The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ

by Frank G. Slaughter

  Elam started to protest, but the tetrarch cut him off. “Neither you nor Pilate shall make me a scapegoat,” he said. “You state that this man claims to be King of the Jews, so I have made Him king for you. If you do not want Him, depose Him and get another.”

  Elam and the other Sanhedrists now had no choice except to bring Jesus back to Pilate and report that Herod had refused to take jurisdiction over Him.

  V

  By the time Mary Magdalene reached the Antonia with Mary of Nazareth, Jesus had already been taken to the nearby palace of the Hasmoneans for the interview with Herod. Since Mary of Magdala lived in Galilee and was a close friend of many influential members of Herod’s court, she decided to go at once to Herod on Jesus’ behalf. But before she could arrange for Mary of Nazareth to be cared for by some of the Master’s followers in the crowd, word came that Herod had sent the prisoner back to Pontius Pilate.

  Shortly Jesus appeared, followed by a jeering crowd and wearing the purple robe which Herod had put upon Him in derision. At the sight of the blood and the bruises on His face where He had been beaten by the guards, Mary Magdalene could not help crying out. She would have run to throw herself at His feet, had not the press of the crowd prevented her.

  While Jesus was in the house of the Sanhedrin, Jonas had gone back to his hovel outside the gate to feed Eleazar, and since, if Abiathar paid him the shekel, he might be able to buy grain when the shops opened, he took the old mule back with him. Now, as he led the patient animal through the crowd, he saw the beautiful woman of Galilee standing with tears upon her cheeks and recognized her as the one he had seen in the train of Jesus when he had waited beside the Jericho road during the Nazarene’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

  Appreciating the irony in Herod’s action as a joke upon the high priest, the crowd laughed uproariously when they saw Jesus wearing the purple robe of a king. But Pontius Pilate was annoyed when Jesus was presented to him again with word that Herod had refused to order the Nazarene’s death. “You have brought this man to me as one who perverts the people,” he told Elam and the Sanhedrists sharply. “I have examined Him before you and found no fault in Him touching the things of which you accuse Him. Neither has Herod. I will therefore chastise Him and release Him.”

  Elam stepped forward. “Noble Pilate,” he said, “we have a custom that on this day, you release one prisoner to us. Will you follow that custom again at this season?”

  “Do you wish me to release the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked contemptuously.

  “There is Barabbas,” Elam reminded him. Since they had returned from the palace of the Hasmoneans, Abiathar had been quietly giving instructions to the rabble pressing against the gate of the praetorium. At the mention of Barabbas’s name, the beggars and thieves at the front of the crowd set up a sudden clamor.

  “Release Barabbasl” they cried, drowning out those who called for Jesus to be released instead.

  Pilate looked at Jesus and was struck once again by His regal bearing in spite of the indignities which had been heaped upon Him. Behind Him, Pilate saw that Claudia Procula had come to the edge of the terrace; she was looking at him with a light of pleading in her eyes and he knew that she was silently begging him to be merciful with the Galilean.

  “Take Him and scourge Him,” he ordered the centurion Pelonius “Then bring Him back to me.”

  Turning on his heel, Pilate left the terrace without giving the crowd any indication of what his final decision would be. Calling a servant to bring him wine, he sank down upon a bench and put his head between his hands. But still he heard the cries of the crowd outside, clamoring that Barabbas be the one to be released.

  When Pilate felt a familiar soft hand upon his cheek he reached up and pressed Claudia Procula’s fingers against his face. “Please have nothing to do with this righteous man, Pontius,” she begged. “I suffered much because of Him in a dream.’’

  “I wish this were all a dream,” Pilate said fervently. “And that it were over.”

  “Why didn’t you let Him go?”

  “If I let the Nazarene go free, Procula, Caiaphas will have the Sanhedrin protest my action to Rome. And you know how much I want to get away from this cursed land.”

  “Could they make trouble for you because of a just decision?”

  Pilate nodded wearily. “In this case, yes. The man was openly named King of the Jews by His followers; many heard them and He did not deny it. Just now He explained to me that He means a spiritual kingdom. But how could I ever convince Tiberius of that?”

  “What will you do then?”

  “Caiaphas has stirred up a crowd of beggars and thieves to demand the Nazarene’s death. I recognized some of them at the gate just now. But there are many in Jerusalem who believe He is a prophet. If I have Him scourged, part of the rabble will be satisfied. Then the rest can demand that He be released instead of Barabbas.”

  From the open window that gave upon the courtyard, came the shouts of the soldiers as they started to scourge the prisoner. The scourge was a whip with several thongs, each loaded with acorn-shaped balls of lead, sharp pieces of bone, or spikes. Stripped of His clothes, His hands tied to a column or stake with His back bent, the victim was lashed with the flagels by six lictors who plied these instruments of torture almost to the point of the prisoner’s death.

  Scourging was not a pretty sight, and Claudia Procula drew the curtains across the window to shut away the sound, but not before she saw the plaited lash with its weighted ends fall upon the slender back bared to it, the cruel thongs cutting into the flesh. She gave a soft cry of pain and protest, for she had seen before what scourging could do to a man, shredding the flesh upon his body and, if one of the leaden balls at the end of the lash happened to strike his eyes, sometimes bursting them from their sockets.

  No cries came from the victim and no entreaties for mercy. Presently Pilate went to the window and shouted for the scourging to stop and the prisoner to be brought back to the praetorium. Shortly Jesus appeared there again, His face bloody from the wounds inflicted by the lash and the leaden weights. The soldiers had dropped His robe to His waist to scourge Him and had not raised it, so the crowd could see how cruelly lacerated the upper part of His body was from the scourging.

  Even the group of hardened thieves and beggars at the gate were silent at what had been done to the prisoner. They knew the same fate would come to any one of them judged guilty of a capital crime before they were put to death. In the silence, Pilate’s voice was loud.

  “Behold!” he shouted. “I bring Him out to you that you may know I find no fault in Him.” With a gesture he indicated Jesus who stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the terrace, still holding Himself proudly in spite of the agony from His many wounds.

  “Behold the man!” Pontius Pilate cried again.

  The crowd was still silent. Then Elam, realizing that in a moment Pilate might release Jesus and that the Sanhedrin could make no complaint for he had already been cruelly punished, shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”

  Immediately others took up the cry, and the beggars and the thieves at the gate, knowing that Abiathar would punish them if they did not follow his instructions, added their voices to the din.

  “Take Him and crucify Him!” Pilate shouted. “I find no fault in Him.”

  The Sanhedrists had no intention of allowing Pilate to taunt the crowd into executing Jesus without official Roman approval, however. For that they could themselves be punished during one of the unpredictable moods which often seized the procurator.

  “We have a Law!” the Pharisee shouted. “And by our Law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God!”

  Pilate turned to Jesus. “Will You not speak to me?” he almost pleaded. “Do you not know I have the power to crucify You or to release You?”

  Jesus’ lips were swollen, but when
the words came they were clear and distinct. “You could have no power against Me,” He said, “unless it were given you from above. He that delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”

  Pilate hesitated, wishing to free Jesus but afraid still of the effect a protest to Rome by the Sanhedrin might have on his career. Elam, watching Pilate and sensing what was in his mind, spoke directly to the harried governor.

  “If you let this man go, you are not Caesar’s friend,” he said. “Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.”

  In his heart Pilate believed Jesus innocent, yet if he released Him, a charge would surely be brought by the Jews that he had failed to approve the death sentence for one who sought to be a king in Judea, in itself a capital offense. And that, Pilate knew, would mean the end of his so far distinguished career as a Roman governor.

  To a man of Pilate’s ambitions there was only one answer. “Shall I crucify your king?” he asked Elam and the other Sanhedrists again.

  “We have no king but Caesar,” they answered, by their own words committing the ultimate sin of blasphemy according to their Law.

  Pilate turned to an aide who stood behind him. “Bring me a basin of water,” he said wearily. When it was brought, he washed his hands and dried them on a towel, holding them up for the crowd to see.

  “I am innocent of the blood of this just person,” he said. “See you to it.”

  From the crowd came the answering shout, “His blood be on us and on our children.”

  “Have Barabbas released,” Pilate directed Pelonius. “And turn the Nazarene over to them to be crucified.”

  As Pilate went back into the palace, moving like a man whose shoulders were weighted down by a heavy burden, Abiathar stepped up to Jesus. Placing upon Jesus’ head a chaplet plaited from the green thorns that Jonas had brought to the palace of Caiaphas the night before, he drove it down with a blow from a reed which he then thrust into Jesus’ hands as a scepter.

  “Hail, King of the Jews!” he shouted derisively. As blood started to drip down Jesus’ face from the wounds of the thorns, the crowd surged forward to drag Him from the praetorium into the street leading to Golgotha, the place of execution.

  In all the tumult, no one heard the cry of grief and pain that was torn from Jonas by Abiathar’s act. At last the little hunchback realized why he had been sent to gather the thorns on the hillside yesterday. In his ignorance he had made possible this final degradation of the innocent man who was now being driven out to be killed.

  Chapter 35

  This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.

  Matthew 27:37

  It was not often that Veronica was able to leave her father’s house, for Jonathan, busy with his studies at the scribes’ school, was not available to lead her mule and all the others were occupied with their work. Once a year she looked forward to a holiday, a visit to the home of her mother’s kinsman, Joseph of Arimathea, with its lovely garden and its beautiful trees and flowers. In Jerusalem no one worked on the day following the Passover celebration, and Veronica had been planning for a long time to make the trip across the city to Joseph’s home on that day.

  Joseph was rich and Veronica would not have thought of shaming him by visiting his home in anything but her best garments. During the year, she had been saving to buy a head veil like one she had seen in the pack of a merchant who had paused one day to buy some of the small vases she painted with scenes of the Jerusalem area. The veil was of a wonderfully fine fabric, a type of cloth that had been woven for a thousand years in the Phoenician city of Byblos on the sea-coast to the north, a material prized, she had been told, even by the women of Pharaoh’s court in Egypt. Of an almost gossamer thinness, the cloth of Byblos shone with a luster of its own.

  Ever since she had seen the head veil, Veronica had begun to lay aside whatever money she could to buy one for herself. Only a few weeks ago the merchant had appeared again and had agreed to take what she had saved in partial payment for a length of the cloth, letting her have it then and collecting the rest when he came again. Since that time, Veronica’s nimble fingers had been busy whenever she had a free moment, binding the cut edges of the cloth with a fine, even stitching and making the whole into what was, she was sure, the loveliest head veil in all of Jerusalem. Only yesterday, while watching the paschal lamb roasting upon its bed of coals in the courtyard, she had finished the stitching. Now, as she rode out into the bright morning sunlight on the way to visit Joseph of Arimathea, her hair was covered by the veil, the fabric only a little more lustrous than the golden hair.

  Veronica tried not to reveal her pride in the lovely veil, for it was not good to be proud of one’s possessions when so many others did not have things equally valuable. But this was the first thing of much value that she had ever bought with her own work, and she could not help feeling that the passersby were admiring the beautiful veil, although in truth they were admiring as much her own fresh loveliness.

  Veronica’s conscience did prick her a little, for she knew many poor people who could have bought food with the money she had paid for the cloth. Still she had also saved for her usual gift to the temple. She and Jonathan had even sacrificed a dove this year in addition to the paschal lamb provided by the family, so she could tell herself she had done what the Law required. The head veil made her happy and she was sure the Most High would not hold it against her if she chose a little happiness when so much of her life had been filled with pain from her crippled leg.

  One thing only marred Veronica’s happiness, the news that Jesus of Nazareth had been arrested during the night and was even now before Pontius Pilate for sentencing. She knew Pilate’s reputation as a ruthless man, but she still dared to hope he would be just and recognize in the Nazarene the qualities of gentleness and kindness to others which she had heard so many people say were the essence of His teachings. It was rumored that Jesus and His followers had sought to make Him king in Judea and overthrow the rule of Rome, but Veronica found that hard to believe. From the glimpse of the Nazarene she had had that day on the road to Jerusalem, He had seemed to be a kind and deeply pious man, not the sort of revolutionary who occasionally stirred up Jerusalem as Barabbas and his followers had done.

  The home of Joseph of Arimathea lay at the northern edge of the suburb which had grown up west of the sanctuary area on some rising ground, not far from the traditional place of execution called Golgotha. The Roman term was Calvaria, which had the same meaning, namely, the skull. From their home at the edge of the Tyropean Valley near the great aqueduct, Veronica and Jonathan had to pass through much of the suburb lying between the Place of the Skull and the fortress of Antonia. So it was that their route soon joined that along which Jesus was being driven by the soldiers and the rabble stirred up by Abiathar.

  When they came to the way leading to Golgotha, their progress was stopped by a great crowd lining the roadway on both sides, waiting for the procession headed by the condemned man to pass on its way to the place of crucifixion. Since they could go no farther, Jonathan was forced to halt the mule, but, not being able to walk, Veronica remained upon its back. Many people were weeping, but for the most part the crowd was made up of the merely curious, who delighted in anything sensational, even if it were a public execution.

  “Jonathan,” Veronica begged. “Let us go back. I don’t want to see Him.”

  Jonathan would have obliged his sister, but the press of the crowd around them made it impossible to move, except into the roadway. And this area was kept clear by guards from the temple.

  “The crowd is too great,” he told Veronica. “We’d never get through now.”

  Just then a rising clamor of voices warned that the condemned man was approaching, and soon the head of the procession came into view, moving slowly because the crowd pressed in on both sides, eager to get a close look at the doomed man who wore a crown of thorns upon His head.

 
First came a dozen Roman legionnaires, clearing a way through the crowd with the butts of their spears. Behind them Jesus staggered, carrying upon His back the heavy crossbeam, called the patibulum, to which His arms would be nailed.

  Crucifixion was the most horrible form of death, not simply because of the immediate pain but because the condemned man would hang upon the Cross sometimes for days before he died from exposure or loss of blood. Originally devised centuries before by Egyptians as a punishment for escaped slaves, it had been adopted by the Romans for the most heinous of crimes because of its spectacular lesson to would-be lawbreakers. Death by crucifixion was a stigma, the most degrading form of execution, and the ultimate humiliation that in itself identified the victim as belonging in the lowest class of criminals.

  Veronica could not repress a cry of indignation and sympathy when she saw the doomed man approaching. With the heavy beam of the patibulum upon His back, He was barely able to stagger along and had fallen repeatedly into the dirt. His face, already wet with blood and sweat, was caked with dust and Gis tortured eyes looked out at His tormentors as if through a mask. Behind Him two other men, identified by the crowd as dangerous thieves who had been sentenced to death by crucifixion, also stumbled along with the patibula strapped to their backs. But they were strongly built and fared better than the gentle Nazarene.

  Veronica did not try to hide the sobs that shook her slender body or the tears that poured down her face. Around her women were weeping everywhere, and she recognized the beautiful woman of Magdala among those who followed close behind Jesus, supporting an older woman whose face was also ravaged by grief.

  Jesus stumbled to His knees a few paces away from the girl and the guards had to jerk Him to His feet, cursing Him for not being able to stand. When He was just opposite Veronica, His knees buckled once more and He fell again, burying His face in the dust of the roadway because, with His arms held by thongs around the patibulum, He had no way of protecting Himself.