The Gospel of the Twin

Copyright 2016 Ron Cooper

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

All characters in this book are ficticious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Bancroft Press

Books That Enlighten

Bancroft Press

P.O. Box 65360

Baltimore, MD 21209-9945

(phone) 410 . 358 . 0658

(fax) 410 . 764 . 1967

bancroftpress.com

ISBN

978-1-61088-159-3 Hardcover

978-1-61088-162-3 eBook

978-1-61088-163-0 Kindle

Cover and Interior Design by J. L. Herchenroeder

Printed in the USA

For Sandra,

like everything I do.

Prologue

I, Judas Didymos Thomas, having wandered a diseased world and witnessed the extent of humanity's depravement and corruption, return at the ragged end of my days to a pile of charred rubble that once was Jerusalem, where I find my people scattered like chaff. No longer do I much care that anything here survives, or that anyone still breathes this filthy air, yet I must do one thing of paramount value: Before the peace of death silences me, it is imperative that I tell the true story of my twin, Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, also called the Christ by some.

After a century and a half of our rebellions and barren fields that would have been enough to drive away any respectable, profit-minded occupiers, and even after leveling Jerusalem and countless villages in Judea and the Galilee, the Romans still infest our land like fleas. The drunken, sodomite soldiers who razed the Temple and plundered our farms live in the shells of our houses while their idiot, nameless children shit in open view in the streets, and their swine wallow in the ashes of our civilization. Any of my people with sense fled this wasteland when they saw Jerusalem crumble along with the promises they could no longer believe their God would fulfill. A few fools remain, like me, spending their last days befriending death.

I am eighty years old, or perhaps older, as many shadows fall over my memories and darken my remaining eye. My family and my brother's spineless followers are all dead. The only evidence of a minimally decent God is that my brother did not live to trudge through the ruins of his brittle dreams, kicking about for a shard of fractured hope.

No one may remember him if I do not preserve the story. To some, he was simply one of a thousand insurrectionist peasants who felt the culmination of their schemes tacked to a tree like a drying hide. Worse, Gentile charlatans have scandalized his memory and made him a Dionysus.

I would rather Jesus be completely forgotten than transformed into something he was not. Since I cannot erase the lies, I must try to combat them by offering truth. I shall write his story in Greek, for my people are disappearing into unknown lands and, if they survive at all, will probably forget their language as they by now should have forgotten their Lord.

Do not look for Jacob and Esau here. While my brother's is indeed a story of jealousy, deceit, and betrayal, my connection to him was nothing so gauche as a newborn clutching his womb-mate's heel. If I have grasped anything, it is a thorough understanding of the man with whom I am of the same flesh, yet who was an enigma I have spent half a century attempting to unravel. Many adored Jesus, and even more despised him—such is the fate of all who inspire—but no one else felt about him the way I did, a way that even I am unable to fully express.

The human world, however, is constructed of stories, and if we find any meaning at all, it is in how we shape our peculiar way of being by speaking it or, in this case, writing it. Perhaps the very act of writing this book will bring some order to the broken images of my brother's life (as well as my own), his vision (as best I can understand it), and his legacy (as much as I may create one).

Chapter One

Verse One

Our father Joseph, who came to Nazareth from Bethlehem, constantly reminded us that he was Judean, and that Judea was the land of the Levites, the priests, the learned scribes, and anything else valuable about our people.

“The Galilee,” he told us children, “has produced only a wealth of dust and ignorance. You should be thankful that you're of Davidic seed. When the Lord restores our land, we'll return to my and James' real home in a real town.”

As a child, I dealt with my father's bitterness by imagining that Bethlehem was a paradise from which he'd been driven by the Romans and for which anyone from there would surely pine. I also knew that his first wife died in childbirth at age fifteen, saddling him with his newborn son, James.

I admired him for not doing the customary thing of leaving the infant with the mother's family. Instead, he brought little James along with him when he heard that the Romans were building towns in Galilee and thus came to find work as a laborer. Father said he needed a fresh start, but I found out later that his brothers were involved in some sort of scandal, and in what may have been the only wise decision of his life, he fled and spent the rest of his life wondering how he'd offended his inscrutable God.

“Maybe the Lord sent me here to become your father, Thomas,” he once said to me when I found him sitting under a juniper tree and dragging a knife through the dirt.

Our mother was a Nazarene child, as naïve as a blind kitten. Like the other illiterates of her family who seemed to survive merely out of habit, she was superstitious, seeing demon faces in egg yolks and hearing a vengeful God's voice in birdsongs. She broke her bread into even numbers of pieces, combed her hair only during a full moon, and buried her nail parings lest a witch steal them for ingredients in a curse. Her father, Joachim, eager to send her off with the first half-polite fellow whose eye she caught, gave Joseph an old shack for a dwelling and helped fix it up. If only some of Joachim's skill with a hammer and saw could have rubbed off on Joseph.

Joseph squeezed out a living carving stone and sawing timber for the foreigners' new homes in Sepphoris. Some of my earliest memories are of me and Jesus walking an hour each morning with our father and James to the new city. Jesus and I were too young to do more than hand Joseph a chisel or pour water on a rock as he tried to shape it. Later, our two younger brothers took up these tasks while Jesus and I did heavier work.

By the time we were about five years old, we had learned to mix mortar from sand and ash, to sharpen tools, and to identify different types of stone (limestone, granite, and flagstone) and lumber (pine, fir, and olive). We knew that the fine meleke stone and the cedar wood were not for us—only the skilled craftsmen could work with them. Jesus once made up a little song:
I stack my stones up to the sky / to see the angels by and by; / a bridge I build with board on board / to take me up to meet the Lord
. Our mother had us sing it for her often. Behind her dark brow labored a mind that probably believed a tall enough tower could indeed take her to see bat-winged angels circling about God's crowned, enormous head.

On the long walks to Sepphoris and back, Joseph taught us an alphabet song he remembered from his youth. He hoped that, unlike him, we would learn to read and write. James was four years our senior, and Joseph paid our neighbor, an accountant, to teach him such skills. Joseph made James teach Jesus and me, but James, as a Judean, treated his assignment as beneath him, even if Jesus and I were his half-brothers. We scratched our lessons on thin planks or broken tiles as James mocked our clumsy scrawls, calling us stupid Galilean urchins.

I tried to show James that I wasn't stupid by backwards reciting the Hebrew alphabet. James asked Jesus to name a book of Torah, and Jesus said Deuteronomy. James began to recite the book verbatim, until Jesus asked, “Is that what the scriptures are to you—a string of words for a contest?” Father yanked Jesus' ear, and even from a few cubits away, I heard the pop. (That ear troubled him all his life.) Jesus looked up at Joseph, “Do you think I am yours to treat as a slave? You will soon understand that I do not belong to you.”

I was shocked that Jesus was so impudent with our father, and my initial urge was to run and hide. But when Joseph drew back to slap Jesus, I shocked myself further by jumping in between them and taking a blow to my head that sent me sprawling. Jesus helped me up and whispered, “Do not hate him, Brother. He is only a man.” I was confused by that statement, and for a moment thought that he was verifying Joseph's mortality if I were so inclined to beat out the man's brains with his own hammer. Joseph stomped back to work mumbling either a prayer or a curse, and Jesus and I exchanged smirks the rest of the day.

We learned to abide our father's short temper, and to entertain ourselves, by often playing tricks on him. We would hide his shoes, throw pebbles at him as he slept, and speak softly to make him think he was going deaf. Once, when we were about eight years old, we enlisted the aid of a girl named Leah who liked mischief as much as we did. She lived on the other side of the village, although the fact is that even had she lived next door, Joseph would not have recognized her.

“Father,” Jesus said, “this girl is lost and thinks the Romans have taken her parents.”

Leah stood with her arms around me and pretended to sob.

Joseph looked up from the chisel he was sharpening. “The Romans? You've seen the Romans?”

“Yes. They were . . . Aaah! They're here!” Leah screamed and pointed down the road behind Joseph's back.

Joseph wheeled around, and the three of us children ran between the houses so old Joseph couldn't see us.

“Do you think we're cruel?” I asked Leah as we laughed.

“I wish I still had a father I could mock,” she said.

While Jesus and I found ways to cope with Joseph's gruffness, we had less patience for James' taunts. “You were birthed too early after your mother's marriage to be of Joseph's seed,” he liked to say. “Perhaps you're not even Galileans. Are your features not like those of Romans?”

I would curse James. “Pig eater! Father told me that your mother didn't die. She ran away with an Egyptian as soon as she saw your cow face.”

Jesus would try to placate me. “Pity him, Thomas. He is only jealous that we have a mother―one that he refuses to accept.” I took little comfort from what I saw as my twin's over-abundance of patience. What I couldn't see then was that such patience would turn out to be one of his elemental traits and, perhaps, one of his main flaws.

Joseph soon tired of the quarrels among his sons. In Sepphoris, we were occupied with work, but in Nazareth, Joseph wished to separate us from James. So, when we were about ten, he sent Jesus and me to a teacher, Zacchaeus, to learn Greek. Zacchaeus was a kind but demanding teacher who had one arm, no teeth, and ate only pigeon soup. Zacchaeus asked questions, and we wrote the answers in Greek as he tossed bread crusts in front of where he squatted and snagged his dinner with a surprisingly quick, spotted hand.

“This will be good for us, Thomas,” Jesus said to me. “We know that Hebrew is dying. We need to look to the future, and the future is Greek.”

In fact, I did not know that Hebrew was dying, although I wondered why Joseph or anyone else cared that we learn Hebrew when everyone in Nazareth spoke only Aramaic, and I thought nothing at all about the future. This, I realized, had become Jesus' way—always a step ahead of me.

“It'll be another hard task,” I said. “Father isn't looking at the future. He's just trying to get us out of his sight for a while each day.”

“It won't be hard for you,” Jesus said. “You were much better at Hebrew than I was. You'll be speaking and writing Greek in a few weeks. If we grow up to leave Nazareth, that'll be a great help to us.”

“Why would we leave Nazareth?”

Jesus rubbed his ear. “Why would we stay?”

After several Greek lessons, Jesus sat drawing in the sand with his finger, tracing the letter alpha over and over in varying sizes. “What are you doing, Jesus?” asked Zacchaeus. “Why do you not study?”

“This is the first of the letters, the beginning,” Jesus said without looking up. “I am studying its true nature. How else can I come to know the others?”

Any other time I would have thought that Jesus was teasing our teacher, but I could tell from his tone that he was serious, although I had no idea what he meant.

“Help him, Thomas,” Zaccheus said. “You're a better student. He could be like you if he tried. What am I to think of him?”

Old Zacchaeus had no idea how many others, including me, were to ask that very question.

Verse Two

The working men at Sepphoris napped in the shade after the midday meal, less, I suspect, from physical fatigue than to avoid yet another conversation about laboring for a suffocating oppressor. Meanwhile, the boys, who like Jesus and me, had come to work with their fathers, wrestled or chased each other around the stones and timbers.

Jesus was fond of making sculptures from mortar thickened with a little of the black soil found in goat pens. He liked to make birds and set them in the sun to dry. At the end of the day, he would throw them into the air and pretend they flew. Most would shatter on impact with the ground, but sometimes a man might take one home as a toy for his daughter.

One day, a boy said that he could make better birds. Jesus accepted the challenge, but instead of fashioning the likeness of a bird, he twisted and stretched the clay into a stick of about a hand's breadth and added wings of wood shavings that looked like carob pods fanning from the top. Jesus set it on a flat stone, and the other children mocked him: “What kind of bird is that?”

“Do they nest in your house?”

The other boy's lump actually looked more like a bird, but it was a crude affair with a bulbous head and a tail more like a dog's.

I knew what Jesus was up to. He could be as insolent as any other child. I stared into his eyes for a moment, my way of letting him know to listen and take me seriously. “That boy is going to be mad and want to fight. Just tell him his is better.”

Jesus looked at the boy, then turned back to me. “I can handle him.”

At the day's end, seven or eight boys gathered to witness the contest, probably hoping that a fight would break out. Jesus picked up his bird, pinched it to make sure it was dry, and held it out for the others to see. He placed it between his palms and, with a twist, flicked it into the air. It rose, and then whirled slowly to the ground like a floating leaf. The other boy then tossed his bird into the air and, of course, it fell and broke. A couple of the boys who were watching laughed and kicked at the pieces of the broken bird. I laughed too.

The boy who'd made the bird clenched his jaw and stared at me with narrowed eyes, as if I were responsible. Jesus must have seen that something was about to erupt and, like me, probably regretted being so spiteful, for he said to the boy, “Look, I can show you how to make one, too.” My brother always thought the best would come out of people if you just offered them kindness. He demonstrated that naïveté the rest of his life.

Instead of listening to my brother, the boy stomped on Jesus' bird, sat beneath a jujube tree, and drew himself into a ball. The boy's father, a burly man whom we children called Flat Nose (for an oft-broken nose that was testament to a lifetime of brawling), approached us and yelled, “What have you done to my son?” He turned his gaze from face to face, then addressed his boy. “Who hurt you?”

The boy pointed in my and Jesus' direction. Like most people, he couldn't tell us apart.

“You twins!” Flat Nose bellowed. “What did you do?”

I looked around and saw that other men were taking notice.

Jesus picked up the parts of his bird and held them out to Flat Nose. “We were making birds—”

Flat Nose slapped Jesus' hand away. Suddenly, Joseph appeared, yelling. Just as suddenly, the other men were in the middle and Jesus and I grabbed Flat Nose's arms. The boys were shuffling around in the dust and we ended up thrown to our backs, leaving the men to hold Flat Nose until he was calm.

Joseph was near us, lying against a tree. He'd hit his head and lay asleep for a few minutes. He had to stop and sit several times on the way home because of dizziness, which prevented his return to work for two days, during which he would not speak to Jesus and me, but instead scowled at us, angry over his lost wages.

“He's going to take you back to Sepphoris and sell you to the Romans,” James said.

“You lie,” I said. “The Romans wouldn't bother to pay. They would just take us if they wanted to.”

“Perhaps they already have,” Jesus said.