The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  Peter looked all round. Three weeks had already gone by since Jesus’s death, and all that time he had not left the upper room. Just a hundred or so sympathizers were there on this particular morning, and the same question was being urgently asked on every side.

  At the far end of the room, their host was the only man standing, leaning against a wall. A score of men were sitting around him, turning their eyes alternately towards him and then to the window, at the foot of which the Eleven were all gathered together. Supporters, perhaps? “Now,” thought Peter, “it’s him or me.”

  The apostle looked at his ten companions. Andrew his brother, who was biting his lower lip; John and James, the sons of Zebedee; Matthew, the former customs officer… None of them possessed the stature of a leader.

  Someone would have to stand up in the midst of this rudderless crowd. Stand up and speak out – for, just now, this was the only way to seize power.

  Peter took a deep breath and stood up. The light from the window illumined him from behind, leaving his face in the shadow.

  “Brothers…”

  In spite of all his efforts, he had not managed to find out where the Essenes had buried Jesus’s body after removing it from the tomb. “He is the only witness apart from me? Does he know? I must grab the attention of these people and assert my authority once and for all.” He decided to ignore the questions of the throng, and measured them with his gaze. They were about to find out that it was he who had executed God’s judgement. God had used his abilities, and God would use them again.

  “Brothers, Judas had to endure his destiny. He was one of the Twelve, and he was a traitor: he fell on his face, his belly opened, and his entrails were shed on the sand.”

  A deathly silence fell on the room. Only the man who had murdered Judas could know these details. He had just publicly confessed that the hand which had held the dagger was not that of some Zealot, but his own.

  He out-stared each of those who had noisily been demanding details of the fate of Jesus’s body: under his gaze, one by one, they lowered their eyes.

  The beloved disciple, at the far end of the room, was still saying nothing. Peter raised his hand.

  “We must replace Judas; someone else needs to take over from him. Let him be chosen from among those who accompanied the Master, from the encounter on the banks of the Jordan up to the end.”

  A murmur of approval swept through the gathering, and all eyes turned towards the beloved disciple. He alone could complete the college of the twelve apostles: he had been the first to meet the Master by the Jordan, and he had been his close associate right up to the end. He was obviously the right man to replace Judas.

  Peter perceived which way the crowd was inclining.

  “We are not the ones who will choose! God must designate the twelfth apostle. We must draw lots. Matthew, take your calamus and write two names on these pieces of bark.

  Before Matthew could obey, Peter leant towards him and murmured something in his ear. The former customs officer stared at him in surprise. Then he nodded, sat down and wrote quickly. The two pieces of bark were placed on a kerchief, of which Peter lifted the four corners.

  “You there, come over here and draw one of these two names. And may God speak in our midst!”

  A young boy rose to his feet, stretched out his hand, plunged it into the kerchief and took out one of the two pieces

  of bark.

  Peter seized it and handed it to Matthew.

  “I can’t read: tell us what’s written there.”

  Matthew cleared his voice, looked at the piece of bark and proclaimed:

  “The name written here is Matthias!”

  Protests erupted from the crowd.

  “Brothers!” Peter had to shout to make himself heard. “God himself has just designated Matthias as the man to take Judas’s place! There are twelve of us again, as at the last meal that Jesus ate before he died, in this very room!”

  On every side men were rising to their feet while Peter drew Matthias to himself, embraced him and made him sit amid the Eleven. Then he stared at the beloved disciple, from whom he was separated by the throng of those sitting on the floor. A compact group of sympathizers was surrounding him now, standing erect, their faces sombre. Shouting above the tumult, Peter cried:

  “Twelve tribes spoke for God: twelve apostles will speak for Jesus, in his place or in his name. Twelve, and not a single one more: there will never be a thirteenth apostle!”

  The beloved disciple stared back at him for a long time without flinching, then leant over and murmured a few words in the ear of a curly-headed teenage boy. Suddenly feeling alarmed, Peter slipped his hand into the slit in his tunic and seized the handle of his sica. But his rival signed to those surrounding him, and silently made his way towards the door. Thirty or so men followed in his footsteps, their faces inexpressive.

  * * *

  As soon as he was out in the street, he turned round: the teenage boy had run up to his side, and held out to him the other piece of bark, the one that had slipped from the kerchief abandoned by Peter after the proclamation of God’s choice. He asked the young boy:

  “Yokhanan, are you sure nobody saw this piece of bark?”

  “Nobody, abbu. Nobody other than Matthew who wrote the name, Peter who dictated it to him, and now you.”

  “Well then, my child, give it to me, and then forget all about it.”

  He glanced at the second voting slip that had been put forward in God’s ballot, and smiled at Yokhanan: the name written on it was not his.

  “So, Peter,” he thought, “you have decided to keep me out of the New Israel for good! Now there is war between us: may it never crush this child, and those who will come after him.”

  25

  Now that Father Nil had been brutally torn away from his studies and the patient reconstitution of the past, his stable, peaceful world collapsed: for the second time, his cell had been searched. And more papers had disappeared from his table.

  The notes that had been taken on this particular morning contained details of his research into the beginnings of the Church. He had been aware that he was venturing down a path that had always been forbidden to Catholics. And now someone in the monastery knew what he was seeking, what he had already found. Someone who was spying on him, slipping into his cell when he was not there, and did not hesitate to steal. The impalpable danger he had sensed around him suddenly became more real – and he did not know from where it was coming, nor why.

  Was it possible that studying might become dangerous?

  His mind elsewhere, he mechanically turned the pages of his friend’s last published work. At every moment he could tell how great was the void left by his death: nobody would be there to listen to him any more, to guide him… Feeling abandoned in the midst of the vast solitude of this monastery, a new feeling overwhelmed him: fear.

  Andrei’s last thoughts had been of him: he needed to overcome this fear and pursue his investigation using a mere brief note as a starting point. The first line mentioned the manuscript of a Coptic apocalypse: doubtless one of the many that his friend kept in the drawers of his office. But the mysterious visitor to the north library, who had almost caught him there that morning, had certainly spotted the big empty gap left on the bookshelf by the M M M he had borrowed. This book could have been taken only by a monk who did not have access to the library – without this, he would have left in its place a “phantom” with his signature, as was the rule.

  They would soon discover the bunch of keys left in Andrei’s trouser pocket, and they would put two and two together: the office would immediately be locked up, and Nil would lose any hope of getting back in there to find the mysterious manuscript.

  Feeling quite crestfallen, he closed the book, mechanically slipping his index finger between the cover and the end paper. And jumped in surprise.

  He had just felt a bump on the inside face of the cover.

  A flaw in the book’s manufacture?

 
He brought the book over to his lamp and opened it under the light: it was not a problem in the binding. The edge of the cover had been unglued and then glued back. Inside, one could make out the presence of a slender rectangular object.

  With the greatest of care, he slit open the end paper that covered the board, pulled it away, and tipped the book so that the bright light could shine into it: there was a document folded into four on the inside.

  Just before he left, Andrei had slipped into his final work a piece of paper that he had taken the greatest care to conceal.

  Picking up a pair of tweezers, Nil cautiously started to extract the piece of paper from its place of concealment.

  26

  That evening, the Father Abbot, sitting at his office, was on the verge of feeling really rather cross.

  He had been asked to be put through to Cardinal Catzinger in Rome, but his number seemed to be permanently engaged. Finally, the prelate’s muffled voice came through.

  “I hope I’m not phoning at an inconvenient time, Your Eminence… I need to ask for your advice, and perhaps your help, in the case of that monk we’ve already spoken about… Father Nil, the professor of exegesis in the theological college. You’ll remember that I alerted you to… yes, that’s right. I’ve recently noticed quite a big change in his patterns of behaviour. He’s always been a very disciplined monk, attentive during the church services. Since poor Father Andrei died, he hasn’t been the same. And something quite unprecedented has just happened: while the post of librarian remains unfilled, I’ve been checking the books borrowed from our library myself. Well, early this morning, I discovered that Father Nil had stolen a rather sensitive book from the north wing. Sorry? Well, it’s, you know, the M M M of the Americans…”

  He was obliged to hold the receiver away from his ear. The private line of the Vatican, used as it was to a higher degree of unctuousness, was now transmitting the Cardinal’s wrath in high fidelity.

  “I share your disquiet, Your Eminence: you’ll be receiving without delay a small sample of the notes that Father Nil himself has been taking… Yes, I’ve been able to procure a few for myself. Then you’ll be in a position to judge whether it would be appropriate to take measures, or whether we can leave dear Father Nil to pursue his scholarly studies in peace. You’ll look after the matter personally? Thank you, Your Eminence… Arrivederci, Your Eminence.”

  Heaving a sigh of relief, the Father Abbot hung up. It was quite without enthusiasm that he had consented to the purchase of such dangerous works as the M M M – but how can one fight against the attacks of the enemy unless one knows which weapons he can deploy?

  He knew that he was responsible before God for his monks, for their spiritual as well as their intellectual lives – and as for violating the sacred sanctuary of the cell of one of his sons, twice over… no, that was something he did not like having to do.

  In his office at the Vatican, Emil Catzinger furiously pressed a button on his switchboard.

  “Get me Mgr Calfo. Yes, straight away. I know perfectly well it’s Saturday evening! He must be in his apartment in Castel Sant’Angelo – just get hold of him.”

  27

  Father Nil’s hand was trembling slightly. He had just carefully pulled out from the cover of Andrei’s book a photocopy. He brought it nearer his lamp, and immediately recognized the elegant script of Old Coptic.

  A Coptic manuscript.

  The photo was perfectly legible, and showed a fragment of well-preserved parchment. Very often, Nil had examined the treasures that Andrei pulled out of his drawer so as to show them off. He had familiarized himself with the script used in the great manuscripts from Nag Hammadi, collated for the first time by the Egyptologist Jean Doresse after their discovery in 1945, on the left bank of the Middle Nile. As an expert in Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, he knew that calligraphy evolves over time, in a process tending towards greater simplification.

  The script of this parchment was of the same kind as that of famous apocrypha such as the Gospel of Thomas from the end of the second century, which attracted worldwide attention. But this one was obviously later.

  The fragment was really small, and must have been deemed obscure and of little interest to Doresse, who had let it go. And it had ended up in Rome, like so many others – to be, one fine day, exhumed by an employee in the Vatican Library, and sent to the Abbey. Andrei, as a recognized authority, often received documents of this kind to analyse.

  Nil knew that the apocrypha of Nag Hammadi dated from the second and third centuries, and that from the fourth century onwards nothing else had been written in the Coptic village. So this late fragment dated from the end of the third century.

  A third-century Coptic manuscript.

  Was this the manuscript that had placed Andrei in such a difficult position that he dared not send his final report to Rome? But in that case, why had he taken such pains to conceal the photocopy, instead of filing it away with the others?

  Andrei was no longer around to answer his questions. Nil buried his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

  He seemed to be seeing the first line of the note discovered in his friend’s hand: Coptic manuscript (Apoc.). He had spontaneously translated Apoc. as “apocalypse” – the traditional abbreviation as used in editions of the Bible. Nil decided to check, and opened the very latest translation of the ecumenical Bible, the one Andrei used. In this recent version, now viewed as authoritative, the abbreviation for the Book of the Apocalypse was not Apoc., but Ap.

  Andrei was always au fait with the latest developments, and a meticulous scholar. If he had intended to allude to the Book of the Apocalypse, he would surely have written Ap., and not (Apoc.). So… what had he been thinking of?

  And all of a sudden, Nil realized that (Apoc.) didn’t mean “apocalypse”, but “apocrypha”!

  This is what Andrei had meant: “I need to talk to Nil about a Coptic manuscript that I hid away in my edition of the apocrypha, just before I left”. The same edition that he had picked up in his office that morning, the one he was now holding. A manuscript the contents of which were of such great importance that he wanted to talk to him about them now, after his trip to the Vatican.

  “It’s the Coptic manuscript sent by Rome!”

  Nil had in his hands the text that had led to the librarian of St Martin’s Abbey being summoned to Rome.

  He picked up the photocopy and examined it closely. The fragment was very small: Nil was no specialist in Old Coptic, but he could read it quite fluently, and the script was so clear that there would be no problem in deciphering it.

  Could he translate it? Not an elegant translation, admittedly, but a transliteration, an approximate word-for-word version – that he could probably manage. Look up every word in a dictionary and assemble them all together: the meaning would start to emerge.

  He rose to his feet. After a moment’s hesitation, he placed the precious photocopy on the plank of wood that monks use as a wardrobe and went out into the corridor. Nobody would come into his cell during the few minutes he needed to be away.

  He quickly headed to the only library to which he had access: Biblical Studies.

  In the first stack, where reference works were kept, he found Cerny’s Coptic-English etymological dictionary. He pulled it out, replaced it with a “phantom” with his name written on it and returned to his cell, his heart pounding. The precious piece of paper was where he had left it.

  The first bell for vespers rang out: he laid the dictionary on his table, thrust the photocopy into the inside pocket of his habit and went down to the church.

  Another sleepless night lay ahead of him.

  28

  Acts of the Apostles, Epistle to the Galatians, 48 AD

  “Abbu, you can’t let them get away with it!”

  Eighteen years had elapsed since the death of Jesus. Standing at the side of the beloved disciple, Yokhanan was seething with impatience. The representatives of the “Christians” – as they had just started
to be called – had now gathered together for the first time in Jerusalem, in order to lance a boil, namely the struggle between the “Jewish” believers, who refused to abandon the stipulations laid down by the Law – especially circumcision – and the “Greeks”, who rejected that particular surgical intervention, but wanted a new god for a new religion. Jesus, rebaptized “Christ”, would be this god: the idea was in the air, it was being whispered more and more insistently.

  This ideological struggle concealed a fierce fight for predominance: the pious Jews associated with James, Jesus’s younger brother and a rising star, versus the disciples of Peter – a majority, on whom the old leader kept an iron grip. And against all these the Greeks of Paul, a newcomer who dreamt of transforming the little house built by the apostles into an edifice of world stature. They had abused one another, hurled the most terrible insults at each other – false brother, intruder, spy – they had all but come to blows.

  The Christian Church as it came into being was holding its first council in Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets.

  “Look at them, Yokhanan! They’re fighting over a corpse, and all they can think of is tearing his memory to pieces!”

  The young curly-headed man seized his arm.

  “You were the first to meet Jesus, before any of the rest. You must say something, abbu!”

  Heaving a sigh, he rose to his feet. Even though he had been sidelined by the Twelve, the prestige enjoyed by this man was still considerable: they all fell silent and turned towards him.

  “I’ve been listening to you discussing it all ever since yesterday, and I have the impression you’re talking about another Jesus than the one I knew. Everyone recreates him in his own way: some claim that he was simply a pious Jew, others would like to turn him into a god. I received him at my table, and there were thirteen of us around him that evening, in the upper room of my house. But the next day, I was the only one to hear the sound of the hammers, see the lance being thrust in, be present as he died – all the rest of you had taken to your heels. I bear witness that this man was not a god: God does not die, God does not suffer the agony he experienced under my very eyes. I was also the first to arrive at his tomb, the day it was found to be empty. And I know what happened to his tortured body, but I will say no more of that than the desert that now shelters him.”