“They won’t come in,” Peter said, a tiny note of doubt in his voice. “They can see that this is a Jewish matter. They don’t care if we kill each other.”
“Just watch Judas and Simon,” I said. “If one of them starts with that no-master-but-God thing, the Romans will come down like an executioner’s blade.”
Finally, Joshua was out of breath, soaked in sweat, and barely able to swing the coil of rope he was carrying, but the Temple was clear of merchants. A large crowd had started to follow him, shouting at the vendors as Joshua drove them out of the Temple. The crowd (probably eight hundred to a thousand people) was the only thing that kept the priests from calling the guards down on Joshua right then. Josh tossed the rope aside and led the crowd back to where we had been watching in horror.
“Thieves,” he said to us breathlessly as he passed. Then he went to a little girl with a withered arm who had been waiting beside Judas.
“Pretty scary, huh?” Joshua said to her.
She nodded. Joshua put his hands over her withered arm.
“Are those guys in the tall hats coming over here?”
She nodded again.
“Here, can you make this sign with your finger?”
He showed her how to stick out her middle finger. “No, not with that hand, with this one.”
Joshua took his hand away from her withered arm and she wiggled her fingers. The muscle and tendons had filled out until it looked identical to her other arm.
“Now,” Joshua said, “make that sign. That’s good. Now show it to those guys behind me with the tall hats. That’s a good girl.”
“By whose authority do you perform these healings,” said one of the priests, obviously the highest-ranking of the group.
“No master—” Simon began to shout but he was cut off by a vicious blow to the solar plexus from Peter, who then pushed the Zealot to the ground and sat on him while furiously whispering in his ear. Andrew had come up behind Judas and seemed to be delivering a similar lecture without benefit of the body blow.
Josh took a little boy from his mother’s arms and held him. The boy’s legs waved in the air as if they had no bones at all. Without looking away from the boy, Joshua said, “By what authority did John baptize?”
The priests looked around among themselves. The crowd moved in closer. We were in Judea, John’s territory. The priests knew better than to challenge John’s authority under God in front of a crowd this size, but they certainly weren’t going to confirm it for Joshua’s sake, either. “We can’t say at this time,” said the priest.
“Then I can’t say either,” said Joshua. He stood the little boy on his feet and held him steady as the boy’s legs took his full weight, probably for the first time ever. The boy wobbled like a newborn colt and Joshua caught him and laughed. He took the boy’s shoulders and helped him walk back to his mother, then he turned on the priests and looked at them for the first time.
“You would test me? Test me. Ask me what you will, you vipers, but I will heal these people and they shall know the word of God in spite of you.”
Philip had moved up behind me during this speech and he whispered, “Can’t you knock him out or something with your methods from the East? We have to get him out of here before he says any more.”
“I think we’re too late, John,” I said. “Just don’t let the crowd disperse. Go out into the city and bring more. The crowd is his only protection now. And find Joseph of Arimathea too. He might be able to help if this gets out of hand.”
“This isn’t out of hand?”
“You know what I mean.”
The inquisition went on for two hours, with the priests concocting every verbal trap they could think of, and Joshua wiggling out sometimes, and blundering through at others. I looked for some way to get Joshua out of the Temple without him being arrested, but the more I looked, the more I noticed that the guards had moved down off the walls and were hovering around the gates to the courtyard.
Meanwhile the chief priest droned on: “A man dies and leaves no sons, but his wife marries his brother, who has three sons by his first wife…[and on] The three of them leave Jericho and head south, going three point three furlongs per hour, but they are leading two donkeys, which can carry two…[and on] So the Sabbath ends, and they are able to resume, adding on the thousand steps allowed under the law…and the wind is blowing southwest at two furlongs per hour…[and on] How much water will be required for the journey? Give your answer in firkins.”
“Five,” Joshua said, as soon as they stopped speaking. And all were amazed.
The crowd roared. A woman shouted, “Surely he is the Messiah.”
“The Son of God has come,” said another.
“You guys aren’t helping,” I shouted back at them.
“You didn’t show your work, you didn’t show your work,” chanted the youngest of the priests.
Judas and Matthew had been scratching out the problem on the paving stones of the courtyard as the priest recited, but they had long since lost track. They looked up and shook their heads.
“Five,” Joshua repeated.
The priests looked around among themselves. “That’s right, but that doesn’t give you authority to heal in the Temple.”
“In three days, there will be no Temple, for I’ll destroy it, and you nest of vipers with it. And three days after that, a new Temple shall be built in honor of my father.”
And then I grabbed him around the chest and started dragging him toward the gate. The other apostles followed the plan and moved around us in a wedge. Beyond that, the crowd pressed in. Hundreds moved along with us.
“Wait, I’m not done!” Joshua yelled.
“Yes you are.”
“Surely the true king of Israel has come to bring forth the kingdom,” one woman shouted.
Peter smacked her on the back of the head. “Stop helping.”
By the sheer mass of the crowd we were able to get Joshua out of the Temple and through the streets to Joseph of Arimathea’s house.
Joseph let us in and led us to the upper room, which had a high arched stone ceiling, rich carpets on the floors and walls, piles of cushions, and a long low table for dining. “You’re safe here, but I don’t know for how long. They’ve already called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.”
“But we just left the Temple,” I said. “How?”
“You should have let them take me,” Joshua said.
“The table will be set for the Passover feast of the Essenes,” Joseph said. “Stay here for supper.”
“Celebrate the Passover early? Why?” John asked. “Why celebrate with the Essenes?”
Joseph looked away from Joshua when he answered. “Because at the Essenes’ feast, they don’t kill a lamb.”
Tuesday
We all slept that night in the upper room of Joseph’s house. In the morning Joshua went downstairs. He was gone for a bit, then came back up the stairs.
“They won’t let me leave,” he said.
“They?”
“The apostles. My own apostles won’t let me leave.” He went back to the stairway. “You’re interfering with the will of God!” he shouted down. He turned back to me. “Did you tell them not to let me leave?”
“Me? Yep.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I sent Nathaniel to Simon’s to fetch Maggie. He returned alone. Maggie wouldn’t talk to him, but Martha did. Temple soldiers had been there, Josh.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, so? They were there to arrest you.”
“Let them.”
“Joshua, you don’t have to sacrifice yourself to prove this point. I’ve been thinking about it all night. You can negotiate.”
“With the Lord?”
“Abraham did it. Remember? Over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He starts out getting the Lord to agree to spare the cities if he can find fifty righteous men, but by the end, he talks God down to ten. You can try something like that.”
“That’s not completely the point, Biff.” Here he came over to me, but I found I couldn’t look him in the eye, so I went to one of the large arched windows that looked down on the street. “I’m afraid of this—of what’s going to happen. I can think of a dozen things I’d rather do this week than be sacrificed, but I know that it has to happen. When I told the priests that I would tear the Temple down in three days, I meant that all the corruption, all the pretense, all the ritual of the Temple that keeps men from knowing God would be destroyed. And on the third day, when I come back, everything will be new, and the kingdom of God will be everywhere. I’m coming back, Biff.”