e to go up with
Nicodemus to ask Jesus to delay no longer, but to lead us into
Jerusalem? he was asked, and perforce had to answer that Nicodemus
wished to talk privily to Jesus, at which they pressed round him, and
from every side the question was put to him: is he going to lead us into
Jerusalem? And then Joseph began to understand that these people would
find themselves on the morrow, or perhaps the next day, fighting with
the Roman legions, and, knowing how the fight would end, he answered
them that the Romans would be on the side of the priests and Scribes.
Whereupon they tore their garments and cast dust on their heads, and in
his attempt to pacify them he asked if it would not be better for Jesus
to go up to Galilee and wait till the priests were less prepared to
resist him. No, no, to Jerusalem, to Jerusalem, they cried on every
side, and voices were again raised, and the Galileans admitted that they
had come down from Galilee for this revolution, and had been insulted in
the Temple by the Scribes, and laughed at, and called "foolish
Galileans"; but they would show the Scribes what the Galileans could do.
Was it true that Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jewish people by
the prophet Daniel?--and while Joseph was seeking an answer to this
question a woman cried: you're not worthy of a Messiah, for do you not
know that he is the one promised to us in Holy Writ? And do not his
miracles prove that he is the Messiah we have been waiting for? None but
the true Messiah could have rid my son of the demon that infested him
for two years; and with these words gaining the attention of the crowd
she related how the ghost of a man long dead had come into her boy when
he was but fourteen, bringing him to the verge of death in two years--a
pale, exhausted creature, having no will of his own nor strength for
anything. But how, asked Joseph, do you know that the demon was the
ghost of a man that had lived long ago? Because in life he had dearly
loved his wife, but had found her to be unfaithful to him and had died
of grief twenty years ago, and was captured then by the beauty of my
boy; and his grief entered into the boy and abode in him, and would have
destroyed him utterly if Jesus had not imposed his hands upon him and
put the vampire to flight. Whither I know not, but my boy is free. It is
as the woman says, a man cried out, for I've seen the boy, and he is
free now of the demon. My limb, too, is proof that Jesus is a pro