The Magic Circle Read Online Free PDF

not: I came here with my Father. Don’t forget, the shofar blows also in Galilee.”
    This of course referred to the Day of Atonement the week before while the Master was still in Galilee, when the ram’s horn was blown as it was each year-end, signaling all men to reflect in the coming year on how they might act more in keeping with God’s will. But it was the casual way the Master mentioned this age-old tradition that gave Nicodemus the uncomfortable feeling that it might have taken on fresh meaning within the Master’s feverishly active and fertile mind. What was he really up to?
    Before Nicodemus could pursue the matter, the Master headed off briskly to the court of the money changers just within the temple precincts. Nicodemus had to puff to catch up with him. There, those who’d taunted the Master outside surrounded him again—as he might have expected and seemed to want—accusing him of bearing false witness. And that was when he did it, the thing that started the rumor he might be mad.
    When these men said they were descended from Abraham’s seed and didn’t require the Master to give them all this guidance he loved to hand out, and particularly they didn’t like his pretentious claims that he was the messiah and heir to the Davidian branch, the Master had the audacity to say he knew Abraham personally. Furthermore, he told them, when Abraham had heard of the Master’s mission here on earth, he’d rejoiced. They said the Master hardly was old enough to know a man who’d been dead, like Abraham, for thousands of years. The Master silenced them with a look. Then he told them that God Himself had introduced them, personally! He said that he, the Master, was himself the son of God—the flesh of God! But this was not the end. He told them, and many here in the chamber were present to witness it:
    “I and my Father are one. Before Abraham was … I am! ” He used the sacred name to describe himself, a blasphemous act worth a lashing or even a stoning.
    But that was only the beginning. Just three months ago, long after the festival, the Master was called to Bethany, to the home of young Lazarus, brother of Miriam and Martha of Magdali, among the Master’s closest disciples. The boy was gravely ill and longed to see him before he died. But according even to the twelve, the Master behaved badly, refusing to go down from Galilee and see the family although the situation was critical and the women begged him to try to heal the boy, to save him from certain death. By the time he finally came, the child had been dead for three days. Miriam told them that the corpse was rotted and stinking, and she and her sister refused to grant the Master the access he requested to the crypt.
    So he stood outside. He stood outside and called to Lazarus—young, dead Lazarus—until he raised him. He raised him from the tomb of his fathers. He raised him in his decaying condition, wrapped in the rotted burial cloths with maggots already working on the corpse. He raised him from the dead.
    “Dear God,” whispered Joseph of Arimathea when this tale was over. As he stared at the others around the table with glazed eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. What could he possibly say? The Sadducees preached that death was simply the end of life; the Pharisees taught that for the good man, for the life well lived, there could be the reward of eternal life in heaven. But nobody believed in the concept of resurrection, of bringing a rotted corpse from the grave back to existence on earth. It was a horror beyond imagining.
    Many of those around the table, seeing Joseph’s consternation, tried to avoid his gaze. But the high priest Caiaphas, who’d contributed nothing to the story told by the others, now interjected a thought of his own.
    “It would seem your nephew, our beloved Jesua ben Joseph of Nazareth, son of a humble carpenter, has developed delusions of grandeur, my dear Joseph,” he said in his annoyingly unctuous voice.