The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

Nil smiled. The thirteenth apostle, too, must have been the father of the souls of those Nazoreans who had fled the very first Church.

  “There is only one father of your soul, Beppe. The one who has no name, whom nobody can know, of whom we know nothing except the fact that Jesus called him abba: father.”

  94

  On this October morning, St Peter’s Square was in festive array: the Pope was to proclaim the canonization of the founder of Opus Dei, Escrivá de Balaguer. On the façade of the basilica, the centre of Christianity, a huge portrait of the new saint was displayed in front of the assembled throng. With his mischievous eyes he seemed to be looking down at them ironically.

  Standing at the right of the Pope, Cardinal Catzinger was radiant with joy. This canonization had assumed a particular significance for him. To begin with, it marked his personal victory over the members of Opus Dei, whom he had forced to come and eat out of his hands for years while the process of beatification of their hero proceeded. Now they were in his debt, which placed him somewhat further out of reach of their never-ending schemes. Catzinger was pleased at the fine trick he had just played on them and, for a while at least, he now had the upper hand.

  In addition, it meant that Antonio was safe from any pressure from Balaguer’s Spaniards. It was a matter of importance to him that the Society of St Pius V be governed with a firm hand, to avoid the trials it had undergone while Calfo was rector.

  Finally – and this was not the least of the reasons for feeling happy on this particular day – the Pope (who was increasingly incapable of making himself understood) had entrusted to him the task of giving the homily. He would take advantage of this opportunity to set out his programme for governing the Church, in front of the TV cameras of the whole world.

  For one day he would indeed govern the ship of Peter. Not surreptitiously, as he had been doing for years. But openly, in broad daylight.

  Mechanically, he lifted the hem of the Pope’s chasuble: the tremors that shook the Pope kept making it slip off in a far from telegenic way. And to disguise his gesture, he smiled at the camera. His blue eyes, his white hair, cut quite a dash on screen. He straightened: the camera was pointing at him.

  The Church was eternal.

  Lost in the throng, a young man was gazing mockingly at the spectacle of the Church’s pomp. His curly hair gleamed in the sunshine, and his jacket, the type worn by Abruzzi peasants, did not stand out: Catholic delegations from the whole world, in their national costumes, made splashes of colour in St Peter’s Square.

  His hands were not free: clutched to his chest, they were hugging a round leather bag.

  Nil had given it to him the night before. He was worried: in the village, where any stranger was immediately spotted, a man had been seen asking questions. He was definitely not from these mountains, nor even an Italian: too many muscles, not enough of a paunch – and the villagers’ eyes were infallible. Given the way things are in a village of the Abruzzi, the rumour had soon reached Beppe’s ears. He had mentioned it to Nil, who had sensed all his old anxieties reawakening.

  Could it be possible that they were looking for him, even here?

  The very next day, he had entrusted Beppe with his bag. It contained the results of years’ worth of study. In particular, it contained the copy of the epistle that he had made. From memory, admittedly, but he knew that it was faithful to the text that he had briefly held in his hands in the Vatican’s secret collection.

  His life had no further importance, his life no longer belonged to him. Like the thirteenth apostle, like many others, perhaps he would die for having preferred Jesus to the Christ-God. He knew this, and accepted it in advance, his heart filled with peace.

  His only regret was a sin against the Spirit that he would not be able to confess to any priest: he would have liked, in spite of everything, to see Jesus’s real tomb in the desert. He knew that this desire was merely a pernicious illusion, but he could not extinguish it within himself. He would have liked to excavate the vast sandy wastes between Israel and the Red Sea. To discover the tumulus, lost in the midst of an abandoned Essene burial ground unknown to anyone. To go where the thirteenth apostle had expressly stated he wanted nobody to go. Even to think of it was a sin: silence had not accomplished its work of purification within him. He would struggle, with all his strength, to eliminate from his mind this thought that kept him from Jesus’s presence, which he encountered every day in prayer.

  Between a pile of bones and reality, the choice was easy.

  But he needed to be careful. Beppe would go alone to Rome and entrust the bag to someone in whom he had every confidence.

  Cardinal Emil Catzinger concluded his homily amid thunderous applause, and modestly sat down again at the Pope’s right hand.

  Furtively, Beppe lowered his head and respectfully grazed the bag with his lips.

  The truth had not been erased from the face of the earth.

  The truth would be transmitted. And one day it would resurface.

  * * *

  Hidden under Bernini’s colonnade, Mukhtar Al-Quraysh did not take his eyes off the young man. He had located the village. The infidel must be somewhere hereabouts, in the mountains.

  He would just need to follow this peasant from the Abruzzi, with his naive expression.

  He would lead him to his prey.

  He smiled: Nil had succeeded in escaping from the men in the Vatican, but he would not escape from him. You do not escape the Prophet, blessed be his name.

  Just as I was leaving the hermitage, I could not refrain from asking yet another question:

  “Father Nil, aren’t you afraid of the man who’s looking for you?”

  He reflected for several moments before replying:

  “He’s not a Jew. Ever since the Temple was destroyed, they have been torn apart by a deep sense of despair: the promise was in vain, the Messiah will not come. But God remains a living reality for them. However, Muslims know nothing of Him – except that he is unique, greater than everything, and that he judges them. The tenderness and proximity of the God of the prophets of Israel are still foreign to them. Faced with an infinite but infinitely distant Judge, Jewish despair has become transformed, in their case, into an anguish they cannot master. And some of them still need violence to exorcise the fear of a nothingness that God cannot fill. He is probably a Muslim.”

  With a smile, he added:

  “Intimacy with the God of love destroys fear for ever. Perhaps he is indeed hot on my heels? If he wants to drag me down into his own nothingness, he will still never appease the anguish dwelling within him.”

  He took my two hands in his own.

  “Seeking to know the person of Jesus means becoming another thirteenth apostle. Anyone can be a successor to that man. Will you be one of them?”

  Ever since, in my Picardy of forests, or fertile fields and taciturn men, the sound of Nil’s last words has never left me.

  When they echo in my ear, I start to feel a longing for the desert.

  The Truth Behind

  The Thirteenth Apostle

  Where does fact end and fiction begin in The Thirteenth Apostle?

  History is not an exact science, it only manages to achieve increasingly refined hypotheses. As time goes on, some of these findings settle down and are sometimes termed “definitive”. But in the field of history nothing is established for ever: the discovery of new sources, or simply a new perspective on events, can call into question an almost official historical truth which had been long-accepted by everyone.

  The novelist follows his investigation up to the point that history has reached. He then imagines what history would have become, if… But he must do so in strict coherence with preceding events. If what he writes is not real, it must be realistic. Historical fiction does not create an entirely new world, as science fiction does: it imagines what the world could have become, if a minuscule grain of sand had oriented history – as we know it – along a different path. It must be plausible hypothe
sis, coherent with what we know from other sources.

  That is how I constructed The Thirteenth Apostle. We know for a fact that this man existed. Did he write an epistle to tell his truth about Jesus the Nazorean? There is no trace of such a letter, but he could have written one, which could have been transmitted to us, as it was the case for many other works left behind by the founders of Christianity.

  What would have been the content of such an epistle? Obviously we can’t tell, but a good knowledge of first-century history allows us to imagine it.

  Fiction, then, is an extension of history. Like a flower bud opening out and blossoming, the hidden facet of world events is revealed at the novelist’s touch. He makes us imagine, but also pushes open new doors, possibly for a new generation of scholars to go through one day. I have attempted to give body, voice, sensitivity to this man whose memory the primitive Church sought to annihilate at all costs. The shadow of the thirteenth apostle looms over my novel, and beyond his that of another man, Jesus the Nazorean, whom he had loved more than anyone else, of whom he had been the most intimate and loyal disciple.

  At least, that’s what he claims.

  Twelve Apostles?

  The literature we possess on Jesus – the man, his personality and the events which led to his crucifixion – is remarkably vast and detailed. We know a great deal more about him than about most of the great figures of antiquity.1 His death, for example, is precisely dated 7th April 30 AD,2 a Friday, at three in the afternoon: such a degree of precision is most rare for this period. We know its official reasons, as well as the true reasons hidden within the texts. The events of the final weeks of his life unfold in front of our eyes as in a film, orchestrated by four more or less scrupulous directors.

  This literature – the New Testament – was written in stages, over a period which began around 50 ad and ended around 100 AD. The New Testament itself is not a historical document, but a polemical, even political one. It was written during a time when the Church was establishing itself, transforming Jesus into God and inventing a legitimacy for itself in relation to the Judaism it had derived from and the other religions of the Roman Empire.

  The choice of twelve men among those who were following him can be traced back to Jesus himself. Why this number? Because it was immediately recognizable for the Jewish crowds of the time: twelve, like the twelve sons of Jacob, ancestors of the twelve tribes of mythical Israel. It is interesting to note that Jesus never once gives them the title of “apostle”, nor even that of “disciple”.3 In his lifetime he simply called them “the Twelve”,4 and it is only later that the expression “twelve apostles” starts to appear in texts.5

  In fact, the title of apostle became a kind of trademark within the Church. Composing his Acts of the Apostles between 80 and 90 AD, Luke describes the choice of the twelfth apostle who will replace Judas, who died in mysterious and tragic circumstances. For the election of the replacement there is only one criterion: he must be chosen from among those “who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us”.

  That is to say from the time of his leaving the desert until his death.

  This condition alone is enough to validate the candidacy for the title of apostle and the authority that comes with it.6 This title is so honorific that Paul of Tarsus – even though he had not known Jesus and therefore not fulfilled the essential condition – would later acquire it by force, in order to feel better equipped in the fierce conflict which would pit him against the legitimate apostles.

  But for the barons of the Church, there cannot be more than twelve apostles. Not one more.

  A Thirteenth Apostle?

  The crucial moment then is when Jesus emerges from his desert solitude, after a long period of meditation. Before this experience he had been a pious Jew among many; afterwards he becomes a different man, filled with a new-found sense of charisma and the promise of a new world. It is at this precise moment that five men meet him. The so-called gospel of St John provides an astonishing account of this meeting:

  The next day John was there again with two of his disciples… they followed Jesus… they went and saw where he was staying, and spent that day with him. It was about the tenth hour. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.7

  One of the two: who is the other disciple, the one who tells the story? He is an apostle, since he has met Jesus as he left the desert, and will follow him to the end. Along with Andrew, he is even the first one to have met him, and will be the last to see him – on the cross. Despite this, he will never appear on the official lists of the apostles. Nor in any other New Testament text, except the fourth gospel, of which he is the initiator.

  This man who could have – more than anyone else – laid claim to the title of apostle, refers to himself as the beloved disciple of Jesus. This is the man whom I refer to as the thirteenth apostle, without being able to name him, since even his very name has been cancelled from memory.

  He reappears at the beginning of the final week of Jesus’s life in Jerusalem and describes the dramatic events of this period so vividly, warmly and precisely that he must have been an eyewitness. But before investigating this account, we must go back and recapitulate what we know about this man.

  The Rediscovery of a Suppressed Eyewitness

  In the 1980s Raymond E. Brown, a Catholic scholar, officially recognized that the beloved disciple was definitely a thirteenth apostle, distinct from St John the Evangelist: “It is evident that the disciple beloved by Jesus was a historical figure and a companion of Jesus.”8

  This unknown witness, a kind of “man in the iron mask” of the primitive Church, appears eight times in the text of the fourth gospel, either explicitly or in unequivocal allusions. Chapter 21 for example describes Peter and six other disciples’ short stay around the lake of Galilee, where they had fled to after the crucifixion. The author gives us the following names: “Simon Peter, Thomas (called Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples”.9 Who are those two other disciples? A bit further in text, one of the two emerges from anonymity: “Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them.”10

  That’s him again: the thirteenth apostle, and in this scene he is explicitly distinguished from the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, whom tradition labels “the Evangelist”.

  When Jesus and the four others leave John the Baptist to return to Galilee, the thirteenth apostle does not join them but goes back to Jerusalem, where he lives. He knows the city well; his descriptions in the fourth gospel are exact, colourful and have been confirmed by archaeological excavations. He possesses a house there, situated not far from that of the high priest Caiaphas and in the wealthy western quarter, heavily protected by the Jewish police.11 As all the villas in the neighbourhood, his is vast and contains, on the first floor, a large “upper room”. This is the room in which Jesus will take his last supper, and where the terrorized disciples will hide after the crucifixion of their master, before leaving for Galilee. Some of them will find refuge there again on their return to Jerusalem several weeks later. And it is also there that the miracle of the Pentecost will occur fifty days after Passover.

  The thirteenth apostle therefore takes the risk of housing the accomplices of a crucified man, a huge favour to the apostles, with whom he is still on good terms.

  But this mutual understanding was not to last long: as we have seen, his name and his very existence have been erased from the New Testament entirely, apart from his narrative in the fourth gospel. When Paul makes three “official visits” to Jerusalem (in 39, 48 and 52 ad), he provides the details of his meetings with the “columns”, i.e. those who matter in the nascent Church: the beloved disciple is mentioned nowhere, either directly or by allusion. Has he already disappeared from Jerusalem, has he already taken refuge in the silence that has been
imposed on him?

  If the apostles have pursued him in their hatred of him to the point of annihilating his legacy, he likewise does not think highly of them at all: it has been noted that in the fourth gospel the word apostolos is never used to refer to the Twelve. Almost as if he had wanted to deny them their official label of authority, he for whom Jesus is the only apostolos of God. He describes himself as mathetes, a disciple in the Greek philosophical tradition.

  A Respectable Local Figure

  He is wealthy and owns a large household: it is one of his servants even who discreetly ushers the rabbi and his followers into the western quarter, where their Galilean accent and scrawny appearance would have made them immediately noticeable. Jesus has carefully prepared his clandestine entry into the city; a signal has been agreed upon between himself and his friend, and he warns his disciples:

  Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. Say to the owner of the house he enters, “The Teacher asks: where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” He will show you a large upper room, furnished and ready.12

  The anonymous owner is the thirteenth apostle, who is treated here as the stranger he has become for the official Church, when this gospel was written forty years after the fact.

  And this short passage is the only one in which the shadow of this man briefly appears in the Synoptic Gospels:13 the apostles overlooked this detail in their bid to cancel him from history – the water carrier, the servant of the owner who was one of theirs, their brother, before saving their lives. Forty years later he has become a stranger to them, an enemy to be mentioned fleetingly.

  This detail is authenticated by those who report it – because they cannot do otherwise. It shows that a trusting, friendly, intimate relationship had been established between Jesus and him, which must have incurred fierce jealousy on the part of the Twelve.

  He is not only wealthy, but also well connected. He has free access to the palace of his neighbour Caiaphas, the highest authority in Israel. The staff there recognize him immediately and let him come and go as he pleases: a regular visitor, as opposed to Peter, who does not dare to enter and stays outside.