Yes, I was an angry man when the business started.
I had seen them in the market-place, noisy, exuberant,
with the kind of vulgarity one associates with street children,
dragging the crowds at the hem of their stinking clothes,
drawing the eyes. People in Jerusalem talked of little else:
Have you seen the Christians? Has there been another miracle?’
These people are Jews, I told myself; we may be ruled by Caesar,
but we have our dignity; our bones are older than his golden eagles.
We have our God. We have ceased to be children.
No wonder I wanted to stamp out this blight on our lineage,
to vindicate Abraham, the fire of Ezekiel, Elijah’s chariot of angels.
No wonder I was sickened by this youth, fly-blown upon the cross of criminals, his creeping legends of kindness, his crawling platitudes
the other cheek;’ Love your enemies.’
I was a Jew and dominant. My blood, erect,
suffered the barbarians but never kissed their feet
So I ordered the martyrdom of Stephen, signed the death paper.
It was a fine morning for a stoning.
The builders had left a pile in a disused quarry,
and the young zealots were glad of an excuse to limber their fist-work
We expected our fox to give us chase. I stood by, holding their clothes, waiting for him to sprint towards the town boundary…
And the bastard never moved.
‘Run, heretic !’ they shouted, sending showers of pebbles to loosen his feet. They laughed, and one of the lads chucked a flint, cutting his lip.
Stephen remained still.
His stillness unnerved me. ‘Finish the job’ I ordered.
Soon he was down on the quarry floor, swollen and bleeding.
But he kept silent.
The silence angered me with its insolent superiority.
I ordered the stones to be thickened.
And then the silence came upon all all of us,
even I, in my frozen anger, felt its power
while the half-dead body rose, inhuman, and spoke,
forgiving us. Then the thing dropped and was dead.
Never had I been so glad of a burial.
After that I struggled to annul an uncomfortable suspicion
that God had been with him.
From then on, I worked to exterminate the Christians,
but with each death the uncertainty increased
till I left for Damascus.
You know the rest
the advent of Christ for me was stone for stone.
I escaped nothing. And in the beginning
it was difficult to distinguish the pain from the glory.
� Sylvia Read
Paul speaks
Sylvia Read