“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I ordered Shobi and the others to wait in their quarters until I had decided on their punishment. I then returned to my bed and lay in the dark and tried to resolve how to deal with Pilate and the Sanhedrin when they heard the news.”

“Your Temple officer, Shobi, is he still with you? May I speak with him?”

The high priest shook his head. “Shobi disappeared that very night According to his orderly he never returned to his quarters. We have not seen him for six years.”

“The other three guards—are they still in your service?”

“They were all found in their quarters shortly after sunrise, dead by their own hands, unable, I imagine, to live with the disgrace of being derelict in their duty.”

How convenient for someone, I thought. Of four possible eyewitnesses to what really happened at that tomb, three were dead and one was missing. “And how did Pilate and the Sanhedrin react when they heard the news?”

“Pilate, I’ve been told, displayed his usual contempt for all of us. He said that one could expect no more from Jewish guards who play at being soldiers by keeping peace between old men and women in the Temple courtyard. The Sanhedrin, called into immediate emergency session by me that morning, deliberated for only a short while before voting to make no public announcement of any kind. They reasoned that the followers of Jesus must already be in flight, to avoid arrest and worse, and they probably had taken the body of Jesus with them to be buried in his native Galilee. So far as they were concerned, the matter was closed and the less said about it the better.”

“How wrong they were.”

“Yes. Hindsight is the greatest prophet of all, Matthias. For the next seven weeks the city was quiet. We assumed that Jesus had been forgotten like all the other false prophets before him. Then, on the morning of our feast for Pentecost, signifying the end of our early harvest season, news came to me that more than a hundred disciples of Jesus had gathered outside the house of the widow Mary, and Peter, a man who had been close to Jesus, had announced to the crowd that the Holy Spirit had appeared to them while they had been at prayer and that Jesus had been loosed from the pains of death and raised up by God and made both Lord and Christ. Before the day had ended, it was reported to me that two or three thousand had believed Peter’s words and gone to him to be baptized as a sign of their new loyalty to Jesus, the Messiah, who would soon return on the clouds of heaven.”

“If the tomb was empty on the third morning, why do you suppose they waited seven weeks to tell the people that Jesus had risen?”