Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  Why was Judas’s soul the price of God’s vacation into mortality? What does that mean—not only for Judas, but for all his fellow mortals? Does this not mean we are merely divine playthings? How can God love any of us if he was willing to so carefully arrange the condemnation of one of us?

  IX.

  On our last day in Jerusalem, Jay decided during breakfast that he would regret leaving Jerusalem without seeing the Garden of Gethsemane. I had seen enough sites of invented significance over the last few days and opted to stay behind in our rented apartment in Yemin Moshe and read. Jay set out. Forty minutes later, he returned. “Something’s going on over by the Aqsa Mosque,” he said. “Something noisy and violent.”

  We turned on the television. Whatever was happening near the Aqsa Mosque, CNN International was already on the scene. Apparently, during the afternoon prayer, a cleric at the Aqsa Mosque addressed the Israeli restoration effort that was under way directly beneath Jerusalem’s largest and most famous mosque. The Israelis were repairing the mosque’s entrance ramp, which had become badly weakened. Jay and I had passed by the site several times during our walks around the city, and the amount of earth the restoration had broken was significant. Understandably, many of Jerusalem’s Muslims were curious about what, exactly, was being done beneath their holy acreage, from which, they believed, Muhammad had commenced his Night Journey. The Israelis had installed twenty-four-hour observation cameras around the restoration site to allay local Muslim fears, but not many Palestinians had the wherewithal, impetus, or patience to see for themselves what the cameras were broadcasting.

  During the afternoon prayer, the Aqsa cleric convinced a number of young men that the Israelis were not, in fact, restoring an entrance ramp but rather dismantling the mosque’s foundation. Several dozen—perhaps as many as a hundred—keyed-up young Palestinians shortly emerged from the Aqsa Mosque and began hurling rocks and bottles at the first Israeli soldiers and police officers they encountered. The Israeli security forces responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. The Palestinians responded with more rocks. Eventually, one enterprising Palestinian got his hands on a deadlier weapon—a pistol of some kind—and fired back, to the result of some extended, sporadically exchanged gunfire. A few Palestinians—including some armed ones—had in the meantime barricaded themselves within a nearby building. I suggested to Jay that we hail a cab and figure out a way to get to the top of the Mount of Olives, which looks down on the Old City. From there, we would have a good view of the standoff.

  Right outside Yemin Moshe’s security gate we found a forty-year-old Palestinian man glumly sitting on the curb beside his Mazda. That he was a freelance cabbie was clear from the plain, detachable TAXI sign affixed to his roof, but his car seemed well maintained. We raised our hands to him, at which he sprang to his feet and waved us over. I told him where we wanted to go.

  “It will be hard to visit the top of the Mount of Olives today,” he said. “There’s trouble in the Old City.”

  I was a journalist, I said. My friend here was a historian. Trouble in the Old City was precisely what we wanted to see.

  The man looked us over. He was wearing a thick brown sport coat, the arms and back of which were somehow covered with burs. (Did he live in a thicket?) The breeze was having its way with his thinning black hair and his teeth were in predictably dire condition, but he had a tough, trustworthy face. “Okay,” he said.

  His name was Achmed, and he had been born and raised in Jerusalem. For the first few minutes of our ride, Achmed referred to his fellow Palestinians as “they,” until, finally, he tired of that game and turned around and asked us what we thought of the conflict. I did not share with Achmed the judgment of one of the characters in a Keith Gessen novel, with which I largely agreed, which was this: the basic problem was that Palestinians were idiots and Israelis were assholes. Nonetheless, Jay and I told him what we thought. Our answers seemed to satisfy Achmed, who now began to refer to the Palestinians as “we.”

  “You may not sense this,” he said, “but, actually, I am a hopeless man. For the first time in this life, I have no more hope.”

  “No hope at all?” Jay asked.

  “Life now is too bad,” Achmed said. “The lack of services, the wall, all these…crazy settlers. We don’t know how to negotiate; we never have. They use that against us.”

  Achmed’s first attempts to find an unblocked road up to the Mount of Olives were not successful. At every turn, Israeli security forces turned us away. Standing guard at one checkpoint, however, was an Israeli soldier with whom Achmed claimed to have good relations. Achmed stopped, got out of the car, walked over to the lieutenant, and tried to lobby for our passage through his checkpoint. The young lieutenant greeted Achmed warmly but soon became a looped reel of gestural negation. When Achmed got back into the cab, he said, “I told him you were journalists. He told me that made you even less likely to get through.”

  I asked, “So what now? Is that it?”

  Achmed fiddled with his radio’s volume knob, though the radio was not on. “There is another way. A longer way. Through our neighborhoods.” This would involve circling Jerusalem almost entirely, whereupon we would come to a street we could see from where we idled but could not currently reach, for it was on the other side of the lieutenant’s checkpoint. “You will visit some neighborhoods that not many tourists get to see,” Achmed said. Jay and I agreed: the longer way it was.

  Twenty minutes later, at least according to a sign, we passed beyond Jerusalem’s city limits. Five minutes later, we passed back into Jerusalem, but through neighborhoods that seemed more desert villages than suburbs. All were poor, and a few appeared devastated. Some had raw sewage streaming down the streets. “They could fix it,” Achmed said when I asked about the sewage, “but they don’t. You will not see such conditions in Zion Square.”

  As we rolled through one neighborhood, the children looked up from their improvised toys—sticks, half-deflated soccer balls, broken kites—to eye us suspiciously. “Why aren’t these roads blocked off by soldiers?” Jay asked.

  “Israeli soldiers don’t know these roads,” Achmed said.

  At this Jay was puzzled. “But we’re in Jerusalem.”

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t know streets inside the city limits?”

  Achmed shrugged: the ignorance of Israeli soldiers was not his problem. The deeper into Palestinian Jerusalem we pushed, the more homemade truck-tire-piled Palestinian checkpoints we were beginning to encounter. I asked what they were for. Achmed explained that anyone wounded in the gunfire in the Old City would be brought to a Palestinian hospital, up here, rather than taken to an Israeli hospital, down there. Later in the day, Israeli security would drive up, visit all the Palestinian hospitals, and arrest anyone being treated for gunshot wounds. These truck-tire checkpoints would be lit on fire and abandoned as soon as any Israeli security forces approached. Which meant the security forces would have to clear the burning tires themselves. Make them do it enough times, Palestinian thinking went, and maybe they would give up and turn around.

  Somewhere we had taken a wrong turn. We faced the wrong side of a dead end within a Palestinian neighborhood cleaved in two by Israeli settlers, or so Achmed claimed. (We got lost, I was sure, due to Achmed’s insistence on pointing out every single settler’s home and describing the damage they had done to the neighborhood.) As Achmed turned around, a dozen Palestinian children poured from the mouth of a nearby driveway and surrounded our car. All at once, they started to punch the windows and slam their small, rocklike fists down on the hood, shouting, “Yehudi! Yehudi!” Instantly, Achmed was outside the car, screaming at them. Every child scattered and fled through various door- and alleyways. When Achmed returned to his seat, his eyes were all wildness and fire.

  “Why did they do that?” I asked.

  Achmed turned and looked at me. “They thought you were Jews.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  Achmed looked at m
e. “I told them you aren’t Jewish.”

  “You haven’t asked us if we are Jewish. Do you want to know?”

  “In my cab,” he said, “you are free to be what you are.” With that, he turned off his meter, turned the car around, found the street he was looking for, and steered us up a series of steep, narrow paths that did not appear navigable at all. The neighborhoods were now a-prowl with packs of young men obviously looking for trouble. I realized why when Achmed switched on the radio, which was spectrum to spectrum with news of the troubles in the Old City.

  Finally, near the base of the Mount of Olives, a dirty, unpromising alley spat us out onto a street a hundred yards behind the checkpoint manned by Achmed’s lieutenant friend. And it had only taken an hour. I patted Achmed on the shoulder. “You’re good.”

  “No one can close everything,” he said. “Not even Israelis.”

  We stopped in the parking lot of the Seven Arches Hotel, the large, spacious patio of which provided panoramic views of the entire city. I asked Achmed if he would wait for us in the car while Jay and I had a look. “We are together now,” Achmed said. “I will wait.”

  “Actually,” Jay said, “do you want to come with us?”

  Achmed answered by plucking his keys from the ignition.

  We arranged ourselves along the farthest edge of the Seven Arches Hotel’s patio and looked down. The first thing we saw: the Jewish tombstones that covered much of the mount’s slopes. Some Jews believe that the Messiah will appear on the Mount of Olives, after which the dead will be raised. Those Jews had paid what Achmed estimated as around sixty thousand dollars for the privilege to be buried near the Messiah’s arrival point. They were, in other words, avoiding an uphill walk on a day in which all known physical laws would be negated. Beyond the tombstones were the golden onion domes of Magdalene Church, the Garden of Gethsemane, a highway, and, just past that, near the Lions’ Gate, three light-flashing Palestinian ambulances waiting for more wounded. Around the corner from the ambulances, half a dozen Israeli soldiers were maneuvering along the city walls. This was why the Israelis did not want people coming up here, Achmed told us. From this vantage point, anyone with a cell phone could tell the Palestinians barricaded inside their redoubt where Israeli troops were and what they were doing. I looked around. A few feet from us were several Palestinian men with cell phones, into which they spoke quietly.

  Elsewhere in the city, life, to coin a phrase, went on. Cars filled the highways. Tourists moved through Old City streets. In the distance: Israeli skyscrapers, Palestinian slums, the soft yellow desert and its hard brown rocks. A few feet away from us, to our right, Ben Wedeman, CNN International’s reporter, went live. Wedeman told the camera that so far seventeen Palestinians and thirteen Israeli soldiers had been wounded. He was dressed in a pine-green sweater, a cell phone clipped to his waist. His cameraman was eating a falafel with one hand and keeping his camera steady with the other. On our left was a Russian reporter, who I gathered was delivering the same statistics. Above us a dirigible floated into view and circled the Aqsa Mosque.

  Suddenly gunshots, many of them, from the Lions’ Gate, where, yesterday, Jay and I had walked the Via Dolorosa. Another peal of automatic weapons fire scared up a ribbon of birds, which poured so liquidly from the Aqsa Mosque it was as though the building had been turned upside down. There was real fighting down there now, the automatic weapons fire punctuated by gas-grenade flashes. Someone was firing on an advancing column of Israeli soldiers from the second floor of what looked like an apartment building. Then the building’s first floor ignited from within; smoke poured from every window. Achmed guessed that the Israelis were trying to gas out the building’s inhabitants. Then I remembered: a school was on that corner.

  Something exploded down the street from the besieged apartment building, though what was unclear; its boom took a surprisingly long time to reach us. A Japanese man next to me said, in English, “Oh wow. Oh my God wow.” Another explosion, then, in the same place. These explosions were not the red-yellow, pyrotechnically enriched explosions of an action film. They were flat, dirty, white-yellow explosions. Clouds of tear gas and cordite blew through the Lions’ Gate: a new Via Dolorosa atop the old. Then the call to prayer began.

  “It’s a war,” Achmed said, as the muezzins sang. “It’s really a war.”

  “Do you have any Israeli friends?” Jay asked him.

  “Yes,” Achmed said. “I do. Sometimes they drive me crazy.”

  The fighting had marooned a few tour buses up here, and what I guessed to be American Christians ventured out to have a look at the source of their inconvenience. Soon these Christian men and women were standing next to us, looking down from the Mount of Olives with their hands over their mouths.

  What, really, was so shocking? Were we not standing atop the birthplace of a certain kind of religious nationalism? Zion lay all around us. See where the Prophet left this earth, where Christ rose from the dead, where the Messiah would, finally, appear. Which of us, in this war, was not Judas to someone?

  * * *

  *1 Although his name comes up relatively frequently in the work of the church fathers, Papias is a man of whom not much is known, other than that his church was connected to one of Paul’s lieutenants, a man named Epaphras.

  *2 The Dome of the Rock was briefly reconsecrated as a church in 1099. It was re-Islamized in 1187 when the armies of Saladin conquered Jerusalem. Christians would hold the Holy Land again between 1229 and 1244, whereupon they faced another defeat by the forces of Islam. Christianity has enjoyed no formal rule over the land of Jesus since.

  *3 The ancient copyists of the New Testament texts render “Iscariot” at least ten different ways. What it was intended to mean, no one knows, but theories abound. The notion that Iscariot means “man of Kerioth” has a solidly ancient acceptance among scribes and church fathers. Indeed, many early manuscripts of John have “from Kerioth” in place of “Iscariot.” John also mentions that Judas has a father, one Simon Iscariot, which further suggests a place-of-origin name. Theories that Judas’s name signals his ultimate intention (Iscariot meaning “man of lies,” for instance, or “ruddy-colored one,” which reflects an ancient cultural revulsion toward redheads) have, over the centuries, proved popular but unconvincing. The most common understanding of Iscariot is that it refers to the Sicarii, a violent band of Jewish extremists. According to Josephus, the Sicarii carried small swords that resembled curved Persian daggers, which the Romans called sicae. The problem is that Josephus explicitly places the rise of the Sicarii in the time of the Roman procurator Festus, who ruled in the 50s CE, and never mentions them as existing—much less active—during the time of Pilate. Some have argued that the gospel writers nevertheless intended Judas’s name to be redolent of Sicarii villainy, for few who were alive during the first century would have been fondly disposed to the murdering and kidnapping Sicarii.

  *4 In New Testament Greek, the word used for “gospel” is euangélion, which means “good news.” Early Latin-speaking Christians used evangelium for “gospel,” but in the Middle Ages an Anglo-Saxon neologism was coined: god spel (good news), which was eventually and stylishly shortened to “gospel.”

  *5 The first scholar to seriously question the traditional identities of the New Testament’s authors was John Toland, a once-Catholic Irish convert to Protestantism. His argument held that the New Testament was mostly composed of essentially anonymous documents. He also argued that the church fathers’ attribution of texts to authors was in almost every case demonstrably spurious. In 1699, Toland was threatened with execution for his trouble. Shockingly, the next intellectually serious study of the formation of the New Testament canon did not occur until the nineteenth century.

  *6 Mark is many things; narratively sophisticated is not one of them. He was known in antiquity as “stump-thumbed” due to his clumsiness and love of redundancy. His idea of an elegant transition is “and.” Yet with Jesus’s in-dialogue narration of his own arrest, M
ark manages an atypical literary stylishness.

  *7 So intent is Matthew on tying Jesus’s every action and word to Hebrew scripture that he misinterprets Zechariah 9:9 to nonsensically portray Jesus riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass. The church father Jerome ingeniously argued that this obvious flub was symbolic of Jesus’s relationship to the Jewish and Gentile worlds.

  *8 Luke was obviously more mindful than Matthew or Mark of the implications inherent to Jesus’s having granted to the Twelve the “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases.” This means that Judas, at one point during Jesus’s ministry, was believed to have performed miracles. A shocking notion even to the wholly secular, and yet there it is in Christian scripture. Perhaps, in Luke’s mind, a man granted by Jesus the ability to corral demons and cure disease could be corrupted only by a force of contending power.

  *9 Paul, who is sometimes called an “apostle not of the Twelve,” wrote his letters decades before the gospels were written. Because standard arrangement of the New Testament places Paul’s letters after the gospels and Acts, the temporal relationship between Paul’s letters and the gospels is sometimes lost on average Christians. The New Testament was not always arranged in this way. In some of the earliest codices of the New Testament, the Pauline epistles are sandwiched between the gospels and the Acts.

  *10 In Acts, Herod Agrippa I is “eaten by worms.” In the apocryphal Jewish work 2 Maccabees, the Hellenizing ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes falls out of his chariot so “as to torture every limb”; soon “the ungodly man’s body” is aswarm “with worms.” In Josephus, Herod the Great suffers from something described as “mortification of the genitals,” and a Sicarii accomplice named Catullus sees his bowels “eaten through” before falling out of his body. In Eusebius, a Christian tormentor has a “suppurative inflammation” afflict “the middle of his genitals,” while his bowels are overtaken by “a teeming indescribable mass of worms.” Etc.