The Gospel Of Judas (3 page)

And on the fourth night, as silent as a nocturnal mammal, she crept into my room and slid into my bed.

Magda knew immediately, of course. I was surprised at
the time, but now I understand. Magda knew all about me. She lay curled up in my bed like a cat, indifferent but knowing.

‘Is that Father Leo Newman?’ A female voice with that faint and tell-tale accent, the
th
halfway between a fricative and a plosive.

‘It is.’

‘This is Madeleine Brewer. We met at that reception. Perhaps you remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘I told you I’d ring. Will you come to dinner? Is next Wednesday all right? I know it’s rather short notice, but …’

Of course he would.

The Brewers had an apartment in the Borgo Pio near the Vatican City. It was the kind of place that embassies keep on for their staff, the square metres carefully equated with rank on the basis of some secret bureaucratic formula, their particular rating being high, for Jack was minister or something. They ate in a large and slightly dusty dining room with photographs of the children on a grand piano
and a painting of a saint – female, distraught – above the vast fireplace. Madeleine felt the need to apologise for the place: ‘It’s like living in a sacristy. I think it once belonged to a cardinal and he left all his holy pictures behind and now we have to look after them because they’re so valuable and if we didn’t they’d just go into some cellar beneath the Palazzo Barberini or something.’

The saint over the fireplace seemed pained by the prospect. A monstrance in her hand betrayed her identity to those who could interpret such things. ‘She’s Saint Clare,’ Madeleine said. ‘Just up Saul’s street.’ This remark was directed at another of the guests, a journalist of some kind. ‘Clare’s your patron saint,’ she explained.

‘I have a
patron saint
?’ He was Jewish – Goldstaub – and looked nervous at the prospect.

‘Oh, certainly. Patron saints don’t give a damn about your religion. They are highly ecumenical.’ And Madeleine launched into a little dissertation on patron saints. ‘There is a typical Catholic logic to the whole matter of patron saints,’ she explained. ‘Saint Lucy had her eyes put out, so she’s patron saint of opticians. Saint Apollonia had her teeth knocked out, so she got dentists. Clare is the patron saint of television because popular legend has it that she appeared in two places at the same time. Pope Paul appointed her.’

‘Pope Paul the
Sixth
?’ The journalist seemed aghast.

‘The very one.’

‘They still
do
this kind of thing? You’re joking.’

‘I am deadly serious, aren’t I, darling?’

Jack smiled indulgently from the other end of the table. ‘Maddy is always at her most serious when she is being absurd.’

‘Now, Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a gridiron––’

‘And got barbecues.’ The journalist was getting the idea.

‘Near enough. Cooks. Saint Stephen is bricklayers. They stoned him. Saint Sebastian, archers.’

‘Archers?’

‘They shot him. A hundred arrows. You’ve seen the pictures, surely.’

‘I thought that was Saint Bartholomew.’

‘He was flayed alive. Patron saint of taxidermists. Oh, and Saint Joseph of Copertino is the patron saint of airmen.’

‘
Airmen?
But, hell, they didn’t
have
airplanes.’

‘They do now. Saint Joseph used to fly around the place, so they chose him for the job.’

‘He used to
fly
?’

‘Fly. It’s quite well attested. He was some time in the sixteenth century, so it’s not all that long ago. Anyway, don’t you have flying rabbis?’

‘Not in Borough Park, we don’t.’ The man turned to Newman for some kind of authoritative judgement. ‘Hey, this is your scene, Father. Is all this true?’

Leo Newman, sweating and awkward at the other end of the table, agreed that it was, more or less. ‘The trick is to treat the absurdities of the faith as genial eccentricities, as proof of the boundless confidence of the believer. It’s not an article of faith. You don’t have to
believe
it.’

‘I should hope not.’

Madeleine caught the priest’s eye. ‘Does Father Leo believe it, though?’ And that was the moment when something turned inside him, something visceral, like the first symptom of disease. That was what made it all the more disturbing, that it seemed so profoundly organic. The cerebral he could deal with. The cerebral he could battle
against, had long ago learned to battle against. Mental images were things he could chase from his mind like Christ chasing the money-changers from the Temple (an incident that is generally accepted by the most sceptical of New Testament scholars as genuine, indeed pivotal). But when it was the temple of the body that was under assault, the dismissal was not so easy. No easier to dismiss a cancer. And her glance at him as they sat at the long dining table beneath the benevolent eye of Jack and the agonised eye of
Saint Clare Contemplating the Eucharist
, School of Guido Reni, seemed to plant the first seeds of some disease in his body.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied lamely.

‘I think you do,’ she said with that smile. ‘I think Father Leo is a sceptic.’ And the word
sceptic
splintered the atmosphere in the room with its harsh consonants, its barbed resonances.

Newman was one of the last to leave that evening. He felt a need to apologise as he was shown to the door. ‘I’ve outstayed my welcome.’

Madeleine helped him on with his coat, turned him round like a child to adjust the lapels. ‘Not at all,’ she said. Others were already going down the stairs, opening the outside door on to the street, allowing a draught of damp winter air to scurry into the stairwell. ‘We’re delighted that you thought it worth staying. You’ll come again, won’t you?’

‘Will I?’

‘If you’d like to. I’ll be in touch.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘I tell you what …’

‘What will you tell me?’

‘Show me your work. Can you do that? That’s what I’d like to see.’

‘At the Institute? It’s very dull. Books, documents, nothing interesting at all.’

‘Let me be the judge of that.’

‘Look.’

They were in the manuscript rooms of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, surrounded by grey steel shelving, lulled by the distant hum of air conditioning and dust filtering, enveloped in a sterile atmosphere designed to suspend what had been previously suspended only by good fortune: the subtle decay of the texts. The old Dominican who was the archivist fussed somewhere in the background, searching for something spectacular and mediaeval to show her, something miniated, rubricated, illuminated with its own inner, pious fire.

‘Look,’ Leo said. He had a computer on, the screen live and shining. A dun-coloured fibrous fragment hung there behind the glass, a fragment of papyrus the colour of biscuit, inscribed with the most perfect letters ever man devised, words wrought in the lean and ragged language of the Eastern Mediterranean, the workaday language of the streets, the meanings half apprehended, half grasped, half heard through the noise of all that lies between us and them, the shouting, roaring centuries of darkness and enlightenment. How was it possible to communicate to her the pure, organic thrill?

‘Is this is one of your pieces? One of the things you are working on?’

He nodded. ‘The En-Mor papyri.’

‘What exactly is En-Mor?’

‘A place. A God-forsaken place by all accounts, except that I suppose these finds show that God never forsakes anywhere. I’ve never been to the actual site. It’s just a
dig run by the Israeli authorities. And they found these fragments in a cave nearby.’ He traced the words on the screen with his finger. ‘
Kai eis pyr
. And into the fire. That’s what it says. Possibly from Matthew, a proto-Matthew. Matthew
chapter 3
, verse 10: Every tree that does not produce good fruit is to be thrown into the fire. Or Luke. They both have the same words.’

He could hear the whisper of her breath beside his ear. She leaned forward to see, leaned over his shoulder; and he was enveloped not by the mystery of the ancient script, its perfect characters, its tantalising context, but by the soft warmth of her presence, by the touch of a stray wisp of her hair, by her scent.

‘We’re not certain, of course. Nothing’s ever certain. But the site is thought to date from the first century. There’s the possibility that what we have are fragments of Q.’ She wanted to know. Her expression told Leo of her interest. Not mere politeness. ‘Q is
Quelle
, the source,’ he explained. ‘The collection of teachings that Matthew and Luke have in common, but which is not found in Mark. Now this phrase actually comes from the preaching of John the Baptist …’

‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ she breathed. Casually, quite casually she laid a hand on his shoulder as she leaned forward. That physical contact sounded louder in his mind than any ideas. ‘So these are the oldest known bits of the New Testament?’

‘Probably. But it’s more than just age. These finds almost prove that the source of the New Testament,
one
of the written sources at least, pre-dates the Jewish War. Now the implications of that …’

She seemed to be interested, that was what was so remarkable. She seemed to want to listen to him, whereas
Jack would just smile and nod and change the subject with a diplomat’s arrogance and a diplomatic unconcern. ‘Does it really
matter
?’ Leo had heard him ask. ‘In this day and age does it really
matter
any longer?’ And Madeleine had answered her husband tartly: ‘To me it does. To millions of people all over the world, as well. Not the clever ones like you, maybe. Not Her Majesty’s bloody Foreign Office, unless it has a political angle. But to
people
it matters.’

‘So what’s the place that you work for called?’ she asked him now. ‘The World Bible Center? Tell me about it.’

He smiled, not really knowing himself, not understanding the dynamics of the thing, the apparent random chance of it all, the manipulation of the hand of contingency that might be mistaken for the hand of God. A few months previously, that was all. There had been a telephone call in the middle of a dull morning, the voice of the director of the World Bible Center in Jerusalem wanting to speak to Father Leo Newman please, and was that Father Leo himself, and how happy he, Steve Calder, was to renew an old friendship with Leo after all this time. Leo knew Calder from a conference in California the year before. He remembered hair of perfect platinum and teeth of pearl. He remembered a low-slung villa amidst weeping willows and immaculate lawns and an illuminated swimming pool in which a Roman Catholic bishop was swimming in the company of a female Evangelical pastor. He remembered an argument during the evening barbecue about the Jesus Seminar, that group of academics who thought that biblical truth could be approached on a democratic basis, by a show of hands. Calder had been an enthusiastic supporter – ‘We’ve got to get more rationality and less faith into the debate,’ he had cried. ‘Faith is the enemy of discovery.’

Fool or fraud?

‘Leo, I want your help,’ the man had said over the phone. ‘We’ve got one hell of a find. A place on the Dead Sea called En-Mor. You know it? Well they’ve just turned up a whole slew of papyrus fragments. And we need someone of your status to help with these things. I’ll give you a look at the material and I’ll give you time to think about it. But I know you won’t need the time. I know when you see these things you’ll be hammering on our door and crying to be let in.’

The first photographs had come by courier the next day. There was that anguish of anticipation as he sat at his desk and struggled to open the package, fiddling with the plastic wrapper, tearing the waybill aside and slitting open the inner envelope to discover inside a single photograph, ten inches by eight. Of course he recognised the thing immediately as he slid it out on to the polished surface of his desk, recognised it in a generic sense, that is: a high-resolution photograph of a flake of papyrus. The fragment was five inches by four. There was a ruler laid alongside to give a scale. It was five inches by four and the edges were frayed and the texture of the material, the warp and weft of the plant fibres, was clear; and there were four lines of writing running across it. The text was blurred and scoured as though by a rough eraser, but the lines of writing were as straight as if they had been ruled, with all the exactness of a machine and all the individuality of an artefact. The ink was faded to brown but the characters were somehow still fresh – bright, live things.
Koine
. The language was
Koine
, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, the language that anyone with an education would have spoken in those days, the language of commerce and exchange, the language of administration
and law. Jesus would have spoken
Koine
. He would have talked to Pilate in
Koine
.

Leo had turned the photograph over just to see, to delay the moment of reading, just as one might savour a childhood treat by deliberately putting it off. On the back was a circular stamp, a stylised globe with the title
WORLD BIBLE CENTER, JERUSALEM
wrapped around the edge like an atmosphere; and a catalogue number.

Then he had turned back and started to read.

It was like solving a crossword clue. One word had stood out. One word had given the whole piece away, a single word that occurs a mere four times in the whole of the New Testament:
gennemata
. Offspring. He checked in his concordance, his hands shaking with excitement as he lifted the volume down from the shelf. Then there were a mere three letters of the following word, but there could be little doubt about them either: epsilon-chi-iota. E-Ch-I.

Echinos
, a hedgehog.

He had laughed aloud at the thought, laughed to himself in the silence of his room. Offspring of hedgehogs. He had wanted someone with whom he could share the joke, someone who would have laughed with excitement at the whole thing. But there was no one there. Just the institutional sounds outside: the slamming of a door, the labouring of the lift as it moved down to the ground floor, music playing in a nearby room. He almost got up from his desk and ran to the door to call someone, anyone to share his emotion, but he didn’t.