Chapter 4

‘What’s this Sanhedrin?’ demanded Aulus scornfully.

‘The Jews’ law-making body.’

‘I thought Rome made their laws.’

‘Just the laws on taxes. The Sanhedrin attends to the rest of it.’

‘You surely have a strange talent,’ observed Aulus, ‘for collecting useless information. What else do you know about Jewish laws?’

‘Only that there are far too many of them. Why, a Jew can be arrested for dragging a chair across his dooryard on the Sabbath! It might dig a little furrow in the ground—and that would be ploughing.’

‘I think you made that up, Timmie,’ chuckled Aulus. ‘But—be that as it may—perhaps this wise Ben-Judah, in the course of a journey, turned aside to listen to the prattle of this fool, just as we did—out of curiosity.’

‘Possibly; but it is much more likely that some influential people are spying on this hermit. He himself is a Jew, and he is talking to his own countrymen. Surely the Temple can’t afford to let this fellow go on, gathering up a bigger crowd every day, shouting that the world is so bad it needs to be cleansed. That’s the Temple’s exclusive business: to see that the world—or at least the Jewish world, which is all that matters in this country—behaves itself. These learned lawyers and rabbis surely cannot permit a fiery prophet to march across Judaea, informing thousands of people that their land is filthy with graft, greed, and injustice, all the way from top to bottom; and that his God—who is also theirs—means to take the whole job of renovation out of the hands of the recognized authorities, and attend to it personally!’

Aulus grinned at this long speech and again rose to his feet.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he drawled. ‘In that case, they will probably toss the hermit into a dungeon—and forget about him. And so will the people. If a man dies a bloody death as a martyr to some new idea, the people remember, and build him a monument; but if he gets pitched into prison—Pouf! Let him rot!’ Aulus dusted his hands and sauntered away.

After a while the handsome man with the deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and the notch on his ear turned his head slowly toward Fara and coolly looked her over.

‘Which way are you headed, young man?’ he inquired in Aramaic, signifying that he considered her a Jew.

‘I am going west, sir,’ replied Fara in Greek, ‘as far as Gaza.’

‘Ever been there?’ asked Tim, and when Fara had shaken her head, he remarked, ‘Very fine place—to lose your shirt and have your throat cut. Let me warn you to ride straight down the middle of the street and have nothing to do with any of the inhabitants. Do not eat their food or drink their water or believe their lies.’