Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  After a lifetime of hardship and frustration, this was to be Joshua’s finest hour. Ya’el had told him that they were both near the end of the road and explained what was to happen. Joshua now understood that he, too, had a vital part to play in Ya’el’s mission. As with Judas’s Ain-folk psyche, there were to be no medals, no special return-ticket to the Empire, but his contribution to the war effort would not be forgotten in the final accounting.

  Resuming the interrogation, Annas asked Joshua if he was The Messiah. The answer, in modern English was, ‘You said it, not me.’ That was enough for Caiaphas. Joshua’s reply was tantamount to saying that he was The Messiah. The ultimate blasphemy. And, if that wasn’t enough, his refusal to answer questions properly showed the Nazarene to be both insolent and unrepentant. Caiaphas ordered the Captain of the Temple Guard to administer a salutary but not too savage beating. They needed Joshua on his feet for his trial before the full Council of the Sanhedrin that coming morning.

  As Nicodemus left Annas’s house, he saw Shimon-Petrus standing in the shadows outside the gate to the courtyard and gave him the news. The Man had condemned himself. It was all over. There must, urged Nicodemus, be no attempt to rescue him. Shimon-Petrus left to spread the word.

  The impact of The Man’s arrest on the Followers and the huge crowd that had flocked with him into Jerusalem was absolutely shattering. They had come to town with such high hopes. Burning with a new-found belief that deliverance was at hand; braced and ready for the dramatic overthrow of the ruling Jewish families and the defeat of the Romans by miraculous acts of power. And what had happened? His closest disciples had fled and were now in hiding. The Man had been arrested without a fight, had submitted passively to interrogation and had allowed himself to be beaten by common servants and ignorant soldiers.

  While this bewildering news spread through the narrow, crowded streets, Joshua was brought before the Council of the Sanhedrin, his hands still bound, at seven a.m. None of the hastily assembled members had ever attended a meeting this early, but Annas and Caiaphas were anxious to get Joshua into the hands of the Romans before his supporters had time to work out a coherent response.

  The arraignment did not go as smoothly as they had hoped. A series of all-too-eager witnesses presented a mass of conflicting evidence. Joshua remained silent, refusing to answer any of the allegations. Aware that the case against the Nazarene was on the verge of collapsing, Caiaphas played his last card. Summoning up the full authority of his high office, he sonorously intoned the sixty-four thousand dollar question – ‘By the living God I charge you to tell us: Are you The Messiah, The Son of God?’

  To which Joshua answered, It is you who say that I am.’

  ‘Blasphemy!’ cried Caiaphas, simultaneously tearing his robes with carefully controlled hysteria. It was a symbolic, ceremonial act which impressed the waverers on the back benches. Annas took up the cry and called for a show of hands. The verdict was unanimous. Guilty on two counts. Blasphemy and treason against Rome.

  Pontius Pilate had barely finished breakfast when Joshua was delivered at the door to the Fortress Antonia, courtesy of the Sanhedrin, charged with claiming to be King of the Jews and urging people not to pay taxes to Caesar. His accusers, who were backed up by a noisy crowd suffering from a sudden rash of loyalty to the emperor, demanded that, as putative leader of the dissident minorities, Joshua should be put to death before the situation got out of hand.

  As governor of the province, Pilate was duty bound to investigate the charges but, after questioning Joshua, he was distinctly unimpressed. The Nazarene’s answers were incoherent and he certainly did not appear to be brimming over with revolutionary fervour. In fact, to put it bluntly, he did not appear to be all there. Who, asked Pilate of his lieutenants, would follow a man like this? On the available evidence, the case against Joshua under Roman law was thin and contrived. What we, since the thirties, have called a frame-up. That, in itself, did not disturb Pilate. All kinds of people, from the humblest Jew to the noblest Roman senator, were rail-roaded every day of the week. But Joshua had already been found guilty of blasphemy. A crime for which, under Jewish law, he could be stoned to death. If the Sanhedrin wanted him killed why hadn’t they done it themselves?

  Pilate made some discreet enquiries of his own. What he learned was hard to believe but if it was true, then the Nazarene was far more than a dull-witted one-time carpenter. His reported powers of healing could be described as supernatural. It was even claimed that he had caused storms to abate, and had saved some men in a boat by walking across the wave-tops of the Sea of Galilee. Could this, wondered Pilate, be the reason why the Sanhedrin had delivered Joshua up to the Romans? But, if these stories were true, why had the Nazarene submitted to a beating? If he could heal the sick with a touch of his hand, why had he not mended the broken skin on his own bruised and bloodied face? There had to be a catch somewhere. Too many things did not add up.

  Despite his cynicism, Pilate, born in 9 BC, was a man of his age. Like Herod Antipas, he had been educated in Rome; acquiring the same veneer of sophistication and the same careless disregard for religion. The Roman pantheon of gods did not make heavy intellectual demands on a man; worship was a mere formality; religious festivals little more than an excuse for getting riotously drunk.

  As a professional administrator and one of the ruling elite, Pilate knew that power came out of the short swords of a well-drilled legion. Even so, one has to remember that, despite the intellectual brilliance displayed by the Greeks in their enquiries into the nature of matter and the structure and origin of the universe, the accepted cosmological theory still put Planet Earth at the centre of seven concentric spheres. And Zeus-Jupiter was believed to be alive and well and living on Mount Olympus.

  Second-sight, or clairvoyance, was not only more readily accepted then, it was much more widespread than it is today. The predictions of the Jewish prophets were a matter of historical record and, compared to other races, the Jews were believed to possess a greater degree of paranormal skills. Pilate did not really buy the idea that Joshua was possessed by a spirit-being from beyond the stars but he was relieved when a member of his staff pointed out that, legally, this potentially troublesome prisoner did not come under his jurisdiction. Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee. As a Nazarene, Joshua was his problem.

  Chained hand and foot, Joshua was delivered to Herod at the Western Palace in the Upper City. Herod Antipas was pleasantly surprised to see the man whose career he had followed with interest but who, up to that moment, had eluded him. What Herod wanted to see more than anything else was one of the Nazarene’s miracles.

  Herod and his circle of courtiers were to be disappointed. Joshua, by nature or design, proved to be depressingly inarticulate. How, wondered Herod, could anyone think that this man could walk on water? He didn’t have the wit to step over a puddle. Why did the Sanhedrin want him killed?

  Whatever the answer, it was not Herod’s problem. For Joshua had been born in Bethlehem. Which made him a Judean and, since the exile of Archelaus, Judea was directly under the rule of Pontius Pilate. Herod ordered Joshua to receive twenty strokes of the whip for wasting his time, then sent him back to the Fortress Antonia dressed in a purple robe. It was, after all, only fitting, joked Herod to his courtiers. If Joshua was supposed to be King of the Jews, then he should be dressed like one.

  And so Joshua was returned to Pontius Pilate, standing on the back of an ox-cart, surrounded by an escort of Syrian mercenaries from Herod’s palace guard. Glad of a little excitement, the soldiers hammed it up, shouting at the people in the streets to make way. Some of the disciples were in the crowd that gathered as Joshua went by. They could hardly bear to watch as the soldiers urged the crowd to salute their ‘king’ and demonstrated how it should be done by spitting on him and beating him about the head and body with their fists. Forcing their way to the front of the crowd, the disciples tried to catch Joshua’s attention but, although he looked right at them, he gave no sign of r
ecognition.

  Pilate was not overly pleased to find Joshua back on his doorstep. Stripped of his ‘royal’ robes, he was dragged before Pilate for a second, and final interrogation. Did he realise the gravity of the charges against him? No reply. Did he have anything to say in answer to the evidence of his accusers? No reply. Did he claim to be King of the Jews? Answer: ‘Thou sayest it.’

  Pilate had passed sentence on a large number of people since he had been appointed procurator but never, in his whole life, had he seen an accused man under threat of crucifixion act like this. Joshua did not have the gallows-defiance of a rebel who knew he had no hope of acquittal. He was just allowing himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter. So be it.

  Like the news about Paul, this next section may leave some of you gasping, but this is where we have to part company with the Book which now proceeds to cast Pilate as the noblest and most reluctant Roman of them all. All that business with Barabbas and the crowd is pure moonshine. It didn’t happen. The agonising by Pilate, his wife’s warning dream, the orchestrated howls of the mob in front of the Fortress Antonia, Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair – all this was the work of later writers whose job it was to whitewash the Romans and, by extension, the rest of the Gentile world. Neatly shifting the blame for The Man’s death unfairly but squarely on to the backs of the Jews and playing right into ‘Brax’s hands in the process.

  It is important to realise that Paul was a Roman citizen as his father had been. The Jew from Tarsus, who had studied under the great Gamaliel in Jerusalem and had been regarded by the sage as one of his most promising pupils. Intelligent, quick-witted, endowed with enormous energy and vision and, above all, a burning ambition to succeed. He also had one other, important advantage. You don’t grow up as a Roman citizen without realising that the secret of Rome’s success lay in efficient, disciplined organisation. Paul was not only a great letter-writer; he was also a great organiser.

  It is no secret that he willingly accepted the task of crushing the rapidly expanding number of Judeo-Christian communes that the Apostles and Followers were setting up everywhere. Paul knew that if he succeeded, he would not only earn the Sanhedrin’s grateful thanks, it could mean rapid promotion to a position of power within the Temple hierarchy. But there remained one insurmountable stumbling-block. No matter how well Paul did in his given assignment, even with Gamaliel’s backing, he could never make it all the way to the top. His Roman citizenship, plus the fact that he was not a Sadducee meant that he could never be High Priest.

  But, on the other hand, as Paul was quick to see, the belief-system of the Judeo-Christians he had been detailed to beat sense into had great possibilities. And the more Paul considered them in detail, the greater those possibilities became. Judaism, as they say, was a living, but the market for it beyond the borders of Palestine was nonexistent. The Man’s message, however, with its built-in element of universality, was something that would sell. The text just needed a little adjusting. The essential thing, apart from widening the franchise, was to make Joshua of Nazareth as important as Jehovah. To say that he was God, and not just God’s messenger. With that one shrewd move, Paul put Christianity on a par with Judaism. Let’s face it, if you’re planning to sell stock in Western Union, it makes more sense to have the Company Report signed by the Chairman of the Board instead of by one of the telegraph boys.

  The light that hit Paul on the road to Damascus was a blinding flash of inspiration. A biliion-watt bulb that lit up with the word ‘IDEA!’ printed on it in Latin. When Paul and his new-found friends took the big step and started recruiting uncircumsised Gentiles into the Judeo-Christian movement it marked the break with Judaism. From that point on, the Jews were to be the enemy. And to make sure nobody forgot that fact, the Pauline scribes sharpened their quills and applied themselves diligently to the task of setting the record straight. Eliminating much of The Truth in the process.

  Pilate did not agonise over Joshua’s fate. He knew that the Jewish establishment had a powerful lobby in Rome. If the Senate heard he had been less than zealous in maintaining the emperor’s authority it could damage his career prospects. When it came down to it, keeping Caiaphas happy was more important than dispensing justice to a tongue-tied carpenter.

  Anxious to rid himself of Joshua’s unsettling presence, Pilate quickly sentenced him to death by crucifixion and handed him over to the duty officer of the garrison. As it happened, an execution squad had already been formed to deal with two thieves who had been sentenced by Pilate some days before. Their scourging – a grimly painful softening-up process – had started when Joshua was committed to the squad’s care with the request for special treatment in deference to his rank. It was not every day that a Roman soldier got a chance to lay hands on royalty.

  The squad-members were all tough ex-campaigners from the province of Galatia – now part of modern Turkey. They were no strangers to pain, or the methods of inflicting it. But the same kind of thing is still going on in the basements of political prisons all over the world today.

  Basically, a prisoner up for crucifixion was beaten with alternate strokes from the flagellum – a whip made up of several thin strands of square-section leather that sliced straight through the skin, and the flagrum – which consisted of three lengths of heavy cord on to which human knuckle bones were knotted some three to four inches apart. A real rib-breaker. On top of which, they rammed a crown of thorns around his skull. If you’ve ever pricked yourself pruning roses, just think about what that means.

  Throughout Joshua’s scourging, Ya’el remained in the Garden of Gethsemane; his meta-psyche drifting invisibly among the trees. A formless cloud of super-consciousness that took upon itself the full force of Joshua’s agony.

  What Joshua felt as he hung chained in the cellars beneath the paved courtyard of the Fortress Antonia was the physical impact of the blows that drove the breath out of his body. The resulting pain was dulled in the way it is when your dentist administers a local anaesthetic. You feel the pressure and vibration of the drill but the pain is mostly imaginary.

  For Ya’el, each blow was like the shrieking jolt you feel when a raw nerve is jabbed. But because of the nature of his spirit-being, the pain you or I might have felt was magnified within him a million times over. That was why he had been so reluctant to face this ordeal. It was this, and not the earlier moment of distress, that was the Agony in the Garden. The moment when, as the writer of Luke noted in a passage that should not be taken literally – ‘his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’

  The Man’s account of this moment had left me puzzled, but before I could seek clarification, I had been distracted by the arrival of our visitors. Now, as I listened again to his voice on the tape I asked myself the same question: If God, The Presence, or Whoever could change the rules of the game and wipe out Ya’el’s karma at a stroke, why couldn’t he have arranged his escape without killing Joshua? Why was it necessary for them to suffer, each in his own way, the agony of the Crucifixion?

  I had to wait until I reached Jerusalem before I was given the answer to that one.

  Chapter 23

  On what turned out to be my last Monday evening in Manhattan, Miriam hung up her white coat an hour before her day officially ended, went home, and cocooned herself in the bath and bedroom; emerging, when I called at eight, as an impeccably groomed social butterfly. I knew that it was meant to be a special going-away present and I complimented her accordingly, whilst secretly wishing she would stop cutting her wonderfully thick, dark hair.

  I am conscious of the fact that Miriam’s coiffure is of relatively minor importance in the overall scheme of things, but I mention it to illustrate how life is made up of both the mundane and the metaphysical. One should remember that even while such notables as Augustine and Jerome were bucking for sainthood and speculating on the nature of God, their minds were also dwelling on the unholier attractions of good food, drink, the racier Greek classics and s
trong-limbed, eager women.

  As my special treat, I’d made a reservation at The Leopard. We had a superb meal, after which Miriam allowed me to take her to see my hero in Escape from Alcatraz. On the way there in the cab we passed the hospital. To my surprise, it was still standing. After the movie we stopped off at the bar where we’d first met when the group of people she was with had come in out of the rain to phone for a cab. Her escort was a guy I’d known at high-school. Which was good luck for me and bad luck for him. Her hair had been long then. Glistening with drops of rain. But that’s another story.

  We had a couple of drinks and looked at each other a lot and then it was back to my place, where we lay in bed, happy to be together.

  In the morning, we were woken by the phone. It was the hospital for Miriam. One of the team had come down with a viral infection. Could she cover? She swore quietly under her breath and grimaced at me. ‘Is it okay if I don’t see you off?’

  ‘Sure,’ I smiled. ‘I hate goodbyes.’

  You know how it is. You either get there too early and run out of things to say, or you’re all tensed up trying to make it through the traffic to the terminal before they close the boarding-gate.

  Miriam got dressed. I pottered around in my robe and made some coffee. We had a toast and orange juice breakfast together during which she checked my wallet to make sure I had the list of names and addresses of her friends in Israel. Some of whom she had already telephoned from the hospital to tell them I was coming. No wonder the goddamn city was going broke. I called her a cab and, minutes later, the janitor buzzed through to say that it had arrived. I took her in my arms and kissed her gently. On her lips, her forehead and each side of her nose.