The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Ratslayer

‘Yeshua,’

‘Ha-Nozri.’

an eye clouded with suffering fixed the arrested man.

‘Matthew Levi,’

‘I said, Hegemon, that the temple of the old faith would fall and a new temple of truth would be built. I said it that way so as to make it more understandable.’

What is truth?’

John 18:38. What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. ~ Francis Bacon https://www.thoughtco.com/of-truth-by-francis-bacon-1690073

And again he heard the voice:

Pilate raised his tormented eyes to the prisoner

The trouble is,‘ the bound man went on, not stopped by anyone, ’hat you are too closed off and have definitively lost faith in people.

he tried to imagine precisely what whimsical form the wrath of the hot-tempered procurator would take at this unheard-of impudence from the prisoner.

by your life,’ the procurator replied. ‘It’s high time you swore by it, since it’s hanging by a hair, I can tell you.’

‘You don’t think it was you who hung it, Hegemon?’ the prisoner asked. ‘If so, you are very mistaken.’

‘You must agree that surely only he who hung it can cut the hair?’

I don’t know who hung such a tongue on you, but he hung it well.

Dysmas,

Gestas,

Bar-Ra...

‘Everyone,’ the prisoner replied. ‘There are no evil people in the world.’

At that moment a swallow swiftly flitted into the colonnade,

the now light and lucid head of the procurator.

The vagrant philosopher has proved to be mentally ill.

precisely where the procurator’s residence was.

Haha

something happened to the procurator’s vision.

something strange also happened to his hearing:

immortality for some reason provoked unendurable anguish.

I think so. Mee too.

a certain Judas from Kiriath,

‘I said that all authority is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will be no authority of the Caesars, nor any other authority. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for any authority.’

The prisoner was the first to speak. ‘I see that some misfortune has come about because I talked with that young man from Kiriath.

Judas!

I have a foreboding, Hegemon, that he will come to grief, and I am very sorry for him.’

So, then,

are all good people?’

‘It will, Hegemon,’ Yeshua answered with conviction. ‘It will never come!’ Pilate suddenly cried out

Pilate asked with anguish for some reason, not understanding what was happening to him.

Mark Ratslayer

the Sebastean cohort

Bald Mountain,

Golgotha, hill of the skull.

the president of the Sanhedrin,

Joseph Kaifa.

According to the law, according to custom, one of these two criminals had to be released in honour of the great feast of Passover,

On the strength of all the foregoing, the procurator asks the high priest to reconsider the decision and release the less

harmful of the two condemned men, and that is without doubt Ha-Nozri.

there was no one to cure the dreadful, wicked pains of the procurator,

it seemed vaguely to the procurator that there was something he had not finished saying to the condemned man, and perhaps something he had not finished hearing.

‘Immortality ... immortality has come ...’ Whose immortality had come?

He was carried along now, smothered and burned, by the most terrible wrath — the wrath of impotence.

Know, then, that from now on, High Priest, you will have no peace! Neither you nor your people’

Pontius Pilate, equestrian of the Golden Spear!‘

you hate them with a cruel hatred, and will cause them much suffering, but you will not destroy them utterly!

You wanted to release him so that he could disturb the people, outrage the faith, and bring the people under Roman swords!