I rubbed my sweating palms on my tunic. Those internal alarm bells were ringing again. All my instincts warned me that I was close to uncovering something meaningful: a road sign, a clue with strange implications, a rare fossil that had never surfaced before in all my digging into the tons of literature devoted to Jesus. I couldn’t let it rest. “James, is there more to this story?”

He sounded almost grateful for my persistence. Head down, he addressed the polished slab of marble beneath our feet “Isaiah was one of our great prophets and my brother’s favorite. Often, in the months that followed his Temple visit, Jesus compared what he had seen here with words from that prophet—words that I was too young to understand at that time.”

“Do you recall them?”

James stood and clasped his hands to his chest. His voice broke when he replied, “They are burned in my heart, forever. Isaiah said, when describing the Messiah who was to come to save the Jews, ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ ”

I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck. “James, was he comparing your family’s sacrificial lamb to … a Roman crucifixion and also to Isaiah’s description of the Jewish Messiah?”

There was no reply, and for good reason. Stern, bold, fiery James, respected and feared by all manner of men, had buried his face in his hands and was sobbing! Joseph leaped to his feet and wrapped his arms around his slumping friend while Shem stood by, scowling at me again.

No more than a few minutes passed before James and Joseph returned to the bench. I was ready with an apology, but the proud and defiant look on James’ face warned me that it would be wiser to ignore what had happened and proceed. I changed the subject. “Jesus never took himself a wife?”

His voice was growing more hoarse. “No, and whenever the elders of our village chided him on his bachelorhood, reminding him of the prophet’s words that the Lord God had said it was not good for man to be alone, Jesus would laugh and reply that since he was wed to an entire household he would certainly be stoned to death for adultery if he were to offer himself to another.”

“And yet the day came when he divorced himself from his entire family, is that not true?”

James nodded.

“What caused this great change to take place in your brother’s life?”