The Gospel Of Judas Read online

  ‘We’re not certain, of course. Nothing’s ever certain. But the site is thought to date from the first century. There’s the possibility that what we have are fragments of Q.’ She wanted to know. Her expression told Leo of her interest. Not mere politeness. ‘Q is Quelle, the source,’ he explained. ‘The collection of teachings that Matthew and Luke have in common, but which is not found in Mark. Now this phrase actually comes from the preaching of John the Baptist …’

  ‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ she breathed. Casually, quite casually she laid a hand on his shoulder as she leaned forward. That physical contact sounded louder in his mind than any ideas. ‘So these are the oldest known bits of the New Testament?’

  ‘Probably. But it’s more than just age. These finds almost prove that the source of the New Testament, one of the written sources at least, pre-dates the Jewish War. Now the implications of that …’

  She seemed to be interested, that was what was so remarkable. She seemed to want to listen to him, whereas Jack would just smile and nod and change the subject with a diplomat’s arrogance and a diplomatic unconcern. ‘Does it really matter?’ Leo had heard him ask. ‘In this day and age does it really matter any longer?’ And Madeleine had answered her husband tartly: ‘To me it does. To millions of people all over the world, as well. Not the clever ones like you, maybe. Not Her Majesty’s bloody Foreign Office, unless it has a political angle. But to people it matters.’

  ‘So what’s the place that you work for called?’ she asked him now. ‘The World Bible Center? Tell me about it.’

  He smiled, not really knowing himself, not understanding the dynamics of the thing, the apparent random chance of it all, the manipulation of the hand of contingency that might be mistaken for the hand of God. A few months previously, that was all. There had been a telephone call in the middle of a dull morning, the voice of the director of the World Bible Center in Jerusalem wanting to speak to Father Leo Newman please, and was that Father Leo himself, and how happy he, Steve Calder, was to renew an old friendship with Leo after all this time. Leo knew Calder from a conference in California the year before. He remembered hair of perfect platinum and teeth of pearl. He remembered a low-slung villa amidst weeping willows and immaculate lawns and an illuminated swimming pool in which a Roman Catholic bishop was swimming in the company of a female Evangelical pastor. He remembered an argument during the evening barbecue about the Jesus Seminar, that group of academics who thought that biblical truth could be approached on a democratic basis, by a show of hands. Calder had been an enthusiastic supporter – ‘We’ve got to get more rationality and less faith into the debate,’ he had cried. ‘Faith is the enemy of discovery.’

  Fool or fraud?

  ‘Leo, I want your help,’ the man had said over the phone. ‘We’ve got one hell of a find. A place on the Dead Sea called En-Mor. You know it? Well they’ve just turned up a whole slew of papyrus fragments. And we need someone of your status to help with these things. I’ll give you a look at the material and I’ll give you time to think about it. But I know you won’t need the time. I know when you see these things you’ll be hammering on our door and crying to be let in.’

  The first photographs had come by courier the next day. There was that anguish of anticipation as he sat at his desk and struggled to open the package, fiddling with the plastic wrapper, tearing the waybill aside and slitting open the inner envelope to discover inside a single photograph, ten inches by eight. Of course he recognised the thing immediately as he slid it out on to the polished surface of his desk, recognised it in a generic sense, that is: a high-resolution photograph of a flake of papyrus. The fragment was five inches by four. There was a ruler laid alongside to give a scale. It was five inches by four and the edges were frayed and the texture of the material, the warp and weft of the plant fibres, was clear; and there were four lines of writing running across it. The text was blurred and scoured as though by a rough eraser, but the lines of writing were as straight as if they had been ruled, with all the exactness of a machine and all the individuality of an artefact. The ink was faded to brown but the characters were somehow still fresh – bright, live things. Koine. The language was Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, the language that anyone with an education would have spoken in those days, the language of commerce and exchange, the language of administration and law. Jesus would have spoken Koine. He would have talked to Pilate in Koine.

  Leo had turned the photograph over just to see, to delay the moment of reading, just as one might savour a childhood treat by deliberately putting it off. On the back was a circular stamp, a stylised globe with the title WORLD BIBLE CENTER, JERUSALEM wrapped around the edge like an atmosphere; and a catalogue number.

  Then he had turned back and started to read.

  It was like solving a crossword clue. One word had stood out. One word had given the whole piece away, a single word that occurs a mere four times in the whole of the New Testament: gennemata. Offspring. He checked in his concordance, his hands shaking with excitement as he lifted the volume down from the shelf. Then there were a mere three letters of the following word, but there could be little doubt about them either: epsilon-chi-iota. E-Ch-I.

  Echinos, a hedgehog.

  He had laughed aloud at the thought, laughed to himself in the silence of his room. Offspring of hedgehogs. He had wanted someone with whom he could share the joke, someone who would have laughed with excitement at the whole thing. But there was no one there. Just the institutional sounds outside: the slamming of a door, the labouring of the lift as it moved down to the ground floor, music playing in a nearby room. He almost got up from his desk and ran to the door to call someone, anyone to share his emotion, but he didn’t.

  It wasn’t echinos of course; it was echidnon. Vipers. Offspring of vipers.

  The rest had been easy.

  ‘I suppose it was what I’d been hoping for all my life,’ he told Madeleine. ‘Concrete evidence that the gospels, at least the source of the gospels pre-dates the Jewish War, and that therefore they contain genuine eyewitness accounts.’

  ‘But surely that’s obvious.’

  ‘But surely nothing at all. You know what the name Jesus actually means?’

  ‘Isn’t it just a name?’

  He shook his head. ‘In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings. Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, Yehoshua and it means God is salvation. So you can see it’s easy enough to explain Jesus away as just the personification of faith in God, not a historical figure at all. If the earliest manuscripts only come from the first century, if the gospels themselves were written that late – after Paul’s ministry, let’s say – then it’s easy to make the kind of claim that you hear often enough, that Christ was a construct of the early Church, a mythic figure given some kind of historical identity in order to help simple people believe.’

  ‘And you’ve disproved it all.’

  He shrugged. ‘It was clear from the start that these pieces were early. Second century for sure. You see those characters?’ She watched and listened with that focus that she had, the moment when the bright and ironical became focused as though by a lens. ‘What we call zierstil, decorated style. See the gamma? Second century at least. And then there’s the use of the iota adscript which died out in the second century, and suddenly I thought, my God, this might be older than the Rylands fragment.’ He looked round from the picture. ‘And I realised that this find was sensational. The earliest New Testament text from the Holy Land, probably the earliest in existence.’

  * * *

  The images came over the telephone lines. Every few days he logged on to the Bible Center’s server and found the pictures waiting for him, two images for each fragment along with a catalogue number, nothing more. One image would be high resolution and time-consuming to download. The other would be a smaller version to give the general idea of things. The ragged scraps would unfurl themselves on to t
he screen of his computer and hang there in the luminous rectangle of light like pieces of old, tattered rag; like bunting from a celebration held long, long ago. They gave an illusion of reality. You could see the shadows they cast on the white background; you could see the individual fibres flaking off from the edges. A row of dun-coloured flags signalling from the past, a strange and cryptic semaphore:

  … winnowing fork is in his hand and … [he will gather the wheat into] … his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire …

  Fragments of the Gospel of Matthew, from a site that could probably be dated to the time of the Jewish War and the burning of the Temple. He was reading the oldest gospel texts known; he was doing what, as a child, he had dreamt of doing, when, fatherless and alone, he had passed hours in solitary thought in the chapel of the seminary: he was reaching out his hand to touch the Jesus of history.

  The Times came out with the story first: NEW FINDS NEAR THE DEAD SEA CONFIRM HISTORICITY OF NEW TESTAMENT. The tabloids put it more succinctly: PAPYRUS PROVES GOSPELS. It was a mild sensation, ringing faint echoes round the world in the inner pages of newspapers, meriting mention towards the end of news broadcasts. Leo Newman found himself crammed into a darkened cell in the BBC studios in Rome to talk to a disembodied voice in London who asked questions like, ‘How does this make the Jesus story more meaningful for the twenty-first century?’ A group of American Bible scholars set about trying to prove, using an elaborate computer analysis, that the fragments were not Christian at all but came instead from a long-lost part of the book of the prophet Hosea. The Pope himself made a private visit to the Institute to view the images and confer a shaky blessing on the head of Father Leo Newman. ‘A lion in the battle for truth,’ he said. ‘A voice of truth for the millennium.’

  Lord, save me from the sin of self-regard, Leo had prayed, while the shock waves reverberated round the globe and trembled in the background, like a distant storm.

  He watched as she walked round the manuscript room, a bright splash of colour amongst the grey and brown, a sharp stroke of the profane amongst the studiously devout. ‘Isn’t there the corrupt smell of ambition in all this?’ Her tone was faintly mocking, touched with that astringent irony that so intrigued him. ‘Isn’t there pride and ambition? Shouldn’t faith be enough?’

  ‘Perhaps faith is never enough.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean? Don’t you have enough faith? You’re a priest.’

  ‘It’s not lack of faith, although perhaps there is always that. It’s the intrusion of other things, human things.’

  She waited a moment for him to continue, standing over by the window and watching him with what was left of her expression once the smile had gone, a look of concern and faint bewilderment. Then abruptly she changed her tone. ‘I must go,’ she said, making a show of looking at her watch. ‘I’m afraid I must leave you to your texts.’ And she began to gather up her things – her handbag and scarf. Her umbrella? That had been surrendered at the entrance to the manuscript rooms. ‘Thank you so much for showing me round, Leo. It has been fascinating.’ Briskness again, a sharp change of tone, a confusing sensation that one person had just been replaced by another.

  He turned the computer off. ‘I’m afraid they won’t search your handbag when you leave,’ he said. ‘But they ought to. They don’t really know how to deal with women – they can’t imagine a woman coming here and stealing anything.’

  ‘But you can?’

  ‘I can imagine almost anything. That has always been my abiding sin.’

  ‘Is it a sin?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it is, yes, because you always end up believing the worst of people.’ He showed her to the main door. The porter glanced at them through the window of his cell and then went back to reading the sports paper.

  ‘Do you think the worst of me?’ she asked. They stood for a moment in the entrance. The urgency of her departure seemed to have vanished.

  ‘I think the best of you.’

  ‘That is very dangerous.’ She touched his arm. She might have raised herself on her toes and kissed him on the cheek, but it didn’t seem appropriate just there, beneath the plaque that talked of popes and pontiffs, of stern fathers and bridge-builders between God and man. So she just squeezed his arm, a quick sharp grasp, and told him that she would be in touch soon and turned and walked away down the narrow street, her shoes clipping on the stones, her feet wobbling on the awkward unevenness of the setts. And he felt an absurd and pungent sense of loss.

  3

  Leo amongst the women and the coffee cups, with Saint Clare looking down on him with anguish as though appalled to see one of her kind embroiled in the trivial and the quotidian. Leo answering polite questions politely – they had been to see the Roman cemetery beneath the crypt of Saint Peter’s – and wanting Madeleine to come and speak to him. He felt like an adolescent, that was what was so galling. He felt like a teenager (horrendous word with its meretricious, transatlantic connotations) trying to attract the attention of some older girl, while she moved through the group of women with a disturbing, adult assurance.

  Finally she came over to him. The topic of the Roman burial ground had been exhausted. All around them the women were talking of families, of children and schools, of houses and maids and holidays. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she asked. ‘Is that allowed? What kind of family produces a priest?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to know about my family,’ he assured her. ‘It wasn’t like yours.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean? Wasn’t it happy? All happy families are the same, aren’t they? Where does that come from?’

  ‘Tolstoy.’

  ‘Anna Karenina, that’s it. All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Is it true?’

  Why should she want to know? What interest could she have? The women came up to offer thanks and farewells. ‘You’ll stay for some lunch?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t want to overstay my welcome again.’

  She laughed, and offered no answer. He watched her smiling and laughing, shaking hands, offering a smooth cheek for a farewell kiss, two farewell kisses, one on each cheek, turning the other cheek, a consummate performance. From on top of the grand piano, framed in silver, Jack and the two girls laughed at the scene. He found himself trying to picture the small rituals of her family life, what the Brewers would do and what they would say to one another. His imagination was defective in such matters, a stunted thing with no experience to call on. It was as though he had trespassed into a foreign territory, a place with its own customs, its own language, with all the attraction of the unfamiliar. He was entranced. His own family, his tiny, fragile family was a different organism from hers, a different institution, hedged about with a past it couldn’t talk about and an inheritance it couldn’t acknowledge.

  ‘Tell me,’ Madeleine said when the last of the women had left. ‘You tell me and I’ll listen.’

  So he told her. Confession of a kind, explication and expiation woven together. He told Madeleine of his home life, musty with the smell of a vanished past and cloying with the attentions of a pious widowed mother who brooked no interference from the outside world beyond the inattentive children who came round for piano lessons. Homes have their own smell, their own amalgam of scents and flavours: his had been redolent of incense, gathered devoutly into his mother’s clothes when she went to mass each morning and brought back to the house, to be extruded into the heavy, languorous atmosphere. A candle, burning perpetually before an icon of the Blessed Madonna and Child, added its waxen perfume.

  ‘Sounds very Irish,’ was Madeleine’s opinion.

  ‘Not Irish, not anything. A strange creation of my mother’s. Her family had been Jewish once – Neumann, Newman. Her mother was a convert.’

  ‘But Newman’s your name.’ There was a silence. Implications were considered, matters of legitimacy and illegitimacy, those terms that once ranked high in the potency of language. The word b
astard.

  He slid past the obstacle. ‘I never knew my father. He died before I was born. I was the only male in the house. All the others who ever came seem to have been women: my mother’s partners in bridge, her piano pupils, the maids, two distant cousins who called occasionally – spinsters or widows, I never really knew which – all were women.’ The incontinence of confession. They sat at either end of a capacious sofa, legs crossed, hers demurely with her skirt pulled down to the gleaming disc of her patella, his extravagantly with his ankle resting on his knee. ‘I’ve never talked about these things before, do you realise that? Never had the opportunity, I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t have to now. Not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘She’s dead. One is meant to speak well of the dead.’

  ‘Can’t you speak well of her?’

  ‘I’ve never really understood the theological basis for the idea. Surely there is a greater need to speak well of the living. Let the dead bury their dead, isn’t that what Our Lord said?’

  ‘So tell me.’

  There was a strange intimacy in talking about it to Madeleine, a sense of confession in reverse, her absolution for his memories. ‘I adored her, of course. I had little choice in the matter. Her rages, her sarcasm, her indifference were terrible weapons. So was her affection. My lion, she always called me, my little brave lion. She suffocated me, I suppose. With love and affection, of course; and with a history that was not mine, that never would be mine.’

  ‘History?’

  ‘You know the kind of thing: ancestors, disasters.’ There was something receptive about Madeleine, as though she exerted a gravitational pull on him, drawing him towards her: his secrets, his past, his very personality. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  He couldn’t recall his mother as a young woman. In his memory her eyes were the only thing that retained an illusion of youth: they were as bright and blue as the eyes of a china doll, gazing out in surprise through the decaying mask of her face as though startled to find time passing and flesh decaying. For the rest, she only possessed the relics of good looks, like an aged actress trying to deny the years. The skin of her cheek was soft and waxy and dusted with a fine powdery down like mildew; her mouth, approximately edged with lipstick, held the shadow of a lost sensuality in the way that a painting may show traces of an earlier figure lying underneath. ‘My manikin, my Männlein, come and give your mother a kiss,’ she would say, and her embrace was heavy with that incense and the rosaceous perfume that she habitually wore. When he was ill he slept in her bed and felt her body, a perfumed presence, a strange melding of the gaunt and the fleshy, close to his. And sometimes the emotion of holding him against her loose breasts (what emotion? what anguish lay behind her cloying attentions?) drove her to tears, so that her features would collapse like wet paper, making a grim contrast with her bright, old-fashioned dresses and her brassy hair. A doll left out in the rain, he used to think; and added that to a list of uncharitable thoughts he had to expiate. ‘What is the matter, Mother?’ he would ask. ‘Tell me the matter?’ But she would shake her head bravely and deny that it was anything that Leo had done, or could do, or could even imagine. The unimaginable was what haunted her, and haunted therefore his childish prayers as he knelt beside his bed at night. ‘Your father, your poor, poor father,’ she would moan, and from silver frames on the piano, on the sideboard, on the mantelshelf, he looked down at the pair of them, a man of imposing seriousness, with a face that bore within it the lean, long lineaments of duty. ‘He watches over us, of course he does. He sees us, he knows our thoughts, he understands our weaknesses …’