The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  He resolutely pulled the first box towards him: The Confessions of the Templar Brothers, Recorded in the Presence of Monseigneur Guillaume de Nogaret by Me, Guillaume de Paris, Representative of King Philippe le Bel and Grand Inquisitor of France.

  64

  Shores of the Dead Sea, March 1149

  “Keep going, Pierre, they’re hot on our heels.”

  Esquieu de Floyran flung his arms round his companion. They were at the foot of an abrupt cliff, a pile of rocky concretions through which goat tracks meandered. Black holes could be seen here and there: the entrances to natural caves looking out onto emptiness.

  Ever since they had met in Vézelay three years earlier, the two men had never left each other’s sides. Fired with zeal by St Bernard’s preaching, they had donned the white tunic with the red cross and joined the Second Crusade in Palestine. Here, in Gaza, the Templars had fallen into a trap laid by the Seljuk Turks. Esquieu wanted to clear the fortress: at the head of some fifteen or so knights, he made a sort of diversion in broad daylight – which did indeed lure some of the besiegers after them. As they fled eastwards, his companions had fallen one after another. Now only the faithful Pierre de Montbrison was left at his side.

  When they reached the Dead Sea, their mounts collapsed under them. The two Templars leapt over a crumbling wall, and came into a ruined enclosure that bore the traces of a terrible fire. They ran on past a vast reservoir dug into the rock, then followed the line of irrigation canals heading towards the cliff. Here they would be safe.

  Just as they were emerging from the cover of the trees, Pierre uttered a cry and fell. When his companion bent over him, he saw that an arrow had pierced his abdomen, near his loin.

  “Leave me, Esquieu, I’m wounded!”

  “Leave you in their hands? Never! We’ll take refuge in this cliff, and escape under cover of night. There’s an oasis nearby, Ein Feshka: it’s the road westwards, the road to safety. Lean on me, it’s not the first arrow that’s got you: we’ll pull it out once we’re up there. You’ll see France again and your commandery.”

  The incandescent words of St Bernard still resounded in his ears: “The knight of Christ can deal out death in all security. If he dies, it is for his own good; if he kills, it is for Christ”. But right now the important thing was to escape a gang of enraged Turks.

  Allahu Akbar! Their cries were now very close. “Pierre can’t manage. Lord, help us!”

  Helping each other along, they started to climb the steep wall of the cliff.

  They stopped at one of the cave mouths, and Esquieu glanced downwards: their pursuers seemed to have lost sight of them, and were discussing what to do. From their perch up here, he could see not only the charred ruins they had just come across, but also the cove of the Dead Sea glinting in the morning sun.

  To his right, Pierre was leaning against the rock wall, deathly pale.

  “You need to lie down, and I’ll get this arrow out. Come on, let’s wriggle into this hole, we can wait for nightfall.”

  The opening was so narrow that they had to enter feet first. Esquieu helped his groaning, bloodstained companion. Curiously, the interior of the cave was quite bright. He made the wounded man lie down on the left of the entrance, his head against a kind of terracotta bowl emerging from the sand. Then, with a swift tug, he pulled out the arrow: Pierre screamed, and lost consciousness.

  “The arrow has pierced him right through the stomach, the blood is streaming out: he’s not going to make it.”

  He poured the last drops of water from his gourd between the dying man’s lips. Then he peered down into the valley below: the Turks were still there; he needed to wait until they had gone. But Pierre would be dead by then.

  Esquieu was a man of letters, a scholar; he had allowed a priory of white-robed monks of the new order created by St Bernard to settle on his lands. He spent his free time reading the manuscripts they had gathered in their scriptorium, and studied the medicine of Galen in the original Greek: Pierre’s lifeblood was draining away, forming a dark puddle under his body. He had maybe an hour to live, perhaps less.

  At a loss, he glanced round the floor of the cave. All along the left-hand wall there were terracotta bowls sticking out of the sand. Choosing at random, he lifted the third one from the cave mouth: it was an earthenware jar, perfectly well preserved. Inside, he saw a thick scroll surrounded by rags, all of them soaked in oil. Against the wall there was a smaller scroll, kept well away from the other one. He took it out, without any difficulty. It was a good-quality parchment, tied by a simple linen cord that he easily untied.

  He glanced across at Pierre: he was immobile, hardly breathing, and his face already had the ashen hue of corpses. “My poor friend… dying on foreign soil!”

  He unwound the scroll. It was in Greek, perfectly legible. Elegant handwriting, and words that he recognized without difficulty: the vocabulary of the apostles.

  He went over to the cave mouth and started to read. His eyes widened, and his hands started to tremble slightly.

  “I, the beloved disciple of Jesus, the thirteenth apostle, to all the Churches…” The author related how, on the evening of the last supper in the Upper Room, there had not been twelve, but thirteen apostles, and he had been the thirteenth. He protested in solemn terms against the deification of the Nazorean. And stated that Jesus had not risen from the dead, but had been transferred after his death to a tomb, which was located…

  “Pierre, look! An apostolic letter from Jesus’s day, the letter of one of his apostles… Pierre!”

  His friend’s head had rolled gently to the side of the earthenware bowl sealing the first jar in the grotto. He was dead.

  An hour later, Esquieu had taken his decision: Pierre’s body would here await the final resurrection. But this letter by one of Jesus’s apostles of whom he had never heard was something he must reveal to the Christian world. Taking the parchment with him would be too risky: made brittle by time, it would quickly crumble away into pieces. And would he himself escape from the Muslims that night? Would he reach Gaza safe and sound? The original would remain in this cave, but he would make a copy. Immediately.

  With great respect, he turned over his friend’s body, opened his tunic and tore a long strip off his shirt. Then he whittled down a piece of wood to a fine point, and placed the cloth on a flat stone. Dipped his improvised pen into the pool of blood gleaming red on the ground. And started to copy the apostolic letter, as he had so often seen monks do in the scriptorium of their priory.

  The sun was setting behind the cliffs of Qumran. Esquieu got up: the text of the thirteenth apostle was now inscribed in letters of blood on Pierre’s shirt. He rolled up the parchment, tied the linen cord around it and gently placed it back in the third jar – taking great care not to touch the greasy scroll. He replaced the lid, carefully folded up the copy he had just made, and slipped it into his belt.

  From the cave mouth, he glanced down: there were already only half as many Turks. Now that he was alone he would be able to evade them. He needed to wait for night, and pass across the plantation of Ein Feshka. He would succeed.

  Two months later, a vessel whose sail was blazoned with the red cross cleared the narrows of Saint-Jean-d’Acre, and headed west. From its prow, a Knight of the Templar in a great white robe took one last glance at the land of Christ.

  Behind him, he was abandoning the body of his best friend. It lay in one of the caves overlooking Qumran, a cave containing dozens of jars filled with strange scrolls. As soon as possible, he would have to go there. Collect the parchment from the third jar on the left from the cave mouth and take it back to France, with all the precautions that such a venerable document deserved.

  Pierre’s death would not have been in vain: he would hand his copy of an apostle’s letter that nobody had ever heard of to the Grand Master of the Temple, Robert de Craon. Its contents would change the face of the world. And would prove to everyone that the Templars had been right to reject Christ and instead lo
ve Jesus passionately.

  On his arrival in Paris, Esquieu de Floyran asked to see Robert de Craon alone. Once he was admitted to his presence, he brought out from his belt a roll of fabric covered with dark brown characters, and held it out to the Grand Master of the Temple, the second to hold that title.

  Without a word, the Grand Master unrolled the strip of fabric. Still in silence, he read the text. It was perfectly legible. He sternly imposed absolute secrecy on Esquieu, on the blood of his friend and brother, and dismissed him with a mere nod.

  Robert de Craon spent the whole evening and the whole night alone, at the table on which the scrap of cloth lay extended, covered with the blood of one of his brothers. On it could be read the most incredible, the most overwhelming lines that he had ever read.

  The next day, grave-faced, he sent out across the whole of Europe an extraordinary summons to a general chapter of the Order of Templars. Not one of the capitulary brothers, seneschals or priors, titulars of illustrious fortresses as much as the smallest commandery, should be absent from this chapter meeting.

  Not one.

  65

  When Nil joined his friend, still bent over the table in the stacks, his face was impassive. Leeland looked up from his manuscript.

  “Well?”

  “Not here. Let’s go back to the Via Aurelia.”

  Rome was preparing to celebrate Christmas. Following a tradition peculiar to the Eternal City, every church, throughout this period, makes it a point of honour to display a presepio, a crib adorned with all the attributes of the baroque imagination. Romans spent their December afternoons strolling from one church to another, comparing the shows that each one had put on and appraising them with eloquent hands.

  “It’s impossible,” thought Nil as he saw entire families crowding in through the church porches, “impossible to tell them that it’s all based on an age-old lie. They need a god in their image, a child god. The Church can only protect its secret – Nogaret was right.”

  The two men walked on in silence. When they reached the studio, they sat next to the piano, and Leeland brought out a bottle of bourbon. He poured a slug out for Nil, who raised his hand to stop him.

  “Come on, Nil, our national drink bears the name of the kings of France. A few sips will help you tell me what you were doing, alone all morning, in a part of the Vatican stacks to which in principle you have no access…”

  Nil did not pick up on the allusion: for the first time he was going to hide something from his friend. The confidential remarks of Breczinsky, his terror-stricken face, had nothing to do with his research: he felt that he was the possessor of a secret that he wasn’t going to share with anyone. He took a big sip of bourbon, pulled a face and coughed.

  “I don’t know where to start: you’re not a historian, you haven’t studied the minutes of the Inquisition’s interrogations that I’ve just seen. I found the texts consulted by Andrei when he went into the stacks, and they immediately spoke to me: they said something both clear and obscure.”

  “Did you find anything relating to the thirteenth apostle?”

  “The words ‘thirteenth apostle’ or ‘apostolic epistle’ don’t appear in any interrogation. But now I know what we are looking for, there are two details that have drawn my attention, and I can’t understand them. Philippe le Bel himself drew up the accusation of the Templars in a letter addressed to the royal commissioners on 14th September 1307, one month before the big round-up of all the members of the Order. It’s kept in the stacks, I copied it out this morning.”

  He bent down and picked a sheet of paper out of his bag.

  “I’ll read you his first accusation: ‘Here is a bitter thing, a deplorable thing, most assuredly horrible, a detestable crime…’ What was it? ‘That the Templars, when they enter their order, deny Christ three times and spit on his face as many times.’”

  “Oho!”

  “Then, from Friday 13th October 1307, until the final interrogation of Jacques de Molay on the stake on 19th March 1314, one question is asked again and again: ‘Is it true that you deny Christ?’ All the Templars, however great the severity of the tortures inflicted on them, acknowledge that, yes, they reject Christ. But that no, they do not reject Jesus, and that it is in the name of Jesus that they joined the militia.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s exactly what the Nazoreans said – the same ones whose texts Origen was able to consult in Alexandria. We know that this was the teaching of their master, the thirteenth apostle: if his epistle is capable, all by itself, of destroying the Church, if it must be everywhere destroyed as the Coptic manuscript demands, it is not only because it denies the divinity of Jesus – many others did the same after it – but because, according to Origen, it contains proof that he was not God.

  “Might the Templars have been aware of the vanished letter of the thirteenth apostle?”

  “I don’t know, but I will say that in the fourteenth century Templars get themselves tortured and killed because they proclaim the same doctrine as the Nazoreans, and they confirm this choice by a ritual gesture – spitting at Christ. There is perhaps a second hypothesis” – Nil rubbed his forehead. “These men were for a long time in close contact with Muslims. The rejection of any god other than Allah recurs again and again in the Koran, and don’t forget that Muhammad himself knew the Nazoreans and quotes them on several occasions…”

  “What does that mean? You’re mixing everything up!”

  “No, I’m linking disparate elements together. It has often been said that the Templars had been influenced by Islam: perhaps, but their rejection of Jesus’s divinity does not originate from the Koran. It’s more serious than that: if you look through the accounts of the interrogations, some of them admit that the authority of Peter and the twelve apostles has, in their view, been transferred to the person of the Grand Master of the Temple.”

  “The Grand Master? So is he a sort of successor of the thirteenth apostle?”

  “They don’t say it in so many words, but state that their rejection of Christ is based on the person of their Grand Master, whom they consider to be an authority superior to the Twelve and the Church. It’s just as if a hidden apostolic succession had been transmitted down the centuries, parallel with that of Peter. It originated with the thirteenth apostle and was then based on his Nazoreans, and then, after their extinction, on this mysterious epistle.”

  Nil took another swig of bourbon.

  “Philippe le Bel levelled a second serious accusation against the Templars: ‘When they enter their order, they kiss the man who receives them – the Grand Master – at first at the bottom of his back, then on his belly.’”

  Leeland burst out laughing.

  “Gosh! Queer Templars!”

  “No, the Templars were not homosexuals, they took a vow of chastity and everything indicates that they respected it. This was a ritual gesture that took place in the course of a religious ceremony, a solemn and public affair. This gesture allowed Philippe le Bel to accuse them of sodomy, since he didn’t understand it – while it certainly had a highly symbolic meaning.”

  “Kissing the backside of the Grand Master and then going round and kissing his belly – a symbolic ritual, in a church?”

  “A solemn rite to which they attached great importance. So what meaning did this gesture have for them? At first I thought they were venerating the chakras of the Grand Master, those crossroads of spiritual energy that the Hindus locate in the belly and… the backside, as you put it. But the Templars did not know about Hindu philosophy. So I have no explanation, except this one: a gesture of veneration towards the person of the Grand Master, the apostle whose authority in their eyes supplanted that of Peter and his successors. Thus they seem to have attached themselves to another tradition, that of the thirteenth apostle. But why a kiss on that precise spot? I don’t know.”

  * * *

  That evening, Father Nil could not go to sleep. Questions spun round and round in his head. What did tha
t sacrilegious gesture, which had sullied the memory of the Knights Templar for ever, actually mean? And above all, what relation was there with the letter of the thirteenth apostle?

  Again, he turned over in his bed, and the springs of the mattress creaked. The next day he would be going to a concert. A welcome change.

  66

  Paris, 18th March 1314

  “One last time, we adjure you to confess: have you rejected the divinity of Christ? Will you tell us the meaning of the impious ritual of admission into your Order?”

  At the tip of the Île de la Cité, the Grand Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, had been hoisted onto a heap of faggots. His hands were bound under his white mantle bearing the red cross. Opposite him was Guillaume de Nogaret, the Chancellor and partner in crime of King Philippe le Bel. The people of Paris had amassed on both banks of the Seine: was the Grand Master about to recant at the last minute, thereby depriving the curious of a choice spectacle? The executioner, legs apart, was holding a flaming torch in his right hand, and had only one small move still to make.

  Jacques de Molay closed his eyes and recalled the whole memory of his Order. It had begun almost two centuries earlier, in 1149. Not far from this stake where he was about to die.

  * * *

  The day following the trip to Paris of the knight Esquieu de Floyran, Grand Master Robert de Craon had urgently summoned an extraordinary chapter of the Order of the Temple.

  In front of the assembled brothers, he had read aloud the letter of the thirteenth apostle, in the copy that had just miraculously reached him. It contained the undeniable proof that Jesus was not God. His body had never risen, but had been buried by the Essenes, somewhere on the edge of the desert of Idumaea. The author of this letter said that he rejected the testimony of the Twelve and the authority of Peter, whom he accused of having accepted that Jesus be deified in order to seize power.