The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman Page A

they are wise or foolish, to be loved or
     to be feared”—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia since Iehuda came to stay—“his assistance
     will be invaluable!” He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. “Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God
     of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!”
    “We have heard,” says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, “that you Jews believe that your God lives in only
     one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?”
    The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help
     him to some wine.
    Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship
     the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred
     place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much
     that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose
     to pass them on, unthinking?
    He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing
     choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.
    “Ah,” he replies to the drunken fool, “perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close
     to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his…favors.” He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his
     thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.
    But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.
    “You’d do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn’t stray so much!”
    The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and
     scowls and drinks more wine.
    Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don’t embarrass important guests.
    “Ah”—he fakes a little laugh—“perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can
     trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god.”
    He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately
     grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than
     they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.
    “Yes,” rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, “you can’t trust women.”
    Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.
    “But now,” says Iehuda, “to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was
     back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard.” He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so
     long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.
    “Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to
     the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else’s.”
    He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories
     of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He
     understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin
     at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would