by Vincent Czyz
Drew whirled on her. “So you shot him?”
“No. The plan was just to get information out of him, but he was so … smug. Just like you. Raymond and Jean were holding guns on him, but he told them he was an old man, ready to die. He promised us there was already enough research being done to dispel the myth of a historical Christ. He was gloating. I have to admit, when Raymond backhanded him, I enjoyed it.”
Drew wanted to backhand her.
“Cutherton staggered a few steps, and his mouth was bleeding, but he laughed. ‘And your mother,’ he said to me … ‘what a silly, old cow’.
“I warned him not to talk about my mother. He wouldn’t stop. ‘Mediocre is being generous,’ he said. ‘A disgrace to the profession, really.’ Then he wanted to know how a woman of my intelligence could have fallen for her pathetically contrived arguments.”
They could hear the wail of the ambulance’s siren.
“I told him to shut up. He sat there, calm as could be, wiping blood from his mouth and chuckling to himself. ‘Treating the Gospels as history,’ he said. ‘But then, people believe exactly what they want to believe, don’t they?’ He shook his head and muttered, ‘Silly old cow.’
“I couldn’t stop myself. I took the Walther out of my purse and shot him. Once I pulled the trigger, it wasn’t hard to squeeze it again. It was only after, when I looked at him on the floor, when he made those awful last noises—air came out of the wounds—that’s when I realized what I’d actually done.”
Drew closed his eyes so he didn’t have to look at her. He tried to focus on his breathing.
“Drew …”
He didn’t open his eyes.
“I’m so sorry.”
She murdered him for being right and then stole the last thing he’d written.
“I am truly … deeply … sorry.”
Drew finally looked at her.
Jesse’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and she began to cry.
The siren was close now, a block or two away.
She put her arms around him.
Drew’s arms lay dead at his sides as though the nerves had been cut. He thought of Epictetus. Socrates. Jesus.
Love the man flogging you like a donkey as though he were your father or brother.
If an enemy strikes you, turn the other cheek.
It is never just to repay injury with injury.
It didn’t matter who had said what. He put his arms around Jesse and hugged her back.
She pressed her face into his shoulder. “They’re going to put me in a prison now, aren’t they?”
“What good would that do?”
She lifted her face to him.
“The best thing about Christianity is you get a chance to redeem yourself.”
She shook her head. “How could I possibly…?”
“Stephen’s manuscript. Finish it. See it through to publication.”
Her face flushed luminous crimson; the ambulance had arrived.
“But I … I can’t. It goes against everything I believe.” Her features were submerged in shadow again as the light rotated away from them.
Drew pushed her away gently. Kadir’s life might depend on a few extra seconds. “Did someone tell you redemption was going to be easy?”
He took off at a sprint.
BOOK 11: 1 ISTANBUL
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
— William Blake
11: 1
WITHOUT AMBASSADOR
GARY STRAHAN SIPPED Turkish coffee. “It’s not over yet.”
The waiter had already cleared their dinner plates.
Drew squeezed Yasemin’s hand. “We’ve been talking about that.”
“What you have been talking about?”
It had been nearly a year since Kadir had been rushed to the hospital, and the scroll, Sayings of the Savior, had been turned over to the Turkish authorities, who, with much ceremony, presented it to a joint Egyptian-Israeli delegation. Legally the scroll belonged to Egypt, but the Egyptians were more than willing to allow Israeli scholars to study it.
Kadir was now sitting across from Drew in a restaurant near the top of Galata Tower. Nathan sat next to him. A window set in a curving wall nearly a yard thick afforded a spectacular view of the Bosporous, the Sea of Marmara, and the Golden Horn. Dark mirrors, the waters reflected the city’s glow and the moving lights of the boats gliding over them.
Sayings of the Savior had been pronounced genuine by a consensus of scholars, and its age had been estimated by radiocarbon dating, which fixed the year the papyrus and its leather sheath had been sealed away in a limestone box at 65 BC, plus or minus about half a century. The remaining contents of the tomb in which the two artifacts had been found corroborated that date. The margin for error, however, meant that the scroll could have been written as early as 115 BC or as late as 15 AD—or, if the dating was just a shade off, 25 or 30 AD. But it was highly improbable that this was the earliest copy; the compilation was almost certainly much older. Nonetheless, standing on this precarious ledge of possibility, traditionalists insisted “the Savior” mentioned in the scroll was none other than Jesus of Nazareth. They hypothesized that the scroll author had deliberately chosen not to identify the Savior by name and had—equally inexplicably—merely claimed to be Eleazar, grandson of Jesus ben Sirach. Pseudepigrapha, after all, were common enough in that era.
A number of scholars vociferously objected. What was astonishing, however, was how many scholars either supported the pseudepigraph theory or advanced others, just as unlikely, that protected the integrity of the Gospels. One PhD pointed out that radiocarbon labs only fixed the date at which the papyrus plants and the goat (whose hide had furnished the leather) had died. It was possible, he argued, that a scribe had used materials nearly a century old to compile the sayings. While several scholars had ridiculed this explanation, others had written articles upholding its plausibility.
Interviews conducted with the guy or gal on the street followed the same pattern. As Stephen could have predicted, most people—a few gloating atheists aside—went on believing what they wanted to believe.
Six months ago, Kadir had been the best man at Drew and Yasemin’s second wedding. Nathan, dressed in a tuxedo, had also been among the guests. At Drew’s insistence, a set of wedding pictures was taken while Kadir or he held a framed photograph of Zafer.
Yasemin had been off Paxil since the wedding, and no border clashes had ensued, but Drew had taken up counseling for his rage issues. He still sometimes got the urge to hang up on his father and occasionally looked around the room for something to break when things were tense, but so far had managed to get out the door without throwing a furniture-breaking tantrum. Yasemin couldn’t accuse him of refusing to confront their problems since his therapist said “cooling down,” by removing himself from the situation, was a singularly effective strategy for preventing destructive behavior. Besides, he still had to confront them when he got back.
A month or so before the wedding, Drew had seen Stephen’s book off to a publisher in London. He was surprised, despite having used the professor’s keywords as points of departure, at how radically some of his conclusions differed from Stephen’s. Stephen had made extensive use of the Old Testament, meticulously demonstrating how earlier scripture had inspired the vast majority of incidents in the Gospels. On the other hand, although Stephen had noted similarities between Jesus, John the Baptist, and James the Just, he had not proposed a composite Christ.
Turkey, reaching an agreement with the Brits, had handed Jesse over to them for her role in Stephen’s death. Thanks to Gary, who, pressured by Drew, had pinned the shooting on Jean Saint-Savoy, she had been cleared of murder charges but, as part of an agreement with the prosecution, had pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Ordered to serve at least two years of a five-year sentence, she had written an intr
oduction to Stephen’s book in her cell and, drawing on Sayings of the Savior, composed extensive footnotes throughout the text that substantially reinforced his thesis. Drew had sent a copy to Stanford University along with a letter addressed to Lisa Dent. Lisa, as terse on paper as she was in person, had written a few sentences back and eventually put together an eloquent review for The Los Angeles Times.
Gary had narrowly escaped jail time himself. While no one doubted he had not intended to perpetrate any of the crimes that had been committed in pursuit of the two scrolls, he had not been affiliated with any police enforcement agency and had technically been an accomplice. Only the intervention of his former employer, the FBI, which negotiated a closed-doors deal with the Turks and the Brits, had kept him out of prison. Part of the deal barred him from entering the UK for five years.
Since the scrolls had been returned to the Egyptians and Israelis, government prosecutors hadn’t locked up Drew or Kadir on smuggling charges, but Drew had spent thousands on a lawyer who had petitioned the Turkish courts to allow him to stay in the country.
Kadir looked at Gary. “What is not being over?”
“Right now everything’s calm … the director of the Ecole Biblique took responsibility for Raymond and his crew—Jan was the only one who actually worked there—but he’s a fall guy. The Sicarii are supposedly dissolved, but you might as well expect the Pope to change his mind about contraception and start handing out free condoms. What if they decide to sink that boat you keep down in Kash? With you on it?” He glanced at Drew and Yasemin. “What if they decide those two will have a little car accident? Maybe a year from now, maybe ten years from now.”
“We’ve thought about that,” Drew said.
“I can get you into the witness protection program …”
Drew shook his head. “She’d never be able to see her family again, and we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in hiding.”
“What about you?” Yasemin asked. “Aren’t you a target?”
“I’m going back to the Bureau. I’ll be pretty well protected.” He looked over at Kadir. “Ever think about relocating to the US?”
Kadir shook his head. “My home is the Turkey. Here I will die.”
“A little sooner than you think if you’re not careful.”
“Don’t worry for me. I am be careful.”
Gary grinned at Nathan. “I guess I don’t even have to ask you.”
“It wouldn’t look good for the Ebionite Church if I just disappeared. Between the money Kadir gave us, and the donations we attracted because of the publicity, all of the sudden we’re not so poor. I’d like to have a say in how the money is spent. For the first time in our history, we might be the most credible church Christians have.”
No one at the table but Drew was aware of the irony: Nathan was an atheist.
Gary aimed a thick finger at the ex-cop. “Now you’ve touched on my problem. I’m not ready to let go of Jesus. I mean, I was raised Catholic, and maybe I didn’t swallow everything the Church was spooning out, but Jesus was my savior. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
“Why don’t you become a Muslim?” Yasemin reached across the table and squeezed his hand.
“My wife would love that.”
“Look, Gary,” Drew said, “even before Plato, philosophers poked fun at worshipers who took stories about the gods literally.”
“I got that part … but how am I supposed to live with it?”
Drew glanced out the window and saw an enormous freighter—a tiny island dotted with light—headed for the open space of the Sea of Marmara. He turned back to Gary. “By realizing the message is more important than the messenger. It doesn’t matter who said turn the other cheek—Socrates, a Cynic, a wandering Jewish preacher. That was half of Christianity’s mistake … the Church deified the messenger and mostly ignored the message.”
“What was the other half?”
“Mistaking the symbolic for the historical.”
Gary, letting out air between his teeth, sounded like a tire going flat. “That’s it? That’s all you got for me?”
Drew shrugged.
“What about you?” He lifted his chin toward Drew. “You used to be a Christian. How you handling it?”
Drew thought for a second. “Plato actually hated the idea of books because they always say the same thing in the exact same way. And they don’t answer questions. He wasn’t entirely off. I mean, any particular book is open to all kinds of spin. That’s a huge drawback for revealed religions. Who decides which one is right? We’re still fighting wars over that sort of thing.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
Drew sipped his coffee. “Dump the books.”
Yasemin glared at him. “Did you really just say that?”
“They’re a map maybe,” Drew said, “but not the territory. Remember the Transcendentalists? Theodore Parker? Emerson? It is by yourself, without ambassador, that God speaks to you. That was the original function of Jesus, of the Logos—to be an intermediary. Emerson scrapped the idea. Dare to love God without mediator or veil, he said. You find God in yourself, in your relationship to the world, not in a sacred book or even in a religious leader. It is God in you that responds to God without.”
Gary waffled a hand. “I don’t know. Sounds a little New Agey.”
“You’re clinging to an authority figure. Parker said—and this is weird, because I must have read this years ago, but I totally forgot it—he said even if Jesus had never lived, Christianity would be as solid as ever.”
“How does he figure that?”
“He insisted the truths of Christianity shouldn’t rest on the personal authority of Jesus any more than the axioms of geometry should rest on the personal authority of Euclid.”
Kadir screeched—no, that was his laugh.
Yasemin told him in Turkish he was being rude.
“The man’s having a crisis of faith here,” Drew chided.
“I am.” Gary looked around the table. “I admit, I never read much of the Bible. I just listened to what they told me in church. Now, I don’t know what to think.”
“How many Christians actually have read the Bible? Or even the New Testament? And how many of those who’ve read it have understood it? I mean … two thousand pigs? Who knew a simple exorcism was so loaded down with meaning? What’s worse, without being immersed in the Levant of the first century, which is pretty much impossible, we can’t understand it. Not completely. That world is gone.”
Gary turned his palms up. “So we’re right back where we started …”
Drew nodded. “Sort of. It really is hard without the mediator. We want a face. We want a name. We want something cut down to human size—not a booming voice from the clouds. We want Jesus of Nazareth.”
“Or James the Just,” Nathan said.
“Or Muhammad,” Kadir added.
“Or Buddha,” Yasemin agreed.
Gary pushed his coffee cup toward the center of the table. “So are you a Transcendentalist or an Ebionite or a Buddhist or what?”
Drew lifted an eyebrow, tilted his head, and gave a little shrug. “Maybe I’ve gotten past labels.”
“Oh yeah?” Gary smirked. “So where does God fit into the world according to Drew?”
Drew drained his coffee to the silt at the bottom of the tiny cup. “I like the idea of the Mystery cults. I like the idea of bringing worshipers face to face with … I’m afraid to say God because I don’t think God is any more recognizable than an electron cloud. And I think it’s time we admitted our ignorance. We barely understand this world, how are we supposed to know anything about what’s beyond it?”
Gary leaned back and sighed. “Got a point there.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s about personal enlightenment, personal revelation. Not something you’re going to impose on everyone else. Except maybe as a poem or a painting, a blog post, or whatever. If you plug into the Oversoul as Emerson called it, you can find divinity just
about anywhere—a stone, a weed, a landscape. Maybe that’s how you plug into the Oversoul, by recognizing that every atom belonging to you is part of everything else. It’s not New Age, it’s an older age. The Lascaux artists saw the world this way. So did the Native Americans. When’s the last time something brought you nose to nose with the Creator? I bet it wasn’t a sermon.”
“I get where you’re coming from,” Gary said, “but that’s still a little fuzzy for me.”
Looking out the window, Drew watched the freighter, a receding glow on the inky sea, continue toward a horizon invisible in the dark distance. It was fuzzy, indistinct. We didn’t get certainties—no matter how much we wanted them—we got possibilities. Probabilities. The kind that mystified philosophers and stumped quantum physicists.
Of all the televised street interviews Drew had seen, he kept coming back to one with a middle-aged woman—a lawyer or maybe an executive. Her face serious, her movements clipped, confident. A reporter asked her what she thought about the possibility Jesus of Nazareth had never existed and pushed a microphone in her face. “I don’t care if Jesus was a real person or not.” She whirled around, long hair whipping past the reporter’s face, and stalked off. Unexpectedly, she turned to add, “He’ll always live in my heart.”
Where he’s been, Drew thought, from the beginning.
A NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF TURKISH WORDS
A note on the Turkish words in this novel: I chose to use phonetic spellings (and the English alphabet) rather than to spell the words according to the Turkish alphabet because I wanted to make the words easier for readers to pronounce. The Turks use a Latinized alphabet, but there are significant differences. The Turkish “c,” for example, is pronounced like the English “j.” I could have put in a pronunciation key, but in my experience, readers rarely refer to such keys and simply pronounce the words according to the spelling they see. So “uncle” in Turkish, which is spelled “amca,” is actually pronounced “omm-jah,” but without referring to a phonetic key, most readers would simply read it as “omm-kah.” Purists made not agree with my decision, but I think the vast majority of readers will.