not the sons of the Father; you are rather sons of the Evil One, for he
is the enemy of truth and you likewise are its enemies.” His words were
uttered in calmness, but they were emphatic, and his eyes flashed. “You
will neither hear the truth nor comprehend it.”
“But, Rabbi, you must be mad.”
Jesus smiled, and Claudia, who had been watching him in complete
fascination since her first sight of him, thought she detected a hint of
restrained amusement in his dark eyes. “No,” he said, “I am not mad; I
speak the truth, and whoever lives by the truth, my brother, will not
even see death.”
“But haven’t all the fathers in ages before—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
Isaiah, all the righteous ones of old—haven’t they all met death? Then
how can you say that others will not die?”
“I dare say, he is not speaking of physical death,” Tullia whispered.
“It’s obvious he’s referring to the afterlife of the spirit. But these
sniveling Pharisees don’t even want to understand him.”
Yet Jesus did not answer the Temple leader, for in the rear of the press
about him a commotion had arisen and the Galilean had turned from the
questioning Pharisee to look out over the heads of the people now
craning their necks to see the cause of the tumult. The questioner and
his little knot had turned, too; the Galilean’s inquisitor, Tullia
surmised, was quite willing for the exchange to be ended, for he had not
been faring well in matching wits and words with the tall one from
Nazareth.
Tullia and Claudia, too, had twisted about to look eastward toward the
sounds that so precipitately had disturbed the strangely inspiriting
discourse and the carping questions of the Nazarene’s challengers. In
that same instant they saw, out in front of the gate of Shushan, several
coarse men half-dragging, half-carrying a bedraggled Jewish woman toward
the throng ringed about Jesus. As the crowd opened a lane inward to the
Galilean, the men rushed the poor creature toward him and savagely
thrust her to the ground at his feet. A man who had been walking in the
rear of the pitiful procession, whom Tullia took to be a minor Temple
priest, stepped in front of Jesus.
“Rabbi, this woman has been taken in the act of adultery, in the very
act, Rabbi, as the witnesses will testify. Now the law of Moses says
that such a woman must be stoned.” He paused, and his eyes surveyed the
half circle of intent, set faces. Along the rim heads nodded in
agreement.
“Is that really the law of the Israelites?” Claudia whispered. “Stone to
death a woman for such offense, by all the gods!”
“Yes, it’s the old Mosaic law, Mistress.”
“That is barbarous, Tullia. By all the gods, if I were a Jew, then
they....” But she paused, for the man had turned back to question the
Galilean. “You, however, Rabbi, have been teaching a new law. What would
you say to her punishment? Must she be stoned in accordance with our
ancient laws or not?”
Jesus was eying the poor woman, who had scrambled to her feet and was
trying to smooth out her disordered robe. Frightened and humiliated, she
kept her eyes on the ground; then, as the man finished his question and
the suddenly quiet throng listened for the reply, she raised them and
looked, with a mixture of defiance, contempt, and fright, at the tall
bronzed man before her.
“But what can he say?” Claudia whispered. “Aren’t they trying to trap
him into advocating violation of their laws?”
“Yes, Mistress. And they know, too, that they have no authority to stone
anyone to death unless the person is first condemned by the Procurator.
Either way, it’s a trap they’re trying to set.”
“Then I shall speak to Pilate....” She stopped; Tullia had laid a gently
restraining hand on her arm, for Jesus had bent down suddenly and
without offering to answer the Jew who had questioned him had begun to
trace with extended forefinger certain markings in the dust of the
marble pavement.
About him stood the silent crowd. Some seemed fearful of the horror they
might soon be witnessing; others, their cold smiles attesting to their
sadistic natures, were waiting expectantly to witness the woman’s death
agonies; only a few solemn faces revealed concern and deep pity. But the
little knot of Pharisees stood with arms folded across their rounded
paunches; their smug smiles betrayed their confidence that at last, on
the final day of the great festival, they had run to earth this annoying
and dangerous young Galilean who had been so cleverly eluding them.
Then, raising his head, Jesus faced the man who had questioned him. “You
have testified aright as to the law of our father Moses,” he said, his
voice calm, deliberate. “The law of Moses commands that the woman ...
and the man ... taken in adultery be stoned. But you ask me my
interpretation of this law?”
“We do, Rabbi. What will you do with this woman?” The man looked about
the semicircle of cold, hard faces, and one by one the Pharisees nodded
approval of his questioning. “Rabbi, what is your law in this case?”
“I answer you, my brother, in this wise, and this is my interpretation
of the law. Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
His quiet, dark eyes rested a moment on the startled countenance of the
man who had just propounded the question, and then quickly they moved
along the line of the challenging Temple leaders.
Now once more he bent forward and with stiffened forefinger traced
symbols in the dust.
For a long moment his eyes remained fixed upon the pavement. When he
looked up, the little group of sneering Pharisees had departed. The
others in the ring about him had fallen back from the steps on which he
sat and stood regarding him with frank amazement; some of them revealed
their delight at his having confounded his enemies, and on the faces of
others could be seen a heightened responsiveness to the young man’s
teachings and for the Galilean himself a strengthened affection.
“Woman, where are your accusers?” he asked the amazed poor creature,
from whom in the swift moment of his answer had fled all trace of
defiant insolence. “Does no man remain to condemn you?”
She lifted her tear-streaked face to him. “No man, Lord.”
“Neither do I condemn you. Go now, and sin no more.”
Claudia could not understand the woman’s murmured reply, but on her face
clearly discernible was a look of radiance as she bowed to the Galilean
and, turning, slipped away out of the crowd. At the same time the
Procurator’s wife noticed a large, bushy-bearded fellow, wide of
shoulders and heavily muscled, pushing through the throng from the
direction of the Gate Shalleketh. He walked up to Jesus, who had stood
up as the woman was leaving. “Master, you have been here a long while;
you must be weary. Let us go over to Bethany to rest a spell.”
“That’s the fisherman I saw one day at Tiberias,” whispered Tullia. “He
is of the Galilean’s company; his name, I think, is Simon.”
The crowd now began to disperse, for Jesus and the big fisherman were
moving off toward the Gate Shushan. They came past the two women, so
close to them that Claudia could have reached out and touched the tall
Galilean. Their eyes met; he smiled and passed on. She stood rooted,
watching the two until they had passed out of sight down the slope
toward the Brook Kidron. “He seemed to recognize me,” she said to
herself, as suddenly a fanciful thought crossed her mind. “But of course
he didn’t; he’s never in all his life seen me before.”
With the two men’s disappearance, however, the spell was broken. Claudia
caught her maid’s arm. “We’d better be going now,” she said. But she was
still lost in her own thoughts; they had rounded the corner of the Soreg
and were nearing the North Gate of Asuppim before she spoke again. “By
the gods, what a man! What a marvelous, strange Jew. And he didn’t do
any feats of magic either. Little one, I’m so glad you brought me down
here.”
“Mistress, now that you’ve seen him and heard his discourse, even though
for but a few minutes, what is your opinion of him? Do you think that
perhaps he really is the Messiah of Israel?”
“I know nothing of the Messiah of Israel ... and care nothing. And this
idea of a man’s being a god, even though we Romans are supposed to
believe that the gods come to earth in the form of men, is just as
incomprehensible to me as it is to Longinus. Maybe that’s because I
don’t believe in the gods in the first place.” They were going through
the great North Gate of Asuppim when Claudia stopped and caught Tullia’s
arm. “Nevertheless, little one—and you asked me my opinion of him—there
is something tremendously different about that man. I’m sure I have
never encountered another like him. He’s a quick thinker and able to
out-wit his enemies, and he’s evidently a good and just man. But there’s
something else”—she paused, her forehead creased in a frown—“something
to me, at any rate, mystifying. The way he looked at me, Tullia....” Her
solemn expression relaxed into a quick, warming smile. “Perhaps he _is_
your Messiah of the Jews, little one, whatever that means!”
38
On her return to Caesarea from the Feast of Tabernacles, Claudia learned
from Sergius Paulus that Longinus had sailed for Rome. The message from
the centurion to the commander of the Roman constabulary had been
brought by a ship’s master who had sailed southward from the Antioch
port of Seleucia shortly after Longinus had gone aboard a ship there for
his voyage to the capital.
The message had been brief, the commander said; its purpose was to let
him know that Longinus had been sent to Rome by the Legate Vitellius on
what the legate must have considered an urgent mission, probably to the
Prefect Sejanus.
“Longinus must have sailed from Seleucia on one of the last boats out,”
Sergius observed. “From now until spring there’ll be few crossings; any
ship attempting to make it will be braving the heavy winds.” He smiled
wryly. “It must have been important business the legate was sending him
on.”
Claudia suspected that Longinus was going to the capital to relay the
legate’s report on the situation in Palestine. Particularly important,
she knew, would be the question of whether or not King Aretas was
planning to attack Herod and thereby involve the whole Palestinian
region in war. But she had no direct message from the centurion.
Longinus was acting wisely, she realized, in sending her no written
communication. He could hardly evolve any innocent appearing reason for
writing her, and it would be impossible to send her such a message
without Pilate’s learning about it, and possibly even the Prefect. And
any message sent would of necessity be innocuous. But as the weeks
pushed deeper and deeper into winter and no word of him came to her at
all, she began to wonder if he would return to Palestine or if, the gods
forbid, Sejanus might have sent him once more to Germania or Gaul or to
some other post far remote from the now increasingly dreary Palestine.
Despite the fact that it was Herodias who had urged her to go up to
Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, the two women had hardly seen
one another during those days in Israel’s capital. Claudia recalled that
even then the Tetrarchess had seemed somewhat reserved. And once when
mention was made of the journey of Longinus to Antioch in response to
the summons of the Legate Vitellius, Herodias had appeared to grow even
more coldly formal. Perhaps the Tetrarchess suspected, Claudia thought
at the time, that Longinus was reporting on Herod’s visit to Machaerus
and the appearance there of the ambassadors from King Aretas, and even
of her own bizarre conduct at the Tetrarch’s birthday banquet. Nor had
Herodias, as they were preparing to leave Jerusalem, invited her to come
to Tiberias.
And at the Feast neither she nor Pilate had seen Antipas. She wondered
if perhaps he, too, might have suspected that Longinus was even then in
Antioch reporting what he had seen and heard at Machaerus. But her
failure to be honored by the Tetrarch in Jerusalem troubled her not at
all. She had less respect for him, she confessed to herself, than she
had for the Procurator. And she hoped that Longinus was finding
opportunity for dropping some poisoned, if discreet, words into the ears
of Sejanus concerning Pontius Pilate and his continuing difficulties
with the Jews.
Nor was the Procurator’s administration of affairs in Judaea, as the
winter advanced, serving to establish him in better favor with the
people he was governing. Stubborn and unimaginative, he steadfastly
refused either to learn anything or forget anything. Scorning his
subordinate officials and refusing to give consideration to their
counseling, fearful of his superiors, including the Legate Vitellius and
particularly the Prefect Sejanus, Pilate provided no stable rule of
Judaea; his administration vacillated from fierce oppression and
arbitrary action to cowardly yielding to priestly demands. His tax
gatherers, working through the despised publicans, those native
hirelings of Rome whom the Israelites looked upon with loathing as
traitors to Israel and Israel’s Yahweh, demanded and received exorbitant
tribute in money and produce of the land; this did not add to the
Procurator’s popularity among the Jews. Both the people and the Temple
leaders were growing increasingly enraged.
The natural breach between the Procurator and the Tetrarch, too, was
widening as the weeks went by; an incident at the Temple during one of
the great festival occasions in which Pilate’s soldiers had slain a
group of roistering Galileans had infuriated Herod Antipas. And Pilate’s
effort to use Temple funds in the building of an aqueduct to bring water
into Jerusalem had evoked the bitter animosity of the Temple leadership.
On all sides, then, the Procurator, beginning with his flaunting of the
Roman ensigns in Jerusalem shortly after his arrival in Judaea, had been
strengthening rather than weakening the natural hostility the Israelites
had for the representatives of conquering Rome.
All this Claudia had observed; she wondered how long this mounting
burden of tension and hate could continue to build upon the broad
shoulders of Pontius Pilate before inevitably it should topple him from
the Procuratorship. The answer, she was confident, lay not in Judaea,
but in Rome. Pilate would last only so long as he did not too greatly
displease Sejanus. And from the moment the tribute from Judaea to Rome
... and Sejanus ... began to shrink, she reasoned, her spouse’s days as
Procurator would be numbered.
_ ... Perhaps Sejanus may have begun to suspect already that Pilate’s
fingers have become sticky, that too large a proportion of the revenues
are failing to reach Rome; perhaps he has revealed, or hinted, his
suspicions to Longinus, and Longinus will tell me everything when he
returns._
_... If he does return. But surely he will be back in Caesarea when
winter relents and calming weather permits the ships to resume their
sailing. Surely he will arrive in time to go with us to Jerusalem for
the Feast of the Passover...._
Thinking one day of the coming Feast, she recalled her earlier visit
with Tullia to the Temple. “Do you remember that last day of the Feast
of Tabernacles?” she asked, turning to her slave maid. The girl nodded
and smiled. “That Galilean,” Claudia continued, “your Messiah of the
Jews, I wonder what has become of him. Do you suppose he’ll return to
the Jewish capital for the Passover festival?”
“I would say so, Mistress,” Tullia answered. “Every devout Jew tries to
go up for the Passover Feast. And certainly the Galilean is a devout
Jew. Even though the Temple priests are bent on destroying him, I’m sure
he will wish to go there to worship.”
“If he does, maybe we’ll have an opportunity to hear him again ... and
perhaps this time he will perform some feat of magic.”
“But, Mistress, those who hold him to be the Messiah insist that he does
not work magic; they declare he does his miracles of healing by the will
of God.”
She smiled. “Well, however he does them—and even from you, little one,
I’ve heard reports that he does—is no concern of mine. But should he
come up to the Temple and perform some such feat, either by his own
cleverness or with the aid of your Yahweh, I would like to be there when
he did it.”
“But, Mistress, you saw him that day they dragged the woman before
him....”
“Yes, but his saving her from that mob was not magic, little one. That
was only the working of a quick intelligence and a good heart. But they
say he can make lame persons walk again and blind persons see. And
Cornelius, you remember, declared he healed his little servant boy,
though Longinus thinks it was only a coincidence that the boy’s fever
broke just at the same time the Galilean supposedly was curing him.
Cornelius even believes that the carpenter once actually restored to
life the son of a widow; he told me they were bearing the young man to
the tomb when the Galilean happened along and brought him back to life.
Of course, the boy may have been in a trance; certainly no sensible
person can believe that he was really dead and then came back to life
when the Galilean said some mysterious words and made some queer motions
over him.” She paused and looked Tullia in the eyes. “Or do you, little
one?”
“But if he is actually the son of our God....”
“Oh, you gullible Jews, even you, Tullia.” Her countenance revealed an
amused tolerance. “And Cornelius. A soldier of Rome. But how, by all the
gods, Tullia, can any present-day person of education and culture
embrace such blatant superstition to believe that a man could come to
earth as a god, even if he could believe that there are gods in the
first place?”
But Tullia skillfully evaded answering the question. “If you saw him
restore to life a man who you knew was dead, what would you say about
him then, Mistress?”
“When I see him do that, little one, I’ll tell you then.”
Nevertheless, Claudia had not dismissed the Galilean from her thoughts,
for that night she dreamed about him. It was a confused and illogical
arrangement of stories she had heard about Jesus, interwoven with the
experience she and Tullia had had that day at the Temple during the
final exercises of the Feast of Tabernacles. In the dream she and
Longinus had strolled with Cornelius down from the Tower of Antonia into
the Court of the Gentiles. Rounding a corner of the Soreg, the three had
come upon a throng ringed about the Galilean. They had pushed forward to
the inner circle, and there, they had discovered on the stones of the
court at the carpenter’s feet a crushed and bloody woman.
“Rabbi,” a burly fellow beside the woman was saying, “this woman is
dead. We caught her in the act of adultery, and in accordance with the
law of our father Moses we stoned her to death. I ask you, Rabbi, did
not we do well in thus upholding the ancient law of Israel?”
“It is the law that the woman and the man taken in adultery be stoned to
death,” the Galilean replied, and then his eyes flamed and his voice
took on a new intensity, “but you who stoned her, were you without
sins?” Then he lowered his eyes to the stones beside the dead woman and
began with his forefinger to trace symbols in the dust. After a moment
he stood up and, bending down, caught the stiffened body underneath his
arms and raised it, unbending, until it stood upright.
“Remember,” said Cornelius, “she is dead, completely dead; see her
mangled face, her crushed skull. Watch the Galilean.”
Jesus was steadying the rigid corpse with one hand. Now he raised his
other hand to a position above her head and began to intone words that
to Claudia were strange and utterly incomprehensible.
“Watch now,” said Cornelius. “Keep your eyes on him. And, remember, the
woman is dead; there is no life in her, none.”
Incredulous, their eyes straining, they saw the stiffened limbs
beginning to relax and the head bend forward slightly; the crushed bones
of the shattered face rounded outward, the torn and bruised flesh
smoothed, the clotted blood melted away, and the desecrated ghastly
countenance was restored to a calm beauty; the woman, looking now into
the serene face of the Galilean, smiled.
“By all the great gods ...” But Longinus hushed precipitately, for Jesus
was speaking to the woman, now fully alert. “No man condemns you, my
sister, and neither do I,” Jesus said, as he pointed toward her
executioners, now slinking away toward the Gate of Shushan. “Go, and sin
no more.”
Longinus turned now to the Procurator’s wife, and on his face she saw an
expression of utter amazement. “But, Claudia, the woman was dead! Her
head was crushed; her face was a bloody pulp. And now, look! She is
walking away, around the corner of the Soreg! The Galilean, Claudia, he
must be a god! By all the gods, Claudia, this man must be a god! He must
be....”
But Longinus’ voice was fading, and he was receding, slipping away, and
so were Cornelius and the Galilean and the woman....
Claudia opened her eyes; her chamber was flooded with light. She closed
them again, trying to recapture the scene in the great court of the
Temple. But the dream had fled. “Bona Dea,” she said aloud. “It was so
real. That woman. And the Galilean. And Cornelius and Longinus. So
vivid. Maybe”—the notion suddenly occurred to her—“I’m dreaming now,
maybe I’m dreaming that I was dreaming.”
She sat up, swung her feet around to the floor, stretched and yawned.
Then quickly she arose and crossing to the window, looked down at the
ships in the harbor. Bright sunlight flashed from the hulls and the
billowing sails. On the docks slaves struggled with casks and crates as
they loaded and unloaded vessels. The world she was seeing was real; she
stood looking through her window upon things tangible and
comprehensible. The dream, with all its implications of the inscrutable,
was gone, vanished.
But she was not to forget it entirely. One day Tullia revealed that
while at the market place she had encountered some travelers from
Galilee who had gone up to Jerusalem and were returning by way of
Caesarea. On their journey, they told her, they had come upon the
Galilean and several of his band in a hamlet in the mountains of
Ephraim. Jesus had returned to Galilee from the Feast of Tabernacles,
but after several weeks he had gone back for the Feast of Dedication.
From Jerusalem he had retired into Peraea.
As Tullia related the story she had been told, her eyes began to shine.
“While he was on the other side of the Jordan,” she went on, “he
received a message from Bethany....”
“Bethany?”
“It’s a small village a few miles—a mile or so—just west of Jerusalem,
Mistress.”
“What was the message?”
“Jesus had three friends who lived there, a man and his two sisters.
While he was over beyond the Jordan he had word that the man was near
death. So he and his band returned to Bethany. When they got there, they
found that his friend had been dead four days.”
“And the Galilean brought him back to life?”
“Yes, Mistress! That’s what the travelers said.”
Claudia laughed. “Cornelius should have been there. No doubt, though,
he’s already heard about it. And, of course, he believes the story.”
“But you don’t, Mistress?”
Claudia wasn’t sure that the servant woman was teasing. “No, Tullia, I
don’t,” she replied. “Very probably this story has been repeated many
times and has been added to by each teller. No doubt it was like the one
Cornelius was telling about the widow’s son, or even the incident in
which his own little slave boy was supposed to have been cured by the
Galilean. Obviously, the man at Bethany was not dead; no doubt they
thought he was....”
“But, Mistress, they said he had been in the tomb four days.”
“They said it, yes. Perhaps he hadn’t been entombed that long; but if he
had, what of it? He wouldn’t have suffocated; tombs aren’t sealed that
securely. In all probability the man was in a trance when they put him
away; no doubt the carpenter roused him from the trance into which he
had fallen.”
“Mistress, you have little faith in the Galilean.” Tullia’s dark eyes
were serious now. “You cannot see how he could be the Messiah of the
Jews and armed with unearthly power, can you?”