“But, Mistress, you saw him that day they dragged the woman before him....”
“Yes, but his saving her from that mob was not magic, little one. That was only the working of a quick intelligence and a good heart. But they say he can make lame persons walk again and blind persons see. And Cornelius, you remember, declared he healed his little servant boy, though Longinus thinks it was only a coincidence that the boy’s fever broke just at the same time the Galilean supposedly was curing him. Cornelius even believes that the carpenter once actually restored to life the son of a widow; he told me they were bearing the young man to the tomb when the Galilean happened along and brought him back to life. Of course, the boy may have been in a trance; certainly no sensible person can believe that he was really dead and then came back to life when the Galilean said some mysterious words and made some queer motions over him.” She paused and looked Tullia in the eyes. “Or do you, little one?”
“But if he is actually the son of our God....”
“Oh, you gullible Jews, even you, Tullia.” Her countenance revealed an amused tolerance. “And Cornelius. A soldier of Rome. But how, by all the gods, Tullia, can any present-day person of education and culture embrace such blatant superstition to believe that a man could come to earth as a god, even if he could believe that there are gods in the first place?”
But Tullia skillfully evaded answering the question. “If you saw him restore to life a man who you knew was dead, what would you say about him then, Mistress?”
“When I see him do that, little one, I’ll tell you then.”
Nevertheless, Claudia had not dismissed the Galilean from her thoughts, for that night she dreamed about him. It was a confused and illogical arrangement of stories she had heard about Jesus, interwoven with the experience she and Tullia had had that day at the Temple during the final exercises of the Feast of Tabernacles. In the dream she and Longinus had strolled with Cornelius down from the Tower of Antonia into the Court of the Gentiles. Rounding a corner of the Soreg, the three had come upon a throng ringed about the Galilean. They had pushed forward to the inner circle, and there, they had discovered on the stones of the court at the carpenter’s feet a crushed and bloody woman.