Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  Grabowski remained impassive. “I’m sure it’s all there,” he said. “Get to the point.”

  “Very well, let me be frank, Your Excellency. My client would like to propose a kind of pooling of information. In exchange for telling us exactly what your cousin discovers about the labyrinth at Amiens, we will permit you to purchase the Gospel of Thomas when it’s found. And don’t misunderstand me, your Excellency. My client will find it—one way or another, with or without your help.”

  “What makes you think, after all that happened with Pontevecchio, that I would ever consider dealing with Scarcella again?”

  “Frankly—and I’m sorry to be so blunt, Your Excellency—you really have little choice. If you cannot accept my client’s terms, and if you refuse to restrict your own half-baked investigations through your cousin, then my client will be forced to put the manuscript on the open market. Consider, for a moment, this event.”

  “I told you before, Marone. I know nothing about my cousin’s activities.”

  “Then I suggest you reacquaint yourselves. As for the price,” he added, “I would not be overly concerned. It is one you have paid already, many times before. All that my client asks is that you continue to extend the banking privileges he enjoyed while your friend Pontevecchio was alive. With more discretion to be sure, but nothing more.”

  The archbishop stiffened, the darkened passageways of memory unfolding like a labyrinth within him, and at each turn the same face with that same smile leaning over that same table at the Hotel Excelsior, stirring his cappuccino with that tiny silver spoon clamped tight between his thumb and little finger. What could be so special about an ancient manuscript that made the former Venerable Master believe he would ever work with him again? Not after Pontevecchio. Not since that bridge in London. Marone was right about one thing—he had already paid.

  For months Grabowski had not even ventured into Rome for fear of being arrested on civil charges stemming from the scandal at Fabiano. He had become a prisoner, as if the borders of the Vatican marked the borders of his conscience too. But now, at last, a compromise had been drawn up between the Italian and Vatican authorities. The IOR had never admitted its culpability, but it had recognized its obligations to alleviate the damage done to all those innocent financial bystanders connected to the scandal. After all, Salvatore Pontevecchio had borrowed many millions, from countless other banks, to prop up his illegal ventures overseas, and those ventures had been owned in many cases by the Church. The very least the Vatican could do, insisted the Italian magistrates, was repay a percentage of the missing funds—around two hundred million dollars.

  The compromise had been agreed upon in principle only the day before, although it would probably not be finalized and signed for several months. Grabowski was free to travel once again, and he had only just decided to go on a short vacation where he could think without the pressures of his job and the ubiquitous paparazzi. But now all this had changed. The trip would have to wait. The past had slipped into the present once again.

  “Dottore Marone,” the archbishop said softly, taking his glasses off and rubbing his eyes. “The banking privileges which you claim your client enjoyed were not dispensed by me, but by Pontevecchio. Of course Scarcella could renegotiate, but even he might find the price of dialogue a little steep. As for me,” he added with a shrug, “I can’t dispense a box of paper clips these days without some monsignor noting it down.”

  Marone laughed heavily, like sea stones rubbing in the tide. “I’m sure that you will find a surprising unanimity concerning this issue. Even the Pope will praise you. Of course, His Holiness will have to have the manuscript reviewed by experts, and without the unnecessary tribulation which a premature exposure would undoubtedly produce. But he will pay the price, and he will not forget your part in finding it. You will be wearing crimson in a month, Your Eminence, I guarantee it.”

  So here’s the carrot, thought Grabowski. He’s already used his stick. “I have no interest in becoming a cardinal. Not anymore.”

  “Perhaps,” Marone answered peevishly. Then, with another laugh he said, “But Church history will record you with a smoother face if you agree. And after all, Your Eminence. Isn’t that why all of us work so hard—for posterity, for our children.”

  “For the Church,” Grabowski said. He stood clumsily, leaning his knuckles against the desk.

  “Of course,” Marone answered. “Let’s not forget the Church.”

  Archbishop Grabowski was still in his office when the call came in from Monsignor Frank Wovyetski. It was dusk, the gloaming light held off by streetlamps and the pitiless illumination of the statues mounted high above the square. “I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up.

  Grabowski took the shortcut to the library, winding through corridors and through forgotten doors, up narrow stone and wooden stairs which plunged at angles through walls and under streets and stone piazzas. Occasionally he passed another figure wandering through the halls and they would greet each other silently, with nods and quiet movements of the hands.

  As he walked, Grabowski tried to think of other things, but his thoughts kept turning to that package wrapped in Christmas paper which Marone had delivered to him that morning and which he, in turn, had sent on to the library for analysis that afternoon. He had played the recorded conversation over and over again, and still he could not understand it. Marone had been cautious. But in the end it was not the threats, nor the vague descriptions of the ancient manuscript which Grabowski found most disturbing. Instead it was his own voice rushing through his head, so drawn and desperate, strung out for exculpation. “For the Church,” the words chimed like a string of bells. “For the Church.”

  At first, yes, long before, there had once been a time when he had marveled at Pontevecchio. He had been younger then. And more, he had been hungry and ambitious too, floundering in the shadow of the legendary Bernardino Nogaro, who from a paltry eighty million dollars in 1929 had raised the assets of the Vatican to more than two billion dollars by his death in 1958. They were large shoes to fill, and in retrospect Grabowski knew why it had taken him so long to pose the questions which eventually the fall of Banco Fabiano had forced him to confront.

  There had never really been a single moment of revelation when he’d finally understood the game that Scarcella and Pontevecchio had been playing. On some level he had suspected for a long time, and when the proof gradually revealed itself, it was more a confirmation than a grim surprise. But something fundamental did change with the knowledge, something at the root of who he was, and he found that what he could never have justified from personal ambition, he now felt obligated to conceal for the security of the Church. He was but one man after all, a single soul, while the money which he earned touched millions in the world. It was the end that mattered. It was always for the Church.

  Grabowski stood in the darkened corridor for several minutes before he finally slipped the key into the door and turned the knob. It opened onto a narrow aisle hemmed in by walls of books. A harsh fluorescent light slit the ceiling above. He closed the door quietly and locked it behind him. Then he moved up the aisle between the bookcases until he came onto a larger corridor. Here he paused. Row upon row of bookcases stretched as far as the eye could see in one direction. But in the other he could just make out a desk, upon which glowed a soft green light. Monsignor Frank Wovyetski sat behind it, his spectacles glaring like half moons.

  “Kazimierz,” the monsignor said as Grabowski approached the desk. “You scared me creeping up like that.” Monsignor Wovyetski tilted his head to the side, and his thick glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, revealing tiny blue eyes.

  “What have you found, Frank?” the archbishop said in English. He pulled a chair up from beside the desk and sat down facing the monsignor.

  “Where did you get these documents?”

  “Never mind that. Just tell me if they’re valuable.”

  Wovyetski pushed his glasses back up the ridge of h
is nose. He had thin gray hair and Grabowski could see tiny balls of sweat shimmering on the pink scalp. “Valuable!” Wovyetski muttered. “Listen to this.”

  His voice carried the thick inflections of his native Poland. It was a heritage he shared with the archbishop, but unlike Grabowski who had been born and raised in Toronto, Wovyetski had grown up near the city of Kaliningrad, known as Konigsberg before the Soviet annexation. He had come to Rome on pilgrimage in the early fifties, and never left.

  “It’s in Eusebius,” Wovyetski said, pointing to a weathered text. “You see.”

  “In whom?”

  “Eusebius. He was the Bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century. He wrote a history of the Church and here,” he said, leaning forward to read the yellowed pages, “here is where he quotes Papias. ‘So Matthew collected in the Hebrew language the Logoi, but each person interpreted them as he was able.’ That’s what Thierry was referring to in his dedication at the beginning of the missal. And this Hebrew version of the Book of Thomas the Contender is what Papias thought were Matthew’s Logoi, the sayings Matthew heard from Christ himself.”

  “What sayings? I thought that all these heretic gospels were discovered a long time ago. What’s so valuable about this one?”

  Wovyetski shook his head. “It’s true that copies of the Book of Thomas the Contender and even the Gospel of Thomas were found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. But none is as old or primitive as this one.” He reached over and patted the manuscript with a bony hand.

  “Is that important?”

  “Kazimierz, you’re not listening to me. It used to be that the Church thought the New Testament gospels were actually written by Luke and Matthew and the rest. But today we know that they were written only ‘in the spirit’ of Luke and Matthew, sometime within the first hundred years or so after Christ was crucified. We know this from physical evidence—carbon dating and the like—and from a technique of literary analysis called ‘form criticism’ which studies the themes and literary forms of early manuscripts. One such theme or Gattung is the use of sayings. That’s what Logoi means—sayings, proverbs.

  “The Logoi Gattung is extremely primitive, dating back to the Logoi Sophon of the Jews, and even earlier. Long before anyone began to write anything down, groups of these sayings were passed from generation to generation. Eventually they were put into a narrative framework, like the Sermons on the Mount and on the Plain. In fact both the Gospels of Luke and Matthew are the result of blending certain Logoi from the source Q with the narrative Kerygma framework found in Mark.”

  “For God’s sake, Frank,” Grabowski interrupted. “I’m not a Biblical scholar. Can’t you simply tell me what it means?”

  Wovyetski reached over and lifted the heavy manuscript in his hands. The pages were yellowed with age, cracked like slate along their brittle edges. “Okay, I believe this version of the Book of Thomas the Contender is what scholars have been calling Q for decades,” he answered softly. “Is stands for Quelle, which means ‘source’ or ‘spring’ in German. It was written by the followers of Maththaios, which I read as Matthew, sometime between A.D. 50 and 75. And it’s probably the same group of sayings which Papias referred to in Eusebius’s history.”

  “You mean it’s older than the gospels?”

  “More than that. I believe it was used as a kind of source in the construction of the gospels.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Of course it’s important. It lends credence to what Thierry says about the Gospel of Thomas. Thierry was the brother of Bernard of Chartres, the chancellor of the Chartres cathedral school from 1119 until 1124. According to his dedication in the missal, there appear to be two separate manuscripts.” He pointed to the document on his desk. “The one we have here, from Amiens—the Book of Thomas the Contender. And the one presumably still hidden somewhere underneath the Chartres cathedral—a version of the Gospel of Thomas. But it’s not just any version, not by a long stretch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wovyetski glanced nervously around the corridor, as if to make sure they were alone. “To understand that, you have to first understand the Church’s policy on studying the gospels. You probably don’t remember,” he continued, “but back in 1964 the Pontifical Biblical Commission officially defined three basic stages through which the teachings of Jesus have come down to us. The first stage is represented by the actual words and deeds of Christ. The second is that of the Apostolic Church, when the apostles gave testimony to Christ, and in their preaching they used various ‘modes of speaking’ or Gattung. And the third stage is recorded for us by the evangelists ‘in a way suited to the peculiar purpose each one set for himself.’ These are the exact words the commission used, and they imply that the ‘gospel truth’ is not to be found in a naive, literal interpretation of the Bible. What we have in the synoptic gospels of the Bible is not a tradition of the first or second stage, but only of the third—the words and deeds of Christ colored by the early Church’s experience of Easter, after several decades of apostolic preaching, the words which the Holy Spirit guided them to keep. Are you following me?”

  Grabowski nodded sullenly.

  “This particular version of the Book of Thomas the Contender is a group of sayings or Logoi that probably dates back to the second stage of the tradition, to the Apostolic Church, the words handed down by Matthew and his followers which Christ allegedly told his apostle Thomas. It doesn’t have the whole narrative structure which we see in later versions of the book, like the one found at Nag Hammadi. That’s why I think it’s the missing source, the Q.”

  Grabowski had never seen the monsignor so excited. He was rocking in his seat, spiking the air with his fingers, pulling first one set of papers into view and then another.

  So this Book of Thomas the Contender was a missing source, the archbishop thought. But why would Marone have delivered it to him if it were so important? What did Scarcella hope to gain?

  “Listen, Frank,” he said. “I don’t care about the Book of Thomas the Contender. We already have it. I only care about the Gospel of Thomas, the one you say is buried somewhere underneath the Chartres cathedral. How valuable would it be, if someone were to find it?”

  “You don’t understand. It would have little financial value, relatively speaking. A few hundred thousand, perhaps. But it would be of inestimable value to suppress it.”

  “What are you saying? Why?”

  “Because it would mean the end, Kazimierz.” He closed the book before him tenderly. “The end of the Church as we know it,” he said. “Don’t you see? If this version of the Book of Thomas the Contender is what I think it is, then Thierry may have been right about the Gospel of Thomas too, the one he says ‘the Count of Dreux bought from the Levanter.’

  “It was written in Aramaic, instead of Greek or Coptic, which was used later. You see? It calls the Logoi ‘devarim’ in the incipit, which is the more primitive Hebrew term. And if that isn’t enough, it bears a reference—which was ‘added later’—to the plot which Piso of Syria ‘launched against the Emperor.’ That’s Nero, and the plot he’s talking about happened in A.D. 65! If Thierry was right, his version of the Gospel of Thomas is even older than the Book of Thomas the Contender here, perhaps the oldest set of Logoi in existence, Kazimierz. Instead of coming from the third stage like the synoptic Gospels, or from the second as this Book of Thomas the Contender seems to do, it could come from the first stage itself, from the hand of Jude called Thomas the Twin who was very probably, like James, the brother of Jesus himself.

  “Think of it, Kazimierz. The very words Christ spoke!” Wovyetski reached out and grabbed the archbishop by the arm. The light reflecting in his glasses made his eyes appear as if they were on fire. “Think what it would mean if we had a historically valid collection of His sayings. And then think what would happen if those sayings happened to be Gnostic, as Thierry claims they are, if the ideas which Christ espoused were not at all the same as those the Church has come to stand for. Can
you see the headlines now: ‘Christ Found to Be a Heretic!’ It would mean anarchy, Kazimierz. The New Testament would no longer be viewed as the Word of God, but only as one set of gospel truths out of many. Can you imagine? Who could possibly be a more powerful spokesman against Christianity than Jesus Christ Himself?” The monsignor caught himself and refocused his attention on Grabowski. “Do you have the gospel, Kazimierz? Tell me if you do.”

  The archbishop shook his head. “No, Frank, I don’t.” He reached across the desk and closed the missal with a simple movement of the wrist. “Not yet.”

  Chapter XI

  AMIENS

  September 17th, 1991

  KOSTER SAT IN THE BACK OF THE TAXI NEXT TO Mariane, thinking as the night whirled by the window that for the first time in a long, long while everything in his life was going right. It had been a faultless evening. First the walk along the river in the afternoon, watching the sparrows thread the bridge and water underneath them. Then they had gone to Le Mermoz, a charming two-star restaurant by the Gare du Nord. Mariane had ordered duck and he had watched her pull the dark meat off the bones with her teeth, and she had seen him watching her and hadn’t cared. It had finally stopped raining. They had left the restaurant and found a cab to take them back to the rue Pinsard where Mariane and Guy shared an apartment. Mariane was laughing at nothing in particular, tilting her head back, staring at the sky through the rear window when Joseph caught her eye and the look which he had longed for finally passed between them. She hesitated for just a moment and fell against him.