“The moneychangers?” said Sharon.
“The same,” said Lavon. “The commander is worried that he’ll come back. The crowds are so volatile; anything could happen.”
Bryson looked at him skeptically. “It can’t be that bad,” he said.
Lavon didn’t speak for a few moments. Finally he directed our attention out the window toward the west.
“Look down at that wall,” he said, “the one extending from below our room to the battlement on the other side of the fort. A few years from now, a Roman soldier stationed there will turn his backside to the crowd on the Temple Mount and break wind in a very loud and deliberate way. According to Josephus, more than twenty thousand people died in the ensuing riot.”
“But Robert,” replied Bryson, “you’ve said it yourself: These ancient writers were prone to exaggerate.”
“Yes; Lavon replied, “the casualties may have been half that number, or a tenth, but that still means two thousand dead. The ancients didn’t have tear gas or water cannons. Once a crowd got going, the only way to stop it was to march through the streets, killing everyone who got in the way. That’s why the Romans pounced so hard on the slightest whiff of trouble. It didn’t take much for a situation to get completely out of hand.”
“That was an intentional insult,” said Markowitz. “The soldier should not have done that.”
“I’m sure he was punished, but it goes to show how unstable things really were. You saw it coming in — the looks on peoples’ faces.”
They mumbled assent.
“And on the flip side,” Lavon continued, “Roman officials didn’t have to worry about videos of dead children showing up on the internet. The whole setup was a recipe for abuse.”
I didn’t doubt that, either.
Inflaming the situation still more, most of the “Roman” soldiers were in fact auxiliaries, recruited from a pool of the Jews’ traditional enemies.
For a while, we all continued to stare down at the activity below. The Temple area had finally gone quiet. The workers had departed and only the Temple watchmen remained. We could see two of them making their rounds, while a third priest fed the fire that burned perpetually on the altar.
“So where does this leave us?” asked Bryson. “Assuming this prophet they’re talking about really is Jesus Christ, will he come back to the Temple again? Could we even get a recording of him teaching from our vantage point here?”
Lavon glanced over to Sharon. “If I remember correctly, the Gospels don’t record anything Jesus did between some teaching on Tuesday and the Last Supper, which is Thursday night.”
“So you don’t know where he will be until then?” asked Bryson.
“We don’t really know even then,” said Lavon. “We can only speculate where the Last Supper was held. We know he was arrested later that night, but we don’t know where they took him afterward.
“Was he brought before the full Sanhedrin here in the Temple complex, or to a smaller gathering at Caiaphas’s house? We don’t even know whether Pilate sat in judgment here in the Antonia or at Herod’s palace, on the other side of town.”
“How can we find out?” asked Bryson.
“For starters,” Lavon replied, “we’d have to go outside and have a look, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
“Well, we need to do something,” said Markowitz. “We can’t just sit here until Sunday.”
That’s
“Let’s do this,” I finally said. “We’ve had a long day. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and work out our plan with a clear head, in the morning.”
Chapter 26
Our next day got off to an abrupt start just before dawn. Several men ran shouting into the room, but I couldn’t understand a word. Lavon stared at them with equal incomprehension; whatever they were speaking, it wasn’t Greek.
Moments later, Publius strode in, carrying a torch and laughing uproariously. He waved his hand and the others scrambled away.
“Decius has lost his bet,” said the centurion. “I told him there was no chance you were Parthian spies.”
“
Publius nodded. “The best test is always a surprise. Each of these men spoke different languages, telling you that the fortress was on fire, and that you should run quickly to save your lives — Parthian, Aramaic, Egyptian. It is obvious you know none of them.”
“I could have told you that and saved them the trouble,” said Lavon.
“What’s going on?” asked Markowitz.
Lavon motioned him to be quiet. “Why would Decius think we were spies?”
“He thought it was odd that you, a traveler from so far away, seemed to have known the name of that little village we passed through yesterday.”
Lavon thought quickly. “It resembles the name of my ancestral town, in Norvia.”
“You also displayed great interest in the construction, pitiful as it was.”
He turned toward Bergfeld. “Her father has an interest in how other countries house their poor. He left us specific instructions to investigate this.”
Lavon wasn’t sure the centurion believed any of this, but Publius merely stared at him for a few more seconds. He then barked orders for the servant outside to bring us food and water and left without saying another word.
Lavon gave us all a few minutes to settle down. He broke a piece of bread off the large loaf and passed it to Bryson, who had taken a seat to his left.
“I’m as guilty as anyone,” he said as he briefly explained what had just happened, “but we’ll have to all take better care to pretend we don’t know some of the things we do.”
“Parthian spies?” asked Bryson. “Who the hell are the Parthians?”
“Persians,” Lavon replied. “At its height, their empire was probably as large as Rome’s.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Few Americans have, but the Romans and the Parthians fought over this part of the world for several centuries. They don’t care much for each other.”
That much I knew. At the Army War College, we learned about Crassus, a Roman general who had blundered his way into the desert and gotten most of his men killed. As the story went, his reputation as the richest man in Rome had preceded him; the Parthians executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.
“Why does this matter to us?” asked Bryson.
“The route we would have followed from Norvia would have taken us through Parthian lands. I’m sure the Romans are curious how we managed to get through.”
***
Before he could say anything else, Markowitz called us over to the windows. In the dim light, we could barely make out two priests stacking a pile of wood on the altar. Another man, near the center of the inner courtyard, appeared to be hauling away ashes from the day before.
The sun slowly edged over the horizon, sending luminous rays glistening off the gold trim that bordered the Temple’s roof. Shortly thereafter, more white-clad priests appeared — to assist with the morning sacrifices, we supposed.
Markowitz stared at priests intently; then turned to Lavon.
“Robert, what do we in the modern world really
