The Gospel Of Judas (4 page)

It wasn’t
echinos
of course; it was
echidnon
. Vipers. Offspring of vipers.

The rest had been easy.

‘I suppose it was what I’d been hoping for all my life,’ he told Madeleine. ‘Concrete evidence that the gospels, at least
the source of the gospels pre-dates the Jewish War, and that therefore they contain genuine eyewitness accounts.’

‘But surely that’s obvious.’

‘But surely nothing at all. You know what the name Jesus actually
means
?’

‘Isn’t it just a name?’

He shook his head. ‘In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings. Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, Yehoshua and it means
God is salvation
. So you can see it’s easy enough to explain Jesus away as just the personification of faith in God, not a historical figure at all. If the earliest manuscripts only come from the first century, if the gospels themselves were written that late – after Paul’s ministry, let’s say – then it’s easy to make the kind of claim that you hear often enough, that Christ was a construct of the early Church, a mythic figure given some kind of historical identity in order to help simple people believe.’

‘And you’ve disproved it all.’

He shrugged. ‘It was clear from the start that these pieces were early. Second century for sure. You see those characters?’ She watched and listened with that focus that she had, the moment when the bright and ironical became focused as though by a lens. ‘What we call
zierstil
, decorated style. See the gamma? Second century at least. And then there’s the use of the iota adscript which died out in the second century, and suddenly I thought, my God, this might be older than the Rylands fragment.’ He looked round from the picture. ‘And I realised that this find was sensational. The earliest New Testament text from the Holy Land, probably the earliest in existence.’

*     *     *

The images came over the telephone lines. Every few days he logged on to the Bible Center’s server and found the pictures waiting for him, two images for each fragment along with a catalogue number, nothing more. One image would be high resolution and time-consuming to download. The other would be a smaller version to give the general idea of things. The ragged scraps would unfurl themselves on to the screen of his computer and hang there in the luminous rectangle of light like pieces of old, tattered rag; like bunting from a celebration held long, long ago. They gave an illusion of reality. You could see the shadows they cast on the white background; you could see the individual fibres flaking off from the edges. A row of dun-coloured flags signalling from the past, a strange and cryptic semaphore:

… winnowing fork is in his hand and … [he will gather the wheat into] … his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire …

Fragments of the Gospel of Matthew, from a site that could probably be dated to the time of the Jewish War and the burning of the Temple. He was reading the oldest gospel texts known; he was doing what, as a child, he had dreamt of doing, when, fatherless and alone, he had passed hours in solitary thought in the chapel of the seminary: he was reaching out his hand to touch the Jesus of history.

The
Times
came out with the story first:
NEW FINDS NEAR THE DEAD SEA CONFIRM HISTORICITY OF NEW TESTAMENT.
The tabloids put it more succinctly:
PAPYRUS PROVES GOSPELS.
It was a mild sensation, ringing faint echoes round the world in the inner pages of newspapers, meriting mention towards the end of news broadcasts. Leo Newman found
himself crammed into a darkened cell in the BBC studios in Rome to talk to a disembodied voice in London who asked questions like, ‘How does this make the Jesus story more meaningful for the twenty-first century?’ A group of American Bible scholars set about trying to prove, using an elaborate computer analysis, that the fragments were not Christian at all but came instead from a long-lost part of the book of the prophet Hosea. The Pope himself made a private visit to the Institute to view the images and confer a shaky blessing on the head of Father Leo Newman. ‘A lion in the battle for truth,’ he said. ‘A voice of truth for the millennium.’

Lord, save me from the sin of self-regard
, Leo had prayed, while the shock waves reverberated round the globe and trembled in the background, like a distant storm.

He watched as she walked round the manuscript room, a bright splash of colour amongst the grey and brown, a sharp stroke of the profane amongst the studiously devout. ‘Isn’t there the corrupt smell of ambition in all this?’ Her tone was faintly mocking, touched with that astringent irony that so intrigued him. ‘Isn’t there pride and ambition? Shouldn’t faith be enough?’

‘Perhaps faith is never enough.’

‘What’s that meant to mean? Don’t you have enough faith? You’re a priest.’

‘It’s not lack of faith, although perhaps there is always that. It’s the intrusion of other things, human things.’

She waited a moment for him to continue, standing over by the window and watching him with what was left of her expression once the smile had gone, a look of concern and faint bewilderment. Then abruptly she changed her tone. ‘I must go,’ she said, making a show of looking at her
watch. ‘I’m afraid I must leave you to your texts.’ And she began to gather up her things – her handbag and scarf. Her umbrella? That had been surrendered at the entrance to the manuscript rooms. ‘Thank you so much for showing me round, Leo. It has been fascinating.’ Briskness again, a sharp change of tone, a confusing sensation that one person had just been replaced by another.

He turned the computer off. ‘I’m afraid they won’t search your handbag when you leave,’ he said. ‘But they ought to. They don’t really know how to deal with women – they can’t imagine a woman coming here and stealing anything.’

‘But you can?’

‘I can imagine almost anything. That has always been my abiding sin.’

‘Is it a sin?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it is, yes, because you always end up believing the worst of people.’ He showed her to the main door. The porter glanced at them through the window of his cell and then went back to reading the sports paper.

‘Do you think the worst of me?’ she asked. They stood for a moment in the entrance. The urgency of her departure seemed to have vanished.

‘I think the best of you.’

‘That is
very
dangerous.’ She touched his arm. She might have raised herself on her toes and kissed him on the cheek, but it didn’t seem appropriate just there, beneath the plaque that talked of popes and pontiffs, of stern fathers and bridge-builders between God and man. So she just squeezed his arm, a quick sharp grasp, and told him that she would be in touch soon and turned and walked away down the narrow street, her shoes clipping on the
stones, her feet wobbling on the awkward unevenness of the setts. And he felt an absurd and pungent sense of loss.

Leo amongst the women and the coffee cups, with Saint Clare looking down on him with anguish as though appalled to see one of her kind embroiled in the trivial and the quotidian. Leo answering polite questions politely – they had been to see the Roman cemetery beneath the crypt of Saint Peter’s – and wanting Madeleine to come and speak to him. He felt like an adolescent, that was what was so galling. He felt like a teenager (horrendous word with its meretricious, transatlantic connotations) trying to attract the attention of some older girl, while she moved through the group of women with a disturbing, adult assurance.

Finally she came over to him. The topic of the Roman burial ground had been exhausted. All around them the women were talking of families, of children and schools, of houses and maids and holidays. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she asked. ‘Is that allowed? What kind of family produces a priest?’

‘You wouldn’t want to know about my family,’ he assured her. ‘It wasn’t like yours.’

‘What’s that meant to mean? Wasn’t it happy? All happy families are the same, aren’t they? Where does that come from?’

‘Tolstoy.’

‘
Anna Karenina
, that’s it. All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Is it true?’

Why should she want to know? What interest could she have? The women came up to offer thanks and farewells. ‘You’ll stay for some lunch?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t want to overstay my welcome again.’

She laughed, and offered no answer. He watched her smiling and laughing, shaking hands, offering a smooth cheek for a farewell kiss, two farewell kisses, one on each cheek, turning the other cheek, a consummate performance. From on top of the grand piano, framed in silver, Jack and the two girls laughed at the scene. He found himself trying to picture the small rituals of her family life, what the Brewers would do and what they would say to one another. His imagination was defective in such matters, a stunted thing with no experience to call on. It was as though he had trespassed into a foreign territory, a place with its own customs, its own language, with all the attraction of the unfamiliar. He was entranced. His own family, his tiny, fragile family was a different organism from hers, a different institution, hedged about with a past it couldn’t talk about and an inheritance it couldn’t acknowledge.

‘Tell me,’ Madeleine said when the last of the women had left. ‘You tell me and I’ll listen.’

So he told her. Confession of a kind, explication and expiation woven together. He told Madeleine of his home
life, musty with the smell of a vanished past and cloying with the attentions of a pious widowed mother who brooked no interference from the outside world beyond the inattentive children who came round for piano lessons. Homes have their own smell, their own amalgam of scents and flavours: his had been redolent of incense, gathered devoutly into his mother’s clothes when she went to mass each morning and brought back to the house, to be extruded into the heavy, languorous atmosphere. A candle, burning perpetually before an icon of the Blessed Madonna and Child, added its waxen perfume.

‘Sounds very Irish,’ was Madeleine’s opinion.

‘Not Irish, not anything. A strange creation of my mother’s. Her family had been Jewish once – Neumann, Newman. Her mother was a convert.’

‘But Newman’s
your
name.’ There was a silence. Implications were considered, matters of legitimacy and illegitimacy, those terms that once ranked high in the potency of language. The word
bastard
.

He slid past the obstacle. ‘I never knew my father. He died before I was born. I was the only male in the house. All the others who ever came seem to have been women: my mother’s partners in bridge, her piano pupils, the maids, two distant cousins who called occasionally – spinsters or widows, I never really knew which – all were women.’ The incontinence of confession. They sat at either end of a capacious sofa, legs crossed, hers demurely with her skirt pulled down to the gleaming disc of her patella, his extravagantly with his ankle resting on his knee. ‘I’ve never talked about these things before, do you realise that? Never had the opportunity, I suppose.’

‘You don’t have to now. Not if you don’t want to.’

‘She’s dead. One is meant to speak well of the dead.’

‘Can’t you speak well of her?’

‘I’ve never really understood the theological basis for the idea. Surely there is a greater need to speak well of the living. Let the dead bury their dead, isn’t that what Our Lord said?’

‘So tell me.’

There was a strange intimacy in talking about it to Madeleine, a sense of confession in reverse, her absolution for his memories. ‘I adored her, of course. I had little choice in the matter. Her rages, her sarcasm, her indifference were terrible weapons. So was her affection.
My lion
, she always called me,
my little brave lion
. She suffocated me, I suppose. With love and affection, of course; and with a history that was not mine, that never would be mine.’

‘History?’

‘You know the kind of thing: ancestors, disasters.’ There was something receptive about Madeleine, as though she exerted a gravitational pull on him, drawing him towards her: his secrets, his past, his very personality. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

He couldn’t recall his mother as a young woman. In his memory her eyes were the only thing that retained an illusion of youth: they were as bright and blue as the eyes of a china doll, gazing out in surprise through the decaying mask of her face as though startled to find time passing and flesh decaying. For the rest, she only possessed the relics of good looks, like an aged actress trying to deny the years. The skin of her cheek was soft and waxy and dusted with a fine powdery down like mildew; her mouth, approximately edged with lipstick, held the shadow of a lost sensuality in the way that a painting may show traces of an earlier figure lying underneath. ‘My manikin, my
Männlein
, come and give your mother a kiss,’ she would say, and her embrace was heavy with that incense and the rosaceous perfume that she habitually wore. When he was ill he slept in her bed and felt her body, a perfumed presence, a strange melding of the gaunt and the fleshy, close to his. And sometimes the emotion of holding him against her loose breasts (what emotion? what anguish lay behind her cloying attentions?) drove her to tears, so that her features would collapse like wet paper, making a grim contrast with her bright, old-fashioned dresses and her brassy hair. A doll left out in the rain, he used to think; and added that to a list of uncharitable thoughts he had to expiate. ‘What is the matter, Mother?’ he would ask. ‘Tell me the matter?’ But she would shake her head bravely and deny that it was anything that Leo had done, or could do, or could even imagine. The unimaginable was what haunted her, and haunted therefore his childish prayers as he knelt beside his bed at night. ‘Your father, your poor, poor father,’ she would moan, and from silver frames on the piano, on the sideboard, on the mantelshelf, he looked down at the pair of them, a man of imposing seriousness, with a face that bore within it the lean, long lineaments of duty. ‘He watches over us, of course he does. He sees us, he knows our thoughts, he understands our weaknesses …’