The Nazarene Quotes

“Nevertheless the story was still told how he lay dead, how the wailing women had lamented for him, how he had been carried away to burial, and how the Rabbi had brought him back to life; and whatever the actuality, Eliezer had been looked on with a kind of dark respect in which there was more than a touch of fear. For most he was a man who had been dead. Men were uncomfortable in his vicinity, started back from him, trembled lest they touch him. It was even suspected that whosoever came in physical contact with him was defiled as by contact with a corpse. For he might be alive and yet dead, he might be a corpse set in motion. Such indeed was the impression he made on many, of a thing that was animated not by a will of its own. Moreover, alive or dead, or both, the long shrivelled body reeked of the grave, and those that saw him in the Temple court, standing behind his Rabbi, would mutter, “There goes the Rabbi with the golem that he has fashioned!”
― Sholem Asch, The Nazarene

“I have never been able to understand wherein lay this profound power which they [the rabbis] wielded over the people. For the people as a whole, and not only the following of pupils, was prepared to obey them in all things, no matter what dangers were entailed. We were, frankly, afraid of the power of the learned, and we kept close watch on them.”
― Sholem Asch, The Nazarene

“Not the power to remember, but it's very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence.”
― Sholem Asch, The Nazarene