by Vincent Czyz
“Do I get to see the scroll?”
“I can show you photographs but not here in Cairo.” Drew jerked a thumb in Zafer’s direction. “The big lug over there will keep an eye on you when you’re with us, but you might be followed.”
“Followed?”
“Stephen’s dead. Tariq was an accident, but he’s dead, too.”
Jesse buttered a piece of toast. “You know, it’s against my better judgment—I mean, guns, the black market, violating I don’t know what laws, but how could any scholar say no?”
Drew nodded. “If I could take it all back and save Stephen, I would. But for the first time in my life, I’m after something. I need to find a way to get this scroll to scholars. I need to know if it changes our understanding of Christianity.”
She looked at him skeptically. “What do you mean, our understanding of Christianity?”
“I think … I don’t think Christ was the Messiah. There was someone regarded as the Messiah, but it wasn’t Jesus.”
Jesse rolled her eyes. “That one’s been tried before.”
“Look, you know about the Teacher of Righteousness, the Liar, and—”
“The Wicked Priest? Mm-hm.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the scrolls never once mention the crucifixion or a resurrection? I mean how could the scrolls mention the Teacher—James the Just, the brother of the Messiah—without mentioning the Messiah?”
“Drew, I have news for you. The Teacher of Righteousness was not James. The Teacher was probably the founder of the Essenes. Which means he lived about two centuries before Christ. You have to remember, dating these manuscripts is an imprecise process. Scholars assume they can narrow it down to fifty years plus or minus—that’s a range of one hundred years.”
“Even if that’s true, some of the scrolls are clearly from the first century AD, yet none of them makes any reference to Jesus.”
Jesse shrugged. “So the Essenes didn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Jews generally didn’t—and don’t.” She put a hand on Drew’s. “You should have gotten your PhD.”
There was a lot more to this argument, but this morning, before catching a plane back to Cairo, probably wasn’t the time for it.
“Just to play devil’s advocate,” Jesse said, “here’s a tidbit for you: ever heard of Philo of Alexandria?”
“Sure.”
“Did you know he went to see Emperor Gaius Caligula around 40 AD, about ten years after Christ was probably crucified? He went to talk the emperor out of putting a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem, but while he was there, he apparently offered testimony about the brutality of Pontius Pilate’s rule in Palestine.”
“Philo wrote about Pilate?”
Jesse tapped a hardboiled egg with the back of a spoon until it cracked. “Yes, but he never mentioned Jesus.”
Drew swallowed a lump of disbelief. “How could you be a Jew, author works analyzing Judaism, be an exact contemporary of Jesus, write about Pontius Pilate’s barbaric treatment of the Jews, and never mention Christ or the crucifixion?”
“Not so fast.” The shell of the egg, still held by a rubbery membrane, peeled away with a soft sucking sound. “The second part of Philo’s Mission to Gaius was lost, and that’s probably where he wrote about Pilate in detail. It’s the only thing Philo wrote that didn’t survive. It’s also where he would most likely have discussed Jesus.” She smiled as she salted her egg. “Keep reading, Drew. You’ll get there.”
It was maddening that he couldn’t tell her about the second scroll, which turned Jesus Christ into a mirage Paul had glimpsed wavering in the heat on a desert road. Drew pushed a clump of hair, still wet from the shower, off his forehead. “Okay, here’s a question for you: is it pure coincidence that we have all of Philo’s works except the one section where Christ, if he had been crucified under Pilate, had to have been mentioned?” Was that, Drew wondered, why Stephen had mentioned Philo? As more evidence of Church tampering?
“What are you saying? That early scribes just … threw away every copy of Book Two of Mission to Gaius?”
“If you can add to Josephus, you can subtract from Philo.”
“Not likely, Drew.”
“Considering that Christian scribes were responsible for preserving nearly every text that’s come down to us from antiquity, do you really think they’d copy something that contradicted their faith?”
Jesse salted her egg. “I think they’d toss out the whole book.”
“And Seneca?”
“What do you mean?” She took a bite.
“Remember my paper for de La Croix? While I was reading up on Augustine, I came across a passage in City of God where Augustine tries to explain how Seneca could have written a book called On Superstition and criticized every foreign religious sect known to the Romans without ever mentioning Christianity. We have like ninety percent of everything Seneca ever wrote, but somehow On Superstition disappeared.”
Jesse smirked. “Like I said, the Church probably tossed the whole thing. Why do you think all that’s left of Celsus and Porphyry are fragments? They made vehement attacks on Christianity.”
There was a loud exchange between car horns on the street below.
“True enough, but you’re proving my point—the Church had a deliberate program of censorship. For centuries. And there’s Tacitus. He writes a year-by-year account of the reign of Tiberius, but the end of 29, 30, and the beginning of 31 AD are somehow the only sections missing. Isn’t 30 AD the accepted year of the crucifixion?”
Jesse nodded. “It’s possible Tacitus skipped over the Crucifixion and the Church deep-sixed those chapters, but he does mention the crucifixion when he’s talking about Nero.” She shrugged. “History goes to the conquerors.”
“I suppose.” Drew looked down at her hand as she spread jam on a croissant. “Where’s your ring?”
She wiggled her fingers as though she’d just freed them from a trap. “Divorced. Almost two years.”
“Really?” He suppressed a smile. “Me too.”
5: 13
RUBRICS
DIVORCED. It might have been better if she had still been married. Here he was, in a taxi on his way to the airport, and in a few hours he’d be back in Istanbul. He’d call Yasemin. He’d be elated to see her because for the first time in two years they were talking about reconciling. He finally had a chance to get his wife back, his old life. The pain he’d been living with since their separation was on the verge of disappearing. So why was his mind still on a hotel rooftop overlooking Cairo?
The taxi approached the enormous statue of Ramses II. The pharaoh stood in a green island dividing the highway, his granite shoulders like an etching on the sky. Drew turned as the taxi passed, bent down to see Ramses’s face through the rear window. Impassive. No advice to give. Forever staring at the stream of cars flowing into the city. And drivers … they hardly glanced at this giant out of their own past.
At the airport, Zafer led them through customs and passport control with nothing but smiles from the officials.
Taking a seat at the gate, Drew pulled out his King James Bible, which used red ink whenever Christ’s exact words were printed. Kadir had opened an old science fiction novel he’d probably already read twice. Zafer looked restless.
Inspired by the conversation with the Ebionites, Drew had decided to re-read Paul’s letters. About half way through Romans, it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any red ink. He skipped ahead to the end of the letter. No rubrics. He skimmed 1 Corinthians and found a single quote—instructions to eat bread and drink wine in ritual remembrance. In the whole body of letters, Jesus uttered only one more sentence.
An icy tingle shot up Drew’s spine.
In his hands were translations of the oldest Christian documents, written within two decades after Christ had died, but all of Christ’s parables, prophecies, sayings, and miracles were entirely absent. Nor did Paul ever mention Mary, Joseph, the Virgin Birth, Bethlehem, Galilee, Pon
tius Pilate, or Nazareth. Although Pilate was mentioned in Timothy, Timothy—as Drew had written in a footnote from his college days— was long known to be a forgery:
Word analysis shows more than 1/3 of words used in Timothy don’t appear in genuine Pauline letters. Of those 306 words, 175 appear nowhere else in New Testament, but 211 are common in works of Christian writers of 2ND century.
Paul actually complains in 1 Corinthians that the Jews request a sign—a miracle. Instead of expounding on a few of Jesus’ thirty-odd miracles, he criticizes their attitude as though he knew of no miracles. Nor did he consider the voice that spoke to him on the road to Damascus worth mentioning.
While Paul had never met Jesus, he was supposedly in direct communication with him. He also knew James and Peter and all or most or of the other apostles. Why hadn’t he found even one of Christ’s miracles worth mentioning? Even one of his proverbs or predictions worth quoting?
A hand on Drew’s shoulder startled him.
Zafer stood up. “Time to board.”
Drew hadn’t even heard the boarding call.
“Don’t look,” Zafer whispered in Turkish. “Blondy. At the end of the line. I think he’s Sicarii. If he knows we spotted him, he’ll call for a replacement.”
Drew sighed. Why the hell did Zafer tell him if he couldn’t look?
After they’d taken their seats on the plane, Drew thought he caught a glimpse of the man Zafer had mentioned. American, British, Polish, German—he could have been any of two dozen nationalities. In his early forties maybe. He took a seat five or six rows ahead but didn’t so much as glance at any of them.
A cheerful stewardess asked Drew to buckle his seatbelt. Smiling weakly, he complied and opened his Bible.
Drew re-examined Romans. He noticed that every chance Paul had to quote the historical Jesus, he quoted earlier scripture. In Romans 15:3 Paul wrote: For even Christ did not please Himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached You fell on Me”. Referenced by the Bible’s editors, the quote was taken directly from Psalm 69.
Romans 5:8 said: But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, the Messiah died for us—which sounded exactly like a New Testament gospel, but was taken almost word-for-word from Isaiah, one of Paul’s favorite sources.
“That’s it,” Drew hissed. “That has to be it.”
“Shhhhhhh.” Zafer held a finger to his lips and smiled. “Blondy.”
The captain advised the flight crew to prepare for takeoff.
Drew barely lifted his gaze from the Bible on his lap. He found it difficult to believe, but it seemed that Paul had constructed a general messiah and put various pre-existing sayings and prophecies into his mouth. It made sense, though, when Drew recalled how Matthew had famously used a mistranslation of a passage from Isaiah, asserting that a young virgin shall conceive when the actual words were a young woman shall conceive. The same passage also predicted this son would be named Immanuel. But Paul was writing before Matthew, and, since Paul had already established a following with Christ Jesus, Matthew apparently discarded Immanuel.
Drew couldn’t help recalling Paul’s accusation in Corinthians 11:3-4 that the apostles were preaching another Jesus. Another savior … or a Jesus who offered different teachings? And if it was a different savior, could it have been John the Baptist? But John was dead by the time Paul was writing and deliverance from the Romans—expected of the Messiah—was nowhere in sight. And if John had been the Teacher of Righteousness, who had the Liar been? Herod Antipas had executed John for reasons that had nothing to do with the priesthood or the Qumran community. And the Liar, scroll scholars had observed, had arisen from within the Essene community at Qumran—ruling out King Herod.
The engines began to whine as the plane picked up speed, and as the whine flattened into a windy roar, the acceleration pressed Drew’s head against the seat. The plane lifted off. Through the window he glimpsed Cairo, the city shrouded in a hot haze and surrounded by desert.
Somewhere down there was a monastery dedicated to Paul, whom the Ebionites believed was the Man of a Lie, the Scoffer, and an Essene. He had seduced people away from the Teacher by exempting them from the Law of Moses—circumcision, dietary restrictions, the rigors of ritual purity. His followers were referred to as Seekers-After-Smooth-Ways. The accusations fit Paul’s ministry perfectly. In letter after letter Paul elevates faith above Jewish Law. In letter after letter he justifies casting the Law aside.
The Acts of the Apostles claimed Paul was on his way to the synagogues of Damascus when he had his vision of Christ on the road, which he never bothers to mention in his letters. But why would Paul go to Syria? It made no sense to send someone from Jerusalem to serve warrants from the high priest when the Sanhedrin—the Jewish high religious court—had no authority beyond the vicinity of Jerusalem.
The answer, perhaps, could be found in the Damascus Document, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls in which, for reasons scholars still didn’t understand, Qumran was referred to as Damascus—another of Stephen’s keywords. Was it possible that Paul had not been going to Syria but to the Essene community in Qumran? Qumran was only thirteen miles from Jerusalem. Why else would Stephen have mentioned Damascus?
The Qumran community believed it would be saved by faith in the Teacher of Righteousness—the Messiah. If the Essenes were tied to the early Christians and James had been the Teacher of Righteousness, then James might have been the other Savior Paul warned against in 2 Corinthians.
Drew flipped to 2 Corinthians.
For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.
The keyword was righteousness—another translation for just and a possible reference to James the Righteous—twice. Not only in the word righteous, but also it was James who steadfastly insisted that Jewish Law be upheld, James who insisted on good works.
If James had been regarded as the Savior, it explained why one of the last things Stephen had said was that Paul had to have been the Liar.
Why the Gospel writers had waited so long after the death of Christ to write down his story had always puzzled scholars. But if James had been a savior figure, then Mark would have had to have waited until after James’s death to reinvent his life. James died in 62 AD, while Mark was written around 70 AD. Roman archives had been burned after the rebellion in 66 AD, clearing the way for the insertion of events that never happened, and with James dead, he could not argue with how his legacy was altered.
Backdating some forty to forty-five years, Mark could have claimed the Savior had died during the tenure of Pontius Pilate, and there would be no records to dispute his claim. Moreover, most of the generation that would have witnessed the crucifixion had already passed away.
James as the Savior also explained why there was no mention of anyone in the Dead Sea Scrolls who could be identified with Christ. But how had James gone from The Teacher of Righteousness to the brother of the Messiah? He had been virtually invisible during Christ’s ministry— not even one of the twelve apostles—and then suddenly, after Christ’s death, he emerged as one of the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem. It made no sense.
Nathan had said that a razor had never touched James’s head. Was that where the image of the long-haired Christ had originated? From James, whose hair had never been cut? James was also said to be holy from the womb. Nazarite, as Drew now knew, was the word for someone who was holy from birth, who didn’t anoint himself with oil or cut his hair, who abstained from wine and even vinegar. He scribbled a question at the top of a page of his Bible: How far is it from James the Nazarite to Jesus the Nazarene?
BOOK 6: 1 - 10
PLATO’S GOSPEL
The disciples said to Jesus, “We know that you must leave us
. Who shall be our leader then?”
Jesus said to them, “Wherever you find yourselves, you shall go to James the Righteous, for whose sake Heaven and Earth came into being.”
— Gospel of Thomas
6: 1
SAFE HOUSE
STANDING AT THE BAGGAGE CAROUSEL, its shifting sheets of steel like the oversized scales of a mechanized lizard, Drew glanced around as discreetly as he could for Blondy.
He didn’t see him.
He leaned close to Zafer’s ear. “Looks like you missed your guess.”
“Maybe. Maybe he passed the ball.” Zafer yanked Kadir’s leather bag—as long-suffering as his vest—off the belt and led the way toward the exit.
The customs officials, who were arguing about a soccer match, didn’t so much as ask where they were coming from.
Not exactly Midnight Express, Drew thought to himself.
Relatives, friends, and drivers holding up signs with names on them pressed up against the tubular fencing outside the exit. They reminded Drew of the times Yasemin had been waiting for him after a visit to the States.
Outside, Istanbul was not as hot as Cairo, but it was a lot more humid. Ignoring the taxi drivers, Zafer walked toward the metro station under the airport.
“Where to?” Drew asked in Turkish.
“Safe house.”
“You have a safe house?”
Zafer nodded.
“What do you need a safe house for?”
“Business. That’s why I call it the Office.”
As they were going down the escalator (Kadir hated stairs), Zafer whispered to Drew: “Don’t turn around.”
Drew felt the blood drain from his hands. “Blondy?”
“Should be at the top of the escalator right about now.”
The train, which was modern and clean, was waiting. Zafer walked past the first two cars and got on the third.
“Stand in the back, don’t sit. And don’t look at the door. Relax. Talk to Kadir.”