Aulus Alexander
Counsel to Aristarchus
Thessalonica
Greetings:
May this letter find you at peace, my friend, and in good health. My affection and deepest love to you and your family at this time and always.
Alexander, I have but a short time in which to write this, my last letter to you, for tomorrow I am to be executed by the authorities. I urge you to read it carefully for it contains information of great importance. For some time I have wanted to explain these matters to you in detail, all the extraordinary events taking place here and what they have come to mean for me.
Do you recall that windy day of years ago, during the war, as we stood together outside the charred remains of what was once the beauty of Kashra? As we watched, the bravely fallen of our mercenary forces were hauled away in the wood carts. That very hour we pledged together our most solemn oath. We agreed, should a similar fate look to befall one of us, the one left standing might grant the other a final desire, a request to be fulfilled regardless of circumstance, whatever it may be. How well I remember that day as I sit here, recalling the vow we had sworn as death’s own procession creaked by, wondering which of us would be first to feel its hand.
In view now of my imminent death, Alexander, I seek this day the honoring of our agreement, for you to kindly fulfill the promise we had placed upon our hearts those many years ago.
My request is a simple one: I ask that upon reading these words, you would not only accept them as a true and worthy account, but make every possible effort to pass them on to our countrymen. Though I realize you are but one man, my dream is the letter might be read by everyone in your considerable realm of influence.
Yet who can know, when one writes of such eternal things? Perhaps one day all of Greece might gaze upon it, the letter bearing an influence of its own, reaching far beyond the border of any one man’s expectations.
My story begins in a place that even now I hesitate to recall.
I was lying in a cold, dark prison cell, half-frozen in the depths of what is called in this mountain city the Fortress of Antonia. A huge stone building, it is here the Roman governor, Pilate, resides and keeps his numerous troops. They are needed in this rebellious town, at least according to Caesar. Words cannot describe a more troubled country.
In the rabid blackness around me, the sound of dripping water echoed through the chamber like a death knell. An ancient, musty smell clung to everything, even my skin. High near the ceiling, a small barred window framed the sight of a glorious expanse of stars. It was difficult to believe that the dawning of a new day would find me in such misery. Only hours before I had stood beneath the heavens and wondered if there was anything so beautiful.
Dining at the home of a close friend, we had just walked out under the evening sky when a large man suddenly charged at us through the trees. Grabbing my neck, he began screaming that I was a thief, responsible for stealing a collection of rare vases from his home. I had barely begun my defense when a patrol of Roman soldiers stormed the grounds and arrested me. Dragged before the local magistrate, to my disbelief I was ordered imprisoned at the fortress, and led from the courtroom in chains. My freedom gone and my spirits broken, I remember each of my feelings as I approached the forbidding walls of the castle. My hopes seemed to desert me as the soldiers led me down a long, dark stairway and cast me into a cell, beating me unconscious.
Awakening in the bowels of a dungeon I could never have imagined in my nightmares, fearing for my life—they hang people on crosses, these Romans—I loudly cursed the fortune that had brought me to the hellish chamber. Declaring my innocence to every guard that passed by, I fell to the dungeon floor and howled like a beast when informed that my accuser sat upon the city council.
At the very height of my panic, wishing a swift end to it all, I was startled when a voice spoke to me from the darkness:
“Do not be frightened. You have nothing to fear in this place.”
I lifted my head from the floor. The gloom of the cell betrayed no human presence as the voice spoke again:
“The charges against you will soon be dismissed. In four days, they will release you.”
Four days? Release me? I was hearing voices! How quickly the madness of imprisonment had broken me; how else could I have explained it?
Lying back on the stone, angry that my fears had overcome me, I had just closed my eyes when the sound of a man’s breathing could be heard from the other side of the chamber.
Twisting my head and squinting into the darkness, to my amazement I saw a man sitting there, leaning against the wall not ten feet from me, barely visible in the soft rays of starlight that shone from the window above us.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What are you talking about?”
I could hardly make out the figure, the shoulders and head of a man who appeared to have been injured, his chest rising out of the shadows with each labored breath. I reasoned that they had thrown him into the cell while I lay unconscious.
“My name is Jesus. From Nazareth. Why are you so troubled?”
Why was I troubled? What was wrong with this man? Could he not know of our circumstance, what it meant to be waiting down here? From the edge of blackness, I heard his voice again:
“You have no reason to worry. I have told you the truth. If you care to accept it, we will meet again, not many days following your release.”
Meet again? We were both going to be dead in a matter of hours, if not from the crosses, then surely from this cold.
As though reading my mind, he replied:
“Death can only conquer those with no life within, my friend.”
At these words, Alexander, I began to feel that something extraordinary was happening. I could no longer deny the force I felt move within me each time he spoke. There seemed to be a reason that this man had been placed in the cell with me.
Once again, as though sensing my thoughts, he answered my unspoken questions:
“I am here to stand trial before the governor, before Pilate. I await him now. Perhaps you have heard why these things are taking place.”
Suddenly it came to me.
As you know, dear friend, though I am absent from the country for months at a time, I had heard something about a “Jesus” in a merchant’s home at Joppa. From what I had learned, he was the cause of a very dangerous upheaval in the religious communities here, proclaiming a powerful message of a new and controversial belief. Some of the acts he had performed had been labeled as miracles. The city’s worshipers had gathered about the temple in protest of the man, denouncing the growing number of his followers as sheeplike and ignorant of the prophecies of old. The Romans had issued warnings against him.
According to some reports, the man’s ideas had spread to distant regions as well. Journeying through the upper country last spring, I had overheard whisperings that he might be the coming “Messiah,” the Chosen One of God awaited by the faithful for years. A special man sent from Heaven, he would arrive in unmistakable power and glory to establish a great kingdom, ending all foreign rule. Ushering his people into a new era, he would forever reign among them, faithfully guarding his kingdom against every evil.
Clearly, however, the broken figure who slumped against the stone across from me was not this Messiah. Whoever he was, if indeed he was the teacher known as Jesus, I soon began to pity him. It was evident that some kind of mob had set upon him on his way to the fortress. Even in the dim light, I could tell that he had been brutalized. I wondered if the captain of the guards had ordered him temporarily held like this for his own protection—at least while awaiting Pilate. Contrary to what I had first suspected, imprisonment had saved his life.
As I pondered his troubles, he again seemed to sense my thoughts and began to reveal the true meaning of his plight. Not realizing that his words would prove the most important statement on life I would ever hear, I thought, as I listened, that I had encountered—a lunatic.
“I am here because the Father has sent me to die. To offer up my life as the substitute penalty for every man’s wrongs committed here on the earth. My blood will be shed as the sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.”
The man said that anyone who believed that, and who asked for forgiveness from his father, would be given eternal life. But those who chose to reject this offer would suffer a penalty far greater than death: eternal separation from God.
His words had a peculiar ring of authority to them as they came from the void. Although the words of an insane man, they ran as clear as a brook.
“I am the Good Shepherd,” he said, “and my sheep hear my voice. If anyone not of my flock hears my voice and comes to me, I will not turn him away, regardless of his wrongs, but will instead make him one of my sheep and bring him into my Father’s kingdom forever.”
He said he was the one the prophets had spoken of. He said that though he sat condemned to die in this rotting hole with me that he was the King many had been waiting for—a ruler not of this world, but of the next. And he said that he would come back—even after the grim death that surely awaited him—to gather his people from the farthest corners of the earth.
He paused then, and in that moment I wondered again whether I was not simply imagining all of this. Then from the darkness he asked me this: “Do you believe these things?”
I could not answer him, my friend. And as the moment lengthened and the sound of dripping water marked the time until our deaths, he asked me yet another question:
“May I ask you then, what you do believe in?”
From the words I was hearing, Alexander, it was clear the man was very troubled. I didn’t even want to consider the possibilities of what might have happened to him. As he looked up at the window, his face illumined in the quiet starlight, I understood why they had brought him here: The Romans brooked no dissent, not even from a man who appeared as innocent as he. Had he incited the people to some kind of revolt? It was a crime punishable by death in any part of the empire. His very statement to me an act of treason, I felt from my heart genuine sorrow for him. Of all his grand predictions of kingdoms and peace, I sensed but one of them would become a reality—he was indeed going to die.
Growing very tired in the cell, what the man had said had been too much for me. Worries of my own death were pressing heavily against my mind, and I wanted only to rest. What had any of his words to do with me, anyway? They would soon be as rain on the wind for the both of us.
Sinking back to the floor, I buried my face deep in my arms. As I slowly drifted down to sleep, the man’s shadowy image faded from my thoughts like a dying candle.
Suddenly I was no longer in my cell, but out among the bright fields of wheat in which I had played as a child, the man still with me talking as we sat together under the warmth of a great glowing sun. In my dream, his question began to haunt me as I watched his eyes, his hands slowly gesturing. “What do you believe in?” The words touched a part of my life I had abandoned in these fields years before.
As he pressed me for an answer, I was up and running as fast as my legs would carry me. Across the fields I ran, stumbling through the land of my youth, my knees torn and bloody from the many falls. Coming to the edge of the fields, I soon collapsed in a large meadow. My entire body bruised and broken, I sank to the sustaining earth. I knew that I could not escape the question that pursued me. I had to offer up an answer to it, one that I knew must come from somewhere deep within me. “What did I believe in?” The question penetrated my heart. It pried into my secret corners, sifting through each hardened layer of stubborn ideas—false and feeble excuses I had used to hide from myself. What did I believe in?
The horrible emptiness that had robbed my life was now made plain to me in a memory I had buried deep in my past.
Many years ago in my wanderings, I had dived for pearls near Pereta, a tiny coastal town near my father’s home. I remember the day I chose to chart all my dreams from this secluded port, to find if on my own I could recover a share of the sunken gems.
I dove by moonlight, a map of the murky underwater caves etched upon my memory. Over the side of the boat and into the chilly waters, taking as much air into my lungs as they would hold, I fought my way many darkened feet down a rocky slope to the black mouth of a cave. As my lungs nearly tore themselves from my ribs I searched within the cave until I came upon an entire bed of exotic shells. With a knife, I quickly freed several and burst to the surface and the air above me.
Over and over I dove, my body nearly exhausted, my hands pale and frozen. And as dawn crept up, I knelt to pry open each barnacled treasure chest.
Imagine my heartache at finding nothing in any of them but a few sandy bits. I could have searched those waters forever and never found the treasures that I desired.
Is this what I feared from the man’s question? If I dove beneath the surface of myself, would I find nothing but worthless sand? That would have been too painful to bear. Was it the fear of emptiness that had kept me from exploring my own heart?
Years later, on a voyage to Athens with my father, Curtisius, I had often walked about the ship in the evening hours, staring into the star-filled skies. Afraid of the most simple answers, what had drawn me to the more distant, elusive ones?
Compelled to search the heavens for these things, I spent many nights on the rolling deck of the Gloria Wind pondering the meaning of those stars. I had even fancied a particular set of them was calling out to me through the darkness. How I had longed for this, for a power greater than my own to bless me with true understanding, to reveal to me the reason I was alive.
The sound of distant chains woke me from the dream with a shudder; my escape had ended. The anguished cries of men could be heard from above. Who knew what fate awaited them? A cold wind blew across my face as I looked about the cell for the stranger. Had they taken him away as I slept? A misty dream was all that remained of my fitful sleep on the stone.
I called to him, but heard no answer. Peering into the darkness, I saw he still sat in the rays of starlight shining from the window. No, they had not come to get him, not yet. I could see from the shadows he had lowered his head and was fast asleep.
Despite the man’s alleged acts of treason, I believed his crimes were unworthy of the punishment soon to be rendered him—the cross. I imagined the agony. The man was to be stripped of all clothing and stretched upon two fastened beams of wood. Iron spikes would be driven through his hands and feet. As those around him watched, the man would then be lifted high above the crowds, the cross carving a sharp dagger into the sky. A slow and painful death would follow.
As I pondered this image, an icy wind howled through the window above. How would they justify the death of a man such as this? What he had explained to me had all the markings of a man gone mad. Yet I knew in my heart there was something more powerful here than madness.
As if to settle these things within me, just as he had seemed earlier to know and answer all of the questions I had been harboring, the man called to me from across the chamber.
At first I thought he was calling for help. God knows his wounds were bad enough. But something was wrong. Something in his voice had changed. As I groped my way through the darkness, I couldn’t believe what I saw as I approached him. My God, I thought, the man had not moved an inch. His head still lay upon his chest, his arms as gray as the walls.
Drawing back from him, I stopped dead against the wall. Who had spoken? This couldn’t be real, I thought.
Another fear gripped me as I realized that I would be the one blamed for his death. The commander had let a man as controversial as this Jesus die under his authority and I would make the perfect scapegoat. The bizarre nature of it all—that I would be blamed for the death of a man who said he was going to die for me.
Inexplicably, I began to laugh. The insanity, the futility, the hopelessness of it all. Grains of sand. All my life, grains of sand. And nothing I could do.
Sinking to the floor, sickened by the thought of how I would be judged by my fellow men—perhaps even you, Alexander—my mind grew black with anger and contempt toward the man.
The approaching footsteps of soldiers quickly ended these thoughts. Startled, I turned to look upon the man for the last time.
A key rattled noisily into the lock of our tomb. My rage seemed to melt away into the walls. All my bitterness ceased, and I resigned myself to the end that would soon befall me.
A squad of four armor-laden soldiers crashed into the dungeon. One of the soldiers bent and slapped the lifeless body of the man, as two others lifted him by the shoulders. I stared at the curious soul with whom I had shared my last hours.
As the soldiers turned the body toward the door, the man came to, his head twisting slowly, alive to meet my horrified eyes.
The truth of what had happened struck me as hard as any fist. I had mistaken his exhaustion for death. And as a strange strength began to calm me, I found myself standing to face him, mindless of the danger.
A soldier fixed me with a warning glare, and ordered me to sit down. Yet from what I had seen, I was unable to obey.
For in a moment that could only be described as the beginning of everything I had searched for, the radiance that I beheld deep in his eyes shone brightly out of the darkness to the very emptiness of my soul.
Alexander, the candle grows dim within the walls of my new cell at the fortress and I must end this letter quickly. From the hall, I hear the moving of many chains; I will soon be led to my execution. I have but a few things left to say, matters which, I pray, I will have time to inscribe upon these pages.
Just as the man had predicted, I was released from the dungeon cell four days following my arrest for the theft at the councilman’s home. As you can imagine, I was astonished. But the experiences that were to follow, Alexander, would make this sweet moment crumble to dust by comparison.
As I wandered in the intoxicating air of freedom from the iron gates of the citadel, I chanced upon a youth who beckoned me to follow him. After a journey of several miles from the city, I was brought inside a modest village home filled to the walls with courteous and smiling people. Standing in the midst of them, speaking words that were as familiar to me as when 1 had first heard them, was the man I had last seen being taken from the prison cell.
The breath seemed to go out of my body as I realized and accepted what was truly happening—that this was the man I had watched being led to his death.
As I looked upon the man and accepted this truth, Alexander, I saw my own destiny and purpose clearly—to follow him, even to my own death if required. Little did I know how soon I would be called to make this, my final decision.
Within a fortnight, I was arrested and charged with treason when I began telling others of the things I had witnessed. My trial was brief. I refused to deny before the Roman judges the fact of his resurrection, that the man Jesus had actually risen from the dead and walked among us. They sentenced me to die.
Without shame, I endured the ridicule and indignities of a leper as I was cursed, spat upon, and led roughly from the courtroom.
Yet I must share with you one final scene before closing this account, Alexander.
Not many days following our gathering at the village home, he began to assemble a small group of his closest friends. To my joy, he invited me to accompany them to a nearby hilltop where he had often turned for solitude. As we made our way in the silence of early morning, he spoke to us carefully, instructing us to tell the world of the miracles we had seen, the truths we had heard. He told us that he loved us, and promised that his spirit would always be with us.
Bidding us then to leave him with just his disciples, we descended the hilltop as a strong wind began to blow from the east. Lagging behind the rest of the scattering group, I turned for a final look. A huge cloud had gathered itself about the mount and I fixed my eyes within it to see if I could spot him but once more. Suddenly I caught sight of a billowing robe deep inside the rising cloud cover. Was it my imagination, or had I seen a miracle too great to comprehend? An instant later, my friend, the cloud dispersed. He was gone.
Remember our oath, Alexander. I await you in the place he himself has reserved for all those who have believed in him and called out to him.
Stephanas