The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Drew grabbed A History of the Gospels, a hefty hardcover, and flipped back and forth between the index and the body of the text. “There it is,” he muttered.

  What man is found to be such an idiot as to believe that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, like a gardener? Every man must understand these things as images under which a hidden meaning lies concealed.

  A few lines later Drew found something even better: No one will doubt that these are merely figurative expressions that designate certain mysteries through the appearance of history rather than through actual events.

  “Straight from the mouth of a Church Father,” he said and filled his own with cigar smoke.

  Encoded information was plausible enough; deciphering it was something else.

  Drew tilted his head back and exhaled a cornucopia-shaped cloud, which drifted toward the exposed rafters.

  The high priest of the Mysteries, the hierophant, represented the dying god. Had this been Jesus Panthera’s crime? Had he returned from Egypt as a hierophant?

  The hierophant led initiates into a cave, the recesses of a temple, or some other dark enclosure where they were expected to bump heads with God. Hadn’t Paul said For now we see in a glass, darkly, but then face to face? Hadn’t Luke’s Christ been born in a katalemna, a cave? Hadn’t Dionysus been born in a cave? Hadn’t Mithra been born out of rock and didn’t his initiates meet in caves? Was it coincidence that the oldest church in the world, Saint Peter’s in Antakya, was a cave?

  Yesterday, when he’d taken Jesse to the Aya Sofya, the first adjective that had come to mind was cavernous—the whole interior of the Byzantine cathedral, its geometry of domes and semi-domes was a stylized cavern. They all were. Every church in early Christendom had been nothing more than an aboveground cave. Only centuries later did the heaven-tending steeple become popular.

  Drew stood and went back to the window although all he could see was the building across the street. He gazed in the direction of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. Here, in once-upon-a-time Constantinople, architecture had preserved Christianity’s ties to the Mystery cults.

  What if the tunnel in the grotto church in Antakya hadn’t been a precaution taken against the Romans, who were barely aware Christians existed at the time Saint Peter was preaching, but part of an initiation rite? After the ceremony was held in the cave, where initiates were baptized, they may well have been sent through the tunnel to emerge on the hillside—a symbolic rebirth. Cave and tunnel would therefore symbolize womb and birth canal.

  Everything had become part of a clear pattern that, until only a few minutes ago, hadn’t existed. When Drew glanced down at the book in his hands and saw the Greek word for initiates, he understood the Mystery.

  8: 14

  A 2,000-YEAR-OLD COLD CASE

  DARK SKY BACKGROUNDED the mosques and their minarets. The Moon was setting somewhere behind the city. The Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn, the Bosporus—he couldn’t see any of them from the Office, but undoubtedly their surfaces had been silvered.

  The word that sent his thoughts down a series of forking roads was mystae—initiates, derived from the verb myein, to close or shut. Novices, the mystae did not yet understand the Mysteries: their eyes were closed. After the hierophant had submerged them in the ceremonies, they were called epoptae—those who had seen.

  The healing of Bartimaeus—a blind man in Mark—now took on an entirely new dimension. For centuries this was read as a simple miracle story, and so it would have appeared to Jews of the first century. But why does the blind man, whose name translates to Son of Timaeus, share the name of one of Plato’s most famous dialogues? A dialogue in which a man named Timaeus distinguishes—at length—between the physical world and the eternal world? A dialogue in which Plato argues that sight is the foundation of philosophy because it is through sight that we recognize the intelligence and divinity blueprinted in the physical universe?

  It now seemed obvious to Drew that Mark’s Jesus in this passage was a hierophant opening the eyes of an initiate to the eternal. Bartimaeus had become an epopt, a witness; he had seen. No Greek or Hellenized Jew could have missed it. To make the master-initiate relationship clear, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak and joins Jesus.

  The Jews of antiquity could easily have confused a hierophant with a sorcerer—heirophants even carried wands. Was this the sorcery Jesus Panthera had learned from the Therapeutae?

  Recalling another story revolving around a man who is closed off— he is deaf and dumb—Drew did a quick Internet search to pinpoint the incident. Mark 7:34. He reached for his Bible and fingered through the crepe-thin pages. The word Jesus utters in Aramaic, Ephphatha, was translated in red letters: “Be opened.” And Immediately his ears were opened, and his tongue was loosed. To the Jews, who, as Paul complained, demanded a sign, the man had been miraculously healed; to the Greeks, who sought knowledge, a man who was closed, a mystae, had been opened to the wisdom embodied in the Mysteries.

  As Drew read, smoking one cigarillo after another, he found more dual-sided incidents.

  Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey while an adoring crowd waves palm fronds at him served to “fulfill” a prophecy in Zechariah about a king lowly and riding on a donkey. Centuries before Christ, however, Dionysus was portrayed as being carried by a donkey. During the procession to the Eleusian Mysteries, a donkey bore materials that would be assembled into an effigy of Dionysus while a crowd along the road saluted the celebrants with sheaves of branches. To Drew, the critical detail was that palm fronds and branches were missing entirely from the verse in Zechariah. Palm Sunday was not a Jewish or even Christian tradition but a pagan one. While Jews reading Mark would pick up the reference to Zechariah, Greeks would see another version of their own Mysteries.

  Drew could almost have convinced himself he was interpreting creatively, but his insomniac descent into history led him to a strange purification ceremony in which initiates took a piglet into the sea with them—as many as two thousand initiates at a time. The idea, apparently, was that the impurities of the bathers would be taken on by the unsuspecting animals. The pigs were later sacrificed by being thrown into a chasm, symbolizing the disappearance of Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter into the Underworld.

  “Two thousand pigs,” Drew muttered to himself and pulled Stephen’s creased list out of a back pocket. He unfolded the square of paper and there they were: two thousand pigs. He opened the Bible again, Mark 5:9. The passage detailed the exorcism of a man who dwelled among tombs. He is possessed by a multitude of demons, which Jesus sends into a herd of two thousand swine. The pigs stampede off a cliff, fall into the sea, and drown.

  To modern Christians and to ancient Jews, this was simply a bizarre miracle. But two thousand pigs? In a country where pork was outlawed? The swineherds could have been Greeks living in Palestine, but why didn’t they demand reparation for the lost herd? Why didn’t Jesus offer any? Even today two thousand pigs would bring a hefty price.

  Because it never happened; the story was an allegory.

  A few keyboard taps brought up Sir James Frazer’s observation that the pig was sacred to Demeter, the fertility goddess at the center of the Eleusian Mysteries. Persephone was worshiped at the same Mysteries. Even as a kid Drew had known the myth of how Persephone had been kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Icy needles formed in his spine when he read Frazer’s version:

  At the moment that Hades carried off Persephone, a swineherd called Euboleus was herding his swine on the spot, and his herd was engulfed in the chasm down which Hades vanished with Persephone.

  The demon-infested man in the Gospel lived in the tombs; what better way of recalling the Underworld, where Persephone presided over the dead for seven months of the year? Sending “unclean” spirits into the pigs was Mark’s translation of impurities going from initiates into the pigs, while having the pigs run off a cliff and drown in the sea implied both the chasm Hades had opened and the briny Mysteries rite.


  Drew no longer had any doubt that the Gospels were essentially attempts to reconcile Judaism with the Greek Mysteries. If he could dig up so many double meanings in a single night, surely scholars poring over the Bible could find plenty more—even the name Jesus Christ was an amalgam of the Aramaic-derived Yeshua and the Greek Christos.

  The societies for which the Bible had been written were long gone, and what we knew about them hardly amounted to an epitaph on a grave marker. But rather than admit our ignorance, we clung to surface details without grasping the deeper meanings; we had the box but had lost the contents.

  Drew recalled the vases at Serafis’s villa in Antakya that had shown Dionysus with loaves of bread and huge jars of wine set before him. The god of wine and fertility, Dionysus was intimately tied to the harvest, to wheat. At Dionysus’s rites wine was drunk as a way of taking the god inside and communing with him. During the same rites, worshipers were given a wheat cake called makaria—blessedness. It was the Eucharist.

  The great Roman orator Cicero criticized Mystery celebrants for taking their rites too literally: Is anybody so mad, he wrote, as to believe that the food he eats is actually a god? Again, the Eucharist. Since Cicero was dead at least four decades before Jesus had been born—if he’d been born—there was no question about who had borrowed from whom.

  It was nearly four in the morning, but Drew went on smoking and reading. There were detectives who worked with bodies and forensic evidence; he was working with the translations of ancient texts, with a two-thousand-year-old cold case.

  He studied Stephen’s list to isolate what was still marked NFI – no fucking idea or CU – connection unknown.

  • John the Baptist – Model for Christ

  • James the Just – Model for Christ, Teacher of Righteousness in Dead Sea Scrolls

  • The Ebionites – Knew Paul was the Liar in D.S.S., insisted Christ was not divine

  • Ananus – the Wicked Priest in D.S.S., colluded with Paul in murdering James the Just

  • Damascus – Essene name (D.S.S.) for Qumran

  • Judas of Galilee – Zealot model for Christ

  • Simon bar Giora – Model for Christ

  • Iscariot – Evidence of Jesus’ Zealot ties

  • The Sicarii – Founded by Judas of Galilee

  • 2000 Pigs – Mysteries connection

  • Clementine Recognitions – Account of James’s death

  • Serapis – Egyptian god (CU)

  • Ezekiel’s Exodus – NFI

  • Philo of Alexandria – Mentions Pilate but not Christ. Wrote about Therapeutae.

  • The Therapeutae – Practiced Jewish version of the Mysteries, (link to J. Panthera?)

  • The Bacchae – a play by Euripides (CU)

  • Nag Hammadi Library – Collection of Gnostic Christian works deemed heretical (CU)

  Not only was his sleuthing incomplete, but also Stephen had only given him a partial list, the words that had come immediately to mind that night. For the hundredth time Drew wished the old hierophant could sit down with him, pour some wine, and help a novice make sense of so much murky history.

  Drew turned to the computer, typed in Serapis, and waited for the list of websites to pop up.

  “Well whaddaya know?” Serapis had been born in Alexandria.

  BOOK 9: 1 - 16

  ALEXANDRIA

  For among the many worthy and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has contributed to humanity, none, in my opinion, exceeds the Mysteries. The rites are properly called ‘initiations’ and in truth we have discovered in them the first principles of life. We have gained the understanding not only to live in happiness but also to die with superior hope.

  — Cicero, De Legibus II, xiv, 36, circa 49 BC

  9: 1

  ASHRAF

  ARCHITECTURE ASIDE, Alexandria was nothing like Cairo.

  Founded near a fishing village by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, it eventually came to rival Rome itself as the empire’s greatest city. Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, became the second Greek pharaoh—after Alexander. Scavenging statues and obelisks from older cities, Ptolemy used them to give Alexandria, conceived and built by Greeks, an Egyptian veneer. His vision was of a city that was a harmonious blend of Greek and Egyptian cultures.

  Next to nothing remained of ancient Alexandria, but Drew preferred it to Cairo. It was right on the Mediterranean, with a beautiful crescent-shaped harbor. Two curving promontories, like protective, if spindly arms, left a small opening to the sea. At the tip of one of them had been the Pharos—a lighthouse that rose some four hundred feet in three magnificent stages, like a slender ziggurat.

  Buses weren’t as popular as trams, which, battered and gnawed by rust, rumbled along tracks that criss-crossed the city. Alexandria was neither as dusty nor as crowded as Cairo, the tang in the air was refreshing, the light seemed to be of a different quality—and there was more of it. Unlike Cairo, Alexandria was not a city of alleys and passages kept in perpetual shadow by highrises.

  The day had started in the car. Zafer was sure the Sicarii would be waiting for them at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul so they drove to Sabiha

  Gökchen Airport, which handled far fewer flights, none of which landed in Egypt. Instead, they flew to Anakara and took a connecting flight from there.

  On arrival in Alexandria there were more games—switching taxis, doubling back the way they had come, alternating between traveling on foot and by car, weaving through crowds and ducking into a hotel and getting out through a back door.

  They had only leather messenger bags slung over their shoulders. Anything they needed, Zafer had said they could pick up in-country. “Don’t worry, Ashraf will take care of us.”

  Ashraf was a tall, swarthy Egyptian with singular markings: three quarters of his left eyebrow was white, and there were small patches of pigmentless skin just above it.

  Drew thought of a friendly bear when Ashraf smiled.

  “Don’t let him fool you,” Zafer said. “He’s a dangerous bastard.” Without turning to look at the Egyptian, who was a couple of feet behind him, Zafer let go with a back kick. Ashraf stepped to the side and parried it. Zafer turned into a Tasmanian devil, whirling and throwing elbows and palm heels and kicks. Ashraf—taller by four or five inches and a good deal heavier—had all he could do to keep the smaller man off him. The play brawl ended with an elegant trip, which put Ashraf on his back, and a wristlock that made him tap the floor.

  Zafer let go of Ashraf‘s arm, hooked thumbs with him in a biker’s handshake, and pulled him to his feet.

  “Egyptian commandos are a lot better than they used to be,” Zafer said, “but they still need some work.”

  Maybe they do, Drew thought, but I won’t try taking one down any time soon.

  Ashraf was no longer in the Egyptian military. He had become a small-arms dealer and used the flat they were in as a safe house. Although it was about half a mile from the Eastern Harbor, there was still a composite odor of salt and damp wood. The building was worn, its amber paint faded, although the shutters covering the long windows— framed by Ionic and Corinthian pilasters and faux lintels—were still bright green. Ashraf had a small network of lookouts—a shoeshine boy, a man who sold wallets on the street, a shop owner.

  The first thing Zafer did was buy a pair of Glocks.

  “You’re not Mossad anymore.” Zafer grinned at Drew. “You don’t have to carry a peashooter.”

  They didn’t wear suit jackets to conceal their weapons. Instead, they were both in shorts and T-shirts.

  Zafer dropped the Glock into his messenger bag. “Car?”

  Ashraf nodded. “Renault 406.”

  “Good.” Zafer turned to Drew and tipped his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”

  9: 2

  THE MONASTERIES

  ZAFER DROVE SOUTH on a highway that cut through desert. It was early afternoon as they approached Wadi Natrun, an area named after the substance found there in abundance a
nd without which mummification would have been impossible. Natron, an earth-made salt, that, if used properly, more or less petrified dead flesh. Of the sixty monasteries that Coptic Christians had built throughout this arid terrain, only four remained.

  Now that they were here, Drew was less optimistic about finding Q. How many caves and tombs could they search? Even if they found the place where the scroll had first been discovered, who was to say the site hadn’t become a haunt for the wind while the scroll was tucked under a bed in some hut in a village that wasn’t even on their map?

  He didn’t like being without Kadir either; it was like they’d left behind their good luck charm.

  Zafer drove past a mosque on the side of the road, sand piled against its walls. The scenery reminded Drew of Arizona although it was considerably more barren, and instead of saguaro cactuses, palm trees grew in scattered clumps. There were even highway signs advertising food, gas, lodging—all in Arabic, of course.

  The three southernmost monasteries were in a tight cluster. Zafer had decided to work more or less backwards, going to the monastery most distant from Alexandria first.

  The first compound of walled-in buildings they approached looked like the adobe of Spanish churches in the American southwest. The small domes with crosses planted in them were more reminiscent of oversized kilns than the architectural marvels of the Aya Sofya.

  Getting out of the car, Drew swept his eyes over the smooth, sandstone-colored walls. They looked to be thirty or thirty-five feet high. Drew was surprised to see a paved lot with a tour bus parked in it, and kids kicking around a soccer ball. It wasn’t the desolate seclusion he’d expected.

  Flies made a tiny cloud around his head, tickling his face when they landed. Waving them away, he followed Zafer through a small door rather than a capacious gate. They were greeted on the other side by a monk who wore a long, navy-blue gown and a cap that covered his ears. The cap reminded Drew of the leather helmets football players had worn back in the 1950s, except that it was a much lighter material and was decorated with stars and crescent moons. His face darker than Drew’s, the monk had a beard of black wool that looked like it could defeat a wire brush.