by Linda Stasi
I put it on the little plastic tray. He called someone else over and they both looked at it.
“My son made it for me in school,” I said of the ancient key, as though my son had gone to school with Moses. “It’s an old key to our, um, barn.” Your barn, where? In Thebes?
I was now hot-flashing like a woman in full menopause, the sweat pouring off me. Oh shit. The glitter is coming off in his hands!
“She is late for flight four,” the Mossad/ticket agent said matter-of-factly, and instead of what I expected, which was: “Arrest her, she put a bomb in her luggage and there’s a rare artifact around her neck with glitter on it!” I just walked through the body scanner.
As I picked up the key from the tray, one of the agents, eyeing me suspiciously, said, “Your son should use better glue next time.”
Should I wish him a happy Passover? Or is it Rosh Hashanah now? Or maybe Yom Kippur? I am such a freaking shiksa!
Somehow I was through security, so I retrieved the truly terrible key, put it around my neck, and hoped like hell that my bag was being loaded onto the same aircraft.
The gate was, of course, the last one in the entire airport, and I ran like my ass was on fire, and saw—thank God!—that they were still boarding. I handed the woman my ticket, hoping against hope that I’d just get on without anything else going wrong. I’d worry about getting through customs at the other end.
But then something happened. When the agent looked at my boarding pass and passport she said, “Oh. I see. Would you step aside, please?”
Not again!
“Is there a problem?”
“No, no, not at all. It seems you got a last-minute upgrade.”
“Upgrade?”
“Yes. You weren’t told?”
“No…”
Maybe they really think I’m attached to a big rock band? Nah.
“Well, it must be your lucky day,” she continued. “Just go back up to the desk and the agent will issue you another boarding pass.”
I reluctantly did as I was told and got a boarding pass for a second-row aisle seat.
I didn’t understand any of it but nonetheless sent up a prayer to the God I didn’t necessarily believe in in the first place.
As I boarded, I looked at the passengers scrambling to put their bags in the overhead compartments and those already seated. Ninety-nine percent of the people on the plane were in some kind of religious garb. Most were Orthodox or Hasidic Jews, as well as a smattering of priests and nuns and a few couples in Muslim burqas and djellabas. There are more atheists in foxholes than there are on El Al flights.
I took my seat and then took out my iPad and overnight kit. Immediately a man who looked even more Mossad than the ticket agent took the seat next to me at the window. He was thin but fit, with a well-trimmed beard. He wore a baseball cap, casual but good khakis, a polo shirt, and suede jacket. He took off his baseball cap and was wearing a yarmulke. I also caught a small pin on his polo. Recording device? Possibly.
Stop it. Most Israelis look like Mossad. What? Now you’re stereotyping Israelis?
The guy reminded me of Yusef Pantera—if Yusef had been Israeli, and not whatever he actually was. I realized then that despite my wild and—no pun intended—unorthodox love for the man, I had no clue what he really believed other than the concept of the perfect order of the universe and the belief that he had participated in the “great experiment” to clone Jesus.
I took out my phone to call the Judsons and realized I should have left them an extra iPad so I could FaceTime or Skype with them so Terry could see me. Raylene picked up after one ring. “Hi, Raylene, it’s Alessandra! How’s Terry?”
“Oh, hello, dear. He’s just fine. Just had a bottle of soy milk and a big bowl of mashed turnips.”
“And he ate it?”
“You best believe he did. Loved it!”
“Can you put him on the phone so I can talk to him?”
“Well, I just put him down for a nap,” she said. “He’s sleeping, but if you want me to wake him…”
I could have sworn I heard him when she first picked up in the background. “Wasn’t that him a minute ago?”
“No, it wasn’t. I told you. He’s sleeping. And if you wouldn’t mind, dear, I’m kind of tired myself and I sure would love to catch some shut-eye while Terry’s napping.”
“Oh. Sure,” I said. “And thanks. I’ll call you as soon as I land.”
“You do that, dear. Good-bye now.”
“Bye, Raylene.” Why did I feel suddenly uncomfortable?
I tried Skyping my parents but they were obviously somewhere over the ocean flying home. Good. By the time I landed, they might already be in New York, or at least the continental United States.
One more call: it occurred to me that perhaps Mr. Engles had run into this Father Elias in his travels. After all, Elias was obsessed with the pages so perhaps he was some kind of black marketeer.
I rang up his shop and a woman answered. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” she said when I asked to speak to him. “Mr. Engles, we…” She paused, clearly sniffling.
My heart started racing. “What happened?” I jumped in, explaining who I was. “Has Mr. Engles been injured?”
“I’m afraid, well, Mr. Engles has passed. This is his niece,” said the distraught woman on the other end of the phone. “He … he … oh God! He was found dead in his shop this morning. There appears to have been an attempted break-in and his assistant found him on the floor clutching his chest.” She sobbed. “He had apparently been dead for hours.”
Before I had a chance to get any details, the flight attendant came by and let me know in no uncertain terms that my phone had to be shut down. “As the announcement ordered,” she added.
I offered my apologies to Engles’ niece and hung up in shock and dismay, upset and confused. Sure, he was an elderly man. But a heart attack? Did someone know he’d been holding the relic for me? Was it really a break-in? She had sounded unsure about that.
There is nothing you can do about this now. Maybe it’s a horrible coincidence. Right. Teesh-mi-ree Al Atz-Mech, Mr. Engles, Teesh-mi-ree Al Atz-Mech.
More upset with this news than I even comprehended, I looked over at Mr. Mossad. Clearly he was less than pleased with me for talking after being told to shut down all phones. “Mind your own business,” I wanted to say and didn’t. Very strict, these Israelis. Like you even know that he’s Israeli.
Then I remembered why I was taking this trip: “Oh my God, The Gospel!” I said aloud, realizing immediately that people were craning their necks to get a look at me.
I stood to retrieve it from my bag in the overhead compartment, and at the same time managed to drop the open bottle of water in the console, which in turn splashed the woman seated across the aisle.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” I said, leaning over and attempting to sop up the water. Forget it. This was first-class, and the flight attendant was there in a microsecond. I was quickly becoming the least popular woman on El Al.
The passenger, a Gisele Bündchen–lookalike, was more gracious than I would have been had someone splashed water on my four-thousand-dollar, perfect, light wool slacks.
The price of her tailored slacks alone could have fed a small third world country for a week. Only old-money young people wear “slacks.” The rest of us wear pants. She smiled. “It’s fine, don’t worry,” she said with a slight, unidentifiable accent.
After we were airborne, I washed up, brushed my teeth, shamelessly put on the pajamas the flight attendants had passed out, and walked back to my seat to peruse as much as I could of The Gospel of Judas before getting some shut-eye.
Once I cracked the book open, sleep became very much a foreign concept, no pun intended, on my flight to Israel. Forget the stolen relic—how’d they’d let me on the plane with this explosive little book?
17
Since I hadn’t had time to read enough about the Gospel itself, what with all the other research I
had to do before I left, I had assumed that it would be yet another telling of the story of Jesus, but in Judas’ version he would be forgiven or something. I was wrong. Judas claimed in this text that he had been in league with Jesus, and had done His bidding. In short, Jesus asked him to betray Him so that He could be executed. Without an execution, there could be no resurrection or return to His life in another realm.
The original find also contained, in addition to the Gospel, a text titled James (or the First Apocalypse of James), a Letter of Peter to Philip, and something called the Book of Allogenes, whatever the heck that was.
But those weren’t my concern—my only concern was the Judas Gospel—the pages that allegedly contained the words of Judas, written down by an unknown scribe and hidden perhaps around 220–340 C.E.
There was barely a full sentence left, however, it having moldered for over sixteen years in that safety-deposit box in Morris’s bank branch in Hicksville, and then, believe it or not, stored in a freezer where it rotted even more. The codex had originally contained thirty-one pages with writing on both sides, but only thirteen pages remained. Had the lost pages been lost, just rotted away, or stolen? Well, I knew some had been stolen from firsthand knowledge.
As I read what was left of the actual words that Jesus had allegedly spoken to Judas, I knew that even those were explosive as an atomic bomb.
It began: “The secret word of declaration by which Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot, during eight days, three days before he celebrated Passover.”
These pages were not about the crucifixion of Jesus, or any of the things about which the other Gospels concerned themselves. This Gospel contained the secret esoteric teachings of Jesus, it was postulated, to his most beloved and trusted disciple, Judas! In fact, according to Judas, he did not betray Jesus willingly but was instructed by Jesus to do what he did. Jesus even tells Judas, “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me.”
In context, it seemed to me that Jesus was saying that his earthly incarnation as a mortal was nothing more than a suit of clothes that He wore during His time on Earth, and that it had been Judas’ job to make sure that his Lord Jesus returned to—where?—Heaven?
Judas hated the other disciples and by the sound of it they hated him as well, but according to this account, Jesus wasn’t a big fan of the other disciples, either, often laughing at them and putting them down.
In the intro, the authors also talk of another Gospel, the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (also disregarded and banned by the early Church). I found it particularly disturbing because in that one Jesus fought with other disciples, Peter in particular, a man who thought women unworthy. Jesus rebuked him after saying that Mary Magdalene should leave them “for women are not worthy of spiritual life.”
Jesus slapped him down, saying, “I will make Mary a living spirit!”
You go, Jesus! No wonder we never heard of it.
As I got to thinking about it, the other disciples actually were the big winners in the end—or at least as far as history is concerned—because Jesus’ beloved companion, Mary, became known as a whore and/or a crazy woman possessed by the Devil. And it was those disciples who led the Church after Jesus’ crucifixion. The winners, after all, write history. To the victors go the spoils. Could the same thing be said of Judas? He lost, but did he? Not if this little book survived. But it hadn’t really survived, not really, since most of it was so rotted.
But if Morris’s stolen pages—the ones that presumably were still intact—really contained the secret to eternal life, or resurrection, or—if used incorrectly—Armageddon, then Judas will still have won because he had written the words that had the power to destroy all of Christianity if not the world—or save it. Would it all be nonsense? Just the ravings of a madman? But why then was the Vatican so eager to get their hands on what we had?
My head was spinning. For example, in Judas’ version of his time with Jesus, or what was left of it in those pages, Jesus shares with Judas things he never shared with the others. For starters, He tells him that He (Jesus) does not come from Earth, but He’s not talking about Heaven, either. It’s some other realm.
What realm?
Was it possible that Jesus didn’t speak so much in parables as in riddles? The fragments that were left and interpreted in this little book were like reading sci-fi circa 220 C.E. But it was sci-fi at its weirdest. Hopefully, I thought, When I get to Israel, Paulo will be waiting to interpret what I’ve got here. And hopefully, he’ll keep his word.
Of course he would. He’s the one who called me. Yes, I was glad he’d solve this mystery and put the pages safely in the hands of Pope Francis where they’d be locked away.
And try finding someone else willing to give you ten million dollars to bail your friend out of jail!
Try as I might, the words before me just weren’t making a whole lot of sense. I couldn’t decide if this was the divine knowledge spoken during His lifetime by the anointed one, the Christ, to His most trusted disciple, Judas, the man we know as the great traitor, or just the rantings of a third-century lunatic who merely put to papyrus what was then 200-year-old oral lore.
Whatever these words were, they seemed to be as weird as if they’d come from another galaxy.
According to the little bits of un-rotted manuscript left, it was only Judas who could comprehend the riddles Jesus was imparting. That’s when it hit me—perhaps these words hadn’t been parables or riddles, but some kind of code! The team of scholars who had been assembled to put the pieces back together and then the others who had interpreted the ancient script had spent their lives studying these languages. They would surely have figured that out—no? Maybe not. What if this was some kind of code?
Great. Then all I’d need would be to find a clone of Alan Turing walking around Israel with time on his hands to decipher ancient code for me. Or maybe Father Paulo already knew it and was waiting for the rest of the pages to come his way.
I was getting as crazy as Judas, or maybe as crazy as the mysterious writer of this Gospel—whoever that was.
And I do mean crazy. At one point, Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel, “Do you [really think you] know me—how? Truly I say to you, no race from the people among you will ever know me.” As in the human race, the Semitic race, the lunatic race? No. It seemed to me that Jesus was talking about a race from another realm or galaxy!
Then Jesus said the first thing that made complete sense to me—the thing I always seemed to know in my heart and mind even as a little girl without ever being told: “Your God is within you.”
Of course no organized religion would go for that kind of talk. When the disciples bristle at such talk in the Gospel of Judas, even from Jesus, He rebukes them, telling them that even the God that is within them is displeased with them. No wonder the Church founders buried this Gospel. Jesus is saying they don’t need any priests or church leaders. God doesn’t live in churches or temples, and the divine is within and we should self-regulate the good from the bad, the right from the wrong.
The disciples then get all prickly that God isn’t happy with them so Jesus challenges them to step forward and face Him if they think they are perfect. However, each shrinks away except for, yes, superhero Judas, who says, “I know who you are and which place you came from—you came from the realm of the immortal Barbelo—but I am not worthy to proclaim the name of the one who sent you.”
Barbelo? Wasn’t that a movie with Jane Fonda?
I was confused: I would ask Paulo if he knew of a town in Israel called Barbelo. Maybe it once existed and now it didn’t? Was “Barbelo” an acronym for “Bethlehem”?
It is Judas whom history views as the most reviled betrayer to ever have lived, yet in this book, Jesus takes Judas in a vision into a house so big he can’t even comprehend where he is. It is in this “house” where Judas himself becomes enlightened and begins to understand the secrets of the “kingdom”—by which he (Judas) means—what?—the unive
rse? Yes.
Jesus says—the interpreters filled in the missing text here or tried to—that, “Truly I say to you that no offspring of this realm will see that race, nor will any angelic army of the stars rule over that race, nor will any mortal human offspring be able to belong to it, for that race does not come from this realm which came into being…” This is followed by a lot of missing text and then, “The race of humans who are among you is from the race of humanity,” then more missing text, then, “power which … some other forces … since you rule in their midst.”
Why won’t anyone say that Jesus was talking extraterrestrial here and not Heaven?
It seemed, at least according to this Gospel, that Judas was the only one who knew what it all meant. Jesus even tells him how much he will suffer because of his understanding of this extraterrestrial world, and that he is going to be tasked with doing the thing that will make him suffer immeasurably.
“Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom, not so that you will go there, but you will grieve a great deal. For someone else will replace you, in order that the twelve [disciples] may again come to completion with their God.”
OK, wait a second here, I thought. Every accepted Gospel already said Jesus had to die to fulfill our destiny; to become our savior, correct? So wasn’t Judas doing what he was fated to do all along?
It occurred to me also, which it hadn’t before, that if Jesus was all-knowing, as they said He was, why then didn’t He know that Judas was a bad guy from the start if indeed he actually was a bad guy? Instead Jesus had trusted Judas above all the others, which is clear in all literature, and even assigned Judas the job of being the group’s treasurer! That’s like the Amazing Kreskin hiring Bernie Madoff to invest his money. I mean, He of all the beings on Earth should have known if Judas was crooked—no?
Perhaps, I began thinking, it was because Judas was the strongest disciple that Jesus had tasked him with the hardest job in the universe: to betray Him in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled. When you look at it with a whole different perspective—like looking at da Vinci’s The Last Supper and seeing that one of the disciples is a woman—you realize, I thought, that Jesus even signaled Judas to commit the treachery at the Last Supper (or Last Seder, technically) in view of all the disciples! Not in secret, but in public.