by Vincent Czyz
She put her arms out and let it tumble to her feet.
“Why do you smell so good?” she whispered. “And why did this take so long?”
A thumb followed the back of her jaw and tucked itself behind an ear. “Um … because the Lord works in mysterious ways?”
She laughed and slapped his chest. “And I thought the night couldn’t get any weirder.” He reached under her skirt with both hands, tucked his fingers inside the elastic band of her panties, and tugged until she could step out of both.
He ran a hand up the inside of a thigh and sank a finger with a soft kissing sound. She sucked in a breath so sharply he thought he had hurt her. At first she worked her hips against his hand, but then her fingers began digging at his belt.
Stripping off his pants and underwear, she grabbed him by the waist and leaned back against the altar, pulling him with her.
He bent at his knees and lowered himself as she reached down with a hand to guide him.
The sound that came from her was like a timber cracking. Her nails sank into his arms, and he froze, paralyzed by how good it felt. In that moment, he would have given her anything she asked for—a wedding ring, Serafis’s five million dollars, both scrolls.
“Oh, God …”
He didn’t even know which one of them had said it. Lifting her legs, he pushed all the way inside her; she gasped and clawed his shoulders. As demanding as the position was, they worked frantically against each other until Jesse finally shoved him away and spread their clothes on the stone floor. Maneuvering herself under him, she locked her legs around his waist.
It might have lasted an hour, it might have gone on longer, but when it ended, their skin shone with sweat, and she was on top, a shirt cushioning one knee, socks padding the other. Only then, with Jesse still breathing hard and trembling against him, did he give any real consideration to the promises he’d made to Yasemin.
7: 14
THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC
DREW WOKE UP IN HIS UNDERWEAR, his pants folded into an unleavened pillow. The smell of damp stone was familiar, comforting—the Earth’s body odor. A leisurely dripping sound came from somewhere behind him. Outside, a few birds made lively chatter while insects chirped and whirred.
The feeble light seeping through the windows and openings in the grotto’s façade had traveled more than ninety million miles to be with him—and Jesse—in this sanctified cavern. But sky, stars, God’s projected affection (did it dispense with distance as effortlessly?) were often distractions. Next to us, Thoreau had insisted, the grandest of laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman we have hired, but the workman whose work we are.
Next to him, Jesse was still asleep, a hand resting on his flank. She was in her panties and the ivory blouse but no bra. All they needed now was for the guy who collected money from eager tourists to find them.
He raised himself up on a single palm. “Shit.” The right side of his body was numb from pressing against the stone floor, and his biceps were sore as hell where he’d caught that kid under the chin. Holding up his arm, he saw a dark blotch.
He glanced at his watch. Six-thirty. And Zafer had no idea where he was.
His gaze dropped back down to Jesse’s face. The perky upper lip. The cinnamon freckles. The nose … not small or dainty but as sculpted as a cat’s. The dark eyebrows like slashes from a painter’s brush. The angular jaw and the nearly invisible cleft in her chin.
What the hell was he going to do when they got to Istanbul?
Gently, he took her hand off his side and sat up. Pulling on his pants, he tried stretching some of the ache out of his muscles. The grotto felt like a tomb.
They had fallen asleep in front of the altar, on an apron paved with rectangular stones. The rest of the floor was pretty chewed up. Here and there were fragments of a mosaic that had once been mostly white but was now a dusty gray. Buttoning his shirt, he walked barefoot to one of the larger fragments. He looked down. In that underground dusk, he made out the remnants of a simple geometric design, nothing like the stunningly rendered scenes of Classical life—gods, goddesses, shepherds, athletes—preserved in Antakya’s museum, but he finally understood. He was standing on the answer. He started to laugh. “That’s it! That has to be it! I’m so stupid.”
“Drew?” Jesse’s eyes were only half open.
He smiled at her, probably a little maniacally. “There wasn’t one Messiah. The Christos is a mosaic!”
She sat up. “What are you talking about?”
“Stephen was wrong! I thought I was looking for a single savior, one man on whom the Christ of the Gospels was based, but Christ wasn’t based on James or John the Baptist—he’s both of them. He’s a Mystery cult figure. He’s Judas of Galilee. He’s all of them.”
“Judas of Galilee?” She used four straightened fingers like a pick on her tangled hair. “What are you talking about?”
“Yesterday you asked me about the crucifixion, where it came from. The sign over Jesus’ head—The King of the Jews—shows up in all four Gospels. But that sign wasn’t over Jesus’ head, it was over Judas of Galilee’s.”
“You’re not making any sense.” She was tugging the floral-patterned skirt over her hips and her breasts jiggled under the shimmer of her blouse.
“Look, Judas of Galilee began a revolt in 4 BC, right after the death of Herod.
Jesse turned her back to him to take off her blouse and slip into her bra.
He forgot his excitement just long enough to be disappointed that she wasn’t comfortable getting dressed in front of him. “He’s from Galilee, but not anywhere in Galilee, he’s from Sepphoris—a stone’s throw from where Nazareth was later founded. In fact, when the revolt began, Judas and his followers broke into the palace in Sepphoris to steal weapons from the armory, right? In Luke, Jesus tells his followers to arm themselves. ‘He who has no sword, let him sell his garments and buy one.’ This totally contradicts Jesus’ ministry, his command to bless your enemy. It’s more likely Luke alluding to a piece of the mosaic.”
Jesse buttoned up her blouse. “You’re not the first to point that out.”
“Before he died, Stephen gave me some words to track down. One of them was Iscariot. That’s all he gave me, Judas’s last name. Why? What does Iscariot mean?”
“No one knows for certain. It might just … designate his village.”
“Cut it out, Jess. It’s derived from Sicarii. And we know from Josephus that Judas of Galilee founded the original Sicarii.”
“Okay, Drew. If Judas Iscariot is an allusion to Judas of Galilee, and Christ is in some ways modeled on Judas of Galilee, why does Judas betray Jesus?”
“The Jews expected someone to save them from the Romans, right? But Judas of Galilee came up short. Then the revolt of 66 AD tanked, and the Temple was destroyed. Mark was writing after the sack of Jerusalem, so he knew if Christ was going to be the Savior, he had to be a spiritual savior, not a kingly messiah. Judas Iscariot’s betrayal and death were a way of rejecting armed revolt as the way to defeat Rome.”
Jesse shook her head. “Sounds like literary analysis, not historical scholarship.”
“Think about it,” Drew urged. “The Gospels quietly acknowledge Judas of Galilee’s challenge to Roman rule by naming one of the apostles after him—he’s a piece of the mosaic. I mean, there’s no question that Jesus sometimes has the tendencies of a Zealot. But in the end, the swords stay in their scabbards, and Judas is cast as a betrayer.”
Jesse frowned dismissively. “You’ll need something a lot more solid.”
“How’s this—Acts 5:37?” He’d reread the whole book a few days ago. “This man, Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the census …” Drew closed his eyes, trying to envision the passage. “He … attracted numerous followers, or something, but he and all those who fought with him perished.”
“Yeah, okay…?”
“Then it says something like And now I say to you, keep away from Zealots for … I don�
�t remember the exact words—”
“If this work is of men, it will come to nothing, but if it is of God it cannot be overthrown,” Jess finished for him. “Gamaliel’s counsel.”
“You see? Clear rejection of a military solution—with Judas the Galilean as the poster boy. And there’s one other thing the Gospel authors took from Judas of Galilee.”
“What’s that?”
“His death.”
“Judas wasn’t—” Jesse stopped herself. “Acts says he was killed but not how. And Josephus never says what happened to him. At all.”
“Not in the copies we have of Josephus.”
Jesse adjusted a shoe strap. “Are you saying he was crucified, and a sign, King of the Jews, was put over his cross? That Josephus wrote about it, and the passage was deleted?”
“The passage Josephus wrote attributing the fall of Jerusalem to James the Just rather than Jesus—which Saint Origin, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Saint Jerome all saw—was deleted. We know that. And don’t forget what Josephus said about the revolt of Judas of Galilee … the chaos and strife it caused in Palestine was all in order to raise himself out of an ambitious desire of the royal dignity. I underlined that yesterday. More importantly, both of his sons, James and Simon were crucified, around 48 AD. And Menachem, a grandson, led Zealots in the rebellion of 66. Menachem put on a crown, the royal purple and, as Josephus says, entered Jerusalem in the state of a king. The entire family aspired to dynasty.”
“That still doesn’t mean he was crucified as king of the Jews.”
“Maybe it’s not definitive proof, but the Romans didn’t crucify criminals. Sedition was a political charge. We both know the Greek word lestai in this context doesn’t mean criminal. Jesus wasn’t crucified between two criminals, they were Zealots. How much you wanna bet the three of them on their crosses in the Gospels represent Judas and his two sons?”
Jesse folded her arms over her chest. “I can’t even tell you how unscholarly this is.”
“Is there any scholarly proof for a charge of sedition?”
Jesse exhaled with obvious exasperation. “Jesus admits to considering himself king of the Jews—”
“It’s tacked on at the very end, Jess. You never hear about that during Jesus’ ministry. And the Sanhedrin accused him of blasphemy—the same trumped-up accusation they leveled against James. And like James, if there was a real Jesus, he was probably stoned.”
“So there was no Crucifixion?”
Drew raked his fingers through his hair. “A dozen scholars have pointed out that it makes no sense for the Jews to be screaming blasphemy at Jesus’ trial while the Romans accuse him of sedition. He was either tried before the Jewish Sanhedrin or Pilate—not both. And if Pilate actually said, ‘I find no fault in this man,’ he would have let him go. The sedition charge, Jesus’ last-minute admission that he’s a king—even though he acknowledges Rome’s authority when he shouts ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—was a Gospel invention to create the drama of the Crucifixion.”
Jesse’s face was full of morning light—the light of Antakya, of ancient Antioch, strained through a stone façade built by the crusading knights moonlighting as masons. Her back to the dark stone of the grotto, she seemed to be waiting for him to say something else.
“Mark was trying to give the Jews their own dying-and-rising god, just as Philo of Alexandria tried to interpret the Old Testament according to the Mystery cults—and the cross fits in perfectly. All the Mysteries god-men are associated with trees, and some of them actually were crucified. The cross, or the stake if we translate literally from the Gospels, is Jesus’ tree. Doesn’t Peter’s epistle say Jesus was hung from a tree? So does Paul. And Peter says it in Acts. Christianity was a Jewish version of the Mysteries. The Romans had to be pulled into Jesus’ death because crucifixion was forbidden among the Jews.”
Jesse shook her head. “A few coincidental dates, a few unexplained facts—”
“I have a few more unscholarly tidbits for you: Jesus had four brothers, right? Three of them were named Judas, James, and Simon, which just happen to be the names of Judas of Galilee and his two sons.”
“They were common enough names, Drew.”
“I’m not done yet. The Jesus of the Gospels is a fictitious figure with two basic layers—one Jewish, one Greek. In the Jewish stratum, there are at least three models: John the Baptist, James the Just, and Judas of Galilee.”
“So, a couple hundred years of biblical scholarship and you’re the only one to notice these connections? Or the only one who doesn’t realize how absurdly tenuous they are?”
Drew hesitated. He heard water dripping at the back of the grotto. He recalled the thousand-fathom strangeness of those deep-sea fish with ugly, oversized mouths and skewed saucer eyes—and saw them as analogous to the alien aspects of beliefs centuries distant.
“Most scholars have assumed they were reading history, not a carefully constructed fiction. Even scholars tend to believe what they want to believe, and that usually corresponds to how they’ve been conditioned by their upbringing and training. We see what we’ve been conditioned to see.”
Jesse smirked. “Well, you’ve been re-conditioned, and now you’re finding what you expect to find.”
“Look, I still believe in God. I just don’t … know how to relate to God anymore.”
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t know how to relate to Christianity anymore, either.”
“All right, so maybe you can help me. Let’s take the Apostles … there’s a John and a James—both sons of Zebedee—a Judas, and Simon the Zealot. These are precisely the names of the men whose lives became the basis for the Jesus of the Gospels. Three of the four also happen to be the names of Jesus’ brothers. What do you make of that?”
Jesse backed herself against the altar, and, bracing herself with the heels of her hands, lifted herself onto it, letting her legs dangle over the side. “Drew, I can barely stand to listen to this nonsense, but tell me: why isn’t there a brother named John? And besides James the son of Zebedee, there is a second disciple named James—the son of Alphaeus. Why are there two?”
“John’s pretty close—he’s Jesus’ cousin.”
“Only in Luke.”
“Maybe. But the Bible gives us more information about John the Baptist than it does about James the Just—and forget about the other brothers. They’re just ciphers. Don’t you see the reversal? John’s mother is old and used up, while Jesus’ mother is an immaculate young virgin—she symbolizes a new start. Jesus’ ministry began precisely where John’s left off. The torch was being passed. Not only that, John’s birthday is celebrated June 24th—the summer solstice. After which the days become progressively shorter. When is Jesus said to have been born? December 25—the winter solstice on the Julian Calendar. After which the days become progressively longer. ‘He must grow greater, while I must become less’. It’s all symbolic. The Gospel writers knew exactly what they were doing.”
Jesse shook her head. “The relationship between John and Jesus is allegorized somewhat, true, but that’s because the Gospel writers wanted to lure Mandaeans and other sects loyal to John over to Christianity. Otherwise this is really just a lot of colorful theorizing.”
Drew glanced down at the floor with its patch of dirty, white mosaic. “You don’t think there’s something in this, Jess? The Jews on whom Christ was modeled are all included in Jesus’ family—John as a cousin, the rest as brothers. And they’re all included again as apostles.”
“Highly unlikely. And what about the second James?”
“Zebedee is derived from the Hebrew. But the other James was the son of Alphaeus—clearly Greek. There you have the dual heritage of the Jesus of the Gospels: half Jewish, half Greek.”
Jesse rolled her eyes.
“Remember the first two Apostles who were called … actually called? “Simon and Andrew.” Jesse frowned. “Simon is a Jewish name, but Andreas—”
“Greek,” Drew finished. �
�Look at Acts of the Apostles … James the son of Alphaeus is never mentioned anywhere. He simply disappears. In chapter 12 of Acts, James Zebedee is executed by Herod Agrippa. Oddly, Herod merely arrests Peter. Why doesn’t he kill him, too? Because it’s a killing of convenience—there was no actual James Zebedee, no historical son of Alphaeus. To make that clear, James Zebedee is killed right at the beginning of Chapter 12—the same chapter in which the real James makes his first appearance. The stand-in is no longer required.”
“You really believe James the Just was the model for Jesus?”
Drew shook his head. “A model. A mosaic is the only way to explain all the contradictions of the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels. I mean, one minute he talks like a Zealot— ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.’ —the next he says, ‘Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ One minute he’s full of the apocalyptic rhetoric of John the Baptist, saying, ‘I came to send fire on the Earth, and how I wish it were already kindled’. The next he giving us long-winded advice on how to be kind to sinners. In other words, he’s not saying forsake this world because it’s already doomed, he’s telling us how to make it better, as if it won’t be destroyed and we should make the best of it. In Mark he cites Moses: ‘Honor your father and your mother. He who curses father or mother, let him be put to death’. But then in Matthew he says He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’.” Drew shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you this is just a handful of contradictory messages.”
“These inconsistencies are already well known, Drew. And have been explained by actual scholars.”
“Yes, but every scholar—actual scholar—who wrote about Jesus picked one aspect and tried to make that cover the whole of the Jesus presented in the Gospels. Someone argues for Jesus as a kind of Jewish sage influenced by the Greek Cynics. Someone else insists Jesus was an itinerant Essene. Another scholar sees Jesus as a magician and healer, based on Greek miracle-workers like Pythagoras and Asklepius. Still another says Jesus was a Zealot who was remade by the Gospel authors into a pacifist. But they all see a historical Jesus at the core. That’s the mistake. No single theory explains all of the contradictory elements. Jesus is all of them.”