They entered Capernaum at night, bone-weary and their wet clothes chafing them. They went directly to the house of Levi — now Matthew — and he brought out such food as hadn’t spoiled during his long absence: nuts and dried fruit and a little salted fish. They fell asleep in chairs, on pallets and couches and, primarily, on the limestone floor.
“We need some time to ourselves, to rest,” Jesus said the next morning.
“I can go out for provisions,” Matthew said. “No one need know you’re here.”
“Let me go,” Thaddeus said to Matthew. “Your appearance in the village might attract attention. Everyone knows Jesus left from your house, and that you left with him.”
Matthew nodded.
Thaddeus went out and returned with a boy leading a donkey burdened with large quantities of grain and fruit and fish stuffed into rough burlap sacking. Peter and Andrew and James and John carried it all inside, and the boy departed. Some time later, the noonday meal was laid out on the great oaken table, Jesus and his disciples sitting and reclining about the table to eat.
“I thought you were discreet,” Matthew said to Thaddeus, and all eyes followed the direction of his nod to the window, where two or three boys peered in from the outer courtyard.
“I thought I was.”
The boys watched awhile and left again and later returned with two or three of their fellows. Matthew went out to shoo them off, but Jesus, overhearing his intentions, went out after him.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“But they’ll —”
“It’s all right. The last thing we want to do is make children feel unwelcome in our company.” He smiled at the youngest, a plump little boy with brown eyes and dark, curly hair. “What’s your name?”
“Samuel.”
“Samuel! That’s a mighty important name for such a little fellow.”
The boy ducked his chin and smiled at the ground.
“Did you know there was a prophet named Samuel?” Jesus squatted in front of him, and the other boys clustered around him just beyond arm’s reach. “What’s that you’ve got behind your ear?” Jesus asked Samuel. “Do you have something behind your ear?”
The boy shook his head.
“I think you do. I think you have a —” He reached out and tugged at a lock of Samuel’s hair just behind the ear. “— a lepton!” He pulled back his hand and turned it palm up to reveal the small bronze coin. “What do you think about that?”
The boy reached out for it solemnly, taking it tightly in his small, pudgy fist.
“Do you see any coins in our ears, mister?” one of the others said.
“Well, I don’t know. Let me look. No, nothing behind that ear. Nothing behind the — no, I was wrong. What’s this?” He withdrew his hand and turned it over to reveal another bronze coin.
“Do me, do me,” the others shouted, one or two of them jumping up and down in their excitement.
“Okay, okay. Line up here. I’ll check behind all your ears.” When each had been enriched a lepton’s worth, Jesus said, “Okay, now, off with you.”
“Can we come again tomorrow?”
He smiled. “You may come again tomorrow.”
When he turned to go back inside, he saw Matthew and Judas standing together at the door, each wearing an identical expression of disapproval.
“From the look of you, I’d think you were twins,” Jesus said.
Judas, his scowl deepening, glanced at Matthew.
“Don’t you think they’ll go home and tell their families?” Matthew said. “To hear there’s a man here at my house performing magic is going to sound familiar to some of them.”
“I suppose it will, but it can’t be helped.”
Judas said, “It could have been helped. I could have come out and sent them away.”
“Ah, but I couldn’t let you do that.”
“Wouldn’t the end justify the means?” Matthew asked.
“No end can justify uncharitable means.”
Matthew looked at Judas, who shook his head.
When they sat down to supper that evening, there were more than a dozen people in the courtyard, several of the boys who had been there that afternoon, three or four women, a half-dozen grown men. Jesus acknowledged them with a wave of his hand and, after he had eaten, went out and spoke to them for a couple of hours.
The next day some of those returned and with them perhaps a dozen others, curious to see the man who had cast the demons out of Jonah and who had healed the paralytic. Jesus again went out and spoke to them. He held their babies, smiling and speaking into their solemn faces. He took the gnarled, arthritic fingers of the old between his hands and prayed for an easing of the pain. He touched the twisted back of an old woman. The crowd of visitors grew from day to day, people coming from as far away as Chorazin and Gennesaret, Bethsaida and Magdala, until the courtyard was overflowing from the first watch until late into the evening.
Herod was still in Machaerus, staying in his villa with Herodias and all his household.
“Why waste your time with that wild man?” Herodias said to him one evening after his return from the dungeons. “You always come back with the stench of him in your hair and clothing. I think he’s affecting your mind as well.”
Perhaps he was. Herod went because he was compelled to go, because John had fanned his lifelong interest in Messianic prophecy into a consuming passion.
“What of the Gentiles?” Herod had said to John, when the prophet stood before him that evening. “When the Day of the Lord ushers in the age which is to come, what will happen to the Gentiles?”
John stood slightly stooped, already aged a decade from the hardships of prison. His weathered skin had paled beneath the grime on his bony hands and narrow face, and he held his arms close against his sides as if he were in pain. He looked up at Herod, but said nothing.
“‘Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. It is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness,’” Herod said. “Joel. The book of the twelve. The suggestion is that many will suffer.”
“Yes.”
“But surely not God’s own people.”
John’s eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “God’s people have turned from him. They are apostate.”
“And the Gentiles, will they be destroyed completely?”
“Unless Israel can be saved.”
“But Israel’s salvation is to be the destruction of the Gentiles,” Herod said.
“No. The Lord intends Israel to be his instrument to redeem the Gentiles. Isaiah says, ‘I will give you as a light unto the nations that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth.’”
“Does he not also say, ‘I will trample the nations in my anger’? ‘I will crush them in my wrath, and I will pour out their lifeblood on the earth’?”
“‘Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth,’” John said. “‘For I am God, and there is no other. To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.’”
“‘They shall come to Israel in chains and bow down,’” Herod said. “Isaiah again.”
“‘The nations shall come from the ends of the earth to Jerusalem to see the glory of God’: The Psalms of Solomon. ‘The Son of Man will be a light unto the Gentiles.’ Enoch.”
“There would seem to be two strands of prophecy concerning the Gentiles,” Herod said.
“Why do you care? What are the Gentiles to you?”
A smile twisted Herod’s face. “I serve Roman masters,” he said.
“Rome! If it’s Rome you’re interested in, fear not; Rome will be destroyed. Look to Daniel. ‘After this I saw in the night visions a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet.’”
“The fourth beast is Rome?”
John nodded. “‘And as I watched in the night visions, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.’”
“‘And as I watched,’” Herod said. “‘I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven.’ Who is this son of man?”
John said nothing.
“You know and I know that Israel cannot defeat Rome by merely human means. It will require the might of this apocalyptic figure of Daniel’s, the one seated at God’s right hand.”
“‘To him was given dominion and glory and kingship,’” said John. “‘That all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. His kingship is one . . .” John broke off.
Herod was crying.
Jesus and his disciples had been in Capernaum for a week when Jairus appeared flanked by two men foreign to Capernaum, from the look of them foreign to Galilee as well. Their dress identified them as scribes, masters of the law.
They pushed through the crowd and stepped through the doorway into the house, Jairus following in their wake and members of the crowd peering past them into the house.
The faces of the scribes were cold and stern. “We’re here to speak with Jesus of Nazareth,” one of them said. Behind him, Jairus’s face showed his discomfort.
“I am he.”
Matthew stood just inside the door, bobbing his head at his distinguished visitors and wringing his hands.
Jesus said, “And who are you? Envoys of those hypocrites in Jerusalem?” He swung his feet to the floor, but remained seated.
Jairus looked appalled.
One of the scribes cleared his throat with a sound like the meshing of iron gears. “We come from the High Priest himself,” he said severely.
Jesus nodded. “Correction noted.” But his tone was dry.
The scribe’s eyes scanned the front room, taking in Matthew and Simon Peter and the other disciples, taking in as well the big oaken table, which still held the plates and scraps of the noon repast. “This is a fast day,” the scribe said. “Yet we see you’ve been eating.”
“I have,” Jesus said. “Moreover, I’ve encouraged others to do so.”
“Why?”
“Do the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”
The scribe raised an eyebrow disdainfully.
“No, there will be time enough for fasting when the bridegroom has left them.”
The scribe looked from one end of the room to the other. “Has someone been married here, or are you mad?” He turned to Jairus: “Is he mad? He babbles like a madman.”
Jairus looked at Jesus and shrugged helplessly.
“Whose house is this?” the scribe demanded.
Jairus, locating Matthew, pointed. “That man, Levi. A collector of taxes.”
The scribe’s eyes widened. “A tax collector,” he said with heavy emphasis. Again he scanned the room, eyeing Jesus’ disciples. “And no doubt the rest of these men are sinners of a similar type. What pretender to holiness would eat with such men?”
“Perhaps it takes genuine holiness,” Jesus said, rising at last from his couch. “Of course, I can understand that you’re more familiar with pretenders.”
The scribe seemed uncertain whether or not he had just been insulted.
“Everything you do is for show,” Jesus said. “You make your phylacteries wide —” He gestured to the leather boxes strapped to their arms and foreheads. “— and the tassels on your garments long. You love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call you ‘Rabbi,’ ‘Master.’ Don’t you know that you have only one Master and that all men are your brothers?”
The scribe’s face had gone pale. Drawing himself to his full height, he said, “You show by your words that you are unfamiliar even with the definition of holiness —”
“Or choose for your own reasons to ignore it,” said the other scribe.
“As the prophet Ezra told the people Israel,” the first scribe continued. “‘Make confession to the Lord the God of your ancestors and do his will; separate yourselves from the people of the land . . .’”
“Woe to you, you teachers of the law. You’re shutting the door to the kingdom of heaven in the faces of your fellow men. You don’t want to go in yourselves, and you want to be very sure that everyone else is going to be damned with you.” The curse hung in the air, all but palpable to those present.
“How dare you —” The scribe was too overcome with anger to complete the thought.
“God is like a shepherd,” Jesus said. He looked around to include his disciples and those who were looking in at the door and window. “If even one of his lambs is lost off from the others, he will leave his flock and go in search of it.”
The second scribe, sneering, said, “You blaspheme, sir. What do you mean by comparing the Most High God to a miserable shepherd?”
“Better a shepherd than a teacher of the law. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert — and when you do, you turn him into twice the son of hell that you yourselves are.” Again reaching out to the others in his audience, he said, “God is the great physician. Will he go out to the sick or to the well?”
“A good answer,” said Nathaniel. “Let them answer that, if they can.”
The two scribes were too enraged, apparently, to say anything at all. Jairus, shocked to the core by Jesus’ attack on the scribes, was filled with dismay.
“Two men went into the temple to pray,” Jesus said. “A man of the law, and a tax collector. The tax collector, who knew he was a sinner, beat his breast and tore at his hair as he pleaded to God to have mercy on him. The other, the man of the law, looked with scorn at the tax collector, and he said, ‘I thank you, O Lord, that I am not a miserable wretch such as that one. I thank you that I am such a worthy fellow.’ Which prayer will God hear?”
“Amen,” someone called.
The first scribe turned to Jairus. “It is clear at any rate how he is able to cast out demons.”
“If indeed the reports be true,” said the other.
“For is not Beelzebub the prince of demons?”
The second scribe nodded.
“It is by the power of Beelzebub that he casts out demons,” said the first.
Jairus looked fearfully at Jesus.
“How can Satan cast out Satan?” Jesus said. “If a house is divided against itself, how shall it stand? If Satan has taken up arms against himself, then his end has come.”
“How then —,” Jairus began.
“How can a man enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property?” Jesus said, completing his question. “He must first tie up the strong man; then he can do as he likes with his property.”
“Listen to him! He himself is possessed,” exclaimed the first scribe.
“Careful, Scribe,” Jesus said. “Careful. The gates of hell loom close.”
“We don’t have to stand here —”
“Those who cannot distinguish between the spirit of God and the spirit of Beelzebub are damned already,” Jesus said.
The first scribe turned abruptly on his heel and strode from the house. As he swept through the door, the other scribe followed in his wake.
Jesus looked at Jairus, who remained standing just inside the doorway of Matthew’s house.
“You will hear from them again,” said Jairus.
“Yes.”
“You could have been more conciliatory,” Jairus said.
“I’m not sure I could have. It’s unwise to be conciliatory in the presence of evil.”
“Evil? They are men of the law.”
“Yes.”
Jairus looked at him searchingly, then he too turned and left the house. Jesus’ disciples stood looking at each other, at the floor, at the people crowding the doorway and the window — at anyone and anything but Jesus himself.
Thomas Aquinas lists seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. It may be more accurate to think of them as dispositions toward sinning rather than sins in themselves. They are tendencies in our character that predispose us to sin. 
The Gospel According to Gore Vidal is a time-travel story. A computer hacker is erasing the past, including the Good News. Timothy, the narrator, is commissioned to record the gospel and bury it lest it be lost to posterity. NBC, a division of General Electric, has dispatched a news crew to the first century to record the crucifixion.
Sholem Asch was the best known Yiddish writer of his day and, thanks to The Nazarene, the most controverial. The book was an effort to bring Christians and Jews together by emphasizing their common historical and theological roots. It was published in 1939, just as Jews were beginning to face organized persecution in Nazi Germany, and his Jewish was not appreciative.