The Babylonian Codex

by C. S. Graham

  “Bosch doesn’t work for you anymore?”

  “Not since last week.”

  “You fired him?”

  She gave a wry smile. “Let’s just say, Noah and the paper had a parting of the ways.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “That’s right. Why.”

  She sank into her chair, her palms resting flat on the surface of her desk. “I should tell you that our personnel actions are confidential. Then you’ll get a warrant and our lawyers will get involved . . . so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? I don’t think it’s any secret that times are difficult for newspapers all across the country. Because our hometown happens to also be the nation’s capital, our circulation remains strong. But we still need each and every one of our reporters to generate a steady stream of printable stories.”

  “And Bosch wasn’t doing that?”

  “Don’t get me wrong; Noah is a real hustler. He’s done some excellent work in the past. But about three months ago I assigned him to do a series we called ‘Who’s Really Running the World?’ ”

  “What was his answer?”

  “The usual suspects. The Trilateral Commission. The Rand Corporation. The Bilderberg Group.”

  “Doesn’t exactly sound like news.”

  “Maybe not to you. But to many of our readers, the discovery that there is basically a revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury, or that former presidents—who still receive CIA briefings—are sitting on the boards of huge conglomerates that invest heavily in everything from the defense industry to oil . . . Well, that’s pretty alarming stuff. Especially these days.”

  Jax kept his face stern. “You say Bosch began this series three months ago?”

  She nodded. “Right after the election. President Pizarro won on a promise to rein in the corporate bandits and shut down the tax havens that are costing American taxpayers one hundred billion dollars a year. Bring back the regulations that once kept us safe from everything from poisoned drinking water to irresponsible financial bubbles. There’s a groundswell of anger in this country.”

  “And you decided to ride it?”

  Her chin lifted a notch. “We’re a newspaper. Our job is to inform. And the fact is, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around out there. A lot of fear. And it’s being fed, deliberately.”

  “You mean, by those who have something to lose if President Pizarro succeeds?”

  “In a word? Yes. The kind of people who can afford private islands don’t let go of their advantages without a fight. And they have the money to buy newspaper chains and television networks.”

  “Not to mention politicians.”

  “Especially politicians. And pulpits.”

  “Pulpits?”

  “Pulpits. Part of it’s a neat synergy of interests. The superrich don’t want any kind of international regulations or controls that will get in the way of their ability to shelter their money and exploit people, while the hysterical fringe sees any kind of international body as the first step on the road to Armageddon.”

  “Ah. The Antichrist.”

  “You got it. There’s also a bizarre strain of what we call free-market fundamentalism involved. Part of it’s a holdover from the days of the Cold War, when any attempt to regulate or even refine capitalism was seen as akin to godlessness. But there’s also a strong element of old-fashioned Calvinism. The idea that the rich are wealthy because God has blessed them, while the poor are poor because God doesn’t like them—or is punishing them because they’re evil.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven’?”

  “One must assume they don’t read that part of the Gospels.”

  Jax said, “So you weren’t happy with the work Bosch did on this series?”

  “On the contrary. At one point we thought he was positioning himself for a Pulitzer. But then he became positively obsessed with the dominionists. He just couldn’t let it go.”

  “The whats?”

  “The dominionists.” She tilted her head to one side. “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of them; very few people have. They make it a point to fly under the radar. And ‘dominionist’ is not a name they typically use themselves. Basically, they’re a loose coalition of politically active religious radicals who believe that the United States should be governed exclusively by biblical law.”

  For a moment, Jax was convinced he hadn’t heard her right. “You don’t mean as a theocracy?”

  “Yes. Or, as some would say, a theonomy.”

  Jax huffed a soft laugh.

  She did not smile. “They’re actually not a very funny group of people. They’re deadly serious. And they’re very closely aligned with some of the key people in the financial industry and the military-industrial complex. At first, Noah turned in a riveting new series of articles that we ran through most of December. But then he started going off the deep end.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was making wild accusations about certain very powerful, influential men. We weren’t getting anything we could print.”

  “What kind of wild accusations are we talking about? Against whom?”

  She gave him what he was coming to think of as her Mona Lisa smile. “Nothing I care to repeat.”

  Jax gave her his Homeland Security scowl. “Who were his sources?”

  “Never anyone who was willing to be named. That was the problem.”

  On the wall behind her hung a framed copy of the Post’s 1974 front page announcing the resignation of President Nixon. Jax nodded toward it. “If I remember correctly, it was anonymous sources that helped break the Watergate story.”

  She kept her gaze on his face. “That was over thirty years ago. Times have changed. The American people have changed.”

  “Have we? Or is it just American newspapers that have changed?”

  “Now that’s an unexpected comment coming from someone with Homeland Security.”

  Jax pulled out a notebook and tried to look officious. “Can you tell me how to contact Mr. Bosch?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. His wife kept the apartment when the marriage broke up and I don’t know where Noah went. He said he was planning to write a book on the Council on National Policy. But whether that’s what he’s actually doing or not, I couldn’t say.”

  “The Council on National Policy?” said Jax, looking up from his notebook. “What’s that?”

  Kelly Brian stood with her hands pressed flat against the surface of her desk and leaned forward to give him one of her damnable smiles. “Look it up.”

  Surrounded by gently rolling wooded parkland, the Franciscan Monastery of Mount St. Sepulchre lay in a residential neighborhood in northeast Washington, D.C.

  Tobie went first to the library, where she printed out a copy of Noah Bosch’s article that she read again in a cab on the way to Mount St. Sepulchre. Asking the driver to return for her in an hour, she paid off the taxi in the U-shaped drive that lay just inside the monastery’s massive gates, her head falling back as she stared up at the century-old church beside her. Built in the style of a Byzantine cross, its walls gleamed golden in the winter sunshine.

  “I’m afraid you’ve just missed the tour,” said a heavily accented voice behind her. “But if you hurry, you can probably catch up with them in the cloister walk.”

  She turned to find herself being addressed by a burly monk in a dark brown habit cinched at the waist with a crude rope. He was big and broad shouldered, with a broken nose and hazel eyes and a head of curly golden-brown hair. “Actually,” she said, walking toward him, “I’m looking for Father Saverius Adel. My name is Yasmina Khalil.”

  The monk spread his arms wide and laughed. “I am Father Saverius. How may I help you?”

  Davenport was at his desk, his laptop running the video of October Guinness’s last remote viewing session, when the call came through from the monk a
t the Franciscan monastery.

  Brother Basil’s voice was hushed. Strained. “You said you wanted to know if Father Saverius received any visitors.”

  Davenport sat forward with a jerk. “That’s right.”

  “Well, there’s a young woman here to see him right now.”

  “A young woman?” Davenport snapped his fingers at Brockman to get her attention. “What does she look like?”

  “She appears to be an Iraqi Muslim. She’s wearing a headscarf.”

  Davenport frowned. It didn’t sound like Guinness. Then again, she might be wearing a disguise. “How tall is she?”

  “Not tall. And slight.”

  Davenport glanced at his watch. “Thank you, Brother. I’ll send someone right away.”

  “I’ll go,” said Brockman as he pushed to his feet.

  “No. Send Kowalski and Welch. You and I need to take a trip up to Bethesda.”

  Chapter 30

  It wasn’t until Tobie looked into the monk’s dark, puzzled eyes that she remembered she was disguised as a Muslim fundamentalist. Not one of your better ideas, Jax, she thought.

  “You’re Iraqi?” Father Saverius asked her in Arabic.

  “Originally, yes,” she said, answering him in the same language. They turned to walk along the Rosary Portico, a vast red-tiled cloister walk that stretched around the perimeter of the garden. “My professor at George Washington suggested I talk to you. I’m doing a paper on the theft of ancient Christian manuscripts from Iraq.” She’d practiced the lie several times in the taxi, to make sure she could deliver it without stumbling. She’d never been very good at making things up.

  “You sound like a Gulf Arab.”

  She gave a startled half laugh. “Probably because I lived in Dubai and Qatar as a child.” That part was actually the truth. As the daughter of a Navy officer and the stepdaughter of a petroleum engineer, Tobie had grown up in a dozen different countries and she’d learned the language of each of them.

  “I must admit,” she said, their footsteps on the arched walkway a soft cadence in the stillness of the garden. “I’m not entirely clear on what an Assyrian priest is. You’re not a Franciscan, are you?”

  “The Franciscans have been generous in offering me a refuge here, but I am not of their order, no. I am a member of the Holy Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East. The Assyrian Church traces its origins to the ancient Mesopotamian See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, which was founded by St. Thomas the Apostle himself.”

  “It’s that old?”

  “It is indeed. We are among the oldest Christians in the world. Like Christ, our native language is Aramaic. For two thousand years we lived and prospered in the land of our origin. Just ten years ago, there were one and a half million of us in Iraq. But now . . .” He spread his arms wide, then let them fall to his side again. “Today, there are no more than three or four hundred thousand of us left in our homeland.”

  “Perhaps one day all Iraqis—Christian and Jew, Sunni and Shiite—will be able to go home and live again in peace,” she said quietly.

  “Perhaps.”

  They walked along in silence, the repetitive arches and alternating spiraled columns of the portico throwing bands of sunlight and shadow across the portico’s paving. After a moment, he said, “Most Americans don’t even know that such things as Arab Christians exist. They think of Christianity as their religion, something intrinsically Western. Something born of Western traditions and Western culture. They forget that Christianity was born and nurtured in the Middle East, just as Jesus was born in Palestine. From there his disciples spread across the Levant and Asia Minor, then west to North Africa and east to Mesopotamia, Persia, and India. You have only to look at the names of the early church fathers to understand the Middle Eastern roots of Christianity: Clement of Alexandria was an Egyptian. St. Augustine was a Berber from what is now Algeria. Ignatius of Antioch lived in ancient Syria.”

  “I knew that Alexandria and Antioch were important early Christian centers. But I didn’t realize ancient Iraq was one, too.”

  “It was one of the most important. There was a large, very old Jewish community in Babylon—just as there were Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean world. It was to these Jewish communities that the first apostles carried their teachings.”

  “The Syrian cross,” said Tobie, turning toward him. “The one that looks like a Jewish menorah combined with a Christian crucifix. That’s what it comes from?”

  He nodded. “It symbolizes the blending of the Jewish tradition with the new Christian teachings. You must remember that the first Christians were Jews. They were even called Christian Jews. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but they also continued to observe Mosaic Law. In fact, there was quite an argument in the early days as to whether or not gentiles could even be Christians. There were many who opposed the Apostle Paul’s teaching that non-Jews could become Christians without also becoming Jewish—in other words, without being circumsized or observing Mosaic law.”

  Tobie was starting to feel out of her depth. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about the first centuries of Christianity.”

  “Not many do, even when they are raised Christian. They often assume the tenets of their faith have always been the same. In truth, there were many different teachings and interpretations competing with each other during those first centuries. Some Christian leaders preached that Jesus was the son of God, while others thought he was a prophet. There were even some who completely rejected the Old Testament—who believed that Christianity was a new religion and should be cut loose from its primitive Judaic roots. They even had their own gospel.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “How many different gospels were there, originally?”

  “Dozens—although most are now known only from fragments. You see, in the first years after Jesus’s death, the early Christians relied on what is known as the Sacred Oral Tradition—stories of what Jesus had said and done, passed from one believer to the next. It’s these oral traditions that were later written down as gospels and dialogues and logia, and expanded and explained by various treatises.”

  “Which is why they differ—because everything was oral at first?”

  “Exactly. Scholars argue as to when these various works were first committed to paper. Most were probably in circulation by A.D. 150. But it wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea—three hundred years after the death of Jesus—that the leaders of the church got together and decided on a uniform doctrine. They determined what Christians should believe and which books would be accepted as part of the New Testament. The books they included became known as the canon. Those they rejected were called apocryphal.”

  “And everyone agreed?”

  “Hardly. But by then the church had the power of the Roman state behind it. Heretics who persisted in believing anything that deviated from the orthodoxy were treated the same way as pagans who refused to convert: they were either exiled or put to death.”

  “You don’t hear much about that part of early church history.”

  Father Saverius’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “No, indeed. I’m afraid the number of Christians martyred for their faith pales to insignificance compared to the thousands of pagans and heretics thrown to the lions or burned alive.”

  Tobie’s gaze narrowed against the winter sunlight as she studied the ancient catacomb symbols that decorated the walls of the portico. “So what happened to the gospels and other writings that didn’t make it into the official New Testament?”

  “They were ordered destroyed. Burned—along with the plays, poems, histories, and philosophical treatises of the ‘pagan’ Greco-Roman world. You’ve heard of the Gospel of St. Thomas?”

  “It was found in Egypt, wasn’t it? At Nag Hammadi?”

  Saverius nodded. “Some Egyptian farmers dug up a sealed earthenware jar that contained a dozen ancient codices dating back to the second century. One of the codices turned out to be a complete Gospel of St. Thomas, which was previously kno
wn only through fragments. The Gospel of St. Thomas was written for a school of Christians who—like the Assyrian Church—claimed Thomas the Apostle as their founder. But when the four canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were defined as the only acceptable gospels, the Gospel of St. Thomas was ordered destroyed. The copy found at Nag Hammadi probably came from the library of the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius. The monks buried it when the possession of such works was labeled a heresy punishable by death.”

  “When was it written?”

  “That is difficult to say. The text found at Nag Hammadi was in Coptic—an ancient Egyptian language written in the Greek alphabet. It was probably copied around A.D. 340. Earlier Greek fragments are much older, dating back to the second century. The original was probably composed somewhere between A.D. 50 and 100.”

  “So it’s very early.”

  “Oh, yes. Perhaps the earliest of them all.”

  “How exactly does the Gospel of St. Thomas differ from the others?”

  “It’s written as a logia—a series of sayings—rather than as a narrative. But theologically, the differences are mainly eschatological.”

  “Escha—” she shook her head. “What’s that?”

  “Eschatology. The end of the world. Armageddon. Revelation.”

  Tobie felt a sudden, inexplicable chill run down her spine.

  Saverius said, “The Gospel of John speaks of a future eschaton, where Jesus will return in triumph to overthrow the rulers of the world.”

  “What did St. Thomas believe?”

  “That the end of the world had already begun.”

  “Well, I guess he got that wrong.”

  Saverius laughed. “I don’t know. It’s all relative, isn’t it? He also believed that the resurrection of man would be spiritual rather than a literal, bodily raising of the dead.”

  “So the papyrus discovered near the ruins of Babylon was a copy of the Gospel of St. Thomas?”

  “Actually there were several papyri found together. And yes, one was a copy of the Gospel of St. Thomas—the oldest copy known, and written in Greek. Early reports dated it back to the beginning of the second century.”