CONCLUSION OF THE LADY AND THE LION
When Jesus and John found Magdalene, they had all headed to the inn where she and Lazaros were staying and from there, Lazaros had sent a courier to the house of Flotillus, hoping Jude and James would be there. They were, and now all of them sat around a carpet in a caravanserai near the city walls.
“Well, I have no intentions of going back to Judea or Galilee anytime,” Magdalene was saying.
“And where do you plan to go?” James asked, not even trying to hide the scorn in his voice.
“Wherever it pleases me,” she said.
“What? And Lazaros follow you around?”
“Lazaros need not have followed me to Palmyra,” Magdalene said.
“Well, it must be very nice to have servants to accompany you so you can go wherever you wish.”
“It is,” Magdalene said. “And for a woman in this world it is not only nice but necessary, and I’ll ask you to keep a civil tongue.”
But before James could keep or not keep a civil tongue, John said, “We had talked of going to Sidon.”
“Oh, Sidon!” Magdalene said. “But I’ve never been. It’s so many places we’ve never been, and in the world as it is now, there’s no reason to be provincial. There’s no reason not to see everything we can.”
Lazaros sighed heavily and said, “Mari, Sidon is a place you will have to go alone, for I cannot spare a servant and I must be back in Jerusalem.”
“But she will not be alone,” Jesus said. “She will be with us.”
“A woman in the company of four men!” Magdalene laughed.
“Well, what would be safer?” John said.
“Or more unseemly.”
“Jude, when have you ever cared about seemliness?” Jesus laughed at his cousin.
“Aye, but it is,” James groaned, shaking his head.
For one heated moment, John remembered being on his knees with James, a boy of fifteen ejaculating in his mouth then looking surprised and lowering his tunic, looking around shamefaced as John spat out the salty fluid.
“We must never do this again.”
“We discovered a small shrine to Eshmun.” Jesus said.
“John said, he had a larger temple in Sidon. I would see it.”
“Eshmun is mighty in Tyre and Sidon,” Lazaros said.
“And though the men in Jerusalem have done their best to erase it, he was mighty once even there.”
“So much of our history we have written over,” John lamented.
“So much we have unsaid and restated or covered up to make this version of ourselves, where we are the chosen people of God.”
“That is blasphemy, John,” James said, truly worried.
Jesus belched as a bodily function, but Magdalene took it as a commentary and laughed.
“While you’re touring the north,” Lazaros said, “I am going down to the Jordan. Not terribly far from us Yocanon was preaching.”
“He preaches now?”
“And prophecies,” Lazaros said. “He fancies himself a prophet, and maybe he is. He says the kingdom of heaven is at hand and the Messiah is on his way to brush away everything old and send a cleansing fire. I have heard that the powers that be in Jerusalem are sending me to investigate.”
“Roman powers or our own?”
“Both,” Lazaros told Jesus.
“Sadducees or Pharisees?”
“Does it matter?”
Jesus said, “It may.”
Eshmun is the God of healing. The Greeks call him Asklepios, the great doctor and master of medicines, and maybe he is. His temples are even older than the first temple of gold and ivory and marble built by Solomon in those ancient days when he ruled over all of Israel and his territory was several times the size of old King Herod. In those days Solomon was the terror of the world and demons fell at his feet, but even before that ancient time, long before Israel would meet her terrible fall, Eshmun was revered in the hill and mountains of Phoenicia.
“He is the oily one, the anointer. For Eshmun means: to anoint. His is for healing, and his oil is to crown the great kings.”
“The things you are saying are full of blasphemy,” James argued.
“How can there be blasphemy in the truth?” Lazaros demanded.
Outside of Palmyra, traveling toward the sea, the land grew green and hilly and they ascended the mountains with their tall trees. Here, in the recesses, they passed shooting watercourses and found their peace in quiet glades. There was no doubt in the mind of Jesus that this was the world the Lord had made.
“When you speak of one who anoints and one who anoints the king, it is only God, our God who anoints, and the one who is anointed is—”
“The Christ,” John said. They were northerners and Greek was their speech. It was James who said, “Messhiach. The Messiah.”
“And Eshmun is the first Messiah,” Lazaros said in a steady voice as they took the narrow paths through the foothills.
When James opened his mouth, Lazaros said, “I am of the ancient families in Jerusalem, and a scholar. Do not think to tell me what is blasphemy when I only tell you what was history.”
“You are speaking of Ba’al.”
“Ba’al is not a god,” Lazaros said, “but rather the word they used for gods as we used Adonai. And sometimes we used it too. Eshmun is "the one who oils," and thus "the one who heals." This is surely the main reason why Eshmun was later assimilated to Asklepios.”
“Why do you tell us all these heathen stories?”
“Because to know is to learn and to learn is of God,” Jesus spoke for the first time.
“Now, Eliezer, tell more.”
“There is no more,” Lazaros said.
Then he said, “Well, there is a little more. Eshmun was Sydyk's son.
“Sydik….” John began. Like… “Melchizedek.”
“Exactly like Melchizedek,” Lazaros said. “For Sidik was an ancient name for our God, and as you know, Melchizedek was king of Jerusalem.” “
“Now you’ve lost me,” James said, but Jude suspected it was because he wished to be lost.
“Did you ever wonder why Jerusalem is the Holy City?”
“Because it is,” James insisted.
“Yes,” Lazaros said, as if James were painfully stupid, “but… out of all the cities, why Jerusalem? Samaria was a much better capital. The Philistines, we are told, ruled the coast, but what of Hebron, the old capital? It was closer to the center of things. And yet David took Jerusalem. And when he took it, so the stories say, he did so with no bloodshed.
“He did it because it was already the holy city, long before he came to it,” Lazaros continued. “The people of Judah, the lion’s welp, they worshiped Yahweh. And the people of the north worshiped El.”
“They are the same!”
“They are the same now,” Lazaros said. “But of old, El was the God of the high places, and everyone in Canaan revered him. David took Sidik’s city and so Sidik, Yawheh and El became one.”
“This is a—”
“Do not call it a blasphemy,” Lazaros said. “Or I will hit you. Why in the world would we say, hear o Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, unless he had not always been one? And Sidiq was his name. This is why we never speak it, have forgotten it. Because if we were to say that our God belonged to the Canaanites first, what a very different story we would have to tell! And Eshmun was his son. Is his son. He is the Christ, the anointer, and Sydik is Justice. So Christ is the son of Justice.”
“You are making my head hurt,” Jude said.
“Not mine,” said Magdalene, who had walked on silently the whole time.
The night was setting, and no one said anything except for Magdalene who said, “It would be prudent to build a fire.”
“That out ancestors, those ancient Jews, would have anything to do with heathen ways…”
“But heathen is just another word for someone who is not a Jew,” Jesus said, laughing. “And all the world is not Jews.”
James opened his mouth, but Jesus continued.
“The Jews practiced Judaism in Jerusalem and then were dragged to Babalon where they changed it more, to what we do. We are Jews. David was an Israelite. He was no Jew. Not as we think of it.”
James looked at his cousin’s eyes glittering in the dark with his mad heresy.
“We are Jews now,” Jesus said. “But as for what we shall be? Who can say?”
