The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “Hell of a story. Sacred light, sons of darkness.”

  “Yes, it is. It is not particularly a Jewish belief unless, like me, you have an interest in the Kabala. But keeping it at the forefront of my life makes me a better Jew, and a better soldier to defend this land. I do not judge anyone by religion or race, I judge according to the light in their souls.”

  “You can see people’s souls?”

  “The manner of a human being’s life is the measure of the light in their soul. Take Yeshua ben Yosef of Nazareth. He was a devout Jew, the son of a carpenter who learned his father’s trade. Contrary to the born-in-a-manger story, the ben Yosef family was quite well off, enough to travel to Jerusalem from Galilee every year for Passover. Ben Yosef had a comfortable life ahead of him, but he gave it up to become a healer of the afflicted and a consoler of souls. He was between thirty-three and thirty-six years old when he died. That would make him an old man in a world where half the population never made it to eighteen.”

  She pointed beyond the windshield and through the iron gates.

  “The night before he was crucified he came to this place, Gethsemane. Christians say he came here to pray, knowing he was about to die. In fact, as a Jew, he would already have done his praying within the walls of the Old City, at the temple and in the upper room of an inn during his last Passover supper. He came to Gethsemane to sleep, as many Jewish pilgrims did. These olive groves were inexpensive campgrounds in the first century. More than that, ben Yosef was trying to keep a low profile. He was the cousin of Yochanin, the one Christians call John the Baptist. Herod Antipas had the Baptist beheaded two years earlier for arousing the people against him. Yeshua ben Yosef was preparing to assume his cousin’s followers by incorporating baptism rituals into his own healing rituals. He had every reason to live out the last years of his life doing good works as a devout Jew. He did not come to Jerusalem that Passover to announce he was the Son of God and die; he came to worship his God at the temple, then carry on with the mission of making straight the way of the Lord.”

  Chana started the jeep, drove ahead. They passed an onion-domed Orthodox church, then a neoclassical church with huge Corinthian columns. In the pediment above the arches there was a depiction of Jesus praying to God, asking for the cup to be passed from him. He was surrounded by his apostles and seven angels. Chana made a sharp left down into the valley and up the other side. She drove under the east wall of the Old City now. There was a graveyard stretching beneath the wall; Muslim this time.

  “Back then Jerusalem was seething. Between the false prophets and the rebels, the Romans were having a tough time controlling their Jews. And Passover was a time when the city’s population quadrupled. Hundreds of thousands of Jews came from all across the Middle East. Jerusalem was on high alert. The Romans had already put down two rebellions in the weeks before Jesus arrived. They slaughtered hundreds of innocent Jews doing it.”

  Chana rounded the southwest corner of the Old City. The world fell away into the Kidron Valley again. There were more compounds flying Israeli flags, all of them surrounded by Palestinian homes. There was also a wide swathe of ground under excavation. Chana stopped in the middle of the road. She kept the motor running, her foot on the brake.

  “Down there is the Lower City, the City of David. Jerusalem’s walls in Yeshua ben Yosef’s time would have included all this. There was a gate at the bottom of the city where the Kidron Valley meets the Hinnom Valley. Inside the gate was Siloam Pool. That is the entrance Jewish pilgrims used to enter the city. They would ritually cleanse themselves in the pool, then climb the steps to temple. You can see the gates in the wall up there.”

  Harper looked out his window, saw the massive south-facing wall of Temple Mount. There were double- and triple-arched gates, all of them sealed now.

  “In his final days ben Yosef spent time at the Siloam Pool. There were always beggars, widows, and sick ones there. Ben Yosef had compassion for them. He performed his healing rituals upon the sick and told stories of comfort to the rest. If someone offered him food or drink, he gave it to the poor. Crowds began to gather around him, rumors of miracles began to spread. When the High Priests of the Temple heard the cousin of the Baptist was in Jerusalem, they grew nervous. When the words Mashiach and Yeshua began to be heard in the same sentence, the High Priests panicked. What happened next is unclear. Christians tell of a conflict with money changers in the Royal Stoa outside the Temple. But such a conflict could not have happened. The Romans oversaw everything on Temple Mount from Antonia Fortress on the north side of the compound. Any disturbance, by anyone, was put down quickly and brutally. Suspicious persons were arrested and disappeared.”

  “What’s your guess?” Harper said.

  Chana shrugged. “Ben Yosef? He was a Jew of the Semitic race. He was a product of the culture. I can see him telling the money changers, and the High Priests, and everyone gathered around him that the Temple was the House of God, a place of prayer, that the very priests who professed to be doing the work of God were turning it into a den of thieves. Ben Yosef would know a subtle dig like that would carry much more weight and cause far more humiliation than simply kicking over a few tables. Plus throwing a tantrum in the Temple courtyards would have gotten him arrested instantly. Whatever happened, whatever was said, severe offense was taken. As today when men of religion are insulted, the temple priests cried “Blasphemy.” A few nights later, ben Yosef was arrested at Gethsemane by the Temple police. They brought him to Jerusalem by the same road you just drove from the olive groves. They entered the city by the same gate into the Lower City, passing the same pool where he performed his acts of healing.”

  “We’re on his final path.”

  “This is the true way of sorrows, not the one made up by Constantine’s mother in the Middle Ages.”

  Chana’s foot came off the brake and she drove on. The road eased down a hill.

  “Everything to the right would have been within the walls of ben Yosef’s Jerusalem, too. This section was called the Upper City. It’s where the privileged and wealthy lived. There were many of them. The rich did very well under Herod Antipas. Like the High Priests, they would disapprove of anyone who might upset their security. Yeshua ben Yosef did not have many friends in the Upper City. The Temple guard brought him here for a face-to-face with Caiaphas, the Highest of the Priests. There were probably a few members of the Sanhedrin there too. Enough to give ben Yosef a hearing. If found guilty of blasphemy, he would be condemned to death by stoning, beheading, burning, or strangulation. Those were the only methods of execution sanctioned under Jewish law.”

  “Jesus was crucified.”

  “Ken. And as Caiaphas wasn’t shy about ordering blasphemers killed, it seems he did not have enough evidence to condemn ben Yosef. That did not mean Caiaphas did not wish to get rid of him. After all, ben Yosef was the cousin of the Baptist. He could only bring chaos to Jerusalem. Caiaphas feared chaos above all else. To him, chaos was God abandoning Jerusalem.”

  Chana rounded the bottom of the hill and drove north along the west wall of the Old City now. There was a steep drop to the left, a narrow valley rising on the far side to modern-looking buildings along the ridge. Chana slowed, cut right, and drove onto the grass beneath the wall. She parked near two stone outcrops. They looked like the ruins of a stairwell.

  “This wall runs along the site of the original walls from the first century. There was a gate here then. It was the gate of closest access to the praetorium of Pontius Pilate, the Roman overlord of Israel. His neighbor was Herod Antipas, the Jewish king. It was called the Essene Gate.”

  “The scribes from Qumran?” Harper said.

  “According to the historian Josephus, they were everywhere and nowhere all at the same time in ancient Israel. And they were far more than scribes. They were healers, too.” She pointed across the narrow valley toward the modern buildings. “They had a camp over there somewhere. Herod Antipas liked having them in the neighborhood. He called on them
for their medical knowledge. That’s how the gate, in its day, was tagged with the name.”

  Harper scanned the valley and the modern buildings along the ridge. Nice-looking modern flats, hotels, commercial buildings. His eyes drifted south to where the house of Caiaphas once stood, then to the west wall where there was a gate named after the Essenes. A line dropped in his head: Luke 23:1 . . . Then the whole body of them got up and brought him before Pilate.

  “They brought him here?”

  Chana pointed to the wall. “Inside the Essene Gate was a courtyard. It was the place of judgment where Pilate conducted public meetings and trials. Once ben Yosef was taken through those gates, he was as good as dead. Pilate is painted as a sympathetic character in the Christian Bible. Conflicted, fretting, not wanting to kill the sad-looking prisoner before him, forced to submit to a ravenous Jewish mob. Pilate was a monster so renowned for his brutality and incompetence that the emperor removed him as prefect of Judea. So seeing ben Yosef would not raise an ounce of mercy in Pilate, especially when he heard the prisoner was attracting crowds. Someone was even heard hailing him as ‘King of the Jews.’ That was all Pilate needed to hear. He ordered ben Yosef to be crucified at first light. Roman soldiers dragged him to a prison near the praetorium. They flogged him until his skin was torn from his back, they pressed a crown of thorns down on his head, they dressed him in a purple robe. Tradition decreed that a condemned man’s crime be written on a plaque and carried before him on the way to his death. In a slap at the population he despised as much as he ruled, Pilate ordered ben Yosef’s plaque to read ‘Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdæorvm.’”

  “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.”

  Chana nodded. “At dawn the soldiers laid a heavy crossbeam across his shoulders and strapped his arms to it. They marched him through the streets of the Upper City. When he fell, they kicked him and forced him to his feet again. A few of his disciples followed at a distance. The wealthy of the quarter watched from their rooftops.”

  “You seem to have an inside knowledge of events.”

  “Nothing a study of archaeology and history based on fact cannot show anyone who cares to look.”

  “And you? Why do you care to look?”

  Chana put the jeep in gear, but did not press down on the accelerator. She looked at the wall as if imagining the Essene Gate was still there.

  “Millions of Christian tourists come to Jerusalem each year. They come because they wish to be close to the places the man they call Jesus spent his final hours . . . and they drive by this place without so much as a glance. It is not the fault of the believers. Things haven’t changed much in this city since ben Yosef’s time, religion is still a big business. Where else but Jerusalem would you find a Sixth Station of the Cross Souvenir and Gift Shop?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish.”

  She pulled onto the road, continuing north, and they passed towers in the west wall and a wide gap with access into the Old City.

  “Jaffa Gate,” Chana said in passing.

  Harper felt dizzy. The bum’s rush through two thousand years of history was mind-bending. He had been holding his electronic fag throughout the tour. He switched it on again, took deep hits.

  “What is it you smoke?” Chana said.

  “Radiance.”

  “What is it for?”

  “It prevents me from falling down.”

  “You have a problem with falling down?”

  “Not particularly. It’s the getting up I’m finding difficult.”

  “I am not surprised.”

  Harper looked at her. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it is a difficult trip across the desert. The abrupt altitude changes, the emptiness, coming to this city. It affects a person. The Jerusalem police keep a lookout for people who suddenly think they are Yeshua ben Yosef or Miriam or the Baptist. The police collect them, get them help, send them home.”

  Harper wondered if that’s what she was doing to him. She turned right at the northwest corner of the Old City’s walls, then another quick right through a stone arch barely wide enough for the jeep to pass.

  “New Gate into the Christian Quarter,” she said.

  She made a series of turns down narrow lanes, came to an open courtyard. She shut off the motor, turned off the headlamps. There was no one around, but Harper heard distant voices. He smelled cumin, cardamom, and sumac. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw two great domes above the rooftops. They were gray and topped with Byzantine crosses.

  “Over there is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is where Christians believe ben Yosef was crucified and buried.”

  “Big business or historical fact?”

  “Strangely enough it is where business and fact meet, partly.” She waved at the surrounding buildings. “All this around us was outside Jerusalem’s walls in the first century. It was a rock quarry called Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. There was a well-traveled road east of where the church stands now. It was a first-century roundabout connecting the Jaffa and Damascus roads. It made the ground under the church an excellent killing ground. The sight of seditionists hanging from crosses provided Jewish passersby with a healthy reminder of Roman power. Ben Yosef would have been marched out of the city through Gennath Gate. It was near that mosque over there, meaning he would have been led through Jerusalem on a completely different path than tourists are shown today. From where the gate stood it was a short walk to the killing ground. Roman soldiers laid ben Yosef on his back and stripped him of his clothes. They nailed his hands to the crossbeam and hoisted him onto a post. Then they nailed his ankles to the post, one on each side. They did not need nails. He was already lashed to the cross. Nails were used to drown the victim in pain. Ben Yosef died a miserable death.”

  “But he wasn’t buried within the church.”

  “Jews would never bury a Jew in a place of execution. And before you ask me where he was buried, I do not know.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “Lots of people. American radio preachers, Internet sites specializing in alien abduction, filmmakers for cable channels. Or you could just come back tomorrow and ask anyone in the Christian Quarter. They will be happy to show you where the true grave is for one hundred shekels. Then pay someone else another one hundred shekels and he will take you to another true grave. You could spend a fortune doing that. Some people do.”

  “Right.”

  Harper had a final hit of radiance. He switched off the fag and dropped it in his coat. He looked at her.

  “An enlightening tour, but you haven’t answered my question.”

  “Signs? Wonders? You?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ask me if I think you are the second coming of Yeshua ben Yosef, the answer is no. He was a vessel of sacred light who sought to heal the sick. You? You’re a warrior who kills as required. Very efficiently, from what Sergeant Gauer says. But for someone like me, that particular talent means there is a connection.”

  She started the jeep’s motor, turned on the headlamps. She backed up and headed through the narrow lanes, toward New Gate.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Now when Jerusalem fell into the hands of Titus Flavius, the sky beyond the Mount of Olives was lit with a great fire. It burned with fury and rage as we gathered for our evening meal. We sat in silence and meditated on the meaning of the flames, knowing that it was Jerusalem burning on this ninth day of Av, as had the Babylonians burned the city on the same day more than six hundred years before. By this sign we accepted the end of the world was at hand.

  For many weeks before the fire, small caravans of suffering came down from Jerusalem and passed near the ruins of Jericho to seek refuge in the lands across the Jordan River. They staggered as they carried bundles of meager possessions. Many camped not far from us. We went to them with food and healing. In this way we learned of the evil into which Jerusalem had fallen.

  Jew had taken up arms against Jew. Zealots and warlords battled ea
ch other for a finger’s breadth of ground. Bandits and murderers prowled the streets. Women and their daughters were violated without mercy. The weak fell in their steps and died where they lay. Then came disease; then false messiahs appeared and caused the disease of madness to spread within the city. Each day did a new messiah lay claim to the Holy of Holies. One of these slaughtered children as a sacrifice to YHWH; and so were many children slain. Not since the days of Manasseh at the Hinnom Valley had such evil passed through Israel. As these things were done, Rome tightened her grip on Jerusalem, and those within the city walls starved. Every animal was devoured for its flesh. Even the rats that fed on the dead in the streets were consumed. When the rats disappeared, so did the living fall on the dead to devour their flesh before it was corrupted. When the starving outnumbered the dead, so did the people begin to slay one another for food. There were stories of mothers who slaughtered their youngest children and ate them.

  Now three nights after we first saw the great fire, having watched it burn for all those nights, the caravans of suffering ceased. Then the fire ended and there were only steep columns of black smoke. For some days we wondered if all the people of the world had been killed.

  Ten days after the destruction of Jerusalem, as evening shadows moved over the commune, six men appeared near the shores of the Salt Sea. It was the twenty-second day of Av and was recorded in the book of Community Rule by the Teacher of Righteousness.

  The men who appeared were Jews by their dress, but the spears in their hands and swords at their sides said they were bandits, too. Four rode on horses and two drove a cart. The cart was heavily laden and bound closed with oryx skins and lengths of rope. From the distance, and as the last of the day’s sun rolled over them, many of the brethren saw glints of light in the metal joints of the harnesses binding the animals, the sheaths of swords and the tips of spears. One of the order said that the horses and weapons must be stolen from the Romans. Another wondered if the bandits were not servants of Rome, seeking to betray their fellow Jews for pieces of silver.