The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  “Yeah, it’s about 6:30. I only gotta do half my route today. I don’t leave until seven, seven-thirty. How’s it goin’?”

  “Everything’s good.” Well, if they were listening, they’d find out how goddamn ordinary his life was. “How are things in Jersey?”

  “Ah, you know, nothin’ much changes over here. You start teachin’ in a couple a weeks, right?”

  “Uh … yeah.”

  “So you’re not thinkin’ about comin’ back home, maybe getting’ a job that pays a little better?”

  Drew sighed. Not again.

  “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but you were third in your class—1,200 kids, not some dumpy little school. And captain of the wrestling team. Your brother never went past high school, but he’s got a house because he learned a good trade.”

  His father’s biggest fear was that Drew would take after the Gypsy side of the family. “Your mother’s brothers?” he would say. “Not a one of ’em can keep a job. They sit around at their little gatherings throwin’ handfuls a horseshit at each other and call it storytellin’.”

  “You graduated sooma cooma whatever from college—”

  “Summa cum laude. Yeah, I know. I paid off the loans.”

  “And what’re you doin’? You’re not even teachin’ lidderacher. You’re just teachin’ sixth-grade English to foreigners. You gotta be getting bored, cuz you’re a lot smarter than that.”

  How exciting, Drew wanted to ask, is that delivery route of yours after twenty-two years?

  “I mean, you’re thirty-two, you need some equity. Your brother’s two years younger, and he got a three-bedroom in a decent neighborhood.”

  “Yeah? What am I gonna do with all this equity?” Drew looked out the window. The Princes’ Islands were gray humps, a little unreal in the hazy distance. It always seemed a pocket-sized miracle that they reappeared in the Sea of Marmara every morning precisely where, as dusk settled the day before, they’d faded against the horizon. At sunset he watched the Golden Horn run with warm bronze and spilled amber. He smoked his narghile, and, in the absence of anything new, re-read Thoreau or Emerson or Whitman, glancing up every now and then to take in how the streaked sky and reflective waters were gradually losing their shimmer. That was the equity he wanted.

  “You wanna leave your kids something don’tcha?”

  His father’s voice, diminished by distance, was reduced to vibrations in a wire.

  “What kids, Dad? Yasemin and I didn’t have any.” His thumb went instinctively to his ring finger, but it was like reaching for a bottle that was empty.

  “I told you not to marry a foreigner.”

  “Dad, that had no-thing—” Anger stretched the word out of shape. “—nothing to do with why we split up.”

  The failure had been half his and half hers, but he’d been the one who’d left. Three months later he was pleading to be taken back, but she was already seeing someone else. He hadn’t known until then emotional pain could be so physical. Like a fist had tightened in his stomach, like that same fist had been pushing on his diaphragm. Breathing became a chore. Sometimes it still was.

  “Yeah, all right, but you might have a family one a these days, and you can’t be savin’ too much with what they pay you over there.”

  Drew rubbed his eyes with a thumb and two fingers. This conversation was doing for him what feet and decades had done for the uneven stairs he’d just come up.

  “Look, I don’t even have a girlfriend right now, so I don’t need a house, I don’t need equity, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to have kids. Is that the point of life? To make some little Drews I can bitch at until they do what I want?”

  “Izzat what I’m doin’, bitchin’?”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me.”

  “You know what these phone bills cost me? I can bitch at your mother for free.”

  “You can Skype for free, too.” Except that his father wouldn’t go near a computer.

  “I call because I give a shit what happens to you.”

  Drew thought about hanging up.

  “You know what pisses me off so much? You wanna know? You got brains. Like I never had. You got opportunity like I never had. You think I coulda gone to college even if I had your smarts? Not a chance. Your grandfather had me working since I was seven—seven years old! School was for girls, not men, that’s what he said.”

  Drew rolled his eyes. “I know …”

  “You think I like drivin a truck for a livin’? You think I’m in love with the Rat’s Ass Meats Company?”

  Renzland Meats.

  “I couldn’t do no better is the sad fuckin’ fact. But you can. I mean, you coulda done anything you wanted—a lawyer, a doctor, whatever. And whaddid you do? You studied books. Not even real books, like history. Lidderacher. Horseshit if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “Well I’m tellin’ you, you fucked up so far, I don’t wanna see you fuck up any worse. I mean why didn’t you write articles for a newspaper or somethin’? Don’t you like to write?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I know, you like to read, but you’re not even usin’ your degree! And you got … what? A dollar fifty to your name? Who you gonna support with that?”

  “Me!” Drew shouted. “I’m the only one I have to support. And maybe you don’t like my job, but you don’t have to do it. And maybe I don’t even like my job, but it’s my choice. Thanks for raising me and not running out on Mom, but here’s a little reminder for you—you know how many of my friends are cokeheads? Alcoholics? I’m not the best son, maybe, but I’m not the worst either.”

  “I’m not sayin’ you are, I’m just—”

  “Look, Dad, we’ve had this conversation before. Why don’t you save yourself that big phone bill you were talking about?”

  “You’re right. Talking to you is like tryina kick-start a bicycle.”

  “Well thanks for calling.”

  “Yeah, g’bye.”

  “G’bye, Dad.”

  Drew let the receiver slide into the cradle. At least this time the conversation hadn’t ended with the slam of plastic parts.

  Padding across the Turkish carpet and down the hall, Drew made a left into the tiny room he used as a study. He plopped down on a padded leather chair that squeaked as it swiveled. He tapped a key on his laptop. The black screen vanished, revealing his e-mail inbox. He scanned the list of senders until he found Stephen Cutherton. Stephen had retired from Oxford as head of the theology and religion department. Drew had met him a few years ago at a poetry reading in Istanbul, and they’d taken an immediate liking to one another. Although Stephen lived in London, he had a summer place in southeastern Turkey and made frequent stopovers in Istanbul. Once in a while, Drew bounced religious queries off him, but Stephen never answered directly. He would reply with a few keywords, leaving Drew to do the research and suss out how the data bits fit together; it was a long-distance game they played.

  Yesterday Stephen had sent an e-mail—still unanswered—proposing that they meet for dinner some evening since he would be staying at a friend’s flat in Istanbul for the month of September while his friend was traveling around Nepal with his wife.

  Stephen would know what to make of Kadir’s scrolls.

  Opening a desk drawer, Drew took out a stack of term papers he’d saved from college. He glanced at their titles, mentally contextualizing each paper. He realized he hadn’t actually produced anything in a long time; he sat around reading instead. He was a species of alchemist who preferred deciphering the moldering notes of long-dead predecessors to conducting his own experiments. His father had never come out and said it, but they both knew Drew’s problem. He was lazy. Not at work or in class, but without deadlines or a structured setting, he wasn’t likely to finish a project he’d taken on—or even to take it on.

  He looked down at the paper he was holding, “The Mechanics of Belief in Fiction and Religion”. Even this one, probably his bes
t, had been only marginally original. De la Croix had been more or less right about that.

  For five or six years after college, he’d read her articles whenever he came across them. One year he turned up a book she’d authored: The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts. Coincidentally, Stephen had panned it in The London Times. When Drew mentioned in an e-mail that she had once been his teacher, Stephen had replied, “What an obtuse, silly, old cow. How she ever found employment is beyond me.” Since Drew hadn’t seen anything with her name attached to it in years, he assumed she’d retired from the field. Occasionally he did a web search for Jesse Fenton but had never come up with a hit. He’d caught Lisa Dent’s byline though. The quietest student in de la Croix’s class, who was now a professor of religious studies at Stanford, had written an article in the Biblical Archaeological Review. Drew had felt a ghostly stabbing pain that was guilt, not envy—guilt because Lisa had made something of herself in her field, and because, despite how vehemently he argued with his father, he knew his father wasn’t entirely wrong about what he was doing—or wasn’t doing—with his life.

  He put the stack of papers back in the drawer and opened up a new document on his laptop. He wondered what his father would say if he knew he was typing a letter resigning his position at Istanbul Technical University.

  2: 7

  PROFESSOR CUTHERTON

  “STEPHEN?”

  Drew was at a row of payphones in Taksim, a bustling quarter crowning one of Istanbul’s seven hills. The main thoroughfare was Istiklal Avenue, which, while serviced by a relic of a trolley, was all but closed to traffic. Now and again there was the inconvenient car that took the cobblestoned length of Istiklal at the pace of a trotting horse as the driver, tapping the horn, nudged people aside with its bumper.

  “Drew! What a pleasure to hear from you. When can I expect you for dinner?”

  “I was hoping you had time to see me today. I have something … well, I guess you could say it’s urgent.”

  “May I ask with regard to what?”

  Drew was on a side street just below Istiklal.

  “I know how this going to sound, but I have a friend who claims to have a Dead Sea Scroll.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Only a photograph. It looks intact.”

  “Do you know which scroll it is?”

  “No idea. All I could figure out is that it’s written in Hebrew. There’s something else … photographs of another scroll he claims didn’t come from Qumran. In Aramaic, I think. He’s not sure where that one is.”

  “Very tantalizing I must admit, but in all probability, forgeries.”

  The red-and-white trolley car, a nostalgic reminder of an earlier Istanbul, clanged its bell as it made its way up the avenue.

  “They might be, but I’m pretty sure someone was killed over one of them.”

  There was enough of a pause for Drew to become aware of the sudden change in light as the Sun emerged from behind a mass of drifting clouds.

  “Oh my. That does change things. You’re not in any danger yourself, I hope…?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He decided to leave out the drubbing he’d taken in his apartment.

  “Drew, listen. I’ve a dinner engagement with a museum director tonight that I’m afraid I simply cannot break. Tomorrow, I’ll be meeting with a pair of Greek scholars who are going to give me a guided tour of the Christian mosaics that have been preserved here in Istanbul. I suspect it will be a rather drawn-out affair. But after that, I’m at your disposal. Why don’t we say eight o’clock tomorrow evening?”

  “Great. Where should we meet you?”

  “Here in Taksim, at my friend’s flat. Seventeen Oba Sokak.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Now let me understand this correctly: your friend has one of the Dead Sea Scrolls in addition to the photographs?”

  “So he says.” Drew suddenly realized that someone was standing directly behind him. He cupped the receiver with his hand, and lowered his voice.

  “What do you know about the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

  “Not much really. Just that they were mostly copies of Old Testament books and records kept by Essenes living near the Dead Sea.”

  The other phones, from what Drew could see, were also in use, but no one else was waiting; for some reason, the guy had decided to stand behind him.

  “If you’re up for a keyword search before we meet, try Muhammad the Wolf, Roland de Vaux, and John Allegro.”

  “Muhammad the Wolf?”

  “Roland de Vaux and John Allegro.”

  “Got it.”

  Drew turned sideways and tried to get a look at the man behind him without being obvious. From what he could tell, the man was wearing a suit and was pale, redheaded, and freckled, which meant he might or might not be Turkish. Some Turks were fair and even freckled.

  “It would be rather exciting if your friend really has gotten hold of a Dead Sea Scroll. The scrolls, you see, are primary source material. Unlike virtually every other document we have from antiquity, later scribes did not make biased insertions or deletions—there were no later scribes. But I must warn you … what the scrolls have to say about Christianity does not always support Church doctrine.”

  The man reached into his pocket, and Drew’s heart speeded up and his mouth dried out.

  “I can live with that.” Drew accepted Christ as his savior, even though he was not a regular at church. Turning casually, he got a better look at the man standing behind him but still didn’t have a sense of whether or not he might have been one of the men who attacked him in his flat.

  “If one makes a habit of prying into these things with an open mind, one will discover a good many things about Christianity that are less than reassuring. Its founder, to take a particularly significant example, did not die on the cross as is supposed.”

  “You’re saying that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t crucified?”

  The man behind him stuck a piece of gum in his mouth and went to a phone that had just been freed up, but Drew barely turned his head.

  “I’m saying no one who went by the name of Jesus of Nazareth ever walked the Earth.”

  BOOK 3: 1 - 10

  THE FIFTH GOSPEL

  It is an undeniable fact today that there is a great deal of diversity among the manuscripts, either because of the carelessness of the scribes or the perverse audacity of their superiors in adulterating the text, or again to the fact that among us are clergy who add or delete as they see fit, deeming themselves correctors.

  — Saint Origen, 185–254 AD

  3: 1

  THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

  NO ONE WHO WENT BY THE NAME of Jesus of Nazareth ever walked the Earth. Drew was sure the professor had thrown him a curve ball yesterday, that maybe what he’d said was true in some technical way, but in some other way it was misleading. He just had no idea how it could be true.

  With a couple of hours to go before their meet-up, Drew sat down to his computer and got started on the professor’s keyword search. Moments later he found himself descending some 1,200 feet below sea level to the lowest point on Earth: the Dead Sea.

  Dusty yellow cliffs pocked with caves predominate. Some thirteen miles east of Jerusalem and about a mile from the Dead Sea, the ruins of Qumran sprawl over a small plateau. It was here in one of these caves in 1947 that Muhammad adh-Dhib—Muhammad the Wolf—made one of the great archaeological discoveries of the century: eight or nine large earthenware jars that contained leather rolls swathed in tattered linen.

  There was Stephen’s first keyword.

  The fate of the vast majority of the scrolls in this cave cannot be known with any certainty. Archaeologists who later explored the site believe the cave at one time held as many as forty jars, which suggests that well over a hundred scrolls had been stored there. Only seven from this cave were ever revealed to the public.

  “Well,” Drew said to himself as he downloaded the article, “maybe Kadir really does have one of th
e scrolls.” He continued to read.

  A number made their way to the black markets in Jersualem and Cairo, where they were most likely acquired by private collectors. Eager to stem the clandestine flow of scrolls, Christian clergymen, to whom the Bedouin had brought the scrolls, began excavating the site. The work proceeded by night in order to escape the notice of the British authorities who ruled Palestine.

  Cave 4 yielded a hoard of some eight hundred scrolls, albeit mostly in fragments. Father Roland de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique, a Dominican school in East Jerusalem, put together an international team to study the recovered material.

  De Vaux was the second keyword.

  The seven original scrolls found by the Wolf ended up in the hands of Israeli scholars. The Israeli team published the material in their possession relatively quickly. The international team, however, refused not only to publish their scrolls but even to let other researchers look at them. The most eminent scholars in the field were turned away as “unqualified,” while graduate students of team members were readily granted access. It took more than half a century for the majority of scroll material to be published.

  Drew frowned. The majority? Were there fragments that were still unpublished?

  The fireworks among the team members began when it was discovered that some of the texts mentioned a “Teacher of Righteousness,” considered by the scroll authors to be the Messiah of Old Testament prophecy. “The just shall live by faith,” a quote from Habakkuk 2:4 in the Old Testament, almost certainly inspired the following scroll passage:

  “…all those who observe the Law in the house of Judah, whom God will deliver from the House of Judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.” The Teacher, however, was persecuted by two men enigmatically known as the “Liar” and the “Wicked Priest” before he was martyred. The Teacher’s followers, Qumran Essenes suffering under Roman oppression, were certain that his death signaled the end of the world.