The Gospel Of Judas (29 page)

‘What’s throne? What the devil’s throne?’ Calder cried impatiently.

‘Nothing. Nothing’s throne. Just an idea.’

‘What about date? Can you give an estimate?’

Leo moved the microscope on to another patch of damage, cross-referencing to photographs they had taken, impatient with Calder’s questions. ‘No one can be certain. Early, I’ll say that. A consistent use of the iota adscript, for example, the general simplicity of the letters, the lack of breathing marks, other things. First century. I don’t think anyone can deny it’s that early. But they’ll deny that it tells the truth. Sure enough they’ll deny that, and no amount of palaeographic or carbon dating will tell them otherwise. Now please—’

‘I’ll leave you in peace,’ Calder said. ‘I’ll leave you be.’

They had housed Leo in an annexe to the Center, a building that had once been a private villa and now accommodated visiting scholars. There was a garden in which he could walk, a place of thorn and cactus, of century plant and prickly pear, of silvery olives flickering in the breeze. The soil was reddish-brown, the colour of dried blood. They
were days circumscribed by work and nights by thoughts of Madeleine. He lived in the annexe and he walked in the garden during the evening and he laboured throughout the day in the artificial peace of the document rooms. He dreamt. Sometimes he had seductive dreams of life and resurrection, so that he awoke to the dull dimensions of reality and the bathos of mere existence. Sometimes his dreams were nightmares of falling through the air, of plunging towards the ground, of plunging into a pit that had no bottom; and then he would wake in relief to find that the nightmares were true. She was dead. Not a presence in some other dimension, a shade in Hades or a soul in She’ol; but dead. Her broken body had been packed up and dispatched to England for a private funeral and now she herself lived only in the impoverished memory of those who had known her, a strange, fragmented afterlife, like a familiar face glimpsed through a dozen different, cracked lenses, not one of the images the real woman who had lived and loved and just as surely died.

‘A terrible, terrible tragedy,’ Goldstaub had said when he met Leo at the airport. ‘But at least you’ve got your faith.’ He had been trying to help, that was what made it so ridiculous. He had been trying to alleviate the pain. ‘Leo, at least you’ve got your faith.’

But Leo’s faith lay anaesthetised on the slab before him and at the mercy of his own careful intervention:

This is the inheritance of Yeshu the Nazir. He was son of Aristob(ulus, son of?) Herod. When the king had Aristobulus put to death his
¹
son Yeshu was ( … hidden away?) For a prophecy had been made that this son would … (ascend to the) thr(one?) Aristobulus was son of Mariam
²
the Hasmonean and his
³
mother was Mariam (daughter) of
Antipater (son) of Herod and (daughter)
⁴
of Antigonus the Hasmonean
.
He swears that this is true who knows it
.

¹
read: ‘Aristobulus’s’. Aristobulus was the second son of Herod the Great by Herod’s second wife Mariamne I. Aristobulus was executed on Herod’s orders in 7
BC
.

²
i.e. Mariamne I.

³
read: ‘Yeshu’s’.

⁴
The text is confused over these precise relationships. Possibly read: ‘Mariam (the mother of Yeshu) was daughter of Antipater and his wife, who was herself the daughter of Antigonus the Hasmonean’. Antigonus was the grandson of the last Hasmonean high priest/king. This family tree would mean that Yeshu was a Hasmonean
and
a Herodian on both his mother’s and his father’s side.

He peered through an image of Madeleine at the even, measured strokes of lamp-black:

And this prophecy was in this manner, that out of Jacob would come a star, a sceptre to rule the world. And this was foretold by the scriptures
¹
. And Yeshu was given to Joseph as his father and hidden from Herod that the child might live and take the throne as prophesied. And this Joseph came from Rama-thain. He was a trusted man and member of the Great Sanhedrin and longed for the return of Israel
.

¹
Numbers 24: 17.

‘The star prophecy from the Book of Numbers,’ Leo told the committee. The Judas Committee, they called it: it had been established to oversee the work, to decide how the destruction of a faith should be communicated to the world. There were half a dozen members – Leah, and David Tedeschi, and someone from the Israel Archaeological Authority, and a government nominee from Hebrew University, and Calder as the chairman. ‘The star prophecy was one of the
most popular Messianic foretellings. Bar-Kokhba springs to mind, of course.’

‘Maybe that dates the scroll to the Bar-Kokhba revolt,’ Tedeschi suggested. He was a thin, bony man with a prominent Adam’s apple and the stooped posture of the very tall.

Leo shrugged the suggestion away. ‘Bar-Kokhba wasn’t the only Messianic hopeful. And then there’s the matter of Joseph, Yeshu’s adoptive father …’

‘Surely that’s where the Joseph of the New Testament comes from,’ said Calder from the head of the table. ‘Adoptive father; just right. Kind of confirms the gospel story, doesn’t it?’ The ceiling overhead was studded with small, recessed lights, like a galaxy of stars. His silver hair gleamed in their reflected glory.

‘In a sense,’ Leo agreed. ‘But not quite the way you mean. This Joseph is Joseph of Arimathea.’

There was a silence. ‘It’s
who
?’

‘Joseph of Arimathea.’ The matter was obvious, beyond surprise. ‘Arimathea – Rama-thain. The identification was first made by Eusebius, and also by Jerome. I don’t think any Bible scholar would doubt it.’

‘Joseph of Arimathea was Yeshu’s
adoptive father
?’

‘That’s what it says.’ He smiled bleakly at Calder. ‘It’s the confirmation you’ve been looking for, isn’t it? That Yeshu the Nazir is the same man as Jesus of Nazareth. It has the dull ring of truth about it, doesn’t it? Explains a whole lot of the New Testament story – who Joseph was, why he had this interest in Jesus, why he gave his tomb to be used. A whole lot.’

They all looked up the table to Calder for some kind of response. He rearranged the papers in front of him, his movements quick and nervous as though he hadn’t got
much time. ‘Who the hell
wrote
all this?’ he asked of no one in particular. He seemed helpless. He wanted answers, and there were none. ‘What in God’s name was he trying to
do
?’ The irony seemed to have escaped him.

‘We’ve been over this time and again,’ Tedeschi said wearily. ‘It’s just idle speculation. The historians and the archaeologists can make of it what they like, but really it’s only speculation. All we have, the only
concrete
thing we have, is the text.’

Calder seemed to cast around for the right words. ‘It must be kept utterly secret,’ he decided. The word
secret
appealed.
Secretus
, set apart. There is the secret of the mass, a prayer murmured by the priest at the offertory. Secret knowledge is the knowledge that the initiates of Gnosticism possess.

‘Doesn’t this kind of thing belong to everyone?’ Leah demanded angrily. ‘I’ve spent most of my professional life battling for the full publication of the Qumran scrolls. I don’t want to find myself caught up in another dubious academic cover-up.’

There was a rancorous argument between her and Calder. ‘The thing’s dynamite,’ he said. ‘Worse than dynamite. Fissile material. Plutonium. The apocalypse, for crying out loud! We cannot just let it out into the world.’

‘We must publish as we work,’ she insisted. ‘Working papers, provisional findings. We must keep the outside world informed. Otherwise all we’ll get is rumour and speculation. There’s enough of that as it is.’

It was the man from the Archaeological Authority who brought some kind of peace. He had offered little to previous discussion and there was the vague sensation that he was an intruder from a different world, some kind of spy. ‘We’re not talking about academic freedom or anything
like that,’ he pointed out. He smiled coldly at Leah. ‘What we have here is politics, plain and far from simple. As Steven says, this thing is more than dynamite. The last thing that the government of Israel wants is conflict with the Christian Church. And this scroll is the property of the Israeli government.’

There was an awkward silence. After a while the members of the committee rose from their chairs and began to pack their papers away. Whether any decision had been reached was unclear, but outside the walls of the Bible Center a storm was on its way. Goldstaub took Leo aside as they left the committee room. He laughed at the idea of secrecy. ‘You think we can bottle up a thing like this? It’s already out, Leo, the story’s just about to break. You remember that
Times
story? Well don’t think for one moment that’s the end of the thing. The rumours are already out there and they aren’t going away.’

Rumour is the wrong word. Rumour means noise, but whatever it was that percolated out through the walls of the Bible Center was more of a caustic, insidious fluid, the first trickle of flood waters. It was as though the world’s journalists were poking at the dyke, watching and waiting for the thing to burst open.
Will the World Bible Center release the full text of this scroll so that the academic world can judge for itself?
the
Tablet
demanded in its next edition.
Can we be assured that this work is in the hands of objective Bible scholars, rather than mavericks with a desire to create sensation?

‘What the hell’s the
Tablet
?’ asked Goldstaub. ‘Sounds like something to do with Moses.’

‘A Catholic journal,’ Leo explained. ‘Intellectual, rather smug.’

‘How the hell do they know anything?’

‘You said it yourself: the story is out there. It’s just waiting for the fullness of time.’

He returned to his work. Isolated from the world, insulated from the world, he returned patiently to the dissection of two thousand years of his faith: letter for letter, word for word, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. He appended notes, he added glosses, he tiptoed through the intricacies of conjugation and declension, of syntax and accidence. Outside, it was summer. Outside, the heat battered on the ground and the light shattered the world into white and bronze, into sun and shade. Outside, the rock was too hot to touch and the cicadas screamed in agony as though at the contact. Inside was the limpid coolness of a cave, the cave-like cool of a scriptorium, the cool of the mortuary.

What kind of man was Yeshu? A waverer
¹
,
a reed (that bends with the wind?) … the Galileans rather than the Pharisees … (he was known?) by the leaders of the people (as) Jesus Bar-Abbas, Son of the Father, that (his ancestry might be?) known to all; but the common people
²
called him Jesus Bar-Adam, which is Son of Man. I knew him and I loved
³
him
.

¹
plagkteros
, possibly with the sense of misleading, leading astray.

²
am-hares
, (Hebrew) in the original.

³
agapa
. Exceptionally the writer resorts to the first person in this passage.

I knew him and I loved him
. He closed his eyes against the strain of the light and the nagging of the intricate letters.
I knew him and I loved him
.

Greek has a plethora of words for love, and even then probably not enough. Love of God, love of man, love of
woman, love of life, love of parent, love of country. Leo crouched over the text and struggled with love. Love of Madeleine, he thought. Too difficult to explain, this last love, being made of
eros
and
agape
and
philia
, the three of them blended together in uneasy combination.
Agape
was the love of man for God and God for man, and through this, the love of one’s fellow beings. It was
agape
that Paul included in his famous triad – along with
faith
and
hope
:
agape
, which the translators of the King James Bible famously and unfortunately rendered as
charity
. But which kind of love destroyed Yeshu? Which kind had destroyed Madeleine?

I’ve tried this before
, she had written
. Oh yes, I’m practised in this kind of thing, didn’t I tell you?

In what kind of thing was she practised? What was the import of her ambiguous words? Leo tried to talk to her. Bereft of a God to address, absurdly he tried to talk to Madeleine, attempted to magick her out of his own mind, tried to create her out of the ether or the air or whatever substance it was that still bore her imprint; just as once, as a child, he had tried to conjure up the living Christ from the assembly of images and illusions that were all he had to go on. And as with Christ, she didn’t appear before him. Madeleine remained mute. He thought of her and the more he thought of her the less substantial she became; he imagined her and the more he reached out to grasp her image, the more elusive it was. There were moments when he dreaded recalling her, in case the very act of memory should expunge the record from his brain, as though memory was finite, a thing used up at each remembering.

This was the teaching of Yeshu, that you should love God
above all things and that you should despise the powers that rule you who are not of God but of man. This was the teaching of Yeshu, that you should renounce your family and your friends and follow him to salvation. This was the teaching of Yeshu, that if a man has riches, he should sell everything and give the worth to those who follow God’s way
.

David Tedeschi invited Leo to supper. The Tedeschis lived in a cramped house in one of the new developments on the outskirts of the city, an area where the buildings were laid out in concentric circles like the walls of a citadel around an inner keep – a supermarket and a post office and a police station. It was as though the inhabitants were expecting a siege.