The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,46
at the seams with Jews from around the known world. Caiaphas, having put in a long day at the Temple, is unlikely to have welcomed the late-night intrusion. Moreover, the trial as described—it was purportedly conducted outside in the courtyard by the light of a bonfire—was strictly forbidden by the Laws of Moses and therefore could not have taken place.
One way or another, the Galilean ended up in the hands of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect and chief magistrate of the province. Tradition holds that he presided over a public tribunal, but no official record of such a proceeding survives. One central fact, however, is indisputable. The Galilean was put to death by crucifixion, the Roman method of execution reserved solely for insurrectionists, probably just outside the city walls, where his punishment would serve as a warning. Pilate might have witnessed the man’s suffering from his chambers in Herod’s Citadel. But in all likelihood, given his fearsome reputation, the entire episode was quickly forgotten, swept away by some new problem. Pilate, after all, was a busy man.
But then again, the prefect may well have carried a memory of the man long after ordering his execution, especially during the final years of his rule in Judea, as followers of the Galilean, who was called Jesus of Nazareth, took the first halting steps toward creating a new faith. Traumatized by what they had witnessed, they comforted each other with accounts of the Galilean’s ministry, accounts that would eventually be written down in books, evangelizing pamphlets known as gospels, which circulated among communities of early believers. And it was there that Archbishop Luigi Donati, in his rooms at the Jesuit Curia on the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome, picked up the thread of the story.
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JESUIT CURIA, ROME
MARK, NOT MATTHEW, WAS THE first. It was written in colloquial koine Greek sometime between 66 and 75 C.E., more than thirty years after the death of Jesus, an eternity in the ancient world. The gospel circulated anonymously for several decades before Church Fathers ascribed it to a companion of the apostle Peter, a conclusion rejected by most contemporary biblical scholars, who contend the author’s identity is not known.
His audience was a community of gentile Christians living in Rome, directly under the thumb of the emperor. It is unlikely he spoke the language of Jesus or his disciples, and he probably possessed only passing familiarity with the geography and customs of the land in which the story was set. By the time he took up his pen, nearly all of the firsthand witnesses had died off or been killed. For his source material he drew upon an oral tradition and perhaps a few written fragments. In the fifteenth chapter, a blameless and benevolent Pilate is portrayed as having bowed to the demands of a Jewish crowd to sentence Jesus to death. The earliest versions of Mark concluded abruptly with the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb, an ending many early Christians considered anticlimactic and unsatisfying. Later versions of Mark had two alternative endings. In the so-called Longer Ending, a resurrected Jesus appears in different forms to his disciples.
“Mark’s original author did not compose the alternative ending,” explained Donati. “It was probably written hundreds of years after his death. In fact, the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, the oldest known copy of the New Testament, contains the original empty tomb ending.”
The Gospel of Matthew, Donati continued, was composed next, probably between 80 and 90 C.E., but perhaps as late as 110, long after the cataclysmic First Roman-Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple. Matthew’s audience was a community of Jewish Christians living in Roman-occupied Syria. He drew heavily from Mark, borrowing six hundred verses. But scholars believe Matthew expanded on the work of his predecessor with the help of the Q source, a theoretical collection of the sayings of Jesus. His work reflects the sharp divide between Jewish Christians who accepted Jesus as the messiah and Jews who did not. The depiction of Jesus’ appearance before Pilate is similar to Mark’s, with one critical addition.
“Pilate, the ruthless Roman prefect, washes his hands in front of the Jewish crowd gathered on the Great Pavement and declares himself innocent of Christ’s blood. To which the crowd replies, ‘His blood shall be on us and our children.’ It is the most consequential line of dialogue ever composed. Two thousand years of persecution and slaughter of Jews at the hands of Christians can be traced back to those nine terrible words.”