight.”

  “Now tell us, from the very beginning, everything that happened. This is your last chance,” he said menacingly.

  “But you were there; you yourself saw what happened. Not only that, but you haven’t ceased asking me the same questions. One would think that you want to be one of his disciples too!” Ezra said somewhat sarcastically. And that did it. The eldest Pharisee howled.

  “You may be a disciple of his, but we are disciples of Moses! There can be no doubt that God spoke to Moses, but we know nothing of the Nazarene.”

  Ezra only grew more sarcastic. “Well, how about that! You know nothing of the Nazarene, yet you know that he healed me. Never since the world began has anyone ever given a man born blind sight, but Jesus does, so you are at a loss as to who he is, as to whether he is a fraud, a sinner, or whatever. Even a simple man like me knows that if he were not from God, he could do nothing.”

  “How dare you,” demanded the Pharisee, “you, who were steeped in sin at birth, how dare you presume to lecture us in such matters?” There were some other less than gracious remarks the Pharisee made as he led his men through the door.

  37

  We spent a wonderful and festive evening in Ezra’s home. Friends and relatives mobbed the house, and the laughter, wine, and tears of joy flowed freely. Nevertheless, we set out at dawn the following morning to catch up with Jesus. Ezra was one of the few who took the trouble to go back to thank the Nazarene; most of those he healed figured they had more important things to be about.

  We had caught up with him before the sun was halfway across the sky, and, recognizing us from the day before, the disciples cleared a path through the crowd for us. Before we could utter a word, Jesus looked at Ezra and spoke.

  “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

  “If you’ll just tell me who he is,” Ezra replied fervently, “I’ll believe in him.”

  “You have seen him. He is speaking with you.”

  “Lord,” Ezra said, falling to his knees, “I believe.”

  Bartholomew too fell to his knees, “Lord, I believe,” he said, his face wreathed with a beatific, almost otherworldly smile.

  The Nazarene’s eyes turned toward me. My mind, my universe, whirled crazily as I looked into the depths of those eyes. It had been possible to believe for a moment back at the Pool of Siloam. It had been possible at Ezra’s home when I saw the jubilant look on his mother’s face. It had even been possible on the way back, as I quietly mulled over the words that I’d heard Jesus speak, and reviewed what I’d been seeing and hearing about the man. But now, as I once again stood before him, it seemed no longer possible. Look, a voice in my mind whispered, he is a man of flesh and blood, just as you are. He is about your age. The Son of God? No. Clearly he is a man. If you cut him, he will bleed. If he goes without food, he gets hungry; without water, he gets thirsty. He gets tired and lonely. He laughs and he cries. He even flew into a rage not long ago when he threw the moneychangers out of the Temple. God Almighty? Hardly.

  “For judgment I have come into this world,” he said, “that the blind may see, and that those who do see might be made blind.”

  “One of the ever-present Pharisees angrily spoke up, dimly sensing a rebuke lay somewhere in those words. “Are you implying that we are blind?”

  Jesus’ eyes never left mine as he answered the question. “If you were blind,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “then you’d be guilty of nothing, but, since you have seen, yet act as if you were blind, you are in sin.” So saying, he turned away, and I never before or since, felt lonelier in my life than I did at that moment.

  38

  It’s hard, so very hard, to describe the mental tumult, the frequency and intensity of the thoughts, doubts, suppositions, theories, and ideas that cascaded down and around, over and under the lobes of my brain every moment of every day in the weeks that followed. My confusion was total. On one hand, I wanted to believe but continued to be plagued by the unsettling thought that I had no absolute proof. Yes, I had personally witnessed phenomena that I could not explain in terms of natural causes. But just because I couldn’t explain them, did that necessarily mean that the incidents were cases of supernatural intervention? No scientist, or layman either for that matter, worth his salt will assert that mankind knows all the secrets of the universe. In that regard, one thinks of the stereotypical scene of the early twentieth century explorer in darkest Africa flicking his cigarette lighter before an awed village assembly, explaining, “Me white god.” He knows how a lighter works; he can explain it in natural terms. To the natives, however, the flame jumping to life in the strange man’s hand is totally inexplicable in terms of the natural laws they know.

  But, as I said, I so wanted to believe him. His words, his teachings, made good sense; they made more than good sense. In listening to him day after day and reflecting on his words, I came to feel then as I continue to feel now—that he was the world’s only real hope. That his message is the most important message in all of human history. But Bertrand Russell, in his The Impact of Science
on Civilization, says it much better than I ever could:

  The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean—please forgive me for mentioning it—is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.

  The more I tried to work things out, the more convinced I became that, in a very real sense, no one can ever prove anything beyond all doubt. Sure, you can prove to your own satisfaction that you exist, in some form or another. Otherwise, how could you be thinking about it at all? But once you try to go beyond your basic Descartes, you find yourself in deep philosophical waters indeed. Strictly speaking, you can’t be sure that your friends, relatives, or even the features of your own body exist as you perceive them, if at all. They could all be figments of your imagination. Your life to date, complete with all your memories, may only be an elaborate and very long dream. Your home, your car, your town, may all be illusions. I may only be imagining that I’m sitting at a typewriter writing this book. By the way, how do you know that there is a major world city called Moscow? Have you ever been there? Even if you think you have perhaps you really haven’t. Even if you have, care to try to prove it beyond all doubt to a determined skeptic?

  Even in our judicial system, which we use to make some pretty serious decisions, such as whether or not to sentence people to life in prison, to free them, or to execute them, we don’t demand proof beyond all doubt; we demand proof beyond any reasonable doubt.