False God of Rome Read Free Page B

following the Torah
and by showing compassion for fellow believers, doing unto them as we would be done by, we will be judged righteous and worthy to join our Father at the End of Days, which is fast
approaching.’
    ‘Enough of this nonsense,’ Pilatus snapped. ‘Do you deny that you and your followers have been actively encouraging people to rebel against their Roman masters?’
    ‘No man is master of another,’ Yeshua replied simply.
    ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Jew, I am your master; your fate is in my hands.’
    ‘The fate of my body is, but not
my
fate, Roman.’
    Pilatus stood and slapped Yeshua hard around the face; with a vicious leer, Yeshua ostentatiously proffered the other cheek; blood trickled from a split lip down through his beard. Pilatus
obliged with another resounding blow.
    Yeshua spat a gobbet of blood onto the floor. ‘You may cause me physical pain, Roman, but you cannot harm what I have inside.’
    Sabinus found himself mesmerised by the strength of will of the man; a will, he sensed, that could never be broken.
    ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Pilatus fumed. ‘Quaestor, have him crucified with the other two prisoners immediately.’
    ‘What’s he been found guilty of, sir?’
    ‘I don’t know; anything. Sedition, rebellion or perhaps just that I don’t like him; whatever you like. Now take him away and make sure that he’s dead and in a tomb before
the Sabbath begins at nightfall, so as not to offend Jewish law. He caused enough trouble while alive and I don’t want him causing more when he’s dead.’
    The sky had turned grey; droplets of rain had started to fall, diluting the blood that ran from the wounds of the three crucified men. It was now the ninth hour of the day;
Sabinus and Longinus walked back down the hill of Golgotha. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
    Sabinus looked back at Yeshua hanging on his cross; his head slumped forward and blood oozed from a spear wound in his side that Longinus had administered to hasten the end of his suffering
before the commencement of the Sabbath. Six hours earlier he had been whipped up the hill dragging his cross, aided by a man from the crowd. Then he had endured, in silence, the nails being
hammered through his wrists; he had seemed barely to notice the nails being pounded home through his feet, fixing them to the wood. The savage jolting as the cross was hauled upright, which had
caused the screaming of the other two crucified men to intensify to inhuman proportions, had brought no more than a shallow groan from his lips. He looked now, to Sabinus, to be at peace.
    Sabinus passed through the cordon of auxiliaries who were keeping the small, mournful crowd of onlookers away from the executed men and saw Paulus, standing with a couple of Temple Guards,
gazing up at Yeshua; a bandage around his head was spotted with blood from the wound to his ear. ‘What are you doing here?’ Sabinus asked.
    Paulus seemed lost in his own thoughts and did not hear him for a moment, then blinked repeatedly as he registered the question. ‘I came to check that he was dead and take his body for
burial in an unmarked tomb so that it doesn’t become a place of pilgrimage for his heretical followers. Caiaphas has ordered it.’
    ‘Why were you all so afraid of him?’ Sabinus enquired.
    Paulus stared at him as if looking at an idiot. ‘Because he would bring change.’
    Sabinus shook his head scornfully and pushed past the malchus of the Guard. As he did so a group of two men and two women, the younger one heavily pregnant and carrying an infant, approached
him.
    The elder man, a wealthy-looking Jew in his early thirties with a dense black beard, bowed. ‘Quaestor, we wish to claim Yeshua’s body for burial.’
    ‘The Temple Guards are here to claim it. What claim do you have on his body?’
    ‘My name is Yosef, I am Yeshua’s kinsman,’ the man replied, putting his arm around the shoulder of the older of the two women, ‘and this