by Linda Stasi
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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With Great Love To:
My husband, Sid Davidoff, a relentless cheerleader who kept me on it—even when I wanted off it.
My best man and best critic, Damien Miano, who never refused to read it one more time, always—amazingly—coming up with startling new ideas and fresh perspectives.
My dear friend, Antonia Katrandjieva, who read, reread, and reread again, inspiring me anew each time with her brilliant knowledge of all things spiritual and esoteric.
Acknowledgments
Thank You
Liza Fleissig, my agent, defender, promoter, protector who, as we New Yorkers like to say, don’t take no crap from nobody! You are the best, the brightest, the bravest in a world of cowards who do take “no” for an answer.
Bob Gleason, my smart-as-hell editor, who believed in me then and believes in me now, and who made my career as a novelist possible.
My family, Jessica Rovello, Kenny Rosenblatt, Marco, Dean, and Reed Rosenblatt, whose everyday successes from nursery school to grown-up work and from “Lil’ Wins,” to big, astounding achievements are a source of wonder and joy to me every day.
Dana Isaacson, an amazing and brilliant freelance editor who helped me rethink, reshape, and then (ugh!) rewrite this book.
Thank you forever, Connie Simmons, my dear friend and Emmy-winning producer/director who has been my motivating/meditating partner who created the wonderful Book of Judas trailer. Check it out at: www.lindastasi.com.
Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction of the Second Avenue Subway, NYC, who took me deep underground to walk into the construction of the unfinished (and very scary) subway tunnels, as well as through its hidden byways, which helped change and shape the book.
Tal S. Perelman, a brilliant nephew-by-marriage, who took me to places in Israel tourists never see—but places that they really, really should see. His knowledge of ancient history and the Torah as well as unlimited patience with his American “aunt” will never be forgotten.
Thanks, too, to all the other American and distant Israeli artist-relatives who brought me into their desert home and down into the three-thousand-year-old tomb/burial chamber in their “basement.” Still wondering, though, what did it mean when the lights went out completely the second I walked in and went back on the second I stepped back outside?
Eran Frenkel of Jerusalem Experience, (jerusalemexperience.com), who helped me re-create everything I’d seen in the old city in Jerusalem after I’d come back, with his video tour of every place I needed once again to see—and some that were completely new to me as well.
Introduction
A few years ago, right after I finished writing The Sixth Station, the first novel featuring New York City reporter Alessandra Russo, I flopped down on a couch in a house my husband and I had owned for twelve years.
I spotted a book in plain sight on the bookshelf, which for reasons I can’t explain, I’d never seen before. It must have been left by the previous owners, or even the ones before that, I thought, because the book, I, Judas by Taylor Caldwell, had been published in 1977!
I picked it up and read it, fascinated. It was a novel based on the idea that Judas had been more a misguided believer than a traitor.
Three days later, my daughter and I were browsing a bookshop in Princeton, New Jersey, on our getaway girls’ weekend and there on the front table of the shop was another Judas book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, which I immediately bought. This nonfiction book interpreted and explained—as much as possible—the esoteric teachings that Jesus had—according to what was left of the rotted manuscript—imparted to his most trusted disciple, Judas (he had been Jesus’ “treasurer,” after all).
I had now gotten two messages about or maybe from Judas in one week!
But it wasn’t until I began digging into the history of the Gospel and the journey that Judas’ nearly two-thousand-year-old codex had taken from the time of its discovery by peasants in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s to its final rediscovery in New York in the year 2000—that I really freaked out.
The long-lost, once-pristine papyri—after three decades of having being roughly passed around, lost and found again on the black market—had ended up in a safety-deposit box in a Citibank branch in Hicksville, Long Island.
Why did that set my hair on end? Because that was the very same bank branch where I’d had my first bank account; the same one in which my parents had banked!
To quote Rick in Casablanca, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
There are literally uncountable numbers of bank branches in the world, and for the pages of Judas—written by the man whose name had been haunting me for days—to have ended up in my own teenage-era bank? Insane. And it was believed that some of the pages had gone missing during those decades.
So, the universe had spoken, and damn! I had no choice but to send my protagonist, Alessandra Russo, on her second great quest—this time to discover what those lost pages of Judas contained.
It was a journey I took with her to Israel and into places not seen by Americans before. Such as a three-thousand-year-old burial chamber underneath a private home in the desert and a tunnel cut deep underground into the bedrock of NYC, which was closed to the public.
Those places, which were opened to me, were just a tiny part of the adventure, which I took with Alessandra, and with Judas. It’s one that I hope you will take with me as well.
The story is fiction, but the truth that’s been hidden for two thousand years isn’t.
Preface
AL-MINYA, EGYPT, MID-1970S
Everyone in the Jebel Qarara hills in middle Egypt knew the story.
A great and glorious book, one that may have held the secrets of life itself, lay hidden within one of the ancient burial caves that dot the countryside.
Many of the hidden holy relics and scrolls had long ago been covered by the shifting sands, while others that had been found had fetched kingly sums for the lucky fellahin who had discovered them. But some were still there, hidden, just waiting …
The village of Qarara is dry and arid, even though it is just a few minutes’ walk from the Nile. The grave robbers who were searching that day weren’t criminals by local standards—they were farmers who hadn’t been able to raise enough crops to keep their families fed. Finding something of real value could mean food enough for their children, wives, and parents for weeks or even months.
The area around the village, like much of Egypt, Israel, and Palestine, was at that time so strewn with artifacts like shards of ancient pottery, coi
ns, even religious statuettes—some authentic, most not—that they didn’t fetch much from the scouts.
These scouts were the middlemen who brokered deals between the peasant farmers who found the objects and the black market antiquities dealers who wanted to buy them throughout the Middle East and beyond. It could be a profitable but very deadly way to earn money. The rarer the find, the more likely it was that it could get a man killed.
Besides the danger from the criminal element, anyone caught tomb raiding and stealing the artifacts within them would be subject to a punishment so severe, it was not spoken of aloud.
That morning, as one man stood guard outside, grave robbers made their way into a burial cave they’d found. Strangely, unlike most of the graves in the area, it had remained untouched by human hands.
Inside they found the skeleton of a man wrapped in a shroud, with the bones of his family or perhaps his servants around him.
Next to the skeleton lay a limestone box, and within it, a codex—a manuscript bound in leather. Had they found the book to which the local legends had referred? They couldn’t read the ancient Coptic script inside the bound papyri, which was still in excellent condition, but the local scout to whom they’d handed it told them that it was a very important find indeed.
What they had unknowingly given to the scout was the legendary, ancient, lost Gospel of Judas.
It was a transcript in the words of Judas (יְהוּדָה), the disciple who was the most trusted by Jesus, but also the one forever known universally as the man who had betrayed Him.
This codex, it had been rumored, contained the most important secret in the world—something so great, so terrifying, and so dangerous that only one earthly being had been entrusted with it: Judas.
The betrayal of Jesus, the codex maintained, was necessary for the process of crucifixion and resurrection—which would change the world—to begin. So even though Judas would remain the most hated man throughout eternity, he had no choice but to obey his Lord Jesus by betraying Him.
The discovery of the lost Gospel of Judas was a find so revolutionary, so controversial, so dangerous, so unique, that the tomb raiders believed they would become very, very rich men when it was sold.
That codex, however, never did make those fellahin rich, but conversely brought misfortune to almost everyone associated with the sale. Was it cursed, wondered the black marketeer who had unsuccessfully tried for years to sell it, first for $10 million, then $3 million, and finally for $1 million?
Yes, it was cursed. The Gospel of Judas—the greatest discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls—was brought to New York in 1984 for a possible sale, which never occurred, and then it was unbelievably left behind, unattended, to rot into nearly one thousand minuscule pieces inside a Citibank safety-deposit box (number 395) in Hicksville, Long Island, until April 3, 2000.
Worse still, it was later determined, as experts attempted to put together the bits of rotted papyrus, that of the pages that remained, eighteen leaves of the original codex were missing.
Most of those eighteen pages were eventually recovered, but some believe that two or three remaining pages still exist out there somewhere.
It is those lost pages which may contain that which no human should ever know. Is it the secret to life itself—or the power to unleash Armageddon?
1
“The son of a bitch is dead. Wanna get drunk?” It was my pal Roy on the other end.
“What?”
“You know, hammered?”
“Roy? You sound like you’ve gone nuts.”
“Yup, nuts,” he answered, barely suppressing a laugh. Roy had been my best friend since high school. Death wasn’t something he usually took lightly—especially not since 9/11 when he’d lost so many of his firefighter buddies.
“Who’s dead?”
“Seriously, Russo?”
“Wait! Let me take this off speaker. I’m in the newsroom,” I said, wondering who and what he was talking about.
“I don’t care! I want the world to know. Ding dong, the ole son of a bitch is dead!”
“Oh my God! Your father? He died?” I asked, trying to keep my voice controlled.
“Finally!”
“I’m sorry. I mean, I know he was horrible to you, but your attitude is…”
“You sound like a girl,” he said, which he knew would rile me up because I liked to think of myself as a woman who’s tough as any guy. The soldiers I was embedded with in Iraq used to say I could take it like a man. And I can.
I answered his poke with one of my own. “You should show some respect for the dead, Roy Boy.”
“You mean the same kind of respect dead Morris always showed me?”
Roy’s dad, Morris Golden, had always been an abusive brute—to his wife and to his son. His abuse got even worse, if possible, after he found out that his hero firefighter son was gay. He could no longer beat him—Roy’d become a big, strapping man—but verbal abuse from a parent can be a punch to the gut at any age.
“Jesus, you didn’t kill him or anything?” I asked, a little panicked now. Silence. “Roy? Did you kill him?”
What he said was: “Have you ever heard such great news on such a winter’s day?”
“It’s spring.”
“It is?”
“Shut up and stop being an ass. I’m sorry about your dad, Roy. I mean that, but I’m seriously concerned that you—”
He cut me off. Roy was trying to string me along, which had been our pattern since we were kids. But this was no time for games. I was late for the news meeting but I was equally concerned that Roy had finally snapped and killed the old bastard.
“That is not the attitude I expect from my oldest friend,” he mock-sighed. “Elation. Unmitigated joy. Piss-in-your-pants happy. All good. Feeling sorry that he’s dead? Not so good,” he said instead.
“Roy, cut the shit and answer me! How did he die? Tell me you didn’t kill him.”
“That’s two questions. And you yourself, Ali, didn’t answer my first one. Do you want to go get drunk?”
Getting more concerned by the second, and losing my patience with his games—and it took a lot for me to lose my patience with Roy; he was the one person besides my oldest girlfriend, Dona, to whom I allowed this kind of slack—I sucked it up and said, “I’ll ask you one more time. Buddy, did you kill your father?”
“Nope. I wanted to, but I didn’t. He called, I went over. Dead!”
Just then, a copy kid started hovering around my desk.
“Ali, the meeting’s starting in five,” he said. Then, “The editor said to get your ass in there. And he means it.”
I gave him a look—learned at my mother’s knee—that could scare a Taliban leader out of his sunglasses. It seemed to scare whatever courage he had left, right out of him, too.
“I didn’t say that—Mr. Brandt did,” the kid choked out. “He said to quote him exactly!”
“OK, OK,” I snapped, “but as you can see, I’m very busy on the phone, here. With a source. Tell that to Mr. Brandt.”
Now the kid looked like he might projectile vomit. I brushed him away, warning, “Go ahead, tell him. You can’t be timid in this game, kiddo. Get moving!”
Apparently twenty-two-year-old males have no understanding of the dangers of continually poking sleep-deprived, water-retaining new mothers who also happen to be dealing with friends who sound like they’re on the edge.
Back on the phone, Roy was still talking, saying, “I been called a lotta things in my time, but a source? Soused yes, source no.”
“But how did he die?” I repeated.
“Here, ask him,” he said. “He’s right here! In his house. We’re—I’m—waiting for the coroner.”
“Jesus, Roy. You’re in your old house in Hicksville just sitting there with your dead father?”
“It’s like a pre-shivah. But with the dead guy present, and without the snacks or the crowds. Not that this old bastard will have anybody to mourn him, or that I’ll even s
it shivah. But I’m always up for some nice hamentashen and dry pound cake.”
The copy kid came back from the conference room, hovering again like a fly on bad meat.
“I said I’ll be right in dammit!” The kid turned on his heels and scooted away just as the HR lady walked by. She gave me the look that said, “We don’t speak to other employees like that.”
I wanted to tell her to drop dead, but we don’t speak to other employees like that. We used to all the time—it’s a newsroom, for God’s sake, not a yoga retreat—but even we reporters are now supposed to be civil. What is this world coming to?
“Roy, I gotta go. And please, go wait outside or something. Don’t just sit there…”
“Outside? And give up the comfort of the living room? Or maybe I should call it the dead room now?”
“You’re in the living room? With the corpse? For Christ’s sake, Roy!”
“Hey, this was a long time coming. Let me enjoy the moment, will ya?”
“Ugh, that’s rough, even from you. And by the way, how did he die again?”
Once more he ignored my question and chirped, “Yup—me and dead Pops—we’re in the living room and I’m staying right here. I want to make sure he’s really dead.”
“You’re a sick bastard.”
“See you tonight and we’ll celebrate?” he asked, as though I hadn’t just called him a sick bastard.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll meet you tonight, if I can get a sitter.” As I sort of mentioned, I was then the proud (read: harried) single mother of a six-month-old bouncing baby boy named Pantera Russo. Or Terry for short, because, as my mother reminded me daily, “Pantera is no name for a child.”
“I’ll drive into the city,” Roy said. “Got the old man’s car. I should say the old man’s old car.”
“Not the ’85 Buick?”
“None other. Whaddaya say we meet at El Quijote—seven-ish?”
