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there was much suspicion and fear even there at the time, and then what I found were half a dozen aging rebels who still hearkened back to Yihuda the Galilean and who had been so long absent from our country as to have lost all sense of the realities facing us. As a result, my relations with them were strained from the start. As others of our party began to filter into the city with more news of the reprisals against us, the members of the Tyrian group grew puffed up with the delusion that the leadership of the movement would now somehow come to rest with them. So the rest of us began to avoid them out of fear they would compromise us in some way, with the Roman authorities or with our own leadership. For my part, since I had heard of no warrant against me in Jerusalem, I began to think seriously of leaving the city, though I knew also that afew of those close to me had been arrested and shipped off into slavery.
    Through all this I had hardly given another thought to Yehoshua. But one day after I’d been in the city a matter of months I came across a gathering of some twenty or so near the city gates and there he stood addressing it, though changed in appearance now, fair and well-groomed and well-fed so that he seemed almost a Greek, and changed, too, in his manner, with an air of authority I had not seen in him at En Melakh. Nonetheless he did not seem to be making much headway with the crowd, who were badgering him because he had slighted the Tyrian gods.
    “You should keep your ideas for the Jews,” someone said to him.
    “Is that what your teachers tell you? That there’s a truth for Tyrians and another for Jews?”
    “You say so yourselves!”
    Soon enough the crowd broke up. A few rough-looking attendants who had been hovering near him in stony silence huddled around him now speaking in muted Aramaic. But when I approached him his eye went to me at once.
    “I saw you in the crowd,” he said. “I was happy to see a friend in it.”
    It was getting on to dark and so I invited him and his men to take their supper with me at the inn where I was staying near the port, run by an old Jew sympathetic to our cause. The whole way there he grilled me in a fairly lively way on the customs of the city, in Greek, leaving his colleagues, who obviously spoke no Greek and in fact looked like the roughest sort of hirelings, entirely out of the conversation. At the time this did not strike me as remarkable,but later I saw how he sometimes consulted them for the smallest things, so that my first impression of them as mere bodyguards or servants seemed mistaken.
    Then at one point, taking me by surprise, he said, “I heard the arrest of that man at En Melakh was because of a plot.”
    “Ah,” I said, and didn’t pursue the matter. But in this way he made clear to me that he’d guessed the reason for my presence there in Tyre.
    At supper we switched to Aramaic, though his men—there were three of them, Yaqob and Yohanan and then the apparent leader, Shimon, whom Yehoshua, however, no doubt because of his hulking frame, called Kephas, the Rock—mainly kept up their brooding silence. From their accents I’d gathered they were Galileans, which went some way towards explaining their manner, since that race was not known for wasting its words. They addressed their master by the shortened Yeshua, which made him seem common. But later I learned that that had been his given name and it was only the prophet Yohanan who had named him more formally, when he had purified him, as was his practice.
    Though he had been Yohanan’s acolyte, his notions did not seem to accord much with what I knew of Yohanan’s. Yohanan had preached the imminent end of days, like the desert cults; but Yeshua did not seem in such a hurry. As he put it, Yohanan was right to make us feel each day was our last, so we might be woken up to our mortality. But in so saying he showed he didn’t agree with him. For his own part, he seemed to think more in the