King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (62 page)

“I fear he has turned traitor and flinched from his task.”

Peter cried : “All may prove traitors to their tasks, but not I. I will boldly use my sword on the wretch who has disgraced us all, and in sight of all Jerusalem, though I die for it.”

“I too will strike without fear,” said John, “for though I loved him, I always loved another better. And is it not my duty to hate the enemies of our God ?”

Jesus asked eagerly : “When did you first suspect the truth ?”

“When you made merry in the club-house.”

“It is well. Come back with me towards the gate, and watch over me until morning, while I make my peace with the Father whom I have offended. Are your swords sharp ?”

“As a priest’s sacrificial knife.”

“Do not let me out of your sight. As you love me, keep a jealous watch ; and when the blow is to be struck, strike home !”

The irony of this dialogue at cross-purposes—recorded in the Ebionite tradition—could hardly have been improved by the most skilful Attic writer of tragedies.

Jesus left the three disciples under a hollow tree and retired to a spot about a stone’s cast away, where he knelt down and prayed. They could hear his vehement words : “Father, sweet Father, to whom alone all things are possible, I beseech you to take this bitter cup from my lips. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Worn out after their long day, and drowsy with the wine and the roast meat, they wrapped themselves in their mantles and fell asleep. Half an hour later their mantles were twitched away from them and they awoke. Jesus was standing over them, holding the two swords in his hand : “See how easily I could have robbed you of your weapons. Watch again, and pray that you do not succumb to temptation and so fail in your duty. Pray for me too, that I am not tempted to rise and flee away from you to Galilee.”

He handed them back their swords and they started shamefacedly to their knees, while he went off to resume his prayers. Presently they fell asleep again, and he roused them a second time. “Peter, could you not keep watch for a single hour ?”

“Lord, my spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

Once more Jesus prayed, and once more the three disciples fell asleep. Then came a sudden clamour of voices and sounds of the orchard gate being battered down. He saw the twinkling of torches and then a crowd of white figures hurrying through the olive-trees towards him. Hobbling back to the sleeping men, he shook James violently by the shoulder and said : “Quick, rise up! Warn your comrades in the hut that enemies are here. Tell them to scatter and run for their lives.”

James grunted and snored, but would not wake. Jesus cried bitterly : “Snore on, then, and finish your sleep! It is now too late to rise.”

But Peter and John had been roused by a sudden sense of danger. They dragged James to his feet and pummelled him into wakefulness as a strong company of Levite halberdiers came running up. At their head were Judas and a Levite officer.

Judas muttered to the officer : “Arrest the man whom I kiss.” He went up to Jesus and kissed him, and as he did so whispered reassuringly : “All is well. Trust Nicodemon.” Then he shouted over his shoulder : “This is your man! This is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Jesus asked : “Judas, do you kiss the man whom you betray ?” And then : “Am I a bandit that these Sons of Levi come against me with weapons in their hands? I preached daily in the Temple—why did they not take me then ?”

“Stand back, men !” the officer ordered. “You are not to use your weapons unless he resists arrest.”

Jesus shouted in a tremendous voice : “Woe to my Worthless Shepherd who has forsaken the flock! His right arm shall utterly wither and his right eye be utterly dimmed. Sword, awake against this shepherd, though he is my friend! Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered !” He let fall his butcher’s crook, which he had carried with him all this while and, flinging out his arms, awaited the blow.

While John stood irresolute, Peter grasped his sword and rushed forward with a shout. “Save him, save him !” cried Judas. But it was at Judas himself, not at Jesus, that Peter lunged.

A Levite darted in to ward off the blow with his halberd, while Judas flung himself sideways and scrambled behind a tree. Peter then aimed a swinging blow at the Levite, but the sword glanced off his helmet, merely gashing his ear. Other halberdiers hurried to the rescue and, finding himself one against fifty, Peter took to his heels and, being swift of foot, escaped over the orchard wall. John tossed his sword away and followed Peter’s example.

James was nearly caught. Someone snatched at his tunic, but he struggled violently ; it tore in two and he broke away naked, with a sword-cut on his shoulder. Thus the prophecy of Amos was fulfilled.

Judas returned to where Jesus was standing in sorrowful resignation. He stooped down, picked up the fallen crook and asked : “Master, have you further need of this ?”

“It is your spoil. Keep it.”

The disciples in the hut meanwhile made good their escape. Andrew had started up from sleep at the noise of shouting and quickly roused the rest ; they had all stolen away unobserved under cover of the hut, helping one another over the orchard wall. Thomas reassured them : “We need not fear for the Master. If he could elude arrest by daylight and in open country at Nazareth, surely he can do so again here by moonlight and among the olive-trees.”

But Jesus made no attempt to escape. He was led out of the orchard towards the house of the former High Priest Annas, where the High Priest Caiaphas, son-in-law to Annas, was staying for the Feast. It was the largest and most luxurious house on the Mount of Olives and stood only a few hundred paces away from Gethsemane.

Peter followed behind at a safe distance. The night was quiet and he expected at any moment to see a company of bright angels swooping down from Heaven to the rescue. Was it not on the Mount of Olives that Ezekiel had once beheld the Chariot and the Glory of the Lord, and was it not there that the Messiah would stand in the Great Day? “I am glad that I submitted to the foot-washing,” he said to himself. “I am prepared for anything.”

But nothing notable happened ; only the noise of howling dogs across the Kidron grew louder and steadier. At Passover the full moon and the maddening presence of many lambs always disturbed the City dogs, and to-night the smell of roasted lamb ascended from a thousand fires in the Galilean quarter. Yet the dogs were denied even the bones to crack.

Jesus was brought into the house of Annas, and Peter, standing in the shadow of the wall, his sword still clutched in his hand, heard the Levite officer making his report to the Captain of the Temple. The Captain answered : “Good! Good! But how did the armed bandits manage to get away? You should have surrounded the place first.” The officer mumbled his excuses, which the Captain cut short with : “Send the informant along to the Treasurer and see that he is given the blood-money. One hundred and twenty drachmae was the agreed sum.” (For Judas, asked to name a price, had remembered Zechariah and demanded thirty Sanctuary shekels, which were worth four drachmae apiece. “It is too much,” they had protested. “Not so,” Judas had insisted, “it is the value of a Canaanite slave as established by the Law ; and I am selling you a free Israelite.”)

Peter listened in incredulous horror. How in the world could Judas, his comrade Judas, whom he had regarded as the most generous and scrupulous of the Twelve, have ever brought himself to sell his Master for a paltry sum of silver? God’s Adversary must surely have entered into him.

At first cock-crow, the false alarm of dawn, Peter stole into the hall,
his sword concealed under his mantle. He looked around in the hope of finding Judas, whom he was determined to kill ; but Judas was not there. Warming himself at the fire, he noticed for the first time that his fingers were bleeding—he had cut them on his sword while climbing into an olive-tree before leaping from an upper branch over the orchard wall.

A cook asked him : “How did you wound your hand ?”

“In the house of some friends of mine, in a rough-and-tumble.”

“Who are you, eh ?”

“I am a cattle-man. I never had any other trade. I have just driven a prime herd of beef down from the north.”

Then a maid-servant said : “I know you, big lout! I saw you the other day at the Basilica during the riot. You are one of the Nazareth gang, a follower of that Jesus.”

“I am nothing of the sort.”

“I could swear to it. I can tell by your
iod’s
and
ain’s
that you are a Galilean.”

“Forty crates full of plump harlots! Upon my soul, I never set eyes on this Jesus.”

“But you are the man who let all the doves fly away! I would know you anywhere.”

“May the Adversary father a litter of devilkins on your fubsy body, witch! I arrived in Jerusalem only twelve hours ago.”

“Then what are you doing out here, on the Mount of Olives, at this hour of night ?”

“I have already told you. I have been eating the Passover with friends near the Booths of Hino. It ended in a brawl.”

“But what are you doing here ?”

“What do you think? I am warming my hands. In Galilee, if a man sees an open door and a fire inside, he enters and warms his hands, and the people bring him wine and a bit of bread and fish. Here, it seems, he gets nothing but insults. Come up to Galilee one day, daughter of sixty camels, and we will teach you manners !”

So he passed it off, and stayed there cursing and swearing to himself for nearly an hour, before he swaggered out into the street again. Then the cocks began to crow in earnest, and he wept bitterly to hear them.

Meanwhile Jesus was taken for examination to the Court-room, which might have been the very same room in which Zacharias had been examined some thirty-three years previously, for the furniture and hangings were the same ; but it was a very thin Sanhedrin that had been summoned to hear the case. Nicodemon had not been notified, nor Joseph of Arimathea, nor any of those who might have been counted upon to show favour or leniency. All those present were Sadducees of the ruling families, who were guided in all their actions by one overriding principle : the need of close collaboration with the Romans. It had been impressed on the Sanhedrin by Pilate, and by his predecessor in
office, that the Temple-cult continued only on sufferance, and that any renewal of disorder in the Province would be the signal for its immediate suppression. No act of violence performed in the name of religion that might prejudice cordial relations with Rome must be overlooked or left unpunished.

The Sadducee leader was old Annas, who had been High Priest for nine years beginning with the year in which Archelaus the Ethnarch was deposed, and without consulting whom Caiaphas, who had now held the office for eleven years, took no important decision. Annas had five sons ; one had been High Priest in the interim between Annas’s term of office and that of Caiaphas, and the other four were all destined to become High Priests in after years.

It was the constant complaint of these seven gifted men, who formed the junta which controlled the Sanhedrin, that the greatest enemies of peace between the Romans and Jews were the members of the High Court, whose lack of political common sense was a national disgrace. The Pharisaic High Court, they declared, never made the smallest pretence of studying Roman sensibilities and judged every breach of the peace strictly by Mosaic standards, as though the Romans did not exist at all ; moreover, because of the absurd leniency of the Court’s procedure, it was well-nigh impossible to secure a conviction in it, even of notorious mischief-makers. They therefore made it their business to review every case of political importance before it could be heard by the High Court, and if there seemed the least likelihood that the Governor-General would be offended by an acquittal, to turn it over to him for settlement, with a summary of evidence and a provisional verdict for his guidance.

“This Court is declared open,” said Caiaphas. His real name was Joseph, but he was popularly nicknamed Caiaphas, “the diviner”, because of his well-developed faculty of intuition ; Pilate called him “the perfect valet”, because of his obsequiousness to his masters, his haughtiness to his inferiors, his adroitness, his correctness and his fundamental falsity.

“I must preface my remarks with a sincere expression of thanks to the members of this honourable Court who have answered a most unseasonable summons to try the case of Jesus of Nazareth. I had feared that the considerable distance of this house from the City might prevent our securing the necessary quorum. The need for an emergency meeting will be apparent to you all as the case proceeds. We could not, with safety, have arrested the prisoner by daylight yesterday because of his strong hold on the Galilean pilgrim crowds ; yet it was imperative not to allow him to remain at liberty during Passover Eve. An incident sufficient to justify armed Roman intervention would be ruinous to the nation ; I need not enlarge on this. Our agents scoured the Galilean quarter where he was reported to be eating the early Passover, but without success, and the information that led to his eventual arrest close to this house did not reach us until about an hour after midnight. My
request for your attendance went out as soon as the prisoner was reported to be safely in our hands.

“The case has unusual features. The Court may be surprised to learn that the prisoner, Jesus of Nazareth, though a Galilean fanatic, has hitherto enjoyed the reputation of a quietist, and that his dossier, which has lately reached me from our police agents in Galilee, is marked ‘Friend of the Government’. It appears that he has criticized certain of the pietistic local Pharisees in a sense that deserves our praise, and has even attempted to reconcile the country people of Galilee to the customs-men and tax-gatherers. According to trustworthy reports, he is on intimate terms with many of the most influential tax-gatherers in the country, including Zacchaeus of Jericho. Yet some evil spirit seems to enter into him whenever he comes up here to keep a Feast. Not content with brawling at the Pool of Siloam during this year’s Tabernacles, he now fancies himself to be a Great One of sorts. On the eleventh of this month Nisan he rode into Jerusalem on an ass in pseudo-regal style, and to-day after passionately expatiating to the pilgrim mob on the glories of the Davidic Kingdom, is alleged to have forced his way into the Chamber of the Hearth and to have seated himself for a while on the throne of the Messiah. Unfortunately, the Levite sentry is the only witness to this insane act, and since no member of the general public can yet be found to swear that he saw the prisoner either enter the Chamber or emerge from it, and since no disorder was caused, the Levite’s evidence must, I admit, be treated with reserve. It is possible, however, that before we come to this charge we shall be able to secure confirmatory evidence, perhaps from the informant who assisted us to procure the arrest.