And the land shall mourn, every family apart : the family of the House of David apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the House of Nathan apart, and their wives apart.
The family of the House of Levi apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the House of Simeon apart, and their wives apart.
All the families that remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.
Judas, who had waited all morning in company with the other witnesses outside the Residency, his mind torn between hope and terror, understood at last that Nicodemon’s scheme had miscarried and that Jesus had been condemned to the cross. When finally the witnesses in the case were dismissed, he ran along to the Temple and, bursting into the office of the Chief Treasurer, flung the thirty shekels on the broad desk.
“This is the price of innocent blood,” he cried.
The Chief Treasurer’s deputy answered coldly : “What is that to us? The money is yours. If you have sinned, you must make your peace with the All-Merciful as best you may.”
“At a goodly price have you valued your prophet! Cast this accursed silver to the potter, that the prophecy may be fulfilled !”
He ran out again and compelled Nicodemon’s son, whom he met on the Bridge, to go with him outside the City. There in a paddock Judas abased himself before his God, and cried aloud : “O God of Israel, have mercy on a wretch who has sinned through presumption and cowardice and by his gross folly has betrayed your Anointed One to worse than death. Let it now be again as in the days of our Father Abraham, when his son Isaac went obediently to the place of sacrifice, carrying a burden on his shoulder, as your Anointed One goes now ; but your heart was turned to mercy and you accepted a ram’s life in exchange. Just Lord, accept now my life in exchange for my Master’s, and more than my life : let me die accursed, so only that he may escape the Curse. For it is written : ‘A curse of God is on that which is hanged on a tree.’ Spare his life, and let the soul of one who loved him too well perish for ever !”
Then Judas kissed his weeping companion, saying : “Son of Nico-demon, now is the time for you to expiate your father’s fault by acting as my hangman, for I would not seem ungrateful to the All-Merciful by taking my own life. And if you refuse me this charge, then I will assuredly make you the victim. It is a life for a life.”
Nicodemon’s son, seeing no help for it, took Judas’s girdle, tied it in a noose and hanged him, out of public sight, on a crooked thorn-tree which grew near by in a hollow.
The silver was now doubly tainted, and the Chief Treasurer could not on any pretext enter it as a contribution to the Temple funds. He therefore “cast it to the potter”, by buying with it the very field where Judas was found hanging ; this happened to be called The Potter’s Field because one end of it was strewn with broken pots from a near-by kiln. Its name was changed to Aceldama, “the Field of Blood”, its walls were broken down and it was let go to waste.
Let me offer no moral judgement in the case of Judas ; it is enough to re-tell the story as I heard it. An Alexandrian sect of Chrestians, called the Cainites, glorify Judas on the ground that if he had not arranged for Jesus’s arrest there would have been “no Crucifixion and no triumph over death” ; but the Ebionites reject this view as mischievous. They say : “Judas, as a disciple under vows, was bound to obey his master’s orders, knowing them securely based on the Law and the Prophets. In the passage that Jesus quoted from the Blessing of Moses, the Levites are praised for their resolution in using the sword against their idolatrous kinsmen. Had Judas obeyed these orders, instead of pitying himself for having been chosen to carry them out and then presumptuously going behind his master’s back in a foolish attempt to save his life, all would have been well : the Kingdom of God, for which he had been taught to pray daily, would have come infallibly, just as Zechariah had prophesied. But whether Judas’s fault, which was cowardice rooted in intelligence, was graver than Peter’s, which was pugnacity rooted in unintelligence, and whether he made full amends for it by his death, that let our God decide, who ordained that Peter too should die accursed on a cross. All that we know is that between them these two postponed the Great Day.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Power of the Dog
ANCIENTLY, it seems, in every country around the Mediterranean Sea, crucifixion was a fate reserved for the annual Sacred King : crucifixion within a circle of undressed stones upon a terebinth-tree, a kerm-oak, a royal oak, a pistachio-pine or a pomegranate, according to varying tribal custom. The practice is said to persist in North Britain and the wilder parts of Gaul : the King’s companions bind him with osiers to an oak that has been lopped to the shape of a T ; he is then decked with the green branches, crowned with whitethorn, flogged and ill-treated in a manner shameful to record, and finally roasted alive ; while his companions dressed in bull-hides dance around the pyre. But his soul escapes upwards in the form of an eagle—as did the soul of Hercules from his pyre on Mount Oeta—and becomes immortal, while the bull-men feast eucharistically on his remains. In Greece crucifixion survives in a partial and playful sense : the annual pelting of the so-called Green Zeus at Olympia. But closer parallels to the Gallic practice are to be found in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, especially the great Syrian tree-sacrifice at Hierapolis and its Phrygian counterpart which the Emperor Claudius introduced into Rome about twenty years after the events here recorded. In every case the Sacred King is regarded as a sacrifice made on behalf of the tribe to its Goddess Mother.
Among the Israelites the King was still annually crucified at Hebron, Shiloh, Tabor and elsewhere in the time of the Judges ; and the Tavcross, which is T-shaped, was tattooed as a royal caste-mark on the brows of the clansmen from whose ranks the Sacred King was chosen. As a caste-mark it is still to be seen among Kenite tribesmen of Judaea and Galilee and appears in Hebrew sacred literature in two contradictory senses : in Genesis as the brand of Cain the murderer—the eponymous ancestor of the Kenites—and in Ezekiel as the divine mark set on the brows of all just men as a sign to distinguish them from sinners in the day of Jehovah’s vengeance.
With the first Israelite dynasty, that of Saul, cannibalism was abolished and the custom begun of prolonging the King’s reign for a term of years and meanwhile sacrificing a dod, or yearly surrogate. This practice survived until the reign of Good King Josiah, though latterly, except in times of drought or other national disaster, a yearling ram was used as a dod instead of a man, and the anomaly justified by the myth of Abraham and Isaac. Josiah abolished crucifixion by inserting an article in his recension of the Law—the Book called Deuteronomy—to the effect that whatever was crucified was not blessed, but accursed. Once this altered principle, fathered on Moses, had been accepted as of divine inspiration, it was used as a means of discouraging crime : the body of a man who had been stoned for blasphemy or other horrid wickedness was hanged up after death on a Tav-shaped cross to make it accursed, and denied decent burial.
Among other nations the Sacred King was likewise excused crucifixion, on condition that he found a dod ; at first the victim was his son or maternal nephew, whom he invested with the temporary insignia of royalty—this explains the legend of Zeus’s sacrifice of Dionysus—but presently more distant kinsmen were accepted and, later still, royal prisoners taken in battle ; and when in times of peace royal prisoners were hard to come by, prisoners of lesser rank were crucified, and in the end even criminals might serve. Crucifixion then became merely a punishment for crime, and so it is to-day ; yet elements of the traditional ritual persist long after its sacred origin has been forgotten, and among the Romans these include the laming of the victim while he is hanging on the cross—since the Sacred King was originally lame, the substitute must also be lamed. It is difficult to discover how much of the Roman ritual is of native origin and how much is Canaanite ; for the early Romans used an X-shaped cross, but during the war against Hannibal the present T-shaped one was borrowed from the Carthaginians, who are Canaanites by origin. At all events, it is a rema
rkable paradox that crucifixion, which in Palestine had once been a magical means of procuring immortality, was now regarded by the Jews as a felonious punishment involving the extinction of their souls, and was therefore used by the Romans as a means of terrorizing political malcontents ; and that Jesus as a Sacred King in the antique style, despite his defiance of the Queen of Heaven and all her works, despite his extraordinary efforts to avoid the destiny entailed upon him by his birth and marriage—or, you may well say, in consequence of these very efforts—was about to be immortalized in the antique style.
Still dressed in his regal finery, he was taken to Herod’s citadel, the Tower of Phasael, which was now the Roman barracks. There he was stripped naked and underwent the preliminary scourging which is an inseparable part of crucifixion. The captain on duty laid on unmercifully with his supple vine-rod until weariness obliged him to desist. Then he handed Jesus over, bruised and bleeding, to the common soldiers, who dressed him up again and tried to make him play “Guess who struck you”, and the cruel May Day game of “King and Courtiers”, for which they plaited him a diadem of thorny acacia ; but he provided them with poor sport and after half an hour or so they let him go and settled down to dice.
There was a deep poetic irony in their choice of diadem, for at Ain-Kadesh a divine voice had spoken to Moses from an acacia-bush ; and it was from acacia-timber that the ark of Noah, the ark of Moses, the ark of Armenian Xisuthrus and the ark of Egyptian Osiris were all built. Throughout the Near East the tree is sacred to the many-named Divine Mother of the many-named Divine Son ; its flowers are white and pure, its thorns sharp, and its wood impervious to corruptive waters.
The provost-captain detailed to command the crucifixion party was a humane man. He told the soldiers : “Your orders are to mock and ridicule the prisoners on their way out of the City. This is merely a precaution against trouble ; however great a prisoner’s popularity, the laughter-loving City crowd will always refrain from attempting a rescue if his plight is absurd enough. However, though you may play whatever fantastic tricks you please on the two Zealots, from all accounts the cripple is a harmless enough fellow, and if you knock him about any more, by the Body of Bacchus I will so knock you about when we get back to barracks that you will wish yourselves in the Navy. And once we are well out in the open country, see that you keep your mouths shut and preserve good march discipline.”
He paraded them in column outside the barracks, where a large subdued crowd gathered, consisting mostly of women ; then sent a sergeant’s party to draw three crosses from the provost stores and bring them back in a transport cart. Meanwhile Dysmas and Gestas were fetched from the cells and placed with Jesus at the head of the column. Both of them had been shockingly ill-used : Dysmas had lost several teeth and Gestas the sight of an eye.
The captain hung the statements of crime about the necks of the three prisoners and gave them their cross-beams to carry. The cross-beam is a six-foot baulk of timber which fits horizontally into a socket of the heavy upright, close to the top ; the upright is carried to the place of crucifixion in a cart, but by ancient custom the criminal must shoulder his own cross-beam. Jesus recognized the wood : it was terebinth, which no Galilean carpenter would work, since it was held to be unlucky, just as black poplar-wood is in Italy because of its connexion with the Death-goddess.
The order to march was shouted. The procession moved off, and passed without incident through the near-by Joppa Gate. Jesus was walking with a staff, but needed both hands to balance the cross-beam on his shoulder and could not keep the pace. When a sergeant tried to hurry him he was thrown off his balance and fell heavily ; the soldiers roared with laughter. The flogging had left him short of breath, and he had difficulty in rising. After a second fall the captain intervened and, stopping a sturdy pilgrim who was about to enter the City, compelled him to carry the cross-beam for Jesus.
This Libyan Jew, who had heard Jesus preach at Capernaum in the previous year, made a virtue of necessity. He cried out to the people : “Men of Jerusalem, gladly I shoulder the burden of this true prophet. May it wipe out the reproach that Nahum spoke against my native land. For when he prophesied against Nineveh as a well-favoured harlot and queen of witchcrafts, he said : ‘The Land of Put and the Libyans were thy helpers.’ Though Put be my mother and the Libyans my brothers, I am no wretch : I will not praise a newer Nineveh that gives her prophets to be crucified by the filthy unbeliever.” The captain, knowing no Aramaic, let this go by.
The procession skirted the City walls and turned north-eastward along a level road towards the Grotto of Jeremiah, which lies about three-quarters of a mile away. The day was sultry, the road thick with dust. A contingent of the Passover Eve crowd of pilgrims, known as the Lazy Ones because the main body always arrived two or three days before, marched in from the north ; they were singing for joy at the sight of the walls and towers of Jerusalem, but the psalm died on their lips as the ill-omened procession approached. All stood still, averting their faces while it trudged silently by.
When the Grotto and the tall, spreading Palm of Jeremiah came into clear view, a sudden wailing of women arose from the rear. The news of Jesus’s arrest had spread rapidly through the City, and though few of his male supporters dared join the procession, Joanna and Susanna were there, and Mary, Jesus’s mother, leaning on the arm of Shelom the midwife ; and Mary his queen, with her sister Martha, and their grandmother Mary wife of Cleopas ; and Mary the Hairdresser, with a party of Rechabite women.
Jesus turned and said, panting for breath : “Weep for yourselves, not for me. The Day of Wrath is at hand when she will be considered blessed who has borne and suckled no children to perish under the wrath of Heaven ; when with one voice the Daughters of Jerusalem will cry to the hills to fall and bury them. For if the green tree is stripped, what will be done to the dry ?”
The proverb refers to the religious awe in which certain ancient trees —usually palms and terebinths—are held in Palestine, as being those under which patriarchs or prophets once rested. Though from all other trees branches are torn for firewood, the people fear to touch them. They grow tall and green, even in the desert beside well-frequented tracks, while other trees are stripped and dry. Jesus meant : “If even prophets are crucified, what fate is in store for the common people ?”
Beyond the Grotto rose the small skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, where in ancient times sentences of stoning were carried out and where the Romans now crucified political prisoners on a platform at the summit. It overlooked the main road into Jerusalem from the north and derived its name “Skull Hill” not from its configuration only, but from the legend that when King David had moved his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem he took Adam’s skull from the cave of Machpelah and buried it at Golgotha as a charm to protect the City. This legend must not be lightly dismissed, for the head of King Eurystheus, task-master to Hercules, was buried in a pass near Athens to protect Attica from invasion ; and several other ancient instances of the same custom occur in Greek and Latin history. Jesus had prophesied truly when he told Thomas that his journey would end where Adam’s had ended.
At the Grotto the captain gave the order to halt, while two old women came forward : they belonged to the pious Guild of Frankincense, licensed by the Pharisaic High Court, and their self-imposed task was to provide a grain of frankincense for every condemned Jewish felon to swallow as an anaesthetic. Dysmas and Gestas gratefully accepted the gift, but Jesus said : “Burn it, rather, as a sweet sacrifice to the Lord. For this Son of Adam must endure to the end.”
At Golgotha he was stripped of his clothes, and the soldiers seized them as perquisites, though in Jewish Law they were the property of his next-of-kin. The sergeant-executioner slit open the seams of the robe and allotted a length of the material to each of his four assistants, but lots were cast for the seamless undergarment bequeathed him by Simon son of Boethus.
They fixed the uprights into the cement sockets prepared to receive them, then made each prisoner in
turn lie down on his back close to his upright. The cross-beam was thrust under his head, his outstretched arms were fastened to it with osiers and his hands secured to the wood with a long copper nail hammered through each palm to prevent him from struggling free. Then with ropes and a pulley he was hauled to the top of the upright until the cross-beam engaged in the slot cut for it, after which the two pieces of timber were bolted together. In each upright, about three feet below the cross-piece, were a row of peg-holes, into the most convenient of which the peg which helped to support his weight was thrust under the crutch. His legs were bound fast to the upright with osiers, and his feet secured to the sides with two more nails driven through the flesh behind the sacred tendon—which some call “the tendon of Achilles” because Achilles, the son of the sea-goddess Thetis, was mortally wounded by an arrow in the same sacred spot. The statement of crime was fastened to the top of the upright, protruding over the victim’s head.
Jesus was given the central place, with Dysmas hanging on his right and Gestas on his left. As he was hauled up to the cross he uttered a last prayer : but not for himself. It was borne upon him at last that his sacrifice had been in vain and that he had incurred Jehovah’s inexorable wrath. The sins that he had committed in his impersonation of the Worthless Shepherd were proved to have been sins of presumption, and by leading his disciples into the same error he had earned his own prophetic reproach : “Whoever deceives the childish-hearted deserves to be thrown into the corruptive sea, a mill-stone about his neck.” His prayer was for them alone : “Father in Heaven, forgive them! Theirs is the sin of ignorance.”
He recognized his mother in the crowd and his disciple John, no longer wearing his prophetic mantle, standing close to her ; pitying her desolate look, he commended her to John’s care.
As the sun rose high in the sky, his pain grew so great that his whole body was shaken with spasms ; yet he choked back every cry. The flies were black upon the broken flesh of his back and sides ; sweat poured from his face. Gestas shouted and raved, cursing Jesus as the cause of his ruin, for the frankincense had not taken effect on him ; but Dysmas, oblivious of his approaching death, said drowsily to Jesus : “My Lord, remember me in your Kingdom. Give me office in your new Kingdom.”