Fresh news arriving in the port of Caesarea canceled that expectation for Procula, who had always sympathized with Agrippina. The distraught Drusus, all hope of release exhausted, had begun to curse Tiberius. His blasts were carefully recorded by his guards, and later read to the Senate. No more meals were brought to Drusus’s cell. The hapless youth spent the final eight days of his life chewing the stuffing out of his mattress in a delirious quest for nourishment.
Mother Agrippina fared little better. Crushed by the loss of her second son, she starved herself to death on the isle of Pandateria. By a quirk of fate, she died the same day on which her archenemy Sejanus had been executed two years earlier. Hardly saddened by these tidings, Tiberius boasted to the Senate that at least Agrippina had not been strangled or thrown down the Stairs of Mourning, as would have befitted her treason and masculine ambition. The conscript fathers thanked the princeps for his mercy.
To Pilate and Procula, it was a clear revelation that Tiberius had always been suspicious of Agrippina and her brood. While Sejanus had played on this suspicion for his own advancement, the emperor’s mistrust lingered on even after the prefect had been swept away. But there was a last son of Agrippina to whom the aging princeps showed some favor, Gaius, the youngest. He was called Caligula, which meant “Little Boots,” or “Bootsie,” a nickname conferred on him by the troops of his father Germanicus when, as a small boy, he strutted about in his own little soldier’s uniform, complete with miniature boots. Tiberius had sheltered Caligula from the schemes of Sejanus by keeping him at Capri. Shrewdly, the youth avoided showing any grief at the destruction of his mother and brothers lest he be sent their way. Instead, he carefully aped the moods and fancies of the princeps, answering his every whim. Rome sensed that a grooming process was underway, and that Tiberius’s teenage understudy on Capri would likely succeed him. Caligula now celebrated his marriage to the daughter of a senator, and, like all higher officials in the Empire, the prefect of Judea was careful to honor the heir apparent with a present, a large and handsomely wrought silver urn from Phoenicia.
Occasionally Pilate thought back to the events in Jerusalem. Despite all his arguments before Procula in defense of his conduct, a nagging twinge of conscience told him that he had not played a hero’s role in the Jewish capital, and that either an innocent man had gone to the cross from his tribunal, or someone guilty of religious indiscretions had been punished too severely. He cursed his removing the jus gladii from the Sanhedrin. If he hadn’t, the case of Jesus of Nazareth would never have crossed his tribunal. Damn Sejanus! Damn his needling pressure!
Pilate wanted to forget. But events seemed to conspire to prevent his forgetting. Jerusalem was a hotbed of rumor. There were reports that the risen Jesus had been sighted on a mountain in Galilee, by the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, around the suburbs of Jerusalem. Later accounts even had it that he had soared into the heavens, leaving the earth at the Mount of Olives.
But the stories which both amused and yet alarmed Pilate concerned the resiliency of Jesus’ adherents. Inexplicably, instead of running off to Galilee and hiding, his disciples were braving the ire of the Sanhedrin and remaining in Jerusalem. And they weren’t being very quiet about it either. The tribune at the Antonia wrote that on a Jewish holiday called Pentecost, he had led a squad of men to control a crowd which had gathered round the house where Jesus’ followers were staying. They were addressing the people in a dozen different languages, so that all visiting pilgrims would be able to understand. Some thought it was gibberish and jeered, “They’re all drunk!” That was when the impressive hulk of a man, Peter, smiled good-naturedly and replied, “No…we haven’t been drinking. It’s only nine o’clock in the morning!” That brought a laugh which Peter used to launch into some kind of moving oratory, the tribune wrote, for afterward about three thousand of the crowd joined Peter’s cause. Pilate might be interested in a phrase from Peter’s address: “By the deliberate plan of God, you used pagan gentiles to crucify Jesus of Nazareth. But God restored him to life again, and made him both Lord and Messiah.”
Pilate replied by return courier that the tribune was to keep the movement under close surveillance. The fact that three thousand should suddenly wish to join the following of someone who had been crucified seven weeks earlier was both incredible and ominous. Any seditious preaching or any resort to arms was to be reported at once. As to Peter’s statement that it was by their god’s determination that the Jews used Pilate and his Roman auxiliaries for the execution, he could make no sense of it. Why should the Hebrew god want Romans to do the dirty work?
The tribune’s next report stated that there was nothing undercover about the movement. The leaders taught the people openly in the temple. One afternoon, two of them healed a lifelong cripple who was a fixture at one of the temple gates. When the worshipers saw him dancing around the precincts for joy, they ran up to the disciples in amazement. Again it was Peter who preached a powerful message and several thousand more joined their cause. He said nothing treasonable. He didn’t even mention Rome except to tell the people that they had repudiated the innocent Jesus when Pilate wanted to release him. At least they had the story straight, the tribune commented, and apparently they bore no deep grudge against the prefect. But the captain of the temple guard arrested the two disciples and threw them into prison. Next day, the Sanhedrin heard their case, but finally let them off with a warning, since they could hardly condemn men who had just healed a cripple.
When the commandant’s third report arrived, Pilate was beginning to wish the man were not so faithful a correspondent, since this message would probably contain more of the inexplicable. He was not disappointed. Jerusalem now reverberated with interest in the risen Jesus, the tribune wrote, and the wonders of healing the disciples were performing in his name. Townspeople were actually carrying the beds of their sick into the streets so that the disciples might cure them. Again the religious establishment tried to check the movement by arresting its leaders, but they escaped from prison and resumed their teaching in the temple. At another hearing before the Sanhedrin, they were ordered to stop their missionizing. They refused, claiming, “We must obey God rather than men.” A motion was introduced to condemn them to death, but it was defeated when Rabbi Gamaliel advised leaving them alone. The movement was either of human or divine origin, he argued. If human, it would collapse of itself, as had the causes of all pseudo-Messiahs before Yeshu Hannosri; but if divine, it would he irresistible, for who could fight God? The Sanhedrin had the disciples flogged and then discharged with a warning. Nevertheless, they were carrying on and winning more converts. But no, the tribune wrote, nothing they preached seemed politically dangerous. On the other hand, if the prefect wished them detained for questioning he would arrest them.
Pilate wondered what to do about this “Jewish subsect in-the-making,” as he now styled the Jesus-inspired movement. Arrest the nucleus of leaders? No. No, for the same reason that the Sanhedrin probably took no action. One religio-political trial had been quite enough at this time for both the Jewish and the Roman hierarchy. No, because the disciples seemed innocent of charges which would concern Rome, though the rate at which they were attracting adherents was disturbing. No, since it was even a little gratifying to see how a dead man could inspire this kind of loyalty. No, because he couldn’t care less if the Jews, who were already fractured into various competing groups and parties, should now spawn an additional tiny and insignificant offshoot, call them Jesusians, Nazarenes, Messians, or whatever. They would linger a short time, he confidently predicted, and then die out.