Knights of the Black and White

by Jack Whyte

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing that’s easily explained, as I said before, but I’ll try. There was a common element among most of the Jewish sects around that time, and it was all about poor-versus-rich politics, those who had nothing against those who had everything. The governing class in Judea was Herodian. They owned everything, simply because they had usurped it with the backing of the Romans, who were happy to have a vassal king in power who was sympathetic to Rome and willing to keep the contentious Jews and the remaining adherents of the Maccabees in their place.”

  “Wait. What exactly do you mean when you say Herodian?”

  Sir William cocked an eyebrow at that, then grunted and said, “Think about it, lad. Herod’s family held all the power, and they used it to create new priests, tax collectors, and a hundred other forms of support for themselves, and all of those people owed their livelihood to the Herods. Their loyalties, therefore, were Herodian, as vassals to liege lords.”

  Stephen nodded, understanding the feudal equivalent, and Sir William continued. “The Jews, on the other hand, whose country Judea was, had nothing. Less than nothing, in fact, for most of them were heavily indebted to the Herodian moneylenders. The system under which they lived forced them to borrow heavily in order to survive, for that was how their entire society had been structured, ever since the Herod clan had come to power. Increasing taxes, including tithes to the temple, kept the people mired in poverty, and they were forced to borrow to be able to pay their tithes, plus their next round of taxes. It was a vicious, killing circle.

  “And so this tradition—this cult—of poverty grounded in unyielding righteousness had come into being, and the Zealots were among its prime supporters. Another sect, Ebionites or Essenes, called themselves the Poor Ones, or sometimes the Poor, Righteous Ones. Or even more simply the Poor.”

  William cocked his head towards the Count, who was listening closely, his face expressionless. “Am I missing anything?”

  The Count shook his head, as though surprised at being addressed. “Nothing important. I am fascinated by how much you can remember without prompting.”

  William turned his eyes back to his nephew. “The Poor. Do you recall Jesus’ words about the camel climbing through the eye of the needle?”

  “Aye, of course. It’s an impossibility, equal to the chances of a rich man gaining entry to the kingdom of Heaven.”

  “Exactly. Rich men, to the Jews of Jesus’ time, were either Herodians or Romans, which meant that they were definitely not Jewish, and the Jews of Judea were the most self-righteous race in the world—God’s chosen people.

  “It means nothing to us today, but it must have been intolerable to them to have their country, and the temple that embodied their religion, ruled and owned by a mongrel race, half Arab, half Greek, and both halves unacceptable in the eyes of Jehovah. And then, simply because they were so stiff necked and unbending, it must have been even worse to be forced to live with the Pharisees, Herod’s false priests. Think then, how their frustration must have been inflamed by having to endure the scorn of the temple moneylenders and the indignity of having to deal with them in the first place, and to know there was nothing they could do about it because the power was all in the hands of the rich, with the hated Romans—who had attempted to set up an idol of their blasphemous emperor inside the Holy of Holies in the temple itself—providing the force that kept the usurpers safe from harm.”

  Sir William was silent for a moment, giving Stephen time to think about what he had said, before he continued. “The Jews lived in a world of black and white, Stephen, with nothing between the two extremes, no middle ground. Anyone who was not Jewish was gentile, and could not inherit the Kingdom of God.

  “But even for a Jew, the way to God’s good graces was a rocky and uncomfortable one, and among the Messianic sects was a group from among the Ebionites, or the Essenes, although some called them Nazarites or Nazarenes, who had set themselves up as a small community in Jerusalem, a community more strictly law-bound and conservative in some ways than were the Zealots—a community of righteousness, founded upon the expectation of the coming of the Messiah and the triumph of the Jews and their God over the whole world. One of that group’s leaders was a man called Yeshua Ben David—we call him Jesus—and according to the records in our Order’s possession, he never laid claim at any time to being the Messiah and never had any thought of being the Christ, the redeemer of the world. He was just a man, extraordinary in some ways. But he was involved in revolutionary politics, so that he fell afoul of the Pharisees, the upstart High Priests, and they denounced him to the Romans, who crucified him.”

  William St. Clair rose to his feet and crossed to the ewer of wine on a table by the wall, where he filled his own cup before offering some to the others. The Count accepted, but Stephen waved away the offer. William drank deeply, refilled his cup, and finally set the wine jug down, leaning his buttocks against the edge of the table.

  “Thirsty work, talking. Doesn’t matter whether you talk well or badly, clearly or confusingly. Have you understood what I’ve been telling you?”

  “So far, yes. But I can’t see what any of it has to do with Saint Paul.”

  Sir William looked quickly at Count Hugh, and then back at Stephen. “Paul was a Seleucid.”

  Stephen sat blinking. “You mean, half Greek and half Arab? No, he was a gentile, a Roman citizen, from Tarsus.”

  “The Seleucids were gentiles, and many of them were Roman citizens, too. And perhaps he was from Tarsus. That’s certainly what he wanted everyone to believe later in his life. But the truth is, no one today really knows who Paul was or where he came from. No one knows anything about his early life, until the moment when God supposedly knocked him off his horse, after which he admitted openly that he had been a persecutor of Christians. But there were no Christians at that time, Stephen. There were only Jews. Christianity had not yet been defined or named.

  “Our records, however, which name him clearly as the man you call Saint Paul, indicate that he was a Herodian—and a family member, at that, blood cousin to Herod—by the name of Saulus, and that he was the man sent as ambassador from the Herodian ‘peacekeepers’ to invite the Roman army that was camped outside Jerusalem to enter the city. The same Saulus sent a report of the event, at the time, to Nero’s headquarters in Corinth, in Greece, a favorite haunt of Paul’s in later years. Anyway, we were talking about the Crucifixion.” He turned to Count Hugh. “You tell him about the Crucifixion, Hugh. You were the one who told me about it, and I’ve never forgotten what you said.”

  The Count at first demurred, saying he preferred to listen and enjoy rather than to think laboriously, but William would have none of it, and eventually Hugh shrugged his shoulders in resignation and sighed deeply.

  “Much is made of the Cross today, Stephen, and of the fact that the Jews crucified the Christ. You know that, of course.”

  “Of course, my lord. Everyone knows that.”

  “Ah, everyone does. Every man knows that.” Sir William’s tone was somber and he shook his head gravely. “You must always be careful of those words, young Stephen, because they tend to mean the opposite of what they appear to say. Things that everyone knows are seldom what they appear to be, and they are seldom true.

  “So, let us begin with the absolute truth, that which we can prove to be true: the Jews did not crucify the Christ. We can go even further than that: the Jews did not hate the Christ, because the Jews had never heard of the Christ. No one had heard of the Christ because the name did not exist until Saul, or Paul if you wish, first used it, years after Jesus was dead, speaking of him as Jesus, the Christ. ‘Christos’ was an obscure Greek word, meaning a redeemer of things, before Saul personalized it to Jesus, to indicate his supposed divinity. So the argument condemning the Jews as the slayers of Christ is a total fabrication. It is a vicious lie, created for political purposes.

  “Nor can it be argued that the Jews hated Jesus the man, even setting as
ide the ‘Christ’ part, because hatred requires great effort and dedication, and they had no reason to hate Jesus collectively. He was one of them, a member of their movement and a citizen of Judea. There was hatred enough to go around in those days, God knows, but it was all used up between the Seleucid family of Herod and his supporters and the people of Judea, the Jews. It flowed in equal measure from both sides, one to the other. But the Jews, most certainly, would not have hated Jesus, simply because he was one of them, the people who were God’s chosen. He was a Jew.

  “And they certainly did not crucify him, either, because that was simply beyond their power. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment. Nor did the Jews—as a mob—ever scream for Jesus’ blood and call down God’s wrath upon themselves and upon their children for his death. That is the worst kind of madness to claim, and to believe. Think about it calmly for a moment. Can you imagine any crowd of people, or even any mob, calling down the wrath of God upon their own heads and their children’s heads, and doing it not only voluntarily but in unison, unrehearsed? It defies belief, and yet people believe it. You do, don’t you?”

  “Believe it?” Stephen floundered, open mouthed, before his uncle took pity on him.

  “Of course you do, because you have no choice. Because throughout your life, ever since you were old enough to understand, the most important people in your life have been telling you that’s the truth, that you have to believe it, because if you don’t, you’ll be excommunicated, you will be damned to burn in everlasting fires. The Church tells you that. The priests tell you that. A monk will tell you that if you stop one on the road and ask him. And there is nothing, anywhere, to suggest otherwise, or to teach you otherwise, or to explain anything in alternative terms. Nothing. So what else can you do but believe what you are told?” He stopped suddenly, dramatically, holding up one hand towards the younger man.

  “But let us think about crucifixion, you and I, for just a while longer before we move on to other things—about the Crucifixion, about the way the Romans and the Jews sought to humiliate the Son of God by hanging him on a cross for all the world to mock, as though crucifixion were a special invention designed to shame and humiliate Jesus. You know all about that, don’t you?”

  “I …” Stephen hesitated, then raised a shoulder defensively. “All about that? I would have said yes moments ago, but now …”

  “Quite right you are, too. Right to doubt. Right to question, because there was nothing special involved in any part of the Crucifixion, except perhaps for the man to whom it happened. It was a commonplace event. Crucifixion was the most common form of death for criminals in Roman times, whether the criminals were thieves, miscreants, murderers, rebels, political dissidents, or deserters from the Roman armies. If you were deemed worthy of death by the Romans, you died. If you were wealthy or well connected, you might die quickly, beheaded or garroted, but if your death was required by the state, as a public spectacle, a lesson and a deterrent to others, you were crucified and died slowly, in great pain. Jesus was condemned as a political criminal—a rebel. And that was how he died. And apart from the people who knew him and were close to him, no one really cared.”

  There was silence among the three men for some time after that, for neither of the two older men wished to add anything at that point, and Stephen plainly did not even know how to begin formulating a response. After a while, he rose to his feet and crossed to the table, where he helped himself to a cup of wine and stood sipping at it, staring at the wall in front of him while the other two waited, watching him. Finally, he gulped one great mouthful and swung around to face both of them, his voice truculent and challenging.

  “You still have said nothing about how all this has anything to do with Saint Paul.”

  Sir William raised his injured arm high and cupped his shoulder with his other hand as he flexed the joint, grimacing in discomfort. “You phrased your comment wrongly, Stephen. It was Paul who had to do with all this,” he said through gritted teeth. He lowered his arm and released pent-up air explosively between his lips. “Paul changed everything, Stephen, from what it was then into what it is today—from Jewish to gentile. It was all Paul’s doing. He stripped what was there in Jerusalem—the movement that Jesus and his followers called the Way—of all its Jewishness, and thereby of all its true meaning, and turned it into something inoffensive and innocuous, an idea bland enough to be accepted by the Romans. He stripped away all the rigid, unyielding, and unpopular Jewish morality and rewrapped the story in the style of his ancient Greek ancestors, with their love of fantastic, dramatic, fictitious, and completely implausible tales. And in so doing, he changed Jesus from a simple Jewish man of high ideals and stern patriotism into the Son of God, born of a virgin.”

  The Count rose to his feet and stretched mightily. “You have heard enough here this afternoon to set your head a-spinning,” he said to Stephen. “So much information, and all so sudden and so unexpected. I know that, and so does William here. But remember what we said earlier, about time. You have your entire lifetime in which to explore and re-examine what we have told you, and you have full access to all the records in our archives, together with equal access to our most learned brethren, who will be happy and honored to share their knowledge and their studies with you.

  “All that we require of you is that you keep an open mind and be aware that there are always other points of view on any topic that the human mind can countenance. In this particular instance of the man known as Saint Paul, you will learn that there are voices from the past, from his own time, that state quite clearly that he was not who he appeared to be, and that he was not altogether wholesome in many aspects of his character, including his truthfulness. There are others, equally strong and cogent, who maintain that his vaunted Romanness led to his being a toady and a confidant and spy of the emperor Nero. Still others indicate—and I make no accusations here, I am merely saying they indicate—that he may have been directly involved in the murder of James, the brother of Jesus. After the death of Jesus, James took his place as leader of the movement that we in the Order call the Jerusalem Assembly. James had no time for Paul and made no secret of his disapproval of the man, while Paul clearly saw James—and said so in his own writings—as a threat, a deterrent and a hindrance to the spreading of God’s word to the gentiles. He denounced and denigrated James accordingly as being worthy of arrest and punishment. There is no doubt that he was right about the hindrance, for James was a Jew, one of the people chosen by God to be His own, and there was no place in James’s world for gentiles.

  “There is far more to all of this, of course, than most men know, but we in the Order, who can trace our direct descent from the Essenes, the Poor Men of the Jerusalem Assembly itself, and who acknowledge the Way that they perceived and by which they lived, have a duty to maintain a clear line of sight from here to where this all began. Bear that in mind at all times from this moment on, and be true to the vows you made in being Raised.” He stopped and eyed Stephen sympathetically. “You look baffled. And so you should. But now you need to go away and think about everything we have said here today. And if you have more questions, come back and ask them, of either one of us. Go now in peace.”

  SIX

  The seeds that had been sown in Stephen’s mind that day rooted strongly, and in the two years that followed, before he was shipped off to join the new fraternity in Jerusalem, Stephen St. Clair developed an insatiable appetite for any information that bore upon the Jerusalem Assembly, the Way of the Essenes, and the earliest days of what would, thanks to the man Paul, become Christianity as the world knew it twelve hundred years later. He soon lost count of the hours spent in a score of locations throughout the country, listening to his elder brethren, the archivists of the Order of Rebirth, recounting and translating the Lore that they safeguarded. The archives were a source of constant amazement to him, for although they were extensive in their scope, they were surprisingly small in physical mass, being mainly, although not exclusively, in the f
orm of scrolls, which were far lighter and less bulky than the heavily bound books known as codices. They were decentralized, too, scattered among the main houses of the Friendly Families and guarded painstakingly by the senior brethren who had undertaken to study and conserve them.

  He became thoroughly versed in the politics of Judea in Herodian times and in the aims and beliefs of the various sects and subsects at all levels of the Messianic movement, and he quickly learned to trust his own judgment in evaluating information, and to rely upon his intuitions when they were backed by intensive reading and research.

  He had quickly discovered, for example, that one of the archives, near the ancient town of Carcassonne in the Languedoc, contained copies of the original writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, and from his studies of those, with the assistance of his mentors who had studied them for years, he came to appreciate that, uniquely self-serving as his writings were, Josephus had provided minute and exquisitely detailed recordings of the political and military situation within Judea and Palestine in his own time. It was by comparing Josephus’s viewpoints and depictions in his two best-known works, The Jewish War and Antiquities, to those in Christian teachings and writings that Stephen had come to understand, and to believe beyond doubt or question, how Paul the Evangelist had sanitized the Jerusalem Assembly’s teachings and used them to create Christianity in his own image and for his own ends, soon after the destruction of Jerusalem, stripping the old religion of its original anti-Roman Jewish nationalism and its anti-gentile prohibitions to make it politically acceptable to the Imperial authorities and to the polyglot citizenry of the Roman Empire.

  He had also been fascinated by the emergence of Imperial Christianity hundreds of years later, from the moment in the fourth century when the emperor Constantine had romanized the Church, extracting and destroying the revolutionary teeth that had attracted his attention to it in the first place. In an act of what St. Clair’s predecessors in the Order had conceded to be unprecedented political genius, Constantine had made the Church an integrated part of the establishment of the Empire by transforming its Pope and cardinals into imperial princes, and the crowning achievement of his stratagem had lain in endowing them with an earthly palace that would forever afterwards symbolize their worldly importance and would mark, for those few who cared, or dared, to look, the true death of the movement established by Jesus, James, and the other original adherents of the Jerusalem Assembly.