I've been in this stinking pit for too long. You join up, and they say, "It'll be great, you get to see the world, a different girl in every port!" and all the other things that make joining the all conquering army of the Roman Empire seem like a good idea. They don't tell you that most of your time you'll be an Army of glorified policemen dealing with the petty squabbles of worthless, beaten and complaining Jews.
So, here I was, just like on every other day of the last three years, in the butt-end of the empire, far from home and far from excitement. All these Jews look the same to me, so when we were told to beat one called Jesus I couldn't really have cared much less - anything to break the boredom. Give me a choice between delivering punishment and another afternoon of guard duty and I'll kick someone every time! To be honest I'd quite happily beat every one of these Jews some days.
You get a feel for a person when you beat them. You gain an insight into their character that I don't think you can get any other way. It helps that people fear us, I mean they know people sometimes die when we 'punish' them. To be honest we have to try quite hard not to kill people - we are Roman soldiers after all, and there's none fitter, meaner or harder than us. With this guy, Jesus, there was a buzz about the place even before we started on him. There were so many people crowding in - my mate got to crack a few heads pushing them back, it made his day! Anyway, like I said you get a feel for a person when you make them suffer, and this Jesus was a strong one. We worked him over properly, probably as much as we could without killing him. We started with the rods, moved on to the scourge, we spat on him, we hit him, we kicked him, we took every opportunity to cause him pain. Normally people start off stubborn and defiant, as if they can endure
the Roman army without breaking a sweat. That doesn't last long before they pain moves them to stage two, anger. It looks pathetic to us, but they start shouting about what they'll do to us some dark night when we least expect it, so we beat them a a little harder, just to show what happens when you mouth off to a Roman. After the anger comes pleading, they beg for mercy, beg us to stop the pain, even promising to pay us off if we let them go. We know the Empire isn't built on mercy, peace doesn't come through being nice to people like them, so we beat them even harder. The final stage comes when we stop, and they are suddenly, grateful. Imagine that, we beat the crap out of them and they end up grateful! Jesus didn't go through the stages though, he just remained... strong. Not physically of course, physically we wrecked him, but he didn't break, he didn't beg, he didn't threaten.
I think this got to some of the lads, they kind of took it as an insult that he didn't break. It made things much worse for him physically, turned it into a challenge to see who could break him. To tell you the truth, we went over the top - the captain tore a strip off us for it, but we figured no-one was going to get that upset over one Jew, and we kept on. By the time we'd finished you'd have struggled to tell the difference between his back and some ruined meat at the butchers. It's probably just as well we crucified him - I hate to think how long it would have taken to recover from what we did to him.
Still he didn't break though. We heard some were calling him a King, so we 'worshipped' him in our special way - we made him a crown of barbed wire and pushed it onto his head. We blindfolded him and then punched him. We spat on him, we did everything short of killing him.
Word came down that he was going to be crucified, so we did the usual, we made him carry his cross on that ruined back. Up through the city, through the crowds, and on to Golgotha. He had a perseverance about him, he just kept grinding out the steps, even when his body betrayed him. We had to drag some pleb out of the crowd to do the lifting eventually because Jesus was too far gone, but even then he kept trying to take the weight back.
Eventually we got him and the cross to Golgotha. I sent the pleb from the crowd on his way with a sound crack to the head - he nearly fell off the hill, so I must have got good contact! We threw Jesus to the ground, and I heard him gasp as the stones ground their way into that dogmeat back of his. I remember thinking, "You're going to get a lot worse than that mate." It's funny how I stop thinking of people as people when we do this to them, they just become a job we have to do. I gave the order and watched as they hammered the nails through each wrist. I always think the wrists are the easy bit - the nail goes between the bones, and while it seems to hurt like death once they are hanging up there (I guess as bone grinds against nail), it's not so bad when it's going in. The bad one is the feet. We twist their legs together and sideways, and drive the nail through both ankles. That has to hurt I reckon, having your bones shattered and pierced by a big lump of iron.
Anyway, we nailed Jesus on, and then lifted the cross up. I watched the shock rip through his body as the cross dropped suddenly into its posthole. Still, though, he didn't break, he didn't threaten, he just endured. Normally it takes a good day or two to die on a cross. When he died though, it was different from the usual. He cried out on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?", "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," and, "It is finished!" And then he died, after only six hours. But as he died the world shook, and I mean that literally - the ground shook, and a storm blew from somewhere with lightning and thunder like I've never seen. To be honest it scared the crap out of me, and you know me, I'm a Roman soldier, we don't scare easy. Right then I believed we'd done something more than we knew - we hadn't just crucified another Jew, the universe was angry at what happened there. It's enough to make you believe...
Right then I didn't have time to think about believing any more though, we still had a job to do, and the weather was just extreme - the wind was whipping sand and grit up, stinging my eyes so I could hardly see and blasting against my skin like tiny needles. We did the best we could to finish everything off - we broke the legs on the other two criminals so they would die quickly, and then some of his friends came and took Jesus' body away. Apparently though even in death Jesus was too dangerous to be left alone. It seems ridiculous doesn't it - Roman centurions guarding the grave of some peasant Jew as if he was precious treasure or something! We had a laugh about it as we hung around the graveyard, but boredom set in pretty quickly again on guard duty. We took shifts of course, and we saw a few people come and tend the grave, but nothing unusual, no riots or plots or magic tricks.
Until this morning that is. This morning something happened, but I can't begin to understand what. I was there guarding the tomb and then something changed, and I became aware that the tomb was open. Now listen, if you haven't seen one of these Jewish tombs let me explain it to you: the entrance is covered by rolling a round stone as big as me down a slope. That stone must weigh a ton, I mean it would take horses and ropes and serious effort to remove it. It certainly couldn't be moved away by one or two people, and definitely not by the dead man inside the tomb. And yet all of a sudden it was moved, and there was no work team with ropes and horses to do it. I looked inside, and there was no body, just the grave clothes (and someone had taken the time to fold them neatly).
So what happened? Well Jesus is gone, and I don't think he's dead - there are all these rumours now that he's been talking to people, changing their lives, appearing with the nail holes still visible, but very much alive.
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