by Simon Mawer
‘There must have been a land movement at some time. The earth fell across and crushed the jar.’ Agron gestured to show the movement, like a crushing of skulls. ‘We got the papyrus out almost entire, and now they’re trying to excavate the rest. We thought we could make out names on the papyrus,’ he said. ‘Youdas, we thought. And possibly Simeon. But there’s no one with Greek here. You’ve had a look. What do you reckon?’
‘It seems possible.’
‘Who were they, then?’
‘Common enough names.’
The excavators were like surgeons at the scene of an accident attempting first aid, trying to ease broken bones, trying to lift trapped limbs out of the wreckage. They worked with brushes, painstakingly sweeping the dirt away, cleaning up the wound, searching for any other survivors of the disaster of time.
‘Is there anything more?’ Leo asked. ‘I think I’d like to get out into the fresh air.’ Panic welled up inside his chest, a tangible, physical thing. The press of rock against his head, the press of circumstance all around him.
Agron looked round. His face was harsh in the lamplight, a structure of light and shadow, almost biblical, almost the face of a prophet. ‘Thought you’d like to see the actual place.’
‘It’s fascinating. But I’d rather get out.’
The prophet grinned. ‘It gets some people like that.’
Outside the cave the light was dazzling. Leo felt a surge of release as he emerged, a tide of relief flooding through his body. He dusted himself down and looked around with all the delight of someone who has just come back from the dead. The sun was up now, shining through the high cloud like a malevolent eye glaring through a thin gauze. The temperature was rising. A radio blared pop music. Dust shifted above the baulks and hollows of the excavation where the small volunteer army grubbed in the dirt. Was it here, Leo wondered, in this place of dust and rock, a dead place beside a dead sea, that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?
‘It’s bloody important, isn’t it?’ Agron said, following him out. ‘They wouldn’t have flown you out like this if it wasn’t important.’ He looked anxious, as though it might not be. Leo nodded and patted him on the shoulder, a gesture that he would never have made in the past, a physical, companionable gesture. ‘It’s important,’ he assured the man. ‘Very important.’
The sheet lay in the document room of the World Bible Center, bathed in a soft, effulgent light, looking quite innocent. Leo sat before it once more, examined it with the cold and objective gaze of reason. Part of him even began to formulate a commentary on the text, a gloss on the word nazir. Nazir, nazaraios, netser, blastos. Root, shoot, offspring; and Nazarene, the word that has always worried the scholars. An academic debate teased at the edges of his mind.
‘It must be a piece of propaganda,’ he said. ‘The other possibility doesn’t bear contemplating.’
‘Contemplate it,’ Calder retorted.
‘The idea that it might be an autograph? The Gospel of Judas?’
‘If you like.’
‘It’s absurd.’
‘You discount the possibility? On what grounds?’
‘On the grounds of common sense.’
Calder considered the idea of common sense as though it were a piece of evidence. ‘Nothing else?’
Leo felt himself casting around in desperation. ‘Common sense is pretty powerful. There are dozens of apocryphal books, you know that as well as I do. The Gospel of Mary, the Acts of Pilate, all of them little more than pious tracts. I imagine that this is another, written from a rather different point of view. Surely that’s what we must assume. We don’t want to leap in with both feet and then look complete fools, do we?’
‘And what about our dating? What about the site? You’ve seen it now. Doesn’t it convince you?’
Leo shrugged the question away. ‘Even if the dating were certain, how would that change things? There were plenty of reasons for writing an anti-Christian tract in the first century.’
‘And what about the content? What about the matter of family?’ Calder was no fool. Showman, entrepreneur, but no fool. It was like the questioning of a prosecuting counsel, the cogent questions carefully inserted amongst the merely circumstantial. Or like a soldier carefully dusting earth over the land mines. ‘What about Mariam?’ he asked.
Mariam, Mary. It was a common enough name. Mary the mother of Jesus, of course. Everyone knows the story: dressed in a motley assortment of dressing gowns, old sheets and costume jewellery the whole cast traipses across the memories of most of the Western world. The Three Wise Men. Gold and frankincense and myrrh. The ox and the ass and the baby in a manger and the murder of the Innocents. And she sits there at the focus of it all, her composed face hooded in blue and white: Mary Mother of God, Mary Queen of Heaven.
But Calder knew, of course. He knew because it was so damned obvious. You could talk about Mary the mother of Jesus as much as you pleased. You could dress her in blue and gold and adorn her with the sun. You could stand her on the moon and put the twelve stars on her head for a crown. But there was one family and only one family that had done what the text claimed, only one family that took power to Israel from the hands of the Gentiles (and) that was destroyed by Herod. That family was the family of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean dynasty, the descendants of Judas ben Mattathias who had driven the Seleucid Greeks out of Israel in the second century BC. And there was a prominent member of that family with the name of Mariam.
Calder left it to Leo:
‘Mariamne I, the second wife of Herod the Great.’
Herod. The name sounded in the hushed atmosphere of the document room; a name that has passed into the language. Herod. Herod the Great, Herod the Edomite, Herod the local warlord who played things right, befriended the right men, pandered to the right men, killed the right men, and finally found himself elevated from warlord to king – King of the Jews, to be precise, a title conferred on him by the Roman senate in 40BC. Once he had acquired the title of king, Herod abandoned his first wife and took a new one: Mariamne the Hasmonean. It was a dynastic marriage. Mariamne’s family had given a line of kings to Israel and a line of high priests – the one never being far from the other in the Jewish mind – and the Hasmoneans still possessed the kind of legitimacy that Herod himself could never hope to acquire. Yet, going by the account of Josephus, he came to love her.
‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ Leo murmured. He sat in front of the papyrus fragments and he smelled the reek of blood, the stink of the abattoir. Herod’s rule had been the exercise of pure, incontinent power, a tragedy in the Elizabethan mould, where, by the end of the final act, bodies lie strewn across the stage. He had loved Mariamne, and yet he lured her own grandfather, the one-time high priest Hyrcanus II, out of exile in Babylon and had him murdered. He loved her, and yet he murdered her uncle. He loved her, and yet her young brother Jonathan, a mere seventeen years old and newly appointed to the high priesthood, was taken by the king’s personal bodyguard and drowned in the swimming pool of the royal palace in Jericho. Herod loved Queen Mariamne, and yet finally, crazed by sexual jealousy, he had killed even her.
‘Jesus as Herod’s grandson?’ Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to handle this one, Leo. I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.’
Leo looked up from the papyrus. ‘It would explain one set of New Testament stories, wouldn’t it? The coming of the Wise Men. An embassy from Parthia comes to visit the new heir to the throne. Perhaps Herod had even recognised the child when it was born. Perhaps someone smuggled the infant out of the royal palace and hid it somewhere in the countryside. Bethlehem. Why not Bethlehem? It would have fitted in with the Messianic prophesies.’
The logic of dynastic murder is implacable: some time after the queen’s death, her two sons by Herod were duly garrotted on the orders of their own father. The date of their murder – 7BC – is instructive: it was about that year that the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth was
born.
‘And when Herod got to hear about it he ordered the murder of every infant in the village. Which has come down to us in Matthew as the Massacre of the Innocents.’
‘Something like that,’ agreed Leo. The stories fitted like parts of a jigsaw puzzle, like the fragments of papyrus pieced together between the sheets of glass before him. ‘Maybe we’ll find out. Maybe the rest of the scroll will tell us.’
* * *
That afternoon Goldstaub drove him back to the airport. They argued about the scroll, about how the work should be conducted, who should know, how it should be made public. ‘The thing is,’ Goldstaub said, ‘you’ve got a stake in all this, haven’t you?’
‘Haven’t we all?’
‘Sure. Sure we have. But the Christian Church especially. It has always made a historical claim, hasn’t it? I mean, look at your creed. You’ve actually got a creed, which is more than the Jews have. It even mentions Pontius Pilate. I mean, what other religion sticks its neck out that far?’
‘It’s a complex story, the origins of the Nicene creed,’ Leo said. ‘The refutation of Gnosticism, things like that.’
‘Yes, but it’s there. Almost a contract. You won’t get a Jew signing a contract unless he can look the other guy dead in the eye. But the Christians have kind of signed up on trust, so to speak. They’ve rooted the whole thing in history.’ He glanced across at his passenger. ‘What happens if we show the history’s bunk?’
The road dropped down off the heights, down through the gorges that guard the way to the Holy City. The Trappist monastery of Latrun appeared on the left of the road, placid in the sunshine. On the hill behind the monastery are the ruins of a crusader castle, the Toron des Chevaliers. The name Latrun is a corruption of El Toron, but it used to be believed that the name came from latro, a thief, and that Latrun had been the home of the good thief who was crucified with Jesus.
Leo sat in silence. He thought of faith and he thought of doubt; he thought of vocation and he thought of Madeleine. Maybe Goldstaub was reading his thoughts; maybe he could do that. When they parted at the airport he shook Leo’s hand and told him to give his regards to her and Jack. ‘You will see her, won’t you? I guess you see quite a lot of her, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Leo replied warily. ‘I suppose I do.’
‘You want to go carefully.’
Leo had to suppress an absurd desire to tell Goldstaub everything, a ridiculous temptation to confess. ‘It’s not easy,’ he admitted.
Goldstaub nodded. ‘Not easy for anyone.’
The plane lifted off the runway and climbed up over the office blocks and hotels of Tel Aviv. It passed over the fawn-coloured hem of the shoreline and the blue fabric of the sea, rising up over the glittering satin, away from the Holy Land, away from the Gospel of Judas with its sceptical whisper from the past.
Leo thought about Madeleine, thought of Judas, thought of faith and belief, of doubt and disbelief. The airline magazine had a story about the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were glossy pictures of the Shrine of the Book and the usual shots of the ruins of Qumran. ‘A monastery of the Essene sect,’ the caption said and the text agreed, falling into the trap that had been set, with a mixture of naivety and ignorance, by the old goat Roland de Vaux all those years ago when the State of Israel barely existed and you could buy a priceless scroll for twenty-five pounds sterling. There was also a mention of the first finds from the dig of En-Mor: The Dead Sea area continues to reveal the profound truths of our religious past, the article said.
He dozed fitfully, waking with a start to a dream that receded from memory even as he tried to recall it. Madeleine had been part of the dream, Madeleine in some public place confessing her love for him while Goldstaub and Calder looked on, laughing. At times both he and Madeleine had been naked but although they were ashamed of the fact, none of the onlookers had seemed the slightest bit concerned. Jack had been there, watching from a distance, a detached and cynical figure.
Peering out of the window for distraction he saw an island lying 30,000 feet below like a fragment of papyrus laid out on a blue cloth. Crete. The aircraft’s wing moved along the line of the south coast like a pointing finger, like a yad. Or like the finger that drew out the fiery letters Mene, mene tekel upharsin, thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The place down there was Kaloi Limenes, Fair Havens, the final shelter on the route that the apostle Paul himself took almost two thousand years earlier on his journey to Rome and to death. Leo knew Paul. He knew him intimately, had always known him ever since the days in the seminary, ever since his first unsteady steps into the dogma of Christianity. He knew Paul from within – the pain, the prejudices, the poetry, a dangerous combination that has never let the world rest. And he knew Paul’s own moment of panic as he lay convulsing in the dust of the road to Damascus.
But he also knew Judas.
An air hostess came down the aisle and asked if he was all right, did he feel unwell, was there anything she could do? ‘I’m fine,’ he said waving her away. ‘Just fine.’
Later the aircraft circled Rome in a bright, evening sky. You could see the meanders of the river and the great cupola of Saint Peter’s like a bubble blown out of the stone. You could see the streets radiating from piazzas like bursts of light from a dozen suns, and you could see the churches, dozens of churches, hundreds of churches, over 400 churches. But Rome was no longer a place of triumph or refuge. The chaotic city that had known every sin on earth was no longer a bastion against doubt. The vandals had swept through and sacked it. It was a brash, noisy, pagan place on the edge of a volcano. The taxi from the airport drove along a wide avenue where transvestites strutted their stuff in the dusk. Malakoi, Paul called them: soft men. Along with sodomites and fornicators they are there in his litany of the damned: fornicators, idolators, adulterers, soft men, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers. The cars cruised past and the girls, men, creatures midway between the two states, opened their coats to display what was on offer. There was haggling over the price and the cost.
The Palace of the Caesars
‘I will show you something, if you agree to come with me.’
‘Something? What?’ Mock suspicion. A bubble of laughter there, just below the surface, a rich bubble of corruption.
‘A treat. But you must agree first.’
‘How can I agree if I don’t know what I’m agreeing to?’
‘That’s the risk you must take.’ Francesco laughing at her, teasing her with his look, smiling at her with that ironical and twisted smile, daring her to refuse.
‘All right. I agree.’
The treat comes the next day, with his Alfa Romeo waiting at the gatehouse at the bottom of the drive, and him standing to open the passenger’s door, sweeping a bow for her as she climbs in, the pair of them feeling the eyes of the guard on them and not caring. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A secret.’ The car roars away from the gates and turns towards Santa Maria Maggiore then left down Via Nazionale towards the road that Mussolini has newly carved through the city in order to lay bare the relics of the first Roman Empire, the one that worked. The Road of the Imperial Forums it is called. There is little private traffic about. Overladen buses, trams clanking and swaying, flocks of bicycles swarming like starlings, but few private cars. Shoddily dressed pedestrians watch the passage of the brave little car with its handsome driver and the blonde woman beside him holding a straw hat to her head, letting her silk scarf fly in the wind. Tedeschi, they assume. ‘Tedeschi,’ one or two of them even say. Germans. ‘Puttana tedesca!’ a cyclist shouts as the little car swerves past him and careers round the Colosseum, which was built by the Emperor Titus after his return from the Jewish War and has now become the largest and most imposing traffic island in the world. Puttana has an ancient etymology. Ultimately it derives from the Latin putidus, rotten, decaying. Puttana means a whore.
The little car passes the Arch of Constantine, heads down the Via San Gre
gorio and draws to a halt at a gateway halfway down the road. Behind the gate is a grassy slope with umbrella pines. Outcrops of brown brickwork breast the summit of the hill. ‘The Palatine,’ Francesco says, handing her out on to the pavement. ‘I will show you the Palatine as you have never seen it before.’
The park is closed to the public. A notice announces as much. But Francesco merely smiles. ‘You must always know someone,’ he explains. ‘That is the source of power and status in Italy.’ With a flourish he produces a key. ‘This, mia cara Gretchen, is one of the keys to paradise.’ He unlocks the gate and holds it open for her, then follows her in and locks the gate behind them. They possess the Palatine Hill.
Figures in a classical landscape, wandering beneath the porticoes, creeping into tunnels and out into the sudden sunlight, stepping over fallen columns, playing hide-and-seek like children amongst the marble relics, posing behind a headless statue so that the flesh and bone head, the living skull and all its tissues, smiling, grimacing, laughing, takes the place of vanished marble emperor or looted marble empress. And the sound of laughter echoes from the cliffs of brick and sends their voices back to them in a kind of mockery.
‘Tell me what it is like …’ he asks as they contemplate a Venus standing amongst the long grass. The Venus gestures with half an arm, like an amputee. Her face, part ravaged by time, still contains within its worn features a strange modesty. Her thighs enclose her glabrous pudendum tightly, so that men may look but not see.
‘What what is like?’
‘To be a woman.’
