GOSPEL OF HANNANIAH
SYNOPSIS
BOOK 1
Seven-year old Hannaniah and her mother Miriam live as outcasts in the town of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. Hannaniah is the product of an illicit love affair between Miriam and Yeshuah bar Joseph, the man known as Jesus. Spurned by the townspeople, loved only by her mother, Hannaniah tries everything and anything to make people like her, including magic. One night, during a lengthy spring drought, which has the local fishermen and farmers praying for rain, Hannaniah watches a rainmaker cast his spells. While he fails to bring rain, Hannaniah performs her own ritual with the assistance of her only friend, a lame sheepdog named Sheshmesh.
Miriam of Magdala survives as a pariah making beautiful pottery, which she sells through a local merchant, formerly her betrothed. She has also taken in a destitute man as a boarder, innocently deepening her reputation as a whore. Hannaniah worships her lovely mother and yearns for and dreams about the man, her father, who abandoned them seven years before.
When the rain comes, Hannaniah believes she is responsible for ending the drought and hurtles through the town, Sheshmesh at her muddy heels, shouting out her triumph. She believes the people of Magdala will forgive her all of her sins and welcome her and her mother into their accepting arms. Rather she is met by anger and suspicion, proclaimed a witch, and spat upon. Covered in mud, soaked to the skin by the heavenly downpour, Hannaniah casts her eyes skyward as a friendly hand clasps her shoulder. Her tear-filled eyes follow that hand up the arm towards a warm smiling face, a loving face she will never forget. Unbeknownst to Hannaniah, her father Yeshuah bar Joseph has returned from his seven-year exile.
Yeshuah carries the child he will not proclaim is his daughter back to her house. Miriam is stunned, overjoyed, lustful and anxious but cannot respond to Yeshuah except as if to a friendly stranger while Hannaniah is present. Over the months and years that follow, Hannaniah and Yeshuah develop a special bond, while he and her mother dance a cautious quiet romance, planning how they might someday be an open family again.
It is a large family, composed of a matriarch Mary, who runs her estate like an empress, and Yeshuah’s many brothers and sisters. James, the oldest, is Yeshuah’s right hand. Joseph is the accountant. Simon is the stalwart. And Judas is the impulsive one.
Life is exciting for Hannaniah and her newfound ‘father’ until Pontius Pilate arrives in Jerusalem and sets up Roman icons outside the Holy Temple. To prevent civil insurrection Yeshuah and Hannaniah travel to the nation’s capital along with thousands of other Jews to protest. Everywhere Yeshuah goes, Hannaniah is at his shoulder. In the fields. By the lake. Wherever he walks. Wherever he teaches. But at the stoning of a young woman when Yeshuah confronts Miriam’s father Habbakuk with his infidelities and incest, Yeshuah is forced into exile again.
Hannaniah adores her father, who she still does not know is her father. Back from exile, he teaches her to read and trains her to be a great rabbi who can solve whatever problems people bring to her. Even when Yeshuah meets John the Baptist and begins his journey towards becoming the nation’s messiah, even as he confronts his own ghosts and the doubts he has about God’s plan for him, Hannaniah remains a loyal and devoted ‘daughter’. It is only when he heads for Jerusalem, only when he has made that awful decision that he must reject the person he most loves in the world in order to become the ordained messiah, does Hannaniah discover the truth. When she confronts him, Yeshuah, whose ministry is open to all, must turn away from her. To be discovered as a cuckold who had a child out of wedlock would be to destroy his ministry and his holy purpose. And so Yeshuah turns his back on her and Hannaniah is forced into her own exile by James, Yeshuah’s faithful and forceful brother.
Hands lashed to keep her from harming herself and trying to escape, Hannaniah travels with a band of merchants, including one young man, Rashi, who falls for her. Going first by camel and then by sea to Tarsus in Asia Minor, she avoids kidnapping and rape, is rescued by a young Greek philosopher, and ends up at the home of Shmuel bar Jonah, a Pharisee devoted to the Torah, his family, and the Jewish community in Tarsus.
Despite the pious atmosphere in the house, Hannaniah falls under the spell of Shmuel’s dark and brooding eldest son Avram, who has many secrets he will share with Hannaniah. Avram is being groomed to be a Pharisee scholar like his father but has absolutely no desire to follow in Shmuel’s learned footsteps. The lonely and angry young girl who has lost her family and her faith is easy clay for him to mold.
While Shmuel takes an instant liking to Hannaniah, seeing in her what he knows is not in his son, teaching her the 613 laws that hold the Jewish community together, Avram is pulling her in a different direction. He is friends with a young Greek brother and sister: Aristocrates, who worships knowledge as Shmuel worships God; and Sophia, the teenage sybarite, who indoctrinates the vulnerable Hannaniah into the cult of Aesculapius and much more. Sophia is a precocious and sexually active beauty. Her society is the young and wealthy of Tarsus, including a Jewish boy named Paul who is anxious to belong and who is close friends with Avram.
Hannaniah’s three years in Tarsus see her grow physically and emotionally from a child into a young woman. She tries to contact her mother and father in Magdala but hears no word in return. Even when Moshe ben Judah, her mother’s former betrothed and now a disciple of Yeshuah, arrives in Tarsus, he cannot give her the information she needs to regain her faith. Neither Moshe nor anyone else knows that Hannaniah is the daughter of the messiah. No one can tell her how much Yeshuah truly loves his daughter and why he cast her aside. Rather a fire of revolution literally engulfs the Jewish community. The people stone Moshe. A fire of unknown origin burns down half of the ghetto. A cancer in the form of Avram the drunk begins to erode at the family of Shmuel the Pharisee.
Once again, Hannaniah is cast out after Avram rapes her and she becomes pregnant with his child. Loving and respecting Shmuel as she does, she does not tell him the truth of how she became pregnant. She accepts her fate and is taken in by her friends Aristocrates and Sophia. After Hannaniah gives birth to a daughter Leah , however, she is welcomed back to the home of Shmuel bar Jonah, who has come to love her as his daughter. But the joy of her return is short-lived. Guilt-ridden for his involvement in the fire that destroyed much of the Jewish community in Tarsus and troubled by his own feelings of love for one of its victims, Avram hangs himself. Hannaniah has to deliver the news to the despairing parents but again uses her acquired wisdom to lessen the blow.
Shortly after, she suffers her own terrible blow. The young merchant who fell in love with her on the journey to Tarsus, Rashi, knocks on Shmuel’s door and offers his hand in marriage. Hannaniah isn’t interested in marriage though. She wants word of her father the messiah, nothing else. Rashi knows only one thing, something he has hesitated to tell her. Her father has been crucified. Devastated, Hannaniah, like Avram, attempts suicide by drowning in a well. She is rescued by God in the guise of Aesculapius the Healer and by Aristocrates who pulls her from the rim of the well. Rather than die, Hannaniah has had a vision and she is determined now to return to her homeland to find out what happened to her father and, if necessary, to take up his mantle as the messiah of Israel.
Hannaniah bids a tearful farewell to Shmuel, promising that she will say a prayer for Avram in Jerusalem. Then, with Aristocrates, Sophia, and Paul of Tarsus, she sets sail for Israel. But the world has changed in Magdala and throughout Israel. Rome is everywhere. Spies haunt the countryside. Armed Jewish rebels, Zealots, try to provoke insurgency. Hannaniah’s mother Miriam has lost her mind over her loss of Yeshuah. Mary, Yeshuah’s mother, has lost her servants and her sons who are on the road all the time, followers of Yeshuah’s successor, his brother James. Undeterred, confused by conflicting reports about her father’s demise which lead her to believe that he might still be alive, Hannaniah heads for Jerusalem.
Almost immediately the seventeen-year-old beauty with the intellect of a scholar and the training of a rabbi draws the attention of people who did not like her father or his ministry. Rashi warns her to keep a low profile, but she is bent on superceding James as her father’s successor. Angry with James for his participation in her exile, she confronts her uncle, who is in turn confronted by a mob of anti-Christian Jews lead by Paul of Tarsus.
Headstrong Hannaniah is determined to succeed her father in a land barreling towards war. Word of another messiah gathering mobs of Jews north of Jerusalem sets her off with Rashi to see if this new messiah might in fact be her father. A force of Roman troops intercepts them all, slaughtering the wayward Jews, their newest messiah, and Rashi. Hannaniah barely escapes, wandering the wilderness in a bruised daze until she is assaulted and rescued, this time by Eliezar, the man who will become her lover, the charismatic leader of a nomadic band of insurrectionists.
In an oasis far from Roman troops, she and Eliezar consummate their love and develop a working relationship. Hannaniah intends to supplant James, becoming the political wing of their effort, while Eliezar builds his forces in preparation for conflict with Rome. Through all of this, Hannaniah has ignored her responsibilities as a mother to her daughter Leah. In fact, she has purposefully pushed motherhood onto Sophia, doing to her child what her father did to her, rejecting all of Leah’s attempts for attention and warmth.
Hannaniah’s reputation as a healer, mystic, teacher, and prophet grows in the countryside and spreads to the city, where she sets up shop in Jerusalem. She builds a following of young urban poor while directly challenging James and the priesthood of the temple, who are no happier with her than they were with her father. She continues to dig into Yeshuah’s ending. Is he dead? Was he indeed crucified? Did he rise after death and ascend to heaven? Or is he in hiding somewhere? And if so, why? James has one story. Yeshuah’s youngest brother Judas has another story. While James insists Yeshuah is dead, Nicodemus tells Hannaniah that he knows Yeshuah survived crucifixion.
In any case, Hannaniah continues to act as a magnet for many of the disenfranchised of Jerusalem. She marries Aristocrates to build up support among the non-Jews of Jerusalem, survives her own assassination attempt but loses Eliezar’s child in the process. Distancing herself further from Leah, ever building her base, she never gives up her search for her father. When Caligula becomes emperor and threatens to engulf Jerusalem with his statues, Hannaniah achieves the height of her renown by circumventing a Jewish delegation to the Roman governor and convincing him to disregard Caligula’s orders.
She returns to Jerusalem a heroine. But from her great height, she is soon toppled. When the Zealots attack and kill one of the high priests of the temple, Hannaniah is blamed for her involvement with Eliezar and the Zealots. She defends herself well before the Sanhedrin, the high council of Jews, much as her father had in his day. But her fate has already been decreed. She is sent into exile in Alexandria, Egypt with Leah, Sophia, and Aristocrates. Here life is actually good to her. She works at the great library of Alexandria, discovering the sheer pleasure of scholarship. But even immersed in books she cannot escape her past or the empty place in her soul. The oracles of Amun convince her to return to Israel, which she does, minus her husband and her daughter, accompanied only by Sophia, who has come to love Hannaniah.
War breaks out. Eliezar comes and goes, impregnating Hannaniah again. And shortly before she gives birth, she is captured by Roman troops and imprisoned in the Antonia Fortress in Jerusalem. Here in the darkness of her cell, she gives birth to her second child, only to have him abducted by the Romans while she is asleep. Madness descends. Hannaniah is interrogated, whipped, beaten, but survives, somehow, survives for seven years in isolation. Only James’s intervention and events outside her prison cause her to be moved to another prison. Upon her release, though still a young woman, she is physically and spiritually spent, a stranger to her own children. She has given up the hunt for her father, given up trying to be the messiah, barely retains any interest in life.
Eliezar’s abrupt appearance unexpectedly forces Hannaniah out of her lethargy. While she rejects her lover’s plea to join him for the final victorious battle against the Romans, Leah vanishes. Hannaniah’s daughter has longed for her mother’s love and respect. Running after Eliezar is her desperate attempt to gain approval from Hannaniah. She has begun a quest much as Hannaniah had in looking for her father. Only now does Hannaniah realize how grievously wrong she has been. Galvanizing Aristocrates and Sophia, they split up to search for Leah. Aristocrates returns to Jerusalem. Hannaniah goes to Madgdala, eventually rejoining her husband in the nation’s capital to witness the martyrdom of her hated uncle James.
James is dead. So, too, Mary, Hannaniah’s grandmother. Miriam has lost her mind, and Judas has been crucified. Worse, Leah is gone. Hannaniah is about to give up all hope when her uncle Joseph, wounded and beaten by the same mob that had killed his brother, finally reveals the truth about Yeshuah. Hannaniah’s father did survive crucifixion. He is still alive, living with monks in Egypt.
Angered by the deceit yet exhilarated by the news, Hannaniah hurries to rejoin Sophia and Aristocrates to set sail for Egypt. At last, she will be reunited with her father, she will hear him utter the words, ‘You are my daughter. I love you.’ But at the last minute, Hannaniah is visited by the ghost of her grandmother. In a panic, struggling with the choice of reuniting with her father at long last after so much pain or making one last attempt to save her daughter, Hannaniah chooses to run after Leah, to find her first child at all costs.
Sending Aristocrates, Sophia, and her children off, Hannaniah sets out on her own to Masada, where she understands her daughter has gone with Eliezar. She recounts a dream she had of her father and of Sheshmesh her old dog friend. ‘Am I the messiah?’ he asks Hannaniah. ‘That depends on you.’ As for Hannaniah she understands at long last that her father, good man though he was, made one mistake, believing himself to be the messiah when, in fact, through the simple act of loving we all are.