The Artifact (57 page)

When they arrested Jesus and bound his hands, the soldiers taunted Judas for unwittingly leading them to his master, making his capture so easy, forcing upon him the traditional thirty
sisteres
for delivering a criminal to the authorities. If I had arrived earlier to take Jesus alone beyond the walls, Judas would not have lingered so long in one place, the Temple Police would not have seen him, and we would have delivered my brother safely to Judah.

Not knowing what else to do, Judas later admitted, he followed along with the Temple Guards and their captive to Herod’s Palace, where Jesus was brought before Pilate, not in a formal trial, as much as an interview the prefect had convened to become more informed about this man from whom the priestly leaders of the Jews so desperately wished to be disassociated. Judas hung back along the thickly draped walls of a large room with a raised platform at one end before which Jesus stood between several guards facing the dais on which Pilate reclined on an ornate lounge trimmed in gold. Even his minions standing behind him seemed intimidated by this cruel despot who had ruled Idumea for a decade and a half, spilling the blood of Jews and gentiles alike at the least provocation.

The procurator terminated his discussion with a fat, bald toady holding an open scroll, waving Jesus toward the stairs descending from the narrow platform. Pilate stared malevolently at the prisoner for several moments before asking, “Who is this man and what charges so heinous are brought against him that he appears before me on this festive occasion of his people?”

The bald man read from his scroll: “He calls himself Jesus of late, your Excellency, born Yehoshua of Nazarat in the Galilee to the north.”

A centurion standing behind Pilate leaned forward to make a
sotto voce
comment to his master.

The reader paused until he again had Pilot’s full attention. “This Yehoshua has been sought these many years for the murder of three legionnaires in association with the rebel, Judah the Galilean. Of recent months he has assumed the guise of a rabbi preaching against the rightful sovereignty of Rome over Palestine. He conspires with this same Galilean and sibling who are the leaders of the vile and murderous
Sicarii
. Yesterday, the accused did attempt to instigate a riot in their Temple by overturning the tables of the lawful moneychangers. The charges against him are murder and sedition”.

Pilate moved from his lounge to the front of the dais from which his lackey retreated. “Are you the man Yehoshua from the Galilee who challenges authority?”

Jesus stood straight and bold with his hands bound at the waist, his humble robe and sandals in sharp contrast to the Roman Prefect and assistants in elegant white togas with the diagonal purple stripe of Roman citizens. His reply was fearless. “Are those the charges against me?”

“Yet crowds flock to hear your teachings against Rome
and
your spiritual leaders! They proclaim you King upon your promise to overthrow existing authority.”

Pilate turned to his minions. “If that is not an admission of guilt I have never heard one. Caiaphas was right. This man is dangerous. Crucify him at dawn before the people wake. King of the Jews, indeed.” Pilate laughed as he walked away. “Let his cross be inscribed thus.”

* * * * * *

After hearing this account from Judas, I sought out James, telling him all that had happened, urging him to use his priestly status to gain access to our brother’s cell in the dungeon below the Palace. Having relieved me of my arms, the laconic guards saw no reason to refuse the condemned man a visit from priest and freedman brothers.

The dim light of a single lamp showed the open wounds and cuts and dried blood indicating that Jesus had been beaten already, which we ignored knowing there was more to come. He sat on the earthen floor, his robe ripped from the shoulder, torn and bloody, smiling up at us.

“That we will not stand silent and obsequious while Rome taxes us into utter starvation and turns our entire nation into a brutal Circus. That God is more than Torah rules and restrictions and rituals.”

I glanced at James, but he allowed that allusion to pass without retort. “And the Sanhedrin?”

“They are no longer the rightful leaders of Jews. As long as the Sadducees and Pharisees live their lives of luxury, they will cater to Pilate’ every whim.”

“People must begin to realize that in order for them to live in peace and prosper, the Romans must return to Rome and the Sanhedrin release us from the less meaningful strictures of the Torah. The burden of purity between man and wife, the exclusion of the downtrodden; the expensive and time-consuming need to make pilgrimage to the Temple for sacrificial repentance, alienating gentiles, the proscription against healing the sick and helpless on the Sabbath.”

I sat on the dirt beside my brother, my body sick from drink, my mind weary from debating, unable to cease chastising my brother hours before his death. “How can your preaching, your disruption in the Temple aid that?”

“It came to me as I fasted in the desert.”

I recalled the many so-called holy men who claimed to hear the voice of God after preaching religion constantly, then drinking watered wine while starving themselves for a month or more in the desert. Who would not experience voices and visions under those circumstances? Yet I would not challenge Jesus with that now.

James rose from the dirt floor and moved to gaze through the bars at the entrance, sick of heart.

I felt outrage at my brother’s calm acceptance of execution for his senseless obsession. “The idea that you should incite the Sanhedrin and Pilate to sentence you to death came to you in the desert? To be a… a, martyr? The messiah some of those idiots call you? For what?”

Here was a man who would be dead this same day, grinning at what he obviously perceived as my irrevocable ignorance. “To fill the need, perhaps until God sends the true messiah.”

I had to laugh in spite of the circumstances. “You admit to being a false messiah?”

“I never claimed it. People inferred that. I am but a mortal man, Shimon, who fears being cast from the only life he knows into the dark void of the unknown.”

Jesus pulled me to him, pressing my form against his battered body. “You mean well, Little Brother, though you do not always act well.”

Jesus smile faded as he released me from his grasp. “It saddens me that you are still without faith, Shimon. When people awake this morning to learn of my unjust death they will rally to my teachings.”

A failed, false messiah and self-proclaimed holy man who roamed the Galilee for a few

years preaching to a thousand or so peasants and was condemned to the most ignominious death

possible? No, I did not believe that his death on the cross would be noticed for longer than it

took the pilgrims to return to their homes.

James was still standing with tears rolling freely down his cheeks when the guards opened the door of the cell ordering Jesus to stand and exit with them. I rose as he did, and his gaze held my eyes as we embraced. “This has been a hard life for you, Shimon, for which God will not hold you to blame.” He held me away for a brief moment as if to imprint my visage in his memory. “At its end you shall enter the Kingdom, and for all eternity know the peace you have sought here on earth.”

Then he and James held each other without words until a guard pulled them roughly apart, prodding Jesus up the damp stone steps into the gray, pre-dawn light.

The flogging started again in the courtyard above, even before we left the palace compound. Not a scream of pain from Jesus at first, just the familiar swish and meaty lash of the multi-thong, thin leather strips knotted with lead pellets. I drew my sword and began to turn, but James arrested me, and I quickly realized the futility of my impetuous intent. We both stepped up our pace from that place upon our beloved brother’s muted screams reaching our ears.

We slumped against the east Temple wall, two grown men crying, unashamed by our great sorrow, elbows on bent knees, heads in hands, each with our own image of our brother stripped to the waist, struggling alone with bound wrists among soldiers with drawn swords.

“I cannot watch,” I told James.

He nodded his understanding as he rose to his feet. “Someone should witness.”

I stood also, and at that moment our horrid thoughts became a reality as a dozen or more soldiers escorted Jesus along the path and up the hill toward the enclosure of Golgotha with its rows of crosses as far as the eye could behold, most with a dying or dead man bound with strands of coarse hemp to the cross-tree. Vertical, unoccupied trunks of notched trees awaited the stout horizontal branch on which other condemned men would be tied.

His muffled groans were finally swept away on the early breeze as Jesus and his executioners crested the hill in the weak sun of dawn, his back torn and raw, his face streaked with dirt and blood, his robe in tatters.

“Yehoshua!” I screamed.

“Go, Shimon,” James told me. “Find Mary. Take her with you. They may round up those known to him after all. You and she would be two on their list. They would not dare arrest a priest, brother or not.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Athenia, Greece

3789
Sivan
(CE 43 May)

The years following the death of my brother were rife with uncertainty and turmoil throughout Palestine, Samaria and in my own mind. I brought mother and Mary to Athina, my sister at first reluctant to leave the close friends of Jesus behind, but finally resigned to fulfill her daughterly duties.

I count the disciples of my brother at only seven from the original eight, because that poor loyal man Judas was found hanged by the neck from the limb of a tree shortly after the death of Yehoshua. For many years Peter and the rest thought Judas deserved his fate, whether by his own hand, which was unlikely, since his wrists were reliably reported by James to have been securely tied behind his back. Nor did they believe he had been killed on orders from Pilate, until I revealed that Judas was the only Jew to witness the exchange between the Prefect and Jesus, giving Pilate no good reason to silence him.