Anesté
Young Paul perched on the end of my couch next to Cartimandua as we ate our supper that evening. He yawned widely and my mother laughed and winked at him.
"Better take him off to bed soon, Cartimandua dear. Don't forget the celebration tomorrow."
"Oh?" I pricked up my ears. "What celebration?"
"The Anastasis," my mother replied and then, seeing the puzzled look on my face added, "Don't you know about this?"
I shook my head. "I have been away, you know. Is it a religious celebration?"
"Of course," my mother answered. "It's in honour of the Christos. We meet together about the time that the women went to the tomb of the Christos and rejoice in the fact that the tomb was empty."
"Is it another Love Feast?" I asked.
"Dear no!" Father broke in on the conversation. "It's just a short gathering, a hymn, a prayer and a reading from the Scriptures. If there's time we try and remember some of the things Peter told us about the Christos. We've all got work to do."
Long before daylight Cartimandua woke me up. She was already washed and dressed and while I stumbled about sleepily she woke young Paul and got him ready. There was just enough light that we didn't need a torchbearer as we set out from the house, a silent procession in the gray light before dawn.
There were lights showing from the house of Gaius and the room was almost as crowded as it had been the day before. Stephanas greeted us, led us in singing a hymn and then Crispus again read from the Scriptures. When he had finished Stephanas stood up, a couple of sheets of parchment in his hand.
"Brothers and sisters, yesterday, after our assembly, a sailor from a ship at Cenchreae brought me a most welcome and precious package - the reminiscences that Peter promised to write down for us when he was here. It's a bit sketchy, but I want to read you what he has to say about the resurrection of our Lord, the Christos. Listen."
He stepped over near the lamp and angled the pages to catch the light. From the way Stephanas stumbled as he read I judged that Peter was no pen-man and his Greek was clearly a second language.
"When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, 'Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?' But when they looked up they saw that the stone, which was very large318, had been rolled away.
"As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed. 'Don't be alarmed,' he said. 'You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, Who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see Him, just as He told you."'
"Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. That's where it ends, but of course there is more at the beginning, stories of miracles and so on. Still, the sun is about to rise, so we must bring our meeting to a close. Brothers and sisters, in the name of the Christos I greet you: Christos anest้!"
My father turned to me and grinned. "Christos anesté!" The man in front of me turned, smiling broadly, and grasped my hand. "Christos anesté!" The the men on either side greeted me with equal fervour. "Christos anesté!" All around me people were doing the same thing and the room re-echoed with the triumphant cry, "Christos anesté! Christ is risen!" Truly, this was the greatest and most profound mystery of all, no legend from the mists of antiquity, no fable concerning the far-off Immortals on Mount Olympus, but a Divinity Who had revealed Himself in our own age and had been seen by living witnesses: Jesus, the ever-living Christos.
Gradually the room emptied as the workmen and slaves hurried off to begin the day's duties. Charite brushed past me and smiled and Stephanas laid his hand briefly on my shoulder as he walked towards the door. I sat on, savouring the joy and peace of the Christian mystery until angry voices out in the street roused my curiosity. I hurried out of the room and through the hall-way towards the main door of the building.
Two men were facing each other on the pavement, the fat man from yesterday, as supercilious as ever, and another man who was positively dancing with rage, his face contorted with fury as he shouted and screamed. His whole body was so transformed by anger that at first I completely failed to recognise Gripus319, the thin man who was so opposed to women. As I came on the scene the fat man made some remark that I failed to catch but which had the effect of further infuriating Gripus, who lunged towards his adversary, his fists raised. My father and some of the other men leaped forward and held him back.
The fat man turned towards us, a sneer on his face. "If he thinks he has a case, let him take me to court. I'm not afraid of appearing before a jury320."
"Court?" Gripus howled, shaking his fists. "Court! I'll take you to court, you swindler! Don't think you can get away with this. The Christos will curse you for your evil ways. May the gods bring divine vengeance on your head. May the furies follow you into hell321 ."
My father and the other men finally hustled the still shouting Gripus away around the corner and calmed him down, but he could not be deflected from his demand for what he called "justice". As soon as they released him he went straight to the agora and appeared in front of the bema to lay charges against the fat man. My father returned shaking his head.
"I don't know, Arxes," he said as we walked home together. "I thought we Christians were supposed to be brothers and sisters. Remember how Paul insisted on speaking to our entire household, even the slaves? It was like that at first, but recently things have been going wrong somehow." He sighed and shook his head. "I wish I knew what to do. Every day I pray to the Christos to send Paul back and sort everything out."
"Where is Paul?" I asked.
My father shook his head. "I don't know for sure. Last I heard he was in Ephesus."
I stopped, an idea budding in my mind. "Listen! That Chloe, doesn't he have dealings with Ephesus? I wonder if we could get him to send a message to Paul? Even if Paul only sent a letter, it might do some good."
318 Most people have a mental picture of a finely cut disk of stone, similar to those found in the so-called Tombs of the Kings or Herod's Tomb in Jerusalem, which makes the women's anxiety rather puzzling. A stone disk, however large, could be rolled away by the weakest woman. In fact, however, Jewish tombs from the first century AD were closed with stone doors or square slabs of stone that fitted tightly into place. The stone that so concerned the women may have been a convenient boulder that was heaved over the proper door as a temporary seal while the proper closure was prepared. Return
319 In former times people commonly regarded an uncontrollable temper as a sign of manly strength, an attitude the philosophers deprecated. In his essay On the Avoidance of Anger Plutarch tries to show how unpleasant anger really was: "Just as the Spartans tried to understand drunkenness by watching their helots, I tried to understand anger by watching others. Hippocrates says that the severity of an illness is proportionate to the degree to which the patient's features become abnormal and the first thing I noticed was a similar proportion between the degree of distraction by anger and the degree to which appearance, complexion, gait and voice change. This impressed upon me a kind of image of the emotion and I was very upset to think that I might ever look so terrifying and unhinged to my friends, wife and daughters, not only fierce and unrecognisable in appearance but also speaking in as rough and harsh a tone as I encountered in others of my acquaintance, when anger made them incapable of preserving their usual nature, appearance, pleasant conversation and persuasiveness and courtesy in company." (p. 182)
The Spartans used to force their helots or serfs to get drunk once a year, the idea being that the sight of these men acting irrationally while under the influence of alcohol and suffering hangovers the morning after would encourage their youth to avoid alcohol. Return
320 Athenian courts, like Roman ones, ostensibly used a jury, though the number of people on a jury was large, perhaps as many as several hundred. Lawyers were used, not for their knowledge of the law but for their skill as orators. Xenophon, in his Defence of Socrates, records one of Socrates' friends trying to persuade the philosopher to take his forthcoming trial seriously. "Don't you see that the Athenian courts have often been prevailed upon by argument to put innocent men to death and equally often have acquitted wrong-doers, either out of pity aroused by the speeches or because they've been flattered?" In fact, oratorical appeals for pity became so bathetic that they were outlawed not long after Socrates' trial.
Roman courts followed a similar procedure. Livy, in his History of Rome III.lviii records that after one of the most scandalous acts of injustice, the judge Appius was sent to prison. "Appius' uncle, Gaius Claudius, had always strongly disapproved of the decemvirs' crimes, especially of the tyrannical behaviour of his nephew, and to mark his disapproval had retired to his old home at Regillus; but now, in spite of his advanced age, he returned to Rome to plead for the man whose vicious conduct had been the cause of his exile. Dressed as a mourner, he appeared in the Forum with his dependants and various other members of his clan and solicited the support of everyone he chanced to fall in with, begging them not to brand the Claudian family with the ignominy of imprisonment and chains." Return
321 The Greeks, at least, those who believed in a soul, had a quite well developed idea of a place of punishment. Plutarch, in his essay On God's Slowness to Punish, describes it in terms very reminiscent of later Christian writings. As his hero tours hell he spots "a row of pools, one of boiling gold, another of freezing lead and a third of rough iron. The deities in charge of these pools used implements, like blacksmiths, alternately to lift souls up and then lower them - these were the souls of people whose criminality stemmed from greed and avarice. When the souls had been heated up in the golden pool until they became transparent from the heat, the deities dropped them into the pool of lead for tempering; they immediately froze as hard as hailstones and then the deities transferred them to the iron pool. Here they became hideously black and they were so hard that bits of them were chipped and broken off and their shapes became distorted; then they were taken back to the gold pool again. These metamorphoses caused them excruciating pain." (p. 291)
Exactly what the soul consisted of is not clear. "The last thing he saw was the souls being modified for rebirth. They were being wrenched and reshaped into all kinds of living creatures by specialist artisans, who were using a combination of tools and blows to join and force together some parts, twist others back and obliterate and eliminate others altogether, so as to make the souls fit different characteristics and ways of life." (p. 292) In view of his musical pretensions, Nero's soul was being shaped to fit into a frog! Return
