by Randy Singer
For four days, Procula had been running a fever that would not break. She had tried everything. Pilate had offered sacrifices to the usual pantheon of gods, sat tenderly at her bedside dabbing her forehead with a damp cloth, hired Greek doctors to prescribe herbal medicines and drain Procula’s blood. She had endured cold baths followed by heated saunas designed to sweat the fever away. But nothing worked, and Pilate was on the verge of panic. “Don’t leave me,” he pleaded with Procula.
She managed a weak smile, reaching out for his hand. “I’m not going anywhere,” she assured him.
It was bravado, and they both knew it. During the first two days of the sickness, she had been vomiting and couldn’t seem to get warm even as her forehead was burning up.
By day three she was weak and fading. She just wanted to curl up and cover herself with blankets. Instead, the doctors drew her blood and forced her to endure the cold baths and hot saunas again. She slept fitfully, screaming herself awake in the middle of gruesome nightmares.
On the fourth day, the doctors gave her poppy seeds to reduce the pain. That’s when the hallucinations started. That evening, as the fever spiked again, they all knew it was time for her to spend the night at the altar of Aesculapius.
She gathered her strength, took a bath, and put on a simple white linen dress. Pilate and her servants walked with her to the temple at dusk, one servant supporting each arm, but that was as far as they could go. Pilate gave her a kiss, and she entered the temple alone.
She knelt before the altar and the marble statue of Aesculapius. “Heal me, O god of eternal life.”
She had brought a nonvenomous snake in a burlap bag. She hated snakes, but she hated the disease more. She would do anything to get rid of the fever, to stop the hallucinations, to feel like herself again.
Snakes were sacred to Aesculapius. He had not only healed many people from poisonous snakebites, but snakes supposedly obeyed his voice, wrapping themselves around a stick at his command. As Procula opened the bag, reaching inside to grab the snake just behind its head, she felt woozy. She wondered if she might pass out on the marble floor.
The snake she had brought, long and green and scaly to the touch, didn’t seem to fall under the god’s spell. As soon as Procula set it down, the serpent slithered off the altar toward the base of the statue.
Her servants had prepared honey cakes, and she pulled them out of a second bag, placing them on the altar as well. From that same bag, she removed a bottle of wine, poured some of it on the altar, and set the bottle down next to the honey cakes. Her bags empty, she walked to a side wall of the temple and sat on the floor, leaning her head back and repeating the words over and over: “Heal me, O god of eternal life.”
She needed sleep, but she was too cold. She knew that those who slept in the temple of Aesculapius had dreams that would describe the cure for their ailments. It was her only hope. She needed to sleep. She needed to dream.
“Heal me, O god of eternal life.” She shivered against the stone. She was freezing, her body shaking. It was dark outside, and the temple was lit only by the oil lamps on the altar. She watched the snake explore the nooks and crannies of the stone temple.
At one point, the snake slithered toward her, and she held her breath. It stopped a few feet away and seemed to regard her with curiosity. She couldn’t harm the snake because it was now sacred.
She froze with terror as the snake came toward her again. She tensed every muscle and closed her eyes, her skin tingling with fear. She felt the serpent crawl over her left calf, and she nearly shrieked as she looked down to see it draped over her leg. It stayed there for a breath-holding, heart-stopping moment, and then it slithered away.
She wanted to leave herself.
“Heal me, O god of eternal life.”
Sometime later, still shivering against the cold, Procula curled into a fetal position on her right side. It was quiet in the temple. The floor was cold and hard. It smelled musty. She couldn’t get the snake out of her mind. What if it came back and crawled across her face?
“Heal me, O god of eternal life.”
Those were the last words she mumbled before she fell into a fitful sleep. The last words before she had the vision.
The man’s face was both beautiful and bloodied. His left eye was purple and swollen nearly shut. His beard and features were Jewish, but he wore a purple robe of royalty. Somebody had wedged a crown of thorns on his forehead—briars that cut into his skin and formed rivulets of blood that streaked down his face and matted his beard.
Yet there was strength in the firm-set jaw and compassion in the eyes. He stretched out his hand and touched Procula. He mumbled something—a prayer in Aramaic that Procula didn’t understand. He placed a hand on her forehead as he spoke. When he had finished, he brushed her hair gently behind her ear and smiled.
She wanted to thank him or minister to him. She tried to reach out and lift the thorns from his head or wipe the blood from his face. But she seemed powerless, paralyzed. She could not even speak. The man knelt there for a moment; then he rose and was gone.
At dawn, Pilate came to wake her. Gently he touched her shoulder and whispered in her ear. He placed blankets around her shoulders.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
It took her a minute to process the question. She was still freezing and she felt weak, but somehow she knew that her strength was returning. She wasn’t dizzy anymore, and it seemed she could focus on her husband for the first time in days.
“Better, I think.”
Together, they made their way to the altar. Pilate had brought a rooster, its wings and beak tied with leather. He placed it on the altar and handed Procula the knife. She gathered her strength; she would need all of it for the next moment of chaos and flurry. With her left hand, she grabbed the legs of the rooster and squeezed. As Pilate helped hold the bird in place, Procula sliced the leather that tied the bird’s beak, and it immediately squawked. Quickly, she cut the leather cord on the bird’s back and its wings flailed out, feathers flying. She squeezed the legs harder, holding on, the adrenaline flowing, and drew the knife across the rooster’s neck.
Another flap of the wings, a warm stream of blood that covered her hand, and then the stillness was back.
She handed the knife to Pilate, and they left together. He pressed a cheek to her forehead and told her that he thought the fever might have broken. For the first time, she realized that her body was soaked with sweat.
There was a litter waiting outside the temple, and Pilate helped her in for the jostling ride back to the palace. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the face of the man who had come to heal her. Had the healing already taken place, or did she need to do more?
That question was answered in the next two days. The fever subsided. Her strength returned. Three days after she left the temple of Aesculapius, she returned with more honey cakes and a prayer of thanks. She stared at the face of the statue. She tried to imagine the statue brought to life, battered and bruised, a crown of thorns on its forehead. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make that face resemble the one she had seen in her dream.
Nevertheless, she said her prayer of thanks and left.
When she finished her story, she looked at me with inquisitive eyes. “What do you make of this?”
In truth, I had no idea. “I’m just glad you are well,” I said.
And none too soon. In seven days, we would be heading to Jerusalem. It was time for the great Jewish feast of Passover. Pilate and his soldiers would be needed to keep the peace. And Procula would be needed to help keep Pilate in check. He was still seething about the shields.
We took a few more steps in silence, and I thought about the healing power of Aesculapius. “With power like that,” I said, “I can see why Jupiter wanted him dead.”
“Yet even Jupiter could not destroy a god with the gift of eternal life,” Procula said.
We were deep into legend now, and I decided to let it go. I w
asn’t sure that I believed any of it, though I had witnessed Procula’s healing like everyone else.
Who can comprehend the ways of the gods? I wondered.
CHAPTER 19
After two days of travel, we entered Jerusalem late in the afternoon on Sunday, five days before the Jewish celebration of Passover. As always, we entered in grand style. Pilate first, sitting erect on the back of a large white stallion, its harness trimmed with gold and silver. He wore a white tunic with maroon sleeves and the dark-green armor of a legionnaire. A sword glistened at his side. For occasions like this, he had found that the armor garnered more respect than the toga.
Our entire procession was designed to impress and intimidate. The captain of the provincial troops, a burly veteran of the wars in Germania, rode next to Pilate. Three thousand soldiers marched behind, lining the roads six abreast, their swords and shields polished, their sandals kicking up a small dust storm.
Procula and I rode behind them all, eating the dust with the other civil servants and the wagons weighed down with supplies. Hundreds of slaves brought up the rear. It wasn’t easy moving the capital of Judea for a week.
During our sixty-five-mile journey, we had passed a steady stream of Jewish pilgrims making their way to the Holy City. They traveled in small family units, fathers and children walking, mothers sometimes riding a mule or a donkey. They moved slowly, carrying cages with pigeons and pulling along sheep or goats. They would get off the road and stand aside as we passed, gawking at those of us on horses, sometimes averting their eyes when I looked at them. Some of the children waved. Procula and I waved back.
By the time we entered the gates of the city, the streets were bursting with pilgrims. Normally the city housed seventy-five thousand residents. During Passover week, according to our best estimates, the population swelled to nearly two hundred thousand. Add in a few hundred thousand animals, and it was easy to understand why Passover, with its frenetic slaughtering of animals and crowds teeming with patriotic and spiritual zeal, was Pilate’s least favorite week of the year.
The crowds made way as we marched through the center of the city. I was constantly mindful of the looks and murmurs of the Jewish inhabitants. We ended our march at the Praetorium, the fortresslike palace that Herod the Great had built on the western edge of the upper city. The western side was fortified by the wall of the city as well as an inner wall forty-five feet high with towers at regular intervals. On the north side, there were enormous white marble block towers topped with battlements. The Praetorium loomed over the city and was, by all accounts, impenetrable.
There were more than one hundred guest rooms in the palace and dozens of huge banquet halls built with rare stones and cedars from Lebanon. Elegant furniture and gold artifacts adorned the various rooms. Bronze statues, Corinthian pillars, and mosaic marble floors graced the large halls. The lush, green grounds of the palace contained gardens and ponds, patios and groves, with running water gushing out of marble statues.
Pilate hated the place. He couldn’t get over the odor drifting up from the city—the carcasses of animals, the sweaty masses of people, the smell of burning flesh from the animal sacrifices, and the grease from the tens of thousands of cooking fires. We would burn incense inside the palace all day long to cover the smell. We planned to stay until the day after Passover and not a minute longer.
The feast itself had ominous undertones. Passover was the Jews’ most sacred holiday, a celebration of Israel’s delivery from slavery in Egypt more than a thousand years earlier. On the last night before their release, an angel of the Lord had instructed Moses to have his people slaughter lambs—pure lambs without any blemish—and spread the blood on the doorposts of their homes. An angel of death, according to the Jewish legends, then killed all firstborn males of the Egyptian households but passed over the Israelites who had taken refuge under the blood. The next day, there was wailing in Egypt, and the Israelites went free.
As far as I was concerned, the story was pure myth, but the ramifications were real. This was the time of year when the Jewish people celebrated God’s victory over their oppressors. Throughout Judea, there were always murmurs of freedom and revolution. But this week, more than any other, brought those murmurs into the open.
The Passover ceremony incorporated symbolism of bloodshed, sacrifice, and rebellion. Young boys, at the end of the Passover meal, ran to the front doors of their homes to look for a prophet named Elijah, the forerunner to the Jewish Messiah. The Messiah, their long-awaited deliverer, would supposedly do to the Romans what Moses had done to the Egyptians. He would usher in a new golden age for Israel, bringing justice that flowed like a river and righteousness like a never-failing stream.
I was all for righteousness. And I had devoted my life to justice. But for obvious reasons, I wasn’t fond of the ancient Israelite prophecies that talked about the overthrow of Jewish oppressors.
“There have always been God-fearing Gentiles who are friends of Israel,” Joseph of Arimathea once told me. He was perpetually trying to get me to worship the God of the Jews. “Even some of the great leaders of Persia, during the time of Daniel, once worshiped our God.”
“I can handle the worship,” I quipped. “It’s the circumcision that makes me nervous.”
Joseph didn’t smile. He took his religion very seriously.
This year, the rumors had reached the Praetorium before we did. Another entourage had apparently arrived in Jerusalem prior to us. It was led by a man named Jesus, a miracle worker, riding on a donkey, his feet scraping the ground. The crowds had surged toward him, placing their cloaks and palm branches in his path.
Pilate’s Jewish sources reported the scene breathlessly. “People pressed in and shouted, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ Women were crying. They held their children out to him, asking for a blessing.”
“Was he armed?” Pilate asked.
“No, Your Excellency.”
“Did he have any soldiers?”
“No, Your Excellency.”
“Was he giving speeches or inciting hatred for Rome?”
“He is not that kind of leader, sir.”
Pilate smirked. Perhaps he was replaying the scene in his mind. “And he was riding a donkey?”
“Exactly.”
Pilate dismissed the men and shook his head. “A donkey,” he said to me as if he couldn’t believe it. Pilate had fought in real battles against ruthless barbarians. Now it was his job to protect Rome from a commander who charged into town on a donkey.
“Let’s hit the baths,” Pilate said.
It sounded like a good idea to me.
CHAPTER 20
The magnificence of Herod’s Praetorium was surpassed in Jerusalem only by the grandeur of the Temple. Even for a person like me, raised in the gleaming city of Rome, the sight was breathtaking. The Temple complex was the center of the Jewish universe, the place where all culture and religion ultimately found its expression. If Herod’s Praetorium was the moon, the Temple was the sun. The former was a dwelling place for an egocentric provincial governor; the latter was a dwelling place for God.
Herod had rebuilt the Temple during his reign, throwing ten thousand workers and over a thousand priests at the task. You could see it from miles away, a great white structure framed by a granite courtyard spanning thirty-five acres. It was surrounded by great porticoes consisting of two rows of huge marble columns, thirty-eight feet high, supporting cedar beams and a red-tiled roof. Only the purest white stone was used in the Temple construction, and it gave the building and its courtyard an incandescent feel. To see the Temple, said the Jews, was to glimpse the glory of God.
At the center of the massive outer Temple courtyard, commonly referred to as the Courtyard of the Gentiles, was the sacred core of Temple buildings. Those buildings were separated from the Courtyard of the Gentiles by a stone wall about four feet high and a gate with signs in both Greek and Latin, warning Gentiles like me that we could proceed no farther o
n pain of death.
The lowliest Jewish peasant from the smallest crag in the land of Galilee could enter, but Pilate and I could not go past that gate. Rome might rule the entire Mediterranean world, yet Romans couldn’t set foot on this small piece of real estate at the center of Herod’s Temple.
Inside the stone wall were other barriers that filtered more people out—the Courtyard of Women and the Courtyard of Priests. The Temple itself stood in the very middle, its white granite carefully polished, its gold overlay flashing in the sun. It had a flat roof with gold spikes to keep the birds away. And inside the Temple, behind an enormous double curtain, was a place the Israelites called the Holy of Holies—so sacred that it could only be entered by the high priest once a year on Yom Kippur, after the priest had ritually purified himself and offered appropriate sacrifices. It was, according to the Jews, the place where their God, Yahweh, dwelled. Entering the Holy of Holies was so dangerous that they tied a rope to the priest’s ankle in order to drag him out if he died while performing his tasks.
I was fascinated by the transformation of the Temple during Passover. Dusty travelers and dirty animals turned the marble Courtyard of the Gentiles into a farmyard. The smell of blood and incense filled the air for an entire week, mixed in with the peculiar smell of serious money being made.
The first time I had wandered through the courtyard during Passover week, I realized that the Romans could learn a thing or two from the Jews about taxation. For starters, the Temple tax could only be paid using Tyrian coins, meaning that tables of money changers were spread throughout the courtyard to convert common coinage into Tyrian shekels. All at an appropriate premium, of course. And that was just the beginning.
The Passover pilgrims were also required to bring an animal deemed acceptable for sacrifice. For even the poorest Jews, this meant at least a pigeon. But there was a catch. The bird had to be spotless and pure, with no bruises or imperfections from the journey. As I watched, the Temple priests solemnly inspected the birds and sadly shook their heads. Not good enough. Fortunately for the traveler, however, the priests had a whole cage of pigeons that were preapproved. The traveler traded his damaged bird for an approved bird, again at a steep premium. Once the worshiper sulked away, the priest took the defective bird, inspected it again, and realized that the animal was more pure and spotless than originally thought. Into the cage it went to be sold to the next road-weary worshiper.
