“But, Rabbi, you must be mad.”
Jesus smiled, and Claudia, who had been watching him in complete fascination since her first sight of him, thought she detected a hint of restrained amusement in his dark eyes. “No,” he said, “I am not mad; I speak the truth, and whoever lives by the truth, my brother, will not even see death.”
“But haven’t all the fathers in ages before—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, all the righteous ones of old—haven’t they all met death? Then how can you say that others will not die?”
“I dare say, he is not speaking of physical death,” Tullia whispered. “It’s obvious he’s referring to the afterlife of the spirit. But these sniveling Pharisees don’t even want to understand him.”
Yet Jesus did not answer the Temple leader, for in the rear of the press about him a commotion had arisen and the Galilean had turned from the questioning Pharisee to look out over the heads of the people now craning their necks to see the cause of the tumult. The questioner and his little knot had turned, too; the Galilean’s inquisitor, Tullia surmised, was quite willing for the exchange to be ended, for he had not been faring well in matching wits and words with the tall one from Nazareth.
Tullia and Claudia, too, had twisted about to look eastward toward the sounds that so precipitately had disturbed the strangely inspiriting discourse and the carping questions of the Nazarene’s challengers. In that same instant they saw, out in front of the gate of Shushan, several coarse men half-dragging, half-carrying a bedraggled Jewish woman toward the throng ringed about Jesus. As the crowd opened a lane inward to the Galilean, the men rushed the poor creature toward him and savagely thrust her to the ground at his feet. A man who had been walking in the rear of the pitiful procession, whom Tullia took to be a minor Temple priest, stepped in front of Jesus.
“Rabbi, this woman has been taken in the act of adultery, in the very act, Rabbi, as the witnesses will testify. Now the law of Moses says that such a woman must be stoned.” He paused, and his eyes surveyed the half circle of intent, set faces. Along the rim heads nodded in agreement.
“Is that really the law of the Israelites?” Claudia whispered. “Stone to death a woman for such offense, by all the gods!”
“Yes, it’s the old Mosaic law, Mistress.”
“That is barbarous, Tullia. By all the gods, if I were a Jew, then they....” But she paused, for the man had turned back to question the Galilean. “You, however, Rabbi, have been teaching a new law. What would you say to her punishment? Must she be stoned in accordance with our ancient laws or not?”