Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  VI.

  Saint Sernin’s was one of the few churches I had visited with an apostolic reliquary that it did virtually nothing to advertise. To the left of the chancel was a gated ticket area. Beyond the gate was a winding two-level ambulatory lined with marble bas-relief carvings and a series of almost ludicrously ornate bays, chapels, and reliquaries. The sublevel contained the lower crypt, where I could see the reliquary of Simon and Jude. As I paid my two euros to access the crypts, I looked around in vain for some sign or notice that brought attention to Saint Sernin’s apostolic heritage.

  This ambulatory was once known for its holy relics display, and within the chapels I encountered an array of impressively carved and beautifully painted wooden reliquaries—they looked like Christian dollhouses—dating from the seventeenth century, most of which contained the relics of various Toulousian bishops. An eight-foot-high wall separated the ambulatory from the upper crypt, which circled the main altar from above. Above the upper crypt’s entrance, printed in gold letters on black lintel, were the words HIC SUNT VIGILES QUI CUSTODIUNT CIVITATEM, or “Here are the watchmen who guard the city.”

  Saint Sernin’s had once boasted Europe’s finest array of relics. Alas, during the French Revolution angry mobs thinned out its collection. The most beautiful surviving relic was a small enameled reliquary, made in the twelfth century, called the Limoges Box, which was said to contain a piece of la Vraie Croix. The bright, Technicolor images depicted on the Limoges Box told the story of how this piece of the True Cross was found and how it later made its way to Toulouse. The floor in the upper crypt was slate gray, the marble pillars were cloudy gray, and most of the art was unnerving: everywhere I turned, the inert eyes of some coldly beatific martyr stared through me. I missed the reliquary of Saint Sernin himself on my way into the upper crypt but found it on my way out; EX OSSIBUS ST. SATURNIN was written above it. A large gold statue depicted Sernin as a man whom doting cherubs rushed to dress. His actual sarcophagus, however, was as small as a piece of carry-on baggage.

  I waded into the tepid darkness of the lower crypt, which was not dug until the fourteenth century. The handrail along the stairs—a length of thick nautical rope—had a glassy, oily smoothness I attributed to the passage of tens of thousands of hands. It was several degrees cooler and duller in the lower crypt. The first thing I noticed was a bright red fire extinguisher with a complicated black nozzle, even though this dark, damp, stony space seemed roughly as flammable as a lake. In the middle of the crypt was a marble pillar as old as the basilica itself. The crypt’s chandeliers had been hung from their chains just a hair too low; many of their misty white lightbulbs had long burned out. I had the sudden feeling of being inside a medieval Christian boy’s first attempt at a spook house.

  The reliquary bays were found around the edges of the lower crypt; all were lit by small spotlights. It turned out that Simon and Jude were not the only apostles whose relics Saint Sernin’s claimed to have. The lower crypt also contained chapels devoted to Philip and both of the Twelve’s Jameses, though their collections, I was later told, were comparatively meager. Likewise, Simon’s and Jude’s relics had other repositories around the world: some are held by Saint Peter’s in Rome, and one of Simon’s arms was said to have been kept in a monastery in Cologne, Germany, which was unfortunately destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. In any event, the lower crypt’s chapel bays were brutally plain and closed off to entry by a black metal gate. The sarcophagi were relatively plain, too, resembling small, primitive, gold arks with triangular tops held up by slender pillars. The sarcophagus of Philip and the James here referred to as “the Lesser” was balanced (I hoped temporarily) on wooden sawhorses. Simon and Jude’s sarcophagus lid looked to have been cut, not very skillfully, from an imperfectly veined piece of marble.

  My nostrils were clogged with the stench of wet gravel. I stood before the plain, carved-out hollow that contained Simon and Jude’s unexciting reliquary, trying and failing to experience something that could be described as an emotion. A few other tourists wandered down into the crypt but never stayed for long. I asked some of the crypt’s visitors if they spoke English. The usual response was a quick scan around the small dark crypt, a queasy smile, an alarmed wave, and a hasty retreat back up the stairs.

  Eventually, two young Americans came down. Two young Americans always come down. I faded back into the crypt’s far corner to give them room and eavesdrop. The man was tall and fit, with hair so gleaming and brown it seemed like an accessory picked to match his outfit. He wore a lilac soft-collared polo shirt, canvas shorts, and leather sandals that showed off the seashell perfection of his toenails. His wife (they wore wedding rings) was wearing a loose white blouse, and her hair had been pulled into a ponytail of polished chestnut lustrousness. They both seemed freshly toothbrushed and unnaturally clean, like Mr. and Mrs. Leisure Traveler on their way to a travel magazine cover shoot.

  While standing before the reliquary of Simon and Jude, the man said, “Who are Simon and Jude again?”

  The woman, already walking to the next chapel, said, “Jude wrote the Letter of Jude.”

  The man did not move. “What’s that about?”

  “It’s the shortest book of the New Testament.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Like a page and a half or something.”

  “Oh, really? I’ll read it, then.”

  “I wouldn’t bother. It’s really boring.”

  “How can a page and a half be boring?”

  Good question. The Letter of Jude, despite being only twenty-five verses long, is the book of the New Testament most historically neglected by Christian thinkers and scholars alike. For this, there are many reasons. It is, for one, among the most textually unstable New Testament documents; verses 22 and 23*11 have been described as “the most corrupt passages in New Testament literature.” Richard Bauckham, the Letter of Jude’s great modern champion, argues that Jude is one of the most concentrated and overt works of exegesis in the New Testament: virtually every line of Jude refers, however sneakily, to another text. Copyists and scribes unable to read the mind of Jude’s author spent centuries trying to figure out what he was trying to say, which frequently put them at cross-purposes, with one copyist “correcting” the interpretation of another until the original meaning was lost.

  Resistance to the Letter of Jude is ancient. One problem is that verses 14 and 15 contain direct quotations from 1 Enoch, a first-century Jewish midrashic text, purportedly written by the father of Methuselah, whose canonicity only two branches of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church accepts. Several early Christian works are familiar with 1 Enoch—it was, in one historian’s words, “part of the mental furniture of the generation of Jesus and his disciples”—but Jude is the lone New Testament work to cite it directly. The issues posed by a canonical work citing a noncanonical work in a manner that suggests the former’s spiritual endorsement of the latter are obvious. Jude also refers to a story in which the Devil wrangles over Moses’s body. This derives from an apocryphal Jewish work called The Assumption of Moses, which survives only in an incomplete Latin text. The author of Jude was merely using a popular story to arrive at a greater point, but, again, there are real scriptural and spiritual issues at stake when a canonical work of scripture refers to a text that no longer formally exists.

  From an average reader’s perspective, the explanation for why this strange letter has been neglected seems relatively straightforward: reading Jude feels like being cornered by someone jabbing you in the chest with his finger while calling you a skeeze. A sample passage: “For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly, who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ….[T]hese dreamers also defile the flesh, reject authority, and slander the glorious ones.”

  The author of the Letter of Jude identifies himself as “Judas, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James
.” Scholarly opinion on its authorship and time of composition varies greatly. Bauckham believes the author was Jude the brother of Jesus, who, he proposes, might have completed the text as early as 50 CE. Most scholars, however, regard the text as pseudonymous and estimate its composition date around 90. On the surface, Jude is a ranting text about sexually or ethically dangerous intruders. Like the Letter of James, Jude says virtually nothing about Jesus; unlike the Letter of James, Jude mentions the apostles but in a way that makes them feel like members of a generation past. As with all the pastoral New Testament letters, the situation Jude is determined to address feels painfully specific to its author’s community. In this respect, Jude feels even more low ceilinged and sectarian than the three letters of John.

  Bauckham argues that Jude, in its abandonment of “reasoned discussion” and focus on “attacking [its] opponent’s moral character,” is a “typically Jewish Christian” text. If so, we can read between the lines fairly easily and conclude that Jewish Christianity was not always a pleasant faith. Its practitioners were apparently obsessed with the end of the world and demanded unbending obedience to a morality of their own envisioning. Communities that seek vindication of their beliefs at all costs are rarely happy, much less long-lived, and strains of Jewish Christianity appear to have been as eager to find fault with others as Gentile Christianity at its worst. Paul’s strategy in dealing with ethical lapses among his communities was notably different. Rather than condemn opponents to “punishment of eternal fire,” Paul actually tried to reason and think his way through a community’s problems. That Jude is not even very explicit about the nature of the problems tormenting his community does not help his case. Like the literature of John, Jude’s letter has almost no persuasive missionary value at all, unless your mission is to persuade one neighbor to string up the other. Intimations of sects first debut in Christianity within the pastoral letters of Jude, Peter, and John, and it is largely from these letters that the Christian disasters of heretic hunting and inquisition can be ignobly traced. It is sadly revealing that the New Testament contains a multitude more warnings against competing Christian understandings than it does against pagan beliefs.

  I introduced myself to the American couple. They happened to be in Toulouse—where the woman, whose name was Beth, had been an exchange student during high school—on their honeymoon. Step one of their honeymoon (a week in Paris) was over. Step two (ten days in the South of France) had just gotten under way.

  “How’s your French?” I asked Beth.

  “My French is bad,” she said. “I’m actually embarrassed I remember so little.”

  They were from New York City, they said at first, but it later came out they were actually from Rowayton, Connecticut. The man, whose name was Michael, worked in finance in Stamford and, given the last few months of economic upheaval, said he regarded the continuing existence of his job as a minor miracle. I decided I liked Michael; I had already decided I liked Beth. Eventually, I asked Beth and Michael if they were Christians. They were. Liberal Christians, Beth was quick to say. She had actually taken several Bible-as-literature classes during college at Cornell, though claimed to remember most of what she had learned even more poorly than her French.

  We talked about Simon Peter and Simon the Zealot and Judas of James and Jude Thaddaeus. Beth and I talked at length about the Letter of Jude, of which Michael finally said, with a laugh, “Yeah, that does sound pretty awful.” When I said something about Paul’s not having been an apostle, Michael jumped in to say, “But Paul was an apostle.”

  “Actually,” I said, “he wasn’t.”

  Michael was smiling. “Are you sure?”

  “He’s right,” Beth said. “Well, it depends. I think he’s called an Apostle Not of the Twelve. Like Mark and Luke and Barnabas.”

  A person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity. It had taken me four years, but I finally found her.

  * * *

  *1 Christian art in medieval Europe got weird in some places, especially in the churches found along the Camino de Santiago. The intrusion of once-forbidden pagan and shamanistic creatures became so common that a medieval monk complained, “What are these ridiculous monsters doing in the cloisters? What are these filthy apes, ferocious lions, monstrous centaurs doing here?”

  *2 Thanks to Epiphanius, we know that The Gospel of the Ebionites (also known as The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles) included Simon and Thaddaeus as being among the first apostles to be called into the Twelve by Jesus.

  *3 Some of European Christianity’s more demented relics: a bone from a child massacred by Herod; Jesus’s foreskin, swaddling clothes, milk teeth, and tears; a piece of Mary’s placenta; clay left over from God’s creation of Adam; and bread left over from the Last Supper.

  *4 Many of Josephus’s charges against the Zealots are almost certainly exaggerated. For instance, they probably did not actually drink the blood of the men and women he claims they killed and violated in Jerusalem.

  *5 One exception to this is the Jewish uprising inspired by Judas of Galilee (or Gamala) in 6 CE, which had highly nationalist overtones. This uprising was a response to the census carried out by the Roman governor of Syria and the concomitant Roman annexation of Judaea. Judas’s son, Menahem, led a group that at one point in The Jewish War is referred to by Josephus as comprising Zealots. This appears to be Josephus’s mistake. Elsewhere in the text, Menahem’s group is identified as the Sicarii, also extremist, but not formally associated with the Zealot party and sometimes, according to Josephus, at war with it. Menahem and Josephus began the Jewish War ostensibly on the same side but quickly became enemies.

  *6 Josephus’s sympathetic portrait of Ananus in The Jewish War is inconsistent with his portrait of Ananus in his later Antiquities of the Jews, where Ananus is criticized for his ruthless dispatching of James the brother of Jesus.

  *7 In the time of Jesus, a worker typically earned a single denarius per day.

  *8 Between a quarter and half an acre.

  *9 The Letter of James, purportedly written by the granduncle of Jude’s farmer grandsons, makes time to rail against rich exploitative farmers: “Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.” In light of this passage, how easy it is to imagine the grandsons of Jude proudly exhibiting their calluses to an emperor!

  *10 It was, technically, the third Jewish revolt against Rome; the actual second revolt mostly took place in Diaspora communities rather than in Palestine proper.

  *11 Here they are: “And have mercy on some who are wavering; save others by snatching from out of the fire; and have mercy on still others with fear, hating even the tunic defiled by their bodies.”

  MATTHEW

  * * *

  Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood: Kurmanty, Kyrgyzstan

  ANDREI & SERGEI • THE CATALAN ATLAS • HO TELONES • LEVI SON OF ALPHAEUS • THE GOSPEL OF THE NAZARENES • HOT LAKE • “DEMONSTRATIONS IN THE SCRIPTURES” • CONSERVATIVE JESUS • SPIDER FIGHT • “MAY GOD LET YOU FIND HIM”

  I.

  Before we left Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in search of a lost apostolic reliquary, Andrei, my guide and translator, wanted me to meet his friend Sergei, whom Andrei described as the “most learned” person he knew. Sergei was also a devoted Christian, prone to leaving Kyrgyzstan for months at a time to study in a Russian monastery outside Moscow. While there, Andrei said, Sergei meditated and did his penances.

  Andrei and I were walking alongside a wildly overgrown park on the outskirts of Bishkek, on our way to Sergei’s apartment. “Why penances?” I asked.

  Andrei smiled. “Sergei sins like no other.” Sergei had converted to Islam to marry his Uzbek wife, who by Andrei’s lights was a wonderful person—beautiful, smart, and liberal-minded. I was more curious to learn how Sergei’s formal conversion to Islam affected his study of Christianity at the Russian mona
stery he habitually fled to.

  “I doubt they know,” Andrei said. “Well, maybe they do. He’s very open about things. But he’s not actually a Muslim. He’s still very Christian. He converted only for his wife’s family’s approval. His wife doesn’t care one way or the other.” Andrei paused. Then: “My girlfriend can’t stand Sergei. Well, I mean to say, she loves him, because I love him, but she doesn’t admire his…duality.”

  “His duality?”

  “That’s what she said. In Russian, of course.”

  I met Andrei through an American friend whom Andrei had guided across Kyrgyzstan the previous year. Andrei was ethnically Russian, blond, in his early twenties, and smart. He claimed to have learned English from watching episodes of Entourage over and over again. I had been in Bishkek for two days now; tomorrow Andrei and I would leave for Issyk-Kul (literally, Hot Lake), the high-altitude jewel of Kyrgyzstan’s mountainous ecosystem, on the shores of which local archaeologists claimed to have found the remains of an Armenian monastery that dated anywhere from the sixth to the fourteenth century. Supposedly, within this monastery, there had once been a tomb or reliquary devoted to the apostle and evangelist Matthew.

  As we walked through Sergei’s neighborhood, many people, Russians and Kyrgyz alike, called out to Andrei by name. He called back to all with a sporting wave. Wherever we went in Bishkek, we met people Andrei knew, including yesterday, at the bazaar, when we bumped into a middle-aged Kyrgyz man Andrei once worked for. Andrei and the man shook hands, fake smiling, their teeth bared in vaguely simian hostility. When the man hurried away, I asked Andrei what all that counterfeit friendliness had been about.