Fishers of Men

by Gerald N. Lund

  All of that had been tumbling through Simeon’s mind when Mordechai appeared before them. For a moment, Simeon wanted to scream at him, lash out for what this man was doing, strike him down for the damage his monumental pride was doing to the Messiah and his own daughter. But he pushed it all back. “You don’t know what you have done this day,” he said softly. “May God have mercy on your twisted soul.”

  Going instantly purple, Mordechai spun away in a swirl of robes, striding out swiftly to rejoin Annas, Caiaphas, and Azariah.

  Simeon and his family, along with the group of apostles and disciples from Bethany, pushed in behind the last of the soldiers. Simeon was not surprised when many of the crowd in the courtyard began to dissipate. They had done their work, made their influence felt with the governor. This unknown man was going to the cross now. They could go home and drink off their ill-gotten wages.

  III

  The streets of Jerusalem

  When they came out of the courtyard of the Praetorium and into the streets, trying to stay close to the column of Roman soldiers, David ben Joseph looked around in surprise. The streets were packed with people. He turned to James and John. “The word is out,” he said.

  John nodded, his face grim. There were a few angry faces around. One or two jeered or spit at the prisoners as they passed. But for the most part, the crowd was not hostile. The loudest sound was the wailing and weeping of the women. On every side, eyes were sunken and haunted, faces showed the horror, stiff bodies were evidence of the disbelief. Here was the man they had listened to raptly on the Temple Mount. Here was the Prophet whom they had gone out to see less than a week before, throwing their garments at his feet and waving the palm branches wildly. Here was the Messiah, who had merited their shouts of hosanna and hallelujah. He moved slowly, his head down as he struggled to carry the cross beam. Could this truly be their Deliverer?

  “Look!” Andrew called out, bringing Simeon’s head around. “There’s Peter.”

  It was true. Ahead of them, standing on a low stone wall, leaning out to see better, was the chief apostle. He hadn’t seen them yet; his eyes were fixed on the Master, who was moving slowly past him.

  “Peter!” Andrew started forward, waving his arm. “Peter!”

  Peter turned, searching the crowd, then saw his brother. He dropped to the ground and started pushing his way against the flow of the crowd. In moments he had reached the other apostles. Crowding around him, the disciples moved to one side of the street to escape the crush of people.

  Peter’s first thought was for Mary. He went quickly to Jesus’ mother and took both of her hands. “I am so sorry, Mary,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I never dreamed it would come to this.”

  She clung to him. Her tears had long since been exhausted. She was now just pale and drawn, hunched over with the never-ending pain. “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “Pilate wanted to release him,” Matthew explained. He was standing just behind the women. “But the Sanhedrin forced his hand. They’re going to crucify him.”

  No one needed to tell Peter that. He turned as Anna came up and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Peter,” she cried. “We’ve been so worried about you.”

  He took his wife in his arms and held her tightly. “It’s all right. I’m here now.”

  “Where did you go?” John asked. “I went looking for you.”

  “I—” The fisherman shook his craggy head, not finishing. He looked around. The procession had slowed to a bare crawl as the soldiers tried to clear the streets ahead of them. Word was spreading rapidly. The Messiah was being crucified. Hundreds of people were streaming in to see what was happening. Peter grunted. He didn’t want to get too far behind, but he saw they could tarry a little longer. Out of long habit, he immediately began taking back his position of leadership.

  The apostle motioned for the men around him to move in closer. “I assume they’re taking him to Golgotha?”

  Simeon nodded, as did several others. That was not a difficult guess to make. The primary value of crucifixion for the Romans was its power to deter future crime. Part of its deterrent value was that it was designed to be a lingering, excruciatingly painful form of death. Often, victims could live as long as two or three days on the cross, alternating between periods of unconsciousness and extreme agony. But even the most fiendish form of execution didn’t carry much deterrent value unless it was well known and vividly implanted into the minds of the population. So it was common practice to choose as the site of crucifixion the sides of heavily traveled roads. Thus, the maximum number of people could become eyewitnesses of this, one of the cruelest ways man had ever devised to end the life of their fellow human beings. Golgotha, which in Hebrew meant “the skull,” signifying it as a place of death, was just outside the northern walls of the city. It was set back only a short distance from the well-used road that led to the northern environs of the city. Everyone in Jerusalem knew about Golgotha.

  “When we start moving again, let’s try to push our way forward a little,” Peter went on. “It will be difficult, but let’s stay as close to Jesus as we can.” He arched his neck, looking out ahead.

  David blanched a little. “You’re not thinking of trying to—”

  Peter cut him off quickly. “No, the Master has forbidden us to intervene. But we can let him know we’re here.”

  “We saw Judas,” Andrew said as they began moving forward, closing in on the last of the soldiers. “He was coming out of the palace of Caiaphas early this morning.”

  “Judas is dead,” Peter said flatly.

  The group responded with gasps and exclamations of astonishment. “Dead?” Deborah cried. She walked beside David, holding his hand for strength. “Where? How?”

  “I saw one of the disciples just a few minutes ago. Someone found him at the base of a tree this morning. There was a rope around his neck that had snapped in two. He evidently hanged himself.”

  John passed a hand across his eyes. “Because of the betrayal, do you think?”

  Peter shrugged, his expression moody. “We may never know. The man who found him said it was clearly done by his own hand.”

  A shout up ahead caused them all to turn. The column of soldiers was moving again. “Come on,” Peter said. “Let’s split up and go on either side of Jesus.”

  IV

  The typical cross was made of two pieces: the stipes, or vertical beam, usually planted deep into the ground and left in place between executions, and the patibulum, or cross beam, the thick plank to which the victim was affixed before it was hoisted into place atop the stipes. This was called the tau cross, after the Greek letter of the alphabet that corresponded to the Latin T, because once the patibulum was in place, that was what the cross looked like.

  The cross beam was generally about four fingers thick, a little more than a hand-span wide, and about four cubits long—roughly six Roman feet. Stout enough to take the spikes driven through it and to hold the weight of a man, it generally weighed upwards of about a hundred pounds. The Roman practice was to place the cross beam over the condemned man’s shoulders, with his arms extended along its length; the beam would be lashed into place with ropes around both elbows.

  At the sound of a solid thud behind him, Marcus turned in the saddle. It took a moment for his eyes to locate the source of the sound, but when he did he grunted softly to himself. The street through this section of the city rose up a set of six or seven stairs. Jesus had not made it. Halfway up, he had slipped and gone down. The heavy plank had slammed into the pavement with the thud Marcus had heard.

  He reined around, but before he could get moving, the nearest legionnaire waded in on Jesus with a short whip. “Get up, fool!” he screamed, lashing at Jesus’ back. “On your feet.”

  Jesus uttered a soft moan as new stripes were laid on his already mangled flesh.

  Marcus spurred his horse, but Sextus was quicker. The centurion leaped in, yanking the soldier back and sending him spinning away. As Marcus
reached them, Sextus had an arm under Jesus and was trying to help him to his feet. With a superhuman effort, Jesus made it almost to his knees, shouldering the weight of the cross, wincing sharply with the pain. Then his knees buckled, and he went down again. He lay there, panting heavily, his limbs trembling with shock and the loss of blood.

  Sextus looked up. “He’s too weak,” he said to Marcus. “He can’t carry this any farther.”

  Head pounding, wishing he either had not drunk as much wine as he had or that he had drunk much more, Marcus nodded. He looked around at the crowds pressing in around them. There were numerous women, peering through the arms and spears of the legionnaires who were holding them back. Their shrill wailing was grating terribly on Marcus’s already jangled nerves. Then he saw a large, dark-skinned man wearing a brightly colored turban around his head. The man was half a head taller than anyone else in the crowd, and powerfully built.

  “You!” Marcus jabbed his finger at the man.

  The man looked up, his eyes flying wide open. He fell back a step. “Me?”

  “Yes. Come forward. You’re going to carry this man’s cross for him.”

  Two legionnaires darted over and grabbed the man and dragged him forward. He was close to panic, Marcus saw. As they passed beside his horse, he leaned down. “Settle down, man!” he commanded. “We’re not going to crucify you. Just carry that man’s cross.”

  With the weight removed, Jesus slowly got to his feet. As he stood there, his whole body visibly shook. His head was down. Sweat darkened his hair, and the dried blood from the thorn crown was starting to streak where it mingled with his perspiration.

  The sight only seemed to send the watching women deeper into their grief. Their cries lifted sharply, reverberating off the walls of the narrow street. Marcus wanted to clap his hands over his ears and shut it off.

  V

  Simeon, David, and Ephraim had pushed their way forward until they reached the last of the three prisoners. But that still left them ten or fifteen paces behind Jesus, who had been placed in the lead. Leah, Miriam, Deborah, and Rachel were right behind them. Benjamin and Esther had chosen the other side and were no longer visible.

  The forward movement suddenly stopped. Ephraim jumped up and down in place, trying to see over the crowd. “Someone’s gone down,” he said. “I think it’s Jesus.”

  “Let’s go,” David said, taking Deborah’s hand. “We’ve got to get closer.”

  Ignoring the angry looks and muttered curses, the seven of them forced their way forward. Suddenly, Miriam felt a hand on her arm, gripping it tightly. “It’s Marcus, Miriam.” Simeon was at her elbow, whispering urgently in her ear.

  “I don’t care,” she cried. “Jesus needs us.”

  Simeon felt a wash of shame. At the sight of his old enemy, he had, for a moment, been distracted from his greater purpose. “Yes,” he said, and pushed forward with greater vigor.

  To their surprise, when they were finally close enough to see Jesus clearly, he was upright and no longer carried the wooden beam. Another man was down on one knee, bent over as two soldiers tied the cross beam to his arms.

  “Jesus!” It was Leah. She was sobbing hysterically. “Oh, Jesus.”

  He turned at the cry, and then his eyes found the familiar faces. A look of recognition flashed in his eyes, and he nodded.

  “We’re here, Master,” Miriam called out. “We’re here.”

  All around them weeping tore the air. A woman next to the wall of soldiers dropped to her knees and wrung her hands. She began the death wail, the funeral dirge used by professional mourners to lament the passing of a loved one.

  To everyone’s astonishment, Jesus lifted his head and cried out. “Daughters of Jerusalem!”

  It came as such a surprise that the surrounding crowd instantly went silent. Sextus Rubrius swung around, not sure who had spoken. Marcus, turning back to his place at the head, also jerked around.

  “O daughters of Jerusalem,” Jesus said in a trembling voice, “weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.’”

  Marcus was staring at the man. At a time like this, he was warning them of potential danger?

  “At that time, then shall they begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us.’ And to the hills, ‘Cover us.’”

  He looked around, his eyes moving from woman to woman. They lingered for a moment on Leah, then moved to Deborah, Rachel, and Miriam. Then his head slowly lowered again. “For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”

  Then, without waiting for a signal from his captors, Jesus started moving again, his step heavy, his shoulders sagging under the sorrow that was upon him. He gave one last look at the four women who had been with him so often in Capernaum, then turned his head back to the front and moved on.

  Chapter Notes

  Certain traditions have become so fixed in Christianity that they have taken on the stature of scripture. An example of this is the idea that three wise men came to Bethlehem to visit the Babe; in actuality, Matthew does not specify a number. So it is with the Crucifixion. The Romans had several different kinds of crosses that they used in crucifixion. They did use what they called the crux capitata, commonly called the Latin cross, which had the vertical post rising above the cross beam. This is the shape so familiar to all Christians. But such an arrangement required a more complicated construction in order to secure the cross beam to the upright.

  The far more common form used, especially in the time of Christ in Palestine, was the crux commissa, or the tau cross. In this case, the uprights were put permanently into the ground so that the cross beam had only to be placed on top and fastened into position. The upright then carried the weight of the cross beam and the prisoner (Edwards, pp. 1455–57).

  For that same reason, the common depiction of Christ carrying the full cross on his way to Calvary is likely not how it happened. It is much more probable that he carried only the cross beam, which, even then, was too much for him in his condition of physical shock and exhaustion. Likewise in paintings, Simon of Cyrene, the man who was impressed into duty to help Jesus carry the cross, is often shown as a black man. That is possible. Cyrene was in what we today would call North Africa. There were likely many from black Africa living in Cyrene at that time. But even at that time, North Africa was made up of Arabic peoples, and this is why the author chose to depict him as such in this chapter.

  Finally, the depiction of the crosses being on a hilltop, while aesthetically and dramatically impressive, is probably not the case either. There are two traditional sites of Golgotha, or Calvary, in Jerusalem today. One is inside the walls of the Old City, the other outside the northern walls near the Damascus Gate. Both are small knolls or hills. However, it is more likely that the crosses were at the base of the hill, near a well-traveled roadway, as is depicted in this novel. That would be the Roman way. It also would better explain Matthew’s comment that “they that passed by reviled [i.e., mocked] him” (Matthew 27:39; emphasis added).

  Chapter 35

  It is finished.

  —John 19:30

  I

  Golgotha

  Sextus Rubrius had been a legionnaire for nearly thirty years. He had participated in some fourteen major battles and countless lesser skirmishes. He had administered the lash to lax or rebellious legionnaires more than a score of times and had been lashed twice himself. He had seen more gruesome sights than any man should see in three lifetimes. He had learned how to steel himself against it, but he had never learned how to revel in it as some did. Once, in Thracia, when a particularly stubborn town had finally been overrun, his commander had ordered every surviving male—more than two hundred of them—crucified. Thankfully by then, like Marcus Didius, Sextus had learned the value of getting drunk before the executions ever began. When they were done, he and his men were
given a week’s leave with unlimited access to the spoils of the vineyard. It was then that he learned that not even a week spent in a drunken stupor was enough to blot some things out.

  He knew with exact precision how to carry out the execution to achieve the maximum effectiveness, and his mind ran over those procedures by habit of long training. First, a mild narcotic made of a mixture of wine and myrrh was given to the victim. Though in a way this was an act of mercy, that was not what prompted the practice. The physical pain was so horrible, so intense, that the writhing and twisting and jerking of the body made it difficult for the soldiers to manage the execution. The narcotic dulled the victim’s pain enough that they could maintain at least some control.

  The condemned was laid flat on the ground with his arms outstretched on the cross beam. Spikes created especially for this purpose by garrison blacksmiths were used to secure the outstretched arms. A full hand-span long, the spikes were square with a heavy rounded head, but they tapered sharply from the head to their pointed ends. Nails in the palms alone would tear free, so a second set of spikes were always driven through the wrists, just above the fleshy heel of the hand. Placing the spikes required the greatest care. They had to go between the two bones of the lower arm, thus providing the stability needed to hold up the weight of the body. Care had to be taken not to pierce the major artery between the arm and hand. If so, the victim would bleed to death quickly, and that wasn’t acceptable. It was far too merciful.