My father is Jeshuah Mathias, the first and the thirteenth, and though he is celebrated far and wide, his life was not a bed of roses and little is written of the years between his Bar Mitzvah and his ascendancy.
In dad's early teens, my grandfather Herod Polli Joseph divorced my grandmother to marry Princess Berniece, and this came as a big surprise to my father. In his mid-teen years, Mariamne was living in Rome with James and Ruth (Tamara stayed on with Jesh in Galilee), and the separation from his mother and younger siblings was excruciatingly painful for my dad.
He responded with a certain amount of rebelliousness, and his followers were legion in the Temple and on the streets, everywhere truth be sought my father's name was on people's lips. He was said to be the greatest Aristobulus of all time, and by many in The Way, even the
Mesiach...Pilate was in his final Jeru years in those days, and my dad and his sisters and brothers were around to keep things clean. On at least three occasions they had many people ready to lay down on the streets. One time they actually carried through with it, when Pilate was complicit in a ridiculous Roman blasphemy, and all of Jerusalem's major roadways were blocked by twelve thousand peaceful protesters.
Even before he left for the University of Alexandria, hopes and expectations of some in Galilee and Jerusalem were hugely unreachable. People were believing Aristobulus would unite all Judaic faithful and overthrow the Roman occupiers, but even at a young age my father was promoting Inity among all humanikind, not just among Jews and Romans.
Some Orthodox elements questioned his pedigree, while others celebrated it. Radicals challenged his passion, and conservatives thought him hot headed and self-righteous. His family was concerned about some of the blokes he was hanging with, and when people gathered to hear him teach, spies and Romans were never far away.
As his own arranged marriage to Princess Drusilla was never intended (by those in power, anyway) to be anything other than a preparation for later life, its rapid dissolution wouldn't have been so bothersome except for the fact that he was also despondent over my mom's first marriage, to the Baptist. The fateful hand of Rome and Jah would bring that to its course, but there was a time of agony and separation on both sides of the divide.
Take this social situation and internal pressure and dash in the highest of expectations for his own life, and you can see how my dad was truly purified by fire.
