Gospel (36 page)

These are the same stories the
perushim
used during the Tribulation of Antiochus IV, overstuffed and legendarized beyond belief. In Ashkelon one can kiss the rope of Simon ben-Sheta, which he used to hang eighty witches by his own strength; in Jericho one can place one's lips upon a lemon thrown by a Pharisee martyr during the desecration of that sinful sprout of Satan's vine, Alexander Jannaeus.
21

I can confidently say, notwithstanding James's commerce, Our Church is sure to soon outgrow the trade of relics and legends and saints, God be praised.

28.
Worse than his relic-mongering, truly, is the misinformation in his accounts and gospels. Among James's library is a gospel that concerns the life of Mary, mother of Our Lord, and the childhood miracles of Our Master—not a truth in the thing!

Our Savior as A Child debates the rabbis as an infant, He makes birds out of clay like every other Jewish mystic for the last hundred years, He kills playmates and brings them back to life.
22
James ends this gospel with outrageous tales of the donkey Our Master rode into Jerusalem upon. Villagers followed Our Master out of town to collect the diamonds and gold coins that would appear miraculously in place of dung droppings. There is an account of the fish caught by Peter and Andrew when Our Lord was in the boat, that sang hosannahs. There are Roman spears that blossom and flower in Our Lord's presence; there is the Jordan that reverses its flow around Our Savior; there is Our Lord walking to meet John the Baptist in the Jordan, walking atop the water, and then John walks above it as well but is not the Anointed One of God and therefore sinks.…
23
One cannot list all the preposterous accretions.

29.
One invention of James's led me to severe remonstration: Our Master's birth sanctified by Six Persian Magi. One scarcely knows how to protest strongly enough! To introduce the demonic magi of the Persians into the Life of Our Master, as if their consent to God's Holy Will was required!
24

“But my brother,” James said to me, “we are making great progress in Persia, where they prefer Our Master to their own Mithra. I have sent them a piece of the swaddling cloth for their adoration in Gabae [Isfahan]. It is a harmless thing to add this little story! We may bring a nation to Abraham's bosom!”
25

30.
I believe my sarcasm showed when I noted that James's account had Our Master as a child flee to Egypt with His family.

“He must go to Egypt,” James explained, “because the Prophet Isaiah said the Messiah must come out of Egypt. So I have written that, to escape Herod's rage, Our Master's parents fled with the babe to Egypt.”

I protested, “Across hundreds of miles of barren desert to a hostile country? They could have escaped Herod's jurisdiction less than thirty miles away, here in Ptolemais! How could anyone expect such nonsense to gain credit and not be found ridiculous through the years?”

31.
James then said to me, “Matthias, my brother, it is a matter of great debate, even amongst the Nazirenes, whether the Son of Joseph was the long-awaited Messiah. He is of David's family, indeed, and of Bethlehem, but many prophecies are unfulfilled by Him. It is important that what is written of Our Lord support the thesis, is it not? Our Teacher was not of humble birth, for example. We know that His father was a carpenter and made of money!
26
His mother, the Sadducees are now saying, was with child before her marriage…”

What lies will they not tell?

James related to me, “His detractors say He was the bastard of a Roman and a prostitute from the Egyptian court. They say Mary gave birth alone and deserted by her customer, scorned by her village and family, squatted and gave birth tied to a palm tree for support.”
27

32.
I asked if God had any need of fictions in order to make the Son of Man more than what He was, when what He was is supreme!

James said to me, “The Nazirenes of John Mark's Damascus circle are convinced that the Messiah must be born of a virgin. A virgin, I mean, who has never known a man.”

Of course, so He can be as Mithra, born of a virgin and Osiris, born of a virgin, and Tammuz, born of a virgin!
28

33.
James asked me, “How are we to reach the Gentiles whose religions have these wonders, if not with the mysteries of Our Lord's birth? You yourself have heard His mother Mary talk endlessly about her little angel—try making a gospel from that! His birth is of no true interest, so what is the harm of making it so, to better persuade the Gentiles, who will simply believe anything, it must be said. How can we coax them to read, say, one of your learned tracts, my dear Matthias?”

But, I said, I still would prefer that we could bring them into the Kingdom by loving them.

James said in return, “Go try to love your fellow Romans and Syrians in Ptolemais tonight and see where it gets you. You're a fine one to preach. I have never known a more elitist man in my life than you, brother Matthias. You have made it quite clear that you think yourself better than any of the Twelve, me included, me and my humble birth! So I shall wait for you to commence the conversion of the Gentiles by brotherly love.”

34.
My Josephus, you must know as a fledgling historian (as I, your brother, have known for some time), that it is not ten years after a man of consequence perishes in this ignoble land, whether prophet, king, or rabbi that he is not festooned with legend and myth like some general of old. Diligent though my own history may be, will I ever know what is the true account? O, that I had asked more questions of the Master! No word should have left his mouth without my hearing it!

As I wrote to you in our earlier letters, Josephus, I had only but one long meeting with the Teacher of Righteousness and with a sixteen-year-old's confidence I depended upon my memory—I curse myself for not bringing a scroll like Matthew or John and writing down his every utterance. In the one or two private moments the Teacher and I shared He was all human goodness, this emanation of love and purity as no man I had ever met. I was in such awe that all I could stammer were commonplaces and banalities. How little the Greatest One Among Us must have thought of your wretched brother.

35.
Before the light of the next morning, I found James risen, pained by gout, limping along his marble terrace that overlooks the sea. I asked James if he had any of the True Church in his heart. Did he not recall the kindness and love of He Who Redeemed Us? What if the Teacher of Righteousness were to return, as He said He would, and were to behold James's shameless business of bribes to Romans, exaggerated martyrdoms, and certainly, the wealth and splendor that James had attained?

James said to me without hesitation, “You have judged me unfairly. What I do here is what all holy men do, just as Daniel and Elijah have tales woven around them, just as Ezra has culled the wheat to suit his whim.
29
It is by such tales we move the mob.”

36.
James took me to the terrace edge and we looked upon Ptolemais, beginning to stir in the foggy morning before the sun's arrival. The cocks crowed on the hillside and one heard the bells of animals as they shook themselves awake. In such a scene of peace, James was moved to say the following:

He said to me, “No, my brother. Our Lord has long since ceased to fill my heart in the way you mean. I look back at those days and find us hopeful and young and quite willing to see all that we saw. I wanted so much to be at the side of the Messiah—you cannot imagine! My mother had raised me for this. And when we rode into Jerusalem for Passover, when the crowds sang His name and bowed down before Him …

“But then He told the priests He could tear down the Temple and rebuild it in three days.
30
This did not happen and for once I saw Him as a mistaken man. Holy, possessed of enormous power, but mistaken somehow as to His role. And the mob, when they did not see this miraculous tearing down and building up … they were the same rabble who lined the streets to spit and jeer at Him as He was marched to the Western Gate with His cross. It is by my writing and my miraculous relics that I will avenge this, and bring this mob running back to Him. I will yet have their tears, their racked and pleading hearts.”

37.
And what of when the Teacher of Righteousness had risen from the tomb?

James said to me, “Those few hours in those strange days when He appeared again passed as in a dream. Just ask, Matthias, any of the Disciples. You will not hear the same story twice! No one can agree on what happened.”
31

Fearing the answer, I asked James if he felt the Lord's Resurrection was an illusion, or worse, a sham? For I was not there.

James said to me, “No, it was no illusion. I am quite sure it was He. Though, some nights I am not willing to believe it myself. It is curious. My having seen Him risen from the dead did not make it easier to accept.”

Here he embraced me and gave me the brotherly kiss of peace.

38.
And James said in parting, “Think, Matthias, of the millennia to come. Just as we revere Moses, they will revere Our Master, and how much more fortunate they will be. Never to have known Him! Free to suppose Him on clouds, borne by angels, light shining from His face, when we poor souls saw Him at His bodily functions, snoring beneath a tree, laughing after one of Peter's hopeless jests. You still disapprove of me, but I give future generations a belief in Our Master in a way they will understand. I construct the rudiments of faith for them.”

And with our different views of ministry we parted peacefully.

39.
Xenon and I then walked to the port. Xenon had slept in the cellar with the good-natured servants amid James's vast hoarding of wines and liqueurs and it apparently was no good accommodation, because the lad was violently ill all morning, irritable and unable to speak clearly or prevent himself from falling asleep all day long. (I am glad to be old and not so much in need of sleep as the young.)

40.
Yet, I tell you I am to this day haunted by James. A vision of him I have late at night, by his candle scribbling feverishly some new tale corresponding to some old prophecy, laughing as he takes a dog's bone and wraps it in a fine case and declares it a relic of a blessed martyr, all the while, supposing himself doing the work of religion. I appeal to you as a fellow historian and a believer-in-God, my brother Josephus: was this the way it has always been? Legends and miracle tales from anonymous holy men who meant well but did disservice to the truth?

ITALY

 

“… O lead me where you said but now awhile,

So that I may behold St. Peter's gate,

And those you say are so oppressed by grief.”

Then he moved on: I followed in his steps.

—from
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, canto 1
(1320)
D
ANTE
A
LIGHIERI

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

—
Christ Stopped at Eboli
(1947)
C
ARLO
L
EVI

Then the Magnifico Giuliano remarked: “We could add to this what Nicoletto used to say, namely, that rarely do we find a lawyer indulging in litigation, a doctor taking medicine or a theologian being a good Christian.”

—
The Second Book of the Courtier
(1528)
B
ALDESAR
C
ASTIGLIONE

I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

—
Foucault's Pendulum
(1989)
U
MBERTO
E
CO

 

 

Sometime in the dark early morning O'Hanrahan awakened, groggy from a half-pint bottle of brandy. The train was stopped. It was cold.

O'Hanrahan looked around the first-class compartment. A man under an overcoat, snoring lightly, sprawled over two seats appeared more tortured than restful. A teenage German backpacker in T-shirt and shorts, long skinny legs bristling with white hair, intellectual's glasses—he too, somehow, was asleep. Beside O'Hanrahan was a woman sitting in perfect stateliness, eyes closed as if in polite meditation, a veteran of the overnight train. Sitting by the window, the professor pushed on the glass to make sure it was closed all the way. They must be in the Alps, he figured. He stuck a finger behind the windowshade to peek out at the scene familiar to any train traveler on the continent: some border somewhere, fluorescent light towers, sleepy officials laughing and smoking short, filthy European cigarettes. Periodically there'd be a musical tone and a disembodied announcement made over the public address in some meta-language no one quite understood, another tone, then silence.

And now the whistle that meant they were pulling out. And as the train lurched to a start and the sleepers sank back into the rhythm of train sleep, O'Hanrahan saw the sign pass by, white letters on metallic blue:
DOMODOSSOLA.

He smiled helplessly: again I am in Italy.

The presentiment of Italian sun and plazas and food and drink, the warmly held knowledge that, yes, the rest of functional Europe is behind now, I have arrived again in the land that speaks the language of the heart. One does not travel to Italy, one returns there. Once in a former, happier life, I made love here, I knelt in prayer here in this land where empires, churches, tyrants and
condottieri,
popes and princes, gods and temples rose and fell but always, always, the worship of the Beautiful persisted.
Cara Italia,
the first adolescent crush of the World …