by Tom Bissell
Karakol’s boulevards were wide and Soviet—Venetian canals filled with cement. It was obvious the town attracted tourists and foreigners: many of the signs were in English, and a small percentage of its ATMs actually worked. As we pulled up to the restaurant Andrei wanted to visit, I saw that it specialized in balikh (fish). I had learned the hard way that one’s best option when confronted with a seafood restaurant in landlocked Central Asia was to fake a heart attack and sneak back to your hotel when your friends ran off to find an ambulance, but Andrei assured me that the fish was all fresh caught from Issyk-Kul, which, he said, “wasn’t that polluted.”
Inside, Andrei and Igor ordered far too much food, the standout of which was an aromatic bucket of fish soup. Overeating was the Kyrgyz way, as this was a land whose national hero, Manas, is said to have eaten an entire sheep at birth and two dozen sheep for his twelfth birthday. After lunch, our search began in earnest for the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood. Thanks to a guide friend of Andrei’s, we knew a few things about the excavation site. One was that the supposed catacombs that once led into the vanished monastery were all that had been excavated and all that could be explored. We also knew that the land on which the ancient monastery had supposedly been located was sold about a year ago, which meant the excavation site was now considered private property. We knew the entrance to the catacombs was “on the left” when heading toward Issyk-Kul and was said to be visible from the “main road.” Finally, we knew a member of the archaeological dig team had planted a large wooden cross near the entrance to the catacombs. As it turned out, though, everything we thought we knew about the excavation site was at least a little wrong.
We stopped in the literal center of Kurmanty and learned it had precisely two kinds of citizens at home in the middle of the day: the awe-inspiringly old and the informationally unharvestable young. Neither had the faintest idea where the old monastery excavation site was located; most claimed to have never heard of it. This seemed odd. The supposed monastery site was mentioned in many books, including several Central Asian guidebooks. I had passed through the Issyk-Kul area once before and heard talk of Matthew’s supposed resting place from a freelance guide who offered to take me there, which later led to my first thoughts of writing a book about apostolic tombs. Also, BBC International had come here and done a story on the excavation site. I did not understand how an international news crew or Western guidebook writers could pass through these small, eleemosynary villages, asking about apostles and monasteries, and not gloriously implant themselves within local memory for the next three generations.
After a short, old, grinning woman with a mouthful of gold teeth told us she had never heard anything about any excavation in the village in which she had spent her entire life, I asked Andrei to rephrase his question. Instantly, Andrei turned to me. “What do you mean? I already asked her about the monastery.”
“But did you mention Matthew?”
“Yeah,” he said, “of course I did.”
“Matthew the apostle.”
He laughed. “I don’t think she knows anything.”
I looked at the woman, who shrugged as though on cue. “This is really weird,” I said.
“I agree it’s strange. But if she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.”
We walked back to Igor’s SUV and drove on down a dirt road. We had been asking around for an hour by this point, and Igor was getting angry. Andrei provided a running translation: “He says the Kyrgyz are ignorant. That’s their problem, he says. They don’t understand good Russian anymore. He says maybe if they didn’t change the names of all their villages, people here would feel some connection to their past.”
At this I sighed. “That’s pretty rich, coming from a Russian.”
Andrei sighed, too. “It’s what he says. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
We pulled up beside a middle-aged, unhappy-looking woman walking along the road carrying a small, stuffed suitcase. She claimed to know of a sign, found a little farther down the road, that made official note of the monastery. Close to where the road passed by the Kurmanty River, we found the sign she spoke of: SIT [sic] OF KORMENTU [sic?] ANCIENT SETTLEMENT. We turned onto the indicated road, Igor still grumbling about the hopelessness of our quest. Ahead we saw some Kyrgyz children pushing one another across the road in wheelbarrows. Igor had a fascinating response to this, which was to gun his engine and steer the SUV toward the children. I advised him never to do anything like that again when I was a passenger in his car and promised that if he did, I would not be paying him. Igor said nothing to me for the rest of the day.
We followed the road but came across no second “Ancient Settlement” sign. To encounter a sign that announced the existence of something that turned out to not exist would not be the weirdest thing ever to happen to me in Central Asia, a land of seven-year-old hitchhikers and hotels and restaurants whose windows were affixed with both Visa and MasterCard stickers and yet refused to accept either Visa or MasterCard. At a bend in the road, we saw an old Kyrgyz woman wearing a bright red head scarf gathering up twigs in a field. Igor had stopped the SUV and was approaching the woman before Andrei had his seat belt unbuckled. I got out, too, half expecting Igor to punch her in the head. Instead, I heard him greet the woman with a polite “Assalom aleikum.” Predictably, she had never heard of any “ancient settlement” found along this road. When we got back in the SUV, Andrei said we should drive down to the end of the road anyway. “What good are old people,” a clearly frustrated Andrei said, “when they don’t know anything?”
We found at the end of the road an old Soviet factory so completely abandoned it seemed more like a first-person-shooter multiplayer map than a place that had ever been a functional site of manufacture. The area was surrounded by collapsed chain-link fence and pieces of concrete that looked catapulted in by an invading medieval army. The factory was found on the lakeshore. In back, near some unloading docks, the tetanusly rusted arm of a broken crane sagged into the water, reminding me that perhaps no force in world history had done more for the cause of rigorous waterfront destruction than Communism. I marveled for a moment at the sight of the factory’s padlocked side door, beside which was a bank of broken open windows. Walking back to the SUV, I cut through some high grass and stepped in a pile of still-warm horse manure several times larger than my foot. I did my best to clean my filthy shoe in the waters of Issyk-Kul while incoming ducks sailed over fast and low. I could hear Igor laughing from inside his SUV.
Andrei had an idea. We should, he said, drive back up the road to the midpoint between the factory and Kurmanty, get out of the SUV, and walk in opposite directions until we found the catacombs’ entrance. This was better than my idea, which was to physically assault Igor.
The off-road landscape at the midpoint was surprisingly rolling, with swampy glade-like areas tucked unseen between the hills. I had with me a burner cell phone that I bought in Bishkek and used it to stay in touch with Andrei while we fanned out in search of the entrance to the catacombs.
When we got far enough away from the SUV, I said, “Igor is a dickhead. Hearing him complain about Kyrgyz not able to speak Russian well…does that motherfucker speak Kyrgyz at all?”
“But the people we met didn’t speak Russian very well.”
“Are you offended by that?”
“Not really. It would be good for us if they did, though.”
“Do you see anything? Anything at all?”
“I see nothing that resembles an old monastery or catacombs.”
“We’re supposed to be able to see it from the road, right?”
“That’s what my friend told me.”
“…”
“…”
“Now what do you see?”
“Nothing. I’m peeing.”
“Great. I see some frogs. I see a swamp.”
“I see a swamp as well.”
“The BBC did a segment on this stupid monastery! Why is it so hard to find?”
“
I have no answer.”
“Do the hills you’re walking on have these odd markings on them?”
“Yes. They’re not markings. They’re paths the cows use to walk along the hillside.”
“Oh. Indeed they are. Okay. Now I’m actually watching a cow spray diarrhea out of its ass.”
“My advice is to stand back.”
“Thanks.”
“…”
“…”
“So. No catacombs here. No ruins. No ancient settlement.”
“Meet you back at the truck?”
“Okay.”
We decided to head to our hotel in Karakol and come back the following day. Near the main highway, however, we saw a young Kyrgyz guy on a motorcycle. “Stop!” Andrei said to Igor. Apparently, Andrei had a feeling about this young man, which handsomely paid off. Not only did he know of the monastery and its catacombs, but he knew roughly where it was located. We were on the wrong road, he said. The road we wanted was the second unpaved road down from the main highway—the road, in other words, that did not advertise its ancient settlement. The young man said we would have to drive down this road a mile or so, after which we would see a trailer. The excavation-site catacombs were somewhere beyond that trailer.
We did as instructed and drove down a bumpy, unpaved road, past a sheep market and a couple tiny houses, and finally saw, in a miniature valley just below a grassy escarpment, the trailer the young man mentioned. We left the SUV, followed the road down, and stopped when we came to a padlocked gate, on either side of which was barbed-wire fencing. The trailer looked as though it had gone unused since Kyrgyz independence. Its windows were transparent plastic that had been taped in place, but the tape had come loose, which meant the plastic windows were flapping in and out of their frames. The trailer was the centerpiece of a surrounding little farm. Here were three endlessly grass-chewing cows, and here was a goat walking up to the gate and bleating, as though to warn us away from entering.
Andrei stepped closer to the barbed wire and discovered a section of it could be parted wide enough for us to squeeze through. We did not discuss whether we should squeeze through. I held the barbed wire open, and he did the same for me. We were now officially trespassing on private property. “In America,” Andrei asked, “could we be shot for doing something like this?”
“Actually,” I said, “yeah, we could.”
“Here you just get the shit beaten out of you.”
We thought we found the entrance to the catacombs when we saw a relatively fancy wooden canopy on the edge of the farm. This turned out to be a cooking pit of some sort. We followed the one path we could find, which carried us along a peaceful inlet of Issyk-Kul. Ducks kicked beside us. Big orange fish slalomed through the tall cattails along the shore. This seemed another world altogether, one onto which the catastrophe of twentieth-century Communism had not crash-landed. Across the inlet, which became as wide as a river, we saw two Kyrgyz shepherds. They saw us, too. In fact, they were watching us. Andrei said, “They’re probably thinking, ‘What are those assholes doing over there?’ ”
The path led around two large mammillated hills and to a delta where the inlet split in two. In other words, nowhere. We walked back to the SUV and found Igor engaged in conversation with an older, mustached Kyrgyz man, whose principal interest derived from the fact that he was the first man I had ever encountered wearing a coat and tie while on horseback. The old man, who spoke Russian extremely well, knew about the monastery and knew about the recent excavation. “They were here last April,” he said, with reassuring specificity. He promised the catacomb entrance was indeed back there somewhere and went so far as to draw for us a map in the dirt. Andrei and I ducked back through the gap in the barbed-wire fence and tried again.
Just past the inlet’s delta, Andrei rushed ahead of me, saying he knew exactly where the catacombs were. I let him go, only to get lost on one of the mammillated hills we had seen earlier, both of which were jungles of tall and finger-cuttingly sharp yellow grass. I had more or less given up on finding the catacombs when I heard Andrei, rooting around on the other hill, shout, “I found it!” He had almost fallen into the entrance, which was not an entrance so much as a hole that looked dynamited into the hillside. Someone had partially covered this entrance with branches and leaves. We looked inside, but it was forbidding and terrifying in the way actual real-life darkness is forbidding and terrifying. Andrei asked if I had a flashlight.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”
“You should have a flashlight.”
“Really? It’s not like I’ve been visiting apostolic tombs for the last several years.”
“I understand American sarcasm, you know,” Andrei said, and ducked inside.
I followed him in, squatting to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling. Almost immediately we both stopped. Fifty feet ahead of us: a shaft of light. To our immediate left: a passageway that led into deeper darkness. To our immediate right: the same. I had been in plenty of catacombs before. These were not the friendly and torch-lit catacombs one found in suburban Rome. This was a cramped, hostile, dirt-floored, spider- and millipede-infested space as uninterested in its own history as it was in our exploratory comfort.
Outside the sun was setting along the edge of a bruise-colored sky. We decided to return, with a flashlight, the next morning.
IV.
Whoever he was, the author of the Gospel According to Matthew had some skill with Greek and felt an obvious comfort and familiarity with Jewish scripture. Most scholars thus regard the gospel’s author as an educated—and probably pharisaically trained—member of the Jewish Diaspora. In this sense, the Gospel According to Matthew has quite a bit in common with the writings of Paul, possibly because its author, like Paul, hailed from a Pharisaic background. Both Paul and the author of Matthew were determined to portray the mission, life, and death of Jesus as the nation of Israel’s experience in surrogate form; Matthew was particularly interested in establishing that virtually every recorded act of Jesus had its basis in Jewish scripture. The gospel formulation that runs “Then was fulfilled” occurs fourteen times in Matthew, once in Mark, three times in Luke, and nine times in John.
This parasitic approach to Jewish scripture had intellectually disastrous repercussions, leading later Christian thinkers (and millions of modern Christians) into an inescapable labyrinth of prophecy anytime they peered into scripture. Irenaeus approvingly called this phenomenon the “demonstrations in the Scriptures,” and these demonstrations, it turned out, were everywhere. Citing proof or demonstration texts has always been a way for Christians to establish the airtight validity of their beliefs. They do not appear to have bothered to imagine how easily someone with a piece of scripture next to him could craft a story that “fulfilled” what the cited scripture appeared to predict.*3
There were other rhetorical methods by which first-century Jews and Jewish Christians put Jewish scripture to work. One method was called halakha, which was legalistically inclined, reveled in commentary and specifics, and tended toward long-winded extrapolation—Paul’s method, generally speaking. The method of the Qumran community (see page 372) was closer to a pesher, or commentary, which lined up chunks of Jewish scripture (sometimes unrelated pieces of scripture that had been grouped thematically) for the purpose of illuminating the social, legal, or cosmic issue at hand. The midrash, which was used by many first- and second-century Jewish teachers, was probably the loosest of all these interpretive methods, as it allowed a speaker or writer to explore pieces of Jewish scripture through parable, homily, and metaphor, sometimes in surprising or counterintuitive ways.
In writing his gospel, Matthew’s author seems to have combined the loose midrashic approach with that of a textually intense pesher. When Jesus is approached by the disciples in Matthew and asked why he speaks in parables, for instance, Jesus responds, “The reason I speak in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’�
�” To put it another way, when asked why he uses midrashic tools, Jesus responds with a pesher on a passage from Isaiah. Matthew’s Jesus, more teacher than miracle worker, is much like the author of Matthew himself: metaphorically gifted but legalistically rigid, devoted to scriptural authority while aware of human needs that scripture does not explicitly address, seemingly open-minded but also an unbending traditionalist.
A major concern for the author of Matthew was the Kingdom of Heaven, even though what exactly Jesus meant by the Kingdom of Heaven remains danglingly up for debate. By all available evidence, the first Christians understood the Kingdom as the coming of a Jewish-run world in which all the vexations that plagued the Jews—occupation, poverty, and disease (not for nothing did Jesus heal)—would be vanquished from the earth. To this end, Matthew mentions the imminence of the end numerous times and the “weeping” that will occur. Luke’s and Mark’s discussions of the Kingdom often feel uncertain and hedging—Luke seems to suggest at one point that it develops within a believer—and in John’s gospel we see overmuch individual belief in the Kingdom lampooned in the figure of Nicodemus, the Sanhedrin’s secret Jesus partisan, who is depicted as being so obsessed with signs of the coming Kingdom that he does nothing in particular to reify its arrival. Matthew’s author is by far the clearest of any of the gospel writers on what he thinks the Kingdom of Heaven means, and discipleship is a prominent part of that message.
For Matthew, Jesus is both the fulfillment and the embodiment of Israel itself. But he is also something new on this earth, something that escapes Israel’s ethno-gravitational pull. Even though Matthew’s Jesus tells the disciples during his ministry, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles,” in the middle of the gospel Matthew cites the prophet Isaiah as the source of these words of Jesus: “And in his name the Gentiles will hope.” Matthew’s Jesus also declaims during the Last Supper that “this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” After his resurrection, Jesus unambiguously tells the Eleven, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”