by Craig Smith
Pilate's venality is a matter of less contention. While he is not specifically mentioned as being especially corrupt, the custom of the day was to return to Rome quite rich after an assignment in the provinces. It was said Tiberius kept his administrators in place for long periods of time so they would not feel obliged to build their fortunes too quickly.
It is almost a cliché to call Judaea a backwater but I find no evidence of it. The East, as it seems to me, fed Rome financially, culturally and, yes, even literally. Caesarea, as we now know, was an extraordinary city - a model of Roman engineering, second only to Antioch of Syria in its ostentatious display of wealth. The Temple compound in Jerusalem was one of the great creations of the ancient world - and Rome did not pay for it. The Jews did.
While it is generally assumed that Caiaphas was the power in Jerusalem, he in fact owed allegiance to his father-in-law, the former High Priest Annas (aka Annanus). Caiaphas was probably appointed not by Pilate but by his predecessor, Gratus, after the prefect quarreled with Annas. Caiaphas's marriage to the daughter of Annas came immediately after his appointment (obliging him to answer to his father-in-law). It is a virtual certainty that the spur to the Jerusalem aqueduct was paid for with Temple funds.
There are a number of ancient accounts about Pilate's wife - all the stuff of legend. Other than her dream in the Gospel of Matthew, we know nothing about her - including her name. Legend calls her Claudia Procula, making her a Claudii. In the Orthodox tradition she is a saint. We know wives did travel with Roman administrators. Many set up shadow courts and became as powerful as their husbands. Tradition gives Procula two children, but many Roman patricians at this time were childless - often by choice.
Cornelius, the centurion, is mentioned in Acts, and is said to be the first gentile to convert to The Way (the terms Christianity and Christians had not yet been coined, this being before the conversion of Paul). Cornelius had a vision of Christ (perhaps on the Cross) and may even have been the same centurion who participated in the Crucifixion. Peter brought him to the faith in Caesarea.
The existence of Pilate's Portrait of Christ is mentioned in the second century by Irenaeus - after which I can find no further historic reference to the painting. Irenaeus says the Gnostic sect in possession of this panel believed that whoever prayed to it (the mood of the verb suggests continuously or regularly) would live forever and never age.
The history of the Holy Face of Edessa is far more complex, a mix of verifiable fact and undeniable legend. In one tradition Jesus sent a cloth he had touched to his face to Edessa to heal the king of leprosy; when Abgar (aka Agbar) saw the cloth, he also saw the face of Jesus and was healed. In another account, Paul sent a panel (?) painting 'made by no human hand' to the King of Edessa. Both of these stories (along with a Syrian text telling the tale somewhat differently) predate the discovery of the actual image or painting buried inside Edessa's city wall in AD 525.
Some believe the image of Christ that was found in Edessa was the Shroud of Turin (taken to France by the Templars and kept now in the Italian city of Turin); others speculate that a cloth with Christ's image was sent to Constantinople and then on to Rome, where it became known as the Veil of Veronica. A third theory is that this image inspired one of the famous icons of the Russian Orthodox Church, and still another theory associates the Holy Face with the oldest known icon of Jesus, the 6th century painting now in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai. The idea that it was Baphomet, the image the Templars worshipped, is so far as I know wholly original.
To my knowledge no one has connected Baldwin I, the first king of Latin Jerusalem from 1100 to 1118, to the Holy Face, the Grail, or the legend of the Fisher King - though he does fit the bill perfectly.
During the nineteenth century, the Arsenal Library in Paris contained the Vatican Archives (courtesy of Napoleon), including every known work on magic and all of the Templar records and artifacts. This made the Arsenal ground zero for the occult revival - which saw public and private acts of necromancy (raising spirits) and the birth of modern magic and occult belief. Both Oscar Wilde and his wife maintained strong ties with occult groups throughout their lives, though in his last hours Wilde converted to Catholicism - in my opinion a genuine conversion that was years in the making.
Wilde did meet a young painter named Armstrong in Paris shortly before his death and the painter was subsequently instructed by his parents to sail home on the next ship (to save him from Wilde's sin). On the last night that Wilde was out of his bed, we know he sat without his usual friends in an out-of-the-way tavern (quite naturally unable to pay his bill) and may have talked to another young painter named Bill Landi, but then that is only the speculation of a storyteller.
At the end of the twentieth century Switzerland came under legal attack for not returning bank funds to the survivors and heirs of victims of the holocaust. The banks insisted they had lost the records of these accounts. Then one night a security guard discovered a cart-full of these records set out with instructions to have the material incinerated the following morning. The guard stole several pages to prove his story, and found someone who helped him take the news to the world. The Swiss bankers, impeccable for three centuries, were caught in their collective lie and agreed to settle. In the aftermath of their disgrace, a number of new treaties have been put in place obliging the banks to cooperate with international inquiries about suspicious accounts. Banking secrecy in Switzerland is now, presumably, a thing of the past.
In Switzerland, there are billionaire fugitives, intelligence operatives, disenfranchised aristocracy, wealthy art dealers, master thieves, mountain climbers, and of course independent bookstore owners, but those in The Painted Messiah are all the work of my imagination.
For more on The Painted Messiah visit my website: www. craigsmithnovels. ch
CS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the following individuals who read an earlier draft of this novel and gave such cogent remarks: Harriet McNeal, James McNeal, Marilyn Bisch, Mike Jefferson, Martha Ineichen, Shirley Underwood, and Burdette Palmberg. For their continuing support and encouragement, thanks also to Herbert Ineichen, Doug and Maria Smith, Don Jennermann, and Rick Williams.
And a special thanks to Jeffrey Simmons and Ed Handy side - the men who made this happen!
Glock-touting heroes Kate, Ethan and Malloy don holsters and body armor again in another enthralling page-turner...