Interviewing the Roman Guard

During Easter season it can be good to be aware of some of the context in which the first Holy Week took place.  In the following piece, Sixtus and Justinius are fictional, but all the other characters and events are based on historical records.  The Record-Express is the name of the newspaper in which this first appeared.

As everyone must know by now, all the garrisons in the city have been on high alert for the past two weeks.  The Roman authorities always anticipate trouble around Passover, and this year was no exception.  Last Saturday we were able to interview a couple of soldiers who were standing guard duty in front of a tomb in a garden near the area known as Golgotha. 

Record-Express: Can you please introduce yourselves and tell our readers what you are doing here?  It’s a bit unusual to be guarding a tomb, isn’t it?

First Guard: My name is Justinius and I’ve been stationed in this back-water province of the empire for seven years now.  That fellow over there is Sixtus.  What we’re doing is trying to prevent any more trouble from that Galilean gang. 

Sixtus:  Yeah, we caught their ringleader yesterday and took care of him in a hurry.  What’s left of him is in this tomb behind us.  Usually getting rid of the leader makes the rest of a gang see the uselessness of any more rebellion against the great and mighty Caesar.  But this guy apparently made some claim about being able to rise from the dead, so we’re here to make sure that none of his followers steals the body and puts out some tall tale about his making good on his promise.

Restoring the Impact

Maestro John Sinclair, during a lecture at the 2009 Moravian Music Festival regarding the latest scholarship on 18^th century music performance practices, observed that, no matter how carefully we reproduce the instruments and performance styles of earlier periods, the one thing that we cannot reproduce is 18^th century listeners.  Our 21^st century ears, having been exposed to the works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and the like, simply cannot hear as shocking the music of Beethoven and his contemporaries.  What once was startlingly innovative now sounds to us quite ordinary.

The same thing is true for stories and sayings in the Bible.  A good example of this phenomenon is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Today we use the term Samaritan to mean helper or healer, as in the names of hospitals and counseling centers.  But to Jesus’ listeners, the concept of a “good Samaritan” was somewhere between shocking and incomprehensible.  The Jews of Bible times regarded Samaritans as apostates, idolaters – a people to be denounced and shunned.  Our pastor during my college years maintained that a way to restore the original impact of the parable was to rewrite it as the “good Communist”.  With the fall of the Soviet Union now two decades in the past, we should revise that once again, perhaps as the “good Taliban”.  Jesus’ point was that it was a member of a detested group who served as a good neighbor when religious leaders of the injured man’s own community failed to do so.