The Transmigrant

by Kristi Saare Duarte

  For effect, the executioner drove another nail into his feet, but Yeshua didn’t react. He was with God.

  When they finally raised the cross, Yeshua caught sight of the crowd who had assembled to watch the spectacle. Judean women who lamented the sacrifice of innocents, curious Alexandrian traders with their camels, a cluster of boys of the age when spilled blood excited more than horrified, and a centurion in full armor. At his feet, the soldiers chatted and laughed as they rolled sheep’s knuckles like dice on the ground to pass the time. None of his disciples had dared come, unwilling to risk meeting the same fate.

  The weight of his body caused the nails to rip the flesh of his wrists. He tried to push up against the plank under his feet for relief, but his feet slipped and his legs could not bear his weight. How long could he last?

  Through the afternoon mist, an angel appeared below him, illuminated by a dazzling light. Mariamne. Yeshua’s heart swelled with love. His faithful wife. He grinned through the delirium. Oh, those ignorant Romans, they could never imagine his rescue by a woman, and had allowed the wives, mothers, and sisters of the prisoners to approach the crosses. What fools. They did not realize that Mariamne was more powerful than any man.

  Yeshua smiled down at her.

  She didn’t smile back. Her hand rested on her rounded belly. Yeshua’s heart skipped. Was it true? Why had he not noticed the glow on her face earlier? Was there a budding life inside her?

  “Let me take you down, Love,” she whispered. She curled up by the cross and kissed his bleeding feet. Yeshua shook his head. He had accepted his fate. He hung there for all to see, a warning to others who threatened to overthrow the empire. They had made an example of him. Do not stir up trouble in the temple. Do not upset the priests. And most important of all, do not threaten the power of Pontius Pilatus.

  But Yeshua had shown them they could strip him naked and nail him to a cross, and still he would be at peace because he was with God. The material world was an illusion, and he was the proof.

  A yellow butterfly landed on his shoulder. It fluttered its delicate black-tipped wings as if to fan him. Its large black eyes seemed to stare right through him. What a gorgeous creature. And he recognized the spirit within. The butterfly had come to give him hope, to assure him that his disciples were ready to spread their own wings.

  Yeshua drifted off. The world disappeared into an abyss.

  And then his mother and his sister Miriam were there beside Mariamne. His mother threw herself at the soldiers’ feet, begging them to release her son. But they just kicked her away. Yeshua wanted to tell her not to worry, tell her he was all right, but his voice had dried out. Mariamne pulled his mother into her arms, embraced her, and wiped away her tears. Yeshua had never loved her more. If only his mother would understand that although her son hung dying on a cross, he did not suffer.

  “Lord, forgive them.” Yeshua’s voice cracked.

  The chatter stopped. Everyone, even the soldiers, looked up at him, shielding their eyes from the setting sun that had broken through the clouds. Mariamne smiled, at last.

  With a final push, Yeshua nodded at the soldiers. “Forgive them; they don’t understand what they are doing.”

  Yeshua’s chin dropped to his chest. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Only the moans of the men beside him kept him in the present. Unable to move his body, his spirit reached out and touched their souls to comfort them. Soon after, their whimpers ceased, and they hung motionless on their crosses.

  The air grew colder as the evening drew near. The thin, layered clouds turned orange against the dark blue sky. The crowd melted into an inseparable mass. The soldiers became one with the observers, the executioners, and his loved ones—and then with him. The oneness he had taught about was real. He loved and forgave them all. They were all reflections of him. And at last he realized he had also forgiven himself.

  Above him, a ray of brilliant light appeared to call him home. In the glow, he recognized the radiant faces of Abba, Yochanan, Kahanji, and Pema; they beckoned him to follow the light of the celestial doorway. God’s Kingdom. It was right here, as he had always imagined.

  Below him, the three women he had left behind—Mariamne, his sister, and his mother—wept in one another’s arms. They caressed his feet, calling to him as if he could return.

  Floating high, he watched one of the executioners step closer and poke his body with a stick as it hung lifeless on the cross. But he had already left his physical body, like so many times before, only this time the silver cord that attached him to his earthly self had snapped. There was no going back.

  Heaven embraced him like a hot summer breeze, enveloping him with pure love. Home. Yeshua looked once more at the three women at the cross who loved him so. They were ready, too. He had given them all he could. From now on, their fate was to continue without him.

  His father called him, Yochanan reassured him. Pema presented him with all the love of mankind. Kahanji invited him into the tunnel of light that continued into nothingness.

  And Yeshua followed.

  MAPS

  Author’s Note

  We don’t know much about Jesus. None of the books of the New Testament were generated during his lifetime. None of them, except possibly the Epistle of James, were written by people who had met him. Most of the New Testament books originated decades after Jesus’s death and are based on stories the authors had heard from people who knew people who knew people who had once heard Jesus speak. Imagine retelling an event to a friend, something you heard happened to someone else forty years ago. How much of that story would be accurate? Would you know the exact words that were spoken? Would the story have “grown” and become more interesting? Did the fish he caught weigh five pounds or fifty? And when it comes to Jesus, did he feed fifty people or five thousand with five loaves of bread?

  I’ve focused on the most authentic sources for this book, trying to establish who Jesus truly was. What did he look like? Where did he spend all those years not mentioned in the Bible—from age twelve to thirty? What really happened? At the same time, I’ve dismissed large parts of the New Testament and the common story line portrayed in movies and books.

  Why? Because the books we know as the New Testament were selected by Emperor Constantine and the Roman bishops during the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325, three hundred years after Jesus died. At the time, there were more than eighty versions of the gospels floating around, and the emperor decided to establish a consensus of what Christ stood for and what Christianity should mean. The oldest existing documents are tiny fragments of second-century scrolls, written generations after Jesus and his disciples lived. We don’t know how much of the Bible texts were changed during the previous three hundred years, nor do we know why the emperor and bishops deemed certain books “authentic” and others “fraudulent.” We can only assume that any books that didn’t proclaim Jesus as the Messiah and the only son of God were discarded. Around AD 380, Pope Damascus announced that the (cherry-picked) books in the New Testament were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and subsequently any questioning of the authenticity of the Bible became a punishable crime.

  The closest we come to actual first-century sources are the thirteen letters of Paul; however only seven of them are unanimously considered authentic by experts. But Paul of Tarsus never met Jesus; he never knew him. Paul only had a “vision” of Jesus a few years after Jesus’s death. In his letters, Paul recounts his quarrels with Jesus’s disciples and complains about how they rebuffed him. Although he begged the disciples to accept him as one of their own, even bribed them with food during the Jerusalem famine of AD 47, Jesus’s disciples would not oblige, because the stories Paul told were completely different from what their teacher Jesus had taught. (Galatians 1:7–21, Galatians 2:11–21, 2 Corinthians 11:22–24, 2 Corinthians 12:11, Philippians 3:1–3, etc.)

  Therefore, we can deduce that Paul invented his own story line about a mythical creature called Christos, the Greek word for the Messiah. Paul
was a Roman Jew who lived among non-Jews far away from Palestine. Thus, he had to attract followers by speaking about a god they would recognize. He based the characteristics of Christos on Attis, a dying and resurrecting god also called “the Good Shepherd,” and drew inspiration from other popular deities such as Horus, Adonis, and Apollonius (death and resurrection) and gods born from virgin mothers (Marduk, Perseus, Immanuel, Pharaoh, and even Caesar). He also added events such as Osiris’s last supper (Osiris was betrayed at this supper by the evil god Set).

  The only credible, relatively unbiased author from the time is Josephus Flavius (AD 37–94), a first-century Roman-Jewish historian. In his books, Josephus described all the contemporary spiritual influences and trends in detail, but didn’t mention anything about Jesus or the Christian communities. There is a passage where “Christ” is mentioned, but it is considered by all experts to be a later interpolation. Furthermore, Josephus mentions a whole slew of pseudo-Messiahs, prophets who behaved as though they had been chosen by God and who caused disturbances in the eyes of the Romans. Thus, if Jesus did exist, he was not the only healer who preached God’s word along the roads of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. And Jesus’s followers were not Christians; they were simply followers of a man called Jesus. The first mention of Jesus as the Messiah appears forty years after his death. However, although Jesus wasn’t widely known during his lifetime, his message of peace and love did have an effect and influenced people to carry it forward for centuries to come.

  Sources used for The Transmigrant

  I don’t pretend to know the whole truth (nobody does and nobody ever will), but I have tried to get as close to original, authentic sources as possible, those that have not been distorted over the years. Therefore, I’ve largely dismissed the canonical gospels (the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and have used only parts of Mark (written around AD 70) and Matthew (written between AD 80 and AD 150). I have not used any part of the gospels of John and Luke, which were compiled by a variety of authors between AD 90 and AD 110, as I consider them to be unreliable and hearsay at best. I have completely dismissed the Acts of the Apostles, which was written around CE 95 by followers of Paul, not followers of Jesus. Instead, I’ve relied on The Lost Gospel, the Book of Q (Quelle), which is believed to be the original but lost source of the canonical gospels. I’ve used the Nag Hammadi Library codices, a collection of more than fifty texts, that were discovered in upper Egypt in 1945 and include texts that were thought to have been destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define Christianity. I’ve also relied on Nicolas Notovitch’s The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, which includes Life of Saint Issa, Buddhist scrolls about Jesus’s life in India, which were discovered by the Russian adventurer in 1887. I’ve assessed the sources based on logic: if Jesus was a man of God, he would have been kind, curious, nonjudgmental, inclusive, and loving. It’s this person I’ve tried to portray in this novel.

  Did Jesus grow up in Nazareth?

  There is no proof that Nazareth existed in the early part of the first century AD. If it did, it would have been a small cluster of perhaps half a dozen huts. Archaeologists have discovered remnants of houses in the area, but most likely they were built by zealots who fled to the countryside after the uprising and destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 66. Nazareth is not mentioned in any scriptures of the time, not even in Josephus’s list of all sixty-three communities of Galilee. In addition, if Jesus had grown up in Nazareth, he would likely have said he came from Sepphoris, the Galilean capital only three miles from today’s Nazareth, just as people today say they are from New York rather than Staten Island, Paris rather than Vincennes, or London rather than Barnet. It’s more probable that the “from Nazareth” epithet derived from the word Nazirite, a member of an ascetic Jewish sect, someone who had sworn off wine and meat and was initiated into the faith by shaving their heads and then never cutting their hair again. If Jesus lived among Hindus and Buddhists, the Nazirite faith would have made a lot of sense to him. Given that all we know about Jesus’s adult life in the New Testament revolves around Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee, it’s fair to assume he grew up and lived in that area.

  Did Jesus flee Bethlehem and go to Egypt after the Slaughter of the Innocents?

  Only the Gospel of Matthew mentions the flight to Egypt. At the time, Bethlehem in Judea was a tiny village of no more than a few hundred inhabitants, and it’s not clear whether Mary and Joseph ever lived there. Neither Mark nor Paul, authors of the oldest New Testament books, mention Bethlehem. Also, there is no known record of a mass infanticide ordered by Herod the Great. Historians believe that the “Slaughter of the Innocents” refers to Herod’s killing of his own sons in 7 BC, not Jewish boys in Bethlehem. If Herod the Great had called for all boys under the age of two to be killed, the story would appear somewhere in historical sources, but it does not. It is more probable that the author(s) of the Gospel of Matthew created the story of the slaughter and the flight to Egypt to match the quote from Hosea 11.1, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” to support the claim that Jesus was the awaited Messiah.

  Did he have brothers and sisters?

  Theologians have debated this question for millennia. Some read the text of the New Testament where Jesus’s brothers and sisters are mentioned and conclude that yes, he did have siblings (Matthew 13:54–56; Mark 6:3). Others believe that Jesus’s mother was a virgin and stayed a virgin all her life. They claim that Jesus’s “brothers” and “sisters” referred to cousins, because the Hebrew language doesn’t distinguish between the words for brother and cousin. However, the gospels were written in Greek, and the word Adolphos can only mean blood brother.

  The Gospel of Mark (considered the most authentic of the canonical gospels) never suggests that Jesus was in any way a supernatural being. In fact, the only books in which Mary, his mother, is portrayed as a virgin is in the Gospel of Matthew, where the author desperately tried to force a connection between Messianic prophecies and Jesus, and the Gospel of Luke, written more than sixty years after Jesus’s death. Moreover, the virgin story was unknown to the original Christian community and didn’t flourish until the fourth century when Emperor Constantine created a Mother Goddess Mary as a Christian substitute for the popular Mother Goddess Isis.

  Did he really travel through Asia?

  Again, we don’t know, and unless we invent a time machine, we will probably never know for sure if the scrolls Nicolas Notovitch found in Ladakh in 1887 were authentic. According to Notovitch and the others who followed in his footsteps, the scrolls have been locked in cabinets in the monasteries around Tibet, which now cannot be reopened until the Dalai Lama returns to his homeland. Over the years, many historians have dismissed Notovitch as a fraud on the basis that no one else has ever seen the Ladakhi scrolls. But that's not true. In 1922, the Indian Swami Abhedananda saw the scrolls. In 1925, the Russian professor Nicholas Roerich saw them, and two women, the American Mrs. Clarence Gasque and the Swiss Madame Elizabeth Caspari, saw the same scrolls in 1939.

  Several facts support the theory that Jesus spent the bulk of his life in Asia. When you look at the similarities between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, it makes sense that Jesus’s beliefs were influenced by Eastern religions. A comparison of the travel times mentioned in the Ladakhi scrolls during which Jesus was said to have traveled from one point to another match Google Maps’ estimates of the time it would take to walk those distances. In addition, there are several places along the assumed route that may have been named after Saint Issa, like the Yuz-Marg meadow and the sacred building Aish Muga, both within a day’s travel south of Srinagar. One must also wonder, if Jesus stayed in Galilee all his life, what kept him occupied between the ages of twelve and thirty? Did he change from an incredibly well-spoken child to an adolescent who focused solely on carpentry for the next eighteen years only to one day discover he wanted to teach again? Not likely.

  Did Jesus have twelve disciples?

  When I started wr
iting the story, I realized that the names of the disciples listed in the Bible (Matthew 10:2–4, Mark 3:16–19, Luke 6:13–16) do not match. My doubts deepened when contemplating why Matthias had to replace Judas after Jesus’s death to once again have a group of exactly twelve disciples (Acts 1:12–26). Why would Jesus care about the quantity? Why twelve? Wouldn’t it make more sense to select all your best students, whether they numbered eight or twelve or eighteen?

  In the first century, the number twelve was considered a magical, complete, or perfect number. In fact, the number twelve occurs 187 times in the Bible. There were twelve tribes in Israel. Jacob had twelve sons. The New Jerusalem that descended out of heaven had twelve gates made of pearl that were manned by twelve angels. There were twelve loaves of permanent offerings on the golden table. Solomon had twelve administrators in his kingdom. The book of Chronicles contains twelve great priests. And so on. We can deduct from this that Jesus did not have twelve disciples; it was just a good number to use to emphasize his holiness. The first time that twelve apostles are mentioned is in The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a sectarian Jewish document written in the first century AD but later adopted by Christians who altered it substantially and added Christian ideas to it.

  Did Jesus marry?

  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Jesus was celibate. A normal marital status, on the other hand, would have been assumed and would not need to be mentioned. In the first century, Jews were strongly opposed to celibacy and the Romans enforced fiscal penalties against it.

  Could Jesus have been homosexual? Yes, it’s possible, but it’s more likely that he was married, and that Mary Magdalene was his wife. She’s always the first woman mentioned among women in the Bible. In the Gospel of Philip, one of the gnostic gospels written around the third century AD and discovered in the caves of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, we can find the following references: “Magdalene, the one who was called his companion” and “[... loved Mary Magdalene] more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her [lips].” In addition, the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, a fourth-century papyrus fragment copied from a second-century scroll and presented to the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School in 2012, includes the lines “Jesus said to them, my wife,” and “she will be able to be my disciple.”