I don’t want to use up valuable space arguing over the Aramaic texts but the Apostles were not given the task of building a church and all that that implies. The original message has been distorted. The Man’s ultimate aim in spreading The Word was to build an army (kahal) of assembled organic unities (edhah) or, as a chronicler of the Empire might say, to reunite the fragmented Ain-folk.
Over the next few weeks, with Mary of Magdala by his side, The Man gathered together the disparate group of twelve who were to follow him doggedly until that panic-filled night in the Garden of Gethsemane. And during the next few months, he also gathered other adherents who were to form the nucleus of the group known as the Followers of The Way. Mary of Magdala was given the task of selecting and organising this group and, as she had direct access to The Man, interceding on their behalf whenever necessary.
The character and eventual fate of the twelve disciples has been chewed over by biblical scholars and endlessly romanticised by a succession of novelists. In historical terms, their personalities, like mine, are irrelevant. Their importance lay in the part that each played in enabling The Man to carry out his mission; the fact that they were twelve in number and because, as a group, they represented a varied cross-section of society. They were not all dirt-poor sod-busters, or fundamentalist fishermen. Matthew-Levi was a tax-collector, Philip a Greek-speaking student of law, Shimon the Zealot was a political activist, and Judas was a member of the Sicarii – a first-century version of the Stern Gang specialising in covert assassination of Roman soldiers and civil servants. Andreas, Philip, Nathan barTolomai, Jacob of Alphaeus, Timmaeus and Thaddeus were the disciples The Man inherited from Johanan-Gabriel. Jacob and Johan barZebedee came, as did Shimon-Petrus, from the fishing community based around Capernaum.
It was Judas, arriving from Jerusalem, who brought the news that Johanan the Baptiser had been arrested for his vituperative assault on Herodias and her pre-teen strumpet daughter, and was now languishing in the slammer at Machereus, Herod’s forbidding fortress-palace on the eastern slopes of the Dead Sea. The curtain was going up on the third and final act. It was time for The Man to assume the role of an itinerant preacher whose wandering route through the Galilean and Judean countryside was to end on Calvary. But first, there was that marriage to attend in Cana.
On the way there, he made that ill-fated attempt to preach in the synagogue at Nazareth which ended, as I’ve already mentioned, with him being run out of town. Cana was the last time he was to meet his mother face-to-face until he looked down at her through pain-racked eyes from the cross. It was also the occasion of his first recorded miracle when, under protest, he turned six stone flagons of water into wine. It was a somewhat frivolous use of his powers but, as those of you who’ve got one will know, Jewish mothers are not easily denied.
Chapter 21
The phone rang, cutting across The Man’s recorded voice. I got up and switched off the tape deck and took the call in the living-room. It was Jeff Fowler.
‘About yesterday,’ he began, not wasting time on any preliminaries. ‘When you get back from Israel do you think you could persuade your friend to come down to the Institute for a complete examination?’
‘What do you hope to prove, Jeff?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure we can “prove” anything,’ replied Fowler. ‘But that food and wine he swallowed last night has to go somewhere. If his internal organs are as perfect as his external appearance and motor functions imply, then he must have gastric juices in his digestive tract. In which case, what are his kidneys doing? And what’s happening to the excess oxygen that’s floating around his system?’
‘What makes you think there is any?’ I replied.
‘Leo,’ said Fowler, ‘his blood contains nothing but mature red blood cells. That means he’s already carrying more oxygen than normal. But if his blood and tissue cells aren’t ageing then the energy that would normally be used up in the building of new cells, muscle fibre, bone and tissue will just accumulate. How does he store it? The guy must be like a superball!’
‘Maybe he has a totally different type of metabolism,’ I suggested, airing some of the knowledge I’d picked up from watching Doctor Kildare.
‘Maybe he has,’ said Fowler. ‘In which case I’d like to find out how it works. Let me give you another “for instance”. If he has no DNA in his white cells, what happens when he cuts himself? How can the cells reproduce to cope with the infection? It’s driving me bananas.’
‘Jeff,’ I said, ‘I think you are going to have to accept that The Man is outside the rules. You’re looking at him in the wrong way.’
‘I don’t accept that,’ said Fowler. ‘Okay, I know he disappeared. I admit I have no answer for that as yet, but the rest leaves us with two options. He is either real, in which case his physiology has to make some kind of medical sense, which is why it’s important to be able to examine him, or we are singly and jointly the victims of an incredible illusion.
‘You’re right,’ I said. We’ve allowed ourselves to be totally deluded by external reality. That’s the illusion. Don’t you see that’s what The Man is trying to tell us? We have to look at everything with a fresh eye.’
Fowler greeted this with a short silence. ‘Leo, let’s be practical about this. Real is real. That’s the only way we can operate. If we don’t hold to that then we might as well book ourselves into the funny farm.’
‘Jeff,’ I replied. ‘This is it. We were all booked in at birth.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ said Fowler. ‘I’ll talk to you when you get back. Have a good trip.’
I put the phone down. Poor Jeff. I knew how he felt. I had often experienced the same uncomfortable wave of embarrassment when I had encountered some banner-waving nut in the street hawking ten cent pamphlets proclaiming the Good News. Salvation for the righteous and eternal damnation for the wicked. Who needed to hear all that? I had been face to face with The Man himself and even I had proved a reluctant customer. While much of what he had said was totally new, some of it reinforced certain ideas that had already occurred to me. But as Miriam had said, I had tried to keep my involvement at arm’s length. My intellectual curiosity had been engaged but I had done my best to avoid any real commitment.
I think the reason that I was able to keep my distance for so long was because, while The Man’s presence may have contributed to my courtroom defeat, it had not affected the practice of law. Whereas it threatened to turn Jeff Fowler’s world upside down. Miriam’s too. Their professional lives were based on their sure and certain knowledge of human physiology and the physical sciences. They could perform their healing function, arrive at a diagnosis because, although much still remained to be discovered, the practice of medicine was founded on the logical analysis of biochemical processes. The observation of cause and effect. Action and reaction. There was always a reason why, even if it could not be immediately found. It was little wonder that Fowler was now clinging like a ship-wrecked sailor, to the notion that The Man’s share of Carol’s sukiyaki must, inevitably, work its way through his digestive tract.
It didn’t, Jeff. But don’t worry about it. Like I said, it’s not important.
I don’t intend to go over everything The Man said and did during his last twelve months in Palestine. The core of it is in the Book. His words have been messed around with but the message is there if you dig for it. Now that I’ve given you an idea of the real set-up you will know what to look for. The events in the Book are not all in the right order but if you approach the New Testament narratives as if you were (a detective) sifting through statements in a murder investigation you will be surprised at what you’ll find.
I’ve already touched upon the feeding of the five thousand. The healing is not in dispute. The state of some of the people he came across was heart-rending. He had to do something about the lepers, the crippled, the deaf, dumb and blind but on each occasion he asked the beneficiary not to attribute their cure to him. The
reason was twofold. Healing took the power out of him. Wherever he went, people clustered round him. Trying to reach through the protective ring of disciples. Over and over again he found himself surrounded by a waving forest of hands and arms, stretching out desperately to touch him. After days like that, he needed time to recharge.
The other factor was his growing notoriety. Obviously, when you restore the ravaged flesh of lepers, make the blind see, send beggars dancing down the street on their once-crippled limbs, give voice to the dumb so that they can praise God; when you heal the minds of raving lunatics, turning a herd of pigs into Spam in the process, perform remote-control cures on a young girl in a coma and a Centurion’s servant, people are bound to sit up and take notice. And the moment you ask them to keep the news to themselves you can guarantee that it’s going to spread like wildfire.
The Man knew that certain Pharisees – the influential sect that were the self-appointed guardians of Jewish orthodoxy – had been meeting with members of Herod’s court to discuss the problems caused by The Man’s abrasive comments on the current state of Judaism and the increasing number of people who appeared to be taking them seriously.
The establishment was also disturbed by the loose talk that he might even be the promised Messiah. Palestine was a powder-keg. An explosive mixture of subversive religious and political factions seething under the Roman yoke. The Man, who was reportedly mixed up with political activists, could be the spark that might blow the country apart.
Nicodemus, through his seat on the Sanhedrin, was well-placed to garner the substance of these backstairs discussions, and Joseph of Arimathea, who himself was a wealthy merchant, was able to monitor the ground-swell of unease among the business community. Both kept The Man advised of the plots being hatched against him. It enabled The Man to keep one step ahead of his adversaries and make the most effective use of his public appearances. He needed to get his message across to as many people as possible, but he also knew that over-exposure could precipitate his arrest. He had to stay out of trouble until the right moment when all the elements would fall into place.
Johanan-Gabriel was already in prison and would soon force Herod to kill him. The Man knew that if Herod was seen to be able to kill someone like Johanan the Baptiser with impunity, his opponents would be quick to conclude that Joshua of Nazareth could be dealt with in the same way. The establishment’s view, as reported by Nicodemus, was coldly realistic. Good news about God was one thing but if this so-called Messiah was going to create a situation where the Romans would feel obliged to send in another hard-line general like P.Q. Varus to reimpose order, then salvation could go to the bottom of the list.
While we’re on the subject of The Man and his progress through Galilee, there’s a point that needs to be made concerning his promise to make the disciples fishers of men. Some of you may remember the story of the miraculous draught of fishes in the last chapter of John and my fantasy about The Man having sonar built into his ankles. It didn’t happen.
It is an allegorical statement about the Ain-folk. Another clue to the real story. The early Christians who were driven underground, first by Paul’s campaign of repression and then by Rome, used a symbolic fish as their call sign; the first example of religious graffiti. This has been explained by scholars as being a kind of visual mnemonic: the five letters of the Greek word for ‘fish’ formed the initial letters of the key-phrase – ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour’. However, like so many of the passages in the Book, there was more to it than that. The fish symbolised both the single Ain-folk element and the shoal. You must have all seen, in the TV documentaries of Jacques Cousteau, pictures of a shimmering mass of quicksilver; sometimes made up of thousands of fishes. All moving as one. Turning in graceful coordinated movements, as if guided by an over-mind. It was this symbol that was the link with our distant past when the twelve ancient races of Man had each been the home of one of the great Aeons. Their guiding spirit.
The story of the miraculous draught of fishes landed by the disciples was an allegory of his mission and the part they were to play in it. The gathering together of all the fragments by the Twelve. Each fish part of the shoal. Each individual Ain-folk element part of the greater whole.
In the fortress-palace of Machereus, overlooking the Dead Sea, Johanan-Gabriel now only had a few weeks to live. Despite the fact that Johanan had heaped scorn, ridicule and the wrath of God upon his wife Herodias and her daughter Salome, Herod Antipas had no personal animosity towards him. In fact, up to the time of his sudden execution, Herod proved a remarkably benign jailer. Herodias was the daughter of one of Herod’s half-brothers by one of his old man’s five Number One wives – Mariamne I. Which made her Herodias The Fox’s half-niece. But before marrying Herod, she’d been wedded and bedded by another half-brother – Herod Philip – making her, officially, Herod’s sister-in-law. All of which was not exactly incestuous but it was regarded by the Galilean bible belt as being too close for comfort. Especially when Salome had a habit of creeping into their bed to keep warm.
While Johanan-Gabriel’s moral strictures had not been exactly music to Herod’s ears, the Baptiser’s honesty made a refreshing contrast to the toadying courtiers that clustered round him, vying for favour. Not that he was overly concerned with truth, honesty or clean living. Like Herod the Great’s other sons, Herod had been educated in Rome where he had picked up a taste for the good life and the usual bad habits. Along with a passion for building, he had inherited his father’s sharp sense of survival. Palestine then, as now, was a region in constant ferment and Herod-Antipas liked to keep his ear close to the ground.
Herod was particularly interested in the rumours that linked Johanan-Gabriel to the alleged birth of two beings from beyond the stars, whose arrival in Bethlehem had been celebrated by the secret visit of three magi in the last years of his father’s reign. At that moment in history, an august body known as the College of Haruspices was still employed by the Roman state to prognosticate upon the future by reading the entrails of slaughtered animals. Naturally, no Roman with a whiff of sophistication took such things seriously. They were superstitious, yes. They still looked for lightning in the right part of the sky. But they were no more irrational than we are about black cats, spilt salt, and walking under ladders. With his Roman background, Herod Antipas took a similar view. His Pharisaic advisors and functionaries might believe in angels and demonic spirits like the Persians and Babylonians before them but Herod took a more cynical view of what made the world tick. Rulers then, as now, assured their futures by trade-offs, pay-offs, and making people offers they couldn’t refuse.
And yet, and yet … there was a strange other-worldliness about Johanan that intrigued Herod. His insistence that there was a spirit-being inside the human body. The constant repetition of the claim that salvation was at hand. Johanan had denied being the Messiah but admitted to having been born in Bethlehem. And Herod knew from his informants that the Baptiser was related to this new prophet that people had begun to talk about. Joshua of Nazareth. From what Joshua was reported to have said, one could almost believe that he and Johanan were one and the same person. With one important exception. This new prophet, it was alleged, could heal people at a touch. Herod was prepared to accept that it might be true. He was aware that the ignorant and uneducated were inclined to marvel at anything they did not understand and that the devout Jew was habitually inclined towards religious hyperbole – but anything was possible.
Herod had sent men out to bring this Nazarene before him so that he could see some of these miracles for himself but, so far, Joshua had proved remarkably elusive. Herod was not too worried. Sooner or later they would come face-to-face. That would be the moment to judge whether there was any substance to the extravagant claims now being made on his behalf. Meanwhile, Herod decided that it would be better to tread cautiously. For if there was an empire greater than Rome beyond the stars, it would be unwise to harm its emissaries.
What Herod Antipas didn’t kno
w was that, in between his occasional chats with Johanan-Gabriel, Herodias had been making a few prison-visits of her own. Her intention had been to convince the Baptiser, with the aid of some heavily-perfumed charm, that a public withdrawal of his condemnation of her would be in everybody’s best interests. Johanan-Gabriel’s response was both predictable and unprintable and led directly to the fateful evening when, in front of the chariot-set that had been invited to supper, Salome tricked Herod into ordering Johanan’s execution.
With the demise of their host-body, Johanan – the Ain-folk fragment that had been Gabriel’s companion – slipped into the shadow-world, that Theosophists know as Devachan, to await its next reincarnation. He had lost his earth-life but in a good cause. The blows that had severed their host’s head had also cut the bonds that tied Gabriel’s temporal aspect to the living body. As he broke free, Gabriel felt the same exultant surge of relief that a pilot does when he manages to eject from a stricken jet fighter and feels that chute pop open safely above his head.
The first thing that Gabriel did after breaking his earth-bonds was to contact Ya’el and give him the good news. With the death of his host-body he, too, would be a free spirit once again.
In his post-baptismal dialogue with the Empire, Ya’el had been told that his mission was to culminate with the transmission of the Power of The Presence from the Empire to Earth – for which he was to be the ground-station. A kind of cosmic lightning conductor. To ensure the effective use of this energy, Ya’el had been instructed to test the effect of an input of Celestial power on the twelve disciples and the seventy-two Followers of The Way who were to be the spearhead of the post-Resurrection phase of the mission. For in order to spread The Word, they needed to be armed with the power to open men’s minds, heal the sick and drive out ‘evil spirits’ – the elemental ‘Braxian forces that were constantly trying to infiltrate the human body.
Mission Page 42
