“I did not consider him at all, in the beginning. There were several reports from friends in Galilee stating that this man had cured one affliction or another, but I paid little attention to them since they involved an uneducated carpenter from a poor little village called Nazareth.”

“A man reported to have the power of healing and you were not even curious?”

“Why should I be? We have many magicians and sorcerers who travel across our land deceiving the people. Such reports are common. However, a few weeks after the first report, I received another that aroused my anger as well as my curiosity.”

I nodded for him to continue.

“It seems that a family whose son was sick with palsy brought him in his cot to a house in Capernaum where Jesus was preaching, but the crowd was so great that they could not enter so they carried the boy in his bed up to the roof, parted the straw, and lowered him by rope into the room where Jesus was speaking. When Jesus saw this he was so taken with their faith that he said, ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven you.’ Several scribes were present, including he who eventually reported this incident to me, and they all wondered to themselves how Jesus dared to speak such blasphemy since only God can forgive sins. Though they had uttered not a word of protest, because they feared the crowd, Jesus turned to the scribes and asked why they were thinking such things in their hearts. Then he asked them whether it was easier to tell the youth that his sins were forgiven than it was to tell him to get up and walk. He said that to prove that the Son of man had power to forgive sins on earth he would speak to the boy again and he did, saying, ‘Arise, and take up your cot, and go back to your own house.’ And the boy, according to my witness, rose up, took his bed, and departed from the crowd, who were all amazed.”

“Caiaphas,” I said, purposely addressing him by name, “is such a healing common among the magicians you say are everywhere?”

“No. Those who were present said they had never seen one like it, especially when dealing with palsy.”

“What did Jesus mean when he referred to himself as the ‘Son of man’?”

The high priest shrugged. “It is a phrase found in many of our writings and psalms, meaning a man of simplicity and purity.”

I just couldn’t help myself. “But didn’t your prophet Daniel write that ‘one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven … and there was given him dominion … an everlasting dominion’?”

Caiaphas straightened up in his chair, eyeing me suspiciously. “Yes,” he acknowledged weakly, but there was no explanation or rebuttal.

“Then didn’t the use of the phrase ‘Son of man,’ by Jesus, cause you any concern?”