A Fictional Biography
I had never meant to remember the man’s eyes.
A Roman soldier learns early to forget faces. You obey the orders; you don’t learn the condemned. The moment you start seeing people instead of offenders, your sword hand hesitates. But that morning, when they brought Yeshua of Nazareth to be scourged, I made the mistake of looking at Him.
I raised the flagrum, the weighted leather that rips through flesh, and He lifted His face toward me. Not with defiance. Not with terror. With grief… for me! I had never seen sorrow like that in a man about to be torn open. A compassion that made my grip slip for half a heartbeat. The centurion noticed and shouted at me. I obeyed. I always obeyed.
But I felt every blow in my ribs as though the leather had turned inward.
Later, as we led Him to the Place of the Skull, the noise of pilgrims filled the air. Preparation day. Their great Sabbath was hours away, and Jerusalem was bursting like an overfull wineskin. Priests recited Torah in the courtyards. Scribes debated loudly, their halakhah, in the streets. And the words, those ancient Hebrew lines I had picked up during long years of service here, drifted through my mind like ghosts.
A righteous man may have many troubles, but Adonai delivers him from them all… He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.
Psalm Thirty-Four. I had heard a rabbi chant it during a festival. I didn’t know why it came back to me now.
We nailed Him to the cross like we had done to so many others. But even as the nails pierced His wrists and ankles, He didn’t curse. I’ve seen rebels spit in our faces, thieves scream, murderers beg. But this man looked up into the sky, darkening strangely, unnaturally, and He said something in their language.
“Father… forgive them.”
Forgive them?
Forgive… us?
Forgive me?
I shook it off. I had a job to do. But the words stuck to me like wet clay.
Around the sixth hour, the sun dimmed. Not clouds. Not dust. A heavy, ancient darkness fell like a curtain being dragged across the world. I had once heard a Judean mutter a prophecy while drinking with other soldiers: “‘I will make the sun go down at noon.’ Amos,” he said. I ignored it then, but the memory clawed its way back now.
The ground trembled and split the earth beneath my sandals. The thieves panicked, straining for breath, pushing up on their nailed feet. But the man in the center, Yeshua, lifted His face and cried out with all His remaining strength, “It is finished.”
Finished. The word struck me like an arrow. Finished what?
Something in the air shifted. The tremor settled. The darkness hung thick.
Then the priests approached, fussing about their purity laws. They wouldn’t come near the dead, their Torah forbade it, yet they demanded we hurry the deaths so the bodies wouldn’t remain on the crosses on the Sabbath. Their “high” Sabbath, they kept emphasizing, as though God Himself needed them to move us along.
The order was given: break their legs.
I hate that part most. The mallet is heavy, and the sound of bone shattering hasn’t left me in years.
I went to the first thief. One swing. Bones cracked like dry wood. His scream tore the sky.
The second thief, another blow. Another scream. The kind that follows you into your sleep.
Then I stood before Yeshua.
He wasn’t moving. His body hung limp. His breathing had stopped. I stepped closer; the air around Him felt… still. Quiet. Like the moment before dawn. I laid a hand against His chest. Nothing.
“He’s already dead,” I said.
The centurion behind me shook his head. Roman law demanded certainty. We didn’t assume death. We proved it. And there was only one way.
“Make sure.”
My heart pounded. I didn’t want to do it. I don’t know why. He was already gone, wasn’t He? But orders are orders. My spear was sharp. Polished. Ready.
I whispered, without thinking, “I’m sorry.”
Then I drove the spear upward beneath His ribs, toward the heart.
His flesh parted… and what flowed out froze me in place.
Blood. And water.
Separate. Distinct. Sudden.
Not the slow seep of a corpse.
A burst, like a wellspring had been opened.
I stumbled back.
I had seen men die a hundred ways. But I had never seen that. And then, suddenly, fragments of all the Jewish Scriptures I’d overheard over the years collided in my mind like pieces snapping into place.
They pierced my hands and my feet. Psalm 22.
He keeps all His bones, not one of them is broken. Psalm 34.
They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced. Zechariah 12.
Not a bone of the Passover lamb shall be broken. Exodus 12.
Lamb.
Bones unbroken.
Pierced.
Blood poured out.
The darkness.
The trembling earth.
His words.
His eyes.
It all slammed into me at once, like someone had shouted truth into my chest.
The centurion stepped beside me. He had commanded men for decades. He was not easily moved. But his voice cracked as he whispered, “Truly… this man was the Son of God.”
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to cling to Rome, to my duty, to everything I knew.
But I was looking at the One I had pierced.
And I could feel prophecy breathing around me like wind.
He had known I would do it. I understood that suddenly.
He had known every blow I struck at the scourging.
He had looked at me with compassion anyway.
He had forgiven me before the spear touched Him.
When I close my eyes now, I see His face in the darkness, calm, steady, sorrowful, knowing.
I see the water and the blood flowing like a testimony.
And sometimes, when the night is quiet, I know, not suspect, not wonder,
He died for the world.
And He saw me.
✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️
After that day, I tried to return to the life I’d known. Rome expected it. A soldier is supposed to pack away the memories of the dead like old rations, sealed and forgotten. But the moment the spear left His side, nothing in me fit the old mold anymore.
And the first thing that changed was the silence.
Not the easy kind, not the “nothing to say.” This was the kind that follows you like a shadow. The kind that forces you to listen to echoes you’d spent your life ignoring.
I stayed in Jerusalem for weeks after the crucifixion. Truthfully, I lingered for one reason: I couldn’t leave the city where His blood had touched my hands. I kept going back to the place outside the walls, standing on the little rise where His cross had stood. Sometimes at night. Sometimes at dawn. And I’d murmur things I never thought I would say, prayers that felt like lifting stones off my own chest.
Then they said He rose.
At first, I thought the disciples were lying, or delusional with grief. But as a soldier, you learn to smell truth the way you smell iron in a wound. Their fear had vanished. Their eyes had changed. Men preparing for a hoax don’t sing. They don’t bless their enemies. They don’t walk fearlessly past the very soldiers who could arrest them.
And Rome never recovers a missing body without someone being charged. Someone jailed. Someone bribed. Someone exposed.
But nothing surfaced.
Instead… those followers gained joy.
I wanted to run from it. Instead, I ran toward it.
I sought out one of them, a fisherman named Yohanan. The youngest. With eyes like morning after a storm. He looked at me as though he already knew who I was. Knew what I had done. And somehow wasn’t afraid.
“You were there,” he said.
“I was.”
“You saw the water and the blood.”
I nodded.
And he whispered, “There are witnesses in heaven and on earth. You were meant to see it.”
Meant.
I had been many things in my life, but was never “meant” for anything holy.
Yet something in me cracked open then, and I told him everything, even the part where I felt forgiveness wash through me the moment the point of my spear touched His side. When I finished, Yohanan bowed his head and said something that turned my bones to water.
“He prayed for you before you ever touched Him.”
I believed him.
Not because he said it, but because it matched the look Yeshua gave me before the first nail. The kind of look a man gives when he sees past flesh, straight into a soul.
After that day, I wasn’t the same.
I asked to be released from regular duty. The centurion approved it, reluctantly, because he said I’d become “unsettling.” But what he called unsettling, I called awakening.
I spent months traveling through Judea and Samaria. When I heard the disciples preaching in the Temple courts, I hid behind pillars and listened. When they were beaten for speaking His name, I watched them stagger away laughing. Laughing! I had never seen men rejoice after chains.
Eventually, I left the service altogether. I sold my armor piece by piece, until I carried only my cloak, a small pack, and the spear I had used to pierce His side. Yes, that one.. I couldn’t let it go. It was no longer a weapon to me, it was a reminder. I couldn’t destroy it, and I couldn’t leave it behind. So I carried it like a pilgrim carries a staff.
Some say I healed the blind with it. Some say other things. I don’t claim miracles. But I will tell you this: when I prayed for people, something happened inside me, a stirring like wind through cedar branches. If God granted anything through these hands, it was because of the One they wounded.
I ended up settling far from Judea, in the hills of Cappadocia, among people who barely knew the Empire existed. I taught them the Scriptures I’d heard sung in the Temple. I recited Isaiah’s words from memory, because they had burned themselves into me. I told them the story of the Passover Lamb whose bones were never broken. I repeated over and over the verse that haunted me the most: “They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced.”
I told them because I had been the one who pierced Him.
And every time I spoke His name, my voice shook. Not from shame anymore, but from awe. Because He had turned the worst moment of my life into the doorway of my salvation.
In my old age, I wandered into wilderness places to pray. Some said I saw angels. Maybe I did. But to me the greatest miracle was this: I no longer feared death. The man on the cross had walked into death like a king entering his own city, and He had walked out again. If He could rise, then death was no longer a cliff, only a doorway.
When I felt my last day approaching, I laid the spear beside me. The wood had darkened with years. The metal had dulled. But to me it still shone. And I whispered the first words I ever prayed to Him, not spoken aloud that day at the cross, but spoken in my heart the moment the blood and water touched the earth:
“Forgive me. And lead me.”
Then I felt the gentlest peace settle over me, like a hand on my shoulder.
And I knew He had already done both.
Image done by my chatgpt AI at my direction… and yea, I know it got it wrong… but I tried 5 times. For those of you who know the Truth, you’ll “get” what I’m sayin’ here.