The Gospel Of Judas (16 page)

‘They found a bomb in a supermarket bag,’ Goldstaub said as they slowed for a roadblock. The soldiers peered at them through the windows but it was only Arab cars that were being flagged down to be searched. ‘Round up the usual suspects. Where the hell does that line come from? Round up the usual suspects.’

‘
Casablanca
,’ Leo said.

‘How does a priest know a thing like that?’

‘A priest watches films.’

Signs pointed the way to the Old City but Goldstaub turned aside and swept along a boulevard that had been carved through the northern suburbs towards the Arab quarter of east Jerusalem.

‘Why can’t you tell me about the find?’ Leo asked.

‘Steve would kill me. He wants to keep the surprise all to himself.’ They crossed the desolate spaces where once the city had been divided, the Mandelbaum Gate that was no more, the Damascus Road that still was and always would be. Finally the car emerged from the buildings and Goldstaub brought it to a halt. Before them the ground fell away down a slope of scrub and bare limestone; and there across a mile of luminous air lay the Old City, cupped in the palm of the hills. All the familiar sights: the dark, funereal green of the Mount of Olives running down into the valley, the wall of Suleiman the Magnificent draped like a golden curtain across the stage, and behind the wall the crowded rooftops with the Dome of the Rock rising in the midst of it all like a turquoise jewel box capped with a bubble of perfect gold. This was, perhaps, the view that the prophets had wept over.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband
.

‘You want to get out and look?’ Goldstaub asked.

‘No.’

‘Seen it all before?’

‘It’s not that.’

Goldstaub sniffed. ‘Trouble is, it means too many different things to too many different people. One place cannot bear so much devotion. That’s the trouble.’ He shoved the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb. They turned up the hill and into a driveway past a plaque that announced
WORLD BIBLE CENTER.

The Center was one of those institutions that float like an ocean liner on a flood of funds from the United States. Part museum, part conference centre, part temple, part university, it sat on the slopes of Mount Scopus in east Jerusalem and looked out over the Kidron Valley and the Old City with a modern, complacent smile. It housed a major collection of finds from the Second Temple period, relics from the times of King Ahab, important fragments from the ancient city of Jericho, scrolls from the caves of Qumran. It had access to the latest techniques and the most astute minds; it was one of the front-runners in the world of textual analysis. The building itself was an uncomfortable blend of styles, a pillared and pedimented body that looked something like a courthouse, with, on either side, low-lying wings of a vaguely oriental caste. It had once been an annexe of the Queen Augusta Hospital, later, during the Mandate, a British military establishment. In front of the steps was a sculpture of an open book with the word LOGOS carved across the double page and the motto of the institution inscribed along its base:
WORDS
WITH KNOWLEDGE
. Bougainvillaea climbed over the main entrance. The blossom looked brilliant and festive, but it was the exact colour of priests’ vestments at a funeral.

So what did Leo Newman find there on the slopes of Mount Scopus, behind the golden limestone walls of the World Bible Center? Understanding? Revelation? Expiation? He found a shaded room that hummed with the faint reverberations of air conditioning, and held within its shadows a soft, aquatic coolness. He found the director himself, his face tanned, his hair a fine silver, his manner that of a business entrepreneur; he found a middle-aged woman with the no-nonsense manners of a nurse, and a tall young man who might have been a doctor. And he found a scroll.

‘The day before yesterday, Leo,’ Calder said. The lighting was subdued. It gleamed on his platinum hair. ‘We found it just the day before yesterday. I called you straight away.’

There were cabinets along the side of the room. There were binocular microscopes and a pair of computer terminals. And in the centre of the room was a table on which the roll lay. Beside it in a second dish lay a filthy rag, like an ancient, stained bandage. ‘It was wrapped,’ the young man said. ‘Wrapped and tied off with some kind of twine. We’re sending pieces of the cloth for radiocarbon dating, of course. And the bundle was inside a jar. The jar is still at the site.’

Leo peered at the roll. It looked like a dried-out piece of turd, like something excreted from the bowels of history, from the fundament of the earth, which is the Valley of the Dead Sea. He peered at the frayed edges, at the dumb, blank verso. ‘Well?’

‘It’s the first literary papyrus ever recovered from the Dead Sea area,’ the woman added. She was called Leah, Leah the daughter of Laban and wife of Jacob. Was she, Leo wondered irrelevantly and absurdly, the plain-looking one of two sisters, the other called Rachel? ‘When we opened the cloth we found that the first sheet was fragmented. It had come detached from the rest of the scroll. But we have all the pieces and it seems there are no significant lacunae.’

‘You’ve read it?’

‘
Koine
is not my specialism,’ she replied.

‘But you could read it?’

‘More or less. There were some problems, but I could get the sense.’

Calder spoke. ‘Leo,’ he said portentously, ‘this may be the greatest text discovery there has ever been. It could make the Dead Sea Scrolls look like a picnic in the Garden of Eden.’

‘Why? What the devil is it?’

The little group had gathered round. They were like a medical team gathering round a patient in a hospital ward. Almost as though delivering a fatal X-ray, the young man leaned across and placed a sheet of glass on the table beside the scroll, a sandwich of glass, two pieces held together with black tape. In between the panes were eight fragments of papyrus. They made a crude jigsaw, the edges in approximate juxtaposition like a collage assembled out of old, discoloured fragments of newsprint. ‘The first page,’ he said. ‘Have a look.’

Leo sat. He turned the glass towards him. Greek cursive script straggled across the pieces, leaping brightly from one fragment to another along the line of the fibres, the strokes of lampblack almost fresh despite their two
thousand years’ entombment. ‘Different script, different hand from the other En-Mor fragments,’ he said. You learn to remember hands. You get to know them as you might recall your own mother’s, the particular shape, the idiosyncrasies, the quirks. He glanced up at them. ‘It’ll not be easy. I’ll need time.’

‘All the time you need,’ said Calder. The others of the group were silent, as though their collective breath was held.

Leo began to read. He adjusted the light over the plate, put on his reading glasses and began to trace the lines of script with his finger, like a child reading the Torah at a bar mitzvah ceremony, tracing out the holy scripture with a
yad
, a silver pointer that is made in the form of a pointing hand, for the word of the law is too precious to be defiled by human touch.

It is Youdas son of Simon of Keriot known also as Youdas the sicarios who writes this
, he read,
and he writes that you may know this to be true
.

He glanced up at them, at the girl called Leah in her sharp white blouse and blue skirt, at Goldstaub looking ridiculous in T-shirt and shorts, at Calder with his expansive smile, at the young man called David, who smiled nervously from the background, perhaps just as his namesake had smiled at the giant Goliath as they confronted one another in the Valley of the Terebinth. Then he looked back at the papyrus and read through the lines again, almost in case he had made some absurd error:

It is Youdas son of Simon of Keriot known also as Youdas the sicarios who writes this and he writes that you may know this to be true
.

Youdas, Judas. Somewhere within Leo’s skull a voice called:
Who is worthy to open the scroll?
Absurdly, for there could be no doubt, he read over the words a third time. Judas.

Had he always been dreading a moment like this, Leo wondered, ever since his first plunge headlong into the warm ocean of belief? Had he always feared that, as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel? Names, and the meaning of names. Judas Iscariot. He has always been a problem, has Judas. Even his name, being part patronymic – Judas Is’Qeriyot, Judas from Kerioth – and part nickname – Judas Sikarios, Judas the knife, even his name is a problem. And here was this scrap of papyrus crowning the academic debate with a simple pun.

‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Leo asked.

‘It’s as serious as sin, my friend.’

‘And who else has seen it?’

‘No one but us. The archaeologists did no more than recover it, just two days ago as I told you. As you know, any palaeographic finds are coming directly to us. You’re the first …’ Calder hesitated, the sentence incomplete.

‘The first what?’

‘The first from the other side.’ He smiled. The expression sat loosely on his face, as though it might easily slip off and reveal the embarrassment behind it. ‘The first Catholic.’

Leo turned back to the page. The motion was everything, the act of turning seemed to occupy his whole body to the exclusion of any thought or any emotion. Merely to act was enough. He called for paper and pencil and then read slowly and methodically down to the end, transcribing as he went.
He skipped some dubious readings, went back and revised, crossed out, erased, rewrote. He took three hours, while Leah moved around in the background, bringing him a glass of water when he was thirsty, and a sandwich when he was hungry, and her view of an occasional doubtful reading when he asked. Goldstaub came and went, Calder looked in from time to time; no one else stepped into the room. He could hear sounds outside, the coming and going of the Institute, the slamming of a door down the corridor, vehicles manoeuvring in the driveway, a radio playing in the distance, but none of this deflected him from the text:

I write for the Jews (of the dispersion?) … the Hellenes and those that live in (Asia?), and for the God-fearers
(theosebeis?)
amongst the nations
(ethne)
that they may know the truth about Yeshu the Nazir that he was a branch
(blastos)
of the family of Mariam that took power to Israel from the hands of the Gentiles that was destroyed by Herod that he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption …

He took a deep breath and looked round. Calder and Goldstaub had come in, sensing perhaps that he had reached the end. David and Leah were watching him impassively as though expecting a judgement.

‘It’s a forgery,’ he told them. ‘A piece of propaganda. Early propaganda, of course, but propaganda nevertheless.’

Calder wore an expression of quiet satisfaction. ‘It’s a first-century site,’ he said. ‘You know that. We’ve got coins of the Jewish revolt.’

‘It’s earlier than the Bar-Kochba papyri,’ David added, referring to one of the most implausible chances of his specialisation, the survival intact of certain letters from
the leader of the second and final Jewish revolt, the Son-of-a-Star himself. ‘I’m certain of that. This is first century.’

‘It’s forgery,’ Leo repeated. ‘It must be.’

Leo didn’t sleep that night. He needed no nightmares. Inured to solitude, he had never felt so lonely in his life. He lay in bed – an anonymous hotel bed with a mattress as hard as in a monk’s cell – and he battled with the text that he had deciphered. The words ran through his mind, driven by their own impetus, pulled and pushed by his manipulations. He listened to them and found nothing wanting – he believed them, and believing them he found the remainder of his beliefs (a fragile fragment of what had been) crumbling to dust. Maybe he could hide behind academic caution; perhaps for the rest of his life he could erect barricades of learned reticence, could argue and debate like the Pharisees in the Temple, could twist this way and that, posing trick questions, finding pat answers just as had been done with the Shroud of Turin, for example. But he knew. The papyrus had about it an awful, dull truth. It convinced by its plainness. He felt an awful void around him. The refuge he had learned to seek over the years – the refuge of prayer – was vacant.

Our Father, if there is a father, who art in heaven, if there is a heaven, hallowed be they name, if you have a name …

He abandoned prayer as though it was a sinking ship and found himself seeking comfort elsewhere, in the memory of Madeleine Brewer. Bereft of spiritual comfort, he searched for material comfort, the fugitive, evanescent comfort of the flesh.

Goldstaub came early in the morning, before dawn, when the air was still cold. ‘You look as though you’ve been dragged out of bed with a hayfork,’ he said. ‘The mattress too hard for you? I thought you guys were all about mortification of the flesh.’

‘These days the flesh is out,’ Leo told him wryly. ‘These days it’s mortification of the mind.’

They drove through still dark, silent streets, a place where the ghosts were at liberty. The walls of the Old City were shadows blocked against a lightening sky, the Dome of the Rock was dull as lead. They drove down into the Kidron Valley, the Land Rover’s headlights cutting a chalky swath through the darkness. Leo felt a strange detachment, as though this was an absurd dream pasted on to his normal life, a grey and colourless
she’ol
from which he would soon awaken. He would get up. He would wash and dress and have breakfast. He would make his way to the Pontifical Institute; he would celebrate mass in the chapel; he would give a morning lecture on the Development of the New Testament Canon; he would continue his work on the forthcoming publication of another of the En-Mor papyri. A life would continue as a life was planned to continue from days long ago in the seminary when his tutors had identified in him a certain dogged application to the trivia of language, an obsession with New Testament Greek, a
quiet horror of the intrusive nature of parochial work.