Page 29 of Unveiled Tamar’s Story (Mysteries & Wonders of the Bible #1)

V alerius stood yet again in the governor’s court, listening yet again to the high priest rage.

This time, Valerius wasn’t against the wall, observing unobserved.

This time, he stood in front of his men before Pilate, posture perfect, expression stoic as stone, just as he’d been trained to do in the face of opposition.

Pilate wasn’t the opposition here though.

Pilate had listened to his report with interest, something akin to wonder in his eyes.

Pilate wanted to believe him, Valerius realized as he spoke.

He didn’t know if he could believe Valerius—but he wanted to.

When Pilate went home tonight, when he told Claudia what Valerius had reported, she would believe.

She would remember the dreams that had apparently disturbed her so—he’d yet to hear the full story of them—and she would grip her husband’s arm and look into his eyes.

“I knew there was something special about Him,” she would say.

“Did I not warn you not to be guilty of that righteous man’s death? ”

Pilate’s education had been the same as Valerius’s. He had been taught to question. To doubt. To examine. To consider. He had been instructed in how to make decisions based on logic rather than emotion. How to detach himself from what he wanted so that he could determine what he ought to want.

Even so, the more Caiaphas sputtered and spewed and demanded, the more Pilate inclined away from the high priest he’d worked so well with for so many years and toward Valerius.

“They ought to be executed for such brazen and blatant neglect of their duties!”

Valerius had lost track of the man’s tirade minutes ago, but he focused his attention on him again, now that he’d concluded his argument. Behind him, he heard the slightest shift. Either Albus or Caeso shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

Pontius let out a long sigh. “I have known Valerius Marius since we were children,” he said, voice even.

“He is as honest a man as they come. Not given to flights of fancy, and his many years of service to Rome have shown only the most exemplary of conduct. Your accusations against him and his soldiers are insulting to Caesar and his men.”

Caiaphas looked as though he might spit in his rage. “His men let those heretics steal the body of their teacher away! Exactly the thing this guard was to prevent.”

Words bubbled up, but they had no chance of making it past Valerius’s lips. Not now, when he was representing his men before the governor officially.

Pilate lifted his chin. “I have heard the reports from each of these men, independently of one another. Their stories are consistent, even as each is unique. No one went into that tomb, not before the women who came to anoint the body and found it missing. The only movement was someone coming out of the tomb, and then the stone rolling away.”

“Preposterous!” Caiaphas bellowed. But his face had gone pale under the flush of rage. It wasn’t just anger fueling him. It was fear, and the hatred that sprang up so easily in the wake of it.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then Caiphas’s machinations had been for nothing. If Jesus was alive, then his sect’s claims about the impossibility of resurrection had been rendered moot. If Jesus was alive, then everything he believed had been proven a lie.

Valerius had been where the priest was. The tipping point, when he had to decide either to refuse to believe and cling to what he’d always known, despite all evidence to the contrary, or to abandon everything familiar, everything that had defined him, and risk it all for something new and uncertain.

He’d stood on that precipice shortly after arriving in Judea, when he first heard the words of the Baptizer calling him to repent. When he’d first heard the words “the kingdom of God is near.”

He hadn’t known who this God was, or what His kingdom was supposed to be.

But John’s warnings about a life of sin and selfishness had resonated deep in his soul.

The life he’d described was the very one that Valerius had witnessed in Rome.

The very one he’d been chasing because it was all he’d known to do.

He’d been raised a Stoic, taught to push his emotions aside and focus on logic.

He’d been taught to identify what was in his sphere of influence and make no reach outside it, lest he open himself to frustration.

He’d been taught to take pleasure when and where he could but to protect his heart from soft feelings at all cost, lest he let those feelings make him soft.

He’d been taught, in essence, to keep himself and his concerns always at the center of his attention, to grow his authority as he could but to keep other people’s concerns from swaying him.

Then came that moment on the banks of the Jordan, that call to something different.

The charge to live for God first, to put his neighbors before himself, to focus on love instead of greed.

That moment when he realized that his sphere of influence would never extend beyond a sliver of the world, and that a heart guarded from any feeling soon turned to stone.

He’d known that if he continued on that path, he’d end up just like his father, and his father’s father.

In Rome, that had seemed fine. But that was before he’d suddenly seen the cost of his choices.

How many people he’d hurt. How many lives he’d been willing to ruin to pursue his own interests. How empty he felt inside.

He’d known, when he stepped in that river to be baptized, that he was stepping away from his upbringing, from his heritage, from his parents and siblings.

He’d known that they would never forgive him for his choices.

He’d known that he’d be happier alone with God than surrounded by people who cared only for themselves.

Well, not alone. God had ensured that by blessing him with a wife whose heart was ready to receive the Lord too.

They had made those choices together, he and Mariana.

Stepped into the river together. But that only meant that their choices risked fracturing two families, not just one.

Hers too would be shaken and rocked by their decisions when they realized the implications.

He wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to insist upon a divorce when they realized where he’d led their daughter.

They had been married less than a year when they made that choice together.

He hadn’t been at all convinced, when he felt the stirring of the Baptist’s words, that his pretty young wife would have any interest in the God of the Jews.

She could have insisted then and there that he return her to her family in Rome.

Instead, she’d gazed deep into his eyes and said that if this God had earned Valerius’s regard, then she would learn of Him too.

Caiaphas would be looking over that precipice now too.

Seeing beyond the edge only a fall to his death, the unknown full of vicious crags and threats.

Behind him, he would see the life he’d built behind him, the one founded on argument and the gathering of power, on working not only to be secure but to be right .

Here stood three Romans, enemies of his people, telling him he was wrong.

Telling him that his worst fears were realized.

Telling him that everything he’d founded his life on was a lie, proven so by the man he’d wanted so badly to execute that he twisted the Law, the very Law he’d sworn to preserve, to do so.

As Valerius watched the priest’s face, he prayed that he would see the Lord’s hand in it, that he would make the same decision other priests had made—the decision to embrace a hard truth instead of an easy half truth. That he would risk it all to believe.

Yet he wasn’t surprised when he saw instead Caiaphas’s expression close off. He watched the fear solidify into hatred once more. He saw the hatred rise and lash out, a whip ready to tear the flesh from his enemies.

Pilate leaned back in his chair, the projected air of relaxation no doubt meant to do exactly what it was doing—infuriate Caiaphas even more, by pointing out that in this court, he was the one in control.

The one with the higher power. The one who had the right to be relaxed while others were on edge.

“Preposterous things happen all the time. Is your entire religion not founded on it? Is it not preposterous for Moses to have parted the sea with an outraised arm? Preposterous that your people would eat for forty years of a strange substance sent like the dew each morning? Is it not preposterous that your prophet Elijah would hold back the rain for three years with his prayer? That Daniel would survive a den of hungry lions, or his friends a furnace made hot enough to kill the guards who delivered them to it? Is it not preposterous that Judas Maccabeus and his ragtag group of men would fight off one of the fiercest armies of the world?”

With each bit of Jewish history Pilate spouted off—most of them stories Valerius had told him about just in the last year—Caiaphas’s fists clenched tighter. “You would compare this blasphemer and His scheming, body-snatching followers to our most revered prophets?”

Pilate blinked. “I am comparing nothing. I am merely reminding you that this God you claim earned His fame among the nations by making the impossible possible. Or would you disagree with that assertion? Is He in fact no more capable of raising the dead than Apollo or Jupiter?”

“He did not raise the dead!”

“Interesting that you would say so.” Pilate craned his head and met Valerius’s eyes.

“Didn’t you say there was a prophet of old who raised the only son of the woman who offered him housing?

And I have received several reports of this Jesus doing the same in His few short years of ministry.

The daughter of one of your own priests…

that widow whose only son had died…and of course, Lazarus of Bethany. ”