Chapter 18: Cousin John and More Degrees

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part Three–Adventurer
                                      

Jesus stayed with his family in Capernaum several months more. Then, promising to return quickly after his long stay in Egypt, he journeyed through the snow-topped hills of central Judea and down into the cold, windswept Negeb Desert and west through the Wilderness of Shur.

After weeks of traveling from oasis to oasis, he spotted the great Nile River valley in the distance. small white huts and here and there a gleaming village or town sparkled brightly in the daylight. As he drew closer to Heliopolis, he could see its tall obelisk rising high and narrow to the sun. The obelisk had been raised almost two thousand years earlier, in one of Egypt’s great ages. It had been the age when a canal was dug between the Nile and the Red Sea, and one of the greatest works of literature, the Romance of Sinuhe, was written.

As Jesus entered the wide, clean streets of Heliopolis, the residents looked at him curiously.

The camel he had picked out in Persia had died of old age shortly after his return to Galilee, so now he rode a simple donkey. His robes were dusty and dirt stained, his face tanned very dark, and his hands were rough from the desert winds and sands. He looked like a wandering beggar or adventurer.

The people of Heliopolis were used to visitors. Greek philosophers, Syrian holy men, and Persian magi often came there with servants and lesser priests to study at the school. But Jesus was riding alone. His dirt, his youth, and the intense light in his eyes made many residents mistake him for a master robber in disguise, possibly even a secret leader of a tribe of thieves that robbed rich desert caravans.

When he arrived at the school, he had trouble, as had happened in other countries, getting admitted. Finally, he remembered the names of several of his former teachers during his last stay. One of them was called and, recognizing Jesus, let him in.

Jesus washed and ate in a pleasant room facing the garden, as was fitting for an initiate of the third degree. Then he looked for John.

Jesus found him in the library. John was sitting at an old cedar wood table of great age and value, studying an ancient book roll. Jesus looked him over carefully. John was twenty-four, a few months older than Jesus. His hair had become a long, thick mane of black that fell to his shoulders and swept across his jaws in the form of a thick, curly beard. He was wearing a simple but well-tailored robe of doubled white linen. Though his shoulders and wrists were still wide, he was a little thin, as if he ate little.

“John,” Jesus said.

The black-haired man looked up. His eyes bore intently into Jesus.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. He laughed. Jumping up, he grabbed Jesus in a hug much stronger than a thin man normally could give.

Jesus winced and hugged him back.

John drew back, gripping his cousin’s shoulders. “Ah, you are taller than I am now!” he exclaimed.

“And you are thin like a straw,” Jesus said.

John patted his stomach. “Barley and lentils, that is what they try to feed me every day.” He made a face. “So I go out to the markets and find my own foods. Figs, dates, and mulberries! And green vegetables from the kitchen here. I work better when I am thin.”

“How can the reincarnation of the great prophet Elijah ever survive on such little food?” Jesus asked. He smiled.

John lowered his eyebrows and looked around the long room. “You know about that?” he asked Jesus.

“You yourself told me,” Jesus said. “Is it true?”

John waved his arm through the air. “Why not? I still have my doubts. But in this crazy place, separated from all things except the desert and book rolls, a man can believe anything.”

He looked at Jesus with a sparkle in his eye. “And you, Messiah, how does it go with you?”

Jesus shrugged. “I’m not ready to teach in our homeland, yet.”

John nodded and grabbed the bottom-most tuft of his black beard. “Come,” he said. “Let us go out to the garden and talk. The priest at the other end, there, is looking this way unhappily. We are too noisy for him.”

In the garden they sat on an alabaster bench beneath a spreading eucalyptus tree. Jesus picked one of the leaves and chewed it for his sore throat, which was still dry from traveling in the desert. The leaf left a cool, pungent taste in his mouth and soothed his throat.

“I hear you have passed all the degrees but one,” Jesus said.

John shifted on the alabaster bench and nodded.

“Tell me,” Jesus asked, “what are they like?”

John’s eyes twinkled.

“The last time we were together, my cousin, it was you who had passed one more degree than I, and I asked you the same question. Should I now tell you what you refused to reveal to me then?”

Jesus shook his head. “No, John. But surely you can tell me if they are hard?”

John looked off toward the desert in the distance. “Some are hard,” he answered. “You will pass them.”

“How do you know?” Jesus asked.

“I just do,” John answered. “I sense these things ahead of time. That is, if you are really the messiah, then you will pass them.”

“Do you say I am the Messiah, John?” Jesus leaned forward.

John stared into his eyes. “Do you say you are?” he asked Jesus.

“I don’t know,” Jesus answered. He rose to pick another leaf from the eucalyptus tree, then sat down again.

“We are both like clouds drifting in the wind,” he told John. “You have bene taught that you are the Forerunner, who will announce me to our people. I have been taught I am the Messiah. We both have certain abilities that make us able, possibly, to carry out these things.”

Jesus raked the toe of his sandal through the ornamental gravel underfoot. “I guess I believe them,” he said, glancing at John beside him.

“Give me signs,” the thinner man replied. “Always give me signs. If we really are who they say we are, then there will be miracles and visions.” His hands gripped the edge of the bench tightly. “There must be.”

He turned to Jesus. “You realize what the cost is, Messiah, if we are wrong?”

Jesus nodded. “If we are wrong, then first, John, we are deluded fools. Second, we will be–or appear as–crazy visionaries who have lost their minds. Third, and this is the worst part to me, we will have lived a lie and made others believe in that lie, too.”

John shook his head violently, as if ridding himself of a beard full of sand. “Why is it we immediately become so serious as soon as we are together?” he asked Jesus.

“It is not you,” Jesus said. “It is I.”

John suddenly rose and slapped Jesus on the back. The taller man winced.

“Come on, Cousin!” John exclaimed. “Let’s go walk through the marketplace! That ought to cheer us up. We can look at gold and silver trinkets.”

Jesus rose with him. “I heard they have a young lion cub there this week,” he told John.

John nodded. “Did one of the priests tell you that? They’ll probably sell it to some rich Roman who will keep it for a pet. Those Romans!”

The two men wandered slowly out of the garden and onto the sandy streets, telling each other stories of what had happened to them while they had been apart.

Jesus informed the school’s priests that he was ready to take his next degree, his fourth. After several weeks of being with John and of studying, an older priest with rosy cheeks and the red robes of the fifth degree came to him in his room.

“We are ready for you, young master,” the priest said.

“Will I see the high priest first?” Jesus asked. He remembered well the tall, dark man with the long purple-and-white robes, and looked forward to meeting with him again.

The rosy-cheeked priest shook his head solemnly. “The high priest is in the great temple across the river.”

“Won’t my initiations into the next degrees be held there?” Jesus asked. “The first three were.”

Again the priest slowly shook his head. “Today, young sir, we journey down to Memphis. Tomorrow in Memphis you will wait in a place assigned for you, until the test for your fourth degree begins. Now here, take these.”

The priest held out fine linens such as a great priest or a pharaoh’s son would wear. He glanced at the stone basin of water in Jesus’ room. “Put these on,” said the priest. “And bathe first.”

He handed Jesus a small gold vase of fine olive oils laced with the fragrant scent of precious nard. “Use it in your bath,” he said. “Afterwards I will trim and oil your hair. We wish you to appear in the most beautiful light of the gods and goddesses, for where I will assign you to stay requires beauty.”

Confused, Jesus did as he was told. The rosy-cheeked priest returned an hour after he had cut and oiled Jesus’ hair, and quickly they journeyed through the growing twilight of the desert to Memphis.

Memphis was one of Egypt’s great cities. In her splendor she housed pharaohs and the poorest of the poor, as well. She was a rich, ancient, and well-used city whose limestone-block buildings and tall white towers glittered brilliantly, casting light down into the crowded streets below. The poor, and many of the middle classes, who had some money, lived in mud houses that were streaked and ugly, houses that disappeared when water was repeatedly thrown at them as sometimes happened in freak rainstorms.

The streets were black with night when the rosy-cheeked priest led Jesus to one of the dark lanes dividing rich from poor in the midst of the city. The priest lit an oily, smelly torch. Its flame shot up, illuminating the dirty street and its surprised inhabitants. On the left-hand side, several beggars held their claw-like hands up before their eyes, hiding their sight from the flame. A prostitute–a little girl of twelve with a sheer linen robe, shivering in the chill of the evening–quickly withdrew her hand from the moneybag of a rich man who had passed out and fallen in a heap on the street. A few small, dirty, knife-carrying boys scuttled back and into a darker alley, and a dog in the sewage-filled gutter tore at an unrecognizable piece of meat with worm eggs on it.

These were Memphis’ poor in a city where even the rich cared little for basic cleanliness.

“Now,” said the priest, “we wish you to wait here.”

Jesus looked down at his fine linen robe, and the gold necklace the priest had put around his neck. The light fragrance of the nard drifted about his body like lotus petals floating in water around a pharaoh’s son. It announced its wearer as wealthy.

“I will be robbed, and possibly beaten,” he told the priest, “unless I remove these clothes.”

The priest shrugged. “You must wait here,” he ordered, “until we come and get you for the test. Do not leave this area.”

Jesus felt a mixture of anger at the priest for putting him in such expensive clothes, and sadness that the clothes would have to go. He began unfastening his gold necklace, to offer it to one of the beggars watching him greedily. He had thought of offering it to the little girl prostitute, but he knew that the beggars would take it from her anyway.

The priest put a hand on Jesus’ arm. “Wait, young sir.” He pulled Jesus over to a solid copper door in the side of a tall, windowless building. He opened the metal door and pulled Jesus inside. “You may stay here also,” the priest told him.

Jesus looked around. The large room was crowded with well-dressed people. Above them the walls stretched high and were covered from top to bottom with rich silks of red, green, and silvery grey. Tables of alabaster heaped with foods of every kind–pearl onions, sweet rice, river pheasant, fish, and fine wines and even little squares of braised baby camel steaks–stood pleasantly in the middle of the large room. The lights were low. Around the walls, large couches held richly-clothed men and women of the upper classes who were being served by black-skinned Nubian maids wearing transparent robes open down the front.

“We have an arrangement with the Pharaoh’s physician, who owns this palace,” the priest said. “We may let our students wait here before testing, as long as they are properly dressed.”

“I am better dressed, thanks to you, than most of these people,” Jesus said.

The priest nodded.

“I will not stay here,” Jesus told him. He turned and walked back out through the door.

The priest quickly followed him and shut the door. The beggars looked at the two men intently. The young prostitute was again dipping into the rich man’s moneybag. She kicked the dog when it accidentally backed into her. She kept turning her head fearfully toward the beggars who, she knew, might try to take from her whatever money she found on the rich man. One of the beggars glanced in her direction every few seconds, peering through the dark.

“I will wait for the test out here,” Jesus told the priest. “My place definitely is not with rich people such as those in that room. They are wasteful. With their bodies full of meat and their lust for their young slaves, they are less likely to have wisdom than these poor ones out here.” It was an instinctual decision, made after spending so much time in so many marketplaces in foreign countries.

He began unfastening his gold necklace again. He hoped one of the beggars would trade robes with him so he wouldn’t be left naked when he removed his own. He didn’t dare leave it on if he was to stay here by himself. He wondered if he could possibly give the little prostitute part of his chain from the necklace, leaving the rest for the beggars. He began walking toward them.

“Wait,” the priest said. “The test is over.”

“But you have not taken me to it,” Jesus said, looking over his shoulder at the torchlit face of the priest.

The priest shook his head. “This is the test. You have passed. We don’t want priests in the higher degrees who prefer riches and an easy life, over poor people. Get on your horse.”

“Long ago,” Jesus said, as he swung up onto the back of his small stallion, “you let almost every one of Egypt’s wealthy men go through all seven degrees.”

The priest grunted as his little mare began trotting. “Things change. It is much more difficult, now,” the priest said.

He swung his mare onto a main thoroughfare of Memphis. Jesus’ stallion followed. Soon the two men on their horses were galloping northward to the Great Pyramid, the temple of Egypt’s priests, with their robes flying behind them and the night wind flowing in their faces.

The next morning Jesus was taken to the high priest, who waited for him in the large stone reception hall. The tall wooden chairs lined up along the walls, and the throne chair with its carved serpent head and the beautifully colored wall hangings, were just as Jesus remembered them from before.

The white-haired high priest was, too. His heavy eyebrows drew down, his purple-and-white robe trailed to the ground, and his tall body rose as he stared intently at Jesus.

“The Messiah returns,” he said. “I welcome you.”

Jesus kneeled. “I greet you, Holy One.”

“Rise,” said the high priest. “Let us get past these formal greetings. You have come for your final degrees of initiation.”

Jesus nodded once as he stood.

The high priest smiled. “You are a man, now,” he said. “And already you have completed the fourth initiation before you arrived here.”

The priest folded his hands over the golden sun medallion hanging against his chest. “Your countryman John,” he continued, “has already passed all the degrees but one. Are you sure you can follow in his footsteps?”

“Yes, Holy One. For I have learned many things in the years I have been gone from here, and most of them cannot be studied in books.”

The priest stared deeply into Jesus’ eyes. “What have you learned?” he asked.

Jesus opened his mouth then shut it again. The priest was asking for more than just a list of skills. Jesus looked at the shining sun medallion half-hidden by the priest’s folded hands. “I have learned,” Jesus told him, “that God is one; and that he is everywhere.”

“Is he still your ‘Poppa,’ as you called him during your first test here?” The high priest looked with curiosity at Jesus.

The younger man nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?” the older man asked.

Jesus looked back into the high priest’s eyes quietly. “First,” he answered, “if I am to believe my mother and Judy, God truly is the force that caused my mother to conceive. I accept that fully.”

The priest closed his eyes slowly and opened them again.

“Second Jesus told him, “I feel close to God.”

“You have felt him within you,” the priest said. “You have been one with him.”

Jesus heard the complete silence all around them, except for an occasional rustle of their robes. “It is more than that,” he said. “When I was returning from India through the desert, and again on my way down here through the Negev sands, I felt my Poppa draw close to me.”

His eyes flashed at the priest, then became quiet again. “God walked with me,” Jesus continued, “in me and beside me, as a father walks pleasantly with his son. God is playful. He enjoyed my laughter. How can I explain this, Holy One? God got down on his hands and knees and let me ride him as if he were a play horse. He lifted me up in his arms and whirled me around. He wrestled with me in fun, and let me win.”

The high priest’s face drew together. He looked down. “At times,” he told Jesus, “in my deepest meditation, I have felt God in this way, too. But not often. Did he actually do these things with you physically, as some men claim is possible? Did he lift your body? These things have never happened to me in the body.”

Jesus shrugged. “It is hard to tell, Holy One. How can one know what is of the body and what is not, when one’s whole spirit is caught up in joy? A villager on the high plain in Persia once ran away from me yelling that I had risen a hand-span in the air. My Indian teacher, Kahjian, once told me such things happen.”

The high priest slowly shook his head and looked around the reception hall with its rows of chairs on either side. “I have heard,” he said, “that it is possible. But I have never met a person who claims he has done it.”

“I claim nothing,” Jesus said. “Not yet. Let me finish my tests of initiation here in the temple first. Then someday I will return to my homeland. The ancient books say that the Messiah will come with signs and miracles. If I am he, then surely it is my own people who will be shown these things.”

“You are still humble,” the high priest said. “Yet your doubts are worthy of you. What if, after all these things, you really are not the Messiah? For myself, the proof shall be in whether you can pass all seven degrees. No man or woman less than twice your age has ever passed all the true tests before. Surely only a Messiah can pass them at so young an age.”

“No,” Jesus said. “It is possible for others, too. I believe John will pass the seventh and final degree soon. I once thought he was the predicted one.”

The high priest smiled. “Your cousin insists he absolutely is not the Messiah. He claims he is only the Messiah’s Forerunner, if even that. Surely if he passes all, it really will be a miracle.”

“No,” Jesus said again. “John is perhaps one of the greatest men living on this earth. A man’s place in life is to break through all obstacles by force, to use his strength and will to overcome all in his path. John breaks down the doors of heaven itself to discover perfection, and in that he is more a man than I. My way is a quieter way. I sit, silently, and wait for the greater powers to work through me.”

The high priest nodded. “We shall see, Jesus. Do not fail us. Many of us already are getting used to your being the One whom the world has awaited. Now go and prepare yourself. You will have six weeks of fasting on fruits and green vegetables before your next test is to begin. Use that time well.”

Jesus kneeled on the floor of the reception room once more, and bowed. “It is good to be back again, Holy One.”

The priest lifted him off his knees. “If you do fail, Jesus of Israel, if ever that should happen, you will always have a home with us.”

He slowly walked with Jesus over the straw mats and through the sunlight slanting in through the deeply cut windows to the great stone doorway. They gripped each other’s forearms in friendship, and then Jesus went to his old, small stone room to begin his fasting.

Six weeks later Jesus weighed twenty pounds less and felt as if the desert winds would blow him away. A priest came to him at this time. The priest wore an emerald of healing, the standard badge of the physicians who taught in Heliopolis’ medical school. He was carrying a small, slender vase of white alabaster through which the sun was shining.

The priest looked around the garden where Jesus was sitting. The sun was shining brightly, and bees were buzzing in and out of yellow and red flowers with long, bell-shaped petals.

The priest was old and sturdy. Bushy grey hair sprouted from his temples. “How are you feeling, my son?” he asked.

“I am well, sir.” Jesus watched him politely.

“These fasts are tricky things,” the priest said. “We like to keep an eye on anyone who is on one.”

“I am sleeping very little,” Jesus told him, “and sometimes I am too restless to sit still. Other than that, I feel better than normal.”

“Good! Good! Well, today I have come to give you a medicine. It is not an ordinary medicine. It is composed of Syrian rue and of bark from what the black race far inland call the iboga.”

Jesus’ eyes grew wide. “I don’t know the iboga, but rue of Syria is poison!”

The old man nodded gently. “In smaller amounts,” he told Jesus, “it will not kill but only confuse the senses. That is its purpose. Once we have determined it is affecting you, you will be taken deep inside the Pyramid for your next text. Your hands and feet will be bound by iron chains, and you will be put in a hall without light, where we keep wild animals for this purpose. We wish to test your courage.”

“What kind of animals?” Jesus asked, already feeling uneasy.

The old man nodded. “Desert jackals. Wolves. Some lions from the deserts by Mount Sinai and snakes from the marshes of the Nile River delta. I believe they also keep several classifications of bats down there, and other things.”

Jesus closed his eyes and felt the warm sun on his face. He made himself breathe. “Name the effects of this rue and iboga mixture on a man,” he told the physician priest.

“No.” The older man shook his head. “That might make it easier for you. But I can say this. No man or woman who has taken it under our supervision has died.”

“How is failure determined in this test!” Jesus asked.

“By losing your mind. Screaming, convulsions, frothing at the mouth, and other such signs as these require that we must pull you out immediately. But don’t worry. We calculate our initiates well, beforehand. No one has lost his mind permanently from this. All come back eventually, after several weeks at the most. The number of failures is one out of every two initiates for the test itself, and if you fail, you may try two more times.”

Jesus steadied himself by looking around the quiet green garden for several minutes. Then he held out his hand.

The physician priest gave him the alabaster vase. “All of it,” the old man said.

Jesus drank it down.

“I will return in an hour,” the priest said, bowing, and left.

Jesus sat and waited for the medicine to take effect. At first he noticed a slight numbing of his fingers and toes, and gradually, as the minutes passed, he grew sleepy. His awareness of his body seemed to be increasing even as a great tiredness made him feel he didn’t want to move for days.

Soon he closed his eyes, for the heat and light of the sun streaming into the garden were becoming much too great. The bench on which he sat felt like it was pressing deeply into his thighs. He slowly stood up and stumbled as if in a trance to a pile of soft leaves. He noticed a stirring and strengthening in his loins, a thing that normally he was accustomed to controlling by breathing in ways Kahjian had taught him. This time he felt too tired to care. He ignored it.

The old priest returned. Jesus heard him as if every step the priest took down the garden path was a huge crackling and snapping of bushes. Jesus didn’t look up. By this time the sunlight was so painful that he had covered his eyes with his hand.

“Tell me what you are feeling,” the priest quietly said.

Jesus felt the man’s voice tear loudly into his head. In a slow, sleepy whisper he described what was happening to him.

“It is enough,” the priest said. “Rise slowly and take my hand. I will guide you to the deep hall.”

They went down endless stairs and ramps. The priest stopped at one point and blindfolded Jesus. It was hardly needed. Jesus kept his eyes tightly closed because of the light from the flaming torch the old man carried. Even through the blindfold, the flame was too bright. When they finally stopped, Jesus felt the iron chains being placed on his wrists and ankles. The chains were cold on his skin. He shivered. His oversensitive ears picked up the sound of many small bodies whishing through the air. From a distance he thought he heard a big cat growl.

“You are in the hall,” the old man said. “We aren’t cruel. This is necessary because a priest of the higher orders must sometimes face much worse than this.”

“Are the animals loose?” Jesus whispered.

“They are nearby.” The man’s voice was further away. “I go to let them in by another door, now.”

Jesus nodded.

“Remove the blindfold when I am gone, if you wish,” called the priest. “May the angels be with you.”

All light disappeared as he shut the door.

Jesus slowly and tiredly sat down on the cold stone floor. He raised his hands to his blindfold and dragged it up from his eyes.

He could see almost nothing. A faint phosphorescent glow seemed to be coming from the nearby stone walls, but further away it disappeared into empty darkness.

A shape flew by him, rustling his hair and giving off a high, sharp squeak. The sound pierced the very center of his head, and he winced.

He heard a distant door opening, and the soft pad of feet on rock. His stomach lurched. The lions, and whatever else there was, were loose.

He bent his head and prayed, slowly and unevenly, and he considered doing breathing control to get his sluggish body moving. But it was just too much trouble.

A face loomed shadow-like out of the darkness. He dimly saw whiskers and a golden cat face before it silently disappeared.

Something nearby on the floor, a shadow perhaps–no, a snake–was slowly inching along. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the shape was gone.

Then the noises started. A great braying laugh suddenly tore through the very air he was breathing, sending his senses reeling. The bray was answered by a fierce growl like an interrupted deep cough. The padding sounds of feet around him were much louder.

He began to shake.

Willing himself with all his strength to break through his deep, motionless weariness, he concentrated on his whole chest and forced it to draw in deeper breaths. He centered his awareness on the middle of his chest, as he had learned in his first test long ago, and waited.

His eyes suddenly saw a circle of vague, furry shapes surrounding him and watching him from unlit, night-black eyes. He jerked in fear and surprise. The shapes moved back into the darkness.

He leaned back again, and felt a furry side bump him from behind.

He stood up. In spite of what the priest had told him, he was almost sure he was about to die, if not from the poison in his body, then from being mangled by wild beasts.

He took a huge breath, held it, and took another. He felt the effects of the poison battling to draw him down into drowsy tiredness again. He fought the drowsiness, kept breathing deeply, and concentrated all of his slowly awakening awareness on the parts of his body that felt numbest or most tired.

He noticed that the numbness in his fingers and toes went away some. He concentrated harder. He felt his blood pounding in his arms and legs, and he imagined the poison streaming through his body. The poison seemed to have a hard, round shape and was cutting into the flesh within him. He lashed out at one stream of poison with his concentration, and he saw it break apart into a smoother, more watery substance. He lashed out, in his mind, again. More poison broke apart. He felt a lessening of his tiredness throughout his body. Quickly, before he could wonder if he had imagined it, he lashed out again in a fury of concentrated willpower. The force of his concentration was so great that he suddenly found himself tumbling, in his mind, into a great, purple, dark-light Awareness far greater than his own. He rested in the center of It, overwhelmed by it, until many minutes later he began thinking thoughts once again.

His first thought was, “I am free.”

He felt the constricting tightness of the chains around his wrists and ankles. But now the chains felt like damp cords or reeds. He parted his wrists. The chains were only reeds after all Effortlessly the reeds popped. He did the same with his ankles.

Carefully he flexed his hands and arms. He felt able to move again. The effects of the poison had gone. He moved his legs and bumped into the furry hide behind him. He turned and faced it, put his hands out to it. It was some kind of wood structure with a lion’s skin tied on.

In a fury of anger at himself for being so easily frightened, he whipped his hands into the air and held them out before him, two hand spans apart and palms facing inward. Kahjian once had told him that some yoga masters knew how to create a fire in the air between their hands. Jesus wanted light now. His anger and will lashed out at the air between his hands and made lines of force appear, visibly, stretching from palm to palm. The lines glowed, came together, and flared into an unearthly yellow brightness.

Suddenly all the strange growls and animal cries in the dark hall stopped. A bat, visible in the light, flew by. In the dim far end of the hall, Jesus saw three sitting priests caught in strange poses with their hands cupped around their mouths. Two of them were looking at his hands in awe. The third, too embarrassed even to notice the strange source of the light, stared sheepishly at his face.

Surprised, Jesus dropped his hands. The light went out. Who are you?” he asked in the dark.

He heard one of the priests clear his throat. “Aren’t you still affected by the poison?” the priest asked from the distance. In the dark he was just a voice.

“It is gone,” Jesus answered.

“Then it is time for you to go, too,” said the voice. “Where did you get that light?”

“It does not matter,” Jesus said. “Who are you?”

“We are the lions,” said a higher-pitched voice, “and the jackals.”

“Take me out of here,” Jesus told them.

One of the priests grumbled and lit a torch. The light flared up. He carried it forward until he was peering into Jesus’ face.

“Why aren’t you still feeling the poison?” he asked.

Jesus drew his eyebrows down. “What,” he demanded of the priest, “is the main effect of your poison?”

“It creates illusions. Imaginary things, especially those which have been suggested to you.”

Jesus reached out and firmly took the torch. His eyes were still slightly sensitive to its flame.

“come,” he said. he took a deep breath. “I am tired of your illusions!”

He shook his head. “You priests are so full of tricks that you make even God seem an imagined trick of the mind.”

“Each of us has passed this very same test!” the priest protested. His cheeks flushed. “There is a purpose to every test we give!”

Jesus sighed. “Yes. I realize that. Thank God you do not give them to people who don’t want them. Even the Romans don’t have such excellent methods of torture.”

The priest nodded. “We select people carefully,” he agreed. “Now, if you are ready, shall we go up?” He held out his hand for the torch. With his other arm he beckoned to the doorway Jesus had come in by. It was still half open.

Jesus handed the man the torch. They walked up several ramps and stairs, stirring up dust that would have made him sneeze if he hadn’t been so angry. Some minutes later, after what seemed like miles of dark tunnels, they burst out into the sunlight once again.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.