The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

say? So much has changed this past year here at our church of Antioch, it is hard to know where to begin. It’s more impossible yet to think that this week’s Pesach marks the tenth since the Master’s death—it shocks me just to think of it. Young as I was, I still recall the Master so clearly from his constant visits to our home. And especially vivid is my memory of that last supper he and his disciples ate together at our house.

I was so proud that it was I he’d chosen to run to the fountain with the water pitcher, so that when his disciples arrived there they might follow me and learn where their meeting would take place. But indeed, it’s that very memory that has impels me to write to you today.

Uncle Barnabas—who asks that I send warmest brotherly regards to you as always—tells me he feels that by this coming summer when I turn twenty-one, I shall have enough grounding in the Master’s work—and my Latin and Greek should be sufficiently developed—that I’ll be ready to accompany him on my first official mission among the Gentiles. Of course, this is excellent news, and I knew you’d be proud I had come so far in this, our second major church outside Jerusalem. But there is one thing that rather sours the matter, and I want your advice. Please share this with no one—not even your closest friends like Simon Peter. I ask this for reasons you’ll soon understand.

There is a man who’s come to Antioch at the express request of Uncle Barnabas to work with our church. He’s a diaspora Jew of the Benjamin tribe who grew up in the north, in Cilicia. As a young man, he studied with Rahh Gamaliel at the temple in Jerusalem, so it’s possible you know him. His name is Saul of Tarsus—and, Mother, he is the problem. I fear matters will only grow worse if nothing is done about it.

I hasten to add at the very outset that Saul of Tarsus has many positive qualities: he’s extraordinarily educated, not only in Torah, Mishnahim, and classical Hebrew, but he also is fluent in Latin, Greek, Punic, and standard Aramaic. He comes from a wealthy and respected textiles family who retain the main concession to supply the eastern Roman legions with that sturdy goat-hair cloth, cilicium, that they use for everything from tents to shoes. As a result, the family holds hereditary Roman citizenship. Clearly, the assets adhering to Saul of Tarsus go far to explain Uncle Barnabas’s attraction to the man.

This is where my principal conflict arises, Mother. For Saul of Tarsus must be regarded, first and foremost, as a man of privilege even from birth: rich, educated, well-traveled, a Roman citizen. And what single thing was the Master most opposed to, as being contrary to the kingdom? It can be said in one word: privilege—most especially, privilege of this particular sort. To highlight the contrast I must be more specific about the events preceding Saul’s own conversion to our order—observe I do not say “to our belief,” for he has an established set of beliefs of his own. I assure you that everything I’m about to tell you I have garnered from the fellow’s own lips.

While studying under Gamaliel at Jerusalem, Saul for the first time became acquainted with the many activist factions in the region—Zealots, Sicarii, Essenes—all agitating for liberation from Rome. And he was also exposed to those, like the Master’s cousin the baptizer, who even went “back to nature” dressed as wild men in fur pelts and subsisting on wild locust and honey. The most despicable of all of these, in Saul’s opinion, were the Master and his followers.

As a sophisticate from cosmopolitan Cilicia, Saul felt horrified repulsion at these sickeningly primitive peasants. Did not he himself, though a Jew, hold the highest honor on earth: citizenship of the Roman Empire, the only passport to the civilized world? He regarded these Judeans as no better than terrorist rabble. Their hysterical demands for freedom from Roman rule, both religious and political, enraged him beyond words. For a paltry freedom they thought they desired, they were relentless in pitting provincial Jews against the whole vast Roman empire. They had to be stopped.

Saul begged permission from his teacher Gamaliel to hunt them down—he wanted to haul them to the temple where they could be tried as heretics, as Roman law allowed, and put to death by stoning. But Gamaliel wisely replied that such was expressly opposed to prescribed Jewish law, as already established in the time of Gamaliel’s grandfather, the great Hillel. In frustrated rage Saul resigned his studies and next took his plea to the Roman-appointed zadok Caiaphas, who was glad of a new recruit to his private mission of supporting the Romans by handing over any rabble-rousers who opposed their rule. Saul soon proved to be the perfect candidate for this bloodthirsty persecution.

Mother, you will hardly credit it when I tell you Saul of Tarsus was actually among the mob that was screaming for blood outside Pilate’s palace the night of the Master’s trial! Not long after, Saul was there again with the mob that stoned our compatriot Stephen to death—though now he claims he never cast a single stone himself, but merely held the cloaks of the others, that they might take better aim! The man is completely unconscionable—and the story of his own “conversion” may be the least believable of all.

Despite his many gifts, Saul of Tarsus has a serious physical shortcoming. He has the falling sickness, the malady of the Caesars that the Greeks call epilepsia—grasped by an outside force. I’ve seen it myself, and it was not a pretty sight. At one moment he was giving a speech—and he does have a golden tongue—at the next he was lying on the ground, foam at his lips, eyes rolled back in their sockets, gurgling from his throat as if possessed by demons. Today he even