by Simon Mawer
4 The text is confused over these precise relationships. Possibly read: ‘Mariam (the mother of Yeshu) was daughter of Antipater and his wife, who was herself the daughter of Antigonus the Hasmonean’. Antigonus was the grandson of the last Hasmonean high priest/king. This family tree would mean that Yeshu was a Hasmonean and a Herodian on both his mother’s and his father’s side.
He peered through an image of Madeleine at the even, measured strokes of lamp-black:
And this prophecy was in this manner, that out of Jacob would come a star, a sceptre to rule the world. And this was foretold by the scriptures1. And Yeshu was given to Joseph as his father and hidden from Herod that the child might live and take the throne as prophesied. And this Joseph came from Rama-thain. He was a trusted man and member of the Great Sanhedrin and longed for the return of Israel.
1Numbers 24: 17.
‘The star prophecy from the Book of Numbers,’ Leo told the committee. The Judas Committee, they called it: it had been established to oversee the work, to decide how the destruction of a faith should be communicated to the world. There were half a dozen members – Leah, and David Tedeschi, and someone from the Israel Archaeological Authority, and a government nominee from Hebrew University, and Calder as the chairman. ‘The star prophecy was one of the most popular Messianic foretellings. Bar-Kokhba springs to mind, of course.’
‘Maybe that dates the scroll to the Bar-Kokhba revolt,’ Tedeschi suggested. He was a thin, bony man with a prominent Adam’s apple and the stooped posture of the very tall.
Leo shrugged the suggestion away. ‘Bar-Kokhba wasn’t the only Messianic hopeful. And then there’s the matter of Joseph, Yeshu’s adoptive father …’
‘Surely that’s where the Joseph of the New Testament comes from,’ said Calder from the head of the table. ‘Adoptive father; just right. Kind of confirms the gospel story, doesn’t it?’ The ceiling overhead was studded with small, recessed lights, like a galaxy of stars. His silver hair gleamed in their reflected glory.
‘In a sense,’ Leo agreed. ‘But not quite the way you mean. This Joseph is Joseph of Arimathea.’
There was a silence. ‘It’s who?’
‘Joseph of Arimathea.’ The matter was obvious, beyond surprise. ‘Arimathea – Rama-thain. The identification was first made by Eusebius, and also by Jerome. I don’t think any Bible scholar would doubt it.’
‘Joseph of Arimathea was Yeshu’s adoptive father?’
‘That’s what it says.’ He smiled bleakly at Calder. ‘It’s the confirmation you’ve been looking for, isn’t it? That Yeshu the Nazir is the same man as Jesus of Nazareth. It has the dull ring of truth about it, doesn’t it? Explains a whole lot of the New Testament story – who Joseph was, why he had this interest in Jesus, why he gave his tomb to be used. A whole lot.’
They all looked up the table to Calder for some kind of response. He rearranged the papers in front of him, his movements quick and nervous as though he hadn’t got much time. ‘Who the hell wrote all this?’ he asked of no one in particular. He seemed helpless. He wanted answers, and there were none. ‘What in God’s name was he trying to do?’ The irony seemed to have escaped him.
‘We’ve been over this time and again,’ Tedeschi said wearily. ‘It’s just idle speculation. The historians and the archaeologists can make of it what they like, but really it’s only speculation. All we have, the only concrete thing we have, is the text.’
Calder seemed to cast around for the right words. ‘It must be kept utterly secret,’ he decided. The word secret appealed. Secretus, set apart. There is the secret of the mass, a prayer murmured by the priest at the offertory. Secret knowledge is the knowledge that the initiates of Gnosticism possess.
‘Doesn’t this kind of thing belong to everyone?’ Leah demanded angrily. ‘I’ve spent most of my professional life battling for the full publication of the Qumran scrolls. I don’t want to find myself caught up in another dubious academic cover-up.’
There was a rancorous argument between her and Calder. ‘The thing’s dynamite,’ he said. ‘Worse than dynamite. Fissile material. Plutonium. The apocalypse, for crying out loud! We cannot just let it out into the world.’
‘We must publish as we work,’ she insisted. ‘Working papers, provisional findings. We must keep the outside world informed. Otherwise all we’ll get is rumour and speculation. There’s enough of that as it is.’
It was the man from the Archaeological Authority who brought some kind of peace. He had offered little to previous discussion and there was the vague sensation that he was an intruder from a different world, some kind of spy. ‘We’re not talking about academic freedom or anything like that,’ he pointed out. He smiled coldly at Leah. ‘What we have here is politics, plain and far from simple. As Steven says, this thing is more than dynamite. The last thing that the government of Israel wants is conflict with the Christian Church. And this scroll is the property of the Israeli government.’
There was an awkward silence. After a while the members of the committee rose from their chairs and began to pack their papers away. Whether any decision had been reached was unclear, but outside the walls of the Bible Center a storm was on its way. Goldstaub took Leo aside as they left the committee room. He laughed at the idea of secrecy. ‘You think we can bottle up a thing like this? It’s already out, Leo, the story’s just about to break. You remember that Times story? Well don’t think for one moment that’s the end of the thing. The rumours are already out there and they aren’t going away.’
Rumour is the wrong word. Rumour means noise, but whatever it was that percolated out through the walls of the Bible Center was more of a caustic, insidious fluid, the first trickle of flood waters. It was as though the world’s journalists were poking at the dyke, watching and waiting for the thing to burst open. Will the World Bible Center release the full text of this scroll so that the academic world can judge for itself? the Tablet demanded in its next edition. Can we be assured that this work is in the hands of objective Bible scholars, rather than mavericks with a desire to create sensation?
‘What the hell’s the Tablet?’ asked Goldstaub. ‘Sounds like something to do with Moses.’
‘A Catholic journal,’ Leo explained. ‘Intellectual, rather smug.’
‘How the hell do they know anything?’
‘You said it yourself: the story is out there. It’s just waiting for the fullness of time.’
He returned to his work. Isolated from the world, insulated from the world, he returned patiently to the dissection of two thousand years of his faith: letter for letter, word for word, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. He appended notes, he added glosses, he tiptoed through the intricacies of conjugation and declension, of syntax and accidence. Outside, it was summer. Outside, the heat battered on the ground and the light shattered the world into white and bronze, into sun and shade. Outside, the rock was too hot to touch and the cicadas screamed in agony as though at the contact. Inside was the limpid coolness of a cave, the cave-like cool of a scriptorium, the cool of the mortuary.
What kind of man was Yeshu? A waverer1, a reed (that bends with the wind?) … the Galileans rather than the Pharisees … (he was known?) by the leaders of the people (as) Jesus Bar-Abbas, Son of the Father, that (his ancestry might be?) known to all; but the common people2 called him Jesus Bar-Adam, which is Son of Man. I knew him and I loved3 him.
1plagkteros, possibly with the sense of misleading, leading astray.
2am-hares, (Hebrew) in the original.
3agapa. Exceptionally the writer resorts to the first person in this passage.
I knew him and I loved him. He closed his eyes against the strain of the light and the nagging of the intricate letters. I knew him and I loved him.
Greek has a plethora of words for love, and even then probably not enough. Love of God, love of man, love of woman, love of life, love of parent, love of country. Leo crouched over the text and struggled with love. Love of Madeleine,
he thought. Too difficult to explain, this last love, being made of eros and agape and philia, the three of them blended together in uneasy combination. Agape was the love of man for God and God for man, and through this, the love of one’s fellow beings. It was agape that Paul included in his famous triad – along with faith and hope: agape, which the translators of the King James Bible famously and unfortunately rendered as charity. But which kind of love destroyed Yeshu? Which kind had destroyed Madeleine?
I’ve tried this before, she had written. Oh yes, I’m practised in this kind of thing, didn’t I tell you?
In what kind of thing was she practised? What was the import of her ambiguous words? Leo tried to talk to her. Bereft of a God to address, absurdly he tried to talk to Madeleine, attempted to magick her out of his own mind, tried to create her out of the ether or the air or whatever substance it was that still bore her imprint; just as once, as a child, he had tried to conjure up the living Christ from the assembly of images and illusions that were all he had to go on. And as with Christ, she didn’t appear before him. Madeleine remained mute. He thought of her and the more he thought of her the less substantial she became; he imagined her and the more he reached out to grasp her image, the more elusive it was. There were moments when he dreaded recalling her, in case the very act of memory should expunge the record from his brain, as though memory was finite, a thing used up at each remembering.
This was the teaching of Yeshu, that you should love God above all things and that you should despise the powers that rule you who are not of God but of man. This was the teaching of Yeshu, that you should renounce your family and your friends and follow him to salvation. This was the teaching of Yeshu, that if a man has riches, he should sell everything and give the worth to those who follow God’s way.
David Tedeschi invited Leo to supper. The Tedeschis lived in a cramped house in one of the new developments on the outskirts of the city, an area where the buildings were laid out in concentric circles like the walls of a citadel around an inner keep – a supermarket and a post office and a police station. It was as though the inhabitants were expecting a siege.
They ate supper in the tiny garden at the back of the house, with the two children running amok around the barbecue and the dining table. David’s wife was called Ellen. They were devout Christians the pair of them, struggling to match their faith with the rest of the world, members of a quiet and convinced American Baptist congregation. They had moved to the Holy Land to further David’s career in the obscure art of papyrology, but also to be nearer the centre of their faith. They had learned Hebrew. They attended services with a group calling themselves Jews for Jesus. ‘And now there’s this scroll,’ Ellen said quietly. ‘Isn’t it heretical?’
Leo tried to reassure her. ‘Many early texts are heretical in one way or another. The Gospel of Thomas, for example. Some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The early Church was riddled with dissent and disagreement.’
‘But this is different, isn’t it? David says this is different.’
‘It’s older, that’s all.’
She wouldn’t let go. She was a big, beautiful, untidy woman. Her brow was furrowed, with concern for her children, concern for the faith, concern for the future of the world. ‘It’s not just older than other non-canonical texts, is it?’ she insisted. ‘It’s older than anything. It’s older than the gospels themselves.’
Leo agreed that, yes, it was. It appeared to be older than any New Testament text, older than the oldest relic of the gospel, far older that the Chester Beatty, older than the Rylands fragment. The oldest text in Christendom.
‘And it denies the resurrection?’
There was a silence. David brought hamburgers from the barbecue and got the children to sit down.
‘Yes,’ said Leo. ‘The writer claims that he saw Yeshu’s body in its corruption. We haven’t got to the end of the scroll yet, but that’s what he says at the start.’
Ellen said softly, ‘I believe that my Redeemer liveth.’
‘So do millions of others.’
‘And now you’re telling me that he died like anyone else. What do you think, David?’
But her husband was silent. The thing disturbed him. The whole matter of the scroll, with its plain, insistent voice, its lack of appeal to the miraculous or the fantastic, its plain historical witness, all of it disturbed him.
Finally Ellen turned back to Leo. ‘I remember in the days of the Cold War,’ she said. ‘My father was in the Air Force. We lived on airforce bases, surrounded by bombers and missiles. I remember I used to have dreams about the whole thing going wrong, the airplanes taking off and the missiles being launched. And the others coming in. Great silent flashes in the sky. Looking out over miles of countryside and seeing the mushroom clouds rising. I would wake up panicking in a sweat, but I never told anyone about it, not my mother, not my father. I feel like that now. The same panic, the same sense of pure, unmitigated disaster.’
David reached across the table and took her hand. She shook her head, but let him hold her hand just the same. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Would you like to say grace?’ she asked Leo. ‘Weren’t you a priest once? Didn’t David tell me that?’
‘I still am. Technically I still am.’
She smiled, and her eyes glistened. ‘Aren’t we all priests in Christ?’
So Leo said grace for his hosts, and the little family bowed their heads over the food as though they all believed that what he said carried some kind of moral weight; and in the act of making that small and unimportant prayer Leo felt something of the power that had once been his, the power and the glory that had deserted him.
Later, when the children had been put to bed, Leo talked about Madeleine. It was the first time he had ever talked to anyone about her, apart from oblique comments to Goldstaub. But now he sat in the Tedeschis’ garden in Jerusalem and told them the whole story, more or less. It was a kind of expiation. Merely to talk about those days in Rome put some of the ghosts to rest.
Afterwards they walked to David’s car. The sky above the houses was blurred with the lights of the city, but still they could see the stars. ‘There’s a moral in that, isn’t there?’ David said.
‘Moral?’
‘Something to do with still seeing the stars even through a polluted sky. Man is in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars and still seeing them despite the pollution.’
‘I suppose there’s a moral in most things if you look for it.’
‘What’s the moral in the Judas scroll?’
Leo had no answer. They drove back to the Bible Center in silence, through the darkened suburbs of the city where Jews waited for the coming of Messiah and Arabs waited for the call of Allah, and as they approached the gates of the World Bible Center they found parked cars and flashing lights and armed, uniformed men. Policemen flagged the car down.
‘What the devil’s this all about?’ David exclaimed. That was the nearest he would ever come to blasphemy. He would never invoke the name of God, but in moments of surprise or stress he might invoke the devil. ‘What the devil—?’
Torches shone in their faces and voices from beyond the lights shouted at them. ‘Get out! Identity cards! Keep your hands in sight. Identity cards! Papers!’
‘How can we do both those things at once?’ Leo asked. He was grabbed and pushed round so that he stood with his hands on the car roof.
‘Are you being funny?’ the voice asked just behind his ear. ‘You think you’re funny guy?’ There was a hint of America in the disembodied voice, a suggestion of American movies. Guns were hard against his ribs. Hands ran all over him, under the arms, down the chest, into the crotch, down the legs. ‘What you doing here? Where you come from?’ they asked.
David looked across from the other side of the car, his face thrown into harsh relief by the lights. Leo was reminded of a face painted by El Greco, the long, lean lineaments, the dark and agonised eyes. He had the patient tone of a parent admonishing children. ‘We’ve just co
me from my home. Mr Newman lives here. We’re on the staff of the Bible Center. May I ask what’s going on?’
‘Can you provide evidence of that?’ the policeman asked.
‘Of what?’
‘Your movements this evening,’
‘Of course we can.’
Calder appeared. He looked as though he had just been dragged from his bed. His hair was awry and his eyes were wild. In sharp contrast to Tedeschi he was shouting. ‘What the hell has been going on? What in God’s name is happening? What are you doing with my colleagues? These men work with me.’
There was a pause around the two figures and the car, and then an apologetic dusting down. Identity papers were restored to their owners. ‘You never know,’ the man in charge said helplessly. ‘You never know.’
‘It seems there’s been some kind of break-in,’ Calder explained as they went up the drive and into the main building. ‘Someone got over the fence and forced a window.’
In the entrance hall the custodian was explaining to anyone who would listen that he had been doing his rounds in another part of the building, that he was always alert, that he never slept on duty. They went round the building with him, opening doors, turning on lights in empty, expectant rooms. In the manuscript rooms a door was open that ought to have been closed, a cabinet was unlocked that ought to have been locked, but there was nothing else. The scroll lay sealed beneath its panes of plate glass, like a winding-sheet on display in a museum. Nothing of significance had been taken, no particular damage was done. But the curious event itself and the subsequent investigation by the police brought an air of disquiet to the Center. Suddenly it seemed that the place was in the front line of a battle whose motives were unclear and whose combatants were undeclared.
‘We must be vigilant at all times,’ Calder announced to the assembled staff the next morning. ‘We must be always on watch.’ On the table in front of him lay a copy of that morning’s Jerusalem Post. BIBLE CENTER SCENE OF MYSTERY BREAK-IN, the headline announced. Had the intruders been after the new scroll? Journalists contacted the Bible Center to ask for confirmation or denial throughout the morning. Could the document be examined? Could the director make a statement, not about the break-in but about the scroll itself? Were stories true that this was the testimony of the disciple who betrayed Jesus? Was it a forgery? Was it a hoax?
