that she was, she dutifully began to tease an oft-heard story out of the senior officer present as Pilatus and I stepped out onto the landing at the top of the wide staircase that led from the Praetorium down to the Judgment Hall.
Below us stood a knot of chief priests and scribes surrounded by a gawking crowd eager to witness pain and punishment. And there before the religious leaders, his head down, was a young man in a dirty, travel-stained gown of cheap cloth. They had brought him from Caiaphas after accusing him of blasphemy in that he claimed to be the Son of God. They had bound his arms and blindfolded him; then they had struck him on the face and asked, 'If thou art indeed the omniscient son of the omniscient God, then say which of us it was that smote thee.' And when he would not, or could not, they had mocked him, saying, 'And yet you claim to be the Messiah! The anointed one that our people have so long awaited!' The prisoner had answered only, 'No matter what I told you, you would not believe me, nor would you let me go,' so they brought him to be judged before the Procurator.
Upon the appearance of Pontius Pilatus at the head of the stairs, the priests and scribes brought their prisoner halfway up the stairs leading to the Praetorium—well, to be exact, they brought him one step less than halfway up, so they could avoid any accusation of having entered a place wherein Gentiles were desecrating the Passover by eating leavened bread.
Pilatus looked down upon them and spoke, and I can remember his words exactly, because I was obliged to repeat them in translation. For the smoothness of my account, I shall henceforth assume you understand that everything that was said passed through me. Pilatus said, 'What accusation bring ye against this man?'
'He has blasphemed, calling himself the son of God!'
The Procurator shrugged. 'Is that so serious? Are not all of us the children of our gods, in a way of speaking? But if you feel that he has offended your cult, then take him and punish him according to your customs.'
Seeing that Pilatus had no intention of accepting the responsibility of punishing this poor fellow over some trivial matter of local cult sensitivities, the chief priest took another tack. 'This man has been perverting the nation, claiming to be King of the Jews and forbidding the people to give tribute to Caesar. We would punish this treason against your worship and against Rome, but you have made it unlawful for us to put any man to death.'
Now, it was true that the Romans had found it necessary to deny the Jews the right to put one another to death over their endless internecine religious spats, so Pilatus said, 'Oh, come now! Surely preaching some political nonsense to a pack of illiterate malcontents is not a matter deserving of death.' His dismissive, cajoling tone might have been used for speaking to quarrelsome children, but when he saw from their determined, thin-lipped expressions that they had no intention of letting their prey off lightly, he drew a long weary sigh and said, 'Oh, very well, bring him up for me to question.'
I cleared my throat to remind him of their terror of proximity to bread-eaters. 'Send him up alone, then! The rest of you can wait there below!'
When the accused was standing before him, Pilatus said, 'Now then, young man, what have you been getting up to? You have certainly managed to draw the wrath of the religious establishment down upon you. Mind you, perhaps it does them good to have their noses tweaked occasionally, if only as an exercise in humility.' He smiled, but the prisoner made no indication that he had heard.
The Procurator's smile faded and he spoke in a graver, more urgent tone. 'You'd be well-advised to cooperate, young man. You're accused of blasphemy towards their god—your god too, I suppose. I cannot help you if you won't speak to me.'
The prisoner lifted his head and settled his calm, deep-set eyes upon my master without answering.
'Did you, in fact, claim to be King of the Jews?' the Procurator pursued. 'Before you answer, I should warn you that Caesar is the only ruler here, so it would be possible to interpret any claim to being king as treason. Do you understand that? Now then. Are you King of the Jews?'
The prisoner responded, 'Those are your words, not mine.'
Pilatus looked at me, and I lifted my shoulders. We had met this phenomenon with all the 'messiahs' we had been obliged to interrogate: this peculiar reluctance to admit to their specific offenses, although they seemed perfectly willing—indeed determined—to achieve martyrdom by suffering for them. It was as though their impulses towards life and towards the diseased ecstasies of martyrdom were tugging them in two directions.
'So you're denying that you claimed to be King of the Jews? Is that it?' Pilatus said, trying to prompt him into the right answer.
The young man responded, but, typically, not to the question posed. He said, 'To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.'
My master and I exchanged a glance. This business about coming into the world to bear witness to the truth had been said by every messiah we had questioned over the past year or so. Indeed, even the phrasing was almost identical. Shifting to Latin so that we could not be understood, my master said, 'Another one who has learned his part perfectly. Are they just rogues and charlatans, after all?'
'Many of them, to be sure. Probably most. But not all. Some are deranged enthusiasts who really do hear voices and who clearly remember things that never happened. But the most interesting of them are honest, rustic teachers who assume the guise of the Messiah to give weight and impact to their teachings among the uneducated masses. Alas, sometimes these teachers find themselves entangled in the net of their little subterfuge when they are questioned by priests and religious functionaries and are obliged either to renounce their claims to deity, and thus lose their followers and the fruits of a life's work, or face punishment for blasphemy, which, of course, can mean death.'
Pilatus nodded. 'Difficult choice. Glory and death, or life and ignominy. But I'll tell you what confounds me, Greek. I cannot understand the appeal of these 'cristos' to the ignorant masses. What do they offer them?'
'Nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'Well, something more profound and more attractive than nothing, Nothingness! They prophesy that the world will come to its end in a very short time. Total destruction! Final judgment! Apocalypse! And that's a very tasty prospect for the lost, the crippled, the lonely, the impoverished, the frustrated, the incompetent, the ignorant, and the powerless who constitute their followings. And even more tasty is the prospect that this total and final annihilation will sweep up the rich as well, together with the clever, the strong, the pleased, the life-embracing, the informed, the liberated, the powerful—all those whom the underclasses envy and hate.'
'An end of misery for themselves, and harsh punishment for the rest of us, eh?' my master mused. 'A heady and attractive mixture. Both surcease and revenge. Hmm.'
'Yes, and each of these 'cristos' dangles this promise before all those who will listen. They promise that the poor and the meek and the downtrodden will reign in heaven, while the rest of us will suffer all the torments of Dis. I view these messages as so many embers thrown onto dry grasslands. While most of them will smoulder, then die out, there is a danger that the promises of one of these messiahs—it hardly matters which one—might catch and flair into a great conflagration that will sweep across the world. And that will be a dark day for all men of culture and refinement, for we shall become the despised minority in a tyranny of the ignorant underclass.'
Pilatus half closed his eyes and nodded to himself, then he turned and spoke down to the awaiting priests and the eager rabble. 'I have interrogated this man that you brought before me, accused of perverting the people. I have examined him before your eyes, and I have found no fault in him.'
The chief priest stepped forth and said, 'We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he claims to be the Son of God.'
'Die because he's an uneducated, superstitious fanatic?' Pilatus said with scornful disbelief. 'Die because he suffers from a terrible longing to be noticed, to be 'someone'? Come, come, my friends. What harm can he do? He's but one among the many who wander the desert with their little bands of followers, working sleight-of-hand miracles and preaching comfortable, rustic home truths. Why not just take him out and give him a good flogging. Surely that will serve to dissuade the others.'
But one of the scribes stepped forward and said, 'If you let this man go free, you are not C?sar's friend, for whosoever claims himself to be a king speaks against Caesar.'
I threw my master a warning frown. Was he aware that by shifting their accusation from religious grounds to political ones, they were transferring the responsibility for his punishment from their shoulders to his? If the man were guilty of blasphemy, he would be punished by the Sanhedrin and the Procurator's only role would be granting or denying them recourse to the penalty of death; but if he were guilty of treason, then Rome's representative in
