Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  The degree to which such conflicting sentiment reflects the beliefs of the historical Jesus cannot be known, but it can almost certainly be traced to the community for which Matthew wrote his gospel. Matthew contains several internal clues that indicate its author, like the author of the Gospel According to John, was directing his words to a troubled community in need of guidance on key issues. It would seem that one of the most pressing issues for Matthew’s community was tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

  If the Jesus of Matthew’s gospel seems torn as to whether his disciples should seek Jew or Gentile, this is probably due to the issue’s remaining unsettled within Matthew’s community. Antioch (in modern-day Syria) is often assumed to be where Matthew was written, and the likely situation faced by Christians in that city would align with what Matthew’s gospel indirectly depicts: a prosperous, ethnically mongrel, Greek-speaking community with strong ties to Jewish Christianity. Matthew’s community was probably not self-destructing, as John’s was, and appears to have agreed on many basic principles. But if some in Matthew’s community sought to make disciples of all nations and others believed Jesus was the perfect fulfillment of Israel—both postulations contained in the Gospel According to Matthew—the nature of its internal disagreements can easily be imagined.

  Matthew is the only evangelist to use the word “church,” which is significant. He is also the only evangelist to use the world “Gentile.” It may be that to Matthew the church brought into being by Jesus’s followers was the Kingdom of Heaven, and the only way to enter it was through official disciples of the church. From Matthew’s emphasis on Jesus’s fulfillment of Jewish scripture to the long speeches he gives Jesus that stress the importance of upright behavior, we see a gospel whose main argumentative thrust is for continuance of tradition and community well-being. “Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments,” Matthew’s Jesus tells us, “and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”

  Yet Matthew’s was not a strictly egalitarian community, and the Jesus of this gospel lingers on the concepts of reward and punishment (“the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire”) to a much greater extent than the other gospels. (John, by contrast, simply writes off everyone who doesn’t belong to his community as hopelessly irredeemable.) Matthew, however, expects a higher code of conduct from the disciples of Jesus, even if “the kingdom of heaven,” as his Jesus says at one point, “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.”

  Throughout Jewish religious history—throughout the history of all religions—there is abiding tension between traditionalists and modernizers. Modernizers were probably the first monotheists, because the earliest forms of Jewish worship were demonstrably polytheistic, strains of which remain embedded in the Hebrew Bible. Traditionalists such as the Maccabees overthrew the Seleucid modernizers seeking to bring Judaism into a place of accommodation with Hellenism, and traditionalists like the Zealots drove a dagger into the corrupted heart of a collaborationist and thus modernizing Temple aristocracy. When Christianity began to win more pagan converts in the second century, staunch pagan traditionalists such as Tacitus and Celsus were horrified.*4 The argument between traditionalism and modernization lives on today within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is and will always be an argument about the past and the future, about the pressures of inheritance and the desire for constancy. Although this ageless argument might twist and turn to unlikely effect (with a great modernizer such as Paul being adored by the traditionalists of today), the argument itself will never resolve. It will never fade away. It will emerge over and over again, with different parties wearing similar masks, for every spiritually engaged community is forced to confront the inevitability of newly arisen beliefs and the drifting tectonic plates of assumed morality.

  The Jesus of the gospels is often viewed as a modernizer, but the Jesus of Matthew is a conservative traditionalist in most matters. The Gospel According to Matthew is most emphatic of all the gospels on one issue in particular: Jesus upholds the Law.*5 When we see Jesus debate the Pharisees on various interpretive matters in the gospels, the temptation for modern readers is to see Jesus as a fearless hypocrisy smasher, an iconoclast putting the conservative, pettifogging Pharisees of his time in their place. In the socioreligious context of the first century, however, the Pharisees were seen as promulgators of many newfangled interpretations of scripture—including one alarming belief having to do with bodily resurrection. But when Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites, which he does on seven occasions in Matthew, it is not because they fail to practice what they preach; on the contrary, it is because they are not living up to the Law as laid down by Moses. John’s Jesus nukes any lingering loyalty to the Law because John’s community felt it no longer applied to them. Matthew’s Jesus honors the decrees of Moses because his community apparently needed the Law to bind together Jew and Gentile under terms both could understand and accept. In the end, that is what the gospels are: accidental autobiographies of the communities, and authors, that produced them.

  The Law, according to Matthew, was the foundation by which disciples of Jesus would be judged. When one considers the type of community for which Matthew was writing—a community comprising Jew and Gentile, deeply familiar with the Law, and desperately attempting to satisfy extremists on both sides of the issue—Matthew becomes a carefully positioned mediating document, even though many of the positions it takes are conservative. In this sense, it is the most fascinating and moving gospel, for the type of Christian community it went to such pains to comfort and promote proved to be early Christianity’s most fragile.

  V.

  The next morning, we went to a bazaar in Karakol to find and purchase a flashlight. With no flashlights available, we were forced to settle for a Chinese-made miner-style headlamp. The debate quickly began: Which of us would be forced to wear the headlamp inside the catacomb? Andrei said he should not be made to wear such a ridiculous thing within his home country; someone he knew might see him. I would wear the headlamp.

  Before heading back to Kurmanty, Andrei suggested we stop in at the local Russian Orthodox church to see if any of the priests there knew anything about the lost Armenian monastery and its purported Matthew reliquary. Karakol’s Orthodox church was well over a hundred years old and made almost entirely of wood; it was a point of local pride that only a few hundred nails were holding the place together. The paint-scoured, faded building had once been highly colorful, Andrei said, but only its turban-shaped onion domes and lintels retained any pigment more vivid than gray. As though to compensate, its surrounding metal gate had been freshly painted, as had the grounds’ benches, both done up in garish, glow-stick blues and greens. We walked up to the church door, on which was a sign. “ ‘No photo or video,’ ” Andrei said, translating it. “ ‘Do not shake hands with anyone. Do not put your hands in your pocket.’ ”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “ ‘Do not sit cross-legged.’ ”

  “Understood.”

  “ ‘No women in pants, skirts, or open dresses. No hats for men. No lipstick.’ ”

  “No lipstick?”

  “ ‘Women must wear head scarves.’ ”

  “Got it.”

  “ ‘No bathing suits.’ ”

  “Now you’re just making shit up.”

  “Again, ‘No bathing suits.’ It says so here.”

  Inside was the bare, forlorn world of Russian Christianity. There were no pews, and only on days of service did anyone bring in the fold-out chairs for parishioners. The floor was orange and warped; when I closed my eyes and walked along, it felt more as if I were walking on the natural unevenness of a hillside path than any man-made interior. A fair number of old, blobby parishioners were staggering on varicose legs from icon to icon. It was genuinely awful to think of the decades of emotional deprivation Russian Christians h
ad endured, and in a way I admired the tenacity of their faith. These people had the devastated stature of tragic heroes.

  Russian Christianity, a brazen imitation of Byzantine Christianity, was nearly destroyed by the Mongols in the early thirteenth century and almost destroyed again after the Bolshevik Revolution. The faith of every Russian Christian was determined by a sense of inevitable opposition—the terror of encirclement, of potential destruction. It was a faith of obedience and strictness, with a view of God as imperial as it was mystical. Nothing Jewish remained in this faith. Some Greek and Roman traces remained, but these were often ornamental, such as the Russian love of icons. Not a few Russian Christian traditions were repellent to non-Russian Christians, such as drinking holy water. Such a viscerally unpleasant thing for a former altar boy to contemplate! The holy water into which I had dunked my fingers as a boy was always a mineral lukewarm pool, as potable as engine coolant.

  We walked to the middle of the church, where there stood a lectern with an icon that appeared to depict Jesus raising Lazarus. The image was unclear, and Andrei did not have the necessary command of liturgical calligraphic nineteenth-century Russian, or enough familiarity with the New Testament, to figure it out. This was the first time Andrei had been in a church in fifteen years. “My mother believes in her soul,” he said, “but she never had me baptized. They say that those who are not baptized are not under God’s protection.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Are you baptized?”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I see. Then I think this is easy for you to say.”

  A Russian woman who obviously worked at the church walked by us. She was wearing a polka-dot head scarf and had oversized welder’s glasses and a mouthful of gold teeth. Her face was unlined but obviously old; this was a woman who had spent a large portion of her life being cold indoors. I nudged Andrei to ask if she knew anything about the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood.

  He approached her. The first thing Andrei said was that I was writing a book on the Twelve Apostles. The moment Andrei said this, the woman’s eyes shot over to me suspiciously. At the moment she started to speak, Andrei said, quietly, “This woman is weird.” She spoke for a while. Andrei, finally, translated: “She has no right, she says, to open her mouth about this matter without the priest’s permission. Even if she knew about it, which she doesn’t, to speak of it would be a sin.”

  “A sin? You’re kidding me.”

  I must have smiled, because she spoke again, harshly. Andrei duly translated: “And now she’s saying this may be a laughing matter to you but to her this is quite serious. Only a priest can give you correct information.”

  “Please,” I said, “apologize to her for me.”

  “I don’t think she cares. Or that it will help. Igor told me that the priest here is a very stern man.”

  “Yeah, no shit. Is the priest here?”

  “He’s not. He’s in Bishkek.”

  “Can you ask her if she’s even heard of Matthew’s reliquary being found near here?”

  Andrei asked her, and she had the same answer: “I can speak only if I get the blessing of the priest. Without that blessing, I cannot speak.” With that, she marched off.

  “She was not helpful,” Andrei said. “Sergei would have found a way to talk to that lady. He would have mentioned the names of respected monks in Russia, and she would have talked.”

  Back at the catacombs, I was standing beside a lake that never froze while snow fell on the mountains from a bright blue sky. No wonder Mongols worshipped mountains. Yet the air was sunny, crisp—a cup of hot tea with a fresh ice cube dropped in it. When we reached the barbed-wire gate, Andrei pointed out that someone had been here after us yesterday, tidying up: the hole in the fence through which we had slipped was bent back into place. We nevertheless made the hole again and climbed through. The animals, this time, turned weirdly restive, and for several seconds we believed we were going to be charged by one of the cows. Rather than follow yesterday’s trail through the ornery bestiary, we decided to walk around the farm and approach the catacombs from a different angle. There was no trail over here, so instead we followed the path of some recently mown hay.

  I found myself wondering who had purchased this property and why the local people seemed not to regard these catacombs as having any historical or cultural importance. When I lived in Rome, a new discovery in Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls was a Reuters-making news event. Even the first mentions of Matthew’s relics here had reached me through a Google alert. But now, years later? Nothing. Nothing to mark this place as significant in any way. It had to be the only potential apostolic site in the world to be so ill-tended and forgotten. Even Hakeldama had its visitors.

  We walked over the hills, which the previous night’s rain had transformed into dunes of wet grass. From the surrounding swamps came the song of bullfrogs—dozens of broken bows dragged along rusty violin strings. When we reached the entrance, Andrei changed his mind: he would wear the headlamp. Once we climbed into the catacombs and could actually see what was inside, it became instantly clear that one of the mysterious tunnels that led off into darkness stopped due to collapse, while the other led into an open area big enough for us to stand in. Revealed by the light of Andrei’s headlamp, this catacomb was so defiantly unremarkable I started to laugh.

  Matthew’s relics were found elsewhere in this world. Some are kept in the Cathedral of San Matteo in Salerno, Italy (according to legend, they were transported there from Ethiopia in the eleventh century), and others are held by Saint Mary Major in Rome. Contrary to many travel guides’ breathless imagining of how Matthew might have wound up in Kyrgyzstan (“Could Matthew have traveled to Central Asia and died there?”), there was never any legend that had Matthew physically perishing in this land. The legend held merely that Armenian Christians brought with them a collection of purported Matthew relics. All mentions of the Ploskih excavation’s having found a sarcophagus that might have housed Matthew’s body were ridiculous. Assuming that Matthew’s relics did find their way into the hands of Armenian missionaries, it goes against all sense that the body of an apostle would be entrusted to Christians launching themselves into a part of the world unknown to most Christians. Whatever relics this legendary Armenian monastery was supposed to have held, they would almost certainly have been small and few in number.

  Meanwhile, the abundance of spiders Andrei and I were encountering within the catacombs would have powered down the nervous system of even the mildest arachnophobe. Every time I picked a spider out of my hair, I felt another hypodermically legging its way along my neck. We walked from one end of the tunnels to the other and back again, cursing the spiders the entire way. When Andrei flicked a millipede at me, I put a spider in his hair. After that, not surprisingly, he decided we had seen enough. We pushed out of the catacombs and sat on the hillside, pointing out our best guesses as to where the legendary Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood might have been. My imagined locations were all in the middle of the lake. Andrei frowned. “Like Atlantis?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly like Atlantis.”

  Andrei plucked a wet piece of grass from the hillside and put it into his mouth. I did not tell him that he still had a spider in his hair. He said nothing for a while. Then: “That doesn’t sound very likely.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

  VI.

  A few days later, back in Bishkek, we visited Holy Trinity Cathedral, the city’s largest Russian Orthodox church. I did not have an appointment, but as luck would have it, standing just inside the gate was Yuri Anastasian, who served as a kind of information minister for the cathedral. He was in the middle of what appeared to be a friendly, animated conversation with a Kyrgyz woman. He was wearing a puffy winter vest with a red long-sleeve thermal T-shirt underneath. Brown-gray hair, beard, thick glasses—Yuri looked a little like a pre-Islamic Cat Stevens in Adidas track pants. During a lull in his conver
sation, Andrei and I introduced ourselves and asked about the ancient monastery in Kurmanty. Instantly, Yuri began to nod. He had been to Kurmanty several times, he said, and had even worked to create a handmade, highly detailed map of the lost monastery by talking to the area’s oldest people.

  Yuri meant the Russian monastery, I realized. I told him I was talking about not the Russian monastery destroyed in 1916 but rather the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood.

  “There’s only one monastery at Kurmanty,” Yuri said. “Or Svetly Mys. It was actually located in Svetly Mys.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood is…what?”

  Yuri was by now amused; I was not the first person to come calling with such questions. “The Catalan Atlas,” he said, “is the only source that mentions that monastery’s connection to Matthew. There was no monastery in that area before the tenth century, in my opinion. And any monastery to appear there after the tenth century would have been a Russian monastery, not an Armenian monastery. We have no reason to think that an old Catalonian map is correct in its information.”

  I asked him about the catacombs.