by Vincent Czyz
“Paul was a heretic?”
None of this meant anything to Zafer. He frisked the priest, too.
BOOK 5: 1 - 13
THE SICARII
The Knights of Malta have a convoluted history going back to the time of the first crusade in 1099, but it was Leo XIII who in 1834 allowed the Knights to establish their headquarters in Rome. The American branch was founded in 1927. In 1941 Francis Cardinal Spellman was the “Grand Protector” of the order, and quite a few American knights are linked to the unsuccessful attempt to stage what amounted to a fascist coup in this country that was designed to put General Smedley Butler in power. Butler, however, blew the whistle and implicated a number of Maltese Knights including John Farrell, then the president of US Steel, and Joseph P. Grace. After the war, Spellman worked with then-bishop Montini who was undersecretary of state at the Vatican, in running the “Vatican ratlines,” which provided phony passports, shelter, money and transport for war criminals heading out of Europe.
— Conrad Goeringer
5: 1
BLESS THOSE WHO CURSE YOU
THE TWO BEDS IN THE HOTEL room became sagging couches facing one another. The fan on the high ceiling squeaked as it turned, while a slender air-conditioner, fitted onto the wall, hummed.
Father Hawass’s hands trembled slightly from the encounter in the lobby, but the depths of his brown eyes were undisturbed, like water in a well. He exuded a kind of cleanliness, as though he shied from meat and kept his surprisingly white teeth in good health by chewing palm fronds.
Nathan, perpetually on the verge of a smile, gave the impression that he was in his own home, and they were all old friends. His curly hair, pure black, he had what Drew thought of as classical North African features: full lips, rounded cheekbones, a straight nose with generous nostrils that seemed capable of scenting urgency. The incipient smile was neither sardonic nor ironic but a genuine effusion of good will. He was one of those people whom, if he were hitchhiking, people wouldn’t hesitate to pick up.
Father Hawass, with a few strands of gray winding through his hair, was probably in his mid forties. Slightly built, his dark-skinned face floating above the black in which he was shrouded, he seemed to have grasped some mystery that everyone else was still trying to work out with rulers and telescopes and equations.
“We’re very small,” Nathan explained. “We only have a few churches but we have members all over the world.”
“And an Ebionite is … what exactly?” Drew asked.
“We are followers of the true Church, which was led by James the Just after the death of Jesus,” Father Hawass said. “We recognize Jesus as our Savior, but we do not believe that he was the Son of God. Rather, he was the Messiah only after his baptism by John. His birth was natural and Mary was a woman like any other.”
“We also don’t believe, as James the Just did not believe, that Jewish Law can be discarded,” Nathan added.
“Jews for Jesus?” Drew asked.
Nathan’s smile filled out with large, straight teeth. “Not quite. We accept the Old Testament, but of the four gospels we accept only Matthew.”
Father Hawass quoted: “Bless those who curse you. Pray for your enemies. Love those who hate you. Give to everyone who asks of you, and do not refuse them.”
“And you reject Paul?”
The priest nodded. “We reject Paul for the same reason James the Just rejected him: for trying to make Jesus into God. James was the true leader of the early Church after the death of Jesus—not Paul, not Peter.”
“The irony,” Nathan continued, “is that Paul insisted that Jewish Law could be abandoned, that through faith in Jesus Christ alone you could be saved, yet he never mentioned a single miracle.”
Drew’s first instinct was to contradict Nathan, but rummaging through what he could recall of Paul’s letters, he couldn’t come up with anything.
“We reject Paul and we reject violence even in self-defense,” Father Hawass insisted. “‘To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.’”
“What about your own gospel, Matthew?” Drew asked. “Doesn’t Jesus say, ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword’?”
Nathan lifted a cautionary finger. “If you look at Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane, also in Matthew, Christ says, ‘Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’”
“All right,” Drew conceded, “but there’s also Luke, where Jesus says, ‘He who does not have a sword, let him sell his garments and buy one.’”
“We reject Luke,” Father Hawass reminded him.
“Find a passage in any of the Gospels that shows Jesus with a weapon of any kind.” Nathan shook his head. “You won’t.”
“So you are Ebionites,” Kadir said. “Good for you. I am Turk. I am wanting to know who killed my friend Tariq.”
And Drew still wanted to know how exactly this obscure sect was connected with questions of Jesus’ existence.
The Ebionites exchanged glances.
Every trace of Nathan’s smirk disappeared. “I killed Tariq.”
5: 2
THE ECOLE BIBLIQUE
THE HOTEL ROOM had the smoke-blurred atmosphere of a narghile café. Kadir, Nathan, and Zafer had all lit cigarettes. Even Drew had pulled out a small cigar. He watched the drifting gray arabesques as they lengthened and uncoiled, making tenuous shadows on the wall. In the swirls just above the lamp, Drew thought he saw, for a second or two, a pair of wings slowly spreading out until they were scattered by currents from the air conditioner.
“It was an accident.” Nathan dragged on his cigarette, held his breath for a second as if considering what to say next, and then let go a stream of bluish smoke. “We just wanted to talk to him, but he ran—”
“Who is we?” Zafer asked.
“Another Ebionite. We’re the only two who … do this sort of thing. In fact, we sort of founded our two-man team to keep an eye on the Sicarii.”
Drew recognized another of Stephen’s keywords. “Who are the Sicarii?”
Nathan’s sigh was full of smoke and regret. “I’ll have to start from the beginning.” He looked at Kadir. “The scroll you have is ours.”
“Ne?”
“Abu had already promised it to our monastery. Although he’d been raised as a Coptic Christian, toward the end of his life, Abu became sympathetic to our church. Mainly because of Hatija, his second wife.”
Zafer cocked his head. “Abu’s wife is one of you?”
Nathan nodded. “Hatija didn’t get him to formally convert, but she persuaded him to bequeath the Habakkuk Commentary to our monastery. But after he died, the scroll disappeared. A household servant named Ahmed went missing, too. We think Tariq met him during his dealings with Abu. No doubt he planned to show up after the scroll was sold looking for his share.”
“No police?” Zafer asked.
Nathan shook his head. “The scroll was acquired illegally. It belongs to Israel. It has to. It’s one of the Qumran scrolls.”
He and Zafer exhaled smoke at the same time.
“Hatija was able to give us Tariq’s name but not much else. My partner and I became something like private detectives for her. I actually was a detective for a while—”
“Where?” Drew cut in.
“Jersey City.”
“Jersey City? I grew up in Lyndhurst.” It should have a been a fact like any other—where Nathan was from—but his Jersey roots, along with his East Coast accent and American mannerisms, inclined Drew to trust him.
“Right down the road.” Nathan smiled. “There’s a big Coptic community in Jersey City. In fact, the Coptic Church is sort of our big brother. They don’t agree with our beliefs, but since we’re such peace nuts—and so poor—they let us have an office in one of their buildings.”
“Wait a minute …” Drew pointed accusingly at Nathan with his cigar. “If you’re an Ebionite, how could you be a detective? Didn’
t you have to carry a gun?”
“I resigned from the department after I became an Ebionite.”
Drew tapped his cigar, and half an inch of gray dropped into a shallow tin ashtray. “A Copt cop?”
Nathan nodded. “Something like that. We’ve got a little more money now because Hatija is generous. Unfortunately, Abu’s sons got most of his estate. Hatija is much younger than Abu was, and they didn’t have any children together. Every time I get on a plane, she foots the bill. My partner, Josh, is a Brit. We managed to follow Tariq to Istanbul, but in the process lost him for about a day—the day he must’ve gone to see you.” He lifted his chin in Kadir’s direction. “We didn’t know your name then. We only knew a dwarf was involved as a dealer of some kind.” Nathan leaned forward and mashed his cigarette into the tin ashtray as though it had done something wrong and then let go a final plume of smoke. “We bluffed Tariq. We said, ‘We’ll just have to talk to the dwarf.’ He panicked, ran out into traffic and …” Nathan shrugged.
“So you are not the destroyers of my shop?” Kadir flicked ashes into an empty cigarette box that he held in his hand since he couldn’t reach the ashtray on the night table.
Nathan shook his head. “We didn’t even know where your shop was.”
“And you guys didn’t rip apart my apartment and knock me around on the way out?”
“That was the Sicarii. They’re also the ones who killed Professor Cutherton.”
Drew was confused. He’d assumed the Sicarii were somehow related to ancient Palestine.
“Usually, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith tries to destroy a scholar’s reputation,” Father Hawass said. “Or they use blackmail to keep information from getting out.”
Drew frowned. “The Congregation for what?”
Nathan ignored the question. “But sometimes there are unexplained deaths. Two years ago a young scholar who claimed he could prove that Christ couldn’t have been crucified under Pontius Pilate was found dead in his apartment in England. Gunshot wound to the head. Oddly, he didn’t leave a suicide note and supposedly burned all of his research before allegedly killing himself.”
Father Hawass wagged a brown finger. “They are not so different from the Sicarii of old.”
“The Sicarii of old?” Drew asked.
“The first Sicarii were Jewish Zealots who resisted the Roman occupation,” the priest explained. “Sica is a knife with a curved blade. This was their favored weapon. They were assassins who were happy to die so long as they killed their targets.”
Now it makes sense, Drew thought.
“We think,” Nathan continued, “they murdered the professor and then tried to make it look like it happened during the course of a robbery.”
“So that’s our new breed of Zealots.” Drew nodded. “But whom do they work for?”
Zafer dropped the smoldering butt of his cigarette into the box Kadir was holding.
“The history of the Catholic Church is a chronicle of their struggle for power,” Father Hawass said. His shoulders narrow, he looked small next to Nathan, but his dignified air commanded another kind of respect. Maybe it had been faith shining down on him rather than the Egyptian sun that had turned his skin an earthy brown. “At the end of the nineteenth century, there were many Catholic scholars who found it difficult to believe Jesus was the Son of God. The more they investigated biblical history, the more they found it contradicted Church doctrine.”
Drew exhaled a stream of smoke in the general direction of the ceiling, adding to the cloud hanging over their heads.
“In 1902,” Nathan said, “the pope created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to make sure any archaeological evidence Church scholars turned up didn’t contradict the ‘authority of the scriptures’ or, as they put it, the ‘right interpretation’ of the scriptures.
“About a decade earlier the Ecole Biblique had been founded.”
“Raymond and Jean,” Drew said.
Nathan nodded. “They’re the modern Sicarii.”
“Christian,” Drew interjected, “not Jewish.”
Nathan nodded again. “Around 1955 Father Roland de Vaux became director of the Ecole Biblique.”
Drew remembered his name. He was the scholar who’d stonewalled everyone on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“Beginning with de Vaux, every director of the Ecole has been a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission—officially listed as a ‘consultant.’ They founded a magazine called Revue Biblique, edited by de Vaux.
“When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the Ecole did everything they could to date the scrolls to a period well before Christianity.”
“Why?” Drew asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Nathan looked at him skeptically. “The scrolls never mention Jesus.”
Drew sat on the edge of the bed dumbfounded. Yes, it was obvious.
“De Vaux used the review to push his interpretation of the scrolls while denying other scholars access,” Nathan went on. “We’ll never know how much of the material disappeared into a black hole in the Vatican. We do know that the Ecole Biblique approached Abu about the Habakkuk Scroll and apparently offered a fantastic sum for it. But Abu denied having it.”
“I don’t know anything about Church history,” Zafer said, “but there’s something about you two that doesn’t add up. You said you didn’t know where Kadir’s shop was when you got to Istanbul. So how did you find us in Cairo?”
Father Hawass crossed himself. “Professor Cutherton—may God bless him—was an Ebionite.”
5: 3
ANCIENT ENMITY
NATHAN LOOKED AT FATHER HAWASS disapprovingly. His nostrils seemed to quiver slightly as though something unpleasant had worked its way into the air of the room. Nathan turned to Drew. “Professor Cutherton was an atheist.”
“I know,” Drew snapped.
“But he did have Ebionite sympathies. Non-violence, he believed, was a good cause no matter what name you gave it. We contacted him as soon as we found out the Habakkuk Scroll had disappeared. We were hoping he might hear something.”
“And he told you we’d been to see him?” Drew asked.
Father Hawass nodded.
“Why didn’t he just tell us the scroll belonged to you?”
Zafer put a hand on Kadir’s shoulder. “Our pal here was an unknown variable. If the professor had pointed out the scroll belonged to the Ebionites, Kadir might have disappeared with it.”
“Yes,” Kadir said. “Unless someone is giving to me five thousand dollars for a letter.”
The Ebionites exchanged dismayed glances.
“It was much smarter to have the professor play along with us,” Zafer said. “This way he could keep an eye on the scroll and keep them up-to-date.”
Nathan nodded. “Exactly.”
Drew sighed. “It’s starting to make sense. One of the last things Stephen said to me was that Paul must have been the Liar mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the Ebionite interpretation.”
“Yes.” Father Hawass agreed.
“And the Wicked Priest?”
“Ananus, of course.”
“Ananus?” Keyword number three.
“Ananus the Younger was high priest in 62 AD. He was the enemy of the Teacher of Righteousness. He was also the enemy of the Ebionites.”
“Now I remember. Ananus the Younger was responsible for—”
“The Wicked Priest persecuted the Teacher tirelessly,” Father Hawass continued. “In the end, the Teacher was killed.”
“James the Just.” Drew pointed a finger. “Ananus had him stoned to death.”
“Yes. In the year 62.”
“Are you saying that the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls are, in fact, the early Christian Church?”
Father Hawass shook his head. “No, but many Essenes revered Jesus. Why should they not? Jesus borrowed many Essene teachings.”
Stephen had said something similar the night he was murdered.
“After
Jesus’ death,” the priest said, “the Essenes put all of their faith in James the Just.”
Nathan picked up the narrative. “Moreh ha-Zedek is the term used in the Scrolls for the Teacher of Righteousness. Ya’akov Zaddik is Aramaic for James the Just.”
“I’m sure,” Drew said, “quite a few leaders were referred to that way.”
“Only James and Jesus,” Nathan said. “We know the Teacher is not Jesus because the Teacher’s death doesn’t conform at all to Jesus’, but there are quite a few similarities to the way James died. It was James.”
“There is also the account of Saint Hegesippus,” Father Hawass said, “an Ebionite of the second century.”
“Hegesippus was an Ebionite?” Drew had heard of him only as a Church historian.
Father Hawass nodded. “Saint Hegesippus tells us that James was holy from the womb and a high priest permitted to enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple. He drank no wine, ate no meat, and no razor ever touched his head. So often was he was found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard like a camel’s. Because of unsurpassable piety, he was called the Righteous.”
Odd that James’s holiness was legendary, yet he hadn’t been one of the twelve apostles.
“The scrolls say that the Liar seduces some members of the Qumran community into breaking the law—Jewish Law. This is presented in Acts of the Apostles as the conflict between Paul and James.”
“That’s right.” Drew shifted his weight on the bed. “Paul wanted to dispense with Jewish Law to make it easier to convert the gentiles. His strategy was to be a Jew to the Jews, a Gentile to the Gentiles.”
“In the scrolls, the Essenes who followed Paul were called Seekers-After-Smooth-Ways.” Father Hawass explained. “The Essenes, you see, were very strict about ritual purities.”
“Ya, we know,” Kadir said. “On the day of Sabbath they are not shitting.”