The Gospel Of Judas (30 page)

They ate supper in the tiny garden at the back of the house, with the two children running amok around the barbecue and the dining table. David’s wife was called Ellen. They were devout Christians the pair of them, struggling to match their faith with the rest of the world, members of a quiet and convinced American Baptist congregation. They had moved to the Holy Land to further David’s career in the obscure art of papyrology, but also to be nearer the centre of their faith. They had learned Hebrew. They attended services with a group calling themselves Jews for Jesus. ‘And now there’s this scroll,’ Ellen said quietly. ‘Isn’t it heretical?’

Leo tried to reassure her. ‘Many early texts are heretical in one way or another. The Gospel of Thomas, for example. Some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The early Church was riddled with dissent and disagreement.’

‘But this is different, isn’t it? David says this is different.’

‘It’s older, that’s all.’

She wouldn’t let go. She was a big, beautiful, untidy woman. Her brow was furrowed, with concern for her children, concern for the faith, concern for the future of the world. ‘It’s not just older than other non-canonical texts, is it?’ she insisted. ‘It’s older than
anything
. It’s older than the gospels themselves.’

Leo agreed that, yes, it was. It appeared to be older than any New Testament text, older than the oldest relic of the gospel, far older that the Chester Beatty, older than the Rylands fragment. The oldest text in Christendom.

‘And it denies the resurrection?’

There was a silence. David brought hamburgers from the barbecue and got the children to sit down.

‘Yes,’ said Leo. ‘The writer claims that he saw Yeshu’s body in its corruption. We haven’t got to the end of the scroll yet, but that’s what he says at the start.’

Ellen said softly, ‘I believe that my Redeemer liveth.’

‘So do millions of others.’

‘And now you’re telling me that he died like anyone else. What do you think, David?’

But her husband was silent. The thing disturbed him. The whole matter of the scroll, with its plain, insistent voice, its lack of appeal to the miraculous or the fantastic, its plain historical witness, all of it disturbed him.

Finally Ellen turned back to Leo. ‘I remember in the days of the Cold War,’ she said. ‘My father was in the Air Force. We lived on airforce bases, surrounded by bombers and missiles. I remember I used to have dreams about the whole thing going wrong, the airplanes taking off and the missiles being launched. And the others coming in. Great silent flashes in the sky. Looking out over miles of countryside and seeing the mushroom clouds rising. I would wake up panicking in a sweat, but I never told anyone about it, not
my mother, not my father. I feel like that now. The same panic, the same sense of pure, unmitigated disaster.’

David reached across the table and took her hand. She shook her head, but let him hold her hand just the same. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Would you like to say grace?’ she asked Leo. ‘Weren’t you a priest once? Didn’t David tell me that?’

‘I still am. Technically I still am.’

She smiled, and her eyes glistened. ‘Aren’t we all priests in Christ?’

So Leo said grace for his hosts, and the little family bowed their heads over the food as though they all believed that what he said carried some kind of moral weight; and in the act of making that small and unimportant prayer Leo felt something of the power that had once been his, the power and the glory that had deserted him.

Later, when the children had been put to bed, Leo talked about Madeleine. It was the first time he had ever talked to anyone about her, apart from oblique comments to Goldstaub. But now he sat in the Tedeschis’ garden in Jerusalem and told them the whole story, more or less. It was a kind of expiation. Merely to talk about those days in Rome put some of the ghosts to rest.

Afterwards they walked to David’s car. The sky above the houses was blurred with the lights of the city, but still they could see the stars. ‘There’s a moral in that, isn’t there?’ David said.

‘Moral?’

‘Something to do with still seeing the stars even through a polluted sky. Man is in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars and still seeing them despite the pollution.’

‘I suppose there’s a moral in most things if you look for it.’

‘What’s the moral in the Judas scroll?’

Leo had no answer. They drove back to the Bible Center in silence, through the darkened suburbs of the city where Jews waited for the coming of Messiah and Arabs waited for the call of Allah, and as they approached the gates of the World Bible Center they found parked cars and flashing lights and armed, uniformed men. Policemen flagged the car down.

‘What the devil’s this all about?’ David exclaimed. That was the nearest he would ever come to blasphemy. He would never invoke the name of God, but in moments of surprise or stress he might invoke the devil. ‘What the devil—?’

Torches shone in their faces and voices from beyond the lights shouted at them. ‘Get out! Identity cards! Keep your hands in sight. Identity cards! Papers!’

‘How can we do both those things at once?’ Leo asked. He was grabbed and pushed round so that he stood with his hands on the car roof.

‘Are you being funny?’ the voice asked just behind his ear. ‘You think you’re funny guy?’ There was a hint of America in the disembodied voice, a suggestion of American movies. Guns were hard against his ribs. Hands ran all over him, under the arms, down the chest, into the crotch, down the legs. ‘What you doing here? Where you come from?’ they asked.

David looked across from the other side of the car, his face thrown into harsh relief by the lights. Leo was reminded of a face painted by El Greco, the long, lean lineaments, the dark and agonised eyes. He had the patient tone of a parent admonishing children. ‘We’ve just come from my home. Mr Newman lives here. We’re on the staff of the Bible Center. May I ask what’s going on?’

‘Can you provide evidence of that?’ the policeman asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Your movements this evening,’

‘Of course we can.’

Calder appeared. He looked as though he had just been dragged from his bed. His hair was awry and his eyes were wild. In sharp contrast to Tedeschi he was shouting. ‘What the hell has been going on? What in God’s name is happening? What are you doing with my colleagues? These men work with me.’

There was a pause around the two figures and the car, and then an apologetic dusting down. Identity papers were restored to their owners. ‘You never know,’ the man in charge said helplessly. ‘You never know.’

‘It seems there’s been some kind of break-in,’ Calder explained as they went up the drive and into the main building. ‘Someone got over the fence and forced a window.’

In the entrance hall the custodian was explaining to anyone who would listen that he had been doing his rounds in another part of the building, that he was always alert, that he never slept on duty. They went round the building with him, opening doors, turning on lights in empty, expectant rooms. In the manuscript rooms a door was open that ought to have been closed, a cabinet was unlocked that ought to have been locked, but there was nothing else. The scroll lay sealed beneath its panes of plate glass, like a winding-sheet on display in a museum. Nothing of significance had been taken, no particular damage was done. But the curious event itself and the subsequent investigation by the police brought an air of disquiet to the Center. Suddenly it seemed that the place was in the front line of a battle whose motives were unclear and whose combatants were undeclared.

‘We must be vigilant at all times,’ Calder announced to the assembled staff the next morning. ‘We must be always on watch.’ On the table in front of him lay a copy of that morning’s
Jerusalem Post
. B
IBLE
C
ENTER
S
CENE
O
F
M
YSTERY
B
REAK-IN
, the headline announced. Had the intruders been after the new scroll? Journalists contacted the Bible Center to ask for confirmation or denial throughout the morning. Could the document be examined? Could the director make a statement, not about the break-in but about the scroll itself? Were stories true that this was the testimony of the disciple who betrayed Jesus? Was it a forgery? Was it a hoax?

The international press followed on the heels of the national. Could they take photographs, could they do interviews? Telephones rang at the Center, in the annexe, at people’s homes. J
UDAS
D
ISCOVERY
R
OCKS
C
HRISTIAN
C
HURCH
, was the headline in the London
Times
.

‘We must control the information,’ Goldstaub advised the committee. ‘Press releases, official interviews. We must manage the information flow. We must pro-act, not react.’ His voice had about it a hint of desperation, Canute advising on how to stem the tide.

‘Can you confirm rumours about this text?’ an interviewer asked Calder in front of the baleful eye of a television camera. ‘Can you deny that it calls into question some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith?’ Calder smiled urbanely into the lights and evaded the question. ‘I would call it another witness,’ he said. ‘An alternative witness.’

It was in those days that the Children of God first appeared. No one quite knew where they had come from but they gathered on the road outside the Bible Center with placards and banners and a clear determination to pray for the souls
of the damned locked up inside the building. Their camper van had
God is Great
painted in crude lettering along the side.

Leo went to speak with them. The weather had broken and there had been rain that afternoon. There were blue-grey clouds hanging like dirty linen over the city; the tarmac still had the slick of wetness. On the far side of the road were the protesters, six or seven of them, women and men. One of the women carried a baby on her hip. The adults were young, but their skin had the tanned and weathered look of parchment and somehow that made them seem older than their years. Their hair was plastered down and they smelt of damp.

‘What do you want here?’ he asked. But they looked past him, through him, tangential to him. ‘The Word is God’s,’ they told him. ‘You have no right to the Word. The Word is from God and the Word is God and there is no other Truth.’ You could hear the capital letters in their speech. One of their number, a young man with a beard and glazed eyes, came up to Leo. ‘All other words are the words of Satan,’ he said loudly. ‘You will burn in hell for what you are doing.’

‘All we’re doing is reading a text that has been discovered at an archaeological site,’ Leo said helplessly.

‘It is all written,’ the man said. ‘It is there in the Apocalypse.’ And he raised his eyes heavenward and began to quote. ‘“So I took the scroll from the angel’s hand and swallowed it and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. But when I had eaten it my stomach turned sour.”’ He glared at Leo. ‘Who can doubt that he is God’s creature and will suffer God’s wrath?’

The work of translation continued, the writing and the
revising. The committee pondered the words, pulled things this way and that, argued, criticised, debated, speculated. There was an edge of anger to the debates, as though each member was fighting for his or her own interests.

After one such meeting Goldstaub approached Leo and handed him a copy of the latest edition of
Time
magazine. The cover showed a reproduction of the crucifixion by Mantegna, the one with the Holy City brooding in the background and the unrepentant thief hanging on a forked tree. The picture was overwritten with a mighty question mark. S
CROLL
Q
UERIES
J
ESUS
S
TORY
, the title said. Inside was a short, sharp summary of the whole story with an information box about all the extant papyrus texts of the New Testament. There was an item on the current state of Christianity in the world. There was a photograph of Calder and the same photograph of Leo that had been snatched at the Ministry of Justice in Rome.
As the world begins the third millennium
, the story asked,
does it also face the end of the religion that, more than any other, has marked those two thousand years? In the nineteenth century Nietzsche declared that God is dead. Perhaps, in the company of an ex-American Baptist and a renegade Catholic priest, we are about to witness His burial
.

Meanwhile the translation continued, the unpicking of the text, the careful knitting together of the pieces:

In the week before the great feast he was anointed by the woman
(Mary?)
… he came into the city as it had been prophesied, riding on a donkey’s back; and the people hailed him as their king. The cohort
¹
was amazed
²
.
Youdas witnessed this. He believed in the rebirth of the nation (and the) (restoration?) of the house of Israel. He wished for the
cleansing of the Temple in the name of the Lord. But the man Yeshu believed that he had become like a god
³
and had the power of kings and was the Messiah
⁴
of God
⁵
.
His band(?) waited outside the city for the word to be given by the elders to enter the city, for his demands were the throne and the crown and the destruction of the forces of Rome. And the elders of the people argued over his manner of taking power
.

¹
speira
. The Roman garrison in Jerusalem.

²
ekplisso
, struck, astonished, amazed.

³
the anarthrous noun
theos
, ‘a god’ in all probability signifying ‘godlike’. cf. John 1:1.

⁴
massia
. The Hebrew word transliterated.

⁵
El
. Again, the Hebrew word for God transliterated.

‘The anointing at Bethany and Palm Sunday,’ Calder said from his place at the head of the table. ‘The triumphal entry. Even with the donkey. The Zechariah prophecy.’ The members of the committee bent over the transcript and Leo’s translation. ‘Does it mention Mary? Is that what it says here?’