I’ll say this for Rome: they’d have been justified in killing us out of hand; but their damned soldiers have discipline. They knocked us about till there wasn’t much life left in any of us, but then we were hauled up and dragged through the dust to Fort Antonia and thrown into one of the deepest dungeons, there to lick our wounds and to contemplate our fate.
Well, there isn’t much to contemplate if you’ve sinned against the Occupying Power. Maybe you’ll get a trial, but who defends you against the grievous wounding of a Roman legionary? No one can bring home to you the guilt of the half-dozen you’ve done to death in the dark; but one wounding is enough. Maybe you’ll get a trial, maybe not: the end is the same. You just have to pray that it’ll be quick – though you know that it won’t.
Gestas took it the worst of us. He knew it was his fault we were lying chained here in the dark. But Gestas was always the tetchy one: up and down like a beetle in a pond; full of fire one minute, despair the next. Not to be trusted. In a war of liberation there are never enough to trust. You have to rely on the others to make up the numbers: the dreamers, the self-seekers, the rash, the boastful, the envious, the shouters who melt away at the first check.
Dysmas was not of these. A big slow fellow – slow except with a knife – slow-thinking, but once he’d made up his mind … You wouldn’t get a complaint out of him now as we lay in the dark and our wounds throbbed and our bellies emptied and our chins sprouted new beard. Not a leader, he would never be a leader, but a splendid second man: a stay, a support, a comfort even in the darkest hour.
And this was the darkest hour. If I died – as now seemed certain – there was no one else to carry on. I could have wept – and once in the dark did weep – that our fine plans had all come to nothing because of such an idle and foolish gesture. Spittle on the wind. Maybe this was what all men’s hopes and ambitions came to.
There was one hope, but it was not much of one. The Passover was near, and it was the custom of Rome to try to put itself on good terms with our people by allowing a free pardon for one prisoner – one Jewish prisoner among the many languishing in these rat-ridden cells. I knew I was much the most valuable prisoner they had – that is, valuable to our sacred cause – but I wondered whether, if a demand was loud enough for my release, whether the Procurator – come from Caesarea for the feast – would accede to it. I had been a hard one to catch, and if set free might give much more trouble. Yet a promise was a promise, and almost certainly many would ask for me.
Then, if that happened, if it really did happen, could I accept it and leave Dysmas and Gestas to a felon’s death? If I got the chance it would be my duty to take it, but it wouldn’t be an easy choice.
They fed us during those hard days, with foul bread full of weevils, and stale water and an occasional bowl of soup. It just kept us alive. There were ten in one cell, and little room to move. It was hard to count the days because no true light fell in the dungeon. But if you were awake you could just hear the trumpets each morning, and every three hours through the night.
So three days passed, and it was Thursday, the fourteenth of Nizan, and the Passover was near and I thought all was lost. By now many people from outlying districts would be flooding into the city for the feast, and my followers would be diluted and maybe even if they did cry out for mercy for me, their cries would be drowned in the cries of others. No question but Pilate would have my guts if he could – and who was to stop him?
On the Thursday night – no, it must have been some time on the Friday morning – two new prisoners were thrown in. I can’t remember what their offence had been, but they had both been burned in the hand, and the moans of one of them filled the cell. The other was more a man of my own heart, and when the bleeding had stopped he tied up his branded hand and told us the latest news. It seemed that Jesus Bar-Joseph was in trouble.
Of course I’d met this fellow a half-dozen times, and twice had been in argument with him – a religious visionary who had come into prominence this last year or so. It was queer, but sometime we’d been mistaken for each other. We had almost the same name, for my name is Jesus Bar-Abbas, and we were of an age and not unlike in looks – at least in colouring and build, though his eyes are lighter than mine. At one time I’d hoped greatly that he would help our cause against the oppressors: indeed, I’d have been willing to stand down as leader in favour of him. I’m not all that much one for religion myself, but you can’t over-value it as a means of raising the fervour of an oppressed people, and you had only to go to one of his meetings to see that he left me far behind – indeed anyone I had ever seen far, far behind – as a rabble-rouser. I swear that man – if any – could have thrown out the Roman from our land; but when I went to see him that first time he was a great disappointment.
True, he spoke me fair enough, but everything he said had a double meaning to it, and he turned away the sharp spears of my questions with shifty answers. When I charged him with the need to conquer these Roman devils and cast them for ever out of Jerusalem, he said it was necessary first to conquer our own souls and to cast out the devils within ourselves. When I spoke with contempt of the weakling collaborator Herod and told him I could make him, Jesus, king of all Judea, he said that his kingdom was not of this earth. I thought him sly and a bit of a windbag, and wondered at the time if he was planning to lead his own revolt without me.
I pressed the branded man for more news of this arrest but he had little more to say. It was only by chance, as he himself was being brought in by two soldiers, that he had seen this other procession coming through the town, some twenty strong, led not by Romans but by our own Temple Guard. Twenty men to arrest one man, the prisoner said scornfully; but I knew it wasn’t quite like that. The holy man had a great following, and if they had turned nasty, no Temple Guard would have stood a chance. And, for that matter, Jesus Bar-Joseph had a reputation for fireworks himself. Some people said he only had to raise his hand and the heavens thundered.
Well he was caught now – like me, and God help him. The collaborators and the slimy Sadducees had got him. They’d be glad we were both under lock and key. There was no leader of revolt left comparable to him and me – no one else with the brains. One by one we had been picked off: caught by the Romans or betrayed by our own folk: John the Nazarite, Simon of Tekoa, Peter of Bethany: they were all dead. After us there was no one.
So the great cause came to an end. I could not believe it. Other young Zealots would arise. Perhaps not yet, but soon, to carry the torch of liberty, to fight, not to talk or to preach or to pray, but to fight to the death, as we had fought to the death, by foul means if fair were denied us, by the dagger in the back and the poisoned arrow and the thread around the throat – one by one we would pick them off, these vile, forever-damned oppressors, until in the end they tired, they wearied of the slaughter, and some emperor in far-off Rome decided that enough was enough and drew his legions away to do more profitable and more useful things. This was the end for which any patriotic Jew ought to be willing to die – and for which I very soon, tomorrow or the next day, certainly would die.
There were two or three ways they might choose to dispose of me, but one, the most likely, was the one I dreaded most.
It was a long time that night. There was scarcely room for us all to lie down, and the cold stench of the enclosed place and the groans of the branded men made sleep hard to come by. It was likely to be my last night on earth; certainly it was my last night of hope, for if I wasn’t released today, then death was as sure as the next sunset.
So it was with a sinking belly that I heard from one of the gaolers about eight in the morning that Jesus Bar-Joseph had been turned over to the Prosecutor. I couldn’t at first think what the Sanhedrin was playing at, invoking Roman Law where its own could run, but whatever the reason I saw my own chance of survival going down the drain. A brilliant fanatic, preaching his doctrines of spiritual purity and that stuff, would be exactly the sort of man Pilate could earn a little cheap popula
rity by setting at liberty – and do no harm to his own interests. Not the man of action like me. Not the true rebel. And all his set – all Jesus Bar-Joseph’s set – would raise merry Hell to get him the pardon.
I wondered what had happened to my lot, whether they were trying to organize something or whether they were at sixes and sevens. I was a popular figure, of course, not only with my own followers but with many ordinary folk, particularly the young ones; but there were quite a few who wouldn’t break their hearts if I was hung on a piece of wood on Golgotha. The trouble with a movement like ours – founded as it partly is on terror – is that its sword always has two edges: one to cut down the oppressor, one to discipline the toadies and the faint-hearts in your own folk. So you have enmities both ways.
Down in the cell you could hear nothing and learn nothing, you waited quaking for the next step; and when it came – a while later – it was four guards, and I knew my hour had come. We were called out by name – first me and then Dysmas and Gestas – and we were shouldered together blinking into the startlingly bright light of the shadowed stone passage outside, and then we shuffled along, first along a tunnel, our chains clanking, then up a flight of steps into a tiny courtyard, with the thin spring sunlight beating against a wall. Here after a minute Dysmas and Gestas were taken off in one direction and me in another. A room with a Centurion by the window, holding his helmet and smoothing the plume; one of the soldiers unlocked my manacles, bent to free my ankles. I stood there rubbing wrists and waiting. The Centurion let me wait.
Then he said: ‘ You are free, dog. Get from here, and, if you are wise, do not show your face in Jerusalem again. The next time there will be no act of clemency to save you …’
Well, d’you know, the flood of relief fairly turned my knees to water in a way no prospect of death would have done. To my shame I had to be helped from the room. Then I was led, recovering all the way, through the Praetorium of Pilate’s palace and on to a balcony, where a huge crowd of people was milling about below. When they saw me they let out a great yell of joy. That was a moment – to feel free again, to be free to join my own, free to plot again and free to fight. Free to breathe the air and smell the sunshine and to live for tomorrow. I came near to blubbering like a weakling and recognized no face in all that crowd, though a voice now and then rang a familiar note in my ears.
I turned to go down the steps, and then saw that beyond the Procurator and a couple of his lackeys was this preacher, Jesus Bar-Joseph; and God, he was in a mess, his face bloodstained, with a sort of laurel wreath on his head, and blood dripping down his legs and on his shoes, and an old purple cloak round his shoulders. He looked like death. We stared at each other for a second or so, and I guessed then that I’d been right – it had been him or me to get the special pardon, but for some reason that I never expected it had come my way. A shiver went down my spine and I thought, out of here before they change their minds, the fools, the damned fools, the thrice-damned fools to give it to me.
I made him a little bow and went down the steps three at a time, and in a few seconds I was being greeted by all my Zealot friends, hugging and kissing me with delight; and in no time I was swallowed up and away. The whole crowd, with me in the middle, began to push and stream out of the square; but just before we got out of sight. I turned and saw them leading the preacher away. And I thought to myself, well, there but for the grace of God go I …
It wasn’t easy to keep my joy for long that day. They told me that Dysmas and Gestas had gone up the hill with the other Jesus to suffer the expected fate. I bathed and ate and had my cuts and bruises anointed in the house of John of Siloam; and spent the rest of the forenoon with him and four others making plans for the future. We all drank too much, and some of our plans were inflammatory to the point of suicide; but goading us to this, in the back of our minds all the time, was this thought of our two good comrades suffering a horrible death no more than a mile away. It was a special load on my soul for obvious reasons; but more often than not I had more thoughts for the other Jesus who had gone in my place. It didn’t seem just, to think more of him than of your closest friends, for he was no friend of mine; but maybe it was the similarity between us, our likeness in looks, the closeness of our names, the feeling that he was now in my place, like another me, as if he was dying in place of me. I tell you, it wasn’t comfortable at all.
John of Siloam told me that Judas of Kerioth had laid the information which had led to Bar-Joseph’s arrest, and I was not surprised. Some men are born joiners and born betrayers, and Judas son of Simon was such a one. He’d been a Zealot, and among the most eager for action, the most urgent to fight for the freedom of Israel; then things had gone wrong – it was while Peter of Bethany was our leader – and Judas had taken the hump and left us. Soon after this Peter was caught in the Galilean riots and cut to pieces, and, come to think of it now, I would not put it past Judas to have had a hand in the matter and manner of his death. Then he had joined the group around the Nazarene, and been hot with enthusiasm for everything they did and said.
That type, I reckon, in a revolutionary movement are the most dangerous bastards of all: it’s a sort of egoism in their nasty little souls that turns them sour. They have to join and, just as surely, they have to betray.
About an hour after mid-day there was a hell of a thunderstorm – in all my thirty years I remember none like it – and it crossed my mind to wonder whether the other Jesus was such easy prey after all. The stories you heard. Most of them were old men’s whisperings such as tag themselves on to any prophet with a following; but there were so many about this chap you almost thought there must be some fire where there was so much smoke.
The people I was with stared out at the crawling clouds and the rent sky and whispered among themselves – no rain, not a drop of rain – just lightning and thunder and the smell of sulphur. I thought of Dysmas and Gestas and thought: better the bolt to strike them, put them out of their agony, poor devils; better the bolt to strike on Golgotha.
By the time the sun was down the sky, the storm had passed, but it left no sense of relief behind it. It wasn’t like summer thunder that clears the air. And now we are all drunk. Not surprisingly we were all drunk. If you can drink enough it brings forgetfulness. I’ve a strong stomach but I hadn’t the guts to go up there and see my two friends and try to comfort them. I despised myself for it.
But a man came just then to tell us. Simeon of Gilboa. A nasty little rant with a snivelling nose. He’d just come from there. He was the sort who always was there, and in a way I hated his bones because of it. They weren’t dead yet, he said, but nearly. The other Jesus was dead. He’d died about an hour ago. And Dysmas had made some sort of a pact with him to meet in the next world. He’d been quite carried away by his sufferings and called this Jesus Master, or some such, and Jesus, poor crazed man, had acknowledged it like a king and had promised him a special seat in Heaven. Simeon of Gilboa always had a filthy nose in the cold weather, and all the time he told this he sniffed and snuffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. So suddenly I could stand no more of it and shoved the wine flagon away so that it toppled over and hobbled red wine like blood on the floor, and wiped my own nose and went to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ asked John of Siloam, and I said: ‘Up the hill,’ and he said: ‘ Then I’ll come with you.’
Golgotha’s on top of this hill, and a couple of hundred yards north-west of the city wall by the Gate of Ephraim, and seeing crosses and gibbets up there is nothing unusual. I hardly ever remember when there was not something dangling in the wind. Today there was a cold air blowing after the storm, and great clouds still mustered over the Mount of Olives, so that the flat roofs of the city glinted like slates wet by the fitful sunshine. The first thing I saw on the hill was that there were two crosses only. The crowds that always gather for these executions were gone, but a few people were still dotted among the boulders, and we passed a group whispering together, and John wanted to stop and a
sk, but I grasped his arm and we went on.
Just for a minute I thought: what if he’s gone, up to Heaven in a thunderbolt, taking cross and all; that’ll be a shock for them; but when I got near I saw the middle cross was lying on the ground, and two soldiers of the Oppressors were standing by it. It was empty. My eyes went to my two old comrades and I saw, thank God, that they were now both dead. They’d been put out of their misery by having their legs broken, but they still hung there like two dreadful plucked fowls waiting for buyers in the market. There was the usual mess of blood and stuff underfoot. They didn’t seem to be human any more, that was perhaps the worst thing.
I would have gone up to one of the soldiers to ask what had happened to the holy man, but this time John pulled me away and edged me towards a group of our own folk. They told us that two members of the Sanhedrin – of all people – had asked for the preacher’s body and were just now putting it in a tomb of their own. I followed their pointing fingers and saw a group of white-clad men clustered about the entrance to a cave-tomb, and not far from them some Galilean women watching.
I had a sense of disappointment. I suppose when you feel the bitter disappointment I had felt this last year since taking over from Peter of Bethany – and especially this last month or so – when you’ve been through all that, and in the cold of the night when you see most truly you can only see ahead of you a long vista of hopeless rebellion – with no strength but men’s minds and hearts against all the legions of Rome – then against your best sense you long for a miracle; and I suppose at the back of my mind – especially after the last talk with him – had been the crazy hope that this other Jesus might have been as good as his word and pulled something off. Come down from his cross and blasted the Praetorium; destroyed Herod Antipas; cut a swathe through the maniples of Rome …