Call Me Joe

by Martin Van Es

  They all protested at once but he held up his hand to calm them.

  “That person already knows who they are, and they should also know that I will forgive them, as I have said before. It doesn’t matter how many armed guards you put on your gates, Yung. No one can ever be safe because that is not nature’s way. Trying to achieve some mythical level of security from all risks is one of the causes of mankind’s current predicaments. Unless a person accepts that they are mortal and vulnerable, they will never be happy.”

  The ripple of protests had died away and they all looked around at one another in horror as they took in the full impact of what he was telling them, each of them trying to work out who the traitor could possibly be amongst this small, self-selected group of people.

  Thirty

  The hotel reception staff were under strict instructions not to put through every call to Joe’s room because they were pouring in in such numbers, so it was a shock for Sophie to be woken by the persistent ringing of the bedside phone. Joe appeared to be sleeping peacefully beside her as she rolled over and fumbled for the receiver, more to silence it than anything else.

  “Yes?” she said when she finally got it to her ear the right way round.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Adams” – it sounded odd to be addressed by her surname – “but we have a Professor Martin on the phone from Oxford.”

  “Oxford?” She tried to focus on this information. “The university?”

  “I believe so, madam. I told him that you don’t accept unscheduled calls in the room but he insisted that you would want to take this one. He said to tell you it is about the scrolls.”

  “Oh.” Things began to come back to her as she struggled to bring herself to a state of wakefulness. She had heard that the scrolls had been flown from Jerusalem to Oxford to be authenticated and had sent another email to the relevant department at Oxford to tell them of her interest, but this was the first response she had received. “Okay, put him through.”

  “Miss Adams?” The voice sounded elderly and a long way away.

  “Yes.”

  “My apologies for disturbing you. My colleagues and I have been examining the scrolls that were recently unearthed in Jerusalem. I believe you have expressed an interest in being kept up to date on the subject. I have been following the story of your friend in New Zealand…”

  “Joe.”

  “Quite. There was a lot of scepticism in academic circles about his claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, as I am sure you can imagine, but I thought you would like to know that things are changing, partly because of these scrolls.”

  Sophie was fully awake now and pulled herself up on the pillows, concentrating hard on what was being said. Joe was beginning to stir beside her but she wanted to find out what the professor had to say for himself.

  “We have found four rolls in stone jars. All rolls consist of twenty-four parchment sheets of lamb’s leather skin.” The professor was talking as if delivering a lecture and she wished she had some means of recording his words so that she could play them back to Joe after the call. “The skin was first stripped of hair, fat and meat in different baths, scraped again and then stretched very tightly to dry. Once dry it was rubbed with salt. We are very lucky here that a unique mix of salts has been used, giving the rolls an unusual light colour and a very smooth surface. This considerably increases the contrast with the letters of the text, important for legibility, of course. These specific salts also have a lowered tendency to absorb water, so there is less effect of moisture, which has benefited the preservation process, despite Jerusalem being naturally higher than the dry environment of the Dead Sea, where many rolls have been found in the past.

  “With a scanner and an advanced computer algorithm we investigated the rolls on material and ink, redrawn in 3D and were able to partially decipher the text. The quality is, of course, not great any more and we will still need quite a lot of time to be able to read everything that has been written, but it is good enough to be able to make a number of statements.

  “We were also able to determine the age based on the usual Carbon-14 dating method in combination with an analysis of writing material, style and other artefacts in the first half of the first century. The text is written in Galilean Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus and his disciples would have spoken. A detailed description is made of which people belonged to the permanent group around Jesus and what their roles were and it confirms that the writer was a scribe called Amos. In addition, the texts contain various counselling and statements, comparable to those in the apocryphal gospel of Thomas. For example, one statement from Jesus that we were able to decipher was: ‘The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of wisdom, not a Kingdom to rule and not a Kingdom of the end’.

  “We have read parts of reports of a number of important events that took place in the years that Jesus and his disciples roamed, reports of events that we also know from the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Exegetes will enjoy a number of deviations in these found texts compared to those three gospels. This feels so incredibly authentic, the texts must absolutely have been written down by someone close to Jesus, such as Amos.

  “The theological world has always been fascinated by the relationship between the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. It is certain that the gospel of Mark was written as the oldest gospel around AD 65-70. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are probably around 10–20 years younger. The gospel of John is 10–20 years younger than that of Matthew and Luke. Mark has been a clear source for Matthew and Luke. Another important theory, however, is that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were also based on an older common source Q (after the German word ‘Quelle’).

  “We cannot yet jump to conclusions, but we have already established, for example, that the sequence in the story of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount exactly matches the rolls and the gospels of Matthew and Luke. And we have also been able to conclude that the version of Our Father’s prayer in the scrolls is almost identical to that in Matthew, while the prayer in Mark’s gospel does not occur in its entirety. We see this as a clear indication that these scrolls have at least served as a source for the later gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, and we are hopeful that we have now found the Q source.

  “So what we have clearly been able to read is the prophecy recorded by Jesus himself that he will die on the cross, will rise from the dead after three days and will go back to his Father. And we have been able to ascertain without any doubt that he planned to return to another place on Earth at a time when all humanity is at a turning point and needs his guidance the most.

  “There is no doubt that these scrolls are authentic. We will be making an official announcement in due course, but I thought you would like to know.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Professor,” she said, “very kind of you indeed.”

  “Not at all,” he replied politely. “We would also be very interested in receiving an exact account of your vision, for the record.”

  “It was just a dream really,” she said, “and it’s hard to remember now. So much has happened since.”

  “Indeed,” the professor agreed. “These are enormously exciting times we are living in, Miss Adams. If there’s anything that you feel you could tell us we would be extremely grateful. Obviously we would keep your words confidential until you gave permission for them to be shared. If at any stage you felt able to make the trip to Oxford you could be assured a very warm welcome.”

  “Let me think about it, Professor.”

  “Of course. Thank you. We are going to be watching your friend’s progress with enormous interest.”

  Once the professor had hung up she lay for a few minutes watching Joe as he slowly came to the surface on the pillow beside her and thinking about the professor’s news. Her heart was racing and thumping loudly in her ears. Real life was turning out exactly as predicted i
n her dream and she felt like she was sitting at the centre of the entire universe. If she genuinely was some sort of divine prophet, it confirmed that she had a central role to play in whatever was about to happen in the world. Her name was going to be written about and talked about for generations. Scholars would be studying her life in thousands of years’ time, like they now studied John the Baptist. Maybe she would even be made a saint. More important than all that, it meant that she and Joe were bound to be together for as long as…

  Her heart gave a lurch as she considered the possibility that Joe might be taken from her as abruptly as Jesus was taken from his followers the last time he was on Earth. The thought of being separated from him was too painful to bear and she was unable to stop a sob from escaping her throat and tears springing to her eyes as Joe lifted his head from the pillow and looked at her.

  “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  He put his arms around her and held her close until the sobbing had subsided for long enough to get out the words, “The scrolls have been authenticated. They all believe you now.”

  “Who do?”

  “The theologians. The scholars in places like Oxford University. They all believe that you are the Son of God.”

  “And this is making you cry?”

  “What is making me cry is the thought of what they might do to you – as they did last time. It’s the thought of losing you. I can’t bear it.”

  “Don’t be frightened,” he whispered, “God will be with you always. We will always be together.”

  She found her sobs turning to laughter.

  “Did I say something funny?” he asked, pulling back to see her more clearly.

  “No. I was just thinking how corny and ridiculous those words would have seemed to me a few months ago, but now they actually sound true.”

  “Does that count as another miracle, do you think?” he grinned.

  “They want you dead, Joe,” she said, refusing to allow him to lighten the mood. “The most powerful people in the world want you dead.”

  Unable to deny that she was right, he held her tightly as she cried.

  Thirty-One

  The American President had finally managed to get through to his Russian counterpart.

  “This healer guy is causing a lot more trouble,” the American waded straight in, never knowing how long it would be before the Russian grew bored and hung up. “The media don’t seem to be able to discredit him, however hard they try. People actually seem to believe his bullshit.”

  “Have you talked to the Chinese?” the Russian asked.

  “Have you tried talking to the Chinese?” the American spluttered, “it’s like drowning in riddles. I can’t get a straight answer about anything.”

  “Did they talk about Yung Zhang?”

  “What do you think? It’s like they never heard of her. I don’t even know if her husband, this Liang guy, is still alive. They’re sticking to the line that they know nothing about his disappearance, which is obviously a crock of shit. And you’d think they would want to neutralise the guy’s wife because she’s a troublemaker, but they just pretend they don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

  “It would be hard for them to take her out now,” the Russian suggested, “with the whole world watching New Zealand.”

  “You think they care about that sort of thing? They’re playing some sort of long game and they don’t intend to let us know what it is. I asked them what they think of this Son of God crap and they just start talking about Confucius. A lot of other world leaders have been calling me. They are all looking to me to do something about it. They all think the healer guy should be stopped.”

  “The British and the Europeans think that?”

  “They don’t know what they think. A lot of the tough guys in Africa and the Middle East, they can see he’s a danger to them. There are a lot of people in Africa who swear by all the Jesus stuff and a lot of them don’t have a pot to piss in; they could easily be stirred up to start making demands and asking for changes. And the Israelis certainly don’t want him stirring up all this religious stuff again. There’s a lot of people who would like to see him disappear. Do you know what I mean?”

  There was a significant pause and then a throaty chuckle from the Moscow end of the line. “Of course I know what you mean. But do any of them want to go down in history as the ones who killed the Messiah for the second time?”

  “He’s hung up again!” The American President threw the phone down, too furious to even bother putting it back on its cradle.

  “I think he understood what you were saying, sir,” the Director of National Security said, trying to calm his boss. “I think you’ll find he will set the wheels in motion.”

  “I hope so because I really don’t want to have to bomb the hell out of New Zealand!”

  Everyone in the Oval Office laughed nervously, aware that their president wasn’t even smiling.

  Thirty-Two

  The Pope leaned in closer to catch the words of the professor who had been sent to Rome from Oxford to explain the findings of the theologians. Overawed by the surroundings and by being in the presence of the man who was possibly the most famous and revered figure on the planet, at least until recently, the professor was virtually whispering.

  “We believe this manuscript must have been a key source for the later gospels,” he was saying, his head bent reverentially low, covering his mouth and making it even harder for the pontiff to make out his words.

  The findings of the scholars had been sent to the twelve leaders of the major religions on the Pope’s list but it had been decided that personal visits would also be in order. The news that the scrolls had come to light at the same time that someone believed by many to be the Son of God had returned to Earth, meant that it was not hard for the scholars to get audiences with the men who were normally impossible for mere mortals to reach.

  “We are praying hard for guidance on how to advise our followers,” the Pope said. “It seems that we have been presented with an opportunity to heal the many historical divisions that have existed between the different religions. This man in New Zealand seems to have the potential to be a unifying force. He has raised the consciousness of people everywhere.”

  “Not just Christians, either.” The professor became suddenly enthusiastic, forgetting for a moment that he was in the presence of the pontiff. “There is nothing to say that he is the son only of the Christian God. This is a chance for all the religions to promote the gods that they have always believed in. His teachings are entirely non-denominational.”

  The Pope sat back in his chair and nodded thoughtfully. Many of his advisers had been warning him against recognising that Joe might be who he claimed he was, but he was beginning to think that would not be a wise course to follow. Just because he spent the majority of his time holed-up in Vatican City did not mean that he was cut off from everything that was happening in the outside world. He had seen the news programmes showing the millions of people all over the world marching upon their capital cities, carrying banners with slogans praising Joe and demanding that he be recognised and listened to by those in power. It was obvious that the energy for most of the marches was coming from young people and the Pope, along with other religious leaders, was aware that he was being classed alongside politicians and even dictators as one of the older generation who had caused the many problems that mankind now faced, and who were clinging to power regardless of whether it was in the best interests of the world. The slogans on the banners, which demanded that the elite changed their greedy, egotistical and short-termist ways, seemed to be aimed at the religious leaders as much as the politicians, business tycoons, generals and hated oligarchs.

  For the next few hours, His Holiness appeared to be absorbed in the theological details that the professor was laying out for him, but at the back of his mi
nd he was already planning how he might get to meet and talk to Joe without seeming to be pushing to the front of the queue. The last thing he wanted was for other religious leaders to feel that the Catholic Church were trying to claim some sort of exclusivity over the returned Messiah, but at the same time he was aware that a large proportion of his 1.3 billion followers would very much like to see him take the lead.

  There had been an announcement of a televised broadcast being planned, which would reach every citizen in the world, and the Pope wanted to be able to talk to Joe to find out what he would be saying before it went out, perhaps even offering some advice on areas that were likely to prove sensitive. Not for the first time he felt like he was walking a tightrope and that whichever way he might fall he was likely to suffer and inflict considerable damage.

  *****

  Over the following weeks, religious leaders who had never spoken to one another sent their diplomats and representatives out to make contact and to explore the possibility that they would all send a request for Joe to meet them before he made his television broadcast to the whole world. Many of their highest officials were wary, unsure where such communications could lead, fearful of insulting their own leaders or those of other religions. Some suggested that they might invite Joe to Rome for the meeting, but it was soon seen that this would look far too partisan. After innumerable letters back and forth it was decided that it would be far more appropriate for them all to go to meet Joe in New Zealand.

  Initially the diary planners of the church leaders threw up their hands in horror at the thought of organising something so enormous at such short notice. Most of their leaders had their days mapped out for years in advance, but as it gradually became clear that this was the will of their leaders, and since none of them wanted to be the only major religion not represented at the meetings, diaries were adjusted and a request was put in to the Prime Minister of New Zealand.