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Prologue
When Jesus commissioned me to learn the heart of the Gentiles, he was
making the best of a bad situation.
Neither Jesus nor my parents wanted me to go on my odyssey, which I refer
to now as “Jude’s Folly,” but I had been relentless on my insistence to venture
forth on my own. They finally gave up
on me and let me go. So, to put a good
face on it for my parents, Jesus gave me my commission. What I didn’t know then was how important
this assignment would turn out to be.
One day, in fact, it would serve me well when I became a disciple of
Jesus and then Paul. What did I learn? To begin with, in the most human way,
Gentiles are similar to Jews: they can be kind, honest, deceitful, and
mean. They are, like Jews, capable of
great evil. Where they differ from Jews
is in their capricious and carefree attitude when killing their foes. Their proscriptions against murder are not
based upon moral imperatives as in our religion. There are no Ten Commandments for Gentiles and only the most
vague notion of heaven and hell. I
accepted these traits as human if not sinful traits. What drove me to despair at times was their attitude toward our
religion. The major reasons for their
dislike and distrust was the very nature of our God. The Jewish God, after all, was invisible and unforgiving. He was distant and mysterious. Pagans, of course, were also critical of
their own gods. Though superstitious,
they appeared to have little or no belief at all. Despite their contempt for their own religions, however, they at
least knew what their gods looked like.
All the Roman and Greek gods, except the unknown god, looked like mortal
men and women. The Egyptian pantheon
was filled with all manner of animal and bird headed gods. It also seemed inconceivable to Gentiles
that we had only one deity to worship when they had a choice between hundreds
of gods.
My biggest mistake was when I attempted to explain
God. The Lord is, after all, unknowable
and appears to be, himself, capricious.
This became evident to them when, during our campfire conversations, I
told them about my people’s heroes.
When, during our fireside chats, I told stories about our scriptural
heroes, they had mixed feelings. On the
one hand, they could admire a brave man like King David, and yet used the
example of Joshua’s murder of women and children as a reason for flatly not
accepting our harsh god. Other
reasons, along with God’s invisibility and apparent meanness, were our
religions restrictions on food and demand for circumcisioin. One of their favorite meats was pork, and
they ate, with relish, a list of nasty, unscaled, crawling things. The very notion of mutilating their private
part was likewise repugnant to them. So
I gave up finally in my effort to share with them what I believed. Every once in awhile I would slip and quote
a passage, but I tried very hard to fit in with my Gentile friends.
As I have recorded in my third volume, the Lord gave
me strength I didn’t know I had. During
one point in our journey, I was able, in a dream state, to kill six men who
attacked our camp. In the end, though,
I was never completely accepted by most of the men. I was, in the words of Apollo and Ajax, “that wet-behind-the-ears-Jew.” I could never shake this label off. Through great hardships, which included
being captured by bandits and placed on the slave auction block, I saw the very
worst of the Gentiles before being rescued by a rich Pharisee. What struck me as ironic was that the man
who liberated me considered me tainted because of my association with the
desert bandits, yet most of the Gentiles I had known accepted my Jewish
eccentricities. They joked about it me
but never condemned me as my Pharisee benefactor had. In hindsight, as I look back, I realize I had learned something
very important about the Gentile mind.
They had no fixed, preconceived notions about religion. They could, with the right message, be
reached. Jesus knew this. I sensed even then, long before I set forth
as an apostle, that Gentiles were looking for something to fill a void in their
lives. I saw it in their eyes when I
told them about our belief that there was an afterlife for the faithful, the one
thing about my religion I knew the least about. Their gods of stone and wood had failed them, and yet the god of
the Torah and as related by the prophets seemed impossible for them to
understand. When the simple message of
the Way was presented to them, they would have no religious baggage to sift
through, as did the Jews. They would
flock to Jesus message of redemption and promise of paradise. On my journey to Antioch, however, I would
never have believed such a thing. They
were the most uncouth and undisciplined people I had ever met. I could not have believed that some of them
would remain friends with me for the rest of my life and four of them would one
day become followers of the Way.
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