Gospel Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  Chapter 1

  Britain

  Chapter 2

  Ireland

  Chapter 3

  Italy

  Chapter 4

  Greece

  Chapter 5

  Jerusalem

  Chapter 6

  Africa

  Chapter 7

  The Promised Land

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Teaser

  Also by Wilton Barnhardt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  to my Blessed Trinity,

  Mary Barnhardt,

  Joyce Carter, and Betty Grigg

  And in her friendship there is pure delight,

  And unfailing wealth in the labors of her hands,

  And understanding in the experience of her company,

  And glory in the sharing of her words.

  WISDOM OF SOLOMON 8:18

  God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

  —Markings

  DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

  NOTE TO THE READER: This is a work of fiction. All of the events, characters, and institutions depicted in this novel are entirely fictitious or are used fictitiously. However, all ancient sources, Biblical citings, apocryphal gospels, and historical information contained in the footnotes of the Gospel are true and accurate.

  1

  I had lost my faith, Josephus.1

  2. It had parted as the flower falls from the wilting stalk, as the tide recedes to reveal the mud beneath the sea, gone as the moon behind a large cloud, as Helios in bed at Eridanus at nighttime’s ebb.2 So it was with me! I awoke to find what had once been certain now uncertain. And thus began my travels, my brother, and this magnificent history you are about to read—surely, I say, to be ranked among the most important of my works!

  3. It is the sixth year [76 C.E.] of this monster Flavius Caesar,3 whose avarice is boundless and cruelty legendary. However, I bring news to your deaf ears, for you, my brother, have done all but service this ogre in his bedchamber. Yes, and I assure you the Jews say worse about you. Such as, “First there was Aliturius upon the stage and now you too: Josephus who acts the Roman, betrayer of his people!”4

  Mind you, Aliturius only committed his genital member to Caesar while you have flung your soul at him, as well as our beloved father’s name, since you are now raised up as “Flavius” Josephus. Furthermore it is no small insult that you dally as an historian, a rival to me, your older brother, whose fame you shall not so easily eclipse by writing love letters to Roman generals! Truly, my brother, I would believe it if I heard that you had taken recourse to surgeons to erase that primal sign of covenant with our people.5

  4. Perhaps you will throw this missive into the fire as you did my last one; certainly my tone with you does nothing for its chances. Indeed, Tesmegan, we shall soften my rhetorical blows when you read this back to me. (Tesmegan is my scribe, purchased here with my last monies, in what is surely the last act of my life. How it must delight you to know that you will never hear from me again!) But keep reading, for there are more delights in store for you, dear Josephus. For nearly half a century you have berated my association with the Nazirene Church6 and it shall be among your final triumphs to know that I come to the end of my life with the Church at odds with me and I at odds with it; it is hard to know who is more disgusted and disappointed in whom. The Nazirene Church in the last twenty years has become a shambles, but I hardly need to tell you that, armed as you are with abuse for the followers of the Teacher of Righteousness.7

  5. Mark my words: my faith in the justice of Our Savior’s teaching has not swayed one bit—not a particle!

  However, the ensuing riot of heresies that has affixed itself to the life-account of Our Master has forced me to stand to the side of the Movement He originated, so rife with blasphemies and innovations it has become. (Naturally, I your brother, scholar and historian, could be depended upon to root out all heterodoxies, but these days I am no more heeded than Micaiah before Jeroboam.)8

  I propose to tell you now of the last ten years and my search for the truth concerning Our Master and His Disciples, and then lastly, how I come to the end of my life, here in the midst of Africa, alone, penniless, without companion or synagogue to support me. (Tesmegan insists that he be counted among my friends—very well, write that down but that is the last of your interruptions, young man.) Like Herodotus, I have come to my account of Xerxes.9

  O Blessed Sophia be ever with me as I commit my last excellencies to posterity!

  6. I recall you despised all of the fellow Disciples that you met, but you have more in common with them than you know, Josephus. Twenty years before the catastrophe of Jerusalem [50 C.E.], I wrote a three-volume Gospel that our Chief Disciple, Peter, quite intemperately burned, instructing me in his blunt, artless manner that I did no service to Our Church.

  A similar fate was prepared for my All Heresies Refuted in Philippi, I was informed, though copies still exist in Damascus and in certain private libraries, along with my Cosmos Explained, which I feel to be immature and enthusiastic in its praise of Sophia, but not without many passages of merit, and my influential Catalogues of Martyrdom, which is a learned speculation upon the matters of the Throne, Crowns, the Chariot, Diadems, and the like. I have, it must be admitted, also distanced myself from that rather enthusiastic work (though my Greek garnered the praises of many).10 I was delighted to note that Ephesus still possessed a copy of my Odes of Arkady, which was well received in many Alexandrian circles, I must say, as well as my splendid epic The Hebraika, which, I am resigned, will long outlive my theological dissertations.

  (You will recall Zechariah bar-Sirach11 himself considered The Hebraika the finest work of its sort since the Psalms of King David, and though you never mentioned it by name in our many letters, I have always suspected that you bore it begrudging admiration. Would that we could put aside these foolish pretensions!)

  7. But now to my tireless history at hand: Clio, may thy steady hand be ever on my calamus!

  Sadly, given your adventures with the Romans, who befriend us one moment to better crucify us the next, I have no way of knowing whether you are alive as I dictate this. I wonder if you have perished answering the outrages of more pots turned upside-down in Caesarean alleyways or died at the hands of the now-desperate Sicarii.12 But there is no reason you shouldn’t be alive and well-fed as you now sit enthroned in my former estate, our family’s property that was rightfully mine and that you usurped from me—let it here be recorded!

  8. I promise not to dwell upon this, the most recent of our contentions, but though six years have passed, I feel no less heated about your being given the title to the estate as a reward by the Romans, and your expelling my Nazirene commune of charities from your property. Understand: it is not for me selfishly that I resented your intriguing with the Romans to give to you, the second-born, the property that was rightfully mine as the first-born.13 My sadness was for the orphans and elderly, virgins and scholars that I had installed there.

  Indeed, I smell the stale perfume and wine-breath of my unbeloved stepmother
, my father’s ill-chosen second wife, in all this! That woman, your mother, an ever-flowing fount of poison where I am concerned, was surely behind your action. Though she rarely left Jerusalem where she and our father spent their last decades, it nonetheless perturbed her that the country estate had been consecrated to this higher purpose. With Jerusalem in ruins, naturally, she set her eye upon the estate just as she had set her eye on our father’s money. Your surprising choice to abandon the priesthood for a military career at the age of twenty-nine with no previous experience served to make her worse-tempered with, as she called it, my “distasteful Nazirene rabble,” a sentiment she attributed to you.

  Distasteful rabble? Coming from one who extinguished years fawning upon Nero Caesar and his whore-wife in that cesspit of all sodomies, Rome, mingling with a court for whom rabble is too good a name! Would that your dispossessed brother who shares your blood were as high in your sight!

  But far be it from my purpose to start an argument.

  9. Go and have the cursed estate, even with my blessing. Enjoy your desolate, ruined Judea. I shouldn’t think the Zealots and rabbis and sons of Zadok and weekly messiahs that sprout like weeds in the rubble of the Temple should give you much peace. As Judeans they could for centuries not agree on a single matter until, of course, the matter of your infamy was before them. So since we find ourselves respectively reviled by the world we used to inhabit, surely then let us be as Jacob and Esau reconciled at Shechem!14 Having the estate in your possession—snatched like the girdle of Hippolyta!—let argument and strife be through between us and let us speak to one another as men of a family. Or better yet, scholars that we are!

  10. And frankly it is little matter old as I am whether you love me or no, but rather, as with all that are aged, whether you attend what I have to say. I suspect you bear me, the one who raised you and encouraged you in your studies, no affection, still find me foolish and irresponsible, find my researches laughable and the values of Our Master doomed to extinction. At least then consider what I have seen, and that I have traveled to Tarsus and Tyre, Antioch and Alexandria, speaking to Celts and Caucasians, to Paphlagonians and Persians, and I write you now in dire circumstances from Meroe!15 Whereas you have marched with pomp into many a city and dealt with the rulers and sat at the fine tables, I entered often as a stranger, a beggar who took the kindness of the town, and believe I can write as true a history from my travels.

  11. I exhort you,16 my brother, to read on and learn!

  You shall not believe the wickedness of the Nazirene’s enemies. False messiahs abound! To take a life in these times is as nothing; no blasphemy is too foul, no lie is too absurd for it not to be believed and championed, no self-mutilation too horrid to practice. Though you have seen much in battle, you shall not sleep when I tell you that I myself, your own brother, was threatened with unchastity and sodomies17 by the fleshpots of our enemies! The Whore Helen, whose notoriety is deserved! (You know that virgin chastity, and freedom from submission to sin,18 I have always felt, to be the only engine of refinement for the soul.) I dread even to think of her now, and her hellish loins.…

  12. Ah, but young Tesmegan tires, and I will begin the tales of my travels tomorrow. How in fits and starts, over the last ten years, I began my wanderings to search for the true relation of Our Church’s origins according to Our Master’s first disciples, followers, and acquaintances.

  BRITAIN

  I never saw, heard, nor read that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular but some degree of persecution.

  —“Thoughts on Religion,” Works, vol. xv, R17 (post. 1765)

  JONATHAN SWIFT

  Let him who is fond of indulging in a dreamlike existence go to Oxford, and stay there; let him study this magnificent spectacle, the same under all aspects, with its mental twilight tempering the glare of noon, or mellowing the silver moonlight; let him wander in her sylvan suburbs, or linger in her cloistered halls; but let him not catch the din of scholars or teachers, or dine or sup with them, or speak a word to any of the privileged inhabitants; for if he does, the spell will be broken, the poetry and the religion gone, and the palace of the enchantment will melt from his embrace into thin air!

  —Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries (1824)

  WILLIAM HAZLITT

  [The Arian Heresy,] this poisonous error, after corrupting whole world at length crossed the sea and infected even this remote island; and, once the doorway had been opened, every sort of pestilential heresy at once poured into this island, whose people are ready to listen to anything novel, and never hold firmly to anything.

  —A History of the English Church and People (721)

  BEDE

  So the Maker of Mankind laid waste this dwelling-place until the old works of Giants stood idle.… Therefore the Man wise in his heart considers carefully this wall-place and this dark life, remembers the multitude of deadly combats long ago, and speaks these words: “Where has the Horse gone? Where the young Warrior?… Where are the joys of the Hall? Alas, the bright Cup! Alas, the mailed Warrior! Alas, the Prince’s glory! How that time has gone, vanished beneath night’s cover, just as if it had never been!

  —“The Wanderer,” The Exeter Book (975)

  Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk, Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a ding.

  Lucy Dantan automatically put her hand to her seatbelt, which had never been unfastened, and steeled herself.

  First flight.

  With the excitement of a first trip to Europe, the unusual mission ahead of her and her terror of being airborne, Lucy reckoned she had acceded to just twenty minutes of tortured plane-sleep, awakening with every bump and wobble. It was 6:30 A.M. by her watch, 12:30 to the British people down below—technically Scottish, Lucy decided—and it wasn’t too long now to London and Heathrow Airport.

  As promised, here came the turbulence.

  Lucy looked at the sleepy stewardess making her way down the aisle. The stewardess did this all the time. Several days a week, for months, years people did this. No problem, this turbulence. Absolutely common. Then there was a big kalumph as the plane dropped a hundred feet, a lurch Lucy found reminiscent of when the down elevator in the Sears Tower back home in Chicago puts on the brakes. A few people groaned, most shifted and readjusted themselves, still sleeping.

  Time for more prayer, she vowed.

  “Our Father, Who art in heaven,…”

  (This again.)

  “… hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come…” Lucy trailed off, this being too pro forma. “Please don’t let this plane crash, Lord. Jesus, if it does go down, forgive me of my sins. And Holy Spirit…”

  (Yes?)

  Lucy dried up on the Holy Spirit. “If we’re all gonna die, please sustain me and allow me the peace to meet my end with dignity.” What if the plane hurtled into the cold North Atlantic? Lucy imagined a crash-landing on the water. The plane would initially float and then panic would break out and there’d be a riot getting to the life rafts. “Give me the strength, Holy Spirit, to be of service through this coming ordeal. And if death is my lot…”

  (The plane is not going to crash, My child.)

  Then the plane hit a treacherous series of drops. A stewardess lost control of the orange juice she was pouring and a baby began to cry.

  “Thy will be done,” Lucy muttered, eyes pinched closed, hands clasped tight. “If You want me to drop out of the sky, twenty-eight years old in the prime of life, all right, I can’t stop You. But I’ll be happy to dedicate my life to something or make some ki
nd of promise…”

  (Over Newfoundland, you promised Us two years with Mother Teresa. What do We get now?)

  “And please, Holy Spirit, be with the pilot and copilot and guide them and be with them so that we may all land safely.”

  (But I am with you always.)

  There was a respite from the turbulence and Lucy was determined to distract herself. There were two allowable diversions: the in-flight magazine with every piece read three times except the mutual bonds article, and Lucy’s own notepad with the details of her mission.

  She reviewed: Dr. O’Hanrahan and his assistant, Gabriel O’Donoghue, her childhood friend and fellow grad student at the University of Chicago, had left the university on some kind of hush-hush expedition back in February. Gabriel and the professor were supposed to return in March. They didn’t. Attempts to contact them by the Theology Department proved fruitless. Soon Gabriel stopped sending messages home. Soon the department had lost the trail of Dr. O’Hanrahan, but since he had the department credit card they had his receipts and some clue as to where he had been. Soon, a bill of $2,000 arrived and the department canceled the credit card.

  While assuring Gabriel’s parents that he was all right, and assuring Dr. O’Hanrahan’s sister that the old man was all right, the Theology Department began to suspect that things were not all right: that this bitter, alcoholic, eccentric genius had taken the department credit card along with many other funds and trusts, and was blowing it in a last-ditch effort at revenge on the department he had built and, he felt, had betrayed him.

  “You see, Miss Dantan,” Dr. Shaughnesy had told her a week ago, as she sat in his oaken office, somber and muted as one expected a theological study to be, “O’Hanrahan is a great man with a great mind, but alas, with a great grudge against us as well. Poor Patrick suspects his ouster as chairman was the result of a Masonic plot.”

  Lucy asked, “If he doesn’t listen to you, why would he listen to a stranger like me?”