King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (66 page)

“We will not forget, Your Excellency.”

Joseph of Arimathea learned from his servants that Jesus had been arrested and handed over to the Romans. He went at once to Gamaliel the grandson of Hillel, who had recently been elected a joint-President of the High Court. They hurried together to the Residency in the hope of saving Jesus’s life, and met Caiaphas as he was leaving the building.

Caiaphas expressed surprise that they should be interested in the case : Jesus, he said, was not only a seditious rascal, but a rank blasphemer.

“Holy Father,” Joseph asked, “is the charge against him one of sedition or of blasphemy ?”

“What is that to you ?”

“I am a member of the Sanhedrin and will be a party to no injustice. If the charge is sedition, let the Romans see to it ; if blasphemy, let the High Court see to it.”

“The prisoner spoke a fearful blasphemy in the hearing of the whole House of Annas.”

Gamaliel protested severely : “Unless an alleged blasphemy is instantly avenged by Heaven, it is nothing until the High Court shall have pronounced it blasphemy. Had the Sanhedrin been moved by sudden indignation to pick up stones and administer rough justice in the manner of the barbarous Samaritans, they would have dishonoured the High Court and themselves, but to hand an alleged blasphemer over to the Romans for crucifixion is to dishonour the Holy One of Israel himself, blessed be he !”

“Not so loud. My men are listening.”

“Let all Jerusalem listen !”

“Learned men, I beg you to step aside and keep silent while I explain to you the case.”

He drew them behind a pillar of the cloister, and said urgently : “The Governor-General is playing with us. He knows as well as we do that this Jesus is a rebel who has publicly claimed to be the Blessed One, the Messiah Son of David. Unless we show our loyalty to the Emperor by disposing of the prisoner before the Feast, he will use this as a whip to our backs ; he has even challenged us to dismiss the case, doubtless in the hope that the prisoner will then raise an easily smothered revolt among the Zealots. He seeks an excuse to intervene in our affairs and put an end not only to the pilgrim traffic from Galilee and Transjordania, but to Temple worship altogether. If he attempts any such thing, it will mean a general uprising and the total extinction of our liberties. Better
that one man should die than that the whole nation should perish. I beg you to leave well alone.”

“To hand over an innocent man to the Romans for crucifixion on Passover Eve is to invite the avenging wrath of our God !”

“Had you listened to his blasphemies, you would quake to hear him pronounced innocent.”

“Since when has the House of Annas become the High Court?”

Caiaphas signified that the conversation was at an end, and strode off angrily.

Gamaliel was a worthy successor of his grandfather Hillel. He told Joseph of Arimathea : “Hurry, brother, to the houses of all your ten colleagues”—the Pharisee representatives in the Sanhedrin—“and urge them to accompany you to the Governor-General with a plea for mercy. You must tell him that the High Priest convened an irregular Court last night in his father-in-law’s house, and that the decision taken there is against the principles of the majority of Sanhedrin members. I myself will seek out my joint-President and one or two of my most eloquent colleagues : I will persuade them to overcome their scruples against traffic with the Romans, and together we will go before Pilate. To save an innocent life I would swallow much filth, and they the same.”

Gamaliel and Joseph went off in different directions, but by the time that they had assembled their delegations at the gate of the Residency, Pilate and the Lady Barbata had already driven out of the City in a fast gig, followed by several others containing members of the Staff and their wives, to celebrate their good fortune in a luxurious dinner-party by the Pools of Bethlehem. The major-domo told the delegates that his master was not expected to return before nightfall, and referred them to Pilate’s deputy, the commander of the regiment quartered at Caesarea.

At this distressing news, Gamaliel and his joint-President united the two delegations into one party which went up to the House of Hewn Stone to intercede with Jehovah. After a general confession of their weakness and sinfulness, and the singing of penitential psalms, they knelt down and prayed with great fervour—that the All-Merciful should spare the life of an innocent man, who was to be given over to the Curse ; and that, if his life might not be spared, the Curse at least should not fall upon him.

When they had done, Gamaliel said : “Brothers, we have offered intercessions to the All-Merciful in company. Now let us offer intercessions in our homes, apart from one another : let us mourn bitterly with all our households until the moment of nightfall, when a double obligation to rejoice will fall upon us : the Sabbath and the Passover. It may be that our God will be gracious, observing the loving sincerity of our hearts, and for our sakes acquit Israel of the name of harlot ; for only harlots sell their children into slavery, and only harlots despise the name of love.”

His suggestion was accepted by the whole assembly. The Doctors of the Law returned to their homes, where they mourned and made
intercession all day long—to the distress of their families and guests, who were obliged to do the same ; and rose to rejoice only when night fell. Thus (so the Ebionites claim) another article of Zechariah’s prophecy was fulfilled, the great mourning in Jerusalem for the murdered prophet :

And the land shall mourn, every family apart : the family of the House of David apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the House of Nathan apart, and their wives apart.

The family of the House of Levi apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the House of Simeon apart, and their wives apart.

All the families that remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.

Judas, who had waited all morning in company with the other witnesses outside the Residency, his mind torn between hope and terror, understood at last that Nicodemon’s scheme had miscarried and that Jesus had been condemned to the cross. When finally the witnesses in the case were dismissed, he ran along to the Temple and, bursting into the office of the Chief Treasurer, flung the thirty shekels on the broad desk.

“This is the price of innocent blood,” he cried.

The Chief Treasurer’s deputy answered coldly : “What is that to us? The money is yours. If you have sinned, you must make your peace with the All-Merciful as best you may.”

“At a goodly price have you valued your prophet! Cast this accursed silver to the potter, that the prophecy may be fulfilled !”

He ran out again and compelled Nicodemon’s son, whom he met on the Bridge, to go with him outside the City. There in a paddock Judas abased himself before his God, and cried aloud : “O God of Israel, have mercy on a wretch who has sinned through presumption and cowardice and by his gross folly has betrayed your Anointed One to worse than death. Let it now be again as in the days of our Father Abraham, when his son Isaac went obediently to the place of sacrifice, carrying a burden on his shoulder, as your Anointed One goes now ; but your heart was turned to mercy and you accepted a ram’s life in exchange. Just Lord, accept now my life in exchange for my Master’s, and more than my life : let me die accursed, so only that he may escape the Curse. For it is written : ‘A curse of God is on that which is hanged on a tree.’ Spare his life, and let the soul of one who loved him too well perish for ever !”

Then Judas kissed his weeping companion, saying : “Son of Nico-demon, now is the time for you to expiate your father’s fault by acting as my hangman, for I would not seem ungrateful to the All-Merciful by taking my own life. And if you refuse me this charge, then I will assuredly make you the victim. It is a life for a life.”

Nicodemon’s son, seeing no help for it, took Judas’s girdle, tied it in a noose and hanged him, out of public sight, on a crooked thorn-tree which grew near by in a hollow.

The silver was now doubly tainted, and the Chief Treasurer could not
on any pretext enter it as a contribution to the Temple funds. He therefore “cast it to the potter”, by buying with it the very field where Judas was found hanging ; this happened to be called The Potter’s Field because one end of it was strewn with broken pots from a near-by kiln. Its name was changed to Aceldama, “the Field of Blood”, its walls were broken down and it was let go to waste.

Let me offer no moral judgement in the case of Judas ; it is enough to re-tell the story as I heard it. An Alexandrian sect of Chrestians, called the Cainites, glorify Judas on the ground that if he had not arranged for Jesus’s arrest there would have been “no Crucifixion and no triumph over death” ; but the Ebionites reject this view as mischievous. They say : “Judas, as a disciple under vows, was bound to obey his master’s orders, knowing them securely based on the Law and the Prophets. In the passage that Jesus quoted from the Blessing of Moses, the Levites are praised for their resolution in using the sword against their idolatrous kinsmen. Had Judas obeyed these orders, instead of pitying himself for having been chosen to carry them out and then presumptuously going behind his master’s back in a foolish attempt to save his life, all would have been well : the Kingdom of God, for which he had been taught to pray daily, would have come infallibly, just as Zechariah had prophesied. But whether Judas’s fault, which was cowardice rooted in intelligence, was graver than Peter’s, which was pugnacity rooted in unintelligence, and whether he made full amends for it by his death, that let our God decide, who ordained that Peter too should die accursed on a cross. All that we know is that between them these two postponed the Great Day.”

A
NCIENTLY
, it seems, in every country around the Mediterranean Sea, crucifixion was a fate reserved for the annual Sacred King : crucifixion within a circle of undressed stones upon a terebinth-tree, a kerm-oak, a royal oak, a pistachio-pine or a pomegranate, according to varying tribal custom. The practice is said to persist in North Britain and the wilder parts of Gaul : the King’s companions bind him with osiers to an oak that has been lopped to the shape of a T ; he is then decked with the green branches, crowned with whitethorn, flogged and ill-treated in a manner shameful to record, and finally roasted alive ; while his companions dressed in bull-hides dance around the pyre. But his soul escapes upwards in the form of an eagle—as did the soul of Hercules from his pyre on Mount Oeta—and becomes immortal, while the bull-men feast eucharistically on his remains. In Greece crucifixion survives in a partial and playful sense : the annual pelting of the so-called Green Zeus at Olympia. But closer parallels to the Gallic practice are to be found in
Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, especially the great Syrian tree-sacrifice at Hierapolis and its Phrygian counterpart which the Emperor Claudius introduced into Rome about twenty years after the events here recorded. In every case the Sacred King is regarded as a sacrifice made on behalf of the tribe to its Goddess Mother.

Among the Israelites the King was still annually crucified at Hebron, Shiloh, Tabor and elsewhere in the time of the Judges ; and the
Tav
cross, which is T-shaped, was tattooed as a royal caste-mark on the brows of the clansmen from whose ranks the Sacred King was chosen. As a caste-mark it is still to be seen among Kenite tribesmen of Judaea and Galilee and appears in Hebrew sacred literature in two contradictory senses : in Genesis as the brand of Cain the murderer—the eponymous ancestor of the Kenites—and in Ezekiel as the divine mark set on the brows of all just men as a sign to distinguish them from sinners in the day of Jehovah’s vengeance.

With the first Israelite dynasty, that of Saul, cannibalism was abolished and the custom begun of prolonging the King’s reign for a term of years and meanwhile sacrificing a
dod
, or yearly surrogate. This practice survived until the reign of Good King Josiah, though latterly, except in times of drought or other national disaster, a yearling ram was used as a
dod
instead of a man, and the anomaly justified by the myth of Abraham and Isaac. Josiah abolished crucifixion by inserting an article in his recension of the Law—the Book called Deuteronomy—to the effect that whatever was crucified was not blessed, but accursed. Once this altered principle, fathered on Moses, had been accepted as of divine inspiration, it was used as a means of discouraging crime : the body of a man who had been stoned for blasphemy or other horrid wickedness was hanged up after death on a
Tav-
shaped cross to make it accursed, and denied decent burial.

Among other nations the Sacred King was likewise excused crucifixion, on condition that he found a
dod
; at first the victim was his son or maternal nephew, whom he invested with the temporary insignia of royalty—this explains the legend of Zeus’s sacrifice of Dionysus—but presently more distant kinsmen were accepted and, later still, royal prisoners taken in battle ; and when in times of peace royal prisoners were hard to come by, prisoners of lesser rank were crucified, and in the end even criminals might serve. Crucifixion then became merely a punishment for crime, and so it is to-day ; yet elements of the traditional ritual persist long after its sacred origin has been forgotten, and among the Romans these include the laming of the victim while he is hanging on the cross—since the Sacred King was originally lame, the substitute must also be lamed. It is difficult to discover how much of the Roman ritual is of native origin and how much is Canaanite ; for the early Romans used an X-shaped cross, but during the war against Hannibal the present T-shaped one was borrowed from the Carthaginians, who are Canaanites by origin. At all events, it is a remarkable paradox that crucifixion, which in Palestine had once been a magical means of procuring immor
tality, was now regarded by the Jews as a felonious punishment involving the extinction of their souls, and was therefore used by the Romans as a means of terrorizing political malcontents ; and that Jesus as a Sacred King in the antique style, despite his defiance of the Queen of Heaven and all her works, despite his extraordinary efforts to avoid the destiny entailed upon him by his birth and marriage—or, you may well say, in consequence of these very efforts—was about to be immortalized in the antique style.