Surprise Witness

Rufus wished he were anywhere but here. He had never wanted to come to Palestine in the first place, every legionnaire in the Empire knew that it was a lousy assignment. No loot, no glory, no chance for advancement. And he couldn’t even get decent duty like chasing bandits in Galilee. No, he had to be posted right in the heart of Jerusalem, doing riot control out of the Antonia fortress. He had had a bad feeling ever since the first year he drew the assignment, when the governor tried to put up a statue of the emperor in the temple. The riots went on for weeks. There was no glory in killing civilians, but what else could you do when even greybeards who ought to know better were throwing stones? And he had seen with his own eyes a group of temple scribes standing barehanded and unmoving on the temple steps, guarding the gates against a line of slowly advancing pikes. It still bothered him, the memory of their deaths. Eventually the governor had gotten orders from Rome that the Jews would be exempt from the directive to include the emperor when they paid tribute to their gods.

But unrest had continued to break out here and there all over the province, and every time the Jews had one of their big festivals their commander had to triple the city patrols. They were so touchy, you never knew what was going to set them off.

Rufus didn’t understand religious fanatics, that was for sure. Nobody else in the empire had any trouble with offering incense to the statue of the emperor, after all, they were enjoying peace and prosperity the likes of which nobody had seen in generations! A little respect seemed a small price to pay.

He had gotten curious enough to try and figure out what was behind the Jews’ intransigence. And he had to admit there was a lot to admire about their religion. Their morals were as high as the stoics, and their god wasn’t as greedy and capricious as most of the other gods he knew about. If it weren’t for the diet - he really couldn’t see giving up ham and oysters - and that horrible rite of self-mutilation they called circumcision, it would be a very suitable religion for a soldier, very disciplined and structured. And apparently their God had actually fought alongside them, or had sent angels or something to make sure they were victorious. That was a long time in the past, although Rufus gathered that another intervention was expected any day now.

Rufus really didn’t quite get what this “Messiah” business was all about. There was simply no consistency to the rumors! He couldn’t figure out if they were waiting for a fighter or a teacher or a king. Most of the time it didn’t come to anything, though. There’d be a flurry of excitement and the next thing you knew people would be running around the countryside after another preacher or healer or whatever, and then the fuss would die down until the next one. Occasionally you’d get a bandit who got a bigger than usual following and they’d have to go clean the nest out - Rufus really hoped his unit would get tapped for the next operation, he wanted to get out of Jerusalem. A couple of years ago there had been that firebrand - what was his name? Johann or something like that - who had been preaching down by the Jordan. Herod had executed him for insulting his wife.

And now this one. Rufus hated execution duty at the best of times, when there wasn’t any question about whether it was deserved or not, but there was something really wrong about this one. Even the governor admitted that this Yeshua hadn’t done anything that warranted execution. There had only been one really disruptive incident, the uproar at the temple earlier this week with the money-changers' tables being overturned and the merchants themselves being whipped down the steps. Rufus grinned to himself. He wished he had seen it! They really were a bunch of rip-off artists! You had to use shekels to buy the sacrificial animals, and the mney-changers doubled or tripled the exchange rate for the big festivals when the town would be full of people who only had Roman or Egyptian coins! A captive clientele indeed.

But most of the time this Yeshua wasn’t any trouble at all, except for the crowds, but they were never rowdy. Rufus had gone to hear him once, and couldn’t see anything wrong with what he said. It didn’t sound political at all. Apparently he was quite the healer. The centurion who commanded the other cohort said that Yeshua had cured his body-slave from a distance! So he couldn’t even be anti-Roman, if he was willing to heal a soldier’s servant.