The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

of bearing false witness. And that was when he did it, the thing that started the rumor he might be mad.

When these men said they were descended from Abraham’s seed and didn’t require the Master to give them all this guidance he loved to hand out, and particularly they didn’t like his pretentious claims that he was the messiah and heir to the Davidian branch, the Master had the audacity to say he knew Abraham personally. Furthermore, he told them, when Abraham had heard of the Master’s mission here on earth, he’d rejoiced. They said the Master hardly was old enough to know a man who’d been dead, like Abraham, for thousands of years. The Master silenced them with a look. Then he told them that God Himself had introduced them, personally! He said that he, the Master, was himself the son of God—the flesh of God! But this was not the end. He told them, and many here in the chamber were present to witness it:

“I and my Father are one. Before Abraham was … I am!” He used the sacred name to describe himself, a blasphemous act worth a lashing or even a stoning.

But that was only the beginning. Just three months ago, long after the festival, the Master was called to Bethany, to the home of young Lazarus, brother of Miriam and Martha of Magdali, among the Master’s closest disciples. The boy was gravely ill and longed to see him before he died. But according even to the twelve, the Master behaved badly, refusing to go down from Galilee and see the family although the situation was critical and the women begged him to try to heal the boy, to save him from certain death. By the time he finally came, the child had been dead for three days. Miriam told them that the corpse was rotted and stinking, and she and her sister refused to grant the Master the access he requested to the crypt.

So he stood outside. He stood outside and called to Lazarus—young, dead Lazarus—until he raised him. He raised him from the tomb of his fathers. He raised him in his decaying condition, wrapped in the rotted burial cloths with maggots already working on the corpse. He raised him from the dead.

“Dear God,” whispered Joseph of Arimathea when this tale was over. As he stared at the others around the table with glazed eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. What could he possibly say? The Sadducees preached that death was simply the end of life; the Pharisees taught that for the good man, for the life well lived, there could be the reward of eternal life in heaven. But nobody believed in the concept of resurrection, of bringing a rotted corpse from the grave back to existence on earth. It was a horror beyond imagining.

Many of those around the table, seeing Joseph’s consternation, tried to avoid his gaze. But the high priest Caiaphas, who’d contributed nothing to the story told by the others, now interjected a thought of his own.

“It would seem your nephew, our beloved Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth, son of a humble carpenter, has developed delusions of grandeur, my dear Joseph,” he said in his annoyingly unctuous voice. “Instead of being the leader—the teacher, the rabh or master, the anointed king or whatever it was—that our companions here had hoped for, it seems he’s degenerated into a madman who thinks he’s genealogically descended from the one true God and can decide who shall live or die. I wonder how such an idea could have arisen in his confused brain?” He looked at Joseph with a sneering smile.

Joseph knew full well that many there, though silent, must share the high priest’s opinion. For God was ineffable and intangible: He could not be incarnate. How could this have happened? thought Joseph. In one short year, his world had turned inside out.

Joseph had to see the Master in person, at once. He knew him better than anyone—he always believed that he alone could see the purity of his soul. He had to see him before the others, before it was too late.

FRIDAY

Joseph’s own beautiful but wildly overrun estate on the Mount of Olives, which he rarely saw these days, owing to his travels, was called Gethsemane. He felt certain the Master would not take his disciples to Gethsemane, nor even go alone, without Joseph’s permission. So there was only one place he would stay in that part of the hill country, and that was in the town of Bethany—at the home of Lazarus of Magdali and his sisters, Miriam and Martha.

At the very thought of the sisters of Magdali, Joseph always had to grapple with difficult emotions. Miriam of Magdali, or Maria as the Romans called her, brought back to him all the failures of his life, as a Jew and as a man. He loved her—there could be no question of that—and in every sense, he loved her as a man should love a woman. Though at forty he was old enough to be her father, if he had his way he would fulfill his infernal Jewish responsibility to God and litter the earth with the fruits of his seed—as Nicodemus might put it.

But Miriam loved another. And only Joseph of Arimathea knew for certain, though many certainly suspected, that the object of her love was the Master. Joseph could not fault her for that, for he loved him too. Which was why he had never declared himself openly to her. Nor would he, for as long as the Master lived. But he did send a messenger to Bethany to invite himself to dinner.

The Master would come down from Galilee on Thursday, and a formal dinner and a light supper were prepared for Friday when, according to Martha’s confidential reply, the Master would have something important to announce. Since the Master had raised the young head of the household from the grave upon his last visit, Joseph wondered with