“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?”

Caiaphas shrugged again. “I do not know. One of my priests suggested that after seven weeks the body would be so corrupted that even if it was found it could not be identified, so that by Pentecost perhaps Peter felt safe in making his false announcement.”

“What did you do when you heard about Peter’s claim?”

“I had notices posted throughout the city and inside the Temple courtyard, offering a reward of ten thousand silver shekels for information leading to the location of the body and the apprehension of those culprits who had removed it from the tomb.”

I made some hasty calculations. As I remembered, one silver shekel was worth approximately sixty-five cents. Six thousand five hundred dollars, in A.D. 36, would have been enough to tempt the holiest of angels. “No one claimed the reward?” I asked.

“No one.” He sighed.

“Would you like to know where the body is hidden?” I heard myself asking.

Caiaphas leaped from the bench. He seized both my arms and clutched them to his frail chest. “You know, Matthias? You know where it is? Tell me, I beg of you, and I shall double the reward! Twenty thousand silver shekels! Think of it! Enough to live all your days in more luxury than you ever dreamed, in the finest villa in Rome. Tell me!”

And now I knew I could scratch the high priest from my list. Caiaphas had definitely not removed the body from the tomb of Joseph in order to prevent that place from becoming the scene of embarrassing demonstrations against him and the Sanhedrin. “I’m sorry, sir, but I do not know where the body is hidden as yet. But I hope to find it before I’m finished here.”

“Thirty thousand—thirty thousand silver shekels when you tell me!”