The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Perhaps most damning of all, 1 Corinthians 2:9 cites a famous wisdom saying: Eye has not seen and ear has not heard nor has it risen in the human heart what God has prepared for those who love him. Paul calls this a quote from scripture. The Gospel of Thomas, however, attributes it to Christ. This saying also shows up in various forms in both Matthew and Luke—as direct quotes from Jesus.

  Here was a wisdom saying older than both Paul’s letters and Thomas. If Jesus had said it, Paul would surely have given him the credit. The fact that Thomas had attributed it to Jesus was clear evidence of the process of taking sayings originally anonymous or attributed to Wisdom and putting them into Jesus’ mouth.

  In Romans 13:9 Paul says You shall love your neighbor as yourself but never attributes this to Christ. Similarly, James 2:8 tells the Christians You shall love neighbor as yourself and claims this as Scripture, not as anything Jesus—his supposed brother—said.

  This was how a Savior had been constructed. From scripture, wisdom literature, from sayings of religious leaders such as John the Baptist and James the Just, from the exploits of Jews rebelling against the Romans, from rituals practiced in the Mystery religions centuries before—all of it framed in the form of a Greek tragedy. And for two millennia it had succeeded brilliantly.

  The downstairs buzzer sounded.

  Drew flinched and shot a glance at the steel door. He waited.

  “Drew? It’s me.” The muffled voice came from the other side of the door.

  Jesse.

  He got out of the swivel chair and sent it rolling back a couple feet. Unlocking the door, he found himself looking at the muzzle of an automatic pistol. Again.

  10: 8

  CON JOB

  COINS LOST CENTURIES AGO and later unearthed by archaeologists showed Dionysus on one side and on the reverse, the god Mithras. Two different gods on a single coin was more or less unthinkable in the modern world, but the ancient Mysteries adherents hadn’t tried to wipe each other out or brand each other confederates of the Devil. Nor did they hesitate to incorporate elements of different myths into their own worship. They burned incense and offered prayers in the temple of whichever god they happened to find themselves because there was always a possibility the god or goddess would appreciate the gesture.

  Drew couldn’t expect any such tolerance from a Sicarii. Backing up, he waved Jesse in. Pistol notwithstanding, she had put together an outdoorsy look: jeans, a white turtleneck, sneakers. “Put that thing away, will you?”

  “Drew, I’m not alone.”

  “Raymond with you?”

  “He’s downstairs. I talked him into letting me come up alone.” Jesse dropped the pistol in her purse. “You don’t look surprised.”

  Drew lifted an indolent shoulder. “I had my suspicions. Starting with your fundamentalist mother, who named you Jesse. I couldn’t help thinking of Jessean, an early name for a Christian. True, you didn’t have to follow in your mom’s footsteps, but the chase in Antakya finally made sense. Zafer knew right away the Sicarii weren’t trying to kill us, but why bother scaring us when we were in the process of selling the scroll? The whole thing was an elaborate way for you to infiltrate our threesome.

  The day we sold the Habakkuk Scroll to Serafis, I did a little web search. I found articles with your name—your married name—in the Revue Biblique, the Ecole Biblique’s mouthpiece. You claimed a moderate, rational approach, but underneath the message was the same as your mother’s: the Gospels are basically history. Although you applauded questioning the divinity of Jesus, you always lined up with the Church in the end. That’s when we cut you out of the loop.”

  “That’s why you wouldn’t take me with you to Alexandria.”

  “X gets the square.”

  “Do you know how we found you?”

  “Zafer said if you put enough people on it, you’d track us down eventually.”

  “He was right. We isolated the neighborhood you kept disappearing into, and just this evening someone finally picked you up. He missed you once because of the haircut.” She shook her head. “It’s not you.”

  He looked at her purse and lifted his chin. “The pistol isn’t really you, either.”

  “Drew,” she looked genuinely remorseful. “Maybe if … maybe if I’d realized I was with the wrong person. Back in college …”

  Drew smirked. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  The angles of her face sharpened, an incipient snarl. “Always the literature major. Are you going to come down with me? Or are Raymond and Jean going to have to come up after you?”

  “I’ll come along peaceably. Marshal. But first—” He squinted an eye and see-sawed a hand. “A couple of things I want to get straight.”

  “I thought you might have a few questions.”

  Drew held out a hand toward the couch. “Cushion for your ass?” He plopped down in the squeaky-wheeled chair. “You knew there was no Jesus of Nazareth, didn’t you?”

  She put her handbag down on the coffee table and perched on the edge of the couch. “We knew.”

  “So let me see if I’ve got the mosaic straight …”

  She blinked slowly and nodded, her mouth almost as slot-like as Hohenzollern’s had been. “Shoot.”

  “Jesus started out as an idea. He was the Logos of the Greeks. He was Wisdom as personified in the Old Testament. So even before he was supposedly born, Christian communities existed—like the Therapeutae in Alexandria.”

  She nodded.

  “Guys like Jesus Ben Sirach began to compile wisdom sayings. That was …. what? Around 170 BC? Other compilations followed. Then along comes Jesus Panthera. He’s dazzled by the Therapeutae. He converts. He tries to bring the new teachings to Jerusalem, but he’s accused of blasphemy and hung from a tree. And there’s the seed for the drama of the crucified messiah—only it’s around 90 BC, more than a century before Pontius Pilate shows up on the scene.”

  Unconsciously almost, Drew recognized the delicate opening bars of “Strawberry Letter 23”, an ethereal funk hit that added to the unreality of the moment.

  “Paul begins his ministry around 40 AD. He grafts the Mystery cults onto Judaism. What better way to reach gentiles? The Persians had Mithras, the Greeks had Dionysus, the Egyptians had Osiris, so now the Jews had Jesus—a Savior who is crucified and resurrected. But Paul doesn’t mention when Christ was crucified or by whom. To Paul, he was still a mythical figure, like Dionysus or Osiris.

  “As it turns out, the Jews aren’t particularly interested in Christianity. By the time Paul is expelled from Antioch, he’s failed to convert a single one. Even Barnabas, his apprentice, deserts him. So Paul goes to the gentiles instead—Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonika—where he promulgates his new god.

  “His letters, supposedly the earliest Christian writings, don’t mention any of Christ’s sayings or miracles. You have to admit, that’s a little odd.”

  Jesse said nothing, so Drew continued. “Decades later, recognizing the success Paul has had with the Greeks, as well as the miserable failure of the Jerusalem Church to convert Jews to their new sect, Mark, like any good Alexandrian looking to reconcile Greek wisdom with Jewish monotheism, not only adopts Paul’s resurrected Christ, he adds miracles to entice the Jews. Matthew and Luke add a virgin birth, and the miracles pile up until John has Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  Jesse smirked. “You have a tendency to do that.”

  “Still, the Jews aren’t particularly interested in Christianity, even with all the miracles. After the death of John the Baptist, Jewish hopes shift to a new savior. The Qumran community believes it’s James—the Teacher of Righteousness, the Zadokite who is hereditary heir to the high priesthood, the Nazarite holy from the womb. Unfortunately, James, like John the Baptist, dies without delivering the Jews from the Romans.

  “The revolt of 66 AD follows four years after James’s stoning, and Josephus mentions something like a dozen men who crowned themselves king or claimed to b
e the Messiah during the war. Jewish hopes are pinned on a military leader, a Zealot. But after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and the reestablishment of Roman hegemony, Mark sees the futility of a military messiah and cobbles together a spiritual redeemer … from pieces of other religious leaders, pagan magicians, messianic figures, and Paul’s letters. Why else does Christ talk sometimes like a Cynic, sometimes like John the Baptist, sometimes like a Zealot, sometimes like James the Just?

  “Mark’s gospel was not a deliberate deception. It was part of a tradition. It was midrash—religious fiction. Allegory. Entirely acceptable at the time. Wasn’t Serapis a composite god? Weren’t the rites of Mithras grafted onto the Saturnalia? Even the Qumran community did the same thing in its own way: past scriptures were interpreted as though they applied to the first century AD.”

  Jesse looked like she was going to yawn. If she knew all this, how could she be aligned with the Sicarii?

  “The part of Christ’s ministry where he addresses crowds is basically John the Baptist, the charismatic speaker. The same with his apocalyptic messages. This is all Q2. When we read about Jesus’ holiness and perfection … that’s James the Just. His cry of “He who does not have a sword, let him sell his garments and buy one” in Luke belongs to Judas of Galilee. His sagely qualities, his praise of poverty and humility … that was Jesus the Cynic and was meant to appeal to Greeks and Hellenized Jews like Philo.”

  Jesse’s gaze wandered.

  “Luke the Therapeut and Matthew follow in Mark’s footsteps. They correct Mark’s errors—Luke more than Matthew—and continue harmonizing Hellenic and Judaic concepts.

  “The Christ mosaic was perfect except for one thing: the Messiah hadn’t rid Palestine of the Romans, nor had the kingdom arrived. So expectations of the Kingdom to Come were indefinitely forestalled by the rumor of a Second Coming. Two thousand years later, people are still waiting. You gotta hand it to Mark—the greatest con job in history.”

  She shifted her position on the couch. “Anything else?”

  “Not really. The Gospel authors completed the tragedy, literally, by pulling elements from The Bacchae. What better way to present the new god-man to the broadest audience? The best part is that this is all built into the Gospels. A blind man is named after one of Plato’s dialogues. Brothers of Jesus are named after the messianic figures on whom his portrait was based. The Mysteries are encoded. I mean, even the incident in Gethsemane. If we re-examine the night Jesus was supposedly delivered up—that, as you know, is the actual Greek, not betrayed as it’s translated—we find the same phrase was used for the Greek pharmakos, the sacrificial victim who also meets his death to atone for the ‘sins of the world.’ It’s perfect. It combines the fulfilling of earlier Jewish scriptures with a concept right out of the Greek Mysteries.

  “The problem here, Jess, is that Gospels weren’t written for the twenty-first century—and especially not for twenty-first century Americans. They were written for Hellenized Jews and Greeks living in the first and second century. In Palestine, Greece, Egypt. That’s why we can’t read them anymore. We’re too distant from that worldview. English isn’t the right language. And the Mystery cults the Gospel writers borrowed so much from have long been extinct, obliterated by Christians themselves.”

  “Look …” Jesse smirked. “It’s trying to think.”

  The remark, coupled with her venomous smile, startled him more than opening the door and seeing her with a gun pointed at his chest.

  10: 9

  MERE MAN

  “YOU’RE JUST AS GODDAMN smug as you were in college.” Jesse’s lips were twisted in disgust. “The Ebionites have always known that the Gospel Jesus was a transparency laid over James the Just and that James was the Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes.

  “They also knew that James wasn’t a Christian. Oh, James believed the so-called Son of Man was coming on Clouds of Glory, but his Messiah had nothing to do with a Jew crucified under Pilate, much less his own brother. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe he was the Savior, either.”

  Drew had known that the Ebionites sided with James over Paul, but he did not know that, like the Essenes, they believed James was the Messiah. Unlike the Essenes, however, they disguised their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.

  “When the Ebionites insist on Christ as mere man, it’s because James was mere man. And yet he lived a morally pure life. The Ebionites found this encouraging. The life of James was something we could all aspire to whereas none of us is a god or the son of God. What’s the big deal if the son of God is perfect? Why wouldn’t he be? He’s the son of God.

  “Of course, by the time the Gospels were written, it was impossible to go on worshiping James. A man who’d been stoned to death by the Sanhedrin, who hadn’t performed a panoply of miracles, who hadn’t walked out of his own tomb or freed the Jews of Roman rule couldn’t very well compete with the Son of God, now could he? But to this day, every time an Ebionite praises Jesus the Christ out loud, inwardly he’s praising James the Christ.”

  Drew sat up a little straighter. “So that’s why they were persecuted almost out of existence.”

  “Well, of course. Today, only their leaders accept these views. They understand that turning a man, whether James or some other messiah, into a god is a perversion. It takes responsibility for salvation off you and puts it on someone else.

  “The real miracle was James himself. That mere flesh and blood could come so near perfection. But as the centuries passed, Christian writers consistently devalued him in favor of Jesus. Ask your average Christian, and she’ll say, ‘What? Jesus had a brother?’ James has almost been wiped out of existence. But, like the Ebionites, not quite.”

  Drew mustered half a smile. “It seems obvious enough now. I mean … all of it. Cosmic myth turned into earthly legend … legend turned into history …”

  “More obvious than you think. Go back and re-read the hymn in Philippians … And being found in human appearance, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Therefore God has exalted him and given him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and of those on Earth.”

  “Okay…?” Drew’s tone was a shrug.

  Jesse shook her head with a mixture of disgust and disapproval. “Think. What does the hymn tell you?”

  Drew had read Philippians, had re-read it on the way back from Cairo and missed the significance of the hymn. He’d missed it even after hearing Jesse recite it, but now it was absurdly clear. “Jesus had no name.” Drew shook his head. “He had no name until after the Crucifixion.”

  “Exactly.” Jesse’s lips pulled back in a genuine smile. “Just as Jacob isn’t called Israel until after he wrestles God in Genesis 32. It’s typical tribal practice, a birth name and an earned name. Jesus’ earned name, after he proves himself on the cross, is Yeshua—Savior. There’s no birth name because, of course, he was never born. The whole crucifixion drama took place on some heavenly plane. The Gospels, as you just pointed out, took a cosmic myth and historicized it, using incidents and details taken from the lives of men like Jesus Panthera, James the Just, Judas of Galilee, and John the Baptist.”

  Drew was confused. “If you … if you already know all this—?”

  Jesse rolled her eyes. “You can really be dense for a semi-bright guy. Of course we know the truth. We’re protecting the rest of you.”

  “Protecting us? Seems to me you’re dedicating your life to a—”

  “A lie?

  “A fiction “

  “Go back to that little paper of yours that set my mother off in class … what’s the difference between fiction and religion?”

  A spring squealed as he leaned back in the chair. “Religions are fictions societies agree to believe in.”

  “Do you know what percentage of the world’s population is college educated?”

  “Five? Six?”

  “One.” She held up a f
inger.

  The nail, he noticed, had been polished white to match her turtleneck.

  “Now, what percentage of college grads do you think have read Philo of Alexandria? Plato’s dialogues? Josephus? Do you think the guy getting his MBA keeps a copy of Augustine’s Confessions in his briefcase? And what about your average peasant or blue collar worker?”

  “I get the point.”

  “The point is people need something black and white, Drew, something easy to grasp. They don’t want Philo’s allegories. They want someone they can talk to in their most hopeless moments. Always with them. Always listening. Ever compassionate. Thy rod and thy staff comfort me.

  “Don’t you see? We can’t inspire the hopeless with a mere man or woman, however extraordinary. Gandhi, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King—they’re not enough. But … we can help the most despairing human being on Earth with a divine Jesus, with an all-powerful Savior who loves each and every one of us unconditionally—the poor, the sick, the maimed, the deformed, the ugly, the diseased—all of us without exception. No soul is too hideous to love. No crime is so great that it cannot be repented and forgiven. It is the hope of nations. It is the wealth of human spirit we’re adding to. We can do that with a man who, by returning from the grave, has proved that death is not final. With a man through whom all things are possible. All, Drew. Jesus is hope itself.”

  “But …” Drew shook his head. “How can you do it with a straight face, knowing what you know?”

  “I don’t know anything, Drew, not for certain. And neither do you. Every day, somewhere in the world, there are miraculous incidents. Darwin’s theory of evolution is only half right. And there are still more things under the sun than are explained in your philosophy. Horatio.”

  Horatio. A belated attempt to return to the innocence of their college days.

  “You don’t have to do it with deception, Jess. I mean, look at Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Does anyone believe that three ghosts—”