The Life of Jesus Christ

Why didn’t Jesus tell people straight out that he was God?  Why did he keep telling people who guessed at the truth not to tell anyone?  Why was he so quick to silence demons when they started to name him?
    There were perhaps two reasons.  First, the Jews of first century Palestine had a strong appreciation for the majesty God.  Any claim to Godhood, for those who did not believe, would be such a monstrous blasphemy that it would have to be dealt with.  Those who did believe would fall on their faces and never get up.  Either response would tend to keep those around Jesus from getting to know him.
    The second reason is that the Jews were not prepared theologically to understand the claim.  Jesus was not God the Father come to live among us.  He was not the Holy Spirit.  He was, or he claimed to be, God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity.  For those with no knowledge of the Trinity, those who knew only a solitary God, a claim of Godhood would be misleading or entirely meaningless.

The council of Sanhedrin met in called session. “He will capitulate,” Caiaphas said of Pilate. “A display of resolve like the one we made in Caesarea, and he will capitulate.”
    “The last display of resolve cost my father his life,” said Elionaeus, a young firebrand of the house of Boethus.
    Annas inclined his head in acknowledgment of the sacrifice. “All Israel honors him for his courage.”
    “There are times when one man must give his life for the lives of many,” Caiaphas said.
    “So what do you say, Annas?” Elionaeus said. “Will he capitulate as Caiaphas says?”
    Annas shrugged. “If we let this go unchallenged, it sets a precedent that may ultimately prove our ruin. If Pilate can raid the treasury for this purpose, then why not another — and another?”
    “Though the aqueduct is ultimately to our advantage,” said Joseph, a rich Pharisee from Arimethea, a town in the hill country of Ephraim. “And these particular funds were unsuitable for any sacred purpose because of their source.”
    “And we have another problem,” Elionaeus said. “There is one here at the festival some say is the Messiah.” He told them of the priest’s report. “Each day a mob rallies around him to hear him speak.”
    Annas frowned. “We are familiar with this Jesus,” he said. “He’s been causing quite a stir up in Galilee.”
    “And now that he’s come to Jerusalem —”
    “Yes, we must follow his career closely from this point.”
    “What’s wrong with people?” a man said. “Have they no learning? When the Messiah comes, he will appear out of nowhere.”
    “The Scriptures don’t make that as clear as we could wish,” said Annas.
    “One thing is certain — he will not come from Galilee.”
    “No,” said Nicodemus. “Not from Galilee. The Messiah will be a descendant of David, and he will come from the village of Bethlehem, which gave us David.” Nicodemus stroked his dark beard.
    “What are you saying?” Annas said, turning to him. “Do you know this man’s origins? Is he not a Galilean?”
    “His speech and his dress are those of a Galilean,” Nicodemus said.
    “If he looks like a Galilean and he talks like a Galilean . . .” The remark produced general laughter.
    “It is not our way to condemn a man without giving him a hearing,” Nicodemus. “What does he himself claim?”
    “Nicodemus,” said someone. “Are you too from Galilee?” There was more laughter.  In the holy city of Jerusalem, Galileans were not highly regarded.
    “Search the Scripture,” Annas said. “You will find that no prophet is to arise in Galilee. Still, what you say makes sense. Let us have this Jesus in for questioning. Let us ask him point blank whether he is the Messiah, as we did John.”
    “And suppose he says he is?”
    “Then we will deal with him.” Annas lips stretched into a thin smile. “We’ll have to. We’re the only Messiah the people need.”
    Elionaeus shook his head. “He’s a great favorite of the crowd. I don’t know if it’s wise to arrest him. We might provoke a riot beyond our ability to control.”
    “Perhaps he’ll come willingly,” Annas said.
    “And if he does not?”
    “Why shouldn’t he come willingly, if he is a good Jew?”

The mob surrounding Jesus was larger than had been reported, filling the area between the sanctuary and the elegant stone partition that barred the Gentiles. The half-dozen guards sent by Annas edged through the crowd, nervous despite their swords and helmets, well aware of the black stares they attracted. Jesus fell silent as they gained the steps.
    The guards stopped, conscious of the crowd’s attention. Some shifted uneasily from one foot to another, their movements accompanied by the clanking of arms — an alarming sound amid the quiet.
    “Yes?” Jesus asked.
    The chief guard cleared his throat.
    “Whom do you seek?”
    A low murmur worked its way through the crowd like the rumble of distant thunder. The guard’s head jerked from side to side, alert to hidden dangers.
    “Are you looking for someone?” Jesus asked.
    The guard mumbled something in a gruff voice that was too low to hear.
    “I’m Jesus of Nazareth. Have you been sent to arrest me?”
    The question seemed to produce alarm. The guard pulled his head more closely into his shoulders, and his words were lost in the renewed murmur of the crowd.
    Jesus waited expectantly. Realizing that some further action was required of him, the guard decided on retreat. He jerked his head at his men and shuffled backward off the steps. The crowd seemed denser than before as the guards pushed through it.
    “I may be with you for only a short time,” Jesus said to the crowd. “The time will come when you look for me, but you will not find me.”
    Mutters of anger and displeasure swept the crowd. The guards, reaching its fringes, were pushed this way and that before breaking clear of it.

Jesus and his disciples left the city by the Fountain Gate and climbed the west slope of the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley from the city walls. Today, on the last day of the festival of booths, the hillside was spotted with booths — temporary shelters constructed of leafy branches in commemoration of Israel’s time in the desert before entering the Promised Land. Peter, stopping and looking back over them in a kind of awe at the sheer numbers, noticed the commotion before the Place of Herod, Pilate’s Jerusalem residence. “Look, Jesus,” he said, pointing. “What do you think it is?”
    Simon and Judas came back to join them. There was a mob in the open area before the palace gates, a mob so large as to dwarf the one that had surrounded Jesus within the temple precincts. “A riot,” Simon said.
    “Pilate looted the temple treasury to help pay for his new aqueduct,” Judas said, amplifying. “There was a lot of anger in the crowd today.”
    “The people were like smoldering coals,” Simon said. “Wanting only a breeze to fan them into flame.”
    “And the Zealots have supplied it?” Jesus said.
    Judas shook his head. “They’re involved, certainly, but this is Annas’s doing. He’s hoping for another victory like that at Caesarea.”
    Jesus shook his head.
    “It’s risky, certainly, but he has little choice,” Judas said. “His control over the temple treasury is at stake.”

The demonstration before the palace gates continued to degenerate into chaos. Some in the crowd banged on iron pots, some hollow drums. Some hurled invectives, making wild and improbable speculations about Pilate’s ancestry, about his sexual practices, about his anatomy. By dusk negotiation had become impossible.
    “They leave me little choice,” Pilate said to the tribune at his side.
    “Yes.”
    “So be it, then.”
    Pilate stepped up to the wall and raised his hands. The crowd saw him and, rather to Pilate’s surprise, became quiet — still hostile, certainly, but apparently prepared to hear what he had to say.
    He hesitated, for a moment tempted to try to reason with them, but he abandoned the thought. He had tried reason. “Disperse,” he called. “In the name of the emperor, I command you to disperse.”
    It was not a command likely to have a soothing effect on the crowd, and it did not. A roar went up, deafeningly loud. How many tens of thousands packed the streets, Pilate wondered? How many women and children?
    Many. He could see that. He stood within plain sight of the crowd, his arms still upraised. Rocks bounced off the wall below him and off the battlements around him. It was the clatter of a spear that decided him.
    Pilate lowered his arms in a swift gesture.
    It was a prearranged signal. Among the sea of homespun before the gates, cloaks were thrown aside here and there, exposing steel that sparked in the torchlight. Five cohorts, half the heavy-armed infantry of the twelfth legion, were scattered among the protestors and grouped strategically. Six thousand one hundred blades slipped from their scabbards as one, each a short, well-tempered Spanish blade with a double edge, equally suited for slashing or thrusting. A few thrusts and kicks brought each cohort into its preferred formation: eight deep, a sword-length between each file of soldiers and each rank. Before the Jews realized there were enemies among them, they were boxed in against the palace walls, Roman soldiers advancing from three sides. The rocks and sticks the Jews brandished were totally ineffective against the ample bucklers, four feet in length and two and a half in breadth, against the helmets and breastplates, against the greaves protecting the soldiers legs. The Romans attacked. Jews cursed and screamed; the Romans fought silently, striking hard and jerking their blades from the falling bodies of their victims. The spray of blood speckled the shields and garments of the soldiers, soaked through the clothing of the fallen onto the stone flagging.
    In half-an-hour it was over. The few who remained alive were trying to crawl away or were groping for succor. The soldiers walked among the fallen, hacking and thrusting with their swords. At a cry from their commander, the legion reformed at one side of the square. The palace gates opened, and the soldiers went into the palace compound. The gates closed, and all was silent but for the occasional moan and the persistent dripping of blood.

Jesus and his disciples were in Bethany, in the home of Lazarus and his sisters. Mary, the younger sister, sat on the ground by Jesus’ feet, gazing up at him with widened eyes.
    “The priests sent the temple guards to arrest you?” she said. “What happened?”
    James the elder, the son of Zebedee, answered her, giving a rather humorous account of the mumbling guards and their subsequent retreat. Mary laughed, and her eyes flashed in the firelight, and James felt a warm glow at being the focus of her attention.
    “They were that afraid of the crowd,” she said wonderingly, unused to the idea of armed men being afraid of anything.
    “They were afraid of Jesus as much as the crowd,” said Simon the Zealot. “They are Jews. Even they have heard about the signs Jesus has done. They ask themselves, ‘When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than these?’  They wonder about him.”
    A new voice cut into the conversation, a woman’s, high-pitched and irritable. “Lord, there are many here to cook for, and my sister sits idle.”
    Jesus looked up and met the eyes of Martha, a tall, spare woman with a pale, thin mouth. “Idle, Martha?”
    “She has left me to do all the work by myself, though I  told her I would need her to help me.”
    Jesus smiled at Martha, his expression sympathetic. “Ah, Martha,” he said. “You are a worrier.”
    “Be that as it may, Lord, I have a meal to prepare, and my sister sits at your feet doing nothing.”
    “Perhaps you would do well to imitate her example.”
    “But the dinner . . .”
    “The dinner will be prepared.”
    “How?” Martha asked. “And when? By whom?”
    Jesus got to his feet and went over to her, grasping her arm and drawing her back to where he had been sitting. “Take my stool,” he said. “Here.”
    “Lord —”
    “Martha, you are distracted by many things, when at the moment, you need focus on only one.” He sat cross-legged on the ground beside Mary.
    James was on his feet. “Lord,” he said. “Take my place.” And he indicated his stool.
    Jesus smiled and shook his head. “Sit,” he said. “Sit. But the offer becomes you. All of you, if you are invited to a wedding feast, do not choose for yourself a seat of honor, because others more distinguished than yourself may be invited. Think of the disgrace when your host comes to you, and he says, ‘Give up your place to this person and move lower on the table.’  If instead you sit down at the lowest place, you allow your host to say, ‘Friend, move higher,’ and you will be honored in the presence of all.”
    “That is his way,” Judas said to Simon in a low voice. “He goes off into a parable on the slightest provocation.”
    “He seeks the teaching moment,” said Simon.
    “Even at the cost of an abrupt change of subject.”
    Judas watched Jesus’ face, which seemed curiously mobile in the shifting light of the fire. He nodded to himself. “Yet,” he said. “His manner adds much to his air of authority.”
    There were shouts on the path below the house, and Jesus broke off in his teaching. Soon a traveler came into view, flushed and disheveled. “There’s been a battle,” he said. “Not a battle. A massacre. Tens of thousands dead before the palace gates.”
    His news stunned them, sickened them.
    Nobody that night had any supper.

The apostle Paul noted that married people are necessarily anxious about worldly affairs, and for that reason he preferred that everyone remain as Paul himself was, unmarried, free to devote himself to the affairs of the Lord.  Even the unmarried, though, have to work for a living, perhaps at some mundane job that seems far removed from any high and holy purpose.  Even the unmarried have to worry about clothing and shelter and food.  Paul himself was a tentmaker.
    As human beings, we pursue educations, plan our careers, plant gardens, brush our teeth, sleep, raise children…These are life’s routines; there is no escaping them.  As important as these things are, though, they are not the most important things.  The busyness of everyday living can be a distraction from what is most important.  We can be engaged in our highest calling and seem completely idle. 
    Our highest calling is to contemplate Jesus Christ.

It was hard for Simon Peter to get used to applying the term “Father” to the most high God, the Lord of hosts, the great “I AM.” He tried it several times on the journey to Jerusalem, and each time he felt presumptuous, almost blasphemous. At times he found himself watching Jesus as Jesus prayed, squatting alone by the fire or breaking bread and passing it among his disciples. He wondered about the presumption of Jesus. He called God “Father”; he violated the Jewish law seemingly at will. He presumed greatly. Did he feel presumptuous, as Peter did? Peter shook his head. He thought not — and who was the more presumptuous, the man who felt presumptu¬ous, or the man who did not?
    Then there was the title Jesus kept applying to himself, the one taken from the book of Daniel. Though Peter did not read himself, he had heard the passage quoted many times, especially over the past few months, had heard Judas and his friend Simon discussing it while standing apart a little ways. As Daniel watched in the night visions, he saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven.
    “And he came to the Ancient of Days, and was presented before him,” Peter repeated to himself.
    As he studied Jesus, he took in the flashing smile with the strong white teeth. The hands with their short, blunt fingers, calloused and hard from years of working with wood. The rough, Galilean homespun.
    This was the man who called God “Father,” and who called himself the Son of Man.

The waters of the pool by the Sheep’s Gate was supposed to have healing properties. Laman, though he was old, couldn’t name anybody who had actually been healed in the pool, but the rumors were sufficient to keep the five columned porches around the pool crowded with invalids. Some, like himself, were crippled with arthritis. Some had been lame from birth. Some were blind, some deaf . . .
    On a bad day, Laman’s swollen knees were the size of melons. On a good day they weren’t much better: not so painful to the touch, perhaps. His hip and his ankles, his elbows and wrists — each bothered him to some extent. At a given point in time any could qualify as the joint that throbbed most with distracting pain.
    Each day Laman sat with his eyes on the surface of the water. Most of those on the porches were similarly occupied; even the blind had someone to watch for them. Again, rumor had it, or tradition had it, that when the pool bubbled, its healing properties were the greatest. Rumor had it that the first person in the pool after it began to bubble would be healed completely of all his infirmities.
    Laman didn’t know. He’d never been first in the pool. Usually the mad dash and hop and shuffle had begun before he even realized the water had begun to boil. The person first into the pool likely had some minor complaint, a recurrent headache or a persistent pimple — nothing that required the supernatural properties of the pool.
    Supernatural? Maybe. There were those that said the Lord sent his angel to stir up the water at certain seasons, that it was the angel that accounted for the healing properties of the pool. Others drew attention to the persistent smell of sulfur: a little gas bubbling to the surface, that was all. Nothing supernatural. No one was healed; only deluded for a while, perhaps.
    Still, one had to live one’s life with hope or without it — and with hope was easier. Laman badgered his family to carry him to the pool earlier and earlier, until some days he was the first one there. His rheumy old eyes remained focused on the pool for many hours, until the sun was high in the sky and the still air beneath the roofs of the porticos was hot, until all the people walking and standing made it impossible to see the water.
    It was early on such a morning that a stranger came and sat on the steps beside him. Laman’s initial feeling was one of irritation. Here was another competitor, from the look of him one well able to beat Laman to the pool.
    “Does the angel stir it often?” the stranger said, after a time.
    Laman glanced at him. “Not often,” he said. “Not so often that I myself have ever made it first into the pool.”
    “You have been here often then,” the stranger said.
    “Often enough. Every day for the past several years.”
    “How many years since the rheumatism first infected your joints?”
    “Thirty-eight.”
    “A long time.”
    “You’re a boy; you can’t imagine how long.”
    The stranger’s smile was only just perceptible beneath the thick, black beard. “Because I am not thirty-eight myself, you mean.”
    “At least you don’t look it.”
    “No. You can’t have been much older than I am now when the rheumatism struck you.”
    “I wasn’t,” the old man said, eyeing him appraisingly. “About your age, I would think.”
    “You want to be made well?”
    “It’s why I’m here.” Beyond the stranger, a few bubbles broke the surface of the pool, but Laman failed to notice.
    “Thirty-eight years is a long time to adjust to being a cripple,” the stranger said. “Thirty-eight years of others taking care of you, of others showing special concern.”
    “I would give all that I have to be made well again.” The strang¬er’s clear, brown eyes were unsettlingly direct, and Laman doubted for the first time the truth of what he was saying. It was true, he thought, that any healing would be a mixed blessing. With a start his head jerked toward the pool, where the waters were roiling as if a great fish thrashed just beneath the surface. How had he not heard it?
    Panic filled him. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, if you would help me.” He struggled onto his hands and knees and lurched against a pillar in his efforts to rise.
    “You don’t need my help.”
    “Sir, for the love of God —”  Already it seemed to him that the pool’s disturbance had lessened.
    “For the love of God,” the stranger said, but he continued to sit impassively.
    Laman stood hunched against the pillar. The waters were still, the opportunity past.
    “You are on your feet,” said the stranger. “Are you in pain?”
    Laman looked down at the twisted claws that were his hands. “Not as much as usual,” he admitted. He relaxed his hands and saw with some surprise that they looked like just that, hands. The skin was liver-spotted and papery to be sure, as befitted the hands of a man nearing seventy, but beneath the skin the hands were healthy and unremarkable. He turned them over feeling something akin to awe as he examined them. He looked up at the stranger.
    “You did that. You healed me.”
    “Did I?”
    “What . . .” Laman felt confused, dizzied by the years that opened suddenly before him. “What do I do now?” he asked.
    The stranger laughed. “What indeed?”
    Laman stared at him, his bewilderment still showing on his face.
    “Pick up your mat and take it with you. Return to a productive life.”
    “Yes. Yes, of course.”
    Moving slowly by force of long habit, his eyes never leaving the stranger’s face, Laman stooped for his mat.
    If there was pain in his knees or his hip, he was unaware of it.

Laman went in search of his family. Though his joints were free of pain, still he was an old man, his muscles weak from lack of exercise. The festival crowd frightened him. It seemed to be an angrier, noisier, more violent crowd than he remembered — though perhaps it was merely because for the first time in years he found himself moving among them. His gait was steady, and he met the gaze of people eye-to-eye as an equal, not having to look up, not having to beg.
    Crossing into the temple precincts, he saw Roman soldiers patrolling the perimeter in what seemed to him unusually large numbers, even for a feast day. To his right, broad steps led up to the Beautiful Gate and the court of the women, which only Jews were allowed to enter.
    “Hey, you there,” a voice cried out as he walked, but people were talking and calling out all around him and he paid little attention. A thin man with a long beard lying gray and full on the breast of his rich robes was coming down the steps toward him. “You there.” Laman turned only when a bony, long-fingered hand gripped his shoulder.
    “What do you mean by carrying your mat on the Sabbath?”
    Laman looked down at his side, following the direction of the man’s gaze. Yes, he was carrying his mat as he walked, though it was a thin mat, not heavy at all — such a little thing that he scarcely noticed.
    “Do you hear me, old man? What do you mean by it? Can you not speak?”
    “I can speak.” Laman looked up into man’s eyes, which were dark and angry. “What’s more, I can walk as well, after thirty-eight years.”
    “Yes, but why are you carrying your mat?”
    “The man who healed me told me to carry my mat.”
    “The man who healed you!”
    “I told you, I’ve been a cripple for thirty-eight years. Until this morning I was unable to walk.”
    “Someone healed you and told you to carry your mat? Who?”
    “I don’t know who. A stranger.”
    “Is he here in the temple? Can you point him out to me?”
    Laman looked about them obligingly, but he didn’t see the stranger. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
    “I, Nathan, a priest of the temple, tell you it is unlawful to carry your mat.”
    Laman dropped it at his feet.
    “You can’t leave it there.”
    “What else am I to do with it? You say I can’t carry it away, and yet I can’t leave it either.”
    “Don’t bandy words with me.”
    “I’m sorry, is that unlawful as well?”
    But the priest turned on his heel and strode away.

Annas and Caiaphas had another problem, a big one. That morning they were escorted into the great hall of the palace, where Pilate was holding court. They waited until he had finished hearing the case before theirs and had rendered his decision. Pilate’s chief administrative assistant beckoned to them, and they approached.
    “Yes?” Pilate said, lounging on his throne of brass and ivory. “What is it this time?”
    “We’ve come to protest the raiding of the temple treasury.”
    “Ah, yes. I thought you might have.”
    “I thought we were agreed,” said Annas. “The city’s public works are the responsibility of the civil government. Of Rome.”
    “The temple will be a primary beneficiary of the new aqueduct,” Pilate said. “You know that.”
    “What we know —,” Caiaphas began.
    “Indeed,” Pilate said, overriding him. “Were it not for all the cleansing necessitated by your continual sacrifices . . . You spill gallons and gallons of blood every day of the year, and it requires many more gallons of water to wash it all away. The current aqueduct is simply not sufficient.”
    What he said was true: it was not sufficient. The current aqueduct, running from the spring of Gihom to the Siloam reservoir just inside the city walls, had been built by King Hezekiah of Judah some seven hundred years before. Seven hundred years. The needs of the city had grown, and the new aqueduct, when completed, would bring water to Jerusalem all the way from Solomon’s Pools, outside Bethlehem five miles to the south.
    “The public works should be paid for with public funds,” Annas said.
    “The new aqueduct is going to stretch for miles — not a third of a mile like the old one. The public funds have proved insufficient.”
    “The procurator —”
    “— is responsible for the in-gathering of taxes,” Pilate said. “I have no power to increase them.”
    “Seizure of the temple funds amounts to a tax.”
    “Not at all. The public monies have run out. If construction is to continue, the temple must make its contribution.”
    “Contributions are by their nature voluntary.”
    “I approached you for a voluntary contribution, remember? You refused.”
    “The looting of the temple treasury amounts to sacrilege in the eyes of the people,” Annas said. “The people won’t stand for it.”
    “The people will stand for what they must,” Pilate said.
    “Remember Caesarea. People came not just from Jerusalem to protest your action. They came from every village in Judea.”
    “I remember Caesarea,” Pilate said, his mouth stretching in a grimace. “And I assure you, there will be no repetition of the leniency I exhibited on that occasion. If you value the peace, as you say you do — if you value the privileges allowed you by Rome — you will control your people.”
    Annas bowed stiffly.
    “Do you understand me?” Pilate said. “There is to be no disturbance.”
    Annas left without responding, Caiaphas coming along ponderously behind him.

Laman had gone only a few steps when he saw the stranger. He stood on the steps along the north side of the court of the women, and a crowd had gathered around him. A big crowd. John’s preaching in the Judean desert, and his recent execution, had sparked the Jews’ unusual interest in prophecy and fanned it into flame. Jesus himself was not unknown. Tales of miraculous healings in Galilee had been told and retold throughout Palestine. Now that Jesus was in Jerusalem, many were eager to see him and to hear him preach. Always, always, there was the undercurrent of Messianic expectation: Could this be the one? Could this be God’s anointed?
    “He calls himself the Son of Man,” said a dark-skinned man at the edge of the crowd. “Ask yourself what he means by that. Remember Daniel. The Day of the Lord.”
    “Judas, think what you’re saying, that this man has been seated at the right hand of God from all eternity, waiting for just this moment to appear on earth. Look at him. You can’t believe that.” The man was a distant kinsmen of Judas’s and also a Zealot.
    “It hardly matters what I believe,” Judas said. “What matters is what they believe.” He indicated the crowd. “They’re enraged that Pilate has looted the temple treasury. Imagine the fury with which they will fight if united behind their Messiah.”
    Laman overheard them, but paid little attention. His gaze was focused on Jesus. “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth,” he was saying in response to a question. “I have not come to bring peace but a sword.”
    “Listen,” said Judas. “Hear him. Could he be any plainer than that?”
    “. . . for I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. One’s foes will be members of his own household.”
    “All signs of the day which is to come.”
    “Sir,” called Laman to Jesus, pushing up through the crowd. “Good sir!”
    Jesus’ eyes seemed to brighten as he spotted Laman. “You look well,” he said.
    “Yes, for a cripple.”
    Several in the crowd exchanged puzzled glances.
    “Please sir,” said Laman. “I don’t know your name.”
    “Jesus. Of Nazareth.”
    “I am Laman,” the old man said, nodding his head.
    “God bless you, Laman. May he bless you and keep you.”

Laman went back to where he had left his mat. There were three priests surrounding it at that time, pointing to it and arguing. “There he is,” said one of them, pointing at Laman. “There is the man who is littering the temple precincts.”
    “I only did what you instructed me to do,” Laman said, protesting.
    “You shouldn’t have been carrying the mat in the first place.”
    “That’s what I’ve come to tell you. The man who healed me, who instructed me to take up my mat and walk, he is here at the temple. Just around the corner, preaching on the steps. His name is Jesus.”
    It was a common enough name. “Come,” said the priest. “Show him to us.” Taking the old man by the arm, they started off.
    “There,” he said as they rounded the corner. “On the top step. The one with the black beard and the flashing eyes.”
    As the priests and Laman pushed through the crowd and mounted the steps, Jesus broke off in what he was saying. The crowd watched expectantly.
    “They say you call yourself Jesus,” said one of the priests, huffing slightly.
    Jesus smiled. “It’s what my parents called me,” he said, and several in the crowd laughed.
    The face of the priest flushed. “What do you, who pretend to be a rabbi, mean by dishonoring the Sabbath and teaching others to do so?”
    “How have I dishonored the Sabbath?”
    “This man says you healed him. Healing is work, forbidden on the Sabbath by the law of Moses.”
    “Healing is God’s work, which is never forbidden.”
    “Who are you to disagree with Moses?”
    “Where in the Torah does he forbid the healing of the sick?”
    “The Torah!” the priest echoed. “You show your ignorance. The proscription is not in the Torah, but in the oral law. In the traditions of our people.”
    “A bad tradition, propounded in error,” Jesus said.
    The priest looked temporarily apoplectic. A boy pulled at Lam¬an’s cloak.
    “Were you really a cripple?” he said. “And Jesus healed you?”
    “At whose feet did you study, Rabbi?” the priest said, finding his voice. “What authority can you cite for your blasphemy?”
    “I have been listening to him,” said a man standing in another part of the crowd. “I will say he has much learning.”
    The priest seemed to know him. “How such learning if he has never been taught?”
    “He did not say he had never been taught,” said the man. “As I recall he made no answer to your question at all.”
    “Well?” said the priest, addressing Jesus. “Have you been taught?”
    “I have. My teaching is not mine, but that of him who sent me.”
    “And who is this?” the priest asked. “Who sent you, and for what purpose?”
    “Anyone who has resolved in his heart to obey God will know whether my words are from God or whether I speak on my own authority.”
    “You claim God sent you? You pretentious ass.”
    “Those who speak on their own authority seek their own glory. I seek only the glory of Him who sent me; thus shall you know my words are true.”
    “You have dishonored the Sabbath.”
    “None of you keep the law in every particular, why pick on me? Why look at me with murder in your hearts?”
    “You don’t even know me,” said the priest. “Name a law I’ve broken.”
    “You Pharisees!” Jesus said, speaking the title like a curse. “You Pharisees and your law!”
    “My delight is in the law of the Lord,” the priest said, paraphrasing the psalmist. “On His law I meditate day and night. We Phari¬sees seek to incorporate the law into every aspect of our lives. Surely that is to be commended.”
    “Surely it would be, if it were true. You use the law to hold the Lord your God at a distance. ‘Thus far you may come into my life,’ you say, ‘and no further. I will follow your commandments, and, when I have done so, I am my own. The Lord has no further claims upon me.’”
    “But that is all that is required.”
    “No.”
    The priest’s lip curled in disbelief.
    “It was said to men of old, You shall not kill,” said Jesus. “Whoever killed was liable to judgment in the village court. I tell you, it is not enough. If you are even angry with your brother, you are liable to such judgment. If you insult your brother, you are liable to judgment by the council of elders. If you destroy his name and reputation, you are liable to the fires of hell.”
    “You’re accusing me of violating the sixth commandment?” The priest’s tone was incredulous. “By my words?”
    “And your thoughts. You have violated the seventh as well.”
    “You’re insane.”
    “You have never lain with a woman not your wife?”
    “I have not.”
    “Have you ever looked at a woman and wanted to possess her? Actually fantasized about possessing her?”
    The priest hesitated, and someone laughed.
    “My friend,” Jesus said. “You have already committed adultery with her in your heart.”