Decipher Page 4

  The audience gave a louder than expected note of amusement but somehow Scott couldn’t trust their motives. They were academics for the most part, with a sprinkling of students. They had come to listen to the man whose little tour had caused quite a stir in some circles. Even the President, a devout and notable Baptist, had felt the urge to come out and actively question his work. One tiny professor from U-Dub. It was ridiculous. Where was the religious freedom in this country anymore? Had it all been a myth to begin with?

  Scott glanced down exasperated at the equipment and caught a glimpse of his own reflection. Neatly trimmed hair. Square jaw. He fiddled with switches, but it was no use. Forlornly, he glanced over to the student research assistant they had assigned to him for just this kind of emergency. “Uh, could you—uh? Hello?”

  A guy from Federal Express was getting her to sign for a package. Scott was amazed. “Uh, excuse me, sir? I’m trying to lecture here.”

  “When we promise ten-thirty, sir, we mean it.”

  Scott couldn’t help it. He broke into a smile and burst out laughing to a squeal of feedback off the PA system. The audience laughed with him.

  “A round of applause for our friends at FedEx,” Scott chuckled.

  The delivery guy took off his cap and gave a bow on his way out, to the delight of the audience. Meanwhile, Scott’s assistant had dumped the package and was vaulting onto the stage.

  Scott cupped his hand over the microphone. “Thanks.”

  She was a bright girl, November Dryden, very bright. Very attractive. But more importantly—very patient. “Knock ’em dead,” she said, returning to her seat with a smile.

  With his lecture back on track, Scott shared an amused jibe with the audience. “I think, on balance, ancient manuscripts are a lot easier to handle,” he said.

  Another ripple of laughter bounced around the auditorium as the audience settled down and the first slide popped up onto the screen.

  Scott was a linguistic and cultural anthropologist by trade. He studied social structures, law, politics, religion and technology, but his specialty was language. He was an epigraphist who spent years deciphering ancient inscriptions. Yet despite the confidence he had in his own work, he’d worried about this lecture more than any other. It might be dangerous to his health, because this was the Bible Belt. A lecture on newly discovered ancient manuscripts that called the Bible into question, wasn’t going to cause lively debate, so much as explosive disagreement. And then there was the other issue—

  “To begin again,” Scott continued. “In the beginning was the word. And that word is ‘unbeliever.’ Let me start my lecture today by being very honest about my beliefs.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t believe in Jesus Christ.”

  There were stunned expressions in the audience. Scott shuffled his papers.

  “The Gospels,” he explained, “were written in Greek. Where we have ‘word,’ the Greeks have logos. But logos means more than just ‘word.’ It means thought, deed, action. It means ‘word in action.’ It’s the same in Hebrew and in Aramaic. Some have recognized this dilemma and opted for the word ‘act.’ In the beginning, there was the act. But that still doesn’t convey the full meaning of logos. Christians wanted to attract Jews to their faith; Jesus was, after all, a Jew. So Christianity—like all great religions—borrowed from its predecessors both the language and imagery of what had gone before. Hence, in the beginning was logos because to the Hebrews, this was nothing new. In Proverbs it’s the wisdom motif.

  “To entice Pagans, all they did was move into a bunch of old churches and not bother redecorating. All those vast mosaics of Christ, the bearded savior—those are portraits of Zeus and Jupiter. Those churches are Greco-Roman. So Christianity then, is the earliest known example of religious recycling. However, how much it borrowed has always been a source of debate. But today I brought the answer with me. And, if I may, I’d like to share it with you.”

  Scott sipped his water. Partly to quench his thirst, but mostly to gauge his audience.

  Ancient texts. They had been calling Christianity into question now for decades. The first had turned up in 1947. A shepherd boy by the name of Muhammad adh-Dhib, or Muhammad the Wolf, of the Ta’amireh tribe of Bedouin, had passed by the ancient settlement of Qumran, by the Dead Sea, and stumbled upon ancient scrolls in some clay jars in a cave. The most recent, the Istanbul Genezah, had been found in a chest in the roof of a mosque. A genezah was a collection of prayer scripture—stored but no longer used, usually because they were worn out. These things hadn’t seen the light of day in at least 1,500 years.

  Throughout this time the Christian establishment had suppressed any information that questioned its religion. But since the mid-1980s a small academic fringe had seen it as their duty to reveal Christ as merely a man. It was a viewpoint Scott hadn’t entirely shared to begin with, but things had changed.

  “So,” he continued now, “if we’ve got problems with just one word, think about the sort of problems we have when we consider that the Bible contains hundreds of thousands of words, and all of them from mostly dead languages. We have to admit that our interpretations, from any point of view, are going to be open to error. For example, how many of you know somebody who speaks fluent Aramaic and uses it in everyday speech?” He let slip a smile. Time for an anecdote.

  “Okay, how many of you here speak German?”

  There was a flutter of hushed conversation from the assorted nervous academics.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to call you up on stage and saw you in half. Just give me a round figure. One, two? Six?” He could see a few hands slowly go up. He nodded. “Six. Right. Okay—out of an audience of maybe two hundred. In Europe, maybe a hundred million people speak German. Maybe more, I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I don’t care. The point is, if you wanted to know how to speak German you’d ask a German, right? I mean, they use it every day.”

  Sounds of agreement.

  “Which is ironic, because people still get it wrong. Even when it comes to the simplest phraseology. Like President Kennedy when he went to Berlin back in the middle of the last century. What did he do? He got up and addressed thousands of Germans, intent on telling them that he was willing to embrace Germany after all the ill-will of the Second World War. Intent on telling them he was one of them. He wanted to say that he understood them. That he too was a Berliner, you know, as opposed to a New Yorker or a Londoner. He wanted to say: I am a Berliner. So right off the cuff he announced: Ich bin ein Berliner!”

  He paused. “For those of you who don’t know, ich means ‘I.’ Bin means ‘am.’ You know, ein, zwei, drei—one, two, three. Well, ein also means ‘a.’ And ‘Berliner’ does indeed mean ‘coming from Berlin.’ So on the surface of it Kennedy said exactly what he wanted to say, right?” There was murmuring, but these were academics. They knew they had been led into a trap. And some of them were old enough to remember the trap the first time around. But for the gullible in the audience, Scott carried it through. He let his face fall. Let his voice go very quiet.

  “Except that it doesn’t quite take into account the nuance of German grammar. By placing ein in front of Berliner, President Kennedy turned Berliner into a noun instead of an adjective. He’d already said ‘A Berliner’ by using bin. But by using the word ein it turned Berliner into a thing, not a place. And a Berliner is a very different ‘thing’ to the capital of Germany.

  “What President Kennedy actually proclaimed, when he stood up in front of the world’s media that day, was: I am a doughnut.

  “I leave it to you to decide which of the two statements was more accurate.”

  The slide up on the screen was of a small fragment of papyrus.

  “This was found in 1920 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt,” Scott told his audience. “It dates from 100-150 of the Common Era, or C.E. I use C.E. instead of A.D. and B.C.E. in place of B.C. I don’t think dates should hinge on the birth of Christ.” The audience definitely did not like that. “So what does this papyrus tell us? In short, that John’s Gospel was written at least fifty years after the death of Jesus. It’s therefore not an eyewitness account, and must be suspect.

  “Think about it … all that. From one tiny piece of papyrus.”

  For Scott it also confirmed that John was written at a time when the Roman Empire was considering adopting Christianity to maintain its grip on power by representing the masses. John, therefore, was probably written by a Roman, since it was fundamental in describing Jesus’s role, and the rules governing Catholicism—a Rome-orientated institution. As a religion it looked to Scott like it had very little to do with God and a lot to do with politics.

  “The Nag Hammadi scrolls are interesting because among them was found a complete Gospel of Thomas consisting of one hundred sayings of Jesus—a Gnostic text that pre-dates the Gospels yet the Catholic Church has branded it heretical. Historical fact is heretical?

  “Okay, since there are freshmen in the auditorium today, you’ll forgive me if I over-explain terminology. ‘Gnostic’ is Greek and means ‘hidden knowledge’—usually, hidden knowledge of the divine. Why do we know there’s hidden knowledge? Because the language of the text has quite clearly been manipulated. It uses imagery as its weapon. After all, this was a new religion. In order to lure in new worshippers they needed to make them feel comfortable. So when, for example, Jesus Christ—Christ simply being Greek for ‘Messiah’ and Jesus being Greek for the name Joshua—when Joshua walks in the wilderness or walks on water … there’s only one other guy who ever did stuff like that, and he too was a prophet. He was never played up to be supernatural although he was played by Charlton Heston. I am, of course, referring to Moses. So what better way to enhance your power than by being likened to the best—that went before you?”

>   Scott took another sip of water and eyed the audience. A couple of people were walking out. He wasn’t surprised. He was, however, surprised that there hadn’t been more. He waited for the door to close gently behind them. People had a peculiar habit of conveniently forgetting even the most widely accepted facts. After all, hadn’t the Egyptian goddess Isis promised an afterlife that was better than this life, thousands of years before Christ?

  Scott smiled, warmly. This was where the fun began. “The Nag Hammadi scrolls are also interesting because they’re Coptic—written in the later form of Egyptian which used a Greek alphabet. But Joshua and his contemporaries spoke Aramaic, so was it unusual for people who spoke Aramaic to write everything down in Greek? Well, actually no. If we think about present-day Belgium, no one writes in Dutch or Flemish, they write in German or French, or more often than not, English.

  “Although none of the Gospels are written in Aramaic, we know the writers spoke that language because Aramaic language structures are hidden within the text. Remember my point about German grammar?”

  He keyed the machine and another slide popped up into view—an ancient scroll covered neatly in ordered brown script. “But, that,” he said, “is the opening page of a lost book. One I think you’ll all find quite fascinating.

  “For years there’s been speculation about a lost book of Q, or Quelle, which was extensively researched by John Kloppenborg in the mid-1980s. Kloppenborg believed that somewhere, there must be the original first-hand account of Jesus before the writers of the Gospels had their say. The consensus was that The Book of Q, which has shaped our culture, was a verbal history, which may initially have been written in Aramaic.

  “But that page,” he pointed to the screen, “proves something else entirely. It is not, and I stress not, The Book of Q. It’s much older, as indicated by Chlorine 36 isotope tests. The genetic deterioration shows it was written on the skin of a very old goat. And it proves for the very first time that Christ borrowed his ideas from the cult of Mithras. This book dates from four to five hundred years before any such Jesus Christ was ever born. Yet the New Testament shares its imagery and its symbolism almost perfectly, almost word for word. It is not a Mithraic text, and it is not Christian. It’s a combination of the two. It’s the proverbial missing link. And it was written in Aramaic.”

  Scott grinned, a touch smugly. He finished off his lecture with a simple, quiet question to the audience. “Anyone here still want to be Christian?”

  It was sometime later that Scott found himself inside a wooden box. Clean and white, the whole approach was airy, instead of the dark and murky confessionals of Old Europe. Barely masking a schoolboy chortle, he announced: “Bless me, Fergus, for I have sinned.”

  The hatch behind the grating slid back with a vicious clap. “Yes, yes. Cut the crap.”

  There was a sigh, followed by a dull tapping sound. It stopped for a moment, then continued. Scott sat forward and peered through the grill at the priest beyond. He could see him rolling his eyes, while fishing around inside his black cassock for a Zippo. He was mumbling some sort of an apology to the heavens as he tapped out a cigarette.

  “What’re you doing?” Scott asked. The first puff of smoke drifted over. He could smell it was a good brand of cigarette. Almost certainly European.

  “Calming my nerves. I can’t believe the sort of hornet’s nest you’ve managed to stir up, Richie, my boy.” He tried to spit out a shred of tobacco but it was sticking to the tip of his tongue. He brushed at his cassock. “A real big fucking mess.”

  They eyed each other. “Let’s eat,” Scott said.

  They strolled across the neatly cut glade in the center of the Grove, heading for the Associated Student Body building where there were better cafeterias and a livelier atmosphere.

  The Grove was a magnificent piece of parkland at the heart of Magnolia University. It may have been March, but it felt like summer in Mississippi. The sun shone brightly through the trees and left beautiful dappled spots of shade on the ground. For the most part, the students wore shorts and Tshirts. In his priestly guise Fergus seemed to be taking it all in with the serene air of a good Catholic gentleman. Which for the most part he was.

  But Scott knew him better than that; they’d grown up together, after all. Scott knew the date, time and telephone number of the girl Fergus had lost his virginity to. Fifteen years later and Scott still couldn’t accept that his best friend had become a man of the cloth. And as for that girl jogging down sorority row, was she wearing any underwear?

  “You’re a married man, Richard, stop embarrassing yourself.”

  “Separated,” Scott grunted, kicking the grass in lazy strides and digging his hands in his khaki pants. “What happened to us, Fergus?”

  “You and me? Or you and Jessica?”

  Scott winced at the mention of his estranged wife’s name. His friend really did have this priest thing down to a fine art. Fergus had flown in from Vatican City especially for his lecture and would be going back in the morning, but somehow Scott got the impression their friendship had nothing to do with Fergus’s decision to come here.

  Fergus reached for another cigarette and scratched his head. “Look, Richie, that was an interesting lecture you gave, but are you honestly trying to say that the Catholic Church was involved in a sixty-year conspiracy to keep the Dead Sea Scrolls suppressed?”

  “And others.”

  “Absurd. We can’t even keep our own clergy in order, so who the hell was supposed to be trustworthy enough to sit on that particular time-bomb? Ireland’s government fell in 1994 because some priests turned out to be pedophiles. I know the Church is fallible.” He paused, then: “Yes, there was a conspiracy, but an academic one. I agree, it’s indefensible. A gang of pompous old asses refusing to release the documents until they’d had first crack at translating them. But what you came out with today … well, I can’t see the Church crumbling over that one. You know what people are like when they hear a new crackpot theory—they ignore it. Like the one about Jesus going to Britain and starting a school, or the one where he married Mary Magdalene and moved to France—”

  “I happen to like that one.”

  “And then there was that half-assed theory about how he’d been trained in the mystical arts of Egyptian magic. People will believe what they want to believe. And they believe in Jesus Christ, Our Lord. I believe. Richie, you’re throwing your career away on bullshit!”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “The Church obviously means a lot to you, or you wouldn’t put in this much effort.”

  They faced off on the lawn. Scott still had his fists planted firmly in his pockets. His tie flapped lightly against his crisp pale-blue shirt in the breeze. He smirked. “Religion, Fergus, is like a disease of the human mind. It’s like rabies. You get bitten and suddenly there’s this great foaming at the mouth, all sense and reason thrown to the wind. There’s a lot of shouting and then you bite someone else in all the madness and it gets passed on down the line across generations, and national boundaries. Forget AIDS. This stuff kills millions.”

  Fergus simply took a long drag on his cigarette.

  Scott said: “Ever heard of the Church of Simon Kimbangu?” The priest shook his head. “It’s on the west coast of Africa. Simon Kimbangu was a militant who believed in democracy. The government considered him a revolutionary and arrested him, but his followers, believing he’d gone to heaven, set up a church in his honor. Prayed to him for salvation. They did any damn idiotic thing except bother to take the twenty-minute walk down to the local jailhouse where Kimbangu was starving to death. And even more insane—the church still exists today! Think about it! Why did the Crusaders lay siege to a castle at Hosen Al Akre for three days before realizing it was populated by sheep?” Scott suddenly asked innocently. “Religion, that’s why.”