by Tom Bissell
I told Father Spiridon I was ready to follow him into the Well of Andrew. Ten rather graceless steps later, we stood in a dark enclosure of rough, uneven walls. Before me was a white marble basin and a rusty faucet. If you drink from the Well of Andrew, one legend holds, you will return to Patras.
“Old years water for gods,” Father Spiridon said as I drank.
“What?”
“Old years. Water. For gods.”
“Gods.”
He began listing them off on his nail-bitten fingers. “Zeus. Apollos. Poseidonus.”
“The old gods!”
“Yes! Historia! Understand? Old time?”
“I understand. Old time. History.”
Finally—and, considering how much time we had spent together, oddly—Father Spiridon asked me my name.
“Thomas,” I said.
He demanded that I follow him back into the old church Andreas. Soon enough, we were standing before a startlingly pretty icon of Thomas, in which he was depicted touching the wounds of Jesus. Father Spiridon pointed at me. “Thoma.” He pointed at the icon. “Thoma.”
“Didymus,” I said, using Thomas’s Greek name.
Father Spiridon looked over his shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “Thoma. Didymus. Same.” He then asked me if I would like to stay for the late-afternoon Mass. Although I had not attended a religious service since I was a teenager—I had, in fact, made it a point not to—I agreed.
The Greek Orthodox service, I soon learned, was a ritual of commendable impracticality, performed as it was by at least half a dozen priests, none of whom talked to the parishioners or made any attempt to connect with them. For the vast majority of the service, the priests remained turned away from the parishioners. The actual Mass was performed in the sanctuary, unseen. Throughout the service, the priests walked in and out. There was endless chanting and singing and recitation: everything in the Greek liturgy, save for the sermons, was sung, and never, in contrast to the Western tradition, alongside instruments. At one point, I had incense whisked at me from a distance of twenty feet.
Two and a half hours later, the service concluded. Father Spiridon asked if I enjoyed it. I told him I had. I meant it, too. What I had just seen was among the more enjoyably incomprehensible human gatherings to which I had ever been party. But, I said, I needed to return to my hotel, where I had a friend who, for all I knew, had maybe died of alcohol poisoning. Father Spiridon extended his hand, but I pushed it away. We were friends, and friends embraced.
* * *
*1 It should be said the actual sequence of events and epistles is highly debatable and not at all apparent from scripture. Also, an epistle known as 3 Corinthians, rejected as pseudonymous by the early church, is accepted as canon by the Armenian Church.
*2 The architectural use of domes enters Islam through Christianity, funnily enough. After Muslims conquered Constantinople in 1453 and Islamized Hagia Sophia, the city’s largest and most grandly domed church, Muslim devotional architecture moved away from courtyard-based structures and toward domed ones.
*3 This almost certainly legendary tradition allowed the Eastern Church to claim for itself an apostolicity intended to rival that of Rome.
*4 The Scythians are mentioned once in the New Testament, in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in which they are used as a metaphorical yardstick for ethnic wildness.
*5 Eastern Orthodoxy should not be confused with Oriental Orthodoxy, whose ancient, still-existing churches include those of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Syria, and Armenia. These churches broke off from the Byzantine Church in the fifth century, unable to abide the doctrinal fine tunings of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Despite their shared rejection of Chalcedon, these churches are today independent and have their own hierarchies and theological peculiarities.
*6 According to a legend that might actually be true, Russia drifted into the orbit of Eastern Orthodoxy because Yaroslav of Kiev, an eleventh-century Russian prince hunting for a state religion who greatly disliked the German devotional architecture he had seen, was told that Constantinople’s churches were beautiful.
*7 The prohibition against worshipping “graven images” is the second of the Ten Commandments, after all, which Eastern Christians have stepped around by arguing that icons are not graven, which is to say, not sculpted. Western Christians, incredibly, led by the argument of Augustine, stepped around the forbidding of graven images by renumbering the Ten Commandments. This involved, in one scholar’s words, “tucking the graven image prohibition inside Commandment One, rather than making it a free-standing Commandment Two.”
*8 Anyone who has read the miracles that Gregory himself reported at immense length in his other writings will find this reticence duly astounding.
JOHN
* * *
The Ruins of Saint John’s Basilica: Selçuk, Turkey
SAINT BLUE JEAN • EPHESUS • “TEACHER, WE SAW SOMEONE CASTING OUT DEMONS IN YOUR NAME” • SONS OF THUNDER • JOHN & PETER • THE DISCIPLE WHOM JESUS LOVED • THE TEST BENEDICTION • “BARBAROUS IDIOMS” • GODOFREDO • ISOBEL & ARTHUR • THE GOSPEL OF ARTEMIS
I.
The Roman province of Asia, today called western Turkey, exerted on Christianity an influence comparable to that of Rome or Jerusalem. Paul, as his letters demonstrate, worked frequently within—and struggled almost as frequently against—the churches of Roman Asia. The Gospel According to John, the most spiritually rebarbative gospel, was probably written in Roman Asia, as were the embattled epistles attributed to John. Revelation was addressed to “the seven churches” of Roman Asia, one of which the text’s author laments for having “abandoned the love you had at first” and, in the next breath, commends for its hatred of a rival sect. Montanism, an early and audacious form of heterodox Christianity that challenged the authority of the apostles themselves, had a Roman Asian provenance. Around 112 CE, a proconsul in Roman Asia named Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan about the problems he was having with the local Christians, who were being denounced by their enemies anonymously. At a time when Christians throughout the Roman Empire dared to mark their graves only with coded scribbles, the reckless Christians of Roman Asia were erecting obviously Christian tombstones for themselves.
A province noted for its relative wealth and sophistication and home to numerous pagan mystery cults, Roman Asia became an accidental colander of early Christian beliefs. By the second century, it was Christianity’s foremost intellectual battleground. By the fifth century, a number of orthodox Christianity’s major theological positions were being settled by councils convened within its cities—many of which were chosen as council sites precisely because of how prevalent strands of heterodox beliefs were within Roman Asia’s famously argumentative churches.
The originally Central Asian people who gave Turkey its name did not cross Turkey’s modern-day borders until the eleventh century. Prior to this great migration, Turkey was home to some of the most important Christian communities in the world. Unlike most Muslim-majority nations, modern Turkey is constitutionally forbidden to endorse any state religion. Even so, 98 percent of its seventy-one million citizens are Muslim. The percentage of Turkish citizens who self-identify as Christian can be generously rounded up to 0.0000011 percent. Istanbul provides the patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy with an official seat and palace, yet Turkey does not contain a single Christian seminary.
Imagine a twenty-fourth-century Syria overrun by Mormons. The near-total extinguishment of Christianity from Roman Asia once seemed as unlikely.
II.
I went to Selçuk with my friend Suzy, who had been living in Istanbul thanks to a journalism grant. We arrived at noon and spent our first hour exploring. This was followed by a tactical retreat to our air-conditioned hotel room. Later in the afternoon, when the sun seemed less punitive, we headed to the ruins of Saint John’s Basilica, the way to which carried us along a wide thoroughfare named in honor of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey and the direct object of one of modern
history’s more benign personality cults. All along Atatürk were bakeries, tractor-part shops, and cafés, their amply shaded patios filled with Turkish men playing dominoes and drinking hot apple tea and smoking cigarettes. Quite a few of these men were arguing. I asked Suzy if she could tell what they were arguing about. She directed my attention to the man who was thrusting his finger down on a copy of that day’s Hürriyet, the front-page photograph of which I had already seen at the airport. This photograph had been taken during the previous day’s session of parliament, where it was being debated whether the Turkish constitution should be amended to include more “direct democratic involvement” (code for allowing the continued erosion of Turkish secularism) in the election of the president. What the Hürriyet front-page photograph showed was two deputies from rival political parties debating that issue with their fists. (It would get worse.)
One of the local guidebooks I had picked up made much of Turkey’s religious equanimity and cited as evidence the last century or so during which the Christian sites of Selçuk had been protected. Not mentioned was the longer period during which the Christian sites of Selçuk were systematically ignored. A century ago, there was little certainty as to where Saint John’s Basilica had been located. No Christian church of comparable significance had been lost for as long. The apostle John, meanwhile, is the only member of the Twelve whose supposed remains are unaccounted for. Muslims were able to venerate many Christian sites at no cost to their beliefs; any site or relic with any importance to Muslims, on the other hand, was necessarily abhorrent to Christians. While Islam recognized and admired Jesus, he rated nothing more than a silver medal. Jesus’s disciples, meanwhile, had little significance to Muslims, though they do turn up within the Qur’an, in which they refer to themselves as “helpers of Allah” and “submitting ones.”
By now we were close enough to the basilica ruins to come across signs pointing our way toward “St. Jean,” which was also the name of the street along which the ruins were found. The initial thing one noticed about the ruins was how little one initially noticed them. Instead, one’s eye was pulled upward, along an adjacent hillside’s green luxuriance, to the top of Ayasoluk Hill and Selçuk Fortress. Thanks to its placement atop one of the highest hills in town, the fortress ranked among Selçuk’s most commanding examples of period architecture. It was also one of the least distinguished, amounting to a weathered slab of gray ramparts that only partially enclosed the open hilltop. A redundant number of Turkish flags dangled from the fortress walls, as did a two-story-tall silk-screen portrait of Kemal Atatürk, his face undulating in the breeze as though it were an image projected onto water.
Behind the walls of Selçuk Fortress not many buildings remained standing—a cistern, a bath, a small mosque—even though, once, the entire area had been ruled from Ayasoluk Hill, first by Byzantines, then by Turkish Seljuks, then by Turkish Ottomans. According to one archaeologist, the hilltop cistern was once the “apsidal part of a Byzantine basilica,” which was devoted to John and predated the larger basilica at the base of the hill. One legend holds that John wrote the Fourth Gospel while living on Ayasoluk Hill. (“Ayasoluk” is a Turkish-inflected derivation from the Greek hagios theologos, or “holy divine.”)
The most conspicuous vehicle on the streets of midsummer Selçuk was the tour bus, and down St. Jean Street they came, space-shuttle white, astronomically heavy, bottoming out at the ponderous upward turn into the basilica parking lot, their engines cutting off with a whomp, their passengers emerging from soda-machine-cool interiors. Suzy and I climbed up the hill after the buses, at the top of which was the parking lot and something called the St. Jean Souvenir Shop and Bookstore. Its sign promised, THE OFFICIAL BOOK ABOUT SAINT JEAN IS HERE. This caught my attention, as did the man who was standing beneath the sign and waving at us. We walked over to him.
“I know people think this sign is a very funny mistake,” he said, by way of greeting. “Ha-ha. Saint Jean. Saint Blue Jean. But I like this sign. I made this sign. And I have the only official book about Saint Jean. But you should know that we Turks call him Yahya. Yahya same as Jean. Isa same as Jesus. Musa same as Moses. We have many of the same beloved.”
The man, whose name was Mehmet, invited us to peruse the soft drinks within his Coca-Cola-brand cooler, his racks of postcards, his rolled-up carpets, his piles of books, all of it amusingly overpriced. His “Saint Blue Jean” patter had drawn us in, though, as he knew it would.
While I consulted the only official book on Saint Jean, priced to move at only thirty euros, Mehmet moved in on Suzy. “You,” he said to her, “are the most beautiful angel I have ever seen. You cannot be American. I refuse to believe this. American women, I say to you, are huge. You are a European woman, I think.” He looked over at me with insistent, salesman eyes that would not take an answer for an answer. “A finer woman I do not remember seeing. If she is your wife or girlfriend, please say so, and I will drop this matter. If not, I will take her to dinner tonight.”
Suzy and I had dated once, literally, as in we had a single date. Our smokiest physical encounter involved some awkward handholding. With Mehmet’s dinner invitation alarmingly imminent, Suzy took hold of the arm I looped around her as though it were a flotation device. “She’s my girlfriend,” I said.
Mehmet bowed at the waist. “Then you are the luckiest man in Turkey. She is the angel from Heaven.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, do not thank me. This is the truth.” To Suzy: “Your red hair—this is God’s present to you! Tell me, what do you call the beautiful marks on your face?”
“Freckles?”
“They are the sunshine. Another gift from God!”
I asked Mehmet if he had ever visited the empty tomb of Saint Jean. “I have seen the tomb, yes,” he said, his hands assuming oath-swearing positions. “A famous Italian priest once came to Selçuk, and I joined him in his journey beneath the earth to Saint Jean. This was ten years ago, and on that day I became a lucky man. If you would like me to help get you down into the earth of Saint Blue Jean, I will call my friend. If old manager is working, no problem, but sometimes the new manager makes a scandal. We will see.” Mehmet speed dialed and put his back to us. A few seconds later, his big head tipped forward. Today the new manager was making scandals.
Over in the basilica’s parking lot, one tour bus made room for another, like whales in an overcrowded pod. “How many people visit the basilica a day?” Suzy asked, demonstrating why she was living in Istanbul on a journalism grant and I was not.
“Sometimes fifty or sixty buses a day come here,” Mehmet said. “Let me say that two thousand people visit Saint Blue Jean each day. Of course, we Muslims also favor Saint Jean. He is one of the four persons who wrote the original Bible. We are believing the original Bible. We are believing the four books. The four books”—he began to count them off on his fingers—“are the Talmud, the Bible, the Qur’an…” The final book evaded Mehmet’s fingertip summons.
Suzy said, “The Hadith?”
“Yes! The Hadith. I must ask you, are you Muslim? If this is so, I will marry you today.”
III.
Before the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, Selçuk was known as Ephesus, a city whose pagan and Christian histories are equally remarkable. A traditional Christian view holds that Paul founded the Ephesian church, and at some later point the apostle John, with the mother of Jesus in tow, took up residence in the city and thereafter led its Christian community.
Another traditional Christian view holds that John founded the Ephesian church, to which Paul (or, as most scholars believe, a follower of Paul’s) later wrote his epistle. Both views are somewhat challenged by the fact that Paul, in his letters, never mentions John being present in or connected to Ephesus; nor does the author (or authors) of the New Testament’s Johannine literature (traditionally thought to be John) mention Paul. According to Eusebius, Paul made his traveling companion (and forced circumcisee) Timothy the first bishop of Ephesus; in t
his tradition, Timothy is honored as the first martyr of Ephesus. Other traditions hand down the news that the first bishop of Ephesus was not Timothy but John. But which John? The apostle John or, perhaps, John the Elder, who was mentioned in the second century by Papias? Or were these Johns the same person?
Suzy and I walked up a cacti-edged path of broken marble slabs to the basilica’s entrance, stepping over a dried-out, ant-swarmed turtle corpse, its pale green shell cracked in two. The marble used to line this path had been scavenged by Christians from the ruins of Ephesus, an hour’s walk across town. “Ephesus,” however, was something of a geo-historical catchall. Several cities called themselves Ephesus, and not all were located in the same place. The chronologically and culturally distinct ruins of Ephesus—only 10 percent of which, it is believed, have been excavated—are spread across six locations within an approximately ten-mile radius. Archaeologists suspect that the Aegean Sea’s coastline, which has shifted considerably over the last few thousand years, accounts for the city’s refusal to stay put.
Ephesus’s most famous ruins—the ones raided by Christians and plastered on postcards—belonged to Greco-Roman Ephesus, which was attractively located between two large hills. They contained a commercial area (where one could walk past an amazing gallery of restored Roman buildings, homes, temples, latrines, at least one restaurant, and a sewer system) and an administrative area (home to the Library of Celsus, one of the most awe-inducing ruins in the world, and Ephesus’s theater, a great stone clamshell capable of seating twenty-five thousand people). A third portion of Greco-Roman Ephesus’s ruins, known as the Harbor District, had almost nothing left to it. The walk to the Harbor District, which brought visitors down the Arcadian Way, a long straight street once lined with columns and lit at night by oil-burning lamps, was nevertheless one of Selçuk’s most enjoyable tourist activities. Many of Ephesus’s celebrated visitors, including Paul, had walked that very street.