The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Aiming his pistol at Hohenzollern’s chest, he unloaded the clip. Red blossoms burst open all over the khaki shirt. After the deafening reports of gunfire in the cave, it was eerie how the sound of the shots was swallowed by the desert.

  The slide had locked in an open position, and a wispy cloud of smoke drifted away from Drew. He looked at the gun as if it had betrayed him. He flung it away. He turned to find Brother Paramos standing behind him. He almost grabbed by the monk by his robe.

  “I’m not asking anymore,” he snapped. “Show me where that goddamn scroll is. If you don’t, all this death will be for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”

  Brother Paramos nodded gravely. “I’ll take you.”

  9: 10

  THE BIRTHPLACE OF CHRISTIANITY

  AFTER RETRIEVING THE CANVAS bag from Brother Paramos’s cave, Drew stripped the bodies of the two Sicarii first—wallets, keys, cell phones—and gathered up the weapons. The legionnaire, hands tied behind his back and legs double-bound at the ankles with Kevlar, hadn’t moved.

  Drew thought about asking Brother Paramos to clear out Zafer’s pockets, but that, he decided would be the easy way out. Crying without sobs or racked breathing, he went silently about his task. Before abandoning him, he squeezed Zafer’s hand half in farewell, half in the impossible hope that he would find a sign of life there.

  There was none.

  He left the body where it lay, as though there were something sacred or at least meaningful about the last position in which it had come to rest. Glancing over his shoulder—again that ridiculous hope there would be something to contradict what he knew was the truth—Drew stood and watched the legs of Zafer’s shorts flap weakly in the breeze.

  He turned away.

  The legionnaire and the Sicarii had come in a jeep, which had been visible from where Hohenzollern lay although it had been parked about three-hundred yards away. The keys had been in Collins’s pocket.

  Drew and Brother Paramos drove south to another set of hills where the monk led Drew on foot to a crevice—probably an ancient crack that had widened over the centuries. Squeezing through sideways, Drew had to hold the canvas bag over his head. He looked up and saw a jagged strip of sky.

  Back and chest abraded by rock, the two men sidestepped, twenty-five or thirty yards, until the gap finally widened, and they could walk comfortably.

  “Here …” In the sheer wall there was a narrow gash whose pointed peak came up to Drew’s waist. Brother Paramos got down on all fours and crawled in. Drew followed, his bare knees bitten by grit.

  They were in a natural tunnel that, at ground level, had inhaled desert; sand and small stones covered the floor. Brother Paramos led the way while Drew held a flashlight. Just as his claustrophobic urge to turn back became nearly intolerable, the tunnel opened up. He stood up in a small chamber. Something about it looked familiar. “This is where you photographed it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Drew swept the beam of his flashlight over the rough walls, the high ceiling, the floor strewn with rocks. He didn’t see the slightest trace of anything artificial. “It’s here?”

  “This is why they could, as your friend said, turn this desert inside out and never find anything.”

  The beam of the flashlight leapt from one part of the cavern to another as Drew sought a niche in the walls, a hidden door in the ceiling, something in the floor. He saw nothing. “They would have tortured you, you know.”

  “Christians have been martyred before. If your soul is prepared to meet God, you can endure any pain.”

  “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “When you threw your weapon away, I believed your reasons for finding the scroll could be trusted. I do not want Tariq and your friend to be dead in vain.”

  Brother Paramos bent down beside a large stone and began sweeping away sand and gravel with the edge of his hand. “After I found this hole, I made sure no one else would be able to discover it.”

  Drew could see now that the floor was a slightly different color where the monk was kneeling. The texture … well, some of the grit couldn’t be swept away; it was embedded in the floor.

  The monk ran a hand over the patch of floor. “This is what we use to repair the walls of the monastery.” He tapped what looked like sandstone-colored cement with a finger. Picking up a large rock with two hands, he brought it down in a swift arc. The floor cracked. He struck it again, and chunks of mortar fell away; Drew heard them hit bottom a few feet down. Brother Paramos kept hammering until all that was left was the wire mesh he had used as backing.

  Drew bent down and peered inside. Dust swarmed in the beam of his flashlight. The circle of light had fallen on a shrunken human face baring its remaining teeth in a ghoulish grin. The skin was as black as old leather, and where it had rotted away, bone was exposed. The lips were gone, which accounted for the permanent smile. Wisps of hair still clung to the scalp just as tatters of the shroud in which the body had once been wrapped clung to the bones. Beside the body was what appeared to be a limestone box. Fragments of the adobe-colored seal had landed on its cover.

  “The scroll is in the box. In past centuries, important books were sometimes buried with a man. Perhaps so that he could draw on this wisdom in the afterlife. I believe this man was a monk.”

  “One of the Therapeutae?”

  Brother Paramos smiled weakly. “Maybe.”

  It made more and more sense. Alexandria was the birthplace of Wisdom literature—that fusion of the Sophia of the Greeks and the genius of Jewish scripture. The Gospels themselves were an amalgam of Jewish belief and the Greek Mysteries. And here, in a limestone box beside the corpse of an ancient monk, another monk had hidden the sayings of the composite savior figure who had given Christianity its name.

  The floor of the second chamber was no more than five feet below.

  “There used to be another entrance,” the monk said, “but it was long ago buried by sand.”

  Drew barely heard him. “Hold that light on me, would you?” He slipped into the hole, his feet landing somewhere behind the box. Bending at the knees, he ducked into a natural tomb that, until recently, had been undisturbed for something like two millennia. Drew glanced down at the mummified face. So this is what discovery is like.

  He lifted the lid off the limestone box, and mortar chunks fell to the floor. White powder covered the bottom of the box. Natron. And there, sheathed in leather, was a papyrus scroll. He lifted it up to the beam of Brother Paramos’s flashlight.

  “Hurry,” Brother Paramos hissed.

  9: 11

  LOGIA IESOU

  TWILIGHT HAD DESCENDED by the time Drew approached the monastery. The sky to the east, behind the walls and domes of the monastery, was a deep blue with an underbelly of purple. Behind him, it glowed a fading orange. Through the chain-link fencing, Drew saw two police cars, their lights off. “Shit.”

  He also saw Shimon. He was crossing the cultivated field Drew and Zafer had crossed this afternoon. He was like a diminutive scarecrow leached of color—hair, beard, and jalabiya all white. Except that he was walking toward the jeep.

  Shimon reached the jeep and grasped the top of a door with his wizened hands. “I’ve been waiting for you. So are the police. You have the scroll?”

  Drew nodded.

  Shimon reached out and put a hand on Drew’s wrist. “Your friend…?”

  Drew shook his head.

  “I’m sorry.” He squeezed Drew’s wrist and let go.

  “The dead man in the cave …” Drew motioned Shimon back so that he could step out of the jeep. “Was he one of the Therapeutae?”

  Shimon shrugged his slight shoulders. With his shaggy white head and the purple-blue sky behind him, he could have been Blake’s Ancient of Days. “It is possible. The Therapeutae lived throughout this area.”

  “Why did they vanish from history after Philo wrote about them?”

  Shimon smiled and shook his head. “They didn’t. Nor d
id they call themselves Therapeutae. That was Philo’s name for them because he considered them healers of the soul.”

  “Then who…?”

  “They were the first Christians, of course. Just as the Church Father Eusebius thought.”

  “Christians before Christ?”

  Shimon nodded. “That’s where Eusebius was wrong.”

  “There were … what? Sixty Coptic monasteries in this area at one time?”

  “At one time, yes. Maybe more.”

  “The Therapeutae … became Coptic Christians?”

  Shimon swept an arm to take in the western horizon. “Egypt is where monastic Christianity began. As the name of Christ made its way west, the Therapeutae adopted the new god. Just as centuries earlier, they had adopted Serapis and the rites of the Mysteries.”

  “The Therapeutae worshipped … Serapis?”

  “It’s not so simple. Gods were not so separate then. Of course they believed in Yahweh. Serapis was merely His Egyptian face.”

  Drew had been overconfident when he’d researched Serapis. He should have known it had been too easy, that everything was connected, on multiple levels, from first keyword to last.

  If the Therapeutae had accepted Serapis, performing the Pythagorean as well as Jewish rites, what was one more composite god to them, this one named Yeshua? Mark had not been deceiving the world when he had written his gospel; he had been following a tradition of syncretism that pervaded all cultures. After the Babylonian captivity, the Jews had taken from Zoroastrianism the concepts of Hell, the Devil, and a Last Judgment. The Romans had adopted the Greek gods, laying them over their own pantheon while giving them Latin names—Zeus became Jupiter; Hermes was known as Mercury; Aphrodite—Venus . Pythagoras himself had borrowed the Mysteries of Osiris and turned them into the Mysteries of Dionysus.

  “Why do you think there were already well-established churches when Paul began his ministry?” Shimon asked. “Just a few years after the Christ of the Gospels was said to have been crucified? Why do you think there is a legend that Peter sent Mark to Alexandria in 43 AD and that this is where he wrote his gospel? Why do you think that Mark is the patron saint and founder of the Coptic Church? How else could the Church explain all these early Christians who had never been anywhere near Palestine?”

  Drew nodded vaguely, but he was struggling to recalibrate his understanding of Mark—both the author and the gospel.

  “Mark was always here in Alexandria. He never lived in Palestine, so he was never ‘sent’ by Peter.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Haven’t you ever noticed the geographical errors in his Gospel?”

  “There’s a small one … when Jesus and the disciples are traveling from Jericho to Jerusalem … I think Mark gets the order of the towns wrong.”

  “Yes, Matthew corrected the error in his own gospel.” Shimon said. “But there are larger errors. Mark places Geras on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, but it is more than forty-five kilometers southeast of the sea. Again, Matthew tried to correct him by renaming the city Gadara, but even Gadara is ten kilometers distant, and there is no slope that goes down to the water as Mark describes. There is also the journey in chapter seven from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee—by passing through Sidon. But Sidon is more than thirty kilometers north of Tyre while the Sea of Galilee, of course, is far to the southeast of Tyre.”

  Shimon shook his head. “Mark was a Gentile whose gospel was written for Gentile converts to Christianity. He had to read the Old Testament in Greek to write about Judaism. He read Josephus to find the names of Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, and Herod. Why do you think Matthew has the flight to Egypt in his gospel? Matthew knew the true birthplace of Christianity is Egypt. Even Saint Epiphanius was dimly aware of this … he believed that Jesus meant healer or physician in Hebrew. He was wrong, but—”

  “But he wouldn’t have made a mistake like that unless he had confused Christ with a Therapeut.” The realization suddenly hit Drew. “Jesus Panthera…?”

  Shimon nodded. “Jewish tradition invariably asserts that Jesus learned magic in Egypt. But it was Jesus ben Panthera, not Jesus of Nazareth.”

  “Luke.” Drew looked at Shimon as if the old man had put the name in his mouth by some form of sorcery. “Luke has always been known as the physician, but Therapeut—healer—is almost the same word.”

  Shimon glanced at Drew’s bag. “Do you know the title of the scroll you have?”

  The beginning of the manuscript had been missing when the professor looked over the photographs. Drew shook his head.

  “Sayings of the Savior. In Hebrew or Aramaic, that would be almost indistinguishable from Sayings of Jesus.”

  A definite article separated them. “Wisdom literature,” Drew said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Modeled on The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach?”

  “Probably”

  “The Book of Sirach was included in the Septuagint, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Drew no longer saw the darkening western sky or the diminutive Ancient of Days, the domes of the monastery, or the shadowy walls they capped. He’d gone back two thousand years. To a shore of the Dead Sea. Blinking his way back to the present, he said, “A friend of mine, a professor of religion, said this scroll was signed. By whom?”

  “El’azar ben Ya’akov ben Yeshua.”

  “Eleazar? The grandson of Jesus ben Sirach? He’s the one … he translated his grandfather’s manuscript for the Septuagint?”

  Shimon nodded. “In the Greek translation of his grandfather’s work, Eleazar also provided an introduction in which he claims these sayings were written in Hebrew in Judea and brought to Alexandria.”

  “When? When was he writing?”

  “Maybe …” Shimon waffled a hand. “One-ninety … perhaps 200 BC.”

  “So his grandson would have compiled Sayings of the Savior … right about the time Jesus Panthera was in exile in Alexandria.”

  Shimon shook his head. “Earlier. One-thirty BC or so. But it’s entirely possible Panthera had studied it.”

  Drew recognized, once again, the theme of reconciling the Greek worldview with the Jewish.

  “Can you drive, Shimon?”

  “Yes.”

  Lifting himself off the seat, Drew dug a set of keys out his pocket. “Take the Renault about two kilometers down the road. I’ll meet you there.”

  As Shimon hurried off toward the monastery, Drew pulled out. Making a circle around the fields, he came out to the newly paved road. Pulling the jeep onto a sandy shoulder, he got out and waited.

  He saw the white Renault approaching about five minutes later at a pace consistent with an old man who’d lost his confidence behind the wheel. Shimon pulled off the road at an oblique angle. Riding the unpaved shoulder for the last fifty yards or so, he trailed a cloud of dust as he pulled up behind the jeep.

  Drew opened the driver’s side door to help him out of the car. “Should I drive you—?”

  “I’ll walk back. I’ll enjoy the stars and the desert. Maybe they’ll enjoy my company as well.” He smiled, his crooked teeth mostly intact.

  Drew kissed the old man on both cheeks, as he would have in Turkey. When they embraced, he felt the old man’s light bones beneath his jalabiya.

  Drew pulled away and watched Shimon recede in the rearview mirror. He hoped he wouldn’t run into any roadblocks on his way back to Alexandria—and that Ashraf could get him out of Egypt.

  9: 12

  SAYID THE ONE-EYED

  “DEAD?” ASHRAF GRABBED TWO FISTFULS of Drew’s shirt and yanked him forward so hard, the cotton ripped. “He cannot be dead!” His left eyebrow was like a white-hot sickle.

  Ashraf was taller, bulkier, and stronger. Only now could Drew appreciate how easily Zafer had handled the big Egyptian when they were fooling around earlier in the day.

  Ashraf relaxed his grip. “How?”

  “Sniper.”

  They were in the Egy
ptian’s flat with its high ceilings and tall windows, its ceiling fans turning like soft propellers.

  “Sniper?” The Egyptian began pacing the room like a caged bear. “He has always hated snipers.” Ashraf stopped in front of a closed door and hurled his fist. The door was old and solid; Drew wasn’t sure if the crack he heard was bone or wood. “Where is the body?”

  Since Ashraf didn’t fall to his knees in pain, Drew assumed the wood had given.

  “The monks have it. The Monastery of the Virgin of El Baramouse.” They had room for the body of one more saint.

  “Do they know who he is?”

  “They think he’s from MIT, but I cleaned out his pockets. I didn’t leave ID on anybody.”

  “What about cell phones?”

  “I took out the SIM cards and dumped them in the desert.”

  Ashraf buried his face in his hands. The knuckle of the middle finger was bleeding.

  Ashraf let his hands fall. “I can’t believe he is dead. You are sure?” The veins were showing in the yellowish whites of his eyes like tiny red cracks, as though pure crimson rage lay underneath.

  “I’m sure.” He almost choked on the words.

  “All right. You will need to get out from Egypt. And you have something you do not want the officials of customs to inspect.”

  “Yes.” In spite of what he’d told Jesse, the original plan had been to get the scroll to the Egyptian authorities. It belonged to the Egyptian government after all. Kadir’s kidnapping, however, had changed that.

  “I don’t know what is in that box you are carrying, but Zafer died for it. Do you understand what that means?”

  Drew nodded, although he wasn’t sure at all.

  “It means that if it is necessary, you must die also for this box.”

  Drew nodded again, but the truth was that Zafer had died for Kadir, not the scroll.

  “We will go by boat. They will be watching the airports. I am sorry for tearing your shirt. You should put on a new one. We have business with Sayid the One-Eyed.”