The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Whereas Philo had equated Jewish Wisdom with the Greek Logos, John had identified Jesus with the Logos and, by association, with Wisdom. Wisdom lost Her identity as a feminine emanation of God and became, instead, the Son of God. This killed two birds with one stone: it excluded the feminine from Creation, and it joined Greek thought with Jewish theology.

  John was the only one of the four Gospels to mention the Logos. Not surprisingly, scholars had shown John did not come from the same milieu as the other Gospels. What was interesting to Drew, however, was that the Logos—the heavenly Jesus—had replaced Wisdom as she appeared in the Old Testament. What was Q1, bagged and boxed on the seat next to him, but a collection of wisdom sayings—Wisdom when she was still the Thought of God? The connection couldn’t be clearer.

  Since Q had been written in Greek, Drew suspected that his scroll formed the original, Aramaic core, undoubtedly compiled in Alexandria and later translated into Greek. Just as Wisdom evolved into the Logos in Philo, the Logos had evolved into Jesus in John.

  Simply put, Jesus of Nazareth was a later superimposition upon an already well-established tradition—nothing more than the latest incarnation of Wisdom.

  If Drew was right, God was probably furious.

  10: 5

  TWIN TWIN

  DREW CLIMBED THE MARBLE STEPS in the unlit stairwell and unlocked the steel door to the Office with Zafer’s keys. The alarm began to beep ominously. Locating the keypad on the wall, he punched in the numerical sequence Zafer had made him memorize.

  The silence was eerie.

  The huge front room with its exposed rafters seemed to have taken on another coat of dust since they’d left. Zafer’s worktables and their swan-necked architect’s lamps as well. The gunmetal gray filing cabinets, the shelves, the desk. The oversized map of Turkey and the map, on another wall, of Istanbul’s streets. This was his home now, a grimy industrial space where information was stored, documents counterfeited, identities forged.

  Ironic that Zafer had been killed over a document. The irony would double if the scroll turned out to be a forgery—the joke would be on all of them—but Drew no longer thought that likely. Although he was neither a scholar nor a paleographer, he had an idea about how he might be able to verify the manuscript’s authenticity.

  He sat down at the steel desk and turned on the computer.

  Logging onto the Internet, he tuned in a radio station that played Western pop from the ’70s. He’d been a child in the ’80s, but songs from the previous decade were still surrounded by the nostalgia of a time when the neighborhood bar his father disappeared into after work and what he did there were a complete mystery.

  While Steely Dan told Jack to go back and do it again, Drew pulled up a webpage featuring a table that showed the sayings common to Q, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and the Gospel of Thomas.

  He took a deep breath. “Either this scroll is a forgery and Stephen is wrong,” he said aloud, “or this scroll is genuine and Jesus of Nazareth never lived.”

  He pulled out Shimon’s translation.

  The Q1 sayings were decidedly Greek and reflected the philosophy of the Cynics, who were already well-established in Alexandria by the third century BC. The school rejected not only material wealth but even the most meager possessions.

  The first Q1 saying listed, which also appeared in Luke, was Think of the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have no storehouse or barn, yet God feeds them. This was lifted right out the life of Diogenes, the archetypal Cynic, admired even by Alexander the Great. Observing a mouse, Diogenes realized that mice don’t put any effort into building a dwelling, they eat whatever they happen to find. They don’t bother about the past or the future, and yet they got along well enough.

  Q1 also included I say to you, love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. This saying was put into practice by the famous Cynic Epictetus, who had written: A rather nice part of being a Cynic comes when you have to be flogged like an ass and throughout the beating you have to love those who are beating you as though you were father or brother to them. When asked how he would defend himself against an enemy, Epictetus answered, “By being good and kind toward him.”

  Another oft-quoted saying in Q1 was Judge not, lest you too be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard you apply, another saying that could be traced directly back to Diogenes. When a disciple asked him how he could master himself, Diogenes replied, “By rigorously criticizing yourself according to the standard you use to criticize others.”

  The list went on.

  The point was not that the author or authors of Q1 had plagiarized the Cynics; rather, the Jewish community that had compiled Q1 shared the same values as the Cynics. In Luke, Jesus commands the apostles “Behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no sack, no sandals.” This was a precise description of the Cynics, who wandered about as beggars preaching their philosophy.

  Scholars had puzzled for decades over which Hellenized Jewish community could have produced the Q1 sayings. The answer had become astonishingly clear: the Therapeutae. The Cynical values—praise of poverty, disdain of property, asceticism, a life harmonized with the rhythms of nature—were all embodied by those austere, monasterial communities near Alexandria. As Philo himself had observed firsthand, the Therapeutae abandon their property and desert their brethren, their children, their wives, their parents. A commandment in both Q1 and Luke expressed the same philosophy: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

  If the earliest layer of Q belonged to the Therapeutae, Sayings of the Savior must have been among their scriptures.

  Whatever city you enter, Luke had written, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you. And heal the sick who are there, and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near to you. Therapeut meant healer. How much of Jesus’ ministry had been healing? The blind, the barren, even the dead?

  Drew put his head in his hands. His skull was ringing as though something electronic had been built into it. How had the obvious been overlooked for so long? He raked his face with his fingers. Even the Last Supper, in which the apostles are commanded to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of Jesus, Drew now saw as a coded element. On the one hand, the use of bread and wine had clearly been inspired by the rites of Dionysus and Mithras; on the other, it alluded to the communal meals of the Therapeutae.

  Drew looked over Q2, the second layer of Q, on the webpage.

  None of the sayings in Q2 showed up in Shimon’s translation. Distinctly Jewish, they were mostly apocalyptical warnings:

  “Woe to you Chorazin! Woe to you Bethsaida! And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, you shall be brought down to hell!”

  “This is a wicked generation. It demands a sign, and the only sign that will be given it is the sign of Jonah.”

  “There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and yourself thrown out.”

  “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”

  How could the gentle sayings of Jesus the Cynic—or rather, Jesus the Therapeut—have come from the same man?

  They hadn’t. Once again, in the first two layers of Q, Drew found the familiar division between the Greek worldview and the Jewish. Their reconciliation wouldn’t begin until Q3, and wouldn’t be complete until the Gospels had been written.

  Some of the Q2 sayings, even in the Gospels, were already attributed to John the Baptist, but all of them were worded in John’s fire-and-brimstone style. Q2 was John. It was simple as that. While a few sayings had remained John’s, most had been put into Jesus’ mouth. It now made perfect sense. There is one to come who is mightier than I. His winnowing fan is in his hand to
purify his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but he will burn the chaff with a fire that can never go out.

  The Baptist never names anyone. Who was to say he was referring to Jesus? Only Mark. The Baptist’s prediction had given Mark a perfect set-up—and where did Mark begin his Gospel? Not with a virgin birth or tales of a childhood Jesus, but with John’s proclamation. It was a seamless fit.

  The Gospel of Thomas, unearthed in Nag Hammadi, contained none of the drama of the canonical gospels. Jesus doesn’t perform any miracles, he’s not crucified, there’s no resurrection. The same is true of Q on all three levels. Both Q and Thomas were simply collections of sayings. The authors of these documents had constructed a Jesus to be revered not for his willingness to die but for his wisdom—precisely the opposite of Paul’s Jesus.

  After the Church banned texts like Thomas, monks who held forbidden texts began to Christianize them. And that, Drew realized, was the Nag Hammadi Library connection Stephen had been pointing to. Almost exclusively Gnostic, the library contained a number of works that weren’t remotely Christian—except for the fact that Christ’s name had been used in them.

  In Thomas, sayings had been attributed to Jesus to give the gospel the veneer of orthodox Christianity. But the strategy had failed. The sole surviving copy of Thomas had come to light only because it had been buried in the sand for a millennium and a half and discovered by an Egyptian peasant.

  Originally, instead of Jesus said, or the Savior said, many of the sayings must have been ascribed to Wisdom. The evidence had been sitting in front of scholars for centuries.

  With a compilation of proverbs, aphorisms, adages and the like in one hand—a compilation now known as Q—and the Gospel of Mark in the other, Matthew and Luke had composed their own gospels. What made it clear that neither had recorded the words of an eyewitness to the “events” about which they had written, was that whenever they shared a quote from Jesus, the words were spoken under entirely different circumstances. Not even the lines that led into the quote were the same.

  In Matthew, for example, Jesus sits down by the sea and tells a gathered multitude a long series of parables, including the parable of the mustard seed. In Luke, however, Jesus tells the parable of the mustard seed after defending himself for exorcising a woman in a synagogue on the Sabbath.

  Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is paralleled by Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, delivered in a level place. Not surprisingly, the contents of the sermons were completely different. What had happened, clearly enough, was that Matthew and Luke had the sayings and the frame story but had had to create specific incidents around the sayings.

  Philip Bailey, the front man for Earth, Wind & Fire, was hitting notes—in a falsetto that seemed to be a trademark of black male singers in the ’70s—that would have cracked Drew’s voice in three or four places. With the ethereal sound of “Fantasy” in the background, Drew re-read the opening line of the Gospel of Thomas: These are the words that the living Jesus spoke and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down …”

  Didymus was twin in Greek. Similarly, Thomas signified twin in Aramaic. Why this man had been called Twin Twin had puzzled scholars for decades. Drew thought he might have an answer. The author of the Gospel of Thomas was alluding to two strata: the Greek layer (the sayings of the Cynics) and its Jewish layer (the apocalyptic admonitions of Q2). The theme of the twin was now clear as well: Jesus was an overlay, a stand-in for Wisdom. The message was identical, but the messenger had been renamed. Jesus and Wisdom were one and the same—twins.

  Drew sat back in his chair, Earth, Wind, & Fire’s hit fading.

  How many martyrs had died for a man who never existed? How many Jews tortured, imprisoned, executed as “Christ-killers”? How many wars had been fought in Christ’s name? Because we had taken something meant for first-century Palestine and tried to apply it literally, the world over, in every succeeding century.

  Wheels squeaked as he pushed the chair back and stood. It was time to find out if Kadir was still alive.

  10: 6

  VORGA

  THE AUTUMNAL CADENCES of Al Stewart’s Time Passages followed Drew out a door that could have sealed a bank vault.

  It was a short walk to Tünel Square, where steel rails formed a circle in the cobblestones and allowed the tram to turn around. Cables and wires criss-crossed overhead.

  Four pay phones clustered just outside the entrance to a funicular that took passengers up the hill from Karaköy or down from Tünel. Directly in front of him was the entrance, marked by wrought-iron bars, to the courtyard where he’d surprised Yasemin drinking with her colleagues. Years ago it seemed. Drew inserted a calling card into a slot, the gold of its exposed electronic chip the only flash of optimism in the gray evening.

  The phone rang several times.

  Come on Kadir, pick up …

  “Alo?”

  “Kadir…?”

  “Vorga.”

  “What?”

  “Vorga,” Kadir said again. “Iyiyim.” I’m fine. “When you are going to get me out of here?”

  “Soon. Very soon.”

  Drew could hear the phone changing hands.

  “We want the scroll.”

  Drew recognized the voice. “You’ll get it when I decide to give it to you.”

  “You’re not being very cooperative.”

  “Why should I? You killed Professor Cutherton and Zafer. You tried to kill me. And you’ve kidnapped Kadir.”

  “Regrettable, but necessary.”

  “Yeah? Well don’t call me, got it? I’ll call you.” He hung up the blue receiver.

  When Drew turned around, he saw someone glancing at him from across the square. Dark-skinned but not Turkish-looking, the man was pretending to browse postcards on a rack outside the frame shop next to Kaffeehaus.

  A Sicarii? One of the men they’d hired? Maybe just a Turk who didn’t strike Drew as Turkish? He headed back to the Office, reversing direction twice.

  The three cable-suspended lamps on Zafer’s street were already lit, tiny moons burning over the slick cobblestones. In the fall twilight the building looked as though it had built out of blocks carved from sooty October sky.

  Just as the heavy steel wing of the outside door swung closed, Drew thought he saw a man across the street watching him. “Fuck it,” he said as he went up the steps of the dark stairwell. “If Raymond wants this scroll so bad, let him come and get it.”

  10: 7

  THE LETTERS

  VORGA WASN’T TURKISH; it was the name of a spaceship from one of Kadir’s favorite science fiction novels. The ship had abandoned Gulliver Foyle to die on a derelict spacecraft. Foyle’s sole reason to live from that point on was to take revenge on the captain of the Vorga. Since the Sicarii no doubt had hired an interpreter to listen in on the conversation, Kadir had used Vorga to send a message to Drew— he didn’t care about the money. He didn’t care about the scroll. All he wanted was revenge.

  Drew glanced at the clock. He was playing a waiting game with Raymond. Well, time was one thing Drew had right now.

  For the last few weeks he’d been adrift in the centuries. For thousands of years people had read or heard the stories of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Mithras, eventually dismissing them as nothing more than the anthropomorphic poetry of defunct religions—as myth. Why then, when we came across the same tale set in a Jewish milieu, did we decide it described a particular carpenter from Nazareth?

  A number of scholars believed that Paul had perverted the original message of Christianity by taking a man and making him into a God. Drew now understood that just the opposite had happened: Paul’s Christ Jesus had never been a human being. Paul had been a species of Platonist. Perfection, he’d believed, belonged to a heavenly realm of pure spirit. He’d devalued the physical and emphasized the spiritual. Flesh and blood, he’d insisted, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.

  After the synoptic Gospels turned Paul’s heavenly Jesus into an actual man, John had
made the final synthesis, taking the Greek idea of the Logos and combining eternal god with suffering man.

  These two schools of thought—Jesus as God, Jesus as mere man—had existed for centuries side by side until the Church settled the question once and for all with the Council of Nicaea and the resulting Nicene Creed, which had made Jesus into God.

  Paul’s complaint in Corinthians, that the Corinthians had received revelation through Wisdom, now made perfect sense: there could hardly be a clearer indication that a collection of wisdom sayings had preceded the Gospels.

  Half a dozen scholars had pointed out that Paul’s use of the language of wisdom sayings was not coincidental. And that meant that Paul must have been aware of a pre-Gospel collection of wisdom sayings. He then derailed the Savior he found in wisdom literature, changing Christ from a figure who offers spiritual salvation through wisdom to one who offers salvation through his own death, a concept borrowed from the Mystery cults. This was the core of Paul’s teaching: faith replaced knowledge— and Mosaic Law—as the way to salvation.

  What Drew hadn’t realized when he’d re-read Paul’s letters on the plane back from Cairo was that although Paul was thoroughly familiar with a tradition of wisdom sayings, Paul knew very well Jesus had not said them. Only later, in the Gospels, were they attributed to Jesus. Ironically, Paul’s letters were the best evidence that before the Gospels had been written, these sayings had not been regarded as quotes belonging to Jesus.

  There were at least twelve passages in Paul’s letters that Paul attributes either to scripture or to God Himself but are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Paul never uses the preamble As Christ Jesus said but instead As it is written, a well-known formulaic introduction for anything taken from scripture. The conclusion was inescapable: the sayings had preceded the one who’d supposedly said them.