[Previous: lines 389-398]
John is narrating Christ's miracles to Pilate.
Nec minus est olli imperii maris aequora in alta;------------
uni omnes undae assurgunt, fluctusque quiescunt [400]
unius edicto: vidi, vidi ipse furentes
illius hybernos ad vocem ponere Coros,
vimque omnem, motas quae flabris asperat undas.
Nondum luna suum ter cursum plena peregit,
cùm subito in lento deprensis marmore nobis [405]
nocte ferè media, duni retia ducimus, orta est
turbida tempestas; et pontus inhorruit ater
fluctibus elatis, et concursantibus undis;
inflictamque ratem iamiam salis hauserat aestus.
Nos trepidare metu leti discrimine parvo; [410]
cum procul, ecce, ducem. quem nuper liquimus alto
littore spectantem fiuctus scopulo illidentes,
ferre iter aspicimus medias impunè per undas
suspensum, tumidoque pedes baud tingere ponto.
Horruimus visu subito, nec credere quibam [415]
me veram faciem, haud simulatum cernere corpus
tam celeres egisse vias sine rcmige in undis,
ni sese, verbis dum nos hortatur amicis,
ultrô ostendisset: ‘Quonam fiducia vobis
iam nunc pulsa mei cessit? timor omnis abesto. [420]
Indubitare meis tandem dediscite dictis.’
Sic ait; atque ratem, quae iam superantibus undis
cesserat, insiliens solo tumida aequora nutu
placavit; posuitque minacia murmura pontus.
Sic terrae in tutum positis adnavimus undis [425]
incolumes, celerique volavimus aequora cursu.
Nec mora, vix siccum attigerat tellure potitus;
ecce aliud dictu magis, ac mirabile visu.
Namque magistratus aderant in littore missi
aera reposcentes, quœ pendere lege quotannis [430]
regibus antiqua, pro sese quisque, iubemur.
Accipit hos placidus; quos dum sermone moratur,
Petrum ad se vocat, et fidam summissus ad aurem:
‘Vade,’ ait; ‘et, iacto quem primum traxeris hamo
aequoribus, piscem cultro scrutabere acuto: [435]
intus erit, regi quod jussi pendimus ambo.’
Iussa facit senior: trahit hamo ad littora prœdam;
argentumque viris dat piscis in ore repertum.
His powers are no less on the high seas;------------
all waves rise up and then again fall back [400]
only at his word. I myself saw a storm,
silenced by his command—bitter northern gales
churning the roiling waters with their blasts.
The moon hadn't waxed and waned three full times
when, suddenly, we were caught on the sea [405]
as we wrangled our nets at midnight—tempests
blew-in from nowhere, spiking the sea black
The surge mounted and waves crashed together,
almost overwhelming our fragile boat.
We shivered with fear at approaching death! [410]
Then, suddenly, far off, we saw our lord—
who we’d left ashore, watching the surf roll—
walking unharmed across the waves, in the midst
of the waters, his feet not even getting wet!
We were startled by this sight, could not believe it: [415]
was it really his face, body—or a vision?
How could he pass so quickly over the water?
But then he spoke these words to his friends and
so revealed the truth: ‘where is your faith in me?
how has it flagged? Abandon all these fears! [420]
You must learn never to doubt anything I say.’
He spoke. The ship was floundering in the waves:
but he jumped in, and, nodding at the rough sea,
pacified it, quelling its menacing roar.
The pitching waves settled, and we sailed swift [425]
through a calm sea to the safety of dry land.
No sooner had we returned to the beach
than we witnessed a more wonderful event.
Some magistrates were waiting on the shore
to collect taxes, as the law requires every year [430]
an ancient tribute that all are commanded to obey.
He greeted these man calmly and, as he chatted,
he called Peter and whispered in his ear:
‘Go,’ he said, ‘fetch the first fish off the hook
and cut open its belly with a sharp knife; [435]
inside you’ll find enough to pay the king.’
The older man obeyed, and brought the fish
and gave the men a silver coin from its mouth.
Vida here tacks-on the account of Jesus walking on water (Matthew 8:23-27, Mark 4:36-41 and Luke 8:23-25) with the separate story of the coin found inside the fish.
When they had come to Capernaum, those who received the temple tax came to Peter and said, “Does your Teacher not pay the temple tax?”The Greek for “a piece of money”, at the end there, is στατήρ (statḗr) the exact temple tax for two.
He said, “Yes.”
And when he had come into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth take customs or taxes, from their sons or from strangers?”
Peter said to Him, “From strangers.”
Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. Nevertheless, lest we offend them, go to the sea, cast in a hook, and take the fish that comes up first. And when you have opened its mouth, you will find a piece of money; take that and give it to them for Me and you” [Matthew 17:23-26]
Though this is not attached to the walking-on-the-water episode, Capernaum is on the Sea of Galilee, so Vida isn’t entirely spitballing here. Me, I've always been a little suspicious: combined with the ‘I shall make you fishers of men’ rhetoric of the NT this has the feel, rather, of a fiduciary promise: ‘I shall maker you fishers of men and it will be super-lucrative!’ Although the larger context of the passage suggests that churches should not raise tithes on their followers but instead source income from strangers, and I don't believe any actual Christian churches have attempted this.
Recent scholarship suggests that ‘Jesus walking on the water’ is a stranger and more unique miracle than one might think:
Scholarly treatments of Jesus’s sea-walking miracle frequently cite several parallel figures “walking on water” in Greco-Roman mythology, such as Poseidon, Orion, Euphemus, and Pythagoras. In fact, however, this “walking” terminology is inaccurate because, contrary to Adela Yarbro Collins and others, Greco-Roman mythology supplies no unambiguous example of a figure walking on water in the way that Jesus does in Mark, Matthew, and John. Rather, there are numerous examples—far more than have been recognized—of running, chariot-riding, and flying over water beginning as early as Homer’s Iliad. Whereas Jesus’s feat is presented as a sort of levitation miracle, water running and water riding are understood as a consequence of superhuman speed in the popular Greek conception of physics, with the idea ultimately based on the motion of wind over waves. Flying over water and other surfaces is associated in Greek thought with supernatural travel convenience; it requires speed and flying devices that are entirely foreign to the Gospel narratives. The few examples of Greco-Roman figures purported to walk on water just as Jesus does either have been misinterpreted or are idiosyncratic, Common-Era creations. There are no actual Greco-Roman parallels to what Jesus does in the Gospels. Walking on the sea was more novel, more marvelous, and less immediately interpretable for nonJewish audiences than has been assumed. [Brian D. McPhee, ‘Walk, Don't Run: Jesus's Water Walking Is Unparalleled in Greco-Roman Mythology’, Journal of Biblical Literature 135:4 (2016), 763]Over the last few blogposts I've been digging a little more into the historical and theological contexts, and spending less time on Vergilian and other intertexts. But I wouldn't want to give the impression that Vida has drifted away from his Vergil. On the contrary, allusions to and direct lifts from the Aeneid are threaded through the whole thing. For example: Vida's ‘bitter northern gales/churning the roiling waters with their blasts’ in lines 402-3 [hybernos quae flabris asperat undas] riffs on Aeneid 3:285: et glacialis hiemps aquilonibus asperat undas, ‘and icy winter ruffles the waters with northern blasts’; and Vida's line 410 ‘We shivered with fear at approaching death!’ [Nos trepidare metu leti discrimine parvo] owes something to Aeneid 2:685: Nos pavidi trepidare metu, crinemque flagrantem; ‘we were shaking with fear at her blazing hair.’ It's a little dull to keep logging all these myriad intertextual moments, although they are everywhere.
The image at the head of this post: Christ marchant sur la mer (1866) by Amédée Varint
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