The Liars' Gospel (21 page)

“He said he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days,” said the man with lumps on his face.

“He said that the end of days is coming,” said another, and none of these things seemed hard to believe to Caiaphas. He had
seen the man raving. He was another of those, and whether he fomented rebellion against Rome or not, a man who spoke against
the peace, who whipped people up, who destroyed property, was not likely to be let alone.

The witnesses began to shout over one another. Ugly, angry calls. Yehoshuah had spoken against the Temple. They had heard
him call himself the Messiah, the rightful king—this was a very serious charge. Under Rome, there is no king but the Emperor
and those whom it pleases the Emperor to set on little thrones for a time.

Caiaphas, seated at a long wooden table with four men to his left and four to his right, had the witnesses ushered back, then
called one of the Levites to bring Yehoshuah forward. The man had been held at the back of the room while the testimonies
were heard. Now he stood before them, seemingly calm, his face sunburnt. They sat him in a chair before the judges. Caiaphas
stood up. The hubbub from the back subsided a little. He made his voice loud but low, a trick he had mastered during the endless
prayers and services to give his words gravitas without exhausting his throat.

“Yehoshuah of Natzaret,” he said, “we need an answer from you. You’ve heard what the witnesses have said. If it’s not true,
if they’re lying, just tell us.”

There was general nodding from the men around the table, an encouragement to behave reasonably. It was surprising how often
even a raver, when faced with the calm interrogation of a court, found his wits long enough to deny the most serious charges,
which gave them the necessary leeway. For blasphemy, the sentence is generally only a few lashes. There are ways to make an
offense less severe in the eyes of the law. That is the purpose of the court—not to condemn but to make the most peaceful
accommodation between the person before them and the community which surrounds them.

The sages tell us that a Sanhedrin which kills only one man every seventy years has wrought enough harm to be scorned with
the name “a Bloody Court.”

But this madman said nothing. A small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. And he said nothing in his own defense and
he did nothing to show that he understood the charges, and the only movement was his foot twitching under his robe, and Caiaphas
thought: this man is entirely mad, but it may still be possible to save him.

He said, “You know what the most serious charge is. Do you say that you are the Messiah, the expected rightful king of Israel?”

And if he had only remained silent, they could have said: he is a madman struck dumb. They would have assigned him lashes
in the marketplace, because one cannot condemn a man to death on hearsay alone if the evidence is contradictory in the least
particular, and these witnesses’ stories contradicted each other wildly. If he had only remained silent, the case would have
fallen.

Instead, with that eerie smile and his eyes affixed on Caiaphas, Yehoshuah said, “I am the expected king. And very soon you
will see me sitting at the right hand of Yahaveh. We are going to descend to earth on the glowing clouds from heaven.”

He spoke the sacred name of God, the name which is spoken only by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies on the most sacred
day of the year. He spoke it as if it were the name of some casual friend.

At this Annas let out a short involuntary breath. And Jonathan, one of the oldest and wisest men on the council, threw up
his hands, and Micah, younger and less circumspect, muttered too loudly, “Now he speaks?” The men on the court exchanged glances.
Caiaphas looked at Yehoshuah. He had gone back to that strange unsettling silence. He was rocking back and forth very slightly
on his chair.

Caiaphas had the feeling that the man had been waiting for many years for this day, for this hour, when he would say this
ridiculous thing to the court and force their hands.

He stood up again. He took a knife from the table, where it stood next to the bread and cheese and wine his wife had laid
out for them. He pierced the bottom of his robe and pulled the knife through to the hem. Then he took both sides of the cut
cloth and pulled them apart. With a shredding sound and a scatter of
fi
bers in the air, he ripped the garment halfway to the waist. The others around the table nodded, knowing that ripping one’s
clothes, the sign of deepest mourning, is the only proper response to hearing the true name of God spoken in the wrong place
and at the wrong time. The power of the name is strong enough to kill, though it grieves the hearers beyond measure.

He said, and he found his voice hoarse despite himself, “If this is what you say, then we have no need for witnesses.”

And the verdict was made. And they tried another two men that evening and found them guilty of more minor blasphemy, and sentenced
them to the usual punishment—forty lashes, the final lash withheld in case they had miscounted. And he heard that Rome had
taken a couple of thieves and intended to execute them too, because Rome never served up her mercy in portions more generous
than a thin dribble.

They might have found a way to save the man even yet. To take a son from his mother and a man from his friends is an evil
thing. They could have left him in that locked stable by the Temple for a week or two, until their own memories had faded
a little, until if they had asked each other, “What exactly did he say?” they might have contradicted one another and so proved
false witnesses. There are ways to save a man from judgment. But it was the festival of Passover and the streets were thronged
with people and the Romans feared that another rebellion might be rising in the city.

And so Pilate summoned Caiaphas in the morning. He stood by a table covered in scrolls of messages and vellum maps, and a
soldier standing quietly to one side, with his sword hanging at his belt. Pilate always greeted him in some similar way, so
that he should never forget the power the Prefect represented.

“I hear,” he said, “that you have a man found guilty of blasphemy.”

Who had told him? Some spy among the witnesses, no doubt. One must never lie to Rome.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is a sin against Rome, you know. Against the sacred cult of Tiberius the Emperor. And it is a crime punishable by death
according to your laws, is it not?”

Again Rome, whose currency is death, can never hear equivocation. Others are weak for not dealing death, weak for seeking
to avoid it. Rome’s daily business is death, her nightly amusement is the death match. Death is cheap and easy among them.

“Usually, yes.”

“But of course you cannot enact this sentence.”

Death is the gift Rome reserves for itself. The people it occupies cannot pass their own sentences of execution.

“No, we cannot,” said Caiaphas.

“Give him to me,” said Pilate.

This was not a request, and to refuse it would have meant death as surely as God smote the Egyptians at the Red Sea. If Rome
wants something, Rome will have it.

And he surrendered, as if the waters of the sea were closing over his head.

“Yes,” he said.

He had the man brought up to him first of all, to tell him that they were handing him over to Rome. Yehoshuah did not respond,
though he must have known what it meant. His head wobbled a little on his neck. His eyes almost closed and then jerked open.
There was a bruise on his face: very probably someone had kicked him or hit him while he was imprisoned in the stable. It
is impossible to root out this kind of mindless cruelty; with so many people coming and going in the Temple, it could have
been anyone. He swayed. The man was ill, it was obvious. Caiaphas felt ashamed. Before they came into the iron embrace of
Rome, they would have found a way to save his life. When the soldiers escorted Yehoshuah away, Caiaphas found himself staring
at a door that had closed on him for a long time.

Annas told him later that they had crucified the man along with a few others, and in some piece of public theater, had released
the rebel Bar-Avo—a mistake on Pilate’s part probably, but Bar-Avo was the more popular man. Perhaps Pilate knew he could
recapture Bar-Avo, or thought that he could trust the man to keep the peace out of gratitude. Perhaps he was genuinely offended
by this Yehoshuah’s claim to be a god: Pilate has always thought that Rome would be pleased if he pressed the cult of Tiberius
upon the people. In this as in so much else, he is mistaken: Annas has it on good authority that Tiberius is a little embarrassed
by the whole business of worship, and refuses to allow many temples to be built to him.

Caiaphas, thinking guiltily of the man’s cracked lips and wild rolling eyes—and fearing, after Annas had set him thinking
on it, that his tomb might become a meeting place for rebels—sent two slaves to bury the body honestly in an unmarked Jewish
grave. But by the time they arrived, the corpse had already been stolen, they said, probably by his friends or family, for
who else would have taken the trouble? A pity. The whole thing had been a foolish waste of life.

And if anyone were to suggest to Caiaphas that this little episode, this regrettable but unavoidable matter, were the Holy
of Holies of his life, the tiny chamber at the center of his heart which is somehow larger than the whole edifice which surrounds
it, he would frown, and half smile, and attempt to be polite, and think afterwards that he had not understood the joke. If
this is a secret chamber, it is entirely empty.

It does not come from nowhere. A city does not catch fire in an instant. It has been months and years. It has been the taxes
and the tribute. It has been the way the Romans look at the Jews, the little taunts, the kicked-over fruit stalls and shoulder
bumps as they pass. It has been the sons and daughters who look at Rome and say to their family and to themselves, “Why can’t
we live like that?” And the girls paint their faces and show too much of their thighs. And the boys shave off their bristles
and go to the gymnasium to exercise naked. It has been the friends of these boys and girls, seeing them become strangers and
collaborators.

It was Pilate bringing the legions with their idolatrous banners into the city when his predecessor knew well enough not to
do that. It was Pilate’s way of administering justice: swift, merciless, unpredictable. It was the fear that grew in the city
so that no mother could see her son leave in the evening without fearing where he was going and whether he would return.

These things rise and rise and no one stops them. And the city is full of angry men.

And the city bakes in the sun. And the city is dried up by the sun. And the city is as dry as a tinderbox.

Pilate sends word again that he will have the Temple money. Caiaphas has ten priests go down into the storerooms to bring
up the gold. He picks them at random, but this is all it needs. They walk through the burning-hot marble plaza at noon with
their boxes of gold, saying, “Make way, make way, these chests are bound for Prefect Pilate.”

And the curled cedar shavings are smoking in the sun. And the flint is struck. And the spark flies off.

They wait until dark. Through the roasting day, people go about their business with stiff bodies and dark waiting eyes. By
the fifth hour of the afternoon the shops close up their shutters and the mothers bring their children in, and somewhere the
young men are waiting but no one can see them, not yet.

In the evening, the second daily sacrifice. Every morning and every evening, a new lamb. To remind us that we must die. Caiaphas
can see it in the men who come to the offering.

One of them mutters as they leave, “Stay home tonight, Cohen.”

The others look and nod, to see that he has understood.

They wait until dark, and past dark. Into the night, they wait, standing on street corners, their cloaks pulled up around
their faces. And the soldiers know something is wrong, but the garrison at Jerusalem is small and they are just standing,
and they cannot arrest people for standing, and besides where would they put so many men?

One of them begins to shout. It is the old call.

“David!” he shouts. “For David, King of the Jews!”

They take it up and throw it between them. “For David!” “For David!”

Like a wolf pack taking up a howl.

Their pockets are full of stones. One of them throws a stone at the shield of the small tangle of Roman men standing at the
gates of their storehouse. It bounces off the shield with a dull thwack of stone on wood and tumbles clattering to the ground.

And then the sky begins to rain stones.

And the tiny smoldering spark on the cedar shaving bursts all at once into huge and beautiful and all-engulfing flames.

The riot goes on through the night. They set the grain store on fire, the one the Romans keep as supplies for their garrison.
A thousand days’ worth of wheat for a hundred men burns with the sweet smell of roasting and then the black scent of wasted
wood and the death of summers past. The flames leap to the stable and the horses begin to scream in terror, kicking at the
doors of their stalls, but the doors are built to withstand precisely this. Someone gets one of the stable doors open and
the animals stampede through the streets, rolling their eyes and rearing and foaming, but not all of them are saved and their
screams grow louder and soon there is the smell of blackened flesh, and death is always the same, whatever set the events
in motion that led to it. Death and destruction are always just the same.

There is a glory in it, for the young men whose blood is up and whose limbs ache for battle and for the sweet exhaustion of
the hunt. Most of them are young indeed, twelve or thirteen, or fourteen or fifteen, and they yearn for a fight. There is
a delight in it, because these Romans have taken their land and laid their people low and desecrated their holy places and
it is good to see them suffer.