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tales Yeshua’s men passed on to me I was able to pick out that Yeshua had come to Kefar Nahum early that spring, which would have been not long after we’d met in En Melakh. The men were very mysterious about how he had ended up there and how they had cometo be his followers, saying only that he had called them, giving to the words that special weight with which converts invested their particular terminology. I thought perhaps he had chosen the place for the refuge offered by the hills in the area should he need to flee, since as far as I knew it was otherwise without distinctions or charms. But it came out he had family nearby in Notzerah, a town just outside of Sepphoris, the former Galilean capital. I was surprised when his men said they had never met with any of his family; it appeared, however, that they had little to do with Yeshua’s past, nor indeed did they seem curious of it.
    We crossed the frontier at Gush Halav not long after dawn the following day, getting through without incident. I immediately felt my blood quicken at stepping back onto native soil. It was just coming on to the end of the summer and the grape harvest was in progress, the vineyards already alive with workers and the air rife with the sweet, half-fermented smell of must. After the gloomy woods that had lined the road to Gush Halav, it was a relief to see open fields again and signs of human presence. I had never been in that part of the country before or indeed spent more than a matter of days in the Galilee and so was surprised at the level of cultivation, not only in the valleys but even on the hilltops, which were covered in olive groves. I imagined it was the Jews who had so tamed the place, in the generations since the Maccabees had won it back for us, though many of the olive trees we passed looked so gnarled and old they might have gone back to the ancient Canaanites.
    It seemed that Yeshua and his men livened up as well when we crossed the frontier, perhaps at the prospect of returning home. But it turned out there was more to it thanthat—they were recognized here. In each village we passed there was someone who knew them, and came quietly offering homage; in one town, where we stopped for our midday rest, there seemed a whole little colony of Yeshua’s followers, who came slowly filtering in to pay their respects at the house where we’d put up. Yeshua appeared different among them than he had among the crowd in Tyre, more at ease, though it wasn’t the elders or even the men of standing who came to see him but the merest peasants and the like.
    It was twilight by the time we reached Kefar Nahum. The town lay along the Damascus road and the caravansary outside the walls gave off the noise and stench of animals and men. But the town itself had a dulled, neglected air. Just outside the gates we found a little crowd who had heard of Yeshua’s approach and had come to await him, most with some particular ailment they wished him to minister to. For the better part of an hour, until it grew too dark to see, Yeshua tended to those gathered. There was one boy, writhing in pain, who’d been brought to him with a broken shin bone, the fractured end of it protruding through the skin; Yeshua, with a few smooth motions, massaged the bone back into place, so that with a splint affixed the boy was practically able to leave on his own two feet. Surely it was more than simple learning that Yeshua brought to this work; he had a gift. You saw it in the concentration that came over him like a possession, the way every fibre in him seemed devoted to the task at hand.
    Afterwards we made our way to Kephas’s house, where Yeshua stayed. It was a small compound just off the main street, dank and cramped and swarming with animals and children. There we had our supper, which was ampleenough, and then Yaqob and Yohanan—who were brothers, it turned out, a point no one had mentioned before—returned to their own home. Kephas invited me to sleep on his