Lucius Varenus, soldier of the cohort at Caesarea, to Marcus Fulvius Rufus, his old commander and friend, greeting.
If you are well, it is well. I would write that I am well also, as we always have, but I will not begin this letter with a lie, because I mean for every word after it to be true.
Your letter reached me eleven days ago by the grain ship out of Puteoli. I have read it more times than I can count. I read it first standing on the quay with the salt wind blowing the edges of it, and then I folded it and carried it inside my tunic for three days before I could read it again. So it is true, then. Pontius Pilatus is dead, and by his own hand.
I do not know what to say about it, Marcus, and I suspect you do not either, though you were nearer to him at the end than any of us. You write that no one in his household could give a reason, that there was no single blow that broke him, only a long darkening, and then one morning he was gone. I will not pretend to know more than you. I was not there. I do not know what was in his heart, and I will not guess at it in ink, because a man’s last hour belongs to him and to whatever gods or God may judge him, and not to soldiers writing letters across the sea. But I will tell you what I have been thinking these eleven days, because there is no one else on this earth I could tell it to.
I keep going back to that day. You know the one.
You remember how it was with him after the business with the Samaritans on the mountain, when he sent the cavalry and the infantry against that crowd at Gerizim and Vitellius ordered him to Rome to answer for it. Everyone said that was what finished him: the disgrace, the summons, the long road back to a Caesar who had died before he arrived. Perhaps it was. But I served in the praetorium in Jerusalem for six years, Marcus, and I tell you plainly, the darkening in him did not begin at Gerizim. It began on a Friday morning in the spring, at the Passover, with a Galilean they brought to him bound.
I was on the pavement that morning. I saw his face.
I have seen Pilatus angry more times than I could number, and I have seen him cruel. I was there when he marched the standards into Jerusalem by night with the image of Caesar on them, and the Jews came down to Caesarea by the thousands and lay on the ground before his judgment seat for five days, and when he ordered us to draw our swords and surround them, they bared their necks, all of them, and said they would rather die than see their law broken. I remember his face then too. Fury, and then something like disbelief, and then he gave way, because what could he do. You cannot frighten men who have already decided to die. I did not understand it then. I think I am beginning to understand it now.
But that Friday, with the Nazarene, his face was different. It was not anger. I have tried for years to find the word for it, and the nearest I can come is fear. Not fear of the crowd. He had despised that crowd for years. Fear of the man.
He questioned Him inside, and I could not hear most of it, but I heard Pilatus come out once and say to the chief priests, I find no fault in him. And I heard him go in again. And when the Jews cried out that the man had made himself the Son of God, I watched Pilatus go pale. I was standing six paces from him. He went back in, and I heard him ask, Whence art thou? And the man gave him no answer.
You know what came after. His wife sent word to him, even while he sat on the judgment seat. One of her women came running with it and I heard the message given: Have thou nothing to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. He offered them Barabbas, the bandit, the murderer, thinking surely they would not choose him over this one. They chose him. He had the man scourged, thinking perhaps that would be enough for them. We did the scourging, Marcus. Our men. You were not on duty in that court that morning, but I was. I will not write down what was done in the courtyard after, with the crown and the purple cloak and the reed. Some of the men I served with for years did things that day I would not have believed of them. I did not stop them. I laughed when they laughed. I want you to know that about me before you read the rest.
And then Pilatus brought Him out, bleeding, in the purple, and said, Behold the man. As though he were asking them to look at what they had done and be ashamed of it. They were not ashamed. They cried out, Crucify him. And when they said, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend, I watched Pilatus understand that he was finished either way.
He called for water. He washed his hands in front of all of them, and he said, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
I have thought about that basin of water for years. I think he thought about it longer than I did. You do not wash your hands of a thing that does not stay on them.
Do you remember the inscription? He wrote it himself, in Hebrew and Greek and Latin: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The chief priests came and begged him to change it, to write that the man had only said he was their king. And Pilatus, who had given way to them on everything else that day, would not give way on that. What I have written I have written. I have wondered since whether that was the only true thing he did all day, and whether he knew it.
So I will tell you what I think, and then I will not speak of Pilatus again in this letter, because I do not have the right to judge him and he has gone where my judgment cannot follow. I think he knew. I think in some part of himself he knew what he had done that morning, and he carried it for nine years, through Caesarea and Gerizim and the long road to Rome, and it never once left him. I may be wrong. You knew him better. But I have watched men carry a thing like that, and I know how it bends them.
I know because I am carrying it too.
I was at the cross, Marcus. I never told you that. You thought I was on the wall that day, and I let you think it. I was one of the four. I was one of the ones who nailed Him.
I want to tell you what I saw, and I want you to believe that I am not mad, and that I am not drunk, and that I have no reason on this earth to make any of it up, because every word of it is a word that could cost me my post and perhaps my life.
When we drove the nails, He did not curse us. Every man I have ever crucified has cursed us, Marcus. Every one. In Aramaic, in Greek, in whatever tongue they had. They curse us and our mothers and our gods and Caesar. It is what men do on a cross. This one did not. As we raised Him up, He said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
I heard it. I was holding the rope.
We divided His clothes under the cross, the way we always do. His tunic was woven in one piece from the top all the way down, without a seam, and it seemed a waste to tear it, so we cast lots for it. I won it. Marcus, I still have it. It is folded in the bottom of my chest under my winter cloak, and I have never worn it, and I cannot sell it, and I cannot burn it. I take it out sometimes at night and look at it and put it back. I do not know why I am telling you this.
At the sixth hour the sky went dark. Not clouds. Not a storm. I have stood watches in every weather from Gaul to Syria and I tell you, I have never seen a darkness like that at midday. It lasted until the ninth hour. Three hours of night in the middle of the day, and the crowd went quiet, and even the men who had been mocking Him went quiet, and there was nothing to hear but the breathing of the three men on the crosses.
At the ninth hour He cried out with a loud voice. Not the cry of a dying man, Marcus. Dying men do not have breath left for a loud voice at the end; you know that as well as I. He cried out like a man finishing something. And then He gave up His spirit, as though it were His to give. And the ground shook under our feet. The rocks split. Men in the city said afterward that the great curtain in their temple had torn from top to bottom.
Our centurion was standing beside me. You knew him. A hard man. Twenty-two years in the legions and not a soft bone in him. He looked up at that cross with the ground still trembling under us, and he said, Truly this was the Son of God.
And Marcus, I said it with him. All of us who were with him said it. We were afraid, and we said it, and we meant it.
Then we went back to the barracks, and someone opened a jar of wine, and by the next week nobody would talk about it.
Three days later the tomb was empty. You will have heard what the official story was, that His disciples came by night and stole the body while the guard slept. I know two of the men who were on that guard. I drank with one of them in Joppa two years ago, and he was very drunk, and he told me the chief priests paid them a great deal of silver to say that, and promised to keep them safe if the governor heard of it. I asked him what really happened. He would not tell me. He only put his face in his hands. Marcus, you know as well as I do what happens to a Roman guard who sleeps on duty. If they had slept, they would be dead. They are not dead. They are rich.
I have told no one this. I am telling you.
Since then I have listened. I have not been able to help it. In the markets, at the gates, in the inns along the coast road, there are people who speak of Him, quietly, among themselves, and I have learned to stand near them and look as though I am not listening. A good deal of what I have heard I do not understand. But some of it I cannot stop thinking about.
They say He taught that if a man strikes you on one cheek, you should turn to him the other also. They say He taught that you should love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. That one I would have laughed at before that Friday. I do not laugh at it now, because I watched Him do it with nails in His hands.
They say He taught that if a soldier compels you to carry his pack one mile, you should go with him two. Marcus, He was speaking of us. Of men like me. I have done that very thing a hundred times on the road, seized some Jew out of a field and made him carry my gear the lawful mile, and watched him drop it at the milestone and spit and walk away. Last spring on the road up from Lydda I took a young man from a vineyard and put my pack on his back, and when we came to the milestone, he did not put it down. He kept walking. I asked him what he was doing. He said, My Lord taught us to go the second mile. He carried it another mile and set it down and said to me, Peace be with you, soldier. And then he walked back toward his vineyard.
I stood on that road a long time.
They say one of our own, a centurion at Capernaum, years ago, sent to Him to heal a servant who was dying, and did not even ask Him to come to the house, because the centurion said he was not worthy for Him to come under his roof. Only say the word, the centurion said, and my servant shall be healed. And the Nazarene marveled at him and said He had not found so great faith, no, not in all Israel. A Roman. He praised a Roman. The servant was well in that same hour.
I keep comparing it, Marcus, to what we were taught. I have poured out wine to Jupiter and Mars since I was a boy. I took the oath to Caesar. I have stood in the line on the feast days and burned the incense to the genius of the emperor with everyone else. And I have never once, in all of it, felt that anyone was listening. Our gods quarrel and lust and lie and steal one another’s wives. They want our smoke and our silver. They demand that we die for Rome. Not one of them ever died for us. Augustus they call divine now, and Tiberius after him, and now Gaius, and I have seen Gaius with my own eyes, Marcus, and he is no god.
And this one, this Nazarene, this Jew from a village no one has ever heard of, a carpenter’s son, they say, who never commanded a soldier or held an office or wrote a book, He let us kill Him. And He prayed for us while we did it. I cannot make sense of these things. I have tried. I lie awake at night and try, and I cannot.
And His people are like Him. That is what troubles me most.
You will have heard about the young man they stoned outside the gate in Jerusalem, some years after. Stephen, they called him. I was not on duty there, but a man from my cohort saw it. He said the young man was bleeding on his knees with the stones still coming, and he looked up and said he saw the heavens opened. And then he cried out, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. The same prayer, Marcus. The same as at the cross. He prayed for the men killing him and then he fell asleep. That was the word my comrade used. Not died. He said, it was like watching a man fall asleep.
I have seen the leaders of that sect taken before the Jewish council and beaten with rods, and I have watched them walk out afterward with the blood still on their backs, and they were rejoicing. I heard one of them say that they counted it an honor to suffer shame for His name. Who rejoices at a beating? What kind of man counts it an honor?
They are being hunted now. The Jewish council hunts them, and there was a young Pharisee from Tarsus a few years ago who was dragging them out of their houses by the dozen, until something happened to him on the road to Damascus that no one will explain to me. And now Gaius Caesar has commanded that his own statue be set up in their temple at Jerusalem, and Petronius is marching down from Syria with two legions to do it, and the whole land is trembling, and I am afraid, Marcus.
I am afraid for what is coming.
Because I know Rome. I know what Rome does to people who will not burn the incense. And I know these people now. I have watched them. They will not burn it. Not for Gaius, not for anyone. I am afraid that one day, perhaps not soon, but one day, Caesar will command us to put them down, all of them, and we will drag them into the arenas and give them to the beasts to be torn apart like dogs for the crowd to watch. And I am afraid that they will go. I am afraid they will go willingly, singing, with that same prayer in their mouths. And I am afraid that I will be the one holding the rope again.
I am deeply troubled in my conscience that what we have done is gravely wrong. I do not mean the ordinary wrong a soldier does. I have done plenty of that and slept well after. I mean something else. I mean that I think we killed a righteous man on that hill. I think we killed more than a righteous man. And I think the gods I have been sacrificing to my whole life are not gods at all.
I brought some of this to the men in the guardroom one night, Marcus, carefully, only a little of it, the part about the darkness at midday. They laughed. One of them said that the Jews had drugged my wine at the feast. Another said I had been in the sun too long. Another said, a little too quietly, that I should be careful who heard me talking like that, and he did not laugh when he said it. So I stopped talking.
But I know you. I know you will take different notice of these things. You were always the one among us who thought before he spoke and listened before he judged. And you stood nearer to Pilatus than any of us at the end. If anyone would understand what I am trying to say, it is you.
So I ask this of you as a friend, by everything we have shared, by Germania and the long marches and the winter on the Rhine when you carried me half a day with a broken ankle: do not share this letter. Do not speak of it to anyone. Burn it when you have read it. I do not yet have the boldness to say these things out loud. I wish that I did. I am ashamed that I do not. Those Galileans have it, fishermen and tax collectors and women, and I, who have stood in the line of battle and never run, I do not.
But I will say it to you, once, in ink, so that at least it has been said.
A part of me believes Him. This Nazarene. This Jew. I believe He was what the centurion said He was, and what I said He was with him, on that hill, with the ground shaking. I do not know what to do with that belief. I do not know who to go to or what it would ask of me. But I am astonished by the whole of it, Marcus, and I cannot stop being astonished, and I am beginning to think that I do not want to.
Perhaps that is what was in Pilatus at the end. Not the disgrace. Not Gerizim. Perhaps he too knew, and could not bear to know, and had no one to tell. I pray that it is not so. I find, God help me, that I am praying, and I do not entirely know to whom.
Write to me if you can. Write to me only of ordinary things, of the weather and the price of grain and your sons, and I will know by it that you have read this and burned it and that you are still my friend. If you ever feel the same as I do, write one line at the end, any line, about the second mile. I will understand.
The peace that young man in the vineyard gave me, I give to you, though I do not yet know if it is mine to give.
Farewell.
Written by my own hand at Caesarea, by the sea, in the third year of Gaius Caesar.
Lucius Varenus
P.S. The tunic is still in the chest. If anything should happen to me, I have told no one where it is but you. Do with it what you think right. I could not.
