Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  He shook his head and grinned that gap-tooth grin that always made me go weak. “It’s the theory that if life exists throughout the universe, it can be distributed by asteroids, comets, and meteoroids when they enter Earth’s atmosphere. It’s even speculated that spacecraft can leave contamination in the form of microorganisms.”

  “So even our spacecraft could have done that elsewhere?”

  “American and Russian spacecraft or probes have landed on the moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury, and even on asteroids.”

  “So you’re saying perhaps an asteroid crashed into the Earth zillions of years ago that was carrying some microscopic form of life that eventually evolved into human life?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “I’m freaking out right now. How do you prove this?”

  “We don’t.”

  “True. I can imagine the reaction when I tell my boss one day that I want to go with the story—at least this part of the story—that the remnants of a disputed, mostly destroyed Gospel, which has been examined by scholars with a fine-tooth comb, contains coded information that they all missed—such as how we came from Sirius. Such as how our DNA duplicates the rotation pattern of the star system Sirius, and that Judas believed that Jesus came from there. Or perhaps it’s just that the God particle—whatever it may be—came to Earth from there. He’ll say no one will believe it.”

  “But how would you rationalize that theory in the face of the accepted fact that Jesus was born of a mortal woman,” he challenged.

  “Correct,” I answered. “An angel came down and impregnated a young teenage girl. But that’s what some folks today would now call alien abduction, or alien visitation!”

  “Maybe no one will. Maybe no one even should.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There was a reason that Jesus gave the information only to Judas. There was a divine reason the Gospel rotted away soon after it was found. And now? The less focus on what’s out there and still intact, the better. For the world’s sake.”

  I was shocked “What? Are you a physicist or a spiritualist, Dr. Pantera?”

  “I am a realist, Ms. Russo. You want to pick which parts you want to reveal. I choose to reveal none of it.”

  38

  Early the next morning, my cell phone rang. Roy! We’d been speaking when we could, and I hadn’t wanted to discuss it on the phone, but had been assured by Mad Dog that he knew he’d be getting out any day now.

  His bail had been posted and even he didn’t know by whom. Mad Dog said it was between him and “the, ah, benefactor.”

  “Who is it—Miss Havisham?”

  Roy corrected me. “Magwitch, actually.” Ten million big ones. Had to be Pantera. I had no idea he was even rich. Rich is one thing, parting with ten million for someone you didn’t know? Clearly somebody—Pantera, probably—knew more than he was saying.

  I came clean to him finally about what had happened, about Terry and how the tube had been stolen. Up until then he’d assumed the “benefactor” was the one negotiating to buy the pages.

  Since there is no proper way to react to finding out that your best friend almost lost her baby to help you out, but that she lost your ten million in the process, sweet Roy just said, “But Terry’s going to be OK?”

  “Terry is very banged up for an infant, but we believe he’ll be OK, yes. Your prayers will help…”

  “I don’t know if anybody’s listening to me anymore, but I will.” Then, “Or maybe somebody is. If you lost the tube with the pages, how is it possible that my bail got paid? Ten million. How?”

  “I know a guy, who knows a guy,” I said, imitating Pantera.

  “Wow. But I’ll pay whoever it is back. Somehow. The old man’s house has gotta be worth something, for starters.”

  “I hope so,” I answered.

  Roy wanted to come visit the baby and me, but I told him I didn’t want any more media circuses than we’d already had. The truth is, I just wasn’t ready to introduce them. Pantera had met enough of my real and extended family, and I wasn’t ready to deal with anything more right then.

  The next days consisted, thankfully, of feeding Terry when he woke, and researching possible answers that might have been hidden in the available text every minute that he slept. It gave my mind the rest that it so desperately needed.

  Terry still wasn’t ready to come home, but in a way I felt we were safer in this hospital. Cops were posted 24/7 near the hospital door, so between me, Pantera, the armed cop, the hovering nurses, and the equally concerned doctors, the baby was as safe as he could be under the circumstances.

  It didn’t take a scholar (although none had discovered it) to figure out that the Judas Gospel was written in code—which was in contradiction to many of the scholars and clerics who’d put the words down to the rantings of a madman. I also began to really believe that these were the words Jesus had spoken to Judas, which had been passed down in secret for hundreds of years until they were lost, almost forever. And the more I read, the more I suspected that what Pantera had suggested—about what was written of the origins of our species, the codes, etc.—were closer to the real truth than not.

  The Judas Gospel sounded like crazy talk—until you broke it down into sacred geometry, a concept I had not known about before this.

  What I learned, which the physicist part of Pantera explained, is that sacred geometry means that God, the Supreme Being, call it what you will, created the universe according to a geometric plan—and that all life and all creation are in line with this geometric language.

  Simply put, pi—as well as the square roots of 2, 3, 4, and 5—are the essences of sacred geometry. Even the word “geometry” comes from Greek: “geos” (Earth) and “metron” (to measure). These patterns are repeated over and over throughout the universe in all life—are all part of the universal pattern.

  Ancient and sacred man-made sites from the Mayan, Inca, Hindu, and Sumerian temples to Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid all used this geometry. Even the so-called Cydonian monuments on Mars adhered to it.

  The Earth and Moon have the same proportions as the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, which can be directly obtained using the Pythagorean triangle.

  Therefore when Judas speaks of twelve and six angels, three hundred and sixty luminaries as well as twelve rulers, he’s speaking in the language of sacred geometry.

  How would a condemned, crazy, desert dweller—or an equally nutty scribe hundreds of years later, repeating the story—know about geometry two thousand years ago?

  We began looking carefully at the specific numbers: six, for example, is said to harness the power of spirit and bring that spirit into matter. Twelve, the symbolic number of the universe, is mentioned a hundred and eighty-seven places in the Bible (twenty-two times in Revelations alone). There are twelve apostles, twelve people on a jury, twelve days of Christmas, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Jyotirlingas in Hindu Shaivism, twelve Olympian gods, twelve Imams in Shi’a Islam, twelve signs of the zodiac corresponding to twelve months in a year, twelve petals in the heart chakra, twelve hours of day, and twelve hours of night.

  My head was about to explode. I yelled out to Pantera, “Not to mention that twelve is Joe Namath’s sacred Jets number!”

  “Irreverent wiseass!”

  Back to business.

  One night as we shared some of Gramma’s homemade meatloaf in Terry’s hospital room, Pantera picked his head up from his laptop screen to say out of nowhere, “Thing of it is, when Judas supposedly betrayed Jesus, there were only eleven apostles left—correct?”

  “Why, you sweet-talkin’ thing!” I kidded him. Then, “So you’re saying twelve wasn’t a sacred disciple number?”

  “Ah, but it was!” he answered. “It was so sacred, in fact, that the apostles replaced Judas with Matthias, giving Matthias the honor, after a coin toss, of becoming the twelfth apostle. Judas then became the thirteenth apostle—the bad-luck number.

  “There
were thirteen present at the Last Supper, which led to His betrayal or His alleged betrayal, and then to His crucifixion. Also on Friday the thirteenth of October 1307, scores of Templar knights—”

  “Your ancestors, if I remember what little history you almost told me about yourself once,” I interrupted.

  He continued without addressing what I’d said. “Right. As I was trying to say, on Friday the thirteenth of October 1307, scores of Templars were arrested and charged with everything from homosexuality to bank fraud and heresy. The indictment called it, ‘Dieu n’est pas content.’”

  “God is not pleased?”

  “Yes, correct. Thus the unlucky number ‘thirteen’ is the antithesis of a sacred number. But on the other hand, at one point in the Gospel, Jesus calls Judas ‘the thirteenth.’ Wouldn’t that mean it’s a lucky number?”

  “Your logic escapes me.”

  “Well, Jesus excoriates the other disciples, but never Judas. Even in the accepted King James Version. He loves the guy. Also, Judas is suggesting here that Jesus had a foreknowledge of what was to come—therefore Jesus had to be in on the whole thing. If not, he wouldn’t have been the all-knowing Savior. Jesus even points Judas out at the Last Supper but doesn’t attempt to stop him. Somebody had to do it in order for the prophesy to be fulfilled and Judas may have loved his Lord so much that he was willing to become the most hated man in history.”

  “Ah, but Jesus calls him the ‘thirteenth daimon’—which is ‘devil.’”

  “Interestingly enough, many ancient, magical texts use that term to mean ‘spirit’ or ‘god.’ In fact, it’s even been interpreted to mean beings that are between human and divine.”

  He immediately pointed to something from the old book in his hands. “Here, look. It says that there are actually thirteen—not twelve—dimensions, and that thirteen is last dimension, the dimension of divine communion and is actually a void. Judas was the thirteenth disciple, hence he was the chosen one to complete the task of Jesus—He who contains all the possibilities!”

  Whatever was real and whatever was false in what we were deducing, and whether Judas was a demon or a godlike compatriot of Jesus, the book’s original scribe certainly knew and understood the concepts of love, loyalty in a crazy way, and sacred geometry in a secret, coded way. Did the missing pages contain, whether in code or not, the formula for resurrection and life everlasting? I believe they did.

  As we toiled away over the next several days in that hospital room, trying to figure out the whole code that might have been hidden within the text, I remembered something else—something we had completely overlooked or hadn’t thought significant at the time. “Remember in the Prison of Christ—there was something scrawled about God’s word being rotten, or rot—something like that?”

  “Yes…,” he said, looking up over the ancient book he was holding.

  “Well, maybe, just maybe, secrets lie also not only in what’s left but what’s rotted away! Maybe it was all part of some divine plan.”

  “Why, Ms. Russo, you sound almost like a believer. For a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, I mean. I’m impressed.”

  “Oh, go shoot somebody or whatever you do on your days off,” I said. “I really don’t care if you think I’m barking up the wrong tree, but I’m going to give up trying to find the secrets in what’s left and look instead at what’s rotted away. I’m a reporter and what I do is figure out whodunit and who done what.” He wasn’t buying it, but I hadn’t been buying what he’d been selling at first, either.

  After staying up most of one night—Terry had been very cranky and had tried to pull out the tubes—I was drifting off to sleep when something jumped out at me.

  And so it began—as clearly as if the words had never been disguised. What I discovered were messages from Jesus to the people of the future, the people of the future whose civilization was being held hostage to worldwide terrorist attacks, global warming, tsunamis, devastating earthquakes, hurricanes, nuclear plant disasters, rampant “religious” beheadings, and rapes, not to mention the unthinkable beginnings of a Christian holocaust in the Middle East. Never again? Until the next time.

  We were now living in a time that in many ways was every bit as primitive and barbaric as the time of Jesus—but now the primitives had sophisticated bombs that could in fact end civilization. Just as we were facing the end of civilization in the cradle of civilization in the very area of the world where Jesus had lived, what was perhaps a new message from Jesus had come. Had He known that this Gospel’s hidden code would be discovered when it was most needed?

  I couldn’t believe what had been right before my eyes. Or more precisely what hadn’t been before my eyes: many of the rotted parts of the words in the Judas Gospel were affirmations of human life: spirituality, creation, God, life, mother, even almost a signature of the Savior.

  When Pantera arrived the next morning with the croissants, fruit, and coffee—he never did capitulate to my lecture on bagels—I said, “Sit down and take a deep breath. Have I got something for you!”

  I had broken what I believe is the code in the rotted-away parts of words. I placed my yellow legal pad on the hospital tray table and said, “These are all the parts of the words that were rotted away. Look!

  “Ra, the Egyptian sun god; Thor, the god of lightning; and negli? It’s ‘from the gods’ in Hebrew, and it’s also Sanskrit for ‘finding unity in diversity.’ Look here: ‘genes—DNA and the Sirius rotation pattern.’

  “Ur, the Scandinavian ruler of the beginning; An, the prefix for the solar deities of Egypt; Se, the divine tree of life; Pli, for Pleiades; Thi, the Sirius Big Dog; and Ove, for egg. Ca, as in Kaaba—from the asteroid matter, the material inside the cuboid building at the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque.

  “It’s Jesus talking to us,” I said when I’d finished. “He’s telling us where we came from, and that we must prevail and give thanks and be in the light no matter how dark the days are ahead. Which is exactly what I needed to remember during this whole, horrible ordeal.”

  “You never fail to surprise me,” he said. Then he surprised me. Laughing out loud, he grabbed me and kissed me.

  I pulled back and stared at him. “And you never fail to surprise me!”

  We both laughed as I sort of shoved him away, despite wanting nothing more than to have him kiss me again and again, and more to the point to be in a big bed with him for endless days exploring not some ancient manuscript, but every single bit of him. This was hardly the time or the place.

  But the feel, the smell, and the maleness of him made me stupid for him, crazy to have him climbing all over me and me all over him, until we were both exhausted, only to do it all over again. And again. I wanted that. I wanted to feel him inside of me, filling me up like no man ever could again. I knew he wanted me at least as much as I wanted him. More.

  But what the hell would happen when we actually could? Should I even put myself in that position? I was still reeling from our first encounter. When we made love again, I knew it would be even more intense, passionate, and all-consuming than it had been the first time.

  Then what? I couldn’t picture him giving up his secret life, his off-the-grid life, doing whatever black ops thing he did for God and country—albeit which God and whose country still remained unclear. Nor did I want him to—no more than I’d want to give up my own life as a reporter. I couldn’t breathe if I couldn’t write, and I just didn’t know if he would be able to breathe if he was tied down to even a semi-normal life. Pantera didn’t live his life like anyone else. And that was another reason I couldn’t get enough of him.

  But the fact remained, however, that as real as our baby was, his father, Yusef Pantera, was the opposite of real. He was a desperado fantasy man, a mystery man with brains. What could come of it all?

  All I knew for sure was that when we finally got our hands on each other, it would be unforgettable. But could it possibly be sustainable? That was something else altogether.

  39
<
br />   Three weeks and four days after the horror began, the heads of pediatrics, Dr. Rodriguez and Dr. Singn, came into Terry’s room. Instead of their usual grim-but-trying-to-appear-optimistic looks, they were actually smiling. Smiling!

  “Well, Alessandra, I’ve got a bit of news for you!” Rodriguez said, trying to contain his giddiness. They asked me to step out into the corridor and to take Terry with me. I gently grabbed my baby boy up in my arms—he was finally free of the horrible tubes—and followed the docs out.

  The corridor was filled with people—doctors, nurses, aides, orderlies, administrators, my family, the cops on the case—everyone was there. They burst into applause and broke out singing my special Terry lullaby, “Terry boy! Mommy’s boy! Mommy loves you so much, ’cause you’re handsome and you’re nice, and you’re Mommy’s best boy!” Pantera—not one for public parties—wasn’t around. I didn’t care. This was for my boy and me.

  Holding Terry close in his little hospital gown, I burst into tears and so did every other person in the hall. Big tough guys, stoic doctors, the cops, seen-the-worst-things-in-the-world pediatric nurses, and even the electrician, were all shamelessly crying. Mad Dog—whom I’d discovered was a huge crybaby but only when happy—was mopping his tears with a wad of Kleenex.

  The hospital staff presented Terry with his very own official TOUGH GUY onesie, followed by a giant cake.

  Dr. Singn said, “I speak for everyone here when I tell you that we can’t remember a day as happy as today.” I looked puzzled.

  He continued, “Why? Because today is the day that we kick Terry Russo and his entire family outta here!”

  I was speechless. Somehow the day I’d prayed for, longed for, and dreamed of was here. I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t think of anything to say other than to go around and kiss every single person. That’s when I finally missed Pantera. Where was he anyway?

  To get ready to go home, Mom and I dressed Terry in one of the fifty-six thousand outfits she’d bought him—a little baseball cap, shoes, and socks. I’m not prejudiced at all, and I mean that, but he is the cutest baby ever born in the history of the entire human race.