The Sensual Chemist
Andrew Sudell Davis
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Andrew Sudell Davis
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Don't Give Me That Shit
Christianity was abolished in 1998. I regarded its final demise as with a mixture of nostalgia and amusement as I was surprised that they managed to make the brand last so long. Now, I never laid claim to be the Son of God. Please let me be very clear about this. I have been very badly misrepresented on this subject over the past 2000 years or so. I never said that I was the Son of God.
What I did say was that I was a son of God. That I was one of God’s children – like we all are God’s children. It was a plea for unity, a plea for universal brotherhood. I was trying to say that my fellow man – all of you – are my siblings. I was trying to tell them something simple. I was trying to tell them something obvious. What I was trying to say, in my own lumpen way, was something that is naturally unpalatable to those involved in organised religions – that there is no us and them – that there are no infidels, no gentiles or no ‘nons’ as Christians are so fond of calling others, that we are all one people. In the west, in the 21st century, it is unacceptable to belong to a group that discriminates against people on the grounds of the colour of their skin. But for some reason, it is OK to discriminate on the grounds of religion. To ‘celebrate the difference’. And sadly, I feel that I am partially to blame for this deeply shameful and repellent situation.
My message got garbled somewhere down the line. The wolves took it one way – King of the Jews – and the sheep took it another. I was doomed from the beginning. I was doomed to be either a minor populist agitator – a tiny thorn in the large, tough side of the establishment – fit only for humiliation, death and obscurity, or otherwise I had to be the person who was going to miraculously transform the world into a better place. In the end history, and those with vested interests, chose the latter role for me. Either way it did not matter – I was a failure as one and I would have been a failure as the other. They distorted what I said and spread their lies far throughout the world.
As Jesus the Carpenter I was a competent craftsman and a reasonably good shit-stirrer. I admit that much – I did not think the world was right and I did so like to cause trouble at public meetings. I was a big, strong and fit young man (not the noble weakling favoured by church images across the globe) and I could get away with speaking my mind on most subjects. Few people would dare to contradict me, or if they did they’d end up with a bloody nose for their trouble. In markets and synagogues my smug voice boomed out above all others, and, egged on by my mates and loosened by more wine than was good for me, I would say the most offensive things. I accused the priests of conniving with the Romans, I accused the women of undermining the men, and I accused the market traders of fleecing all in sight.
Poor bloody market traders – they bore the brunt of my wrath. I disliked them automatically. I disliked them because they did not actually make things like I did, because they weren’t wise and learned like the apothecaries, because they weren’t beautiful and hard-working like the women and they were not strong and fearless like the Roman soldiers. They were just there. Lazy parasites, taking my hard earned cash for bread and wine, skimming off a profit from my basic needs. Lazy, weak, stupid and – given half a chance – dishonest. Did you ever hear of a poor trader? When business is brisk, they make money, when business is slow or goods are in short supply, they put up the prices. Have you ever noticed how the price of cooled wine doubles in a heatwave?
But Jesus the Carpenter – popular with the women, viewed with suspicion by the authorities and downright unpopular amongst the barrow boys – was all there was to me. They all called me a carpenter, but I liked to think of myself as more of a skilled craftsman. A designer rather than a mere chippy. I could make you a beautiful turned table (at a fair price) as well as hang all the doors and shutters in your house. I liked wine and I liked women and I liked the sound of my own voice, but that was the depth of me. I held vaguely nationalist sentiments, but knew only too well that over half my work came from the Romans. And they always paid up on time without trying to haggle over the last penny.
Yes, I must admit that I was religious, in the broadest sense of the word. I believed in the one and only Hebrew God; indeed, I also worshipped the major Roman gods, just to be on the safe side – that’s how religious I was. I know it’s the coward’s view of things but, as people say, I thought there was something out there, I just wasn’t sure what. Of course, I believed in an afterlife, but then we all did. It was a given. I had no idea that the world was a spinning ball of rock, or that the stars were other suns – I knew nothing of all that. The idea of an afterlife was just a fact of life, a thing which no one doubted – what people doubted was which version of life after death was going to come true. Elysian fields or Jehovah’s Kingdom when your time had come? The thing that never crossed my mind was reincarnation – life was strictly onwards and upwards in my book.
I used to talk a lot about truth and peace and justice. I was angered by official hypocrisy and bureaucracy – especially when drunk. Judges, priests and tax collectors were held in equal scorn alongside traders, after a sack of wine. But I never felt that I was on a mission from God. That was a role that they forced on to me. That was their idea, their wish-fulfilment, not mine. They made a place for me and I filled it. Quite willingly. At first, I even enjoyed the attention. But I never experienced any divine inspiration; anything I said came straight from me.
So I did believe in an afterlife, and although I did not know which version was the right one, that was what I had expected. I thought that my life here on earth was just the beginning of a greater journey, the setting off point for a long voyage of exploration amongst celestial figures. The truth turned out to be very different. Nothing in my culture had prepared me for the drudgery and horrors of the endless cycle of life.
And although death held no terrors for me when it was a dim and distant object on the horizon, something years away in the future, my casual, even optimistic attitude began to fade as it looked more and more likely that it was going to be leaving this world (as I thought) sooner rather than later. The ultimate legal sanction was not a thing that I embraced happily. It is a popular modern notion that if you live in a society where death is a common occurrence (high infant mortality, disease, war), that you as an individual are somehow used to it and immune to any feelings of disquiet over your own end. Not so. Like young people who talk about wanting to die before they get old, when you get to 88 years old another six months of life are just as precious as they were when you were twenty. Maybe even more so if you take the attitude that you got this far. And even those who steadfastly claim to believe in a heaven still take great umbridge at the prospect of their own death. The excuse is usually that it is ‘too soon’. If the idea of heaven is that it really as great as it is meant to be, why do they want to cling on to a few more years of this shitty existence down here? I thought it compared unfavourably.
Don’t you think that even the suicide bomber, in that last second before she presses the button, suddenly realises that it is a mistake? Does she realise that she is only doing it to please some other, less gullible and less soon-to-be-dead older people who are at that very moment sitting comfortably at home, sipping tea and listening to the radio for news of the latest atrocity. If it is such glory, why don’t they take up the challenge? How many Japanese Wing Commanders decided to personally fly their planes into American war ships? Does a spectacular suicide mission for your cause become less valid once you are over 25 – it certainly looks that way. Why don’t the leaders lead by example?
Anyhow, it became clear to me that I was being set up for my own suicide mission in the name of Jewish unity and the Messiah. Not something I relished, or even possibly believed in. I was to become the catalyst that brought the chosen people out of colonialism and back up where they belonged – at the top of the world.
An unstoppable combination of the authorities looking to set a high-profile example, the religious nationalists looking for a convincing martyr and my own big, wine-driven mouth was enough to seal my fate. I was swept along by the speed and the strength of public and official opinion. As someone who was used to being well able to defend his corner, both verbally and with the fist, it came as a shock to be faced by such organised and entrenched forces. The pressure that the zealots put me under to be their new god was intense and like nothing that I had ever experienced before. I was used to lording it over my mates in the tavern, taking the piss out the traders in the market and generally assuming the position of top dog due to the volume of my voice, the speed of my wit and my sheer physical presence.
Of course, it did bring me into conflict with all sorts of people, and I didn’t always come out of it the best – but I think that was part of my appeal. I was the de facto leader of my gang of drinking companions, and they had never seen me walk away from a fight, even if I was set to get a drubbing. But they admired me for it. If they had problems, they would ask my advice, if they were in trouble they would come to me for practical help. And in return, all they had to do was laugh at my jokes, buy me more wine, back me up in a fight and most importantly act like to cowardly toadies that they undoubtedly were. They came from all walks of life – fishermen, builders, stall holders, even a clerk from the tax office and a couple of legionnaires who had been stationed in Palestine for so long that they considered themselves local, even though they were born north of the Rhine. Some of the guys even worked for me on a casual basis. The thing that they had in common was that they all liked a drink, enjoyed gambling at backgammon and dominoes, and were prone to chasing women given half the chance. And like me, most of them were unmarried.
My new friends, the religious nationalists, seemed to come from nowhere. They didn’t all turn up at once, and I already knew some of them from the various watering holes around town. They were familiar faces, working men who mixed easily with my less motivated contemporaries. But they had a certain steel about them, carried their convictions earnestly. At first I dismissed them, considering them to be merely the latest in a long list of holier-than-thou do-gooders who were always blowing in from the east or stepping off trading ships from Rome or Greece. But these blokes were convincing, realistic, honest, hard-working men, not mystic, head-in-the-clouds dreamers. They were not cowards. They would argue with me if they thought I was wrong, ignoring the barracking that my more dog-like companions would heap upon them in their attempts to back me up. But their arguments never became reduced to mere personal abuse, and they cleverly managed to avoid our discussions breaking out into pure physical violence. Although they were working men, they were intelligent, thoughtful and articulate. My new friends would always listen to my side of the debate, carefully and considerately, and would often change their minds if they thought that what I was saying made more sense than their ideas.
It was actually quite exhilarating. Until they came along, I was used to the two extremes. Either out-and-out, head-to-head confrontation with the priests or tax men who would not stop to listen to what I had to say, and which often resulted in violence and occasionally arrest, or the gutless fawning of my wine consuming cronies and hangers on. It made a change to engage in real debate, and to be able to win on the strength of my ideas alone, rather than using muscle or relying on sycophancy for a result. It was good – they made me feel like an ancient Greek philosopher. One by one these new friends replaced my older ones. Not in a noticeable way – we were always an itinerant crew, meeting up as and when in the inns across town, new drinkers always welcome, old ones going away or just moving to another part of the bar. I had a hard core of mates who always stuck with me, but even they drifted – off to Rome to join the army, moving into new fishing ventures further up the coast (the lure of new boats and new nets). And after a while I noticed that my drinking circle now comprised more of the religious right wingers than it did my old, non-thinking mates…
The turning point came when Anthony, another carpenter (but not as highly skilled or painstaking as me) stopped sitting with me at the Bunch of Grapes. He was one of my oldest friends, one of my faithful retainers. We had a lot in common, our families knew each other (two of our cousins were married) and we both worked in the trade. One evening, he came in, got his bottle and went and sat in the other corner with the Phoenician brothers, Andrew and Michael, and their crowd. We called them the Phoenicians, but in fact they were born and bred in Palestine, and it was their parents who had come and settled, building up a sizeable fishing fleet. Whereas their father was a shrewd and resourceful businessman, his two sons had inherited none of his qualities. Spoilt as children, and grudging workers in the family business, they preferred to spend their spare time drinking and womanising in the bars. My kind of people you might think. But there was some bad blood between us. It was nothing serious, not enough to stop us drinking in the same tavern, just enough to make us sit at opposite ends of the room. I thought that they were arrogant, moneyed brats (correct); they thought that I was a self-opinionated bully and a boor (correct).
When their father died, they took over the business and it slowly began to go downhill from there – they were not willing to put in the time, mending nets and maintaining the boats. They left that to their disinterested hired hands to do. They ignored the advice of their mother, foolishly dismissing her as a feeble old crone, and retreated to the relative delights of the Bunch of Grapes. Here their inherited shekels ensured that they always received a warm welcome from the barman, any available women and their own ready-made bunch of cronies. So they sat at one end of the room, and, whenever I was in, I sat at the other. It never came to blows, and we would acknowledge each other with respect if we met in the latrines, but everyone knew that there was no love lost between the Phoenician brothers and Jesus the carpenter.
So I was a bit pissed off when Anthony walked in and sat with them as if they had been best friends all their lives. He just came right in and sat right down with them without even looking in my direction. It didn’t mean that much to me – I had other friends and I was on a winning streak at backgammon that evening. I had just completed a contract to supply and fit all the doors in the refurbished revenue offices in town, so I was flush with money and awash with wine. But as the evening wore on, and I drank more than I should have, it began to rankle, eating away at me like a bad dream. I could not see what I had done to upset Anthony in this way. It was not so much the sitting with the Phoenician brothers that hurt me (although why anyone would want to share an evening with those fat little piggies was beyond me), but the fact that he completely ignored me. I mean, be a complete bastard by all means, but at least have the grace to let me know that you are doing it and, more importantly, let me know why. By the time it was dark and I was on my third bottle, I followed Anthony round the back when he next went to the latrines.
I greeted him and we both stood in uncomfortable silence as we urinated in unison into the foetid pit below. As he turned to go, I grabbed him by the shoulder and, in my drunken and graceless way, swung him back round and demanded to know what he was doing. I winced as I saw the fear in his eyes – he obviously thought that I was going to push him into the cesspool – something that I had done to others before. But not this time – I just wanted to know what he was playing at. After a few feeble explanations, and some visible cues to my rapidly rising ire (shouting, jabbing forefinger, unblinking stare) it all came out.
‘Jesus
mate, it’s not me, it’s you who’s changed!’ Anthony could
barely contain his contempt for me, because although he was scared of
me, he was also drunk:
‘It used to be a laugh drinking
with you, playing games and winding people up. We had some good
times. But look at you now – with all you new activist friends,
it’s like Plato’s bloody Academy in there. You can’t say
anything without them jumping down your throat and correcting you.
They think that they are all so bloody clever. It used to be fun, but
now it’s just like going to a sermon or a philosophy lecture. And
you go along with it all – they butter you up and you love it. You
fall for it every time. Jesus, they are using you, they aren’t your
friends, they just moved in on you because you’ve got a reputation.
They aren’t your real friends. You haven’t got any real friends
left – they’ve all left and you haven’t even noticed.’
For once I was silent. Anthony gave me a look of disgust and went back inside. I stood in the dark for a few minutes, not knowing what to think. It was true of course – what Anthony had said was true. But I was finding my old friends dull and unexciting. Their interests never really went any further than the bottom of a wine bottle or the width of a domino table. If you couldn’t drink it, fuck it or bet on it, they weren’t really interested. Their enjoyment of my arguments with the authorities (or rather, the authority figures) was that of a child laughing at the comic king having his nose tweaked by the jester. They were not concerned with the argument, they probably did not understand what it was about anyway; what they relished was the fight, the thumbing of the nose, the two fingers up at the establishment. They enjoyed seeing the all-powerful priests being made to look stupid and being powerless to fight back. They laughed the laughter of the oppressed as their superiors huffed and puffed and failed to come up with a convincing riposte or even a suitably stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks threat.
I was their champion, tilting at the people that they really despised but were too scared to name. I was their buffoon, their town square trouble-maker – but that was all that they wanted from me. When your clown takes himself too seriously, when he actually wants you to listen to what he has to say, that’s when his public desert him. That’s when the others move in. Most people want entertainment, not education. Anthony complained that it had become like a philosophy lecture, but I liked that, that was what I wanted. It had become more serious; it had become political, and I had been drawn into the whole charade without realising it. I felt that I was at a crossroads – I could leave the activists behind, go back to my drunken friends, take solace in their undemanding and mundane company and regret it for the rest of my life. Or I could continue down the path that the activists – my disciples, they had started calling themselves – had seemed to already have mapped out for me.
I know, I know, it’s a fool who believes his own propaganda. But having eight strong, resourceful, intelligent men tell you that you, a humble carpenter, are their leader of choice is a powerful drug. The said that they had been looking for someone like me for years, that they had scoured the eastern Mediterranean in their search for a man worthy to carry their cause. They had had many false starts, many dead ends and many false prophets, but at long last they had found me. I was the one.
It felt good to me. But they exploited my weaknesses.
No one can explain away insanity. You can describe it, and you can guess at the events or circumstances that trigger it off. We all recognise it. You can categorise it, you can name it – or at least bundle the symptoms together and name them; depression, nervous breakdown, stress-related illness. You can even treat insanity with varying degrees of success. This success may range from the cheery ‘full recovery’, through the ambivalent ‘much better and coming back to work sometime soon’ to the tactful ‘responding to treatment’. But it can often depend on where you were starting from in the first place. If you were mad before your breakdown, there’s every chance that you will be mad when you eventually crawl your way out the other side. It’s not like a broken leg, where we all agree what it looked like before the accident, and can mostly agree what it should look like once the doctors have finished doing their stuff. It’s not even like plastic surgery where there’s a clear aim in mind, even if the affected part will never actually look or work like it once did. At least you have got something to aim for.
But the problem with losing your mind is that no one can say what it was like in the first place. Your friends, relatives and colleagues might have their own idea of what you are like as a person, but that is only their own individual perception. Unless you happen to have one hugely noticeable and dominant characteristic – like say you were so overtly aggressive that it blotted out any other redeeming features – the chances are that ten different people would describe you in ten different ways. Your spouse might say that you were kind, your children could say strict, your mother would say lovely and your workmates might individually call you lazy, short-tempered, intelligent, perceptive, arrogant, a great laugh and lacking in confidence. And they might each all be right. Or, of course, they could all be wrong because only you know what sort of person you are. Well don’t you? No, I suppose not. Are you confident, are you musical, do you have a great sense of humour? Try writng your own lonely hearts advert and you will soon find out what a featureless landscape your mind is.
Maybe the best that you can do is list all your measurable, verifiable skills and massage them all together into one sort of composite personality that then becomes you (or you become it). I am cool and calculating enough to keep a straight face and win at cards; I am emotional and caring enough to remember all my relatives’ birthdays and to go to great lengths to buy them thoughtful and appropriate gifts; I do enjoy wild karaoke parties where I am the centre of attention; I am an aggressive and proud car driver who feels constantly challenged by people in inferior motors, and who then feels the need to compete, despite pleading from my wife and children to stop…
But that still doesn’t say who I am. You can spend your lifetime filling in Cosmo quizzes, but it will only tell you more about the person that set the questions than about yourself. Do you love your mother? Are you happier now than when you were 16? If you could live your life again what would you change?
When your mind is broken, and you don’t know why, it can be as enjoyable and relaxing as trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture, using pieces from many different sets, naked in a room full of scorpions. You only have a vague idea of what you are trying to do, it is not possible anyway, and you have the strong feeling that you shouldn’t even be there anyway.
It happened to me when I left my usual friends, turned my back on my family and only saw my disciples, as they now all nominated themselves. It happened to me when I stopped drinking every night (but then went on three-day binges every so often to compensate). It happened to me when I gave up my work and gave all the tools of my trade away (mostly to my one time friend Anthony). It happened to me when I began to believe that I was an angel, sent down to this world to perform miracles. I think that I stopped eating, or at least ate very little. I burned a lot of incense and lived off of bread and wine. My ever-present and brooding anger disappeared and was replaced by joy and hope. Whereas I once railed against people and things, I now had answers and felt that I could tackle anything. With my disciples in tow, I was ready to take on the world. I do not think that they were ready for this, the new Jesus. At first they looked at me with astonishment and credulity. They even tried to calm me down, to change me, to make me drink too much wine again; but I was too strong for them. Some of them left our meetings and went elsewhere. Others stayed on and witnessed my transformation. They even began to understand and like the new me. Those who did stay realised that what I said and what I did was the truth, and they spread the word to others who were eager to come and join us.
We had suddenly come to see what our purpose was. They looked for me and, at long last, they found me. I remember very little from this period, except that it was rich with love and laughter and tears. Jesus the Carpenter had become Jesus the Prophet.
But, of course, I was not happy. It felt as if my mind and body had been taken over by someone else, and all I could do was sit back and watch as events unfolded before my eyes. My friends took me places and I did things and tried to heal people and feed people, although I myself did not feel too well, and ate very little. If things were not going the way they planned them, I remember them making the miracles happen themselves. But I was grateful for that – the mob that followed us around in those days had such high expectations of me, that I thought that if I could not come up with the goods and satisfy their craving for supernatural happenings they would turn on us and lynch me. Indeed, often in many villages where they took me, the people were sceptical and aggressive from the start. My disciples (now numbering nearly 30) had to act as bodyguards, keeping between myself and the crowds, looking out for trouble. The occasional egg or even stone would come flying my way, and I was much too out of it to notice or even care. More than once I received cuts and bruises, courtesy of my unruly audience. It was as if they did not quite have the courage to believe in me, but at the same time, they did not have the courage to not believe in me and keep well away. So instead, I was faced with this seething mass of scared and gullible non-believers who were almost daring me to put a foot wrong. Whilst this was obviously good for business, the stakes were high, and even higher if you factored in the additional problem of my closest supporters nearly getting caught in the act of using more earthly methods of making miracles happen.
The blind and the maim were often brought in from outside of town, bribed and threatened in equal measure not to reveal their previously unblemished health record. At first I tried to stop this nonsense, but I was too weak to stop them. My disciples were willing to go to any lengths, take any risks, to promote my cause. I had little say in the matter. I was the figurehead, they were the executive.
Of course, there were benefits to this system, beyond saving my skin when the crowd turned nasty. It put people in the mood for the supernatural. I think that maybe it was even the cause of it – like the trick of smiling to make yourself happy. But still, when my first inexplicable miracle happened, it made me, my disciples and the audience sit up and take notice. A distraught mother brought her sickly child to my feet out on a homestead on the West Bank. I reeled off my usual mantra about suffering and injustice, and put a very strong emphasis on suffering in this world being made better in the next. This boy looked as if he had spent his life with crooked legs, and his mother, who had recently been widowed, was a picture of desperation and hope. It was obvious that she wasn’t one of my helpers’ plants. She had burst through their protective ring and pushed her child towards me, insisting that I help them, as they would surely starve if I did nothing. The boy, Jacob, was apparently 12 years old, but looked much younger, malnourished and weak. There was no way that he was ever going to walk again.
I was half way through my speech, when he suddenly turned, stood up, and walked across the stage! The look of astonishment on my face must have mirrored that of my disciples, and I could see them mouthing their disbelief to each other across the crowd, trying to work out where this one had come from. The audience went crazy, the mother burst into tears and clung to me. Jacob walked back to his mother, grinning wildly. Why this apparently seriously ill child could suddenly walk was beyond me, but I witnessed it myself, and was happy for him and his mother. She was so grateful that she spent the rest of the night with me.
But the most overwhelming effect was on the audience. For over an hour they produced cripple after cripple, blind child after blind child, each of who appeared to be miraculously healed after simply coming up on the stage with me. I wasn’t even doing anything – it had got beyond that. It was a mad scramble for the front as I rather ineffectually touched heads and muttered nostrums. But it worked – something worked. I healed more people on that one day than in the preceding month. It was as if I had reached a watershed. My disciples were trying to maintain order without much success. My celebrity had extended beyond their organisational skills – all they could do was sit back and watch.
From that day on, people believed in me and took it for granted that I was going to perform miracles. As far as they were concerned, miracles were going to be performed on those days whether I had anything to do with it or not. They were performing their own miracles. I have never seen so many sick and disabled people curing themselves en masse. I just stood there and they made themselves better. My disciples made sure that I got the credit, but I knew the truth. You could say that it was my presence which allowed these people to will themselves back to good health, but, if I was honest with myself, I thought that they were doing it for themselves. I knew they were.
The only person that it seemed I could not heal was, of course, me. As the whole juggernaut rolled on, I felt more and more like the fraud that I was now beginning to think that I was. The more my disciples told me that yes, I really was curing the sick and making supernatural events happen, the more I knew that I was nothing to do with it, and the more convinced I became that they were going to find me out. That was when I was sober. I now seemed to have more drink and more drinking time than I ever had. When they took me to a new village, they would always ensure that there was a plentiful supply of cooled wine available. And none of your rubbish either – decent Roman or Greek vintages, none of your local Palestinian brews. We would turn up, walking the last mile or so for the ‘man of the people’ effect, and immediately find somewhere to eat and drink. This would go on until a suitably large crowd had gathered, and then we would go into the act. If I was lucky I would remember my lines fairly coherently, and the people gathered there would do the rest. On slow days, my men would have to be on hand to do some encouraging. Either way, I would reach my trance like state and the people would be happy. My disciples would broadcast their ideas on the back of my performance, and we would have a few more converts for the cause.
What the cause was, I was not sure. The more people who joined us, the more I thought we were being infiltrated and diluted. I began to restrict the number of people who I would speak personally to. Every new stranger I would suspect of being a Roman spy. The main purpose of my existence had become to generate more money to buy wine and lodgings and to carry on generating more money. And the more popular we became, the worse I felt about the whole charade. I saw Roman spies everywhere. In my ignorance and blindness I became convinced that I was going to meet my fate at the hands of a Roman. I would wake up in the night, screaming and sweating, convinced that they were coming to get me.
As ever, I was wrong. It was our own people who were to let us down – the Romans were simply the back-up in a piece of vicious local in-fighting. In retrospect it became very clear, but at the time, all was confusion. The picture painted of me, years later, as someone who fully understood what was going on and calmly accepted my fate, was a work of pure fiction. It was fiction generated by those who were not there at the time and who wanted to use my name to further their own political aims. If I was really as in control as they made me out to be, do you think I would have let that happen to me. Drunk, yes; mad, maybe – but stupid? No.
I had been drunk for over a week, at least seven days on the trot, meeting people, healing people, feeding people. Our constituency was the poor, and they were very grateful for it. Never in living memory had any group of zealots combined religious fervour with practical help for the needy; political answers to a stalemate with the promise of redemption for the wealthy – and made money out of it. It was the perfect system, nearly everybody was happy. My disciples were happy because things were moving forwards, and they were becoming more influential. The people were happy because we gave them food and healing and entertainment and a message of hope for the future. The Romans were happy because, despite my paranoia, their pantheistic view of the world always underestimated the strength of religious movements. They regarded religions as little more than a pick and mix approach to life, and we represented some sort of benign stability in a bread and circuses sort of way. The only unhappy parties were myself and the Jewish establishment. And the two of us were set to clash sooner rather than later, despite the best efforts of my disciples.
Ignore what it says in the Western Christian Revisionist Bible – it is a tissue of lies from start to finish. Not only does it misrepresent history as it happened, it also obscures the bigger, more broadly-painted truths. I laugh at the medieval arguments of Henry VIII and Thomas More – Leviticus says this but Deuteronomy says something else. It’s like school children arguing about whether Blur or Oasis produced the best music the world has ever known.
Like I said, I had been living on wine alone for days and days, surrounded by the sick and needy, followed wherever I went. I was beyond drunk and into the dreamlike state where you can get from point A to point B without apparently having to involve walking. I felt that I was constantly awake and constantly in the company of someone. If I did sleep I was not aware of it, although I was vaguely aware of long periods of time being absent from my memory. I had lost track of time in the detailed sense – but I could still distinguish between night and day if I could be bothered to leave my tent. Generally people came to me. But there were people with me wherever I went, I was even accompanied to the latrines. I think that they were afraid of my falling in. However long this went on for, and whoever the people with me were, I think that at some point it all became too much. I must have reached saturation point in every respect. I say I think that this was the case – I cannot actually tell as I do not actually recall. It is largely guesswork on my behalf, and I do not think that my compatriots had a clue as to what was going on in my mind. I suspect that they were too busy looking after themselves to be concerned with me.
I must have decided to make a move at some point. I do remember walking through the street in the darkness and being guided back to the tent by Judas and Peter. I do remember swearing at them and lashing out and hitting one of them – I don’t remember who, but I do remember there being a lot of blood. I think I fell over and went to sleep maybe. But then the next thing I was on my own in the dark again, and I just kept on walking, staggering, into the dark. The only feeling that I had was a strong urge to get away from everyone, and that was what drove me, shoeless, into the darkness. It felt as if I walked for hours. I could hear wolves crying in the distance, and the land was wilder and scrubbier. Wherever I was heading, it was away from the civilised farmland of my home and out into the wilds of the desert. It was cold – I could see my breath by the moonlight – but I was numb. I saw pale blue light emerging over the silhouette of the mountains in the distance. Descending a steep incline down to a dried out riverbed, I stumbled over rocks and woody plants and fell. Blackness.
The sun burnt my face when I opened my eyes. Strong arms lifted me up and marched me across the rough ground. My head spun and I felt sick. I was sick. The Roman soldiers ignored this and kept on marching me towards the intense sunlight. My friends were nowhere to be seen. I did not know where I was. When I asked the soldiers what they were doing, they answered me in a language I did not understand. They had no understanding of Hebrew, Latin, Armenian, or Greek. They were obviously new to the posting, and were taking their role as brutal oppressors very seriously. No one had bothered to tell them that this was an easy province and that the locals were friendly.
From that point on I was kept in isolation – both physically and verbally. I did not hear another word spoken that I understood – orders were barked in the harsh guttural language that my captors used. I felt as if I was dying. I wished that I was dead. My brain was too big for my skull, the world revolved with the slightest movement, I could not balance to stand up let alone walk and my stomach was being full with poison. The gentle light from the edges of the cell door burnt deep into my eyes. I was constantly and regularly retching blood alcohol onto the straw covered floor. Now I felt the cold – the sort of cold that penetrates every organ of your body. No one would tell me why I was there, where I was or what was going to happen to me. I felt too ill to even contemplate my future – I was too busy dealing with the terrible effects of the here and now. Voices echoed around my head. Some in my own language, some in Latin, some in Greek – voices of my family, my father, my friends. Even my disciples had their say. Contradictory and angry voices, soothing and healing voices – they were all there.
When they came for me I still did not know what was going on. I never saw another familiar face, or heard a familiar tongue. Contrary to later reports, I did not carry the means of my own execution – that would be stupid. It was just another example of the silly over-dramatisation that surrounded my death. When I saw the crosses, I realised what was to happen to me, but I did not know why. I argued, I begged for mercy, I cried, I struggled. But it was all to no avail. The soldiers dealing with us (and there were a lot of us, over 20, all pleading for our lives) carried out their work with grim professionalism. It became clear by the decorations on their uniforms that they were veterans of the north European front, sent to Palestine for a holiday. These men were used to seeing their comrades torn apart by German warriors bent on revenge, and had experienced days on end being stalked by unseen barbarians in the thick, cold, dark northern forests. The pathetic mewlings of a few Jewish criminals were not going to turn their hearts.
Being crucified with a bad hangover on a warm, sunny day by unsympathetic foreign soldiers is about as bad as it can get. Not knowing why didn’t help. My only glimmer of hope was the thought of an afterlife. But of course, this did not happen. Unconsciousness was followed by death and that was the end of Jesus the Carpenter.
* * *
Bad Things Come From Abroad
Matilda was eight years old when I met her. I spent most of the first part of my new life with her. I came to her from my single parent, after travelling thousands of miles from the east.
The swamps which passed for farming land in what would later be known as the middle Ukraine were always fertile at the edges. Grains such as rye and oats would grow easily in the rich, black soil during the summer season. Other crops, especially beetroot and cabbage, did well in the winter as long as you worked the earth and allowed it to drain properly. The crops would survive the harshest of winters as long as they were allowed to grow on well-tilled soil and spared the worst excesses of the rains. If you left them to stagnate in freezing water, by Easter you had rancid mush to harvest and nothing to eat. Grown well, the cabbages would feed your family until the summer and the beets would last into the next winter.
As a consequence of these technical details, the sloping land around the fertile marsh was highly prized and often fought over, especially following the death of the head of the family, or maybe a tribal exodus for religious or military reasons. The nameless villages along these productive strips were home to a gently transient population, many often being unwillingly moved on by more aggressive settlers from the north, south or east. If, for whatever reason, you were driven from the land, the only way to go was west.
The Yacobs family had farmed this land for as long as anyone could remember. They were considered to be among the older families living there. They had avoided being moved on by incomers by using a combination of aggression, numerical superiority, trading, marriage, bribery, payment of ransoms, minor relocation and acceptance of a degree of servitude. Although they had a faint awareness of an ancestral link with Israel, no one could say from where or how the family had come to rest where they were now. It was a lost connection, kept alive only by the fact that they were a Jewish family by religion, in a larger community of other Jews, living amongst a heathen population on the edge of a swamp. Their gentile neighbours worshipped a combination of Romano-Greek gods, local deities and, more recently, the pantheon of northern gods. The Norse merchants brought these along with ivory, silk and gold, on their circuitous trading routes. The river from the west acted as the main route for worldly and supernatural things, rather than settlers.
Life was hard, cruel, vicious and brutal, but it could also be peaceful, happy, enjoyable and kind to everyone. Over the last few years, the only real enemies had been the extremes of weather and the onset of disease. Death was common, but life was rich and good for those who did survive. This was particularly true on warm, sunny spring days, after the worst of the snows and before the threat of summer brought the threat of crippling droughts and plagues of insects. There were times when it felt like the Garden of Eden, and not the anonymous village on the edge of the anonymous swamp.
Within living memory, everything had come along with the Vikings from the west, up the river and along the banks. These visits were welcome, an opportunity to trade surplus food for more exotic goods, and to meet even more exotic people. Although they came from the west, these merchants brought people from all over the world with them, from as far away as Egypt and Iberia. But this year was different. All was well – the winter was not too harsh, the crops had grown tall in spring, and everyone was as healthy and well fed as they ever had been. Visitors from the Mediterranean Sea had even introduced them to new ways of fishing. Then a wave of people came in from the east like a storm. They were not traders and they were not even farmers it seemed. Speaking previously unheard languages the new neighbours disturbed the status quo with a brutish swagger. They showed no inclination to learn local languages, and had no need to as their actions made their intentions perfectly clear. Each of them came on a horse, which they looked after with more care and attention than they would lavish on members of their families. Even very small children rode these horses, and they came and went as they wished. These people from the east were strong, intelligent and determined and showed no interest in compromise, trading or marriage.
Although they settled after a fashion, there was no way of telling how many were there or who would be there the next day, as they often travelled overnight and slept in the day. Their settlements were more like camps dedicated to their horses. These people were not really interested in taking the land, but they would take whatever produce they wanted, when they wanted. For months there was an uneasy peace with these new neighbours, but it could not last. Attempts were made to communicate and trade, but they were arrogant and surly, secure in their strength and numbers. More came. They viewed the local people as animals, below themselves and below their horses.
No one could ever find out who their tribal or even family heads were – there seemed to be no leaders, but they were militarily more organised than the rest of the village put together. A large Kurdish family clan, whose bread store had been raided one time too many, enlisted the help of as many other families as they could muster, the Yacobs included, and went to confront their antagonists. At first the new people ignored them and laughed, dismissing them like dirt. Then when it got serious, and some of the younger men started turning over their cooking pots and setting fire to their tents, they took to their horses and raced off back to the hills. A loud cheer went up as if they had been defeated and this was the end of it. Two hours later they returned tenfold in number – no one knew where from, but they razed the entire village to the ground, killing half the inhabitants, raping women and children as they went. The villagers that could escape ran to the forests.
The Yacobs family lost ten members. But those who did survive managed to find each other, gather the last of their food supplies and gold under the cover of dark, and set off west along the riverbank into the unknown. They walked for five days, sparingly using what bread there was, not knowing where the next food would come from. The forest was a dense and forbidding place, all trees and no food. The river provided them with their only source of fresh food, although catching fish without the right tools took more luck and patience than it had before. They felt that the time would be better spent putting more distance between themselves and their new enemies.
On day six they met a Norse trader known to them from happier times. He was only too willing to turn his boat around and take them back down river after they told him about what had happened in the village and had paid him with the gold he had bartered with them for beetroot the previous summer. Unknown to the Yacobs, my single parent had made the leap from its original host, who it had met in deepest Mongolia, across to several members of the their family, and was now settling down nicely in it’s new Nordic home. The Yacobs family’s bodies were used to this sort of invasion, and fought of my siblings as they had unknowingly done before. The Viking was used to infection as well, and although he did feel more unwell than the Yacobs, he dismissed it as a touch of swamp fever, which he often got when he went inland, and carried on with his business. Two hundred miles further down the river he dropped off his passengers at a large nameless town, thanked them for warning him about the village and for the gold, and continued on his way. At the next town he met Matllda, and my single parent went to her.
I exploded into the world along with 200,000 siblings in the lining of Matilda’s throat. Her body had never seen anything like us before and we were free to continue reproducing as fast as we wanted. Red corpuscles were there for the taking. An hour after I was born, I had produced another 100,000 of my kind, and within a day we were literally all over her. Her body’s defences did what they could, and thousands of us were eaten alive by her young and voracious immune system, but we had the advantage of surprise. By the time that Matilda’s system was producing killer antibodies that exactly matched our DNA, we were tearing into her lungs, her lymph glands, her brain and her digestive system. All her parents could see of us was the symptoms – fever, delirium, vomiting and coughing up blood.
Their apparently healthy child had suddenly succumbed to an unknown illness that had seemingly come from nowhere. Nineteenth Century scientists would have vaguely recognised me as something similar to tuberculosis. If my strain had not mutated beyond recognition by the Twentieth Century, I am sure that micro-biologists would have torn me apart with their clever chemicals and extracted my DNA, tabbed me, bottled me, labelled me and probably attempted to propagate me or even replicate me by artificial means. The Son of God, as two millennia of fools persisted in calling me, would have been sitting in a tanker full of liquid nitrogen, locked behind sealed bio-hazard doors in a high security warehouse somewhere deep within Porton Down. I would have been kept there, not quite dead but not really alive, waiting to either be coaxed into drowsy action to produce an antidote to a genocidal enemy attack, or to be woken fully and bred, ready to do my masters’ bidding. In the event of war I would have been brought out of isolation, tweaked, chemically pumped up, trained, exercised and cloned – then released, like an invisible army, to wreak havoc amongst the opposing forces. Fired from the rocket tubes of an RAF Jaguar, I and my half-siblings would have spread death amongst an army of teenage Polish conscripts, guaranteeing me and my family a very long and well-deserved future along the southern Baltic coast. My place in history would have been assured as we would have teemed uncontrollably across swathes of northern Europe, never quite being eradicated, living on in the soil and in the wild animal population.
But sadly, it was not to be. Such was the fragile nature of my kind, hampered by the low density of human hosts in the dark ages and paradoxically by our rampant success once we got hold of one, that we died out. We became extinct. Individually we were a hit, but as a mass movement we failed miserably. In the world of survival of the fittest, our face did not fit. Living for hundreds of years amongst Mongol tribesmen we achieved a state of balance, existing in harmony with our benefactors. We did not kill them - indeed many were infected by us and never knew it. And they never managed to shake us off, as we were able to adapt and mutate to whatever their poor malnourished bodies tried to throw at us. Although these people were tough, strong and active, their diets were poor. As individuals they were powerful, vigorous warriors, capable of surviving in extreme conditions, living off of mare’s blood and grass if necessary. They had to be. Any weak strains had been killed off and bred out of the population hundreds of years ago. But their weak point was their insides. These people were never one hundred per cent well, and they tended to die young, in their 30s. They were the ideal home for my kind. We lived within their tribes, slipping easily between one and another, mutating and adapting at a slow pace to ensure our survival. It was an easy life. My parent never met any serious challenge from their collective immune system. We were like fleas on a cat.
When I was born, flooding across Matilda’s innocent body, it was a very different world. Instead of being gently contained by a sluggish yet effective defence system, I found my options wide open. There was nothing to stop me. I gorged myself for hours on her essential amino acids without a worry. I was like a starving dog in an unattended butchers’ shop. For centuries my ancestors were used to making the transfer to a new victim and immediately meeting some opposition. Nobody ever won the battle. The prey lived on and so did the disease. We would eat and reproduce as fast as possible, but there were always some antibodies there right away, killing off our offspring as fast as they were born. Sometimes, if it was a particularly fit, young victim, they would overwhelm us and kill off an entire strain before the host even knew about it, but that was rare. And again, sometimes if the victim was elderly, wounded or already ill with some other disease, we might triumph over their faltering white corpuscles (if there were any at all) and they would die. Not a particularly welcome outcome, as it usually represented an evolutionary dead end for that strain, trapped in a dead body with nothing to eat and little chance of getting out. Especially if the humans quickly cremated the corpse, which they often did.