CHAPTER 29

I had experienced an eclipse before, and I knew there was nothing miraculous about it. The moon covered the sun, creating a few hours of darkness at midday. It could all be explained rationally.

But all Romans, myself included, believed there could be supernatural causes as well. When Augustus died, an eclipse of the sun —greater than any previously known —so darkened the skies that the stars came out at the sixth hour. The body of Augustus rose from the funeral pyre to become one of them.

The son of god ascending.

And now, with another man who called himself the Son of God, hanging on a cross, the sky had grown black again. Could it be just coincidence? Of course. But something deep in my troubled spirit told me there was more to it than that. The gods were angry.

Perhaps they were angry at me.

I stood there, like the others, trying to get my bearings. Nobody had prepared for this. Soldiers don’t bring torches to a midday execution.

For a moment, I considered the possibility that when the sun reemerged, the cross would be empty. That the rabbi would pull off the greatest disappearing act in history, wiggling his way down under cover of darkness. It was ludicrous, I knew, but so was darkness at noon. Imaginations run wild when the darkness disorients.

I instinctively moved closer to the cross, near where the Roman soldiers stood guard. I bumped into a few people along the way. I didn’t think the followers of Jesus were numerous enough or strong enough to take advantage of the darkness and pull the rabbi down. And if they tried, I wasn’t sure whether I would help them or resist them. Either way, I wanted to be close to the action just in case.

I waited, but nothing happened. In the silence, you could hear the labored breath of the condemned men as they pulled themselves up, inflated their lungs with a few gasps of air, moaned, and then slumped back down. There was a rhythm to it, punctuated by an occasional curse from the recalcitrant thief.

The darkness had an intriguing effect on the crowd. A few of them talked about trying to return home. The soldiers no longer played games. Quintus dispatched two of the men to bring back torches.

There was whispered conversation about what the darkness meant. The soldiers tried to shrug it off —this was not the first eclipse in history; it wouldn’t be the last. But the religious leaders had been silenced. Nobody mocked the rabbi now.

As the silence lingered, I edged closer to Quintus.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked.

He had been on the battlefield. The man had experienced some things. Still, I wasn’t shocked by his answer.

“Never.”

A half hour later, the soldiers returned, and Golgotha danced with the shadows of firelight. Most of the crowd had left, except for some members of the Jewish religious establishment, the band of soldiers under the command of Quintus, and a few friends of the rabbi.

Time passed slowly.

I thought about a lot of things. Strangely, I remembered the story that Seneca had told me about the German gladiator who killed himself in the lavatory, choking himself to death by jamming a sponge down his throat. “That man defied everyone, choosing the manner of his death!” Seneca had exclaimed.

Romans were fascinated with death. Who could face it with courage, and who would shrink away? What bizarre things could we concoct to prolong the agony of it? And most important, as Seneca had noted, who could choose the manner of his own death?

I sensed that the rabbi, nailed to the cross and slowly suffocating, was still somehow in control.

Three hours after the darkness descended, long past the time that an eclipse should have lifted, Jesus rose up one last time and pierced the darkness with an anguished shout. “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” My limited Aramaic didn’t keep me from understanding the words. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I stared at him, waiting for more. They were the first words he had spoken in three hours. One of the soldiers thought he had asked for a drink and filled a sponge with sour wine. He held it on a reed stick so the rabbi could quench his thirst. Jesus tasted it, turned his head, and spit it out.

He then cried out at the top of his lungs. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

It sent chills down my spine. A young woman gasped. The woman I thought was the rabbi’s mother covered her mouth with her hands, sobbing. Jesus dropped his head to his chest and said, in a barely audible voice, “It is finished.”

And just like that, he stopped breathing.

I was holding my own breath, watching his chest, and realized that the man was finally at peace. The silence was broken only by the sobs of his mother and the other women who had followed him to the cross.

That’s when it started. First a small rumbling, followed by a low growl as the ground shook beneath us, as though the entire hill on which we were standing might be swallowed into the bowels of the earth. I struggled to maintain my balance and kept an eye on the crosses as they shook, the blood spraying from the prisoners and sprinkling those of us below. People around me gasped and shouted for mercy. Quintus fell to his knees while the other soldiers crouched in readiness as if preparing to do battle with the gods themselves.

The earthquake ended as abruptly as it started. The ground became firm again, and people struggled to catch their breath.

“Surely, this man was the Son of God!” Quintus exclaimed.

I kept my eyes fixed on Jesus, half-expecting him to shoot to the heavens like a comet in reverse, the way Augustus had done. But he just hung there, motionless, his struggle finally over. The earth did the same, as if it had struggled along with him and, with him, found its peace.

Gradually, inexorably, the light returned. The soldiers regained their composure, and Quintus looked at me with a wary eye as though I might tell Pilate that he had given the title of Augustus to this beleaguered Jewish rabbi.

I noticed in the sunlight that my own toga had been stained with a few drops of the rabbi’s blood. It brought to mind the image of Flavia at the Festival of Fordicidia, soaked with the blood of a pregnant cow. Or the way physicians would have a patient suffering from parliamentary disease drink the blood of a slain gladiator. Romans knew one thing: there was power in blood, especially the blood of a sacrifice.

I walked alone back to the Praetorium. I hardly noticed the damage from the earthquake along the way.

It wasn’t until the following day that I first heard the news. The earthquake had damaged the four-inch-thick curtain that separated the Holy Place of the Jewish Temple from the Holy of Holies, the place that only the high priest could enter once a year. The curtain had been torn in two. The earthquake must have shifted the structures holding the curtain in place.

They said it had been torn from top to bottom.