King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (69 page)

“There are many apartments in our Father’s house.” Then he turned to Peter : “Simon son of Jonah, do you love me still ?”

He gasped : “Yes, Lord, I love you.”

“Then feed my lambs—but do you love me truly, son of Jonah ?”

“Lord, you know that I love you.”

“Then feed my sheep—but, Simon, are you sure that you still love me ?”

“Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you with all my heart.”

“Then feed the lambs and sheep which I led astray.”

“And the Kingdom of God? Is it at hand, after all ?”

“On Passover Eve I learned this : that the Kingdom is not to be taken by violence.”

“But may we expect to live out our thousand years ?”

“While you are still young you clothe and gird yourself ; your feet go wherever your eye directs. But one day old age will overtake you, with feebleness and blindness ; others will clothe and gird you, you will walk gropingly, and at last a Power will come to conduct you to a hated place. Yet is it not written : ‘Though I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou, Lord, art there also’? Come now, follow me !”

Peter, still confused with fear, asked : “Is John to come too ?”

“What is it to you whether he comes or not?”

He glided noiselessly downstairs. Peter stumbled after, and then all the others without exception. They followed him through the dark narrow streets, and out through the East Gate, and down the steep hill into the Kidron valley, and over the foot-bridge up into the Mount of Olives. It seemed to them that the slower or faster they walked, the slower or faster also he walked, so that they never either caught up with him or lost sight of him. The strangest part of this experience, when
they looked back upon it afterwards, was that he no longer seemed to be lame.

They passed Gethsemane and climbed still higher. Near the summit three women stood side by side on a knoll : Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary his queen, and a very tall woman whose face was veiled. These three beckoned to him as if with a single hand, and he went towards them, smiling. But before he reached them, a sudden mist enveloped the mountain and, when it cleared, Jesus and the three women were gone.

The disciples never saw any of them again, though Jesus appeared frequently to them in dreams and occasionally in daylight visions. Once, after their return to Galilee, they had so plain a view of him at the Lake-side, broiling a trout on the red embers of a wood fire, that they could almost hear and smell the sizzling of the fish.

Here the story of Jesus seemingly ends, but the Ebionite bishop declared to me : “No, it is not ended. Jesus by his defeat of death remains alive, an earth-bound Power, excused incarceration in Sheol but not yet risen to Heaven. He is a Power of Good, who persuades men to repentance and love whereas all other earth-bound Powers (except only Elijah) are evil, and persuade men to sin and death. In those days neither piety nor iniquity was universal in Israel ; therefore the Kingdom could not be established, but established it will be in the end, when the Female is conquered, and then he will reign his thousand years and all the world will obey him. For he will be crowned once more, but this time his queen will be worthy of his virtues : a woman not carnal, nor arrayed in splendour as formerly, but modestly clothed in fine white linen. Seven lamps of wisdom shall burn perpetually before his throne and the four beasts of Horeb shall crouch as guardians about it, singing praise to him without cease. And the corruptive Sea shall be no more. Until that day Israel must remain a peculiar nation, though scattered and persecuted, and at Jerusalem the twelve tribes shall be reunited at last.”

MY first clue to a new solution of the Nativity problem came from the
Acts of the Apostles
, chapter xiii., in which Sergius Paulus the Roman Procurator of Cyprus is recorded to have been “amazed” by Paul and Barnabas when they told him about Jesus. I could see no good reason for questioning the general truth of this story, despite Hilgenfeld’s plausible suggestion that in the original version Barnabas’s wicked opponent Bar-jesus, alias Elymas the Sorcerer, was really Paul. And I knew that it took a great deal to amaze one of Claudius’s hard-headed Governor-Generals, whose guiding juridical principle was
title
: for example, they would have classed the followers of a man who had falsely claimed to be King of the Jews with the abettors of one found in possession of stolen Government property. Paulus is unlikely to have been in the least interested in religious or ethical theory, and there is no suggestion in the
Acts
that he was baptized into the Christian faith. These considerations made me ponder on Pilate’s extraordinary favour in granting Jesus a private interview, usually reserved for Roman citizens, and on the unconventional
titulus
which was fixed to the Cross at his orders. The logical development of these interrelated problems, in the light of certain passages in the
Gospel to the Egyptians
and the
Proto-evangelium
, was so startling that for a while I did not know what to make of it. I confided it in outline to Sir Ronald Storrs, Classical scholar and Orientalist, who also happens to have been a successor in office to both Sergius Paulus and Pontius Pilate. It was his generous encouragement—though he did not commit himself to accepting my hypothesis—that started me working on the book. However, who Jesus was by birth is of much less interest to-day than what he did and said ; and I hope that critical attention will be focused rather on my later chapters—especially on those dealing with his attempted fulfilment of the Deutero-Zechariah’s prophecy, which I believe to be the only valid explanation of the extraordinary events which immediately preceded his arrest.

A detailed commentary written to justify the unorthodox views contained in this book would be two or three times as long as the book itself, and would take years to complete ; I beg to be excused the task. Take, for example, the incident in Chapter Six of the terrifying apparition which appeared in the Sanctuary to Zacharias the Priest. It would not be enough to quote Epiphanius on the lost Gnostic Gospel
The Descent of Mary
(“in which are horrible and deadly things”) as my authority for a story which nobody has hitherto taken seriously and which is usually connected with Tacitus’s ill-informed account of a secret Levite ass-cult. Nor would it help to quote Apion, who is my sole authority for the story of Zabidus the Edomite and the golden ass-mask of Dora, because nobody has questioned Josephus’s good faith in rejecting it as unhistorical, despite his dishonest denial that any such
place as Dora existed in Edom. My acceptance of both unlikely stories depends on a view of Herod’s Messianic obsession and his attempt at reviving the ancient onager-cult of Set-Typhon, which could be justified only by adducing an impressive set of authorities and commenting on them at length. Then there is Dr. M. R. James, who holds that the Zacharias story in
The Descent of Mary
is a libel connected with early
graffiti
of a crucified ass ; whereas I take these to be not caricatures but pious Judaeo-Christian identifications of Jesus with the Messiah Son of David, whose symbol in Rabbinical literature was the ass, as that of the Messiah Son of Joseph was the ox. This contention would involve me in another long critical argument.

Or take the Unspeakable Name, which according to the Jewish tradition of the
Tol’Doth Yeshu
was illegitimately employed by Jesus for raising Lazarus. My arrangement of the letters is based on original research which begins with an account of the origin of the alphabet given by the mythographer Hyginus (
Fable
277) and ends with various guesses at the Name made by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Philo Byblius and others. I take both the Name and cult of Jehovah to be of non-Semitic origin, but could not prove this credibly in less than a hundred pages. So, refraining even from a bibliography, which would be more impressive than helpful, I undertake to my readers that every important element in my story is based on some tradition, however tenuous, and that I have taken more than ordinary pains to verify my historical background. These researches have taken me into uncomfortably remote fields. For example, the mystical meanings here given to the Golden Calf and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom are deduced largely from the remnants of Gnostic, ultimately Essene, secret lore preserved in Calder’s
Hearings of the Scholars
and other miscellanies of ancient Irish poetic doctrine, and in the thirteenth-century Welsh
Llyfr Coch o Hergest
; and they yield their full sense only in the light of Babylonian astrology, Talmudic speculation, the liturgy of the Ethiopian Church, the homilies of Clement of Alexandria, the religious essays of Plutarch, and recent studies of Bronze Age archaeology.

I write without any wish to offend orthodox Catholics, who can afford to disregard my story as irrelevant to their faith ; for Catholicism is an incontrovertibly logical system of thought, once it is granted that many of the events mentioned in the Gospels transcend human understanding and must therefore be taken on faith. Though I reject this premiss, it will be clear at least that I respect Jesus as having been more uncompromising, more consistent, and more loyal to his God than even most Christians allow.

To write a historical novel by the analeptic method—the intuitive recovery of forgotten events by a deliberate suspension of time—one must train oneself to think wholly in contemporary terms. This is most easily done by impersonating the supposed author of the story, who has much the same function as the carefully costumed figure placed in the foreground of an architectural drawing to correct misapprehensions about
its size, date and geographical position. I have chosen to be the mouthpiece of old Agabus the Decapolitan, who wrote in the year
A.D.
93, rather than of some closer contemporary of Jesus, because the divergences of the Synoptic tradition from what appears to be the true story call for explanatory comment on Church policy after the Fall of Jerusalem.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to a reasonable view of Jesus is not the loss of a large part of his secret history but the influence of the late and propagandist
Gospel according to John
. Though it embodies valuable fragments of a genuine tradition not found in the Synoptic Gospels, the critical reservations that have to be made in reading it are proved by the metaphysical prologue, which makes no sense whatever in the original context ; by the author’s wilful ignorance of Jewish affairs ; and by the Alexandria Greek rhetoric unfairly ascribed to a sage and poet who never wasted a word.

My solution to the problem of Jesus’s nativity implies a rejection of the mystical Virgin Birth doctrine and will therefore offend many otherwise irreligious Christians, even though the doctrine cannot be traced earlier than the second century
A.D.
and cannot be reconciled either with
Romans
i. 3,
Hebrews
vii. 14 or
Galatians
iv. 4—documents which are earlier in date than any of the Canonical Gospels. Its value as a means of asserting the divinity of Jesus and glorifying him equally with heathen gods was first remarked upon by Justin Martyr in his philosophical
Apology for the Christians
(
A.D.
139) ; and its value in exculpating the earlier Christians from any suspicion of trying to revive the Davidic dynasty is clear from the persecutions of the House of David under the Emperors Trajan and Domitian. But the Christians were not wilful liars, and the bold theory of Jesus’s miraculous birth could never have been advanced had there not already been a mystery connected with his parentage : it must have seemed the only way of harmonizing the apparently contradictory traditions that Joseph was not Jesus’s father though contracted in marriage to Mary (
Matthew
i. 18–19) and that Jesus was “born under the Law”—that is, legitimately—“that he might redeem those who were under the Law” (
Galatians
iv. 5).

No store should be set by the earliest extant text of
Matthew
i. 16, discovered only recently, according to which “Joseph begat Jesus”. I take it for an Ebionite interpolation designed to champion Jesus’s legitimacy against enemies of Christianity who, like the Roman Celsus, falsely described him as the bastard son of a Greek soldier. The Ebionites’ difficulty was that if Mary had already been contracted in marriage to Joseph when he found her pregnant, this would in Jewish Law (
Deuteronomy
xxii. 13–21) have bastardized her child even if the marriage had not been consummated and she had in the interval secretly married someone else. But the solution is infelicitous as contradicting the credible account of Joseph’s embarrassment given two verses later in the canonical text and as making nonsense of the story of the interview with Pilate. On the other hand, the Virgin Birth doctrine, now that no one believes
the God Hermes to be the Word of Zeus, and Hercules and Dionysus to be his sons, no longer has the same force in religious polemics as it had in Justin’s day ; and since the prevailing view in Protestant countries is that Jesus was, beyond everything, a moral exemplar, the suggestion that he was not a man in the ordinary sense of the word, and not therefore subject to human error, may be said to discourage imitation of his virtues. True, many saints have held the doctrine serenely, and it can be argued on their behalf that if Jesus is regarded as a mere man his authority is greatly diminished ; but to the mass of people nowadays the choice is between a Jesus born in the ordinary course of nature and one as mythical as Perseus or Prometheus.

The long dialogue in Chapter Nineteen, between Jesus and Mary, may puzzle readers who do not know their Bible or Bible origins well. I am here suggesting a new theory of the composition of the early historical books : that to the parts not already existing in, say, the ninth century
B.C.
in the form of ballads or prose-epics were added anecdotes based on deliberate misinterpretation of an ancient set of ritual icons, captured by the Hebrews when they seized Hebron from the “Children of Heth”, whoever these people may have been. A similar technique of misinterpretation—let us call it iconotropy—was adopted in ancient Greece as a means of confirming the Olympian religious myths at the expense of the Minoan ones which they superseded. For example, the story of the unnatural union of Pasiphaë (“She who shines for all”) and the bull, the issue of which was the monstrous Minotaur, seems to be based on an icon of the sacred marriage between Minos, the King of Cnossus (pictured with a bull’s head), and the representative of the Moon-goddess, in the course of which a live bull was sacrificed. The story of the rape of Europa (“Broadface”) by Zeus disguised as a bull belongs to a companion icon—an example of which has been found in a pre-Hellenic burial near Midea—showing the same Goddess riding on a bull. Again, the story of Oedipus (“Club-foot”) and the Sphinx who committed suicide when he guessed her riddle seems to be based on an icon of the Lame King (Hephaestus) adoring the Triple Goddess of Thebes after having killed his predecessor Laertes. The riddle, “four legs at dawn, two legs at noon and three legs at sunset”, suggests an attached cartoon showing a child, a youth and an old man with a staff—the meaning of which is that the Triple Goddess is man’s sovereign from the cradle to the grave.