King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (59 page)

Jesus lifted a hand for silence and told the priests a parable. “A land-owner planted a vineyard, hedged it securely about, hewed a wine-vat from the rock, and then, being suddenly called abroad, let it out to tenants. After three years, as the agreement was, he sent an agent to collect the rent, but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Another went to them and they wounded him in the head, and a third they nearly killed. When the land-owner heard this news, he was very angry. He sent his own son, whom he loved dearly, to collect the rent that was due and demand reparation for the injuries to his servants ; for the tenants would surely respect him. But they said to one another : ‘Here comes the heir, let us kill him and the vineyard will be ours. The owner is far away ; we are safe from his vengeance.’ Smooth-spoken son of the High Priest—you who smiled to hear that John, the prophet of the Lord, had been sacrificed to the adulteress of Sepphoris—confess, did you not plot murder last night against a Son of David born at Bethlehem of Judah ?”

The Chief Archivist stood speechless, his mouth agape. “Come, let us leave this madman to his raving,” said the Captain of the Temple, plucking him by the sleeve.

As they turned and left Jesus in possession of the field, he sent this arrow after them : “You spoke of my rejection by the builders of this Temple. Have you not read the psalm in which King David says : ‘You have thrust cruelly at me, but the Lord saved me from falling’? And again : ‘Open to me the gates of righteousness ; I will go through and praise the Lord. The stone which the builders refused has become the quoin that bears up the roof’ ?”

The crowd swelled still further, and he resumed his preaching.

Herod Antipas, who had arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover, was alarmed. His servants told him that Jesus was inciting the pilgrim crowds against Herodias and himself as the murderers of John the Baptist. What was he to do? He had no jurisdiction in Judaea, and was on equally bad terms with the Great Sanhedrin, the High Court and Pontius Pilate the Roman Governor-General, whom he had recently offended by refusing to support him when, in defiance of the Law, he introduced into the City a set of votive shields inscribed with the Emperor’s name. But it was not for nothing that Jesus had styled him a fox. He knew a question that Jesus could hardly answer without embarrassment, and he knew the right man to ask it—his bitter-mouthed estate-steward Chuza.

Chuza was not afraid to accept the charge. He went at once to the Court of the Gentiles, thrust his way through the crowd with knees and elbows, and emerging close to where Jesus stood, interrupted his discourse with the reiterated cry : “A question! A question !”

The disciples tried to silence him, but he persisted : “A question! A question !”

“Ask on, importunate one,” said Jesus at last.

“Does the Law permit us to pay the poll-tax to Caesar ?”

When Chuza asked this question the crowd, tense with emotion, believed that it was pre-arranged : Jesus, who had so far spoken only of the glories of the past, was about to commit himself to an open defiance of the Romans. “Ah,” they sighed expectantly.

He asked in pretended innocence : “The poll-tax? In what coin is a Jew called upon to pay Caesar? Have you a coin to show me ?”

Chuza produced from the corner of his kerchief a new silver denarius. Jesus examined it for a long time, turning it over and over in his hands. At last he asked : “Pray, tell me : who is this mournful-looking man in the laurel-wreath ?”

A tremendous laugh went up and it was some time before Chuza’s answer could be heard : “It is Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Emperor of the Romans.”

Jesus cast the coin from him with repulsion. “Dare you bring this thing into the Temple ?” he shouted indignantly.

Chuza met anger with anger. Picking up the fallen coin and carefully knotting it into his kerchief again, he shouted loudly : “The fault is yours ; I had counted on changing it at the Basilica, but you drove away the money-changers. And now that you have seen and handled it, answer my question without prevarication.”

“Do not pay God what is Caesar’s, nor Caesar what is God’s.”

The meaning of this statement has often been argued, though in the context in which it was spoken it conveyed only one sense : “Jehovah is your sole sovereign ; and in paying your debt of life to him you must bring him nothing tainted with the Gentile curse.” It followed that all taxation, except the Temple-tax authorized in Deuteronomy, was illegal, and that if the Jews were to keep their lives untainted, they must expel the Romans from their shores. But since Jesus had not committed himself to an answer which would have justified the Captain of the Temple in arresting him, Chuza, never at a loss, took advantage of its ambiguity. He answered boldly : “Chuza thanks you—Chuza, estate-steward to Herod Antipas the Tetrarch. I am glad to know that you approve of paying Caesar what is Caesar’s. My wife Joanna, greatly against my wishes, has been financing your ministry ; infatuated, I doubt not, by your cheap eloquence. Yet I am glad to know that whatever your morals may be—for my wife confesses that three or four well-known prostitutes are of your party—you are at least a loyal supporter of Rome. If I thought otherwise, I should take a stick to her and beat this nonsense out of her.” Then he bawled : “Make way there !” and forced his way out again.

Chuza succeeded where the Chief Archivist had failed, for a crowd is always impressed by a bold, angry man whose wits are sharpened by a private grievance. Jesus’s audience broke up into a number of hotly disputing groups, and when he attempted to speak again he was greeted with such a hubbub of questions and counter-questions that he disdained to answer. With a curt, contemptuous signal of dismissal he stepped from the stair, and limped, chin high, down the lane that opened for him, and then out of the Court by the nearest gate, his disciples following behind.

An hour or so later he was back again, unrecognized because of the richly embroidered cloak that he now wore. With impassive face and resolute bearing he threaded his way through the crowd, making for the Chamber of the Hearth, where by ancient tradition a fire was kept burning for the Messiah and his cushioned throne stood behind a low barrier of gilt railings. Peter and Andrew were already standing outside, amicably teasing the Levite sentry at the entrance. Jesus greeted Peter and Andrew and then said gently : “Make way, porter! I would be seated on my throne.”

The sentry smiled at what he thought was another jest. “Man, are you mad? If you go in there and seat yourself on the throne, fire from Heaven will scorch you up. It is the seat of the Anointed One !”

“Who is the Anointed One ?”

“Are you a fool, or do you take me for one? He is the Son of David, who will lead the armies of Israel against their oppressors. Only he may sit on that throne !”

“Then why do you bar my path ?”

“Are you then the Son of David ?”

“King David himself says in the psalm : ‘The God of Israel said to my Lord’—meaning the Messiah—“ ‘sit at my right hand until I make a footstool of your foes”.’ How can the Son of David be the Messiah? Does a father address his son as ‘my Lord’ ?”

While the sentry’s slow mind was puzzling over the question, Jesus slipped past into the Chamber. The sentry grasped his truncheon and ran after him ; but Andrew tripped him up, Peter disarmed him, and between them they gagged his mouth with a kerchief. They were alone in the Chamber. Jesus stepped over the barrier and solemnly seated himself on the throne of the Messiah. He said to Peter and Andrew : “Remove the gag !” and to the Levite : “Go in peace, man! Tell the Captain of the Temple that you have seen the Son of David seated on the Throne of David.” The Levite stumbled off in anguish of mind.

Presently Jesus descended from the throne, to saunter out of the Chamber and then out of the Temple again, still unrecognized. Levites with truncheons rushed wildly about in search of him, and the tremendous news ran through the crowd : “Jesus of Nazareth has dared to sit in the Messiah’s seat, yet no harm has overtaken him !”

That same morning Jesus had told his disciples : “I have a great longing to eat the Passover in the manner of my fathers. Why should we deny ourselves flesh-food and eat only fish and unleavened bread? Let us eat both the flesh and the fat.” Judas was sent with a private request to Nicodemon son of Gorion for a room in which to eat the meal.

This was the Thursday of the week and, as it happened that year, the Passover fell on a Saturday ; therefore, according to a ruling of Shammai’s the disciples could not roast the Paschal lamb on the Friday evening, because the prescribed moment for the roasting is sunset, and the Sabbath day begins at the previous sunset, and work is forbidden on the Sabbath, and roasting is work. Shammai’s solution was to celebrate the Feast on the Thursday night and the Galileans had adopted it, with Levite permission, though the Judaeans followed a ruling of Hillel’s, by which the Passover was held superior to the Sabbath, so that the meal might legitimately be eaten on the Friday evening.

Judas went to Nicodemon’s son, who agreed on his father’s behalf to provide an upper room, also the lamb, the wine and all that was necessary ; only let Jesus be discreet, allow nobody to know to whom he was indebted for the entertainment, and conceal his identity from the inmates of the house.

“Where will this room be ?”

“I cannot tell you yet, but an hour before sunset one of my watermen
will be watching in the Street of Coopers, at the end nearest the Temple, and he will take you to the place.”

“I thank you on behalf of my Master. But, my lord, if I should wish to speak to your father urgently—for I fear that my Master will put himself into great danger before the day is out—how can I do this without bringing trouble to your house ?”

“Knock at the little door next the stables, to the right of the entrance gate. Say that you have come for the copying work. I will arrange for a confidential clerk to admit you.”

So now when Jesus left the Temple, which was thronged with Galileans carrying lambs for sacrificial slaughter by the Levite butchers, he sent Peter and John ahead to the Street of Coopers, where the waterman was looking out for them. They were led to a house in a side street and asked the porter there : “The guest-room for our Master to eat the Passover with us ?” The porter conducted them to a large upper room where they found everything prepared down to the smallest detail : lustral water, basins and towels laid out ; the table set for thirteen ; a batch of Passover bread ready for the oven ; the wine decanted into flagons ; the endives cleaned and shredded ; the ingredients for the sweet sauce carefully measured ; a fine fat lamb already skinned and gutted, and with its sacred shoulder removed for Levite eating, suspended from a hook. Nicodemon’s son had even been thoughtful enough to supply the thirteen wayfaring staffs, cut from a hedge, which the company must have with them during the meal, in memory of their ancestors’ hasty flight from Egypt.

Peter went out on the balcony which served as kitchen, lighted the fire, fanned it into a blaze, and at the exact moment of nightfall, when the trumpets sounded from the Temple Hill, took the lamb, impaled it on the traditional spit of pomegranate-wood and began to roast it. This spit is another evident relic of the Canaanite cult of Rimmon the Pomegranate-god which, as has already been mentioned, was swallowed up about the time of King Saul by the cult of Jehovah ; the lamb must once have been dedicated to Rimmon and may well have superseded a child victim, a surrogate of the god himself, though of this no tradition remains among the Jews. Similarly, the wayfaring staffs seem to be relics of those carried in ancient times by the celebrants of Rimmon when they performed the
Pesach
, a hobbling dance in invocation of their god, from which the festival derives its Hebrew name. Those who have taken part in the Dionysian Mysteries will understand precisely what I mean, though pious Jews would be horrified to think that there was even the least connexion between the cult of Dionysus and that of Jehovah ; for the explanation of the festival in terms of the story of the Exodus from Egypt under Moses is universally accepted by them.

What Jesus had said about longing to eat flesh-food had sounded doubly strange in Judas’s ears : he was breaking not only a private rule that he had kept since his youth, but a principle publicly laid down by Hillel, that the Passover lamb must not be eaten gluttonously as if it
were ordinary flesh, but must be regarded as the symbol of a common participation of all Jews in the mercies of Jehovah. In theory the lamb might not be eaten by fewer persons than ten or by more than twenty, but this rule was observed only in strict Sadducee households. The obligation to hospitality among the Pharisaic synagogue-goers was such that throughout Jerusalem house-doors stood open for all to enter who could find room at table, and the lamb of a single household might well be shared among two or three hundred persons. The official ruling was : “To partake of the Passover you shall eat a piece of the victim no smaller than an olive,” which explains the proverb : “Though the Passover be but an olive, let the
Hallel
(the hymn of praise) split the roof.”

The Temple priesthood would doubtless have opposed this ruling, which curtailed their dues, if they had been able to cope with the work of slaughtering enough lambs to feed the army of pilgrims who came up to eat the Passover : but to provide a victim for every twenty persons in a crowd of at least two or three hundred thousand was manifestly impossible in the course of a single evening. The Levite butchers began work in the exact middle of the afternoon and worked with extraordinary dexterity and speed, while the priests formed an endless chain between the slaughtering-blocks and the altar, passing from hand to hand small silver tumblers each containing a few drops of a victim’s blood, and passing them back again as soon as the contents had been poured on the altar. Hour after hour they kept up the action, like automatons worked by a swinging pendulum, and when the evening trumpet blast ended their labours were like men who wake up exhausted after prolonged nightmare. That Jesus ate this Passover with his disciples in private and with doors shut, and with a whole victim provided for the consumption of only thirteen men, is therefore worthy of remark, even when the need for secrecy is granted.