He pulled me over to a patch of olive trees still too young to be more than overgrown bushes. We waded into the middle of them and fell on our stomachs. After catching my breath I edged forward and carefully parted the branches just enough to see our transportation disappearing around a bend in the road.

Joseph was obviously enjoying himself. He wasn’t even breathing hard as he lay next to me in the bushes and explained his plan of action. “If our friend is following us, he should be going by soon, so keep your head down. Poor man, he’s in for a most difficult and frustrating day. Shem will take our carriage all the way to Jericho, and on this miserable road that is a two-hour ride. Then he will turn around and come back the same way, picking us up right here, approximately four hours from now. Will that give you sufficient time for your Bethany visit?”

“Yes, but how far is—?”

“Bethany is just over that hill to our right. Only a short walk.”

“You old fox. Shem is our decoy?”

“He is, and so far as anyone following us knows, we’re still in the back seat of that carriage. It will be …”

His voice trailed off. Small patches of floating sand and dust were moving toward us along the road from the city. Eventually a single rider appeared, wearing a long black robe and headcloth. He trotted by on a gray stallion, less than fifty feet from where we lay, carefully adjusting his pace so that he could keep the dust clouds from Joseph’s carriage in sight.

“He is not such a fool, that one,” muttered the old man. “Back there, outside the garden, we saw a bald head that might make us suspicious if we saw it again, so now the skin is covered. No matter. Shem will make him earn his wages, this day. Let us be up and about out business, Matthias.”

The Mount of Olives, or Olivet, is a mile-long undulating range of hills running north and south, parallel to Jerusalem’s eastern wall. It rises more than three thousand feet to a flat summit before sloping down toward the east, the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, more than twelve miles away.

Bethany, in Aramaic, means “house of poverty.” It was aptly named. Arriving at the crest of a rock-strewn hillock in the meadow, Joseph pointed to a small cluster of flat-roofed hovels, perhaps fifty in all, on both sides of the descending road. “As you can see,” he said, “to travel from there over the top of Olivet on the footpath is a much shorter journey to and from the city than circling the mount as we have just done.”

“And probably a lot easier on the body,” I groaned, rubbing my now tender rear.