The First Apostle (39 page)

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche viewed him as the anti-Christ, and the American Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “Paul was the first corrupter of the teachings of Jesus” and actually tried to have his writings removed from the Bible.

As the Spanish scholar Josep Puente states in the book, St. Peter is found only within the pages of the New Testament, and there’s no independent historical evidence to substantiate his existence. The two epistles ascribed to Peter were apparently written in sophisticated Greek and display such disparate characteristics that many commentators doubt they were written by the same person, and few serious researchers believe they could have been authored by a simple Aramaic-speaking fisherman. Despite all this, he’s considered by the Roman Catholic Church to have been its first pope.

Both men apparently died at the hands of the Romans, and in Rome, though neither death can be substantiated historically. Peter is believed to have died on either 29 June or 13 October A.D. 64, and he was apparently crucified upside down, while Paul was allegedly beheaded in A.D. 64 or A.D. 67—as a Roman citizen he could not be executed by crucifixion.

As for the final resting place of the bones of the two saints, the Vatican has shown a certain amount of confusion on the subject. Two entirely separate sets of bones, both found under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, have been conclusively identified as those of St. Peter. The announcements were made in 1950 by Pope Pius XII and in 1968 by Paul VI.

The first set was inspected by an anthropologist in 1956 and found to contain five tibias—most human skeletons have a mere two, and at least one of those examined came from a woman—as well as pig, sheep, goat and chicken bones.

The 1968 bones, like the earlier set, included those of various domesticated animals, plus those of a mouse, as well as fragments of St. Peter’s skull. The skull fragments were something of an embarrassment, because what purported to be the apostle’s skull had rested in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome since about the ninth century.

Finally, to complicate the situation still further, in 1953 what appeared to be the skeleton of St. Peter was unearthed in Jerusalem on the site of a Franciscan monastery called “Dominus Flevit” on the Mount of Olives. The bones were in an ossuary inscribed, in Aramaic, “Simon Bar Jona” (Simon, son of Jona).

Bearing in mind that there’s no evidence St. Peter ever lived, such confusion over his remains is perhaps not surprising, and such “duplication” of relics is not uncommon in the Catholic Church—although there were only twelve apostles, the remains of some twenty-six are buried in Germany alone.

According to the Venerable Bede in his
Ecclesiastical History,
St. Paul’s bones were given by Pope Vitalian to Oswy, King of Britain, in A.D. 665. Given the Vatican’s reluctance to surrender relics of any sort, this seems a somewhat unlikely fate for the skeleton. What happened to the bones after that isn’t known.

Catharism was a dualist and Gnostic religion that possibly descended from the Byzantine Bogomils and, earlier, from Manichaeism. The Cathars believed that a benevolent god had created the human soul and the realm of spirit and light that lay beyond the earth. But an evil deity had then trapped the soul and forced it to suffer in the corrupt flesh of the human body: salvation lay only in death, when the soul could finally escape to the spiritual realm. Because they believed that the soul could also make this journey in the body of an animal, they were strict vegetarians.

They saw themselves as Christians, but rejected the Old Testament because they believed that the god who was described in it was the evil deity who had created the world to enslave the souls of mankind. They believed this god was actually the devil, and that the Catholic Church was therefore in the service of Satan.

Catharism was diametrically opposed to the medieval Catholic Church in almost every way, and the contrast between the two could hardly have been greater. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathars asked for nothing at all from their congregations except faith. In fact, they made material contributions to the society in which they lived. When a Cathar took the
consolamentum
vow and became one of the
perfecti,
he or she donated all their worldly goods to the community. They had no church buildings or property, and the movement rejected all the trappings of wealth and power. Unusually for the period, Cathars also treated women as equals, and ensured that the children in the community were properly educated. The obvious piety and essential goodness of the Cathar
perfecti
greatly appealed to the people of the Languedoc, and the heresy gained considerable power. That, predictably, was unacceptable to the Catholic Church, which could see its own power and influence in the area waning, and the inevitable result was the Albigensian Crusade.

The events that I’ve described as taking place during the Albigensian Crusade, such as the massacre at Béziers, the mutilation of the prisoners from Bram and the ending of the siege of Montségur, are historically accurate.

The defenders of the citadel did request a two-week truce to consider the surrender terms offered by the crusaders, only to then reject them on 15 March 1244. One possible reason for this strange request was that the Cathar defenders wanted to celebrate an important ritual on the previous day, 14 March, possibly the so-called
manisola
festival.

The day before this, 13 March, was the spring equinox, another important date for the religion, and some records suggest that this was the date when at least twenty—perhaps as many as twenty-six—non-Cathars opted to receive the
consolamentum perfecti,
which would condemn them to certain death some forty-eight hours later.

For obvious reasons it hasn’t been possible to establish as fact the story of the last four Cathars’ escape from the doomed fortress carrying the “Cathar treasure,” but there is considerable anecdotal evidence—some apparently deriving from records of later interrogations conducted by the Inquisition—that something like this event did actually occur.

Finally, anyone who has ever properly researched the birth of Christianity must have wondered why no truly contemporary sources—apart from the books that now form the New Testament, which were anything but contemporary, being written between about A.D. 75 and A.D. 135—ever mention Jesus Christ.

In all, the Bible is a compilation of sixty-six books—thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New—that were written by some forty different individuals over a period of about 1,600 years.

It’s generally acknowledged that the first list of the present twenty-seven New Testament books appeared in a letter written in A.D. 367 by the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. In Carthage in A.D. 397, a council decreed that only the canonical writings—the “agreed” twenty-seven books—were allowed to be read in church as divine scriptures: they were literally to be accepted as the “gospel truth.” That decree essentially marked the creation of the New Testament.

All those other documents—and there were hundreds of them, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, the Gospel of Mary, the Protovangelion of Jesus, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Nicodemus—that disagreed with this corpus of work were excluded and became known colloquially as “the banned books.” And it’s worth emphasizing that the selection was made on the basis of content, not authenticity or relevance, so the result was, by any standards, highly selective.

And even those books that
were
included are frequently at variance with each other, even the so-called “synoptic” gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew, which appear to derive from an earlier common source, possibly the so-called “Q Document,” now lost.

So, despite what is preached from pulpits in churches around the world every Sunday, the only evidence for the existence of the man upon whose shoulders rests the largest single religion in history lies within the pages of a single section of the Bible, a heavily edited, noncontemporary source. What this proves has been—and no doubt will remain—a source of worldwide debate by theologians and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, for centuries to come.