“Sometime before dawn I was awakened by my orderly, who said that the guard had returned from the tomb and insisted on seeing me immediately. Alarmed, I dressed hurriedly and went down to the lobby, to find the four of them acting as if they had all taken leave of their senses. Shobi, who is a huge man, rushed toward me and fell to his knees sobbing. He clutched at my garment, begging for forgiveness, crying that he and the others had grown weary of guarding a dead man, after their long day in the Temple, and so they had fallen asleep. While they all slept, he wailed, someone must have come to the tomb, removed the great stone, and taken the body away.”

“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.”