“He drove them out with a whip, but that was not why He was executed.”
“Of course it was! I saw Him, I spoke with Him! He was human just like you or me! But He did not say He was the Messiah because He wasn’t! He was a man, a wretched, decent, and honest man like you or me! He was getting on, His beard turning gray, His face a bit puffy; He prayed and then they came for Him on the Friday at daybreak, took Him off and later on the two rogues as well, who had also not been sentenced!”
Marcellus listened aghast.
“The only reason I wasn’t executed was because I’m a Roman citizen! And after that I had dinner at Pilate’s place!” Uri declared. “He executed Jewish prisoners as a deterrent, and specifically at Passover, so it would be witnessed by the multitudes and they wouldn’t get any ideas about rising in rebellion. Because they had done so not long before! He had no idea who exactly he was putting to death! He wasn’t interested either! Pilate was afraid of provocation back then and also of Vitellius, with good reason, too, because it was Vitellius who got rid of him in the end!”
Marcellus held his peace.
“Herod Antipas was also there!” Uri affirmed. “He just happened to be there… He wasn’t in the habit of making pilgrimages to Jerusalem; Galilee falls outside the area where making the pilgrimage is compulsory, but he happened to be there because Vitellius had been threatening him, too, and he wanted to ally with Pilate! What do your people have to say about that? What were you told?”
Marcellus kept a strained silence before finally speaking:
“Antipas also interrogated the Messiah and referred Him back to Pilate…”
Uri groaned out loud.
“Your Anointed hero was a man! A man! I was jailed with Him, saw Him from an arm’s length away!”
Overcome with hatred, Marcellus hissed:
“You never did time in prison! You never even traveled to Jerusalem! You never dined with Pilate!”
One of Sophocles’s dictums is that there is nothing worse than man.
Carneades, on the other hand, wrote that notions about nonexistent objects come into being in the same way as those regarding existing ones, and they are just as effective as the latter, the proof being that they result in real acts. Men therefore act according to what they believe in; whether those beliefs are true or not makes no difference.
Flora did not turn up for a few days. That happened every now and again; she took water to other places and obviously made love to other men, but Uri asked no questions about what had happened, setting high store on the fact that she never asked for money in return. When she next brought water Uri was not as chipper as usual, and indeed she asked him what the matter was.
“I had a meeting with my son,” Uri muttered. “It was rather depressing.”
Flora still did not understand, but she did not ask for further details, preferring to pump him about whether or not he would prefer her hair long and straight, because there was an ointment available which straightens curly hair. Uri did his best to talk her out of the nostrum. The lovemaking ensued eventually but was not as sweet as it had been previously, and Uri had a feeling that this had also reached its end.
Marcellus lounged about at home, eating the whole day long, doing what he had done as a boy in Puteoli, only now he had an ideology to wheel out in its defense. Uri would politely inquire whether he might wish, by any chance, to earn a bit toward covering the cost of his upkeep, to which Marcellus would respond with deep conviction that he was now a holy man, the Holy Ghost was laboring inside him and a New World was here, it would spread, gradually perhaps, to take in the entire world, and then everything would change: everything that had been on high would be set down low, and everything that had been lower down would be set on high, and there would no longer be any need to labor.
“You might at least ask to be given back your tessera!” Uri would growl.
Marcellus would be offended:
“I endowed that on the congregation! I can’t ask for it back! It’s my gift!”
“Endowments are for the rich to make! You’re poor!”
“No, I’m not poor! I became rich through giving it to them!”
Uri was silenced; there was some truth in that dialectic.
“You’re just Jews who’ve gotten taken for a ride, my dear son,” he eventually grumbled irately. “You don’t even know what you’re scared of!”
“Of what, then?” Marcellus riposted insolently.
“Of Rome, my dear son!”
That was far over Marcellus’s head. He blinked at his father. The old fool! He’s a captive of the old, invalidated world, ripe for dying! Such a pity that he too would be resurrected.
Uri was quite sure that he had been invited back to the assemblies of the Nazarenes, but apparently they had sent their messages via Marcellus, who had chosen not to pass them on. Uri would not have gone among them another time anyway, but he was grateful to his son for making it possible to have visited the one time, and he pondered why it was that he viewed these pleasant, pure, noble-spirited people as frightening.
He tried to discount Marcellus, but even so they remained frightening.
Idolizing an emperor who is setting himself up as a god is very human because it holds out the promise of any number of advantages, and so everyone at least pretends to believe in it. An emperor is like his currency: a real object given in return for simulated belief.
It is superstitious to believe in the succor of a pagan deity, but what is a bewildered person, left on his own and terrified of death, supposed to do if he gets into trouble, or if a fatal disease afflicts him or one of those whom he loves? He will race over to a statue of the deity, embrace its feet, and whisper his wishes into its ear, and if by any chance these should be fulfilled, he will put up a plaque of thanksgiving.
Believing in an Eternal One who does not have a human face and demonstrably has had no hand in human affairs for millenia is also not foolish: a person thereby belongs to a community that protects him in direst need with the alms and pe’ah, nurses them in the event of illness, and does not even cast aside unwanted children, irrespective of whether a person is a Sadducee, a Pharisee, or an Essene. All these systems of belief, as Uri now saw it, were in fact mutually exclusive in a radical fashion, and it was merely out of laziness that believers in these various religions were all called Jews. They believed themselves to be the chosen people of a one and only God; fair enough, but so did the Samaritans, who slaughtered other Jews because they had in turn slaughtered them.
The religion of the Jews had long not been one religion; maybe there never had been just one, not even when Moses led them out of Egypt.
There were still Jews only among those living in minority communities, threatened and hard-pressed, like in Alexandria. Wherever they were in the majority — as in large parts of Judaea and Galilee — there were no longer any Jews, though no one had put it into words, and the Jews themselves were not aware of it either yet.
In the rural villages, Jews were still Jews, and there, they were ignorant of any other faith; although their naïve faith was not that of the priests, they were not aware of this and they were happy to offer ritual dues to the Temple.
The religion of the Jews of Rome was also faithless — like every Roman religion. Customs and ceremonies half-heartedly adhered to, strictly supervised. The Kahal as an institution operated in an earthly fashion, committing earthly crimes; just like any other community, its true god was Mammon. The Jews of Rome were wrong to protest that the ancient laws of crafts did not apply to them — the Jew-hating officials of Rome saw that much more clearly.
But to believe in a man who was killed and rose again from the dead, and to say that He is the Anointed, even though there had been no drastic change in the world — that was more grievous than any superstition.