Chapter 1
Jerusalem 33AD
Someone took the robe, someone took the spear. A few people emptied the room of the Last Supper of all its plates and dishes and goblets. A band of men chopped up the cross into chunks and slivers. A rabbi got the sandals and a zealot snagged the death shroud. A man charged with the Master’s burial, with cleaning and anointing the body, removed the crown of thorns and placed it under the blood-streaked worktable. Later that night a boy tasked with swamping out the room pricked his thumb with one of the thorns from the crown and immediately swooned with its power. Still fresh with the Master’s blood, it mingled with the boy’s own and later that night he fell into a deep trance and saw the future…
Some clipped his fingernails and later others simply tore them off his fingers. Soon his head was bald, shorn by an excited barber who wasted no time making short work of the Master’s beard as well. There had been talk of flaying the corpse but by this time, acolytes guarded the tomb and were in turn guarded by hired enforcers.
At last, the desecration of the Master’s body ceased…
Very soon, he was spirited away to an unmarked grave and people flooded the narrow streets proclaiming the Master had risen to heaven. Within minutes of this excited shouting, the far-sighted grave robbers were also in the streets hawking the pilfered relics to an increasingly impassioned crowd. Surprised by their hysterical demands for sacred pieces of anything the Master had touched, the robbers immediately clipped their own fingernails and cut their own hair to distribute for the right price. Little squares of shroud linen made their appearances, the more expensive ones dappled with drops of blood from surprised farm animals…
The rush for relics was on. No one knew what had become of the Crown of Thorns. It had not made its way to the marketplace, not even any of its thorns. Certainly, there were sales of ordinary thorns dipped in the same animal blood as the shroud, but these stopped after a very short time. Someone remembered the child swamper who now lay in a wide-eyed stupor babbling about the coming end of the world, as they knew it. The Master’s message was clear but soon the child drifted back to his troubled sleep and never wakened again.
All agreed: the Crown of Thorns was missing. Thus, the price for it immediately went through the roof. Only a rich merchant could afford it – but there were plenty of them. The bidding on the missing crown of thorns rose with the desire to possess it.
Days passed. The Master’s bones, hidden in an unmarked grave, were safe from the saws and cleavers. Life returned to the serious normalcy of before and many people wondered: what became of the Crown? Why, of all the relics removed from the tomb, even the burial shroud had been torn away, why was the Crown missing?
Soon, people ceased to ask and never thought of it again…
