I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. I tried to answer but couldn’t.

“Matthias, is it your intention to question others about Jesus?”

I nodded.

“Very well. Let us meet again, you and I, after you have finished speaking with all of them. By then you will understand, I am certain, far more than you do now and you will also be better prepared for my answer to your last question.”

He kissed me on the forehead, released me, and turned to embrace Joseph. Then he was gone, but not before he turned and shouted, above the tumult around him, a single word.

“Mizpah!”

The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.

Emotionally drained, I turned to the old man from Arimathea and said wearily, “Joseph, please take me home.”

six

JERUSALEM HAD THE PERFECT community wake-up service. Every morning, as soon as the rising sun’s first shaft of light appeared on the distant eastern horizon beyond the lavender and gray ranges of Moab and Gilead, surging blasts of priestly trumpets from the Temple announced the birth of a new day. Not even the soundest sleeper in the most remote corner of the walled city could ignore their strident and persistent message that the first hour had commenced. Those horns were all the reveille I needed on the morning following my first visit to the Temple.

Matthew, the next on my list of “witnesses,” proved as easy to locate as James. His habits were well known to Joseph, and we found him, soon after sunrise, exactly where the old man said he would be—praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Outside the city’s east wall, jagged limestone cliffs descended several hundred feet into the Valley of Kidron. Beyond the valley sprawled a green uneven ridge, the Mount of Olives. The garden lay at the foot of the mount, only a short walk across a stone bridge from the city’s gates yet concealed from the curious eyes of passersby and those looking down from the Temple courtyard by thick clusters of cypress, fig, almond, pomegranate, and—especially—olive trees, from which it had derived its name, Gethsemane, meaning “olive press.”

Leaving Shem with the carriage, Joseph and I entered the garden, dodging several low-hanging silver-leafed olive boughs as we made our way along a narrow path that wormed its way between bushes and partially submerged boulders. Untended beds of flowers had overflowed their once prim borders and now struggled for survival against lush dew-covered grass that grew almost to our knees, while dead lower branches of fir trees still clung tenaciously to living green trunks. Above our heads each tree seemed to be sheltering its own family of swallows, which were all letting us know, with shrill angry cries, that they did not appreciate this early morning intrusion.

“Jesus came here often, didn’t he, Joseph?”