From:     "Jesus -- A Life"  -- A.N. Wilson  1992 W.W. Norton 

Chapter 9

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Certainly, if Jesus had been expecting that the heavens would open, and the Day of the Lord was about to dawn, he have been hideously disappointed.

A small fight broke out. Although it was generally forbidden bear arms at Passover time, it was (and still is) permitted to the to act in self-defence during the festival. By tradition, Simon drew his sword and struck at the ear of the servant of the high priest who had come to supervise Jesus's arrest. In Mark, the ear is cut off.  In Luke, Jesus picks up the ear and miraculously appends it more to the head of the High Priest's servant. Only in the Fourth  Gospel is the servant given a name -Malchus, meaning the king.  In an earlier part of this book, we discussed how the arrest of becomes a Midrash on the prophecy of Zechariah. It is from this prophecy also that the evangelists derived their idea that Judas been paid thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus.   ('So they weighed for my hire, thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, cast them unto the potter,  ' which in the Gospel becomes the story of Judas returning to the high priests, casting the thirty pieces of silver at their feet, with which they buy the piece of land known as the potter's field.)

But the High Priest's servant. Let us concentrate for a moment upon him. In my chapter on Paul, I remarked on the fact that Paul's obsession with the Cross and the Crucifixion of Jesus is nowhere explained. New Testament scholars repeat, as an axiom, that Paul and Jesus never met, without offering any suggestion as to how developed this obsession. If, as I surmise, Paul, or Saul as he was then, had a minor but significant part in the drama of the Crucifixion itself, might not 'Malchus' be our man? In his letter to the Galatians, one of his most autobiographical letters, Paul revealed that he bore in his body 'the marks of the Lord Jesus'.  Some commentators have gone so far as to wonder whether Paul did not, like Francis of Assisi and many other Christian devotees, receive the mysterious marks of the stigmata, the actual wounds of crucifixion in his hands, feet and side. Ego gar ta stigmata tou lesou en to somati mou bastazo.

At Paul's conversion, the mystical vision of Jesus told him, 'It is hard for thee to kick against the goad'.  In the vision, Jesus was both the man whom Paul was persecuting, and a man who is stabbing Paul with a sharp instrument. Nothing could be proved, but one way of reading Paul's admission to the Galatians was that he spoke the literal truth: he bore in his body wounds inflicted when he arrested Jesus. If I had the chance to return in time and meet Paul, I should take a close look at his ears.

You might say that if so important a figure as Paul was to become in Christian history had been present at Gethsemane, this would surely have been mentioned. This is not necessarily the case. To the original hearers of Mark  (followers of the Pauline cult of the Cross) it could be that the phrase 'servant of the High Priest' was a phrase as readily identifiable as 'the Beloved Disciple' was to the Fourth Gospel community of believers. For subsequent generations, these phrases are impenetrably obscure. No one knows for certain who 'the Beloved Disciple' was, but it was clearly not a phrase used in the first instance to obfuscate or confuse the hearers of the Gospel. In the 1980s in Britain, the Prime Minister was so famous that she could be alluded to by kennings or phrases -'the Iron Lady', or simply 'the Lady' or 'the Right Honourable Member for Finchley', referring to the fact that she represented the north London suburb of Finchley in Parliament. If after some disaster of war or earthquake London were destroyed, and all that survived of twentieth-century British history were a few newspaper articles, mistranscribed and then translated into another language, historians could be puzzled about their references to the Iron Lady. Some would claim that she had obviously been a mythological being, while others would suggest that some such person might conceivably have existed though they did not know her name. Then, one day, perhaps, archaeologists might unearth a railway-station sign-board emblazoned with the word FINCHLEY and one part of the puzzle would be solved. Finchley was, after all, a real place, even though most 'Iron Lady' scholars had persuaded themselves that it was purely imaginary.

My guess is no more than a guess; and some will say that it is fantastical guess. But supposing that the first generation of Christians, those who were loyal to the Jewish inheritance of Jesus, perhaps, and who disliked what they heard of Paul's missional activities, supposing that they called him 'the servant of the High Priest'; or supposing, even, that they called him 'the king', since his name, Saul, was the name of the first of the Jewish kings. The servant's name was the same as that of a king/malcho: that is, the servant's name was Saul. ' If, as Acts 15 suggests, there was a fundamental rift between Peter and Paul and in their interpretation of Jesus and his message, it would make sense that his followers -those who began to compile the Synoptic tradition -should not have named  Saul as having been instrumental in the downfall of Jesus. Rather they preferred to vilify Peter as the man who was prepared to deny Jesus in his hour of greatest need.

Whatever happened durirtg that scuffle in the dark, it ended. The soldiers knew their man. Peter, or whoever it was who attacked  'Malchus' with a sword, ran away into the darkness; so did all Jesus' other friends and followers. The soldiers grabbed hold of one other person. He was a young man, dressed like a catechumen expecting Baptism, in a shroud. The armed men grabbed this garment, but theyoung man shook himself free, vanishing, like everyone else in the scene, and like all the scholarly explanations for it, into the darkness.  He was naked. Jesus was left alone with his captors.