Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine Page 19

  “The man who handed the coin to the Nazarene,” said a suspicious voice, “was it perhaps one of his own men?”

  “Of that I cannot be sure. I was not there and only relate the tale as it was told to me. Supposedly it was a Pharisee, although I suppose it could have been one of his men posing as a Pharisee.”

  I mentally thanked Clarence for all his research and jumped in. “Does anyone here have a silver piece?” That drew some nasty looks, for they all knew what was coming. I stared down the man next to me, and he grudgingly handed me a shekel. I held it up in the flickering firelight. “Don’t each of you carry such coins? I am told that this is the most common coin in this part of the world.” The answer was grumblings of assent. “And yet whose graven image appears on it? Melqart, a Phoenician god.”

  “We are traders,” said the man defensively. “We have no choice in the matter. Phoenician silver is what we must deal in; it is recognized everywhere … besides, even the Temple priests have sanctioned the use of shekels for payments to the Temple.”

  Another voice broke in raucously. “Perhaps then, if we are to be true followers of the Nazarene, we should render our shekels to Melqart!”

  “Do you see,” said the man, “what foolishness this leads to?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “you are taking him too literally. From what you’ve told me, it seems clear to me that he often is speaking symbolically and using figures of speech.”

  “Perhaps,” said a richly vibrant voice from the darkness beyond the campfire, “you are not taking him literally enough.” But when we all turned to peer into the black night, we could see no one, and the only sound was the passage of the wind.

  32

  Since we were now on a major trade route and in the company of the relatively fast-moving caravan, we started making pretty good time. Late the following afternoon, we found ourselves in Nain, a small village located on a plateau on the lower northwestern slope of Mount Moreh. What made this tiny, sleepy, little, insignificant settlement suddenly so important was this: the residents claimed that the day before, the man, Jesus of Nazareth, had raised a widow’s son from the dead.

  The merchants in the caravan expressed a mild interest but were anxious to feed and water themselves and their animals and move on. The business world hasn’t changed much in two millennia, I guess.

  But Bartholomew and I greeted the news with great excitement for two reasons. First, because we were now only one day behind Jesus; we would surely catch up with him the next day. Second, because of the nature of the miracle. I spoke earlier of being unimpressed, for the most part, by the many healings I’d heard of. There were too many other possible explanations. But for a man who was truly dead, there could be only one possible explanation for this rising at the words of another. This was really important, I knew, for there are only three recorded instances of Jesus raising the dead—this young man, Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus. Bartholomew and I let the caravan pull out without us because we immediately began interviewing everyone in sight.

  By this time, we had established our standard operating procedure. Bartholomew interviewed eyewitnesses, while I, whenever and wherever possible, interviewed the principals. The young man, Silas, was twenty years old and his mother’s only child. Her husband had died three years before. Silas was able to tell me nothing except that he had been deathly ill for about twenty days prior to his apparent demise. The last week, he had been running a raging fever and slipping into and out of a comatose state. From the symptoms he described, I gathered that it was some kind of viral infection of unknown origin. At any rate, he told me that he had grown gradually weaker, then died.

  “How do you know that you died?” I challenged. “You were slipping into and out of consciousness quite a bit. You could have just been in another coma.”

  His belief was unshakeable. “Have you ever been dead?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course I haven’t,” I shot back in exasperation.

  “Well, believe me, when you die, you’ll know it.”

  So much for the son. “Could you,” I asked his mother, “could you possibly have been mistaken? Could he have still been alive when you were taking him off to bury him?” She looked at me as if I were a madman.

  “You have no children,” she replied. It was not a question. I shook my head. “If you had a son yourself, you wouldn’t need to ask such a stupid question. He is my only son, my flesh and blood. I gave him life. I fed him at my breast. I watched him grow into a young man. He is my son, my only child. Never would I consign him to the grave if there were even the slightest possibility of his being revived. Never.”

  Next I spoke to the woman’s sister-in-law, the one who had actually prepared the body for burial. It would have been she who would have washed the body and anointed it with nard and with a mixture of myrrh and aloes. It would have been she who would have tied the hands and feet with linen strips, veiled the face, and wrapped the body in its shroud. It would have been she who would have been the last person to see or handle the body.

  “Sir, with all due respect, your questions are silly. We all know the difference between a live man and a dead man.”

  “Mistakes have been known to happen.”

  She looked about furtively, and, after assuring herself that we were alone, declared, “When I put him in the shroud, he was dead. Of that there can be no doubt.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I pressed.

  “You’ll not tell my sister-in-law? May I have your word?” I nodded impatiently and she continued. “You see, she would be offended if she knew I had departed from the Jewish custom. But I am not a Jew. I was brought up in Egypt, where proper reverence is shown for the deceased. Here in Judea they are so backward in so many ways. I would not, could not allow my only nephew to be buried with as little ceremonial preparations as the Egyptians would show an animal.”

  “Of course not,” I mumbled, glancing up at the ceiling. What a waste of time.

  “So I prepared his body for burial in the Egyptian manner.”

  “You did what?” I asked, feeling a strong, powerful, and eerie tingling start at the base of my neck and run down the length of my spine.

  “I removed his brain, intestines, and other vital organs, washed them in palm wine, and placed them in canopic jars filled with herbs, then—”

  “Are you telling me that all the vital organs had been removed from that boy when Jesus of Nazareth stopped the procession and raised him?”

  “Yes sir. You see, I left them in the canopic jars, and the jars were in my home. I had intended to go out to the grave later on that night, and inter the jars with the body under cover of darkness. Many find the Egyptian ways … strange or even offensive. I only wanted to make sure the boy had a civilized burial.”

  “But when you saw the boy raised …”

  She nodded. “The first thing I did, once I recovered my wits, was to run back to my home … where all the canopic jars were right on the shelf where I’d left them … only they were now completely empty.”

  “Thank you,” I replied. Then I stumbled out into the street in a daze, where I literally bumped into Bartholomew. He was beaming.

  “Lightfoot, I have talked to no fewer than eighteen people who saw the miracle. Following your instructions, I interviewed each person separately to preclude the possibility of one witness’s account influencing another’s. The accounts agree in all respects. They all saw the dead man raised to life by Jesus.”

  “Good,” I mumbled absently.

  “Is something the matter? You don’t look well.”

  “My interviews,” I said guardedly, “have also given indications that the event that occurred here was … most curious.”

  “Curious?” Bartholomew exclaimed incredulously. “Curious? A man is raised from the dead, and you find that only curious?”

  “There could be other explanations,” I said with little conviction.

  “But I have personally talked to eighteen p
eople who saw the thing with their own eyes, who saw Jesus raise him up!”

  “How could those spectators be sure that he was in fact dead?”

  “Well …”

  “Could they not have been mistaken? Could they not have been tricked? Could they not be intentionally lying for some motive of which we know nothing?” I challenged him.

  “Friend Lightfoot, why would anyone, let alone a large group of people, lie about such a thing? By saying what they do, they invite only ridicule and scorn from most, charges of blasphemy from others, and, from others such as yourself, sharp questioning.

  “As for their being mistaken or deceived, I allow that it could be so, but do not for a moment believe it. This is one of the many wonders Jesus has worked, and one, however clever, cannot trick all of the people all of the time. Neither can people mistake all that they see and hear of Jesus and yet their stories be so consistent.

  “But enough. You spoke to the boy himself, as well as to his mother and her sister-in-law. You are perhaps in a better position to judge than I. What are your conclusions?”

  I suddenly felt all of two thousand years old as I looked up at the bright, starry night sky. I thought of the billions of stars in the firmament, of the inexorable wheeling of the enormous galaxies, of the boundlessness of the universe.

  “My conclusion, Bartholomew, is that we are on to something so big that …” Words failed me at that point, and the silence was so intense that when I resumed speaking, I found myself speaking in a hush.

  “But we must be sure. We must be sure.”

  33

  On the road the next day, right after we finished a midday snack of lentil soup and bread, I stretched out on a large slab of rock for a short nap. The custom of a daily siesta was one to which I had no problems adapting, and I think if modern Americans took it up, there’d be far fewer ulcers, divorces, and heart attacks.

  I had been minding my own business, content to just lie there soaking up the warm rays of the sun like a big old lazy iguana and was just beginning to doze off when Bartholomew spoke.

  “Lightfoot, have you always been a spy?”

  “A researcher,” I snapped angry for being so rudely snatched from the arms of Morpheus. “Don’t use that word ‘spy’ anymore, Bartholomew. You almost got us into some big trouble back there in the caravan. I’m a researcher. Remember that.”

  “Just so. A researcher. Have you always been a researcher?”

  “No,” I answered, putting my hands behind my head and interlacing my fingers. “I’ve spent most all of my life as a warrior.”

  Bartholomew rolled over and put his hands behind his head. For a long time we both did nothing more than gaze up at the impossibly blue, blue sky. The only thing I could be certain of was that we weren’t thinking the same thing, for, in my mind’s eye, I was in the cockpit of an F-106.

  “I have often wondered what the life of a warrior is like. I myself have never been to war and at times feel that I am the poorer for it. It must be exhilarating—the camaraderie with your fellows, seeing strange lands. Yet, at the same time, it must be terrifying.”

  “It is both,” I admitted, “but mostly the latter. It is also a very sorrowful thing—seeing innocent people turned homeless because of what you yourself have done.” I thought of the bombing runs over Korean towns and villages and of the sickening, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I thumbed the bomb release, sending a rain of napalm down on the thatched roofs of a people, who, for the most part, were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a place where there were North Korean or Chinese troop concentrations or next to a strategic bridge or weapons production factory.

  “It is also,” I continued, “a sorrowful thing to see young men and women and children on both sides, who had their whole lives ahead of them, and who had so much to offer, cut down like so many weeds. The world will never know how many great writers, scientists, artists, inventors, and poets died by the sword before they could even have a chance to display their talents. Cut down. Cut down like so many weeds.” I thought of the motto of one of the squadrons of fighters that specialized in close air-to-ground support, particularly in built-up, populated areas, “Kill ’em all; let God sort ’em out.”

  “Believe me, Bartholomew, you have missed nothing.”

  “Do you mean that if you had it to do all over again, you wouldn’t choose the life of a warrior?” A fair question, that. I considered for a moment.

  “No, I would do it all over again.”

  “Even though it is terrifying?”

  “Yes, even though it is terrifying … you see, there are worse things that can happen to a man than death.”

  “My friend, what could possibly be worse than death?”

  “Experiencing the death of the things you love, whether they are people or ideas.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Yes, it’s hard to put into words … I, like many others, see my country not so much as a place but as a noble experiment. When I fought, I wasn’t fighting for its mountains or plains or valleys; I was fighting for what my country stands for. For the conviction that a man has the right to speak his mind, to worship God as he sees fit, to be secure in the privacy of his own home, to enjoy due process under law, to be free to pursue his dreams. If these things were to be destroyed, well, that would be worse than death.”

  “But, friend Lightfoot, most of the people in the world don’t have those freedoms. Yet life goes on. Yet life is worth living.”

  “It wouldn’t be for me.”

  “Fighting for those things is indeed most commendable. But what if you could not hope to win? A hundred years ago, for example, Spartacus challenged the might of the entire Roman Empire. He was doomed before he started. Surely you don’t advocate the same kind of extremism?”

  “One must fight whether he will win or not. These things are too precious to surrender under any circumstances.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bartholomew shake his head.

  “You would fight a war you could not win?” he asked in sheer disbelief.

  “Of course, Bartholomew, I would prefer to fight a war I could win, but … look, of all the things worse than death that can happen to a man, the worst of them is this: to live with himself after he has forsaken the things he loves, the things that give meaning and purpose to his life. To see his reflection in a looking glass after he has betrayed the things he believes in—this is the worst thing of all.”

  In the long silence that followed we both dozed off, each to his own dreams.

  34

  It came suddenly, and it wasn’t exactly the way I’d pictured it would be. But then I guess that’s characteristic of all the most important moments of our lives. None of us is ever really prepared. Although much is made of man’s imagination, it is, nevertheless, always a poor match for reality.

  Bartholomew and I topped a rise and beheld a virtual living carpet of people covering the next slope. There were between 6,000 and 6,500 of them clustered in a gigantic semicircle about the man who stood at the top of the 500-foot hill. We just stood there for a moment, frozen in our tracks, gawking. There, in the distance, stood the man who had changed the whole of human history in a way so powerful, so through, and so far-reaching, that the world even dated all its events in terms of years before or after his birth. There stood a man for whom tens of thousands who had never met him would go cheerfully to their deaths rather than renounce him. There stood either the biggest fraud in the history of mankind, a lunatic, or the Second Person of the Triune God. Ecce homo; behold the man. My knees began to shake.

  Neither of us spoke. It was a moment too big for words. We kept our silence as we moved to join the crowd. We got to within 250 yards before the density of the crowd prohibited any further forward movement, then we sat down with the rest to listen. Needless to say, I couldn’t distinguish any of his facial features at that distance, although I could hear quite well. We’d been sitting there for all of five minutes
before I realized how extraordinary the latter condition was. We could hear quite well! He was speaking in a normal conversational tone, yet we, 250 yards away, could hear him as easily as if he were three yards away. He wasn’t shouting and used no voice amplification devices, electronic or otherwise. Yet all who came to hear him heard him. Now this was the first physical phenomenon in connection with Jesus of Nazareth that I had personally witnessed, and, while it might seem unimpressive or even trivial compared to other things reported in the Gospels (or later in my own reports), it was my first on-the-scene experience with miracles, and I can still remember it as if it were yesterday.

  There have been many famous and infamous men in the history of our planet who have been great orators, who could sway crowds or whole nations. Men, who through the skillful use of words alone, could make people laugh or cry or move them to show generosity or mercy or cruelty or heroism. Who could move people to build or to destroy, to heal or to kill. One thinks of such widely disparate personages as Patrick Henry and Adolph Hitler, as Demosthenes and Winston Churchill, as Mohammed and Daniel Webster. But Jesus was not like anyone else. He did not speak in the flowery multisyllabic eloquence of a Webster or a William Jennings Bryan, nor with the frenzied gut wrenching passion of a Hitler or a John Brown. No, he had a way of stringing plain, simple, everyday words together in a quiet but powerful and authoritative way that reached deep down inside you, where you really lived, and made you know that you were hearing the Truth, whether you liked it or not.