The Trail to Golgotha

ISBN 1-60813-969-7

Joachim is a happy child living with his parents and siblings in Galilee. When the boy is twelve years old, the family travels to the temple city of Urushalim for the Jewish feast of Passover.

Jerusalem is a center of banking and trade. The visitors of many nations intrigue the boy. The size, wealth and beauty of Herod’s temple astound him; however, operations by the temple’s company disgust him. Pressed by curiosity, he becomes an eyewitness to a bloody insurgency. Appalled by the arrogance of foreign rulers and the greed of temple men, Joachim takes home his memories—he has seen the prostitute’s rapturous smiles too. Twenty years later, he’ll return and challenge the ruling religious establishment.

During his teens, Joachim is spellbound by the world beyond his birthplace. A free spirit and a dreamer, he leaves his native Galil at seventeen. Thirsting for adventure, he follows the Roman aqueduct to the pagan city of Caesarea, where he falls in love and stalks a married woman. In the Phoenician city of Tyre, he criticizes the official cult and meets head-on Melkart’s priests. Despite his fiascos, Joachim is a happy young man.

In the company of a Greek philosopher, the young Galilean sets out on the Silk Road, reaching Zoroastrian Persia and beyond. After a rough encounter with the forces of nature, he chances into the tender arms of a young widow in northern India. A few years later, his life in the silk-producing lands comes to an abrupt end and he goes on the trails again.

When Joachim returns to the land of his parents, he has delved into Paganism, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Listening to his traveling companion, Alexandros, he has become acquainted with Greek thought. By the time he returns to his native land, his only certainty is the doubt.

Supported by a handful of fishermen and a lady friend, Joachim attempts to deliver the Jews from the clench of the temple institution. Preaching independence from the cult and humanitarianism, he annoys the spiritual authorities. As a result of his challenge, the young prophet is taken before the Roman governor by the temple company and bogusly accused of sedition.

With candor, Joachim faces his biased judges: an irritated religious council convicts him outright; to keep the peace with the religious ruling class, the Roman governor intends to sacrifice him; the agnostic ethnarch, Herod Antipas, finds dementia in his subject’s serenity but refuses to acquit in deference to the accusers. During three seemingly disconnected trials—the religious, the secular and the ethnic—Joachim’s courage becomes an enigma to everyone. The defendant senses proudly that, should his physical destruction come about, his tenets will endure.

On the last hours of his life, Joachim wins influential pagans to his dreams. The governor’s wife pleads his cause forcefully before her husband. Still, he’s convicted and sentenced to an ignoble demise. Then, the cycle of his public life in Judea closes unpredictably.