The path was bordered by wild cactus and prickly pears taller than ourselves; as we ascended there were pines, firs, and giant broomcorn; and when we lifted our eyes to the heights we saw great cedars swaying in the wind. And these were but the lower ridges. The path narrowed, becoming stonier and doubling back upon itself; the river, which had accompanied us for a while, fell away beneath our feet in a final cascade of rushing water.
Without the river’s prattling voice, we could hear the wind above us, bending the cedars and sharpening the edges of the rocks. A narrow pass, between a face of red rock sweating ice-melt and on the other side a plunging precipice, brought us not to a crest but to yet more steeply upward vistas. Paul scrambled ahead, Barnabas plodded after, dragged by the other man’s zeal, and I paused, stunned by the sheer extent of mountain walls before us, ridge after ridge, the farthest crowned by snow though April was well advanced.
We all have our revelations, on the road to Damascus or elsewhere. I called out my refusal to go any farther.
Paul skidded back down, pebbles scrambling and spilling from beneath his sandals, which were as dusty and cracked as the horny gray skin of his feet. “What’s this, my son?”
“Rabbi, this is madness. There is nothing above us but barren mountains, with all their perils, and then highland cities that are merely rumors to us. Where are the synagogues, the ghettos, that will give us shelter and audience?”
A brief laugh showed Paul’s ragged brown teeth in his black beard. “The Jews are there, my boy, if not in such numbers as you have been accustomed to in Judaea, Syria, and Cyprus. Wherever the emperor has established order, our brethren will already have ventured, pursuing the trades that demand patience and close vision, observing the close-woven old laws of the Torah, every jot and tittle.”
There was this teasing scorn with which he spoke of the Jews, though he was a Jew. I asked, anger rising in me, “Is it to bring Christ to these sparse colonies of the circumcised that you ask us to risk our lives in a freezing wasteland?”
“To the circumcised and the uncircumcised,” he said. “In Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything; nothing avails but faith which works through love. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. If you are Christ’s, then you are the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise. You have heard me speak thus many times, John Mark; why do you now seem to dispute?”
I was a young man and had no wish to dispute with Paul at the height of his power and evangelical urgency. Yet I had taken in the tales and sayings of our Lord before I could walk, for my mother’s house was the first in Jerusalem where the followers of the Way gathered. The Last Supper was held in her upper room; the apostles met in the same place after Jesus ascended, tongue-tied in their amazement. At times I felt His presence with those that were gathered there, and I knew in my heart when His message was being perverted. “Our Lord said,” I told Paul and Barnabas where they had paused on the steep path, resting their packs at the base of the wall of sweating red rock, “that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them.”
Paul said quickly, in his hurried tumbling voice, no longer smiling, “If righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died in vain. Christ died that all nations might be saved. All the nations, not just the nation of Abraham. Until the coming of Christ, the Law was our tutor, but since the revelation of faith we are no longer under a tutor. We are free, in Christ’s love.”
“But Christ came from Abraham,” I said, “and his disciples came from the synagogue. If the Gentiles need not be circumcised to be converted, and may continue to eat meat that is unclean by the laws of Leviticus, then Christ need not have been a Jew.”
“He chose to be a Jew,” Paul said, “as the Jews were themselves chosen. But now that He is come there are Jews no more. We who are Jews by birth know that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by doing what is in the Law. If the Law could create new life,