Testament by Nino Ricci Page A

he was bluffing or he was one of those madmen that the emperors sometimes sent out to the provinces simply to rid the capital of them.
    “Cease your protest and go home,” Pilate said, “and I will spare your lives.”
    And on that signal the soldiers to a man unsheathed their swords.
    This was an act of such provocation that it seemed there would be nothing for it but for us to riot, weaponless though we were and composed as much of women and children as of able-bodied men. Perhaps that was exactly what Pilate had hoped for; he could then send word back to Caesar that the Jews had revolted, and he had been forced to put them down. For a long moment then the strangest sort of tension seemed to hover over us, of outrage mingled with fear and with the simple astonishment that we could suddenly be facing our deaths. I was surprised at how little zeal I felt at the thought of such a sacrifice—it was not the way I’d ever foreseen my contribution, as a simple number in some tally of our dead.
    At that instant, however, it happened that one of the leaders from Jerusalem, a young teacher by the name of Eleazar, suddenly came forward out of the crowd and had himself heaved up onto the barricade beneath Pilate’s tribunal. Before the soldiers could remove him, he shouted out to Pilate that we were prepared to die rather than transgress our own law. Then, for all to see, he knelt down on the narrow shelf the barricade afforded and bared his neck to the soldiers, as if to invite their swords.
    A hush fell over the stadium while we waited to see how the soldiers would respond. But since no signal was forthcoming from Pilate, they made no move. Someone else took up Eleazar’s cry then, and someone else again, so that it spread by degrees across the stadium, and then, one by one, people began to kneel down in the dirt with their necks offered up, until nearly every man, woman, and child in the place was readied for the sword.
    My initial reaction at the sight of such submission was abhorrence, for while there had clearly been somethingcalculated and cynical in Eleazar’s gesture—he was, in effect, simply calling Pilate’s bluff—the crowd seemed to be following his lead in utter seriousness, as if people were truly prepared to be slaughtered there where they knelt. But even as I struggled with my revulsion I found myself kneeling with the rest, perhaps merely because I feared being taken for a coward if I did not; and in kneeling I had a sort of revelation, for what I felt was not a sense of submission but of sudden power. The most an enemy could take from you was your life; offer that to him freely, and his hold over you was gone. So it was that the ten thousand of us kneeling there in the sand, our lives at stake, suddenly seemed to be the ones who instead were holding Pilate for ransom: he could only submit to us or have us killed, though in so doing only take that which we had willingly given over to him.
    I could hardly have described the feeling that went through the stadium as we knelt there except to say that it was as if we had all of us for a moment been bound up in a single will. The fear that had been palpable when the soldiers had first appeared had completely vanished; and if it had happened at that moment that Pilate had given the signal and the soldiers had descended on us, I would have wagered that not one of us would have flinched before the knife. As it happened, however, the signal didn’t come: Pilate merely stood staring out at us as dumbfounded as we had first been at the sight of his soldiers. He had reckoned us the merest savages, to be frightened off our beliefs at the first hint of any threat; instead, he found us willing to die over a matter that must have seemed to him almost trivial.
    After a few minutes, Pilate, pale with anger, got up from his seat and left the stadium, leaving us kneeling in the sunand the soldiers watching over us with their weapons still bared. For perhaps an hour we remained