The “Palmyra” had entered the smooth bending of the Tiber and was moving rapidly toward the river’s nearest approach to Janiculum Hill, Rome’s Jewish quarter on the west bank of the stream. Longinus pointed to the steep rise of the hill and the plane before it cluttered with the densely massed homes of thousands of Jews, many of them born in the capital, others newly settled there. “It seems to me, Centurion, that you’ve become an adherent of the Jewish one-god religion.”
His words amused Cornelius. “Other Romans at our post in Galilee have charged me with the same thing. It came about, I suppose, from my helping the Jews at Capernaum build their new synagogue.”
“Then surely you must be a member of their fellowship or synagogue ... whatever they call it?”
“No, I’m no convert to the Jews’ religion, Centurion. I don’t belong to the synagogue. I helped them, I told myself, in order to promote good relations between the Jews in Galilee and the members of our small Roman post. But maybe I had other reasons, too. There are many things about their one-god religion that seem sensible and right to me. But there are also practices among the Jews that I don’t approve of at all, practices that seem cruel and senseless. Their system of sacrifices, for instance. I can see no act of proper worship in slitting the throats of innumerable sheep and cattle to appease an angry god....”
“I agree. But we do the same thing. Doesn’t the Emperor dedicate the games by slitting the throats of oxen?”
“Exactly. But what is the good of such worship or ceremony or whatever you may choose to call it? If there is a god to whom the sacrifice is being made, what good does it do him, what pleasure could he possibly receive from it?”
“I see nothing to any of it, Cornelius. Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, forest worship in Britannia, whatever the system is; it’s all superstition, delusion....”
“I grant you, maybe it is. But, Longinus, don’t you feel deep down inside yourself that there must be some intelligence, some power, far above man’s very limited intelligence and power, that created the earth and the heavens and controls them? Else how did they get here in the first place?”
“I don’t know, Cornelius. You’ve gone ahead of me, my friend. I never gave much thought to matters like this.” The lines of his forehead wrinkled into a frown. “But even if you should feel that way, how could you ever know? Have you seen a god, Centurion? Have you ever felt one or heard one speak?”
“I’ve never seen one, Longinus. But I think I have felt and perhaps heard one. There have been times when I was confident that I was communicating with one.” Cornelius watched the spume thrown up by the flashing oars as they cut into the muddy waters. He turned back to face Longinus. “That’s the difficulty, you know, communication. How can one get a grip upon a god—the god, if there be but one, and the way I see it that is the only sensible answer—like those slaves down there grip the oar handles? How can one hear a god, see him, taste him? Obviously, one cannot, for this god, whether there be one or many, must be different from man; he must be a spiritual being rather than a physical one. But if he is a spirit, how can we of the physical world communicate with him and he with us? There, my friend, is the problem.”