It was then that the Sanhedrim took counsel. As a result, and with the hope of entrapping him into some blasphemous utterance on which a charge would lie, they sent meek-eyed Scribes to question him concerning the authority that he claimed. He routed the meek-eyed Scribes. Then, fancying that he might be seduced into some expression which could be construed as treason, they sent young and earnest men to learn from him their duty to Rome. The young and earnest men returned crestfallen and abashed.
The elders, nonplussed, debated. A levite suspected that the casuistry and marvellous cures of the Nazarene must be due to a knowledge of the incommunicable name, Shemhammephorash, seared on stone in the thunders of Sinai, and which to utter was to summon life or beckon death. Another had heard that while in Galilee he was believed to be in league with Baal-Zebub, Lord of Flies.
To this gossip no attention was paid. Annas, merely—the old high-priest, father-in-law of Caiaphas, who officiated in his stead—laughed to himself. There was no such stone, there was no such god. Another idea had been welcomed. A festival was in progress; there was gayety in the neighborhood, drinking too; and as over a million of pilgrims were herded together, now and then an offence occurred. The previous night, for instance, a woman had been arrested for illicit commerce.
Annas tapped on his chin. He had the pompous air of a chameleon, the same long, thin lips, the large, protruding eyes.
“Take her before the Galilean,” he said. “He claims to be a rabbi; he must know the Law. If he acquit her, it is heresy, and for that a charge will lie. Does he condemn her he is at our mercy, for he will have alienated the mob.”
A smile of perfect understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead the prisoner to the Christ.
They found him in the Woman’s Court. From a lateral chamber a priest, unfit for other than menial services because of a carbuncle on his lip, dropped the wood he was sorting for the altar and gazed curiously at the advancing throng, in which the prisoner was.
She must have been very fair, but now her features were distorted with anguish, veiled with shame. The blue robe she wore was torn, and a sleeve rent to the shoulder disclosed a bare white arm. She was a wife, a mother too. Her name was Ahulah; her husband was a shoemaker. At the Gannath Gate, where her home was, were two little children. She worshipped them, and her husband she adored. Some hallucination, a tremor of the flesh, the flush of wine, and there, circled by a leering crowd, she crouched, her life disgraced, irrecoverable forevermore.
The charge was made, the usual question propounded. The Master had glanced at her but once. He seemed to be looking afar, beyond the Temple and its terraces, beyond the horizon itself. But the accusers were impatient. He bent forward and with a finger wrote on the ground. The letters were illegible, perhaps, yet the symbol of obliteration was in that dust which the morrow would disperse. Again he wrote, but the charge was repeated, louder, more impatiently than before.
Jesus straightened himself. With the weary indulgence of one to whom hearts are as books, he looked about him, then to the dome above.
“Whoever is without sin among you,” he declared, “may cast the first stone.”
When he looked again the crowd had slunk away. Only Ahulah remained, her head bowed on her bare white arm. From the lateral chamber the priest still peered, the carbuncle glistening on his lip.
“Did none condemn you?” the Master asked.
And as she sobbed merely, he added: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
To the elders this was very discomforting. They had failed to unmask him as a traitor to God, to Rome even, or yet as a demagogue defying the Law. They did not care to question again. He had worsted them three times. Nor could they without due cause arrest him, for there were the Pharisees. Besides, a religious trial was full of risk, and the cooperation of the procurator not readily to be relied on. It was that cooperation they needed most, for with it such feeling as might be aroused would fall on Rome and not on them. As for Pilate, he could put a sword in front of what he said.
In their enforced inaction they got behind that wall of prejudice where they and their kin feel most secure, and there waited, prepared at the first opportunity to invoke the laws of their ancestors, laws so cumbersome and complex that the Romans, accustomed to the clearest pandects, had laughed and left them, erasing only the right to kill.
At last chance smiled. Into Jerusalem a rumor filtered that the Nazarene they hated so had raised the dead, that the suburbs hailed him as the Messiah, and that he proclaimed himself the Son of God. At once the Sanhedrim reassembled. A political deliverer they might have welcomed, but in a Messiah they had little faith. The very fact of his Messiahship constituted him a claimant to the Jewish throne, and as such a pretender with whom Pilate could deal. Moreover—and here was the point—to claim divinity was to attack the unity of God. Of impious blasphemy there was no higher form.
It were better, Annas suggested, that a man should die than that a nation should perish—a truism, surely, not to be gainsaid.
That night it was decided that Jesus and Judaism could not live together; a price was placed upon his head, and to the blare of four hundred trumpets excommunication was pronounced.
Of all of these incidents save the last Mary had been necessarily aware. In company with Johanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Salomè,
