The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  No, no, all was in order, they said. The Temple had been purged. Sacrifice continued. None need hang back. There was neither threat nor danger to anyone. It had been, the council protested, a single affair. In fact, these Galileans had brought the judgment upon themselves.

  What had they done?

  Well, they had committed heinous crimes. What crimes? Well, the priests and the elders gave their earnest word to the people that when they were able to reveal the nature of the Galileans’ crime, they would. They surely would.

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING DAY, the high priest convened the council again. This time all seventy members were present.

  Caiaphas said, “Pontius Pilate tells me he has evidence that the Galileans murdered an imperial official, an innocent courtier, a Roman citizen who served in the governor’s residence in Caesarea.”

  “What evidence? How does he know this thing?”

  “A charioteer and a foot soldier found the official’s body. He had followed the Galileans into the hills above Beth-horon, but when it grew late and he hadn’t returned, they went looking for him. His throat had been slashed. He was, they said, a heavy corpse in difficult terrain. It took a while to drag him out again.”

  Caiaphas spoke with slow circumspection, calm and grey and saturnine. He sat on a stone seat, dressed in the white linen of his office, making a cage of his fingers before his face. He was not given to personal passions. Rather, he was concerned for the efficiency of public machines.

  “But,” certain Pharisees objected, “did this chariot driver see the murders? And if not, how can he know who committed them?”

  Caiaphas said, “Excellent question. Nevertheless, Pilate has it by confession from a dying Galilean that they had gone into the hills to meet the man whom people call ‘Son of Father.’”

  “Barabbas? That smoking firebrand?”

  “The same.”

  “Bold robber! Cunning thief! Scourge of the merchants and the Romans. The people adore him.”

  “They do. But they shouldn’t.”

  “Well, but he gives a poor Jew hope. He makes the old man young again by driving a hot blood through his veins.”

  “He turns Jews into Zealots,” Caiaphas declared. “He makes the Romans nervous, which makes me very nervous indeed.”

  “But the people adore him!”

  “Right. And the more they do, the greater the danger he is to us.”

  “Then how do you plan to handle Barabbas without a riot?”

  “Brothers, I propose that we set one of our foes against the other, keeping our hands hidden and our hearts clean.”

  Quietness spread through the Chamber of Hewn Stone. The entire Sanhedrin, as conscious of the tension in present events as the high priest was himself, gave tacit approval to his intentions, if not yet to his proposal.

  “Indirectly, without promise or commitment,” Caiaphas said, “I indicated to the governor that we might be able to name the Zealot’s hiding places, and that we might—again, through a whole Babel of indirections—communicate those places to him.”

  “You would serve the Romans!”

  “I would save the Temple, sir! I will use any expedient to keep the Temple holy!”

  “So! And I suppose that you in your fine linen know how to locate the cave rat, Barabbas?”

  “This,” said Caiaphas, “is what I say: Ask the rabbi. And if the rabbi, his father, will not divulge his son’s hiding place to us, then we will censure the rabbi. We’ll make the father known to Rome, that Rome may do as it pleases with him.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER the council gathered again in the Chamber of Hewn Stones.

  By then the Feast of Tabernacles had concluded without insurrection or incident. The pilgrims—more than one hundred thousand of them—had left for home, uplifted. Jerusalem was reduced to its more peaceful population of fifty thousand. It had scrubbed its white stone streets clean of the worshipers’ dirt and had returned to common commerce and an easier routine. Pontius Pilate, too, had gone back to Caesarea by way of the Beth Horon road, taking a good many troops with him.

  The Sanhedrin was meeting in regular session to discuss both a death and a capture.

  The man whom the common people called “Son of Father” had been found and imprisoned in a cell underneath the palace of Herod the Great. That was the capture.

  But the father himself, the old rabbi long notable in Jerusalem, had died with the fierce serenity of an undiminished hatred. He had kept completely silent regarding the haunts of his son. The Romans were forced to execute him and then, in their usual brutish manner, to find Barabbas on their own.

  VI

  ACENTURION STOOD before a small house of sunbaked clay. It was scorched black around the windows, the lintel, and the doorway. The door itself had fallen outward into the road, cracked with char. Ribbons of smoke still rose from the interior straight up into blue sky. There was no roof. The beams and the weave of branches had burned, and all its mud had collapsed into the house. It smelled rank. A bitter ash.

  “Whether you see them or not, sir,” the centurion called, “my troops completely surround you now. Arise and come out, or we will come in, and then you will never rise again.”

  The centurion waited. He lowered his head and sighed. His name was Longinus. He had been an officer in the legions for nineteen years, transferred from cohort to cohort, promoted by small degrees. Now he was less than a year from retirement and very tired. His men were from Gaul. Longinus was himself a Roman citizen. The Gallic soldiers knew each other well. Of him they knew discipline, the crack of his vine-staff on their backs, absolute command and obedience, but they did not know the man. Nor should they, of course. Yet he was tired of the loneliness, too.

  Suddenly the door that lay by the road shifted. It slid sideways, and dust blew out as from an exhalation.

  “What’s that?” Longinus said. “Soldier, the door moved. Lift it up. Watch out—the wood’s still smoldering.”

  In ranks around the burned-out house the hundred Gauls stood armed, cuirass and helmet flashing in the sunlight, some slouched, some alert, all of them looking like a broken wooden fence.

  The soldier closest to Longinus walked to the door, gingerly touched its edges, then began to lift the near end slowly from the road. It was made of three heavy planks joined by crosspieces, top, middle, and bottom.

  “Di meliora!” the centurion breathed. Then: “Don’t drop it!” he shouted. He rushed forward and knelt down in the shadow of the door.

  There was a child underneath it. A girl. Blood soaked her hair. Blood and a black dirt smeared her lower quarters, her legs, and the soles of her feet. Blood filled the whorls of her ears. Her small shoulder, white as alabaster, was perfectly clean—but both her hands were split and seared with burning. Her palms were sloughing a wet flesh. She was breathing, but unconscious.

  Strangely, when he lifted the child in his arms, it was the pure white and naked shoulder that most broke the centurion’s heart.

  He glared at the house and roared in a hoarse voice: “Do you keep a count of the people who suffer for you? Does it matter? Here is a child dying because you hid in her house! Come out, you scelus! Come out and see whether she is your sister or just another Jewish sacrifice!”

  Longinus felt the sting of tears in his eyes. Ah, he was too old for this anymore.

  A voice came out of the house: “Who kills children?”

  The words were huge, echoing: “Who has slaughtered all the villages around Beth-horon? Was it a Jew or a Gentile?”

  The voice was magnified by round, hollow plaster walls. So, then: Longinus had a fix on the fugitive.

  “It was no one but a Jew,” he cried back, “that triggered our just and necessary response!”

  “Oh, Roman! A cohort comes for one man! Ten centurions, one thousand soldiers crawling the countryside, bludgeoning people in the streets and burning their houses! Roman! Roman! Is that a just response?”

  With one hand, Longinus clutched the child to his bo
som; with the other he signaled his men into the tiny courtyard of the house, mouthing the word: Cistern. They began to creep toward the gap that had been a door, four with spears, four with swords.

  Longinus shouted, “But one sole Jew had only to surrender in order to stop the cohort. You, Barabbas, hero of the people—you chose your neck over their safety. And now what? Now I shall clap my hands and crack that neck, and you will have gained nothing at all.”

  He meant it. He was sick of these Zealots who considered their cause more holy than human life. Destructive, fanatical people. Religious! Blind to the benefits of Roman order and Roman roads and the peace that Augustus bequeathed the world!

  The eighth soldier had just crept through the stinking brick. The centurion shifted the child in his arms, preparing to clap this insurrectionist to death.

  But she coughed. The little girl opened her eyes and looked up. She saw the martial aspect of the man who held her, and she began to shriek—powerful, piercing, terrified cries: “Mama! Mama! Mama—”

  Immediately, louder than the child’s terror there came from the house a wild bellow: “Roman jackal! What are you doing?”

  And the Zealot Barabbas vaulted the black wall, lean, athletic, and enraged. He landed face-to-face with the centurion. But before he could draw breath, ten Gauls seized him, buckled his knees, and bound his arms behind him.

  The child was stunned to silence by the brutality. She gaped. She began to shiver in the centurion’s arms.

  “Nothing,” Longinus said. “I am doing nothing but cradling a baby who is afraid of me. Nothing, sir, so meaningful as you are doing.”

  Barabbas spoke with a voice like a whistling whip, spitting hatred: “She was trying to open the door, Roman,” he said. “She was trying to save me from the fires your people set. But the door was ablaze on the inside. I could not get near it. And then it dropped outward.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “She is a Jew.”

  “Yes, but do you know her?”

  “All Jews are precious to me.”

  “Yes, sir. Yes: you are a very great man, and this is but one Jew. A baby Jew. A girl. Are Jews also precious to you one by one?”

  Barabbas paused and looked directly at the child. “She is my sister’s daughter,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Longinus. “I will take her to your sister. Where does your sister live?”

  “My sister is dead,” said Barabbas. “My brothers are dead. Our father died two days ago. Only our mother is left alive. In Jerusalem. Perhaps you will spare her life if she has a child to feed. Or perhaps you will kill them both.”

  “Barabbas,” said Longinus, too weary to argue, too old and too lonely to bear the dry hatred of these rebellious provincials anymore: “for the record, what is your legal name? I’ll write my report, and we can be done with each other forever.”

  Barabbas spat in the dust.

  The centurion sighed. “For your niece, then, so that I lodge her with the right family after all, what is your name?”

  Barabbas—on his knees, bound, and bowed to the ground—twisted his face into a grimace of genuine pain. “Yehoshuah,” he said, speaking it fully in Hebrew: Yahweh Is Salvation.

  The little girl reached out a hand from which hung damp ribbons of skin. “Yeshi, Yeshi,” she whispered. “Jeshua.”

  Longinus turned to the soldier who was recording information on a tablet. He dictated an official time, date, and place for the arrest. Then he repeated the name of his captive in his own tongue: “Jesus Barabbas,” Longinus said. “The prisoner’s name is Jesus.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  To Jerusalem

  I

  Judas

  THE INSTANT HE HEARD of the capture of Barabbas, Judas Iscariot gasped and cried out: “The people! The people!”

  Suddenly, he saw! Judas was able to see! Understanding struck him with the force of lightning. He nearly wept at the inspiration. Why had he never seen it so clearly before?

  A friend from Judea, a Zealot, found him in Perea.

  In the middle of October Jesus had crossed the Jordan with his disciples north of Pella. They were traveling slowly through the northern portions of Perea, when the young Zealot arrived from Jerusalem and drew Judas aside to tell him the horrible news: first, Pontius Pilate had surprised certain Galileans in the Temple precincts and mingled their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Next, the governor went looking for Barabbas in the towns around Beth-horon, punishing the people, actually killing their children in order to secure that man’s surrender. Barabbas himself was captured ignominiously in a tiny place.

  “A tiny place,” the Zealot said, “a lonely house, burned down to the ground—”

  And Judas cried: “The people!”

  All at once an entire strategy was vouchsafed to him exactly as oracles are given by God to the prophets.

  “It should have been Jerusalem,” he said, dazzled by the insight. “There should have been a hundred thousand Jews around. Watching! Ready to riot! But ready,” he said. “The Galileans—they were not ready. And Barabbas—he missed the pregnant hour by a week. It should have happened at the Feast of Tabernacles. Holy time, holy place, holy people, all the people, crowds of people from everywhere on earth, outraged at the revelations of Rome and ready to fight! Yes!”

  So Judas had a plan to think about.

  Perhaps it would have remained merely a dream, another scheme for the saving of Israel, except for the events of the very next day.

  Some Pharisees from the southern part of the Perean province saw Jesus on the road with his disciples. They recognized him and paused to talk. For once it seemed that they genuinely wished to be helpful.

  There were three of them. In fact, Judas recognized one as having been a supporter of John the Baptizer, even after his imprisonment. Judas himself had considered following John. He liked the boldness of the man and the whiplash of his rhetoric. But John was a cold man, truth be told. He seemed unable to acknowledge the contributions of others, the personal qualities that someone like Judas brought to the group.

  When Jesus had greeted the Pharisees, they said to him, “Teacher, get out of here.” They spoke with intensity. “Go north to the Decapolis or west into Samaria,” they said, “but don’t stay in territory Herod Antipas controls. He wants to kill you. He said it himself. More than ever these days, kings are nervous and rulers are taking counsel together. The times are dangerous for people of a public praise.”

  Jesus smiled. Judas thought how his Master’s eyes had the yellowish steadfast stare of a cat: how cool his response! How nearly sarcastic in the face of danger!

  Jesus said, “So, you have occasion to speak to Herod?”

  The Pharisees nodded. “Now and again.”

  Jesus, still smiling, also nodded and said: “You go tell that fox these words exactly: Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following. For it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem. Those words exactly.”

  The Pharisees did not smile. Nor did they wish to keep talking. They promised to carry that message to Herod, then they uttered words of a heavy farewell and left, continuing north.

  Judas, on the other hand, could scarcely contain the tumult of feelings in his breast.

  Jerusalem—of course! Jesus was going to Jerusalem, slowly to be sure, but boldly and openly. No one could not know his going or his destination. And so wonderfully notorious was he that the rulers themselves were afraid of him. Ha! There might indeed be substance to his plan.

  Judas Iscariot gazed at Jesus, blinking furiously against tears of pride. None of the other disciples seemed to recognize the true nature of the man they were following, the explosive potential in his subtle face.

  What potential? Why, a power no less than Messianic!

  Now that the Pharisees had departed, Jesus was speaking again. A large group had
formed around him—yet perhaps it was Judas alone who understood the deepest meaning of the Master’s words. He memorized them. His proud, passionate attention could not help but keep them in his mind as a manifesto for the future.

  These are the words that caused his tears and turned his dream into a firm commitment:

  Jesus said, “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and Oh! how I wish it were already kindled!”

  Jesus’ face was transported with the vision—the same vision, surely, as Judas was seeing.

  The Lord said, “Do you think I’ve come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division! Hereafter in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother.”

  Judas whispered to himself certain more ancient words which these words recalled: The day comes, burning like an oven, when all the evildoers will be stubble. The day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts.

  Judas’ heart was hammering. He tested the word. He whispered, Messiah.

  Now Jesus raised his voice so that no one should miss the saying: “When you see a cloud rising in the west,” he cried, “you say, ‘A shower is coming.’ And so it happens. When you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat.’ And it happens. You hypocrites!”

  Someone giggled. It was Judas who giggled. He couldn’t help it. Jesus had uttered the sharp word hypocrites.

  “You hypocrites!” Jesus cried. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky. Why, then, do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

  Judas was overcome with gratitude. He bowed his head and covered his face. For he it was who had the gift! He could interpret. And it seemed to him that Jesus recognized that mystery between them alone.

  Yes, yes, more certainly than roundheaded Simon Peter—since he knew more deeply than Simon what such a title truly meant—he spoke in his heart his personal confession: You are the Christ! And we shall tread down the wicked! On the day when you act they shall be ashes under the soles of our feet, O Lord, O Messiah, Jesus, Son of David, the One who was to come—you!