“Only a coincidence?”
“What else could it be? Surely you don’t believe that this carpenter fellow, without even going to the sick boy, drove out the fever? You know that fever victims either get well or die and that once the fever reaches a certain point, it goes one way or the other; it’s either death or a very rapid recovery, and the odds are about the same.” He shrugged his shoulders. “After hearing Chuza’s story the carpenter probably calculated it was time for the fever to break, and he simply gambled on the outcome.” Then he was suddenly serious, his eyes questioning. “Cornelius, don’t tell me you believe the carpenter actually cured the boy?”
“I don’t know, Longinus. But I’ll say this: I don’t disbelieve it. And I do know that the boy is alive and well today.” Cornelius stood up and stretched. “After all, to Chuza and Joanna that’s the important thing. When you see Chuza, you might ask him what he thinks of the Galilean.”
“If that carpenter did cure the boy in the manner you described, Cornelius, then he’s bound to be a god. And would a carpenter be a god, and a Galilean carpenter, at that? To me the whole idea is preposterous. But I’m just a Roman soldier; I haven’t been exposed, like you, to these eastern workers of magic.”
“This Jesus is no magician. In fact, he seems reluctant to perform these—what did he call them—‘signs and wonders.’ But the sick and the crippled continually besiege him to heal them, and his sympathies for the unfortunate appear to be boundless.” Cornelius sat down again on the parapet. “Tell me, do you remember that day we were sailing down the Tiber, standing at the ‘Palmyra’s’ rail talking about the various gods, and you said that you could never comprehend a spirit god, something that was nothing, you said, a being without a body?”
“Yes, and I still feel that way.”
“But what about a god that does have a body, a god-man? If a god should have a physical body and be in every physical respect like a man, would that make sense to you? Could you comprehend such a god?”
“By Jove, Cornelius, you’ve been out here with these Jews for much too long. You’ve been listening to too much prattle about their Yahweh. A god without a body, a body that houses a god. Bah! I put no credence in any of these notions. As for that carpenter, I’d say he’s another Wilderness preacher, not as fanatical perhaps, not as desert-parched and smelling of dried sweat as John, but certainly no god—whatever a god is, if there is such a thing, which I most seriously doubt. A carpenter from Nazareth, that hillside cluster of huts! Cornelius, I’ve been to Nazareth, as I’m sure you have. I ask you, would a god choose Nazareth to come from?” He stood up. “Nevertheless, the story you told was entertaining. Maybe to some it would be convincing. To me, though....” He shook his head slowly. Then suddenly a wide grin lighted his grim countenance. “How is it that you and I inevitably get around sooner or later to a discussion of the gods? And where do we invariably end? Nowhere. Talk, that’s all. And talk is all it can ever be, isn’t it? It’s all too nebulous, intangible....”
“But, Longinus, if this all-powerful, all-wise, all-good god that old Pheidias envisioned, this supreme one god, in order to communicate with his earthly creatures”—Cornelius held up his hand to stop Longinus, who had been about to interrupt—“should decide to take the form of a man, an ordinary man....”
“By all the small and great gods,” Longinus did interrupt, “do you think then that he would choose to be a carpenter from Nazareth?”