by Vincent Czyz
“Does that really matter?”
“A little good faith might come in handy. We took a queen with a pawn, but the game isn’t over yet.”
8: 10
AND THEN THERE WERE TWO
“WHADDA YOU MEAN YOU’RE OUT?”
Neat stacks of bills covered the slate-topped coffee table in the Office. A total of $105,000 had gone to Serafis and Ozatlay, leaving $4,895,000 to be divided up. Kadir set aside $500,000 for Tariq’s widow. Drew’s share—more money than he’d ever dreamed of having—was $895,000. Zafer got $1.5 million. Kadir, two million.
It was unreal, all this money, all this paper—the world’s greatest fiction. He wished his father would call now and ask him what good studying lidderacher was. Or what he was going to retire on. Or what he was going to leave the kids he didn’t have.
But the money hadn’t diminished his desire to find the Q document.
Kadir, on the other hand, had lost all interest. “I will give my shop to my cousin. I will go into the south and buy to a boat. I don’t want to getting killed for another piece of antique paper which is written with Jewish holy words.”
Drew had gotten used to their team of three. “Zafer? What about you?”
“I told you, I’m in the game till the end.”
“I guess, then, we need to figure out where Q is.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Well,” Drew said, “Q wasn’t stolen from Abu, so there was no reason for Tariq to take it out of the country. We need to track down whoever found it and contacted Tariq. He’s probably near Cairo since that was Tariq’s territory.”
Kadir, who was filling a briefcase with 10,000-dollar stacks, paid no attention to the conversation.
“Zafer, can you get the photos of Q?”
The Turk went to one of his filing cabinets, took out a yellow envelope, and slid the photos out.
Drew spread them on the table.
The photographer had used a flash—something no professional would have done with such delicate material—so wherever the photos had been taken had been badly lit.
Drew looked up at Zafer. “What do you think?”
“The scroll looks like it was unrolled on … that might be stone.”
“A cave?”
“Maybe. Or an old basement with a rough floor. Could be an old church.”
“The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves.” Drew turned to Kadir. “Where did you say Tariq was from originally?”
“A village near to Sadat City.”
“Do we have a map of Egypt?”
Zafer nodded. “I’ve got an atlas.”
Kadir cleared the rest of the money off the table and Zafer spread the atlas over about half of it.
“Okay, Sadat City is here … between Alexandria and Cairo.”
“So?”
“Well, I’m thinking that Tariq had most of his contacts in the area he was from.”
“Also many contacts he had south from Cairo. He had car.”
“Yes, but this is a Jewish scroll, written in Aramaic. The largest concentration of Jews outside of Palestine when Q was written was in Alexandria. And remember, when Jesus Panthera fled Jerusalem, he settled in Alexandria. The Therapeutae that Philo wrote about lived near Lake Mariout, just south of Alexandria.”
“Jesus who?”
“Never mind. The point is we need to find a system of caves, a monastery, a cemetery—the scroll could have been photographed in a tomb—somewhere between Lake Mariout and Sadat City. Cairo at the farthest. If we go to Egypt, maybe we can find whoever came up with Q.”
Zafer shook his head. “Might as well be looking for a contact lens on the bottom of a pond.”
Drew nodded. “I suppose you’re right.” He walked over to the desk Zafer let him use and pulled The Collected Works of Philo out of a stack of books. All he could think to do was reread what Philo had written on the Therapeutae. Which might improve the odds slightly—like looking for a penny on the bottom of a pond.
8: 11
THE PYTHAGOREAN THEORY
WHEN DREW HAD LEARNED about Pythagoras in high school, the ancient Greek had simply been an obscure mathematician—a name and a theorem to memorize in geometry class. It wasn’t until he got to college that Drew learned that A2 + B2 = C2 had been discovered not by a math teacher, but by a religious sage who, in many ways, paralleled the Christ of the Gospels. Pythagoras was commonly held to be the son of Apollo and Parthenis, a mortal whose name had its root in parthenos—the Greek word for virgin. So a god had been his father and a virgin his mother. According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras also performed any number of miracles, including calming the waves of rivers and seas in order that his disciples might the more easily pass over them.
Said to have spent twenty-two years in Egypt as a student of the Mysteries of Osiris, Pythagoras had lived some five centuries before the traditional date of Christ’s birth. The Pythagoreans gathered for prayer at dawn, devoted themselves to the study of philosophy and mathematics during the day, and in the evening gathered for a meal sanctified by readings from their scriptures. Robed in white, they refrained from eating meat of any kind and tended to be celibate. This was almost identical to Philo’s description of the Therapeutae.
Jesus Panthera had learned “magic” while exiled in Egypt. Magic, Drew figured, was the Pythagorean theology passed on to him by the Therapeutae. Panthera, like Pythagoras himself, had brought back knowledge that his countrymen simply didn’t understand. Or accept.
If Panthera had been one of the models for Christ, then it wasn’t surprising that Pythagorean concepts of numbers had been encoded in the Gospels. Twelve, for example, made a number of appearances in the New Testament: Jesus is twelve years old when he holds forth in the temple; Jesus has twelve apostles; Jairus’s daughter, whom Jesus raises, is twelve; and the hemorrhaging woman whom Jesus cures has been bleeding for twelve years. All the more intriguing that the dodecahedron—a solid shape with twelve pentagonal sides—was the Pythagorean symbol for the cosmos.
“You can call them coincidences, Jess,” he said as if she were in the room. “But they’re adding up.”
John seemed to have borrowed more heavily from Pythagoras than any other Gospel. In fact, the opening was stolen right from Philo of Alexandria, who had also been known as Philo the Pythagorean for his veneration of the Greek sage.
In his allegorical interpretation of Genesis, Philo had put forth his own concept of the Logos or Word, a theme that already been expounded on by several Greek philosophers, including Heraclitus. Philo had believed in two Adams: the first was a heavenly human who reflected the image of God; the second was the mortal Adam patted out of clay. The first was a perfect man inhabiting a realm consisting purely of God’s thought— borrowed obviously enough from Plato, specifically his Timaeus and its realm of ideal forms. Philo calls this heavenly human God’s Logos or Word. Adam’s father, Philo wrote, is God, who is likewise Father of all, and his mother is Wisdom, through whom the universe came into existence.
Flipping to the opening of John, Drew read, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without him nothing was made that was made. The Word and He in John had always been interpreted as Christ, but this was clearly Philo’s concept of the Word tacked onto Christianity: instead of Philo’s Man from heaven being Adam, it was now Jesus. Whereas Philo wrote that the universe came into existence through Wisdom—the personification of God’s thought—John moved it to Jesus as the Word. This conceptual sleight of hand cleverly eliminated the feminine Wisdom from the equation.
By stealing Philo’s concept and pronouncing Jesus—not Adam—a denizen of heaven, John had helped change the course of religion, and, subsequently, of history. The irony was that, as scholars had demonstrated, whoever had written John wasn’t even one of the twelve apostles. His Greek came from outside the Pauline mission area.
Drew went back to the
Therapeutae, this time as seen through the eyes of Eusebius, the so-called Father of Church History. Writing in the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea made a posthumous fool of himself by “proving” the Therapeutae were the first Christians. Anyone, he says, can see that Philo was writing about the earliest preachers of the Gospel teachings and the traditions handed down by the Apostles from the beginning. Eusebius didn’t know of course that the Gospels were written well after Philo had composed his essay and that the Therapeutae and their practices predated Christ by as much as centuries. Eusebius insisted that the skeptical would find proof that cannot be found anywhere but in the rituals of Christians who follow the Gospel. And yet, not only did the Therapeutae follow these practices, so did the Pythagoreans, whose cult was established nearly half a millennium before the accepted date of Christ’s birth.
Drew picked up his volume of Philo and underlined They read scripture and make a philosophical study of this ancestral wisdom, comprehending it according to allegory, since they consider the literal sense to be symbolic of a hidden reality revealed in figures. Drew underlined allegory twice.
Even two thousand years ago, neither the Therapeutae nor Philo took scripture as literal history but as symbolic—in other words, fiction. Not lies but truth in poetic form. Fascinating as that was, Drew was no closer to the location of Q. He closed the book with an angry whump.
“Kadir, don’t you know any of Tariq’s contacts?”
Kadir frowned. “There wasn’t importance to know.”
“Yeah, well there is now. And Amal burned his phonebook. What about … is there anything near Sadat City—ruins, caves, an abandoned church maybe?”
Kadir nodded. “There is monastery.”
“What?”
“When Tariq was child, he was living in monastery.”
“I thought he was Muslim.”
“Yes, he became Muslim. But he was Christian before.”
Drew jumped out of his chair. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Does it important?”
“Yes, it does! Which one? Which monastery?”
“I have no any idea.”
“Zafer, do you have a … a guidebook on Egypt?”
“Somewhere.”
“Find it. That has to be the connection. It has to be.”
Zafer scanned a few shelves, pulled out a book, and tossed it to Drew.
It thumped against his chest. Sifting the index, he found listings for all of Egypt’s monasteries.
“There are four monasteries between Alexandria and Cairo.” He looked up at Zafer. “That has to be Tariq’s connection to Q.”
“Easy, Drew. Even we find the right monastery, it doesn’t mean we’ll find the scroll.”
“But at least now we know where to look.”
8: 12
TRUST
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN there’s a second scroll? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Calling from a public phone as per Zafer’s instructions, Drew hadn’t thought the euphoria of the good news—the Habakkuk Commentary was in the hands of the Turkish government and two Sicarii had been arrested—would wear off so fast.
“Jess, you know how things work with Zafer and Kadir. They keep me on a short leash.”
“Yeah, I understand, but they don’t listen in on your phone calls, do they?”
“It’s not a matter of trusting you, Jess. Zafer doesn’t even trust me.”
“So you’re telling me there’s a second scroll, probably in Egypt, an Aramaic version of Q1, and you’re going to leave me—probably the only qualified scholar in Istanbul who’s not in jail—and go off to find this thing on your own with a, a …what is he? An ex-commando? Did he even go to college?”
“Considering the people we’re up against, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing have to an ex-commando around. But listen, we don’t even know if this thing is genuine.”
“And what exactly are you going to do with it if you find it?”
“Get it to you.”
There was a pause. “Really?”
“Like you said, you’re the only expert we’ve got. How else are we going to know if it’s genuine?”
“So you … you know where to look?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, no hesitation. You know exactly?”
“Pretty much.”
“Drew this is … this is incredibly exciting. Are you sure I can’t come with you?”
“Not as long as Zafer is running the show. And without him, there is no show.”
“Why don’t you just … just message me when you get there? I’ll show up on my own and … and make up a story.”
“He’s way too smart for that.”
“Shit. Well, can I see you? Before you go? I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“I don’t understand why I can’t go with you. Is it because I’m a—”
“It has nothing to do with the fact that you’re the only one of us who could model a swimsuit for Sports Illustrated. When we sold the Habakkuk Scroll, Zafer wouldn’t even let Kadir go.”
“Can you imagine how I feel? The greatest find in New Testament archaeology—”
“If it’s genuine.”
“Right. And who’s going to find it? An English instructor and a guy who got kicked out of the Turkish army.”
Drew kept the insult he felt out of his voice. “Hey … who found the Dead Sea Scrolls? A Bedouin shepherd. If we do come up with Q, you’ll be the first to translate it. Your name will be in the history books right next to Q.”
“Well, now that you got my hopes up, you better not come back without it.”
8: 13
THE MYSTERIES
DREW GAZED OUT A WINDOW. A tin-capped lamp, weighing down a cable strung between buildings, turned the street into a black-and-white photograph: cobblestones dark as cinders, crumbling doorways sunk in shadow, eroding faces carved into cornerstones— sepulchral, like tomb effigies.
He glanced at his watch. Two a.m.
The empty street should have been silent. He stopped breathing and listened. He thought he heard faint footsteps on the cobbles. No, what he’d heard were echoes of whoever had already walked these back streets. Maybe this morning. Maybe before he’d been born.
In spite of the fact that he was looking out of a third-floor window, he had found his way into an underworld. He had a pile of money but no job, and half the things he did were illegal. He had become a part of the city’s shadow population—just as his father had always feared.
“Well,” he said to himself, “I guess it was always in me.”
He sat down at the desk he’d come to think of as his and lit a cigarillo.
The mosaic wasn’t finished. The Jewish pieces were in place, but the Greek picture was still a tombstone in the fog.
From the cardboard box beside the desk, he pulled out his battered copy of The Golden Bough. Sir James Frazer had dug up the oldest of Christianity’s roots—the worship of a god who dies only to be resurrected—and followed it to its elemental source: the cyclical death and rebirth of plant life. It was that simple. The turning of the seasons. Drawing upon examples from hundreds of cultures and peoples as divergent as African huntsmen and German peasants, Native Americans and Welsh farmers, Frazer had demonstrated that Christianity and a host of other religions reflected the death of the Earth in fall and winter and its rebirth in spring and summer.
If Christianity was essentially a Jewish Mystery cult, then the Gospel authors must have unwound a thread for initiates to follow. Jesse would have dismissed the idea as wild speculation, but the Mysteries had from the first worked through symbol and allegory: they were meant to be double-sided, deciphered, to be narrative double-entendres.
Drew picked up Ancient Greek Religions and skimmed the highlighted passages until something Plato had written stopped him:
It seems that those men who founded the Mysteries were not unenlightened but in fact had a hidden meaning when they said that he who
goes uninitiated and unsanctified into the world hereafter will lie in the mud …”
Drew tapped ashes from the tip of his cigarillo. Plato’s statement was interesting but vague. Taking another drag on the cigar and surfing the index, he found a more explicit quote from Heliodorus, a hierophant of the Mysteries:
Philosophers and theologians do not reveal the meanings encoded in these stories to the uninitiated but instead use myths to instruct them. Those who have attained the higher levels of the Mysteries, however, they initiate into deeper knowledge in the sanctity of the holy shrine, in the light cast by the flaming brand of truth.
Drew snatched up his leather-bound Bible and scanned Paul’s letters. His finger stopped on a passage in Corinthians.
However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory…
He closed the Bible and let it thump onto the steel desk. If it was already common practice among the Mystery religions to encode certain information, then it was almost certain the New Testament authors had done the same. Nearly two thousand years after the Gospels had been written, we were the ignoramuses, the inexperienced initiates who believed every word of a narrative that was never meant to be historical. Jesus hadn’t been born to a virgin any more than Athena had sprung, fully armored, out of Zeus’s head. What history the New Testament contained had been thoroughly disguised and placed in a mythic framework—a fiction. Hadn’t Jesus said “To you it is given to know the Mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest of them it is only given in parables?” Weren’t the Gospels exactly what had been given to the rest of them—to us?
Drew recalled fragments of something similar a saint had said about Genesis. He tapped a palm heel against his forehead trying to remember which Church Father it had been. “Saint Origen?”