[188] “No, no,” Sisenna went on, “you are mistaken; at least, if my friend the physician told me true; Christus was never in Rome, and he was crucified, if I remember right, eight years before Claudius came to the throne.”
“Crucified, was he?” said one of the previous speakers. “Then he must have been a slave. Fancy a number of people calling themselves by the name of a slave!”
“No,” answered Sisenna; “as far as I could understand, he was not a slave; but of course, he was not a citizen. He was a workman of some kind, a carpenter, I think the physician told me; but whatever he was, he was a wonderful man. He seems to have gone about healing sick people, and making blind men see, and lame men walk; aye, and dead men live again.”
There was a general outcry at this. “No! no!” said one of the audience, expressing the common feeling; “that is too much to believe; the other things might be; but making the dead alive! you are laughing at us.”
“I can only tell you,” said Sisenna, “what the old man told me; he said that he had seen these things with his own eyes. One of the dead men was a friend of [189] his own, aye, and had been his patient, too, in his last illness. ‘I saw him die!’ he said. I remember his very words, for I was as little disposed to believe the story as you are. ‘I saw him die, for I had been with him all the time; I had done my very best to save him; and I saw him buried, too; then comes this Christus�he had been away, you must understand, when the man died�and makes them roll away the stone from the door of the tomb, and cries to the dead man, “Come forth!” I saw the dead man come out, just as he had been buried, with the grave clothes about him, and his chin tied up with a napkin, just as I had tied it with my own hands, when I knew beyond all doubt that he was dead.’ These were the old physician’s very words.”
“He must have been mad,” said one of the audience.
“Possibly,” returned Sisenna; “but he wasn’t in the least mad in other matters. He talked as sensibly as a man could, and a better physician I never hope to see.”
“But tell me,” said a soldier who had been listening attentively to Sisenna’s word, “how did this strange man come to such a bad end? If he could do such wonderful things, couldn’t he have prevented it somehow? And couldn’t he have made himself alive again, if he made other people?”
A murmur of approval followed the speaker’s words, as if he had succeeded in expressing the general feeling.
[190] “Well,” replied Sisenna, “that is just what I asked, and the old man did try to explain it to me, but I could not rightly understand what he said. Only I made out that he needn’t have died if he had not been willing.”
“No,” cried the soldier; “that can’t be true. A man choosing to die in such a way! It is past all belief.”
“Well, so I thought,” said Sisenna; “but as for what you said about his making himself alive again, that is just what the old man told me he did.”
“Did he ever see him alive again?” some one asked.
“No, he did not. I particularly asked him, and he said he was not one of those who did. But he believed it. He knew scores of people, he said, who had seen him.”
“This is all very strange,” said the veteran who had begun the conversation, “and for my part, I can’t make head or tail of it. But tell us, what sort of people are these Christians? do they do the horrible things that people charge them with?”
“I can’t believe it,” replied Sisenna. “I know nothing but what is good of them; and I never found any one who did know, though there are plenty who are ready to say it. My old physician spent all his time in visiting sick people, and I am sure not one in ten paid him anything. He wouldn’t have taken anything from me, but that I told him I could afford [191] it. They had a house, he told me, where they took in sick folks to care for them; not people that could pay, you must understand, but poor workmen and slaves and lepers, all the poor wretches that no one else took any heed of.”
At this point in the conversation a newcomer entered the room. He was greeted with a cry of welcome. “Ha! Pansa,” said one of the company, “you are just the man whom we want to see. Do you know anything about these folk that men call Christians?”
“Well, I ought to,” replied the man. “Don’t you know that the prisoner whom Celer and I had charge of up to the spring of this year was one of their chief men? He was a Jew, but a citizen. Paulus was his name. He got into trouble with his countrymen at Jerusalem, and was brought before the Governor; but thinking that he should not get a fair trial there he appealed to C?sar; so the Governor sent him over here. For some reason or other it was a long time before his trial came on, and meanwhile he was allowed to live in a house of his own here in Rome. Well, as I said, Celer and I had charge of him all that time. I don’t know whether there is any one here who has had a charge of a prisoner. If there is, he won’t need to be told that you get in that way to know as much about a man as there is to be known. You can never get away from him, nor he from you; chained for twelve hours to me, and then twelve to [192] Celer, that is how Paulus lived for two years. And if Celer were here�he got his discharge, you know, about three months ago�he would say what I say, that one couldn’t have believed that there was such a good man in the world as our prisoner was. And I do maintain that if the other Christians are anything like him, they are a very admirable set of people. In the first place, his patience was quite inexhaustible. I needn’t say that it is a trying thing to a man’s temper to be chained to another man. If it was to his own brother, he would not much like it. Of course, it is part of our business, and it all comes in the day’s work. But we don’t like it. And I am ashamed to say that till I got to know what sort of man this Paulus was, I was often rough with him, and Celer was worse; you know Celer had a rough temper sometimes. But we neither of us ever heard so much as an angry word from him. But he had other things to try him besides us, and we, anyhow at first, were bad enough. He had but poor health; his eyes, I remember in particular, were sometimes very painful. Sometimes, too, he was very short of money. You see he had to live on what his friends sent him, and now and then their contributions fell short or were delayed on the way. Anyhow, he had sometimes scarcely enough for food and firing. But he never said a word of complaint. And whenever he had anything he was always ready to give it away. Prisoners, for the most part, I fancy, think very little of any one but themselves, [193] but he was thinking day and night of people all over the world, I may say. There were letters always coming and going. He could not write himself�his eyes were too bad�though he would add commonly just a few big, sprawling letters with his own hand at the end of a letter. (Footnote: So in Galatians vi. II. “See with how large letters I have written unto you with mine own hand.” Revised version.) I don’t pretend to understand what they were all about. They were in Greek in the first place, and I know very little Greek; and, indeed, however much I might have known, I should hardly have been much the wiser. But I could see this, that they gave him a vast amount of trouble and care. He was thinking about what was in them day and night. I could hear him talking to himself, and he would pray. I have seen him for an hour together, aye, a couple of hours, on his knees praying.”
“Why, Pansa,” cried one of the soldiers, “I do believe that you are more than half a Christian yourself.”