by Simon Mawer
The international press followed on the heels of the national. Could they take photographs, could they do interviews? Telephones rang at the Center, in the annexe, at people’s homes. JUDAS DISCOVERY ROCKS CHRISTIAN CHURCH, was the headline in the London Times.
‘We must control the information,’ Goldstaub advised the committee. ‘Press releases, official interviews. We must manage the information flow. We must pro-act, not react.’ His voice had about it a hint of desperation, Canute advising on how to stem the tide.
‘Can you confirm rumours about this text?’ an interviewer asked Calder in front of the baleful eye of a television camera. ‘Can you deny that it calls into question some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith?’ Calder smiled urbanely into the lights and evaded the question. ‘I would call it another witness,’ he said. ‘An alternative witness.’
It was in those days that the Children of God first appeared. No one quite knew where they had come from but they gathered on the road outside the Bible Center with placards and banners and a clear determination to pray for the souls of the damned locked up inside the building. Their camper van had God is Great painted in crude lettering along the side.
Leo went to speak with them. The weather had broken and there had been rain that afternoon. There were blue-grey clouds hanging like dirty linen over the city; the tarmac still had the slick of wetness. On the far side of the road were the protesters, six or seven of them, women and men. One of the women carried a baby on her hip. The adults were young, but their skin had the tanned and weathered look of parchment and somehow that made them seem older than their years. Their hair was plastered down and they smelt of damp.
‘What do you want here?’ he asked. But they looked past him, through him, tangential to him. ‘The Word is God’s,’ they told him. ‘You have no right to the Word. The Word is from God and the Word is God and there is no other Truth.’ You could hear the capital letters in their speech. One of their number, a young man with a beard and glazed eyes, came up to Leo. ‘All other words are the words of Satan,’ he said loudly. ‘You will burn in hell for what you are doing.’
‘All we’re doing is reading a text that has been discovered at an archaeological site,’ Leo said helplessly.
‘It is all written,’ the man said. ‘It is there in the Apocalypse.’ And he raised his eyes heavenward and began to quote. ‘“So I took the scroll from the angel’s hand and swallowed it and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. But when I had eaten it my stomach turned sour.”’ He glared at Leo. ‘Who can doubt that he is God’s creature and will suffer God’s wrath?’
The work of translation continued, the writing and the revising. The committee pondered the words, pulled things this way and that, argued, criticised, debated, speculated. There was an edge of anger to the debates, as though each member was fighting for his or her own interests.
After one such meeting Goldstaub approached Leo and handed him a copy of the latest edition of Time magazine. The cover showed a reproduction of the crucifixion by Mantegna, the one with the Holy City brooding in the background and the unrepentant thief hanging on a forked tree. The picture was overwritten with a mighty question mark. SCROLL QUERIES JESUS STORY, the title said. Inside was a short, sharp summary of the whole story with an information box about all the extant papyrus texts of the New Testament. There was an item on the current state of Christianity in the world. There was a photograph of Calder and the same photograph of Leo that had been snatched at the Ministry of Justice in Rome. As the world begins the third millennium, the story asked, does it also face the end of the religion that, more than any other, has marked those two thousand years? In the nineteenth century Nietzsche declared that God is dead. Perhaps, in the company of an ex-American Baptist and a renegade Catholic priest, we are about to witness His burial.
Meanwhile the translation continued, the unpicking of the text, the careful knitting together of the pieces:
In the week before the great feast he was anointed by the woman (Mary?) … he came into the city as it had been prophesied, riding on a donkey’s back; and the people hailed him as their king. The cohort1 was amazed2. Youdas witnessed this. He believed in the rebirth of the nation (and the) (restoration?) of the house of Israel. He wished for the cleansing of the Temple in the name of the Lord. But the man Yeshu believed that he had become like a god3 and had the power of kings and was the Messiah4 of God5. His band(?) waited outside the city for the word to be given by the elders to enter the city, for his demands were the throne and the crown and the destruction of the forces of Rome. And the elders of the people argued over his manner of taking power.
1 speira. The Roman garrison in Jerusalem.
2 ekplisso, struck, astonished, amazed.
3 the anarthrous noun theos, ‘a god’ in all probability signifying ‘godlike’. cf. John 1:1.
4 massia. The Hebrew word transliterated.
5 El. Again, the Hebrew word for God transliterated.
‘The anointing at Bethany and Palm Sunday,’ Calder said from his place at the head of the table. ‘The triumphal entry. Even with the donkey. The Zechariah prophecy.’ The members of the committee bent over the transcript and Leo’s translation. ‘Does it mention Mary? Is that what it says here?’
‘The text is damaged.’ Leo’s tone was almost apologetic, as if he was somehow to blame for any defects. ‘The name, if it is a name, begins with the letter mu. David and I are working on the damaged letters. It’s not easy, for goodness’ sake. It’s not easy to be objective.’
‘Who needs objectivity with those barbarians at the gate?’ Calder asked.
David flushed. ‘They’re just people with a strong faith,’ he protested.
‘Friends of yours, perhaps?’
‘People with many of my beliefs. You can’t just trample over people’s faith.’
‘Who’s trampling? I’m sorry, David, but the only person who’s trampling here is Yeshu.’ Calder turned from the young man’s concern to the page before him. ‘There’s an insurrection of some kind … that right? The cohort was “amazed”. Amazed, confused, what good’s that?’
‘The word in the original is ekplisso,’ Leo explained. ‘It’s ambiguous. It could mean struck, literally struck as well as metaphorically.’
‘Maybe it’s literally struck. Maybe Yeshu has a whole army and they’ve defeated the Roman garrison and got the survivors holed up in the Antonia Tower. Maybe that’s what it was.’
Another voice, the man from the university, said, ‘There’s the cleansing of the Temple, just like the gospel account.’
‘What I want to know is, what has this Yeshu got waiting outside the city? Band, it says here. What’s a band?’ Calder looked up at Leo with a smile. White teeth, evenly capped, like a row of shining trophies on a shelf. ‘Has he got sousaphones or what?’ There was the momentary relief of laughter.
‘The word is strateuma,’ Leo said. ‘You can see from the transcription. It appears to be strateuma although there’s a bit of damage there. You may see the photographs if you wish. Strateuma, maybe stratopedon. Strateuma goes best with the stichometry, but the difference is minimal. And they both carry the same meaning.’
‘But strateuma’s not a band, is it?’ Calder said. ‘It’s an army, for God’s sake. This Yeshu’s got a whole damned army waiting outside the walls.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’ll say maybe. What’s “band” in the New Testament?’
‘It depends on the translation.’
‘Of course it depends on the translation, Leo. For God’s sake, I know it depends on the translation. I’m not stupid.’
‘Band is usually speira, which is what I’ve translated as cohort earlier in the same passage. Technically cohort is likely.’
‘So we have the two words in the same passage, army and cohort. The contrast’s significant, isn’t it? Jesus, this Jesus has frightened the Jerusalem cohort away. He’s got a whole damned army with him waiting outside the city. And that’s
the difference from the gospel story. A rebel army. Galileans, I guess. This is only a supposition, but I guess they’re Galileans. And he’s waiting to see whether the Sanhedrin wants to call him in, go the whole hog – sorry, Daniel, that’s not too appropriate is it? – and occupy the city.’
‘It’d be the Jewish War scenario but half a century earlier.’
‘Thirty. Thirty years earlier. Get your chronology right. If this is, what 33AD? then the Jewish War is just three decades in the future. And this Yeshu is nothing but another power-hungry military leader. Or that’s what he seems.’
‘Or that’s what he’s become,’ Leo suggested. ‘Youdas implies that it was not always so.’
‘Of course. The guy has changed. Of course he’s changed. Power corrupts. We know that. What’s going to happen at the end, that’s what I want to know.’
‘The final two sheets are detached from the scroll,’ Leo said. ‘There’s some damage.’
‘Well let’s find out. We’re in the home straight and Leo’s doing great.’
The meeting broke up and the members dispersed. David followed Leo along the corridor towards the manuscript rooms. ‘I don’t feel happy about this,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel happy with Calder, I don’t feel happy about anything.’
‘Many people are going to have to rethink their ideas after this. Even Steven Calder.’
‘He gave you a bad time back there.’
‘He’s nervous. Worse than that, he’s frightened.’ He held the door open for David to go through into the manuscript rooms. There was the familiar hush of the air conditioning. ‘Like a cigar humidor,’ someone had described the atmosphere. It wasn’t much different from keeping cigars: the same vegetable matter to be conserved, the same worry about humidity, the same threat from mould and bacteria.
Together they stood looking down on the scroll as it lay there in its long glass case. The letters, the regiments of letters, the ranks and the columns, the squads and the cohorts, seemed to move to a rhythm, as though someone was calling the orders, someone was marshalling the troops. And they had marched with them down to the final, fragmented end of the scroll. The translation was almost complete.
‘What on earth is it going to tell us?’ David wondered aloud. He didn’t wait for an answer, but went off morosely into one of the other rooms to look for something to do. Leo found the place where he had left off and took up his pencil again.
Youdas went with the Temple guard to treat with him at Gat Semen …
He was inured to surprise now, hardened to the dramatic resonances that sounded throughout the scroll. Gath Shemen (Aramaic: the oil press), he wrote as a gloss, becomes Gethsemane in the gospel account (cf. Matt. 26: 36; Mark 14: 32). Youdas makes no mention of this being a garden. After the name there was a damaged patch of a few lines before the sense picked up again:
… his own followers let him into the presence of their leader and …
… the elders would call the people1 to war in the name of the House of David. And Yeshu embraced him and agreed to go with him to the elders, that all of Israel might speak with one voice for the (destruction of the power?) of Rome … 1Hebrew, am ha’ares, in the original. The significance of this familiar biblical phrase is difficult to interpret here. Perhaps merely ‘people of the land’, i.e. peasants, perhaps ‘people who were not in complete observance of the law’, a sense which certainly had become common by rabbinical times.
‘How’s it going?’ David called from the doorway.
Leo shrugged. The question had no answer. ‘There’s some damage here you need to look at. I don’t know if there’s anything to be done.’ The young man leaned over Leo to see, and Leo remembered Madeleine looking over his shoulder in the Biblical Institute in Rome. He felt for a treacherous moment the soft touch of her hair and the breath of her scent. But Rome seemed so far away, as far away as it would have seemed to the two men meeting there in the garden of the oil press: a distant ill-defined threat. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing to the text. ‘It’s the Judas kiss.’
David was silent, reading Leo’s rough translation. ‘There’s something sinister about it all,’ he said finally.
‘No there’s not. There’s nothing sinister. Nothing at all. That’s what makes it so disturbing. It’s just so matter-of-fact.’ He took up his pencil and returned to the task. He worked silently and without break through the afternoon, and by the time he had finished he had reached the broken end of the main roll:
… arguments in the Sanhedrin and amongst the elders and the priests. Youdas witnessed this … arguments amongst his own followers, between the Hellenists and the Hebrews … Yeshu himself stood up before the Sanhedrin and asked which they wanted – Jesus Bar-Abbas2 or Jesus Bar-Adam3
… but the … (high priest?) … stood up and said, It is better that one man dies than the whole nation. For if this man lives and this revolt (continues) then surely we shall die4 …
… the cohort from Caesarea and the revolt was crushed and the man Jesus was handed over …
2Bar-Abbas, Son of the Father. It is unclear whether this term refers to God the Father, as in the Christian gospels, or the man Jesus’ actual father, the Hasmonaean Aristobolus (see above).
3Bar-Adam, Son of Man.
4cf. John 11: 50, 18: 14
And all that remained was the final fragmented sheet.
Later that evening Leo stood outside the Bible Center and watched the sun setting below the clouds, saw the domes and towers touched with a momentary fire. Nothing in the whole span of that view was as old as the Church, nothing but the skeleton of the landscape itself: neither the golden dome that belonged to the Umayyads; nor the walls of the city, that were Suleiman’s; nor the dark olive trees down there in the shadows of the Garden of Gethsemane; nor the cluster of cupolas amongst the crowded roofs of the Old City that marked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, nothing. Only the bones of the landscape were as old as the Church, only the slope of that hillside on his left descending into the shadows: the Mount of Olives, where something like a rebel army had gathered before its final entry into the city a distant nineteen centuries ago, while the power-brokers of the province of Judaea argued and debated and wondered which way to jump.
What had happened down there in the shadows of the garden? Who had betrayed whom, and for what motive?
The broad bulk of Goldstaub loomed up in the half-light. ‘We’re almost at the end, aren’t we?’ he asked.
‘I suppose so.’
‘You know when I read a book, you know what I do?’
‘You read the last page first.’
‘Hey, how the hell did you know that?’
Leo smiled.
‘But you haven’t, is that right? It’s been sitting there all the time, and you haven’t even taken a peek?’
‘I’ve transcribed it. That’s all.’
‘But you know this damn language. You must have got some idea of what it says.’
Leo shrugged. ‘No more than a vague hint. No breaks between words, no punctuation of any kind, remember that. You don’t know where one sentence finishes and another starts, or even where a word begins and ends.’
Goldstaub hesitated. He sensed the other man’s mood, wondered how to react. Finally he clapped Leo on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry about Madeleine, you know that? I’ve told you before, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. I’m just sorry. For her, yes. But more for you.’
He went away after that and Leo stood there on his own. Amongst the sterile stars overhead – mere clouds of hydrogen exploding in the void – his only comfort was memory of Madeleine, a fragile woman with a sharp sense of irony and a hard streak of selfishness, a woman who had forgiven him for being a sterile, wasted thing; a woman who had claimed to love him above all things, a woman who had killed herself for reasons that he could not clearly fathom, a woman who left him with a plain and unblemished sense of guilt.
He watched the light fade and the stars begin to come out over the hills and t
he city, stars whose names he did not know cast in patterns he could only half recognise. Rigel, Sirius, Antares; the Great Bear, the Swan, the Scorpion. The pagan past still riding high over the present. He felt the solitude of the stars and the awful emptiness of space.
14
Leo rose early and breakfasted on yoghurt and fruit. He glanced at the newspaper as he ate. There had been a raid into southern Lebanon the day before, a unit of Hezbollah destroyed, an Israeli soldier killed. Arab shops in east Jerusalem were closed as a protest about something. The Pope had made a statement on the relationship between the Jewish faith and Christianity, a statement that was already being dissected, analysed, argued over, dismissed, applauded. He hadn’t mentioned the Gospel of Judas by name, but he would soon enough. Those who would seek to destroy faith in the name of historical research, he was quoted as saying, are anathema to both our religions. Anathema was a strong word in papal pronouncements. It smacked of the Inquisition and the auto-da-fé.
After breakfast Leo made his way through the garden of the villa to the gate that gave on to the grounds of the Bible Center. Shadows still lapped at the bottom of the valley below the garden, but on the far side the walls of the Old City were touched with light and the Dome of the Rock was a brilliant, golden flame. There was that limpid morning cool, with the threat of great heat to come.
Today he would decipher the last of the scroll, the final hours.
He walked up the drive to the Center, where purple bougainvillaea hung down the wall: Tyrian purple, the colour of kings. Outside the main gate were the Children of God with their banners and their slogans. He went through the main entrance of the building into the hall where there was a mosaic on the wall showing the plants of the Bible – vines and fig and olives – intertwined with symbols from Christianity and Judaism: a cross and a menorah, a fish and a Star of David, and a bipartisan chalice. Self-conscious and didactic, it was not a successful work.
