Fifth Gospel (7 page)

When
they were alone Herod clapped for more wine, but the procurator raised a hand to prevent it, saying he wanted better wine, perhaps that fruity wine from Cyprus, brought to his praetorium, where Herod’s pleasures awaited his eager attention.

Herod
sighed, seemingly pleased with himself. ‘You must not give way to nervousness, procurator, nervousness has been known to turn a man to madness.’

‘
You mean to say, as it did your father before you?’

There was a long
, odious moment between them. Rufus thought he could see shadows, wings, flapping over the Jew but his reverie was broken by Herod himself, who spoke now with a strained voice, ‘You are weary…go to your rest…remember…soon you will return to the cool airs of Caesarea and Judea will be a distant speck in your mind. This night you need not concern yourself with anything more than the pleasures awaiting your attention!’

Rufus
did not know how true these words would come to be, for Herod had made certain that he would be taken to new heights of carnal ecstasy, surpassing himself in the quality of flesh prepared for Rufus’ amusement. Three days and nights were spent without a thought for insurrections and dissidents. Fear had no moment among those orgies of naked flesh, wine and gluttony. At the zenith of his sexual raptures, an ecstatic vision of his wife, in her death throws, struck Rufus such a note of joy that he consummated his lust with a power he had never before known and it caused him to fall into a satiated unconsciousness that lasted the rest of the Paschal Festival.

For this reason
, he did not hear of the strange goings on at the gates of the city…though it is unlikely he would have even if he had been sober and awake, for his Captain, Gaius Cassius, would not have reported it.

P
ASSOVER

M
ariam
was among the pilgrims from Nazareth who travelled the Jordan valley to Jerusalem. In a solemn ceremonial mood they had come to the other side of Jericho, having left its palm groves, gardens of roses and balsam plantations behind them.

This was the last leg of the journey and many thought they could almost smell the
Temple incense wafting in the breezes. The anticipation of it made all minds and hearts full of gladness, all except Mariam.

For h
er husband Joseph had died some months ago leaving her a widow with seven children to raise, gardens to tend, flour to mill, and sheep to graze. With so much to do, she never found the time to cultivate her love of reading and learning, and began to neglect even her prayers. If her friends had not offered to look after her animals and garden, she would have let another year pass before Yeshua’s youth ceremony.

As s
he followed the others, with her dress wrapped around her legs to make walking easier, she told herself that she should accept her destiny with equanimity and look on all the vicissitudes of her life as opportunities for mastering her stubbornness. Still, her destiny had been a difficult one and it would have been even more difficult, had she not befriended Mary, the young mother of Jesus.

Mary
, walking beside her, was of mixed blood like many Galileans, and some years her junior. It was true that she lacked learning and sophistication but this lack was compensated for by an abundance of love, a child-like spirit and a fresh, youthful innocence. Mary seemed to her like a sun trapped in a house of flesh, whose rays, falling daily over the icy landscape of Mariam’s soul, made it come awake again. Mariam had not known such innocent and loving company since her youth.

She had been
joyous when she discovered that Yeshua and Jesus had also found friendship in one another. For although dissimilar in temperament and learning, the boys too sensed, like their mothers, that a thread of destiny was spun between them.

This brought her
now to the primary reason for her concern. She looked about the group for Yeshua and found him walking vacantly beside Jesus. Since their journey to Jerusalem she had sensed something strange about Yeshua.  The closer they came to the Holy city the more markedly did she observe this strangeness: Yeshua, once so wise, alert and questioning, had grown long in his silences and dream-like stares and there were moments when she felt him taken by a great oppression of the heart. In truth when she looked directly at her son she saw only an emptiness, as if his spirit had grown loose in the cavity of his body and would wing away at any moment and leave her grasping at the shadows of his ghost.

She did not know what to think. She
hoped that Yeshua might awaken from this strange spirit-illness upon seeing the great city, for who could be unmoved by the sight of Jerusalem? Sparkling as if snow-covered and gold dusted it rose now from out of the clefts of the valleys like a jewel, with its great walls, its palaces and criss-crossed streets clotted with houses of every shape and kind. Her companions fell to their knees in a prayer of thanks to see it, for soon they would walk through the gates and find their way through those bustling streets to the Temple and they could even now hear the chanting of the Levites and the blowing of the horns. This was surely a dream experienced in the day! A gleaming heaven-made manifestation of the fulfilment of God’s commandment!

Everywhere there was joy.

Mariam took Yeshua to one side and pointed out the sacred girdle of walls within which stood the splendid Temple, with it magnificent courts and its holy sanctuary. She reminded him that Jerusalem was the seat of the Sanhedrin, the greatest place of learning and piety in the world. The place where he could finally feel at home, for one day his destiny would lead him here again so that he might accomplish a great task.

But this did not
seem to stir a fire in the boy’s heart. Instead, the eyes that stared at her appeared removed from life.

‘
My task is near at hand mother,’ he said.

These words struck her a
s a blow, and she found she could not move. What did he mean,
near at hand
? The others had already walked beyond them and were melting with those crowds at the gates to the city – all except her friend Mary who waited, quiet and patient with Jesus.

Mariam did not wish to draw attention so she walked on and called to him
, ‘Come.’

At the city gates Roman soldiers
took stock of the names and ages and the birthplaces of all who had come, and now her concern for Yeshua was traded for a palpable, terror-filled knowledge of peril. She stood back in the line, away from the others, letting them pass. She must think. What should she say? That her son was born in Bethlehem at the time of Herod? On their return from Egypt she had heard of the terrible massacre of the children and she had long grieved for her friends and relatives who had lost their sons. Yeshua was the right age to have been one of those children and the Romans would know it. Within her a force compelled her lips to form a lie to save her son’s life and she searched in her mind for support from the scriptures but found only admonitions:

‘A false witness shall not go unpunished; and he that speaketh a lie shall perish!’

A great crowd came from behind and pressed her forward. She realised that she had lost sight of Yeshua again. This added to her mounting anxiety so that her voice came out shrill when she called his name into the bevy of pilgrims. She found him standing before a Roman soldier, whose face bespoke a cruel heart.

She prayed for two things: for the str
ength to tell the man the truth and for the man’s ignorance of its importance. She thought she might faint to the ground on saying it, but she did not. She stood perfectly poised and still.

‘
Cassius!’ the Roman said to a centurion who stood not far off, inspecting some bundles tied to a mule.

When this man looked in her direction Mariam saw that he was possessed of a young man’s body but
that his eyes went deep into his skull and were shadowed like those of an old man. He left the mule and came to see.

Her heart moved in a lump to her throat.

‘Come, hear what this woman tells...her son was born in Bethlehem, at the time of Herod!’

The centurion’s face was all
a-frown, his voice a sting in her ears, ‘Bethlehem of Judea?’ he said to her.

She nodded.

‘She says he is fourteen springs!’ the other man said, with a smile playing at his mouth.

S
he felt demons of fear un-spooling a thread of misery into her bowels. She said another silent prayer and caught Yeshua in a protective grasp. A desperate desire to flee fired up her legs and yet, where could she go?

‘Is this true?’ The centurion
pressed.

‘It is,’ she told him
squarely. ‘My son’s name is Yeshua bar Joseph, of the house of David.’

The centurion
was fiercely attentive as she spoke and she noted that it seemed as if a number of pictures were flitting past his eyes as he looked from her to Yeshua and back again.

‘Bethlehem of Judea?’ he asked again, ‘In the time of Herod the Great?’

She nodded.

An
expression of relief now surfaced on his face and made it soft, as if all cares were of a sudden taken from it and put away. The moment was suspended while the world moved in loops around them. She thought that he would soon call for his guards. But he said nothing. He allowed his teeth to worry his lips and his eyes to narrow.

She waited.

There was an imperceptible nod of the head and with it the scrap of a moment passed, taking the softness from the man’s face and replacing it with a rigid shield of flesh.

She shuddered and closed her eyes.

‘Mind your son, woman,’ she heard him say, stern of voice, ‘this is a great crowd and the city is large. You have come so far it would not do to lose him now!’ He drove his eyes down into hers to make the significance of his words more clear and turned away.

‘
Let them through, Septimus!’ he called out over his shoulder.

The other man
hesitated.

There was a look full of danger in that young man’s eye
. He let loose a seductive whisper between them, ‘See these hands, Jewess?’ he showed them to her, ‘These were bloodied from killing all the children of your township…one by one I cut their little throats and stacked their pitiful Jew bodies in piles and milked the blood from their veins for your mad king to drink…what do you think of that?’ He watched her, waiting for a response. When none came, he made a cold, perilous laugh at the back of his throat. ‘You were clever to have saved him, I’ll give you that! But you can’t change his fate,’ he leaned in, so that she could smell his wine-sour breath. ‘Fate is a hard mistress, Jewess…she always comes to take her earnings, believe me, and when she does…’ he smiled, ‘I hope I am there to see it!’

Mariam kept her eyes steady on his and her face calm. Meanwhile, the line of pilgrims swelled behind her and the people complained so that the soldier, now drawn from his reverie, was made to shift an eye to the hordes. He straightened and a look of frustration passed over his face for the menial task that had no end, and with a wave of a hand dismissed her and shouted to a place behind her,

‘Next!’

T
HE KISS

I
t was
in the Temple that what had begun three days before came to fruition. Before that there had been three days of endless marches and toiling over rough roads. All around him there had been the constant noise from prayers and songs and psalms, the ever-movement of the people onwards, the laughter of the children and their games and his mother’s concern in his ear.

In the night
, dreams shadowed his soul. He had seen an abyss, a dark, fiery furnace molten hot in which he glimpsed many things of darkness, dreadful to behold, waiting to ensnare him. On a far shore stood his friend Jesus, adorned in light, with his heart-face radiating love. In the dream he had gestured for Yeshua to cast into the abyss all his hard-won treasures but Yeshua’s heart had been weighed down with sorrow for the loss.

His friend’s voice had told him, ‘Remember, we are brothers, Yeshua
. All that you lose will one day return to you and all that dies will live again through me.’

On the last day he fell ill
, faces came and went, but his soul was awake only to the process that was mysteriously and cautiously working its way through him.

And his question to it was:

Am I?

And the answer was:

Not yet
.

He did not understand this voluntary leaving of his body
but he was not afraid, his concern was for his mother.

When she had shown him Jerusalem she had spoken of the Sanhedrin, of its
Temple and palaces, of its gardens and of its people. She had expected that it would quicken his heart with excitement. But his heart was grown too big in his body to be excited and it could only strike a slow rhythm.

When they entered the city,
all around him he heard the clamour of the pilgrims, the calls of the merchants in the bazaars, the noise of the camels and horses and entertainers, the chanting of the priests and the clanging of bells – all these sounds were seeking to bring him back to life and to entice him from his task but the will of God was set. Death, he knew, lay at the end of the way, and he walked this long road with Jesus to his Father’s house, where it would be accomplished.

Once over the twelve steps of the
Temple, he followed Jesus through the Beautiful Gate whose massive double doors were made of brass. Now in the courts of the Temple, the world was left behind them and amid the dissonant cacophony of sounds his mind began its unravelling so that his soul rose up from his bones and his muscles, and his eyes grew blind, little by little.

H
e turned to Jesus but could not see his friend. Tears flowed over his cheeks. He bowed low and fell upon his knees. What had sustained him until now was spent, burnt up and consumed.

‘Am I?’ he asked his friend
. He took a breath, allowing it to enter deep into his lungs, so that it filled every corner of his being, right down to his very finger tips, until he could hold onto it no more and his heart felt as if it would burst. How could he let go? And yet he must! He must let go. But in a moment between one breath and the next, a memory came; a memory of himself as a great king standing on a ziggurat observing the sun. Something told him that what had been prepared for aeons could now come to pass. A sense of peace came over him. He remembered!

Now he could forget.

He breathed out.

A
ll of his learning, his wisdom and his selfhood, moved completely out of him then – his treasures. They stood before him a moment and made a descent into that other self, into the soul and body of Jesus.

And, as
Jesus looked down upon his dearest friend with concern, he felt his heart torn open now and he took a breath in, and by way of it something entered into him and he knew. He knew that somehow he and Yeshua were truly united, like two sparks meeting in a gentle flame, pellucid and brotherly. From now on Yeshua would see the world through his eyes, and there would be no need for words between them.

Am I
you?

Jesus asked
Yeshua now, his gaze full of the familiar and unfamiliar.

And
the answer came from within his heart:

We are Tzelem and Demut…image and likeness.

‡

‘And so it was
– a metaphysical conception.’ Lea said to me, ‘And so, what had been written in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs of Jerusalem came to pass: that a priest would come from Levi and a King from Judah, and they would become one for the salvation of Israel.’

‘
The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs...’ I said, pausing in my writing and extracting my eyes from the images she had conjured before them. ‘I do believe I know it!’ Now my mind was on something else. ‘What you have just told me makes sense! I realise why the Gospels of Luke and Matthew differ. I realise why Magi visited one child while the other was known only to the Shepherds! Poor old Eusebius would laugh now to hear it, since this had caused him so much pain.’

‘
Matthew has Yeshua born at the time of Herod,
pairé
, while Luke has Jesus born two years after that, at the time of Quirenius, and the census.’

‘
Yes…that’s it! That’s it, my child,’ I thought it over. ‘Even their genealogies are different, yes...! Matthew has it ending with Abraham, while Luke ends it with Adam. I always thought it a curious thing but now I think it must signify that Jesus is…somehow related to the first man. That he is angelic.’ I shook my head with astonishment. ‘There have always been men who believed that Jesus was not a man at all, you know, that he was a phantom…others have thought that he was nothing more than a man…now all is reconciled…they were only seeing different sides of the one face. That is, two persons in one body, image and likeness combined!’

T
he elegance of this solution caused me to feel a cautious elation. Still, I had to find proofs and so, in the days that followed, I resolved to search through our library of scrolls and parchments and rats and rat dung to find the Twelve Testaments. In my search the first thing I found was a forgotten gospel, called the Gospel of Thomas, and it occupied me for some hours. When I found that it also spoke of how two must become one, I hit the side of my head with such force that I saw stars! Again, on searching further, I found the Testament which Lea had spoken of, written by the Twelve Patriarchs of Jerusalem, and she was right, it foretold the coming of a king and a priest – one from the line of Levi, and the other from the line of Judah!

All day
I pored over scrolls written by the forefathers of our faith, by the Essenes and others whose tenets had mixed with those of our founder, Mani. I realised that they all spoke of the same thing – of two Messiahs. Parchment after parchment described two children! I was astonished. There it was for anyone who cared to see! Why no one had understood it in all these years I could not guess! But you see, I was conveniently forgetting that I had not seen it myself!

The next night
, when Lea came again, I told her of my discoveries and my thoughts. She listened with quiet interest.

‘Do you know what this means?
’ I told her, ‘It means that our two sides, Cathars and Romans, have each held one part of the truth!’

‘Yes,
pairé
…together you would have the whole truth,’ her eyes regarded the fire, ‘and yet you are not together, one side sits here upon this mountain, while the other is below throwing shots from their catapults and mangonels.’

I frowned
, she had thrown the calm waters of her wisdom over the fire of my enthusiasm and I was now forlorn, when before I had been so elated.

‘What
is there to do then?’ I said, in dismay.

‘Men must come to know the contents of the Fifth Gospel, that is all
,’ she said.

‘That is all!
You say that is all, but that is impossible! Because it is not written down!’

‘Not until now.’

‘But no man will believe what I write since I am not one of the apostles!’

‘
But
pairé
, no man would believe it even if you were an apostle,’ she said, evenly. ‘Look at those parchments and proofs you hold in your library, they would not last in the hands of the inquisitors even a wink, for they would burn them as heretical lies.’

My head and my heart ached
with these contradictions. ‘Yes, yes…quite right, quite right…so why am I bothering to stain my hands, if there is no man that will believe what I am writing?’

‘There is hope
…in wisdom.’

W
isdom? I looked at her, ‘All my life I have desired knowledge, but wisdom, well, that is something else…so far it eludes me and look at how old I am!’

‘
Wisdom does not come by thinking about things,
pairé
, it comes when you become ripe for true judgement; when you can allow the truth to meet you from out of the things themselves. But you must be desire-less, for the more you desire wisdom, the less you will find it,’ she said. ‘When you no longer desire it for your own sake, it will find you. That is when wisdom becomes revelation. Men will need to see it for themselves, it will be revealed to them.’

‘W
ell,’ I said, put out, ‘I do not see much good in such a thing that is revealed only when you don’t want it and a book that no man will believe!’

‘
The desire for knowledge feeds the self…but one must love wisdom not for the self, but for the sake of wisdom itself,
pairé –
that is what it means to be a philosopher, and only a true philosopher can see the Fifth Gospel.’

A sudden understanding came
then, and with it an uncomfortable feeling of shame. She was talking to me, yes, that learned man that I thought I was! She was telling me that I must let go of this learned man (who loved learning for his own sake) if I ever wished to become wise, or to see these things she recounted for myself. I was chided, yes, bewildered certainly, but at the same time I was struck by a sudden desire to let go of all I thought I knew in order to become a philosopher.