St Paul's Labyrinth

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  And behold, he has returned to Jerusalem, a man in the prime of his life. He stays with Simon Peter because he wants to build on the foundations of his community. He sees none of the Apostles, except James, the Lord’s brother. He tells them that he is joining them, will be one of them. People say of him: ‘This man who used to persecute us now proclaims the faith that he once tried to eradicate.’ They give praise to God for him.

  And he stays there for two weeks, in Peter’s house. He does not see the high priest, he does not see her, but he will destroy them. He will make Peter’s church stronger; his shall be greater, and the Pharisees will be diminished, that brood of vipers. Like whitewashed tombs they are, that look beautiful on the outside, while within they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. They are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. They exalt themselves and will be humbled, but he humbles himself and will be exalted.

  He is ready for battle. He has spent three years working on his plan, three long years. He will be an Apostle for the Apostles. His Lord will become their Lord, his message their message, and they will never be aware of it. He will go like a sheep in the midst of wolves. He must be as wily as a serpent and look as innocent as a dove. But he conceals his plans from Peter, he conceals his plans from James. They will bring him in like a gift, as the Trojans brought the wooden horse through their gates, jubilant at their victory. In brotherhood they will break bread together, in unity they will pray to the Lord.

  And he goes back to Cicilia, back to Tarsus, like a bird returning to its nest. But the raven has become a lion, and every bit as strong. He captures his prey, this son, and returns to his den. He will rest only when he has devoured his prey and drunk its blood.

  And behold, he travels for fourteen years, through Syria, Cicilia, Asia Minor and Hellas. He lives in Roma, he is indefatigable, writing letters and founding congregations. Five times he is punished by the Jews with forty lashes less one, three times he is beaten with rods, once he is stoned. He is shipwrecked three times. He is adrift on the sea for a night and a day. He travels constantly, in danger from rivers, from robbers, from his own people, from strangers, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea. In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, cold and exposed. In Damascus, the governor under King Ar′etas closes the city in order to seize him, but he is lowered in a basket through a window in the wall, and escapes his clutches.

  And so he proclaims his message. He breaks the bread, the body of his Lord Mithras, and drinks the wine, the blood without which there can be no redemption. He teaches them: ‘He who does not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, so that he remains in me and I in him, shall not know salvation.’ The people hear his message. They already know the stories; this is old wine in a new wineskin. They receive the message with joy. And he thinks: Like a lion I will attack Ephraim and like a young lion I will turn against the House of Judah; I myself will rend them, I will carry them off, beyond hope of rescue.

  I am a Lion.

  29

  PERSES

  PERSIAN

  Twenty-one years ago, spring 1994

  The new knowledge that Ane gave him was like drops of spring rain on dry desert soil. Tiny drank it in thirstily.

  They met regularly, in secret. Both men felt as though they were balancing on a tightrope. To the best of his ability, Tiny continued to carry out his daily activities as the shepherd of his flock. He was forced to keep his new knowledge to himself. But it felt like a new world had opened up to him, as though the scales really had fallen from his eyes. He began to see his old knowledge, everything he had learned as a theology student, in an entirely new light when he spoke to Ane. He could continue to celebrate Holy Communion, the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, as he had always done. Nothing would change for the faithful, who looked up with him as he broke the large communal wafer and raised his arms to lift the chalice. The mystery of the mystical union with Christ remained exactly the same for them. But for him, everything had changed.

  At first, Ane and Tiny concentrated on the stories he already knew. He revealed things that Tiny hadn’t been told at his seminary. That the Israelites’ stories weren’t set down in writing until after their years in captivity in Babylon. That those written stories had been strongly influenced by the mythologies and traditions of other civilisations. The story of the Flood and Noah’s Ark had been lifted directly from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Long before Moses was born, Sargon of Akkad was cast adrift on the waves of the Euphrates in a basket sealed with pitch. That the Jews took Persian stories and ideas with them after their Babylonian exile, stories about the battle between light and darkness, heaven and hell, the advent of a saviour, that time had a beginning and that there would also be an end time when everyone would be judged … They worked all of these details into their stories. Just one generation later, they no longer knew which stories were true and which stories had been borrowed.

  Ane pointed out the many anachronisms in the stories. That the camels in the story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers were probably common in that area at the time the story was written down, but not likely to have been there at the time it supposedly took place. That excavations had revealed that the great city of Jericho, whose walls were said to have fallen when the Israelites walked around them seven times, was at that time still a collection of mud huts. That the ‘mighty’ Jerusalem was little more than an overgrown village. That the legendary Saul, David and Solomon were composites of many other people. That even after a century of digging, not so much as a golden thimble from Solomon’s fabled riches had been found. That the bible should primarily be seen as a sort of title deed that the Israelites used to justify their claim to the Promised Land. ‘This land is ours,’ the Israelites said, ‘because it was the land of our fathers and it was promised to us by God. Here, you can read it for yourself in this book. We have written it all down with great accuracy.’

  That the Israelites had worshipped multiple gods, including the storm-god Yahweh and his wife Asherah. You could even read this in the bible, as in Psalms 82, verse 1: ‘God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgement.’ And that when you knew this, Yahweh’s obsession with forbidding the worship of other gods made more sense; he was jealous … The second commandment said: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ That in the Hebrew version of the creation story, the word elohim was used, the undeniably plural form of the word eloi, ‘gods’.

  That the seventh-century authors of the Old Testament had tried to create an epic past, full of legendary heroes who were no more historically accurate than the tales of Virgil. An Italian wouldn’t point to The Aeneid’s stories about the foundation of Rome to prove that Italians had a right to that particular piece of land. The bible’s authors wanted their scriptures to unite their community with a shared history, determine their shared norms and values in comparison to those of the other tribes around them. Once you were aware of these things, your view of the bible was changed forever. It was impossible to unlearn what you had learned; to make what was known unknown.

  The focus of Ane’s stories began to move towards the character Jesus. He told Tiny that the so-called virgin birth was based on a mistranslation of the prophet Isaiah’s words about a ‘young woman’ who would fall pregnant. And that in his Gospel, Matthew blatantly said that the story he was telling was very different to the one most people knew. He even introduced the magi. It was usually translated as ‘wise men’, but the men who came to the stable were no more or less than mages, Zoroastrian priests. The bible doesn’t say how many there were; the belief that there were three was based on the number of gifts they brought with them. Later, the anonymous wise men would be portrayed as having three different skin colours, to show that the saviour had come to save every race. Their three ages reflected the three phases of human life. Centuries later, they were given names and their characters were constructed from
earlier stories. Twenty-year-old Balthazar from Asia brought myrrh, as in Psalm 45, a wedding song celebrating the king’s marriage. Verse 8 says: ‘Your robes are all fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia. From ivory palaces, stringed instruments make you glad.’ Forty-year-old Melchior from Europe brought gold, which was taken straight from Psalm 72: ‘Long may he live, may gold of Sheba be given to him!’ And finally, there was sixty-year-old Caspar who brought frankincense, a detail that was added to the story because of Isaiah 60, verse 6: ‘All those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense.’ Gold symbolised Jesus’ kingship, frankincense his priesthood, and myrrh his death.

  That these wise men, who were actually astrologers, appeared at precisely the same moment that the Age of Aries ended and the Age of Pisces began. That this would go on to have great significance in Jesus’ ministry, seen in the icthus, and in his words to Simon Peter and Andrew: ‘I will make you fishers of men’ … And that a new age was approaching, the Age of Aquarius, a time of great change.

  And that for almost every story in the New Testament, you could find an equivalent in stories from other Middle Eastern countries, often many centuries older than the stories about Jesus. Stories about shepherds coming to worship a child, wise men seeing him and recognising him as the long-awaited saviour, about an angry king hunting the child down and trying to kill him, and the child escaping this fate because his parents were warned about the danger in a dream – and why did they not warn other parents so that they could escape too? – and about the child showing unusual wisdom from an early age. As the Book of Ecclesiastes said before Jesus was even born: ‘there is nothing new under the sun’.

  Tiny learned about all of these things for the first time. He wrote it all down, filling notebook after notebook.

  From the priest’s notes

  Osiris and Isis – Osiris was the son of the earth god, Geb, and the sky goddess Nut. A huge festival took place in the spring when the dead god Osiris was buried. The ‘body’ that was laid in his tomb was a clay figure filled with silt from the Nile and grain. This effigy was made wet, causing the grain to germinate. A day of deep mourning followed the funeral, but on the third day, the priests announced that the tomb was empty and that Osiris had risen from the dead. The priest proclaimed: ‘I have come forth out of the primeval waters … I have been made completely pure. I have taken off my garments and I have been anointed …’ His sarcophagus bore the words: ‘Whether I live or die, I am Osiris. I enter in and reappear through you.’

  The other Osiris story was about his jealous brother, Set. He tricked Osiris into getting inside a chest which he then locked and threw into the Nile. But the chest was found by Isis, Osiris’ wife. Set flew into a rage and hacked Osiris into fourteen pieces which he scattered throughout the land. Isis gathered the pieces – traces of this story are found in the tradition of hunting for Easter eggs in spring – and put his body back together. Although his penis was the one part of Osiris’ body which she couldn’t find, Isis was still able to get pregnant by him and bear him a son. This son was the god Horus, who was born twice. Once during the winter solstice in December, and again during the vernal equinox in the spring. Isis was also known as Stella Maris or ‘Star of the Sea’. Images of her with Horus on her knee would later become the inspiration for images of Mary and her son Jesus.

  Cybele and Attis – The Megalensia was a Roman festival celebrated in the spring, starting around 200 BC, connected to the Phrygian mother goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, who was both her son and her lover. At the beginning of spring on March 20th, a pine tree was felled to represent the death of Attis. It was brought into Cybele’s temple, wrapped like a body in a linen shroud, in effigy of the young god at his death. The next day was a day of abstinence and mourning. The believers fasted all day and wept ceaselessly, lamenting the death of their beloved god. Many scourged themselves or cut their bodies until the blood streamed from their wounds. In the night that followed this day of bitter grief, the followers were considered to be reunited with the goddess, just like Attis, and their euphoria knew no bounds. The priests entered Attis’ makeshift burial tomb, the priests would light a lamp and call out to the followers who were gathered outside: ‘He lives!’ Delirious with joy, they repeated the priests’ words: ‘He is truly risen! He lives!’ Attis symbolised the grain kernel, dead and invisible under the dark earth, which then sprouts again, bringing forth new life. During the celebration, lambs and bulls were also sacrificed and the followers of Cybele would purify themselves by bathing in the blood, the blood of their god.

  Dionysus – Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. Semele was burned alive when Hera, Zeus’ wife, disguised herself as an old crone and persuaded Semele to reveal the identity of the lover who visited her at night. Zeus saved their unborn child, Dionysus, by sewing him into his thigh. A few months later, he was born for the second time. Dionysus was the god of fertility; his power made nature flourish again every spring. In the springtime, people grieved for the grapevines that had withered in the winter and which looked as though they would never bear fruit again. The death of nature presented man with a mirror image of his own inevitable end. In some areas of ancient Greece, women went up into the mountains at night, half-naked and mad with grief at the death of Dionysus. They ripped apart wild animals with their bare hands, ate the meat raw and drank the blood in the hope that these frenzied rituals would bring their dead god back to life and unify them with him. The next morning, they went to the temple, carrying the seedlings of plants that they had found on the mountains, proof that their god had come back to life. They celebrated his resurrection exuberantly, with an abundance of wine, his gift to them. Indeed, his first miracle had been to turn water into wine. He was hailed as the Good Shepherd, and was also known as ‘the true vine’.

  Heracles – Every spring in the city of Tarsus, a figure representing the god Heracles was ritually burned on a pyre. The devotees knew that he hadn’t actually died, but that he would be taken up to heaven. Because he had to descend into Hades before he could ascend to heaven, he was considered to be a divine saviour. In Euripides’ play Alcestis, Heracles rescues Alcestis, the wife of his friend Admetus, from Hades and reunites her with her husband.

  The essence of this myth was a combination of the most primitive hope – the hope of immortality and reunion with loved ones in the hereafter – and the most primitive of all fears – the fear of death.

  Adonis – The Phoenician Adonis was revered in the Middle East, but the centre of his cult was … Bethlehem. His followers gathered every year in a cave to mourn his death and to rejoice at his resurrection three days later. He was the son of a goddess and after his birth he was placed in a wooden chest and given to Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, for safekeeping. He was so beautiful that Ereshkigal did not want to let him go. But she had no choice and was forced to part with him. Adonis was raised as a shepherd boy and was an avid hunter. During a hunt for wild boar he was hit by an arrow and impaled on a tree. His lover Inanna – a young incarnation of his mother! – refused to accept his death and went down to the underworld to bring him back. She reached a compromise with her sister Ereshkigal: Adonis would spend half of every year with Inanna, but he had to return to the underworld to spend the other half with Ereshkigal. He was worshipped as the god of the grain that dies under the millstone so that it can be baked into bread. In Bethlehem – which literally means ‘the house of bread’ – he was worshipped as the god of bread.

  The mysteries were about chthonic gods, gods who were associated with the earth or its underworld. The earth was a fertile womb that brought forth food and took care of us as a mother takes care of her children. But she was also an open grave who always took back what she had given.

  The mysteries were based on a symbolic act, a ‘mystery play’ portraying the death and resurrection of the deity. The initiate who was permitted to witness this was imbued with some of the power of the re
surrection and would themselves be reborn after death. Like Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture, who spent six months of the year in the underworld … The natural world mourned with her mother who was so grief-stricken that she neglected to take care of nature. But when Persephone returned in the spring, nature joyously thrived once more. In the same way, believers would also be given new life; they would be ‘reborn’.

  Tiny wrote all these stories down.

  The common thread was that the gods, whichever name they were given, conquered death and bestowed eternal life on their devotees. The god’s suffering and death mirrored the suffering of all people; everyone recognised their own life’s path in his story, but also what came after it: the divine promise that death was not the end.

  Tiny learned that every mystery religion had elements that were known to everyone: the concepts and rituals of repentance, belief, baptism, communion, the laying on of hands, resurrection and final judgement were openly available to the uninitiated, the ‘psychici’. The deeper meaning of the stories was meant only for initiated, the ‘pneumatici’. Now, for the first time, he understood Jesus’ words in Matthew 13, verses 10 and 11:

  Then the disciples came and said to him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ He answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.’

  And then, Ane told him about Mithras.

  30

  Saturday 21 March, 6:30am

  Tiny was woken by someone pounding on the door. Although it wasn’t his usual habit, he had spent the night here. The outside world knew this house as the place where he studied, but it had been the society’s operational base for centuries. It had been given to him soon after he had succeeded Ane as leader. He wanted to be here rather than in his house in the Leiden suburbs so that he could keep a closer eye on things as they developed.