by Tom Bissell
To read any apocryphal work is to vacate a series of expectations. The first vacation is spiritual: However edifying these works purport or attempt to be, their noncanonical standing renders their message curiously distant from the expediencies of faith. For the nonreligious reader, the distance is similar to that which one feels in the presence of any religious work but with the added yardage of knowing that an apocryphal work is, in some faint but definite sense, a failed work. The second vacation is formal: The gospels, despite some considerable literary inadequacies (from a modern reader’s viewpoint, at least), are commendable in many ways. They have structure, contrapuntal detail, rhythm, and style. This helps them remain grippingly relevant to millions of people, most of whom know nothing about life in first-century Palestine or the complicated manner in which Jewish and Greek thought enriched each other in the Roman world. Jesus’s confrontation with Pilate, his frustration with his disciples, the agony of Judas, the miracles—all stand out, even for readers of no particular faith, as powerful stories about courage, fear, failure, love, and death. Apocryphal works are not like this. They are sloppy, repetitive, frequently boring, often obscure, usually ugly, bizarrely circuitous, and typically build to moments of dramatic import baffling to all but the most cross-eyed sectarian.
The apostolic heroes of the Apocrypha have precious few modes. They are stentorian moral teachers, wondrous miracle workers, tender-footed wanderers, and world-champion denunciators of Jews, pagan gods, marriage, sexuality, and most other forms of human pleasure. One can certainly become sick of reading the gospels, but one never really tires of them. The optimal reading of an apocryphal work, on the other hand, typically requires a morning cleared of any pressing commitments and a soundproofed room. Of all the apocryphal works, none is quite so wearying as The Acts of John.
It contains the usual apocryphal assortment of healings, rich men, demonically possessed wives, bugs controlled by apostolic telepathy, necrophilia, and self-castration. One famous passage describes John’s effort to destroy Ephesus’s Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. By all evidence, the Temple of Artemis was the object of pathological hatred among early Christians. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul visits Ephesus, criticizes those who worship at the temple, and is in short order driven out of the city. It is no surprise, then, that Christian fantasists would spend the next few hundred years imagining ways in which the temple was destroyed, most often by John, for The Acts of John’s account of its blessed demolition is one of several. It is probably the most appalling version of the story, though, if only for the moment when John tells Artemis’s Ephesian followers, “I alone will call upon my God to kill you all because of your unbelief.”
The temple was actually destroyed in the second half of the third century during a massive earthquake. A good deal of Ephesus was destroyed along with it—including, possibly, the first Ephesian chapel devoted to John. After the earthquake, Goth plunderers looted what was left of the temple. Christians, however, remained angrily fascinated by the temple and its patron goddess, which says something about the strength of Ephesus’s Artemis cult. In the early fifth century, John Chrysostom complained that Ephesus’s Christians were too squishy-minded to rid the city of Artemis and those who followed her. Sometimes called the “Augustine of the East,” Chrysostom was a relatively unsophisticated thinker but a skilled public speaker. (Chrysostom comes from chrysostomos, “the golden-mouthed.”) He was also one of the first prominent Christian thinkers to view scripture literally, unlike earlier Christian intellectuals such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Around 405, Chrysostom might have personally led the mob that destroyed the Temple of Artemis for the last time.
VIII.
Suzy decided to head back to our hotel to catch some Turkish television news, which was her primary method of language acquisition whenever she found herself away from Istanbul. By 6:00 p.m., the ruins exhaled a half day’s worth of absorbed sunlight, and the heat began its laggard daily withdrawal. Above, the sky was all lilac softness.
While I was walking back to our hotel to join Suzy for dinner, I saw two obviously Western tourists heading up St. Jean Street to the ruins. I decided to follow them. Inside the ruins, pale light fell on the toppled columns in the basilica courtyard, across which the tourists walked in reverent silence. It was here that I approached them. Their names were Isobel and Arthur, mother and son from a place called Toe Head on the southern coast of Ireland. Isobel wore a strapless orange tube top, her skin boiled red but for where her bikini straps had been. Her face was smooth and covered in a fine white down. Other than the poached, sun-swollen bags under her eyes, she did not appear nearly old enough to be Arthur’s mother.
Arthur, meanwhile, looked as if he had stepped out of the New Testament and into a backpacker’s hostel: long brown hair, crazy beard, big round irises of pimento-flecked hazel. His T-shirt featured a joint-toking, copyright-infringing Bart Simpson. I learned that Isobel’s husband had passed away the year before; Turkey was one of his favorite places in the world. She had come to Selçuk with Arthur so they could enjoy one last family vacation together. Her husband was with them now. Or so it felt to her.
“So you’ve been to Saint John’s ruins before?” I asked.
“No,” Isobel said. “This is my first time here. I first saw the Virgin’s House several years back, with my husband. We came back and saw it a second time, but for some reason we never made it here.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure why, actually.” Her eyes popped open a bit, and she looked away, as though fighting off a sudden, happy memory of her husband.
Her son, Arthur, sensed what was happening and took her hand. “We’re glad we came,” he said, while Isobel composed herself. “It’s a moving site. It’s extremely moving.”
“I like it, too,” I said.
Isobel, having recovered, said, “It’s interesting for me to put it all in perspective. We know our religion but not our history.”
“The history’s very interesting,” Arthur said.
“Have you been to the Virgin’s House?” Isobel asked.
“I think tomorrow,” I said. What I did not say was that I regarded Mary’s House—previously known as Panaya Kapulu (the Chapel of the All Holy) and today known as Meryem Ana Evi (the House of Mary)—as one of the many sites around Selçuk whose purported connection to historical fact was even more specious than that of John’s tomb. For instance, there was a tower in the administrative region of Roman Ephesus’s ruins in which, it was said, Paul had been kept prisoner. Not too far away from the tower was a small funereal building that, it was once claimed, held the remains of the evangelist Luke.
The House of the Virgin Mary was found about five miles from Selçuk, on the slope of Mount Koressos. Popes Paul VI and John Paul II both visited the house—the latter celebrated Mass on its grounds*11—and a million people visit it each year. It was “discovered” in 1891, though the local tradition behind it is apparently very old. The first official pilgrimage to the site took place at the turn of the twentieth century, but the government of Turkey did not officially recognize Mary’s House as a legitimate, protected tourist site until the 1950s.
Many of the legendary accounts of Mary’s death give the apostle John a prominent role. These legends, which begin to appear in the fourth century, were composed in virtually every major language used by early Christians, though from which Christian community the tradition first emerged is still debated. In any event, Christians—not to mention Muslims, whose Qur’an mentions Miriam, as Muslims know her, more frequently than the New Testament—were left with two traditions about the fate of the mother of Jesus. The traditions of Eastern Christianity and Islam generally hold that Mary died in Jerusalem and ascended to Heaven after three days in state, though many Eastern Christians accept that Mary lived in Ephesus at some point. The Western Christian tradition maintains that she was taken to Ephesus by John and later ascended to Heaven without death or burial.
The former tradition is older. In fact, one can today visit Mary’s tomb in Jerusalem’s Kidron valley, which is a site jointly held by Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians, though Muslims also pray there. (Until relatively recently, the tomb’s custodians were Muslims.) Mary’s Turkish house is also partially open to Muslim pilgrims, though Christians and Muslims pray to her in different rooms.
In the view of Raymond E. Brown, Mary as an individual “has no place in Johannine thought.” Not only does she go unnamed in the gospel many Christians believe was written by the man who later cared for her, but she appears in the Fourth Gospel only twice. Her first appearance occurs during the Cana wedding scene, during which she notes that no one is serving wine. Jesus brusquely responds, “Woman, what concern is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.” Jesus’s mother, as though goading her son, takes a few wedding servants aside and says, “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus, neither the first nor the last young Jewish man to find himself cornered by maternal ambition, dutifully transforms the wedding party’s water supply into wine. (It is his first public miracle.) The second and final scene involving the mother of Jesus is the crucifixion, when Jesus commends her to the care of the Beloved Disciple. For the author of John’s gospel, Jesus’s mother appears to serve a symbolic purpose. Because one unnamed figure being entrusted to another unnamed figure cannot be history, it must be theology. The community that believed itself closest to Jesus thus used his mother to assume for itself a kind of vague dynastic authority.
“The Virgin’s House is a very special place,” Isobel said. “It’s such a beautiful, simple site, and there’s all this lovely greenery on the outside. When you go inside and see all the candles and carpets, you have this really quite amazing feeling. Every time you step inside, you feel it.”
“What kind of feeling?” I asked.
“Oh, how can I describe it?” Isobel’s face filled with joy, as though being asked to describe the feeling would be akin to reexperiencing it, which for all I knew it was. “First, of course, you feel something like grace. Real grace. Her grace. You feel the weight of all those Christians who’ve come before you.”
“And Muslims,” I said.
“Yes,” Isobel said instantly, brightly. “They’re there, too. And they’re lovely, lovely people.”
“We’re going tomorrow,” Arthur said. “I can’t wait to see it.”
Isobel smiled. “He’s heard me talk about Our Lady’s home for years now. All I can say is that it’s a very special place.”
“It’s nice to actually find some Christians here to talk to,” I said. “Most of the people I’ve met here don’t seem to be at all interested in John or Mary or, really, anything.”
“Are you here on mission?” Isobel asked.
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’m just here as a tourist.”
Isobel allowed my admission to drift serenely past her. “Saint John looked after Our Lady, you know. He was the last person to be with her. So he means a lot to me. Quite a lot. Even if he hadn’t written his gospel, he would still be important to me.”
“He was loved by Jesus,” Arthur said. “Of all the apostles, he was Jesus’s favorite.”
As though the interpersonal dynamics of the gospels could ever be that apparent. But to Arthur, and to many believers, the interpersonal dynamics of the gospels were precisely that apparent. As apparent as every miracle, as every word of Jesus. I knew that when Evangelical scholars put on their lab coats and took on the air of independent-minded detectives, the results were frequently ludicrous, as when Richard Swinburne writes that alternative hypotheses for Jesus’s miracles “have always seemed to me to give far less satisfactory accounts of the historical evidence than does the traditional account.” Dr. Swinburne, you don’t say. Forget that this “historical evidence” was subject to the editorial control of people emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually committed to believing that everything in the gospels was true. Forget that the “historical evidence” the Evangelical scholar holds up alongside the work of Tacitus and Thucydides is of a completely different character. Even worse were the Evangelical scholars responsible for stuff like this: “Theologians working with a Humean definition of a miracle would look on the Easter resurrection of Jesus as a moment when God abrogated the existing laws of nature….Underlying analogy is nomological universality. According to the principle of nomological universality, the same laws that govern the past and present will govern the future as well. This too needs critique.” It was as though Michel Foucault emerged from fifty-eight semesters at Oral Roberts University.
But if you believed in the gospels, and you believed that John was the Beloved Disciple, he was Jesus’s favorite, and quite obviously at that. And it felt good, suddenly, to be reminded by Arthur that not every Christian was an Evangelical scholar, that some things—indeed, most things—could be true and untrue at the same time, that the untrue could abide with the true as the believer abided with the unbeliever, and that a widow and son too young to lose his father did not need to choose anything right now but how best to honor the ghost they believed could look down upon them from the paradise of their understanding.
“I like the moment when John puts his head in the lap of Jesus during the Last Supper,” I told Arthur. “It’s such a beautiful, sad little detail.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Arthur said, “that we’re standing so close to his tomb.”
With this Isobel swiftly agreed. “I was just saying, before you came up, that there are a few places in this world of ours that you simply must see, if you’re a Christian. And I think this is one of them.”
We walked to the edge of the basilica’s courtyard, where we looked down the slopes of Ayasoluk Hill, over the old fort walls. Beyond the fort walls was the Isa Bey Mosque. Beyond the mosque were little squares of parceled farmland, out of which grew row upon row of grape bushes. Beyond the farmland was the only surviving pillar of the Temple of Artemis. And beyond it, the dim blue iridescence of the Aegean Sea. I described to Isobel and Arthur what they were seeing, a leapfrog view from Christianity to Islam to paganism, and said that all three westward-facing structures were clearly meant to replace one another.
“Which one was Artemis again?” Arthur asked.
“Fertility goddess,” I said. “But not a Greek or Roman one.” Artemis emerges from Anatolian myth as a mother goddess called Kybele, which, I went on, explained why her temple was so grand, even though it was built on top of a swamp. “She was a local girl, a virgin. Her cult spread everywhere—as far as Scandinavia. So it made some historical sense that the Ephesian Christians latched onto Mary as strongly as they did. You could say that Mary kind of replaced Artemis here.”
“I’m not sure I would say that,” Isobel said politely.
“No, of course,” I said. “One could say. But when the Greeks got their hands on her, Artemis was reimagined as the daughter of Leto and Zeus, and it was said she was born near a spring. Today the House of the Virgin is near that spring. Guess what it’s called now?”
“I don’t know,” Isobel said. “Mary’s Spring?”
“Yep.”
“That’s very interesting,” Isobel said, and laughed. “That’s actually very interesting.”
Arthur asked when the Temple of Artemis was destroyed. It had been destroyed a few times, I told him, and pieces of the ruins were not discovered until 1869, after a long and largely fruitless search by a British surveyor.
“I wonder,” Arthur said, “where all of Artemis’s people went after her temple was destroyed?”
It was a good question. After talking a little more, Isobel, Arthur, and I said farewell. We all hoped that we would see each other again, tomorrow, at the House of the Virgin, but we did not.
Later I wondered if perhaps the followers of Artemis ran away, but not too far away. Perhaps they gathered in a cave somewhere near the ruins of their goddess. Perhaps they were silent and much afraid. See them, looking at one another, huddled, trying to un
derstand what had happened to them and why. Imagine the story that one of them, eventually, begins to tell.
* * *
*1 The accuracy of Mandeville’s account of his journeys, like the existence of Mandeville himself, is disputed, though most scholars believe it has some factual basis.
*2 Among the most fascinating pieces of Christian Apocrypha, The Epistle of the Apostles was considered sacred scripture by many early Christians, and it eventually fell out of favor largely because the date it audaciously pegged to Jesus’s eventual return came and went. Most scholars regard the Epistle as an “anti-Gnostic” text, but sneakily so, in that it attempts to mimic the tone and structure of the so-called Gnostic texts with which the Epistle’s author was obviously familiar. The Epistle also appears to make the argument that Paul should be regarded as less authoritative than the Twelve.
*3 “Boanerges” has some cross-cultural resonance: Castor and Pollux, the sons of Zeus, were both believed to sit at their father’s side, where they wielded control over thunder and lightning. This may shed some interesting light on a later scene in Mark, when the Sons of Thunder ask Jesus, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” In other words, Jesus’s nickname may be an example of a pagan religious belief interestingly breaching the hull of Christianity.