THE ANSWER FOR

    

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  TWENTY-TWO

 

 

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  THE QUESTION:  Let me guess.  Matthew?  I have been wondering just when the two of you had actually recorded those memoirs of your days together in Judea?  How did he know where to find you?  

 

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Question Thirty-three

  

 

  THE ANSWER:    Yes, it was indeed Matthew and I had always been so very close and intimate with that wonderful and faithful man, and if anyone was ever fully aware of just how much the two of us had meant to each other it was Mary.  After Matthew arrived, Mary confessed to me that she had confided in Matthew just before she left Judea of my likely whereabouts and that she was leaving only to be joining me somewhere in or close to Alexandria in the land of Egypt "in the direction of the setting sun," and that I would likely be in the company of local intellectuals; “Don’t even bother to look amongst the Hebrews or even mention his name should you ever follow me there in hopes of renewing our friendships,” was Mary’s only binding condition for having shared what no other friend or even family had any knowledge of.  Of course, I was hopelessly overjoyed with Matthew’s arrival and naturally faulted Mary with nothing but my gratitude for having been so thoughtful and trusting of our dearest friend.  Matthew had returned in a time that he thought he had just too few years left on this earth and along with his encouraging reports of the improving conditions of the Hebrews in Judea as well as their regaining strength and growing resistance against Rome, he was excited to report that I had indeed had a bit of a positive influence on the general thinking of our people, even though it often resulted in bitter splits between different factions of Hebrews as well as growing difference even with those who had so willingly and completely disassociated themselves with their once proud Hebrew heritage.  He also reported that even my brother, James had taken some of my causes to heart, and in my absence, felt it was rightly his responsibility to maintain the family’s influence on at least some of those factions.   Most importantly of all, and with a sincere and loyal desire to give me at least some of the rightful credit for some rather dramatic changes in Judea, Matthew felt compelled to write a bit of a personal account that only the two of us were apt to be able to compile, even in light of our aging memories and desires to simply forget some of the more discouraging events.  It was this last visit with Matthew and what little we had committed to some sheep skins that he had brought with him that was my bases for knowing that the accounts attributed to Matthew were more likely to possess any degree of accuracy should they had remained in tact.  It appears that whatever we had once recorded in that tradition of telling the truth was sorely lost over the passage of time, and neither of us is now in any position to ever regain the excitement of those once shared moments, and most especially since what we had once accomplished in our maturity has been so bastardized with greed and the want of power.  I am so terribly thankful that Matthew does not have to share these present moments of realization of such a totally unexpected and sad outcome to our youthful efforts and sacrifices while we were once alive on this earth.  This is now only a blessing that he shares.  I wish there was more to report about our remaining years in Egypt, but with the exception of the birth of our son, Joseph, there really wasn’t all that much to share.  With Joseph’s exceptional education and his command of several languages, he left our company when he was about twenty years of age and was headed to Rome, where he had hoped to gain a position as a teacher.  It is interesting that in all of his studies he was never educated to becoming a devout Hebrew; he only knew that his mother and I were from Judea and that we shared some Hebrew traditions and nothing more.  I wasn’t at all ashamed of my past, but I was so forsaken by so many of my own people that I no longer felt any spiritual connection to those lost roots.  Joseph enjoyed an unencumbered upbringing leaving him free to explore his world without the constraints or shackles that often accompany unrealistic and false belief systems imposed on them often by their own parents.  Neither Mary nor I wanted our son to be at all limited in his own explorations of the world to which we both had so joyously introduced him.  He was free to choose or to never choose anything at all in which to believe, except his own gift to love and the enjoyment of this earth through and with his own intuitive eyes.  I hope that he maintained that lovely gift to his dying day and that perhaps he might have even blessed his own children with such a wonderful gift; I, for one, will never know whether Mary and I were that fully successful.  I had no further word from my son until my dying day, which by the way, preceded that of Mary who was still in good heath and cheer with the exception of my unexpected departure from this earth.