Jesus Christ: A Fictional History. Chapter 9.
Pilate stood in the palace gatehouse, looking out over the mob. “How many of them are there?” he asked his tribune.
“Forty-five hundred as of this morning,” the tribune said. “I think more have gathered since.”
“Five thousand?”
“Maybe.”
More than a thousand Jews had followed him from Jerusalem to Caesarea, and more had gathered daily, choking the streets between the palace and the artificial harbor, which had been constructed by Herod the Great of large stone blocks. For five days they had obstructed commerce and shouted their demands.
Pilate shook his head. “They won’t give up. Tell me, what’s so offensive about a bust of Caesar?”
The tribune shook his head.
“It amounts to treason,” Pilate said. “An unwillingness to tolerate the emperor’s likeness.”
The tribune said nothing. Pilate continued to look out over the crowd of Jews, his mouth curled in distaste. By Jove, how he hated these superstitious barbarians, their long hair and their unshaven faces! “Intolerable,” he said once, indistinctly.
“Pardon, sir?”
Pilate came to a decision. “Send a man down to them. Better — go down yourself. Tell them I’ll meet with them to discuss their grievances. Tell them to gather in the great amphitheater. I’ll meet with them at noon.”
The tribune saluted, striking his breast plate with his fist then extending his arm. He turned on his heel and left. Pilate listened as the sound of his boots on the stairs faded to scuffing then was gone.
Caesarea’s amphitheater was a round, free-standing building with an arena and seats placed around it in concentric circles. Pilate’s tribune delivered the message to Annas and the others of the Jewish leaders, and Annas spent the rest of the morning spreading the word that Pilate had at last agreed to meet with them. As noon ap¬proached, they crowded in through the gates and down the radial walks into the arena.
The circular shape of the amphitheater was dictated by the specific forms of entertainment that Greeks and Romans cherished; that is, gladiatorial games and venationes, contests of beasts with one another, or of men with beasts. At noon, five thousand Jews were milling about the arena, talking and shouting to one another, all anticipating their victory. By one o’clock they had begun to get restless. They looked up at the ranks of empty seats that surrounded them, and some crowded near the gates.
At two, Pilate appeared in the podium, the seat of honor in the first gallery. Only a few saw him at first, but those few pointed out the procurator to others and gradually the whole assemblage lapsed into silence. They stood in ranks before the podium, craning their necks and looking up.
“Subjects of Rome,” Pilate said in a high, crisp voice that carried over the arena. Beside him stood his tribune and a handful of soldiers. Pilate’s salutation and the show of military force produced sporadic mutterings among the Jews. Pilate waited for silence.
“Subjects of Rome,” Pilate said again. All around the arena the great doors were swinging shut, closing off the exits. “This foolish¬ness will cease, and it will cease now,” Pilate said.
No one among the Jews said anything. Soldiers had begun to file into the first and second galleries, a full two companies of them.
“I am giving you one chance to disperse. You will return to your homes, to the cities and villages from whence you came.”
A voice sounded from among the Jews, old and reedy, but weighty with authority. “What of the graven images?”
Pilate’s eyes scanned the crowd, seeking the speaker. He spotted him a little to his right. On the old man’s robes was the insignia of the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews in Jerusalem. Pilate had been hoping it would be Annas.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Kill him.”
The tribune nodded to one of his men, and the soldier launched his javelin. In the arena the old man fell back with the shaft of the javelin protruding from his chest.
“Who else has a question?” Pilate asked the Jews. In the utter silence, the old man coughed and a stream of blood ran out over his lips as he died. “If you do not pledge — here and now — to desist from this rioting and this endless petitioning, then not one of you will leave this arena alive.”
Among the Jews, there was some rustling of clothing, some shifting of feet. A sound rose up like a collective sigh.
“Am I understood?” Pilate said.
There was no answer. A smile tugged at a corner of Pilate’s thin mouth.
“We are prepared to die for our God,” said a voice, crackling with authority. The voice belonged to Annas, standing far back in the crowd. As Pilate focused on him, Annas stepped up onto a block left in the arena from a previous entertainment. “If you would kill some of us, you must kill us all,” Annas said. He gripped the collar of his tunic in both hands, and he tore it open, revealing a desiccated chest bristling with white, curling hair.
Pilate extended a finger toward him, and the tribune beside him looked at him questioningly. Pilate opened his mouth to give the order that would end Annas’s life, then he hesitated. The arena was filled with the sounds of ripping cloth as tunic after tunic was torn down the front. Everyone was tearing open his clothing and exposing his chest.
“Kill him?” the tribune asked.
Pilate was staring out over a sea of naked chests, over five thousand bearded faces, upturned and defiant. He was looking at the leadership of the Jews, those who, out of self-interest, were most willing to collaborate with Rome. If he killed them all, he would indeed be relying on his legions to keep the peace.
Pilate moved his head fractionally, staying his tribune. “What’s this about really?” he called to Annas. “It can’t be about a few metal busts.”
“That’s exactly what it is about,” Annas said. “Graven images of a man whose claims to deity are codified in your own law.”
Pilate listened with his lower lip caught in his teeth.
“Our people will not tolerate the graven images of a foreign god,” Annas said.
“And if I promise henceforth to remove them before entering Jerusalem?”
“If you make such a promise, we will disperse,” said Annas.
There was a silence. The eyes of the Jews and of the Roman soldiers surrounding them were all on Pilate.
He nodded once, decisively. “Very well,” he said, and, turning on his heel, he strode away.
It was Thursday by the Roman calendar when Simon’s mother-in-law began her recovery from her wasting illness. At midday on Friday of the following week, they were on the roof of the house, enjoying the heat of the pale sun as they ate their lunch of fish and nuts and dried fruit. John sat on the edge of the flat roof with James of Cana; the two were kicking their legs as they ate. They were almost done when a man called to John from the street. “John! Is Andrew here? Or Simon?”
It was Philip, a sometime resident of Bethsaida whose casual attitude toward work left him free to travel all over Palestine. He had been with Andrew at the Jordan when the Baptizer pointed out Jesus.
“They’re both here,” John said. “Who’s that you have with you?”
The man with him was a big, barrel-chested man with a full beard. James recognized him at once. “Nathaniel,” he said.
“Little James.”
Jesus, who had been squatting beside Simon as he ate his lunch, walked to the edge of the roof. “Philip,” he said. “I thought I recognized your voice.” He raised a hand to his mouth and bit into his last dried fig. “I take it that’s Nathaniel with you.”
“It is, sir,” Nathaniel said, his face upturned and eyes squinting against the sunlight.
“You look familiar.”
“I was at Carmeli’s wedding in Cana.”
“So you were,” Jesus said, nodding. “Greetings.”
“I don’t think we had the opportunity to speak on that occasion.”
“No. What would you have of me?”
“Knowledge, if you’re the prophet Philip says you are.”
“Which prophet does he say I am?”
“He wasn’t specific.”
Jesus laughed.
“Pardon my doubts,” Nathaniel said, “but, as far as I can tell from Scripture, no prophet is to come from Galilee.”
“Or especially from Nazareth?”
“I find no mention at all of Nazareth.”
“You are a straight-talking Israelite, Nathaniel. Was it the improbability of a prophet coming from Galilee that you and Philip were discussing as you sat under the fig tree?”
Nathaniel looked at Philip, then back up at Jesus. “Master,” he said, and his voice cracked.
“Come on up,” Jesus said, nodding toward the stairs. He met them at the top and picked the twig of a fig tree from Nathaniel’s hair, the twig studded with green buds. He held it out to Nathaniel, smiling. “Someone as easily impressed as you are will be a pleasure to have around,” he said.
Philip and Nathaniel brought news of the events in Caesarea: Pilate had backed down; the stature of Annas and Caiaphas and the other priestly families of Jerusalem had been immeasurably enhanced. Judas, especially, was distraught.
“They’re nothing but Roman toadies,” he said. “These insignifi¬cant concessions, though, will increase their influence. It will be all the harder to arouse the people.”
“Who says we want to arouse the people?” Nathaniel asked. “We don’t want a war, not with Rome.”
“We are God’s chosen people,” Judas said. “It is not right that we pay tribute to heathen oppressors.”
“It’s not a question of right and wrong. It’s a question of practical¬ities. We won’t throw off the yoke of Rome until the Messiah comes.”
“And what then?” Judas asked, not daring even to glance at Jesus. The hopes he and Simon harbored were something he was not yet ready to discuss. “What can even the Messiah do, if Annas and his cronies have the confidence of the people?”
Nathaniel studied him, just as he might an unusual species of insect. “What can he do?” he repeated at last. “What can he not do? Do not the scriptures say, ‘Behold, he comes with ten thousand of his holy ones to execute judgment upon all and to destroy the ungodly’? That ‘they shall seek to hide themselves from the presence of the Great Glory, and the children of the earth shall tremble and quake’?”
“The Book of Enoch,” Jesus said, and everyone looked at him. “Hardly ancient wisdom.”
“Enoch? Perhaps not. But the same theme runs throughout the prophets. Take Isaiah, speaking of the day of the Lord: ‘All hands will be feeble, and every man’s heart will melt . . .’”
“Literally, do you think?” Jesus said, interrupting. “What does he mean by a melting heart?” He knew, of course, of the tradition to which Nathaniel referred. For centuries Palestine had been buffeted by the world powers, overwhelmed repeatedly by military forces so great that some Jews had despaired of rescue by merely human means. They had come to believe that time itself was divided into two parts: the present age, which was wholly evil, and the age which is to come. Separating those two ages would be the day of the Lord, a day on which a Messiah, pre-existent from all eternity, would sweep down from the heavens and drive his enemies before him.
“The author of Enoch was quite right in thinking that the Jews were beyond the help of any human agency,” Jesus said. “He was wrong, though, in his ideas as to what form the divine invasion would take.”
Nathaniel was looking at him expectantly, waiting for some citation of authority. When he realized that none would be forth¬coming, he blinked and looked at those around him. Jesus had assumed an authority greater than that of Enoch; only Nathaniel seemed aware of the enormity of what he had just done.
“A divine invasion?” James of Cana said tentatively. “What sort of invasion?”
They stayed up talking well into the night, and no one went home to sleep, not even those with houses in Bethsaida. Ten men stretched out shoulder-to-shoulder and head-to-foot across the front room of Simon Peter’s house, taking up every bit of floor space.
Simon Peter woke stiff and cramped in the early hours of morning, before the first watch, and he pulled himself up into sitting position against the outer wall. As he combed his fingers through his hair, he looked around at the crowd of sleeping strangers, each a shapeless mass hunched under a single blanket, and he wondered if his life would ever be the same again. He yawned and smacked his lips. As dawn approached, a little light filtered around the canvas covering the room’s only window. How many houseguests did he have now? He counted and came up one short of the expected total. It was several minutes before he realized who was missing: Jesus himself, the cause of all that had happened to him these past several days.
Simon let himself quietly out of the house. It was the Sabbath, a day when no Jew could lawfully work, and no one was about. Simon reentered the house.
“Andrew,” he said, shaking a sleeping form. James the son of Zebedee turned his head and blinked up at him, eyelids heavy with sleep. “Oh. James. Sorry.”
“What is it?”
“Jesus is gone. Which one of these lumps is Andrew?”
Andrew sat up. “Simon?” he said, blinking at his brother. Beside him, Judas came awake, pushing up on one elbow.
“He’s gone again, has he?” Judas said. “Where this time?”
Simon didn’t much like either of the Judeans, having seen little to overcome his natural prejudice against them. “I don’t know where,” he said irritably. “If I knew where, I wouldn’t be in here asking, now would I?”
Andrew struggled to his feet. The others were stirring, rolling onto their backs, sitting up, throwing aside their blankets. “Thank God it’s morning,” one of them, Philip, said.
“Don’t be profane,” said Nathaniel.
“You mistake a heartfelt call to prayer for casual profanity.”
“I call it like it sounds.”
Soon they were all crowding through the door.
“This way,” Andrew said. “When I got up yesterday, he was coming from the lake.” Andrew led the procession down the wide dirt road toward the water’s edge.
“Where?” said Judas when they got there. “I don’t see him.”
“Up there.” It was Philip. He pointed to a pile of jumbled rock that rose to an elevation of thirty feet or so above the surface of the lake. Weeds of all kinds and a number of stunted, twisted trees were growing up through the rock, the trees leaning out toward the lake, into the gusting, onshore breeze. Jesus was crouched at the top of the rock pile where the wind had swept it clean. The morning sun, just breaking above the horizon on the other side of the lake, shone in his face, and the wind blew his hair.
“Jesus.” Philip waved his arms.
Jesus looked down and saw them. “Good morning.” He stood and bounded toward them, his feet finding the stones in his descent as surely as a mountain goat’s. “You’re up,” he said. He looked around at them and grinned. “All of you.”
Simon Peter shifted his feet. Glancing down and then up again to meet Jesus’ eyes. “What were you doing, Rabbi?” he said. “Why do you go off by yourself each morning?”
“Ah, but I wasn’t by myself.”
Heads turned as some looked for an heretofore unnoticed companion. Others exchanged glances.
“How about all of you?” Jesus said. “What have you been doing? Have you washed? Have you eaten?”
“No, Master. We woke, and we came out here to find you.”
“Very devoted of you. Why don’t we all walk down to the river where it feeds the Sea of Galilee and bathe there? We can be on our way.”
“On our way where?” asked Andrew.
“And what about breakfast?”
Jesus reached out and tousled James’s hair. “We’ll breakfast in Capernaum,” he said.
“Capernaum? But that’s six miles,” Nathaniel said. It was, he thought, a significant objection, because travel was one of the thirty-nine types of work prohibited on the Sabbath.
“I have an open invitation to speak at the synagogue.”
“But the law . . .” Nathaniel trailed off, silenced by Jesus’ eyes — mild and yet, it seemed to Nathaniel, dangerous.
“The law tells us we must rest on the Sabbath,” Jesus said.
“Yes.” Nathaniel nodded vigorously. “As God Himself rested on the seventh day.”
“Come with me then, and I will give you rest.”
“But —”
“Is there any among you who would find an hour-and-a-half’s walk along the lakeside unduly onerous?” Jesus asked them. “No?” He turned back to Nathaniel. “How then is it work in any meaning¬ful sense of the word?”
Nathaniel opened his mouth to state the obvious — that the oral traditions defined travel as covering any distance over something less than a mile, however onerous or easy — then he closed it again. His eyes shifted away from Jesus, and he shrugged.
Simon Peter, who had been looking from Nathaniel to Jesus, began to smile, and the smile broadened until they could see every tooth in his head. “A little hike on the Sabbath?” he cried. “Won¬derful! Marvelous! I get so stir-crazy on the Sabbath, sometimes, I think I’m going mad.”
“Let’s go then,” Jesus said. “Before madness strikes us all.” He started off around the lake, and after a moment’s hesitation, his disciples followed, the youngest, John and little James, running to catch up with him and walking abreast of him along the shore.
They reached the synagogue in Capernaum at the end of the first watch. When the others began to arrive, Jesus and his disciples were already seated on the benches that circled the four walls.
Jairus, the master of the synagogue, paused in the doorway, his eyes scanning the row of strangers. His gazed fixed on Jesus, and a smile flitted briefly across his features. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“You seem almost surprised to see me.”
“To tell the truth, I thought perhaps you’d been arrested, as John was. The word is that Herod’s holding him in the dungeons below his palace at Machaerus, on the shore of the Dead Sea.” Jairus shook his head. “The threat of unrest has the authorities on edge, from Herod and Pilate to the chief priests in Jerusalem. Any popular figure must be on his guard.”
The possibility of danger had not occurred to all of Jesus’ disciples. Simon Peter and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, looked at him uneasily.
“At least you can refrain from personal attacks on the king,” Jairus said.
Another man came into the synagogue. In contrast to Jairus’s oiled locks, this man had dirty, matted hair that stuck out from his head in spikes. His eyes lighted on Jesus, and his head seemed to retract into his neck like a turtle’s.
Jesus’ eyes focused on him. “Hello, Jonah,” he said, and Simon Peter, who had listened to Jesus’ exchange with Jairus in growing apprehension, looked from Jesus to Jonah and back again.
Jonah didn’t answer Jesus’ greeting. His eyes never leaving Jesus, he moved crablike along the wall to the row of benches opposite him.
“Who is that?” muttered Simon Peter without moving his mouth.
Jesus glanced at him. “Jonah,” he told Peter. “You must not spend a lot of time in Capernaum.”
“I can’t say I’m sorry,” Peter answered. Jairus graciously pretended not to hear.
When it was time for the services to begin, Jairus introduced Jesus and offered him the scroll of Malachi. Jesus, unrolling it, read: “Surely the day is coming which will burn like a furnace. It will set on fire all the arrogant and every evildoer, and they will be as stubble. Not a root or a branch will be left to them, saith the Lord Almighty. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteous¬ness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.”
He looked up and saw the eyes of Judas and Simon, the Judeans, upon him. With a sigh he closed the scroll and sat down to expound upon the text. “You have all heard of the preaching of John the Baptizer,” he said. “Now that he has been arrested, the day of which Malachi prophesied is upon us, the day on which the Lord will separate the wheat from the chaff, the wicked from the good. Each must repent of the evil that is in his heart. Each must turn from his evil ways . . .”
He was interrupted by Jonah, who throughout the service had become increasing agitated.
“Of what do you repent, Rabbi?” he said. “Of what do you have to repent? We know who you are, Jesus of Nazareth. We know.”
“We?” Jesus said.
One of the men of Capernaum said, “He’s never been quite right, not since childhood. He’s my brother.”
“He’s possessed,” muttered another man. “That’s what Jonah is.”
Jonah, on his feet, put his hand to the back of his head. “Did you call me Jonah?” he said in a high falsetto. “I’m Jonina, his sister.” He bobbed his hip. “I’m a girl.” His voice changed. “Did I say a girl? I meant to say hyena.” He cackled madly, bobbing his head. He stiffened suddenly and, craning his neck, began goose-stepping about the synagogue, his sandals slapping on the stone floor. “Did I say hyena? I meant to say ibis, the sacred ibis of Egypt. Did I say ibis?”
“Enough!” Jesus said, his voice sharp and authoritative, and Jonah fell silent, his body stopped in mid-gesture.
“We know who you are,” Jonah said again, in a voice nearest to his own. “I know.”
One of the men of the synagogue said, “It is the demons.” His tone was hushed. “The demons have taken him.”
“You’re the Messiah,” Jonah said. “The anointed one. The holy one of God.”
“Enough,” Jesus said again, more softly.
Jonah teetered, as if unbalanced by the merest breath of air. One leg came off the ground, and he collapsed abruptly. The man who had identified himself as Jonah’s brother came off the bench in a futile effort to break his fall.
“Please,” he said, looking up. “He’s been so ill.”
Jesus knelt beside them, and with one hand he reached out to Jonah. “Be gone,” he said, placing the palm of his hand against Jonah’s cheek. “Be gone, woman and hyena and jackal and ibis. Be gone all of you, and leave this man in peace.”
Jonah, staring up at him, began to shake. “They’re going,” he croaked. “Oh. Oh. They’re going.” His hand gripped Jesus’ forearm squeezing until his knuckles were white. He relaxed slowly. “They’re gone,” he said. “They’re gone.” He shook himself and tried to sit up. He succeeded, Jesus supporting him on one side and his brother on the other.
“They’re gone,” he said again, looking around at the others with wide-eyed amazement, and they returned his gaze with an amaze¬ment equal to his own. Then all eyes turned to Jesus.