Fishers of Men

by Gerald N. Lund

  Down the row of tables the man went, the whip cracking sharply in the air if anyone was bold enough to step forward to try to stop him. Few did. Table after table was overturned, and thousands of coins bounced across the courtyard. Marcus moved along behind, stepping over and around the people who were on their hands and knees now, shouting and yelling as they clambered frantically for the money on the tiles.

  One of the moneychangers saw Marcus’s uniform and darted over. “Aren’t you going to stop him?” he shouted. “He’s robbing us of our money.”

  “Leave him alone,” a man beside them shouted. “Look! He’s not taking the money. He’s giving it back to the people. It’s the moneychangers who are the robbers.”

  Miriam turned to see who spoke, but the man was already melting away into the crowd, not wanting to give the Roman soldier a chance to respond to his taunt. But she realized with a start that the heckler was right. The scourge-wielding attacker had not picked up a single coin. He was hurling thousands of shekels to the ground, but he paid no heed to the money itself. This was not robbery; it was white-hot anger, fury against the extortion that filled this corner of the Temple Mount.

  Miriam felt a tug on her arm and turned. Livia was there beside her. “Are you all right?” she cried.

  Marcus turned and saw who it was. “Get Miriam out of here,” he commanded. “There’s going to be trouble.” He started to draw his sword.

  Miriam jerked free from Livia’s grasp, then reached out and pinned Marcus’s wrist against his side. “No, Marcus! Don’t draw your sword. Look at the crowd. They are delighted with what is happening. If you try to arrest him, they’ll turn on you.”

  He pulled free, but now there was hesitation. Her eyes were pleading. He had no idea how fragile this situation could be. Her people were so emotional. The slightest spark could set them off. “I’m not the one in danger, Marcus. You are.” She turned, pointing to the melee around them. “Listen to them. They love what this man is doing. If you try to stop him—”

  She stopped as she realized the man with the whip was coming straight toward them now, the whip swinging back and forth at his side. Marcus took a quick step in front of the two women to protect them, but the man with the blazing eyes walked right past them, not even seeming to notice they were there.

  They turned. Five feet away was the table piled high with the cages of the doves that Marcus and Miriam had passed just minutes before. The merchant was wailing piteously, holding up his hands. “Please! Please, don’t!” he begged.

  The man stopped, and Miriam could see his chest rising and falling. The whip was tapping ominously against his leg. There was a sudden hush, and then the attacker spoke. “Take these things out of here,” he said in a tight voice. “Why have you made my Father’s house a house of merchandise?”

  “Who are you?” the seller of doves cried. “By what authority do you interrupt our business?” But even as he spoke he began removing the cages with the birds and stacking them on a small, hand-drawn cart behind the table. There was no answer from the man who stood before him in terrible silence.

  At that moment two of the temple guards, soldiers employed by the Sanhedrin, burst out of the crowd and into the circle of surrounding onlookers. They looked around at the chaos.

  “It’s him!” one of the moneychangers shouted, pointing. “He overturned our tables. He’s stealing our money.”

  “He broke my pens and set the animals free,” another voice cried.

  One guard rushed forward, his spear held at the ready. “What do you think you are doing? You are under arrest.”

  The man with the whip straightened to his full height and faced the guard. There was not the slightest indication of fear on his face. “This is the house of the Lord,” he said quietly. “These—” his hand swept out in a gesture that took in all of the merchants and their places of business—“these have made it into a den of thieves.”

  “Yes!” a woman cried. “He’s right. Leave him alone.”

  Instantly the crowd took up the cry.

  “Arrest the thieving moneychangers,” a man shouted. “Leave this man alone!” called another. As one, the crowd drew the ring in tighter, anger on their faces.

  The guard with the spear looked around anxiously, then quickly stepped back beside his companion. The spear lowered. Only a fool could miss the mood of the people. The merchants and moneychangers who profited from the simple piety of the pilgrims were deeply resented. The attack on them had hit a responsive chord.

  “We had better report this to the Council,” the one guard said to the other. His companion nodded, his eyes darting back and forth with real fear now. They backed away, then plunged through the crowd to the jeers and catcalls of the people who let them through.

  A little dazed by it all, Miriam turned back to see what this angry avenger would do next. To her astonishment, he was not where he had been just seconds before. “Where did he go?” she exclaimed.

  Marcus and Livia whirled back as well. Like Miriam, they had focused on the humiliating retreat of the guards. Now all three searched the faces of the people around them. But the man with the blazing eyes was nowhere to be seen. He had pushed into the throng and disappeared.

  Marcus grabbed Miriam and Livia by the arms and gave them a gentle shove. “My soldiers may be coming,” he hissed. “There could be trouble. Now go! Your father will have my head if something happens to you.”

  This time Miriam didn’t resist. If the legionnaires intervened, there was indeed real danger. “Be careful,” she said, touching Marcus on the arm, the previous tension between them now forgotten. Then she took Livia’s hand, and the two of them pushed their way into the crowd, heading for Solomon’s Porches and away from the Antonia Fortress.

  Chapter Notes

  From the writings of early rabbinical sources and contemporary historians such as Philo and Flavius Josephus, and also through extensive archaeological excavations in Jerusalem, we have a remarkably detailed picture of the great temple complex built by Herod the Great (see, for example, Edersheim, The Temple, pp. 42–60; Schürer, p. 141; Ritmeyer, pp. 25–53).

  The temple complex was an engineering as well as an architectural marvel. Some of the stones used to build the massive retaining walls that formed the Temple Mount are huge. For example, one stone carved from a single piece of limestone has been found in the lower courses of the western wall. It is forty-six feet long, ten feet wide, and thought to be ten feet thick. Its weight is estimated to be more than four hundred tons! (see Zimmerman, p. 41).

  There were two cleansings of the temple, one at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus and one at the end (see John 2:13–16; Matthew 21:12–13). Elements of both have been combined here.

  The mezuzah was explained in an earlier chapter. The phylacteries, which are mentioned in Matthew 23:5, or tefillin as they are called in Hebrew, come from a core passage in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy. After giving the great command to love God with all their hearts, the Israelites were commanded to keep these words in their hearts and to “bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes” (v. 8).

  Chapter 11

  Legem non habet necessitas. [Necessity knows no law.]

  —St. Augustine, Soliloquium, 2

  I

  3 April, a.d. 30

  As they stood in the deep shade of the portico, taking a moment to recover their breath before descending down the great staircase, Miriam scanned the courtyard where they had been a few moments before. The commotion had died down now, and she could see the spears of the legionnaires above the heads of the crowd. The spears were all close together, suggesting that the soldiers were back in formation. The crisis was over.

  “Who was he?” Livia asked in wonder.

  Miriam didn’t have to ask who “he” was. “I don’t know. He was a Galilean.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Didn’t you hear his accent? Yes, he was definitely a Galilean.”
She shook her head, remembering his eyes. “I have never seen such rage in a man before.”

  To Miriam’s surprise Livia shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Anger, yes; rage, no.”

  “Didn’t you see him overturn those tables?”

  “I did. But if he was in a rage, why didn’t he overturn the tables with the doves?”

  Miriam reared back a little, startled by the unexpected question.

  “Well,” Livia said, seeming a little defensive now. “When he came toward us, I thought he was going to overturn those tables too. You could see that he was still very angry. But he didn’t. Why?”

  “I—” Miriam hadn’t even considered that fact before. “I don’t know.”

  “If the cages were thrown to the ground, what would have happened?”

  Miriam began to nod slowly. “The doves would have been injured. Some even killed perhaps.”

  “Yes!” Livia said in wonder. “He was inflamed with anger, but he had not lost control of himself. Not for one minute.”

  Miriam’s eyes widened. Livia was right, and that was remarkable. Then she remembered something else. “Did you hear him? Twice he called it my Father’s house. He was so angry because of what was going on in ‘my Father’s house.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  Livia was silent for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I want to know who he is,” Miriam said. “He was magnificent.”

  Livia stared at her. “Magnificent?”

  “Yes! Didn’t you feel it? I hate this aspect of Passover. They turn the Temple Mount into a dung heap. Everyone in the city complains about the graft and corruption, but we stand by and do nothing.” She took a quick breath, a little surprised at her own passion. Then she rushed on. “Well, he didn’t just stand by and do nothing. Why didn’t anyone stop him? He was only one man in a multitude. Not even the armed temple guards dared confront him. I call that magnificent.”

  Livia slowly bobbed her head. “Yes, I guess it was. It was really remarkable.”

  Miriam turned and looked back to where they had been a few minutes before. “I want to know who he was.”

  “And how are you going to find that out?”

  As Miriam turned back, an idea came. “Marcus will know. He will find out about him.” She smiled, and there was a trace of sorrow in it. “And Marcus is coming for dinner tonight. I will ask him.” Then she straightened and turned. “We had better go.”

  As they started for the portals that led down to the great western staircase, Miriam looked back over her shoulder one more time. “I’m going to find out who that man is and thank him,” she murmured. “He was magnificent.”

  II

  Gratefully, the tension that had developed between Miriam and Marcus while discussing Rome and its policies regarding its client states seemed to be forgotten. Marcus was warm, witty, and seemed to feel quite comfortable in the home of Mordechai ben Uzziel and his daughter. Miriam soon found herself relaxing and enjoying his company once again.

  And yet. Back in the corner of her mind she could not shake the faint disquiet. She found him to be a compelling and attractive person, perhaps one of the most charismatic men she had ever met. Though none of the men she knew personally treated Miriam with disrespect—she was too wealthy for one thing, and her father was too influential for another—more than one man of her acquaintance had that she’s-a-wonderful-woman-but-she-is-a-woman attitude always lurking just below the surface. She did not sense even the slightest touch of that with Marcus. He treated her with great respect and spoke with her as though she were his equal.

  On the other hand, he was thoroughly Roman. Everything Miriam had ever seen of the Roman personality had been from a distance. She had heard the Roman psyche discussed and analyzed, but for the first time it had been her privilege to walk right up next to one of the Roman nobility, supposedly the best that Rome could produce, and be allowed to peek inside his soul and mind. And what she saw there was chilling. He had dismissed the deaths of young children with three words that both condemned and praised Herod in the same breath—“brutal but efficient.” Savagery was brushed aside as the incidental side effect of running an empire. Slaves were referred to with the same indifference one used when talking about pieces of furniture or shovels and rakes. She couldn’t even think of a word to describe what it was that had shaken her so deeply. Callous didn’t do it. He was refined, intelligent, genteel, cultured. Casual. That was the word she had finally come to. The thing that bothered her most about Marcus Didius was how casual he was about things that she held to be of enormous importance.

  To her surprise, she found herself comparing Marcus to Simeon the Javelin. What a contrast! It was ironic that she had met two such unusual men in the period of four days. Both were powerful personalities and natural leaders. Both were strikingly handsome. The irony lay in their being complete opposites. Marcus was outwardly warm, charming, and immensely likeable—but what she glimpsed inside was deeply unnerving to her. Simeon, on the other hand, was cold, aloof, bitter, and used his tongue like the point of a sword. And yet, beneath the surface, she had caught a glimmer of a very different person. Whether or not that other person ever fully surfaced or not she would never know, but . . .

  She pushed her thoughts away and focused on the conversation between her father and Marcus. They were discussing the current status of chariot racing in Jerusalem, a sport that had become quite popular since Herod the Great had completed the Hippodrome south of the Temple Mount some years earlier. It had become the sport of favor with the Jewish elite, and Miriam knew that her father bet heavily on his favorite drivers and teams.

  There was something else on Miriam’s mind, and she listened politely, waiting for an opportunity to change the subject. When they went on and on, the conversation now being directed by Marcus as he talked about the greatest chariot races of all at the Circus Maximus in Rome, Miriam finally decided she would not wait any longer. At the first momentary lull in the conversation, she broke in. “Marcus? Were you able to find out who that man today was?”

  Marcus frowned, and not because of the interruption. He had not planned to bring up the subject of what had happened at the temple this morning. He didn’t want Mordechai to know that his daughter had been that close to a potentially deadly situation. He shook his head. “No. We inquired, but the people weren’t very cooperative. I’m not sure they knew either.”

  Mordechai had gone very still. He was looking at Miriam with narrow eyes. “What man?”

  “There was a disturbance today in the Court of the Gentiles. A man with a whip—”

  “I know all about that. The question is, how do you?”

  Miriam realized her mistake even before she saw the warning in Marcus’s eyes, but now it was too late. “As the tribune and I were walking around looking at the temple, we happened upon the scene.”

  Mordechai swung on Marcus. “You were there?”

  Marcus nodded. “I was. We were a few feet away when we heard a commotion. I saw most of it.”

  “Marcus made Livia and me leave,” Miriam said quickly.

  Her father barely heard. “You were there, and you didn’t stop him?”

  “I was alone,” he said evenly. “I sent my centurion to alert the troops, but then the man was gone again.”

  “The crowd was very ugly, Papa,” Miriam said. “They were cheering the man on. It would have been a mistake to try to stop them. Especially alone.”

  She was surprised to see a flash of irritation pass through Marcus’s eyes. Though unspoken, the message was clear and unmistakable. Enough. Say no more. He spoke to her father. “It was not a general insurrection, and we have strict instructions to leave internal affairs to your Council to handle, unless they cannot.” There was an obvious jab there, and Marcus pushed it home in case his host had missed it. “Your temple guards were there. Aren’t they charged with maintaining order and security on the mount?”

 
; Mordechai gave a disgusted grunt. “They were afraid of the crowd.” He seemed mollified now and ready to change the subject.

  “Who was he, Father?”

  He waved a hand. “Some itinerant teacher from the Galilee. His name is Jesus of Nazareth.”

  That seemed to interest Marcus. “From the Galilee? He wasn’t a Zealot, was he?”

  Mordechai quickly shook his head. “No, they say he is a carpenter. He’s come down for the Feast of the Passover and has been teaching on the Temple Mount these past few days. He’s won himself a small following.”

  “Well, he won a lot more than that today,” Miriam said. “It was remarkable to watch him.”

  The corners around Mordechai’s mouth tightened perceptibly. “I thought you said you and Livia left?”

  “She saw just the first part,” Marcus answered smoothly, “then I sent her and the servant girl away.” Then once again, in what Miriam was learning was his style, Marcus turned the conversation and put her father on the defensive. “So did you bring charges against the man?”

  “No. Several of us on the Council found him later in the Court of the Women. We questioned him for a time, demanded to know by what authority he interfered with the business of the temple.”

  “That is not part of the business of the temple, Father,” Miriam broke in. “You know what those moneychangers are doing. It is a travesty.”

  “Miriam, that’s enough.” It came out quietly, but his anger was barely contained. “The moneychangers operate with the permission of the Sanhedrin. Yes, there are excesses, but they are not interlopers to be driven out by someone with no authority.”

  “And what did he say?” Marcus asked, wanting to deflect what he saw happening here.

  Mordechai was fuming now. “We asked him to give us a sign of his authority. He is a madman. Completely insane.”

  “Why do you say that?” Miriam asked, unable to contain herself although she knew that she had nearly crossed a line with her father that was dangerous to cross. “He was angry at what he saw happening there, but he certainly didn’t seem like a madman.”