King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (65 page)

Jesus sighed deeply, smiled at Pilate and gave a hardly perceptible shake of his head.

Pilate rose briskly. “Very well, then. If you refuse, you refuse ; and Heaven help you! If you will not be King Jesus of Judaea, you are still plain Jesus of Nazareth, a subject by domicile of your paternal uncle
Herod Antipas, to whom I shall send you for trial. I sincerely hope that he treats you as unhandsomely as he treated your maternal cousin John of Ain-Rimmon.”

He clapped his hands and shouted. The sergeant ran in. “Jucundus, bring me pen, ink, parchment. And march this Galilean half-wit back to the guard-room.”

Jesus was led out, and Pilate sat down to write a letter.

To His Excellency Prince Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee, from Q. Pontius Pilatus, the Governor-General of Judaea—Greeting.

I am sending you herewith an interesting personage. I may disclose to you in confidence that he is reported to be the rightful heir to your father Herod’s dominions under the terms of his last valid Will. Be good enough to examine his claims, which have satisfied my cursory examination. As a child he escaped the Bethlehem Massacre which your brothers Archelaus and Philip the Tetrarch carried out at your father’s order, and has since resided partly in Egypt, as you will gather from his Alexandrian idiom, and partly in your own Tetrarchy. Because I must assume him to be a Roman citizen until the contrary is proved, pray act on the same assumption and refrain from putting him to the torture. You will be as strongly impressed as I was by the characteristically Herodian cast of his features. I shall not, of course, report on the case to the Emperor, or mention it to a living soul, until I have heard your private view ; I should be loth to spoil the friendly relations that exist between our two governments by submitting to Rome a claim which would have the effect of dislodging you from your comfortable Lake-side quarters.

Farewell.

“I think,” muttered Pilate, smiling in self-congratulation as he sealed the letter, “I think, clever man, that this letter will net you anything up to thirty talents, which will come in handy these penurious days. But you must not forget to buy your wife the most beautiful necklace in Jerusalem. After that dream of hers, which nearly spoilt your breakfast, she will take it hard if the man is strung up. Your own fault, for confiding Nicodemon’s story to her last night when you went back to bed and found her awake. You talk too much, clever man. It is your greatest weakness.”

He ordered Jesus to be taken to Antipas, who by long-standing agreement used the West wing of the Residency as his headquarters during the Feasts.

Antipas and Herodias were ill at ease when Jesus was led into their private sitting-room by a staff subaltern, but both did their best to conceal it. Antipas dismissed the subaltern, and offered Jesus a chair and wine.

Jesus declined both. “I have a vow,” he said.

“I am not offended,” Antipas replied. “But I regret your vow. Wine is a useful mediator in business affairs, and my friend the Governor-General has sent you here, if I have read his letter intelligently, on a business errand. Assuming that you are what you profess to be, and that
the Governor-General is not playing with me in his jocose way—assuming, that is to say, that your identity can be proved before a Senatorial Court—the question naturally arises…”

Herodias broke in with crude directness : “What is your price, man ?”

Jesus was silent.

“My half-brother Herod Philip in somewhat similar circumstances accepted an annuity, which I am still obliged to pay him, in return for a document waiving his rights to our father’s estate. Archelaus the Ethnarch, my brother Philip, Salome our aunt and I, agreed to give him the interest on a sum of thirty talents, banked at Alexandria …”

Herodias interrupted again. “Nonsense, it was only twenty-five !”

“You are right, my dear—I remember now that it was only twenty-five talents, of which Archelaus and I each contributed nine, my brother Philip five more, and Salome the remainder. Silver talents, not gold ones, of course. Now he draws only the interest of my nine and Philip’s five, for Salome made the Lady Livia her sole heiress, and Archelaus forfeited his estate to the Emperor as a punishment for bungling the affairs of his Ethnarchy. Still, the interest on fourteen silver talents at three per cent. is a very comfortable sum, and he enjoys it without any of the cares and troubles of kingship. Do not misunderstand me : I cannot offer you anything approaching the same amount, my revenues being what they now are. Philip might be persuaded to disburse a few talents more ; his affairs continue to be in good order. But I must warn you : Pilate will not be so accommodating as either of us. You should have come straight to me instead of interesting him in your claim. He will demand at least half your annuity, if not more, as his cut of the cheese. However, that is your business, not mine. Shall we say the interest on three talents? I will guarantee to extract three more from my brother Philip.”

Jesus made an impatient movement.

“Not enough? Well, what about four? You can live very comfortably on the interest of four talents at Alexandria.”

Jesus turned away.

“I wish you would do me the courtesy of answering. I know that you are an artisan unused to Court life, but surely you have a tongue in your head ?”

Gradually Antipas raised his bid to ten talents, and then looked despairingly at Herodias. Her eyes were blazing. She clapped her hands for the major-domo : “Philemon, fetch that moth-eaten old scarlet cloak of His Royal Highness from the chest by the armoury door and get hold of a papyrus-reed and a pair of theatrical buskins. Dress this impudent fellow up as a King, with the reed in his hand, the buskins on his feet, and a copper pan on his head, and send him back to the Governor-General with the compliments of His Royal Highness.”

To Jesus she said : “Very well, then, be a King, and to the ravens with you !”

Antipas was frightened. As soon as Jesus had been led away, with the Palace guard playing him down the colonnades to discordant music, he hurried along to Pilate, who had meanwhile rapidly disposed of two criminal cases and several petitions, and was signing documents in his study. He begged him to pay no attention whatever to Herodias’s jest. “Put him out of the way, Your Excellency, and you shall have ten talents.”

“Forgive my unmannerly smile.”

“Fifteen.”

“Try again.”

“Twenty !”

“Twenty gold talents? Not good enough. Nor would twenty-five tip the pan.”

“Twenty-five! My Herodias would never forgive me if I paid you that.”

“Nor would my Barbata forgive me if I accepted it.”

Antipas groaned. “My last word is thirty.”

“Thirty? Not so bad. Very well, you could easily afford more, but I will not haggle : your friendship is worth far more to me than mere money.”

“I will pay you when I see his crucified corpse.”

“But you will write me out a bond for half the sum at once.”

“How am I to know that the fellow is not an impostor ?”

“That will be for my friend Aelius Sejanus to decide, if you cannot.”

Antipas held out his right hand. “You are a hard man, Your Excellency.”

“But appreciative of your generosity, my dear Prince, which cancels any slight resentment that I may have been harbouring against you since you supported the High Court in that affair of the votive shields. Do you know, I would almost have given half to-day’s earnings to have been present when you and the Princess Herodias were screaming away like melon-sellers at your dumb country cousin. It must have been perfect Atellan comedy.”

“I sincerely hope that the jest will not one day recoil on Your Excellency’s head.”

“My one regret is that your irreligious brother the Tetrarch Philip has not come up for the Feast, and that we are obliged to hurry this business through so indecently fast that you lose your chance of recouping from him his due share of these thirty talents. By Hercules, I think it is very hard on you.”

“Or do you rather regret, Excellency, that you cannot squeeze a second thirty talents out of him ?”

Pilate guffawed. “How well we understand each other! Yes, I must confess that the disgusting affluence of his cities—Hippos, Pella, Gerasa and the rest—is a constant source of irritation to me. But you are a good loser, my dear Prince, and if henceforth we can work together, we may
yet be able to pluck out a few of his gaudy feathers and line our nests with them.”

The High Priest was still standing outside the breakfast-room at the Residency. Pilate went out again to apologize for having kept him and his associates waiting so long, and on a day of such importance in the Jewish sacred calendar.

“Your lame King,” he said, grinning, “causes me a deal of anxiety. I see no justification for executing him. His attitude is correct and my friend Nicodemon son of Gorion has asked me as a personal favour to release him. What do you say? Why not be charitable and forgive him his blasphemy? You know that this is the day on which the Emperor has authorized me to perform an annual act of clemency, the granting of a free pardon to one Jewish criminal—in theory, any criminal without exception. The choice is supposed to be made by a popular show of hands, but your servants will serve the purpose of a crowd.”

He beckoned the Levites, and asked : “Shall I pardon your King? Or would you prefer me to pardon Simon Barabbas, the leader of a gang of Galilean Zealots who killed one of my men in the early hours of this morning ?”

“Barabbas !” the grandees cried in unison, and “Barabbas, Barabbas !” echoed the Levite servants.

“What, crucify your true-born King? Why should I do anything so barbarous ?”

“You will be an enemy of the Emperor’s if you do not,” cried Caiaphas. “This man is planning a religious revolution which, if we do not check it, will be the prelude to a nationalistic revolt. I do not doubt that the Zealot parade was organized as a demonstration against his arrest.”

“Indeed, is it as serious as that? Why in the world did you not tell me so at once? Well—I do not know—perhaps I shall let you have your way after all. But if so, you must accept the entire responsibility. I ‘wash my hands of the matter’, to borrow a Hebrew metaphor. You may kill him or you may let him go, just as you please ; but if he is to die, it must be by a regular crucifixion, with no nonsense about ‘popular justice’.”

“Will a beheading not suffice? Crucifixion carries a curse with it, and we do not wish to antagonize the Galileans unnecessarily. His closest adherents are all Galileans.”

“Your Holiness underrates the care and piety with which I have studied the Mosaic Law. First you ask my permission to have your prisoner stoned for blasphemy, well aware that the body of a man so stoned must be afterwards hanged on a tree to make it accursed, and now you inconsistently suggest that the curse should be forgone.”

The High Priest explained : “Our custom of hanging corpses has long fallen into desuetude, and the last stoning for blasphemy took place more than thirty years ago.”

“Indeed, I was under the impression that your Laws were still observed in all their primitive starkness ; you have destroyed a favourite illusion of mine and I hardly know what to believe now. I feel like the simple satyr in Aesop’s fable, who saw the countryman blow hot to warm his hands and cold to cool his porridge. At all events, in this case, if the punishment is to have the necessary deterrent effect, it must be crucifixion.”

“We cannot refuse the responsibility,” answered Caiaphas, though with evident reluctance. “He is a dangerous criminal, and we are content that his blood should be on our heads.”

Pilate called for a basin, and publicly washed his hands in a solemn caricature of the Jewish ceremony by which City elders absolve themselves from guilt when an unexplained murder occurs in their district. He told Caiaphas : “If you decide to crucify your King, I will lend you a crucifixion party. That is as much as I can undertake to do.”

“But the statement of crime? An execution is illegal without a statement of crime, and I have no authority to write one, especially as crucifixion is not a Jewish practice. You must at least write us out the statement ; so much authority you are bound to accept.”

“Very well. Wait only a little longer, and you shall have one written out for you ; and, while we are about it, two more for the pair of Zealots who were sentenced with Barabbas this morning—which reminds me that I have yet to sign their death warrants. They can all three be tied up in a row.”

The grandees waited, fuming with impatience, and presently the statements were ready, inscribed in Latin on short pieces of board with Greek and Hebrew translations underneath. The two prepared for Dysmas and Gestas read :

L
ATROCINIUM
: Q
UOD
P
ROVINCIAM
P
ERTURBAVERUNT
.
Banditry : to wit, disturbing the peace of the Province.

But Jesus’s statement of crime surprised and alarmed the grandees. It was not, as they had expected :

M
AJESTAS
: Q
UOD SE
R
EGEM
J
UDAEORUM
F
INXIT
E
SSE
.
High Treason : to wit, pretending to be King of the Jews.

but :

H
IC EST
J
ESUS
N
AZARAEUS
, R
EX
J
UDAEORUM
.
This is Jesus the Nazirite, the King of the Jews.

Caiaphas begged Pilate to alter the wording, but he obstinately refused. “What I have written, I have written. You have undertaken full responsibility for crucifying your King. If you change your minds at the last moment, let me know, and I confess that I shall not be sorry. I have come to pity and even to admire the man. Well, before I say goodbye, I must remind you that I grant favours to provincials neither often nor cheaply, and that this morning you have wasted with this petty criminal case nearly two hours of valuable time which were not my own
to waste. I had promised to hurry through my legal business and take the Lady Barbata for a drive into the country, and now, I fear, it is already too late. The only adequate apology that you could make would be to club together and present her with the most beautiful necklace to be found in Jerusalem. Emeralds are her favourite gems, but she turns up her nose at the yellowish sort, and they must be cut and set by an experienced Alexandrian lapidary.”