by Tom Bissell
A late scene in Luke shows Jesus having dinner at the house of yet another toll collector, one Zacchaeus, who works as the chief toll collector in Jericho. When the people of Jericho complain, Jesus again makes a public comment about the necessity of his attending to the sinful. In Matthew, Jesus announces that toll collectors and prostitutes are likelier to enter the Kingdom of God than those who disobey their fathers; he also commends toll collectors and prostitutes for believing in the proclamation of John the Baptist. Luke, too, makes special note of the toll collectors who had been baptized by John.
Obviously, Jesus was remembered as having made some pronouncement concerning toll collectors that ran counter to their popular social standing in Palestine, and there seems to have been a communal memory from the ministry of Jesus that had him consorting with toll collectors personally. That so many of Jesus’s parables involve wealth, and its various social derangements, helps contextualize why toll collectors are figures of such specialized treatment in the gospels. Eventually, the apostle Matthew became the patron saint of all moneyed trades: accountants, bankers, tax collectors, and customs officers. In many traditional representations, he is often shown clutching (or standing on) a bag of coins, bringing him dangerously close into symbolic brotherhood with Judas, who is sometimes depicted holding coins as well.
The earliest copies of Mark contain numerous textual variations as to which disciple Jesus called from the tax booth—in some texts, the called disciple is James son of Alphaeus—leading one scholar to judge the assumed historicity of this scene as “problematic” at best. While both Mark and Luke include the call of Levi from his tax booth, they do not include Levi in their lists of the Twelve, which seems to suggest that Levi was regarded by these gospel writers as a fully fledged disciple of Jesus but not as a member of the Twelve. While several church fathers (Origen and Clement of Alexandria among them) regarded Matthew and Levi as different disciples, tradition has generally evolved to accept that the toll-collecting man Jesus summoned from his booth had two names: Matthew (his Greek name) and Levi (his Semitic name). But Matthew is not a Greek name—Matthaios, as his name is rendered in Greek, is a shortened form of the Hebrew name Mattityah or Mattityahu, which means “gift of Yahweh”—and not many first-century Jews are known to have used two Semitic names in this manner.
The conservative scholars W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann argue that “Levi” was not a personal name but a tribal designation that was eventually overwritten as a personal name. According to this notion, Mark and Luke misunderstood a tradition in which Matthew the Levite was called from his tax booth and rendered the scene as the call of Levi. Other scholars have proposed that the author of Matthew’s gospel, familiar with a tradition in which the apostle named Matthew was a toll collector, confused by Mark’s treatment of the call of Levi, and not knowing what to do with Mark’s assertion that Levi was a son of Alphaeus, swapped Levi’s name for Matthew’s. If this happened early in the history of Matthew’s composition—before it had achieved literary fixity, say, but after it had become associated with Matthew—the decision makes good sense, as it added to the gospel an extra degree of authenticity.
Consequently, most early mentions of Matthew the apostle are related to his having written one of the gospels, though Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria both briefly mention him in the context of having evangelized in Judaea. According to Eusebius, the early-second-century Christian writer Papias wrote, “Matthew compiled the sayings [logia] in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as he could.” A curious and revealing note of defensiveness on the part of Papias is detectable here. Matthew’s “sayings” text appears to have been questioned for its interpretive divergences, which Papias apparently tried to attribute to translational difficulties. What Papias meant by “sayings,” however, has never been clear. The relationship these texts, which Papias attributed to both Mark and Matthew, had to the canonical gospels is unknown. They might have been early versions of the canonical gospels, but they might also have had little in common with the canonical gospels.
In Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus, a tract on Christian ethics written around the turn of the third century, the apostle Matthew is put forth as an exemplar of the moderate, restrained type of living Clement most cherished in his fellow Christians. Clement believed that the “most suitable” foods were those “fit for immediate use without fire” and argued that an overreliance on cooked meat could lead to a “Belly-demon,” which in Clement’s mind was “the worst and most abandoned of demons.” Clement went on: “It is far better to be happy than to have a demon dwelling with us. And happiness is found in the practice of virtue. Accordingly, the apostle Matthew partook of seeds, and nuts, and vegetables, without flesh.”
That Matthew was thought to be vegetarian is a more historically interesting assertion than it might initially seem. One ancient source pegs James the brother of Jesus as vegetarian, and several ultra-ascetic sects of early Jewish Christianity, including one branch of Ebionites, were purported vegetarians. Irenaeus, meanwhile, wrote that Matthew originally wrote his gospel “in the language of the Hebrews” and, in Against Heresies, discussed a group of Christians who “use the gospel according to Matthew only.” Origen, too, noted that Matthew’s gospel “was published for believers of Jewish origin, and was composed in Aramaic.” Virtually all of the church fathers believed that Matthew was the first gospel to have been written and that it had originally been written in either Hebrew or Aramaic expressly for Jews. These baseline assumptions endured for roughly fifteen hundred years, until their first serious questioning in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, from all this we see second- and third-century Christian thinkers recognizing that the obvious Jewishness of Matthew’s gospel was related to the Jewishness of its original audience. We see, too, that many church fathers regarded this fact with at least mild discomfort.
By the late fourth century, many assumptions about Matthew and his gospel had become institutionalized. Jerome, one of the few Latin writers who spent considerable time among Eastern Christians, confidently noted that Matthew wrote his gospel in Judaea for “those of the circumcision who believed.” He also maintained the gospel had been translated into Greek from Hebrew by parties unknown. According to Jerome, Matthew followed “the authority” of the Hebrew version of Jewish scripture rather than the Greek Septuagint. Jerome even claimed to have had “the opportunity to copy” the original Hebrew version of Matthew’s gospel, which he said he received from “Nazarenes” living in modern-day Aleppo.
The majority of Jerome’s assertions about Matthew’s Hebrew provenance have effectively been disproven. Most scholars now believe that Jerome was at best exaggerating his familiarity with the “original” Hebrew version of Matthew. (Jerome made claims in his work of having fully translated works he had only partially translated and to have seen other works that might have never actually existed.) What most scholars assume is that the gospel Jerome claimed to have fully translated, while related to Matthew, was neither an original version of nor even a gloss on Matthew. It was, rather, a specific gospel, written in a Semitic language and apparently used by Nazarene Christians. Christian fascination with this “original” copy of the Gospel According to Matthew, nonetheless, endured well into the medieval era, with Jacobus de Voragine relating a legend of how a copy “written” in Matthew’s “own hand” was discovered among the bones of Barnabas and was used to heal any ill person who came into contact with it.
Unlike his fellow apostle and evangelist John, Matthew was imagined to have written very few other works, whether canonical or apocryphal. One text, today known as The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, is an eighth- or ninth-century Latin conflation of the Protoevangelium of James and The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It was evidently written to bolster the cult of Mary, and one of its authors or editors attached to it a spurious letter of prefatory endorsement from Jerome, who, funnily enough, wrote at length against the Protoevangelium of James during his lifetime. The Bo
ok of Thomas the Contender, a Coptic “sayings” text from the third century that emphasizes the importance of sexual abstinence, purports to have been written by either Matthew or Matthias, as there was rampant confusion among early Christian storytellers about which of these two was which.
A legend contained in Pseudo-Abdias has Matthew journeying to Ethiopia and staying with the Ethiopian treasurer whom Philip converted to Christianity in Acts of the Apostles. There Matthew runs afoul of a pagan king named Aeglippus, whose two serpent-wielding sorcerers, Zaroës and Arfaxat, Matthew battles. In short order, Matthew overcomes the pair and chases them into Iran, where they later run afoul of Simon and Jude. With his magicians defeated, Aeglippus and his family promptly convert to Christianity. According to this legend, Matthew thus established the Ethiopian church. The legend concludes by noting how Matthew lived in Ethiopia for years, until being stabbed in the back by an agent of Aeglippus’s brother, whom Matthew forbade to marry a young nun.
III.
I had last visited Central Asia in the spring of 2003. At that time, in a hotel bar in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I fell into a conversation with a Belgian who worked for the International Monetary Fund. This man hated Uzbekistan—hated being there, hated working there, hated the government, hated the police, and hated the political situation. (It would get worse.) But this man was careful to note how much he loved Kyrgyzstan, to which he traveled as often as he could. “Now that,” he told me, “is a country.”
I had visited Kyrgyzstan a couple times in my travels through Central Asia, and I, too, had adored my time amid its mountains and among its almost unflaggingly welcoming people. The Kyrgyz were tough without being overly aggressive—and quite unhappy, many of them, but not in a way that became your problem. Since my last visit to Kyrgyzstan, however, much had changed, including the overthrow of two despotic governments. There had been the occasional talk of civil war, angry protests against an American military base, and increasingly strychnine relations with neighboring Uzbekistan. One of the young men who worked at my hotel, an ethnic Uzbek, had told me, when I tried out my disintegratingly rusty language skills on him, “You know, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks—we are no longer brothers right now.”
Considering Kyrgyzstan’s internal political turmoil, I had been expecting to find the country I so loved transformed into a minor police state. When Andrei and I left Bishkek around 7:00 a.m., in a car piloted by our hired driver, Igor, no one stopped us. We came to no checkpoints. In Tashkent in 2003, you were stopped at least three times while trying to leave the city limits—even the checkpoints had checkpoints. As Bishkek disappeared behind us, I blathered something to Andrei about how the lack of checkpoints seemed to me indicative of Kyrgyz culture’s greater openness.
“There are plenty of checkpoints in the south,” Andrei said. “Down there, whole villages are surrounded by tanks.” Andrei gazed out the window for a moment. “But you know,” he said, turning to me, “maybe if we had more checkpoints, we wouldn’t have so many revolutions.”
The Kyrgyz Tulip Revolution, which occurred in 2005, succeeded in ridding Kyrgyzstan of President Askar Akayev and his vampirically embezzling family. In my first book, I referred to Akayev, a former physics professor and the first president of independent Kyrgyzstan, as “the most liberal” leader of post-Soviet Central Asia. When the Kyrgyz people started pushing back against the Akayev regime in 2004, they were astonished to discover that few members of its beleaguered police or internal security forces had any heart left to defend the system. Kyrgyz protesters eventually found themselves standing in the drawing room of Kyrgyzstan’s presidential palace, which like ours is called the White House. When Akayev’s personal diaries were discovered (the man himself had fled to Russia), the genuinely shocking extent to which he had been enriching himself on the backs of his impoverished countrymen was revealed to all.
Akayev was succeeded by Kurmanbek Bakiyev, whose strongest support came from southern Kyrgyzstan. Bakiyev’s many broken promises, a high national unemployment rate, a kidney-punched economy, and, eventually, race riots involving Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the south led to widespread protests and weeks of violent unrest. (The flame-blackened husk of the prosecutor’s office, stormed by protesters as a symbol of all that was wrong with the regime, still marred Bishkek’s Ala-Too Square.) Bakiyev, who resigned in 2010 and fled to Belarus, was replaced by his foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva, a major opposition figure during the Tulip Revolution and, by most accounts, a relatively decent human being (though ten years from now I might be lamenting my credulous admiration of her as well). Of President Otunbayeva, Andrei said, “She won’t be allowed to seek reelection, so obviously she’s trying to steal as much as she can right now.”
I was disappointed to hear bad things about Otunbayeva, if only because Kyrgyzstan badly needed and deserved a break. Igor perked up when we began to discuss Otunbayeva, for he had an opinion on her, too. I did not put much faith in Igor’s opinions. Any of them. He affected great offense whenever I put on my seat belt, for instance, claiming he was such a fine driver I would not need to wear it, and later asked Andrei if I was in the CIA. The only CD Igor had in his car was something called Hans Zimmer Presents, even though none of the songs (the Hawaii Five-O theme song, the Chariots of Fire theme song, the X-Files theme song, Spandau Ballet’s “True”) had anything to do with Hans Zimmer.
While Igor declaimed his opinion on Otunbayeva, Andrei translated by saying, “And now he’s going on about a bunch of bullshit, basically.” As intrigued as I was by Igor, I would have recommended his driving services only to my most implacable enemies. Igor loved hunting through the tracks of Hans Zimmer Presents when he was passing another car. In fact, he saved all of his most complicated, attention-requiring in-car maneuvers (rolling down his window, turning around to talk to me) for when he was passing another car, preferably around a blind turn.
When we were a few miles outside Bishkek, Igor told Andrei he could arrange a prostitute for me and insisted Andrei ask me if I wanted one. It was troubling but not really surprising to learn that of all the Americans Igor had driven, all but two “went crazy,” in his words, for local prostitutes. When Andrei made it clear I had no interest in prostitutes, Igor asked him if he thought I was gay. “If he is gay,” Igor said before a stunned Andrei could answer, “we have a big problem.” When Andrei told me all this later that day, part of me wanted to tell Igor I was a gay CIA agent here to break up prostitution rings run by freelance drivers, but my fear of being beaten to death roadside with a tire iron prevailed.
The day before, it had snowed for hours in and around Bishkek. The spectacular mountains all around us were covered in snow and invisible against a bleach-white sky. As we drove on, the morning grew warmer, and little by little the lower reaches of the mountains developed patches and then swaths of evergreen. At the base of the mountains were little huddled collections of smokestacks and boxy industrial buildings. By 9:00 a.m., huge clouds had risen up behind the mountains. Later, the clouds shifted and shrouded the mountaintops like ragged, broken halos. Some of the higher mountains managed to pierce the cloud layer, creating wounds of intense blue. In a few hours’ time, we had our first glimpse of Issyk-Kul. Initially, I could see only a curved, scythe-like section of the lake. As more of it came into sight, it was a prairie of plate glass sparkling in the sun.
The Kyrgyz government takes Issyk-Kul’s “ecological habitat” status fairly seriously, as can be seen when one enters the lake’s officially protected environs and passes beneath a grand arched gate marked BIOSPHERE ENTRANCE. At 450 kilometers in diameter, Issyk-Kul is the tenth-largest lake in the world. Its name (Hot Lake) derives from the curious fact that it never freezes, no matter how cold the winter or how many meters of snow lay piled on its surrounding panorama of mountains. It has been theorized that the bubonic plague that wiped out 50 percent of Europe in the fourteenth century might have been spread by merchants who stopped at an important Silk Road way station found on the shores of Issyk-Kul—a
nd what an unfortunate historical association for such a lovely, lonely place. We were driving along the lake’s edge now, where the little resorts had an almost Chesapeakean tidiness. Andrei told me that if we had been here a month ago, we could have seen Bishkek’s elite out on the lake in their sailboats. The water, now that we were closer to the shoreline, seemed motionless, autumn still, and gray.
Soon we were driving down a road lined on both sides by tall, perfectly spaced poplar trees. Sometimes the trees broke to reveal small tucked-away villages or Muslim cemeteries. Igor was swerving a lot, for on the road were more animals than cars. Among the creatures we almost hit: several sheep, a cow, two horses, and a goat. Among the creatures we actually hit: a chicken, two crows, and a dog. (The dog lived. The chicken did not. The fate of the crows was unclear.) At one point, Igor had to stop and get out of the car to shoo away a dozen horses standing in the middle of the road, one of which turned and hissed at Igor when he smacked her on the backside. Andrei and I watched this confrontation with great amusement from the safety of our SUV.
Most of the villages we passed were little more than one-building-deep rows of roadside homes. You could sprint from one end to the other of most of these villages in twenty seconds flat. You could stand in the middle of these villages and physically count the number of people who lived in them.
The village we thought we were looking for was once called Svetly Mys, which means “Bright Cape” in Russian. Like most places throughout Central Asia, Svetly Mys had been granted a new name after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was now called Ak Bolun, which means something like “White Knight” in Kyrgyz. Although Ak Bolun was found two miles away from the shore of Issyk-Kul, its former Russian name suggests it had once been closer to the water’s edge. After talking to some villagers, we learned we were looking not for Svetly Mys or Ak Bolun at all but rather for a nearby village called Kurmanty, which was also the name of the small river that divided Kurmanty from Ak Bolun. The people of Ak Bolun were adamant that Kurmanty was where all the recent excavation work had taken place. Before our search for the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood formally began, we decided to drive to Karakol, the regional capital, for lunch.