Knights of the Black and White

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 form 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.

St. Clair would never forget the exhilaration he felt on first reading and hearing such things, for this was heady and frightening information, reeking, at first, of apostasy and heresy. But it had been made clear to him by then, by his sponsors, that the Order of Rebirth had documented everything of which it spoke, and the evidence it possessed, smuggled out of Judea by the fugitive priests and their families, was impressive in its scope, its great age, and its obvious authenticity. There was sufficient material there, as Stephen had since seen for himself, for several lifetimes of study, and many of his predecessors, archivists and antiquarians down through an entire millennium, had dedicated their lives to investigating, translating, and interpreting what was there.

He now believed implicitly that the ancient Order of Rebirth in Sion was the sole legitimate descendant of the Jerusalem Assembly remaining on earth, and that should its existence be discovered, it would be eradicated instantly by Saint Paul’s creation, the Christian Church, which in the course of twelve hundred years had systematically rooted out and destroyed all opposition, even the most supposedly benign, in a ruthless and sustained effort to protect its own power and values and to keep the entire world subjugated to its will—a will that had been indisputably created and formulated by men. That latter was an important point, for these so-called representatives of God, whether they called themselves bishops, archbishops, cardinals, popes, or patriarchs, were all men, mortal men who, by their lives and actions, demonstrated daily that they knew little and cared less about their supposedly immortal progenitor, the man who had lived so long ago in Judea and died on a cross for fomenting rebellion against Rome.

Paul, St. Clair now believed, had been much more a self-serving cynic than he had been a saint. He had had the acumen, and an opportunistic instinct, that had enabled him to recognize a magnificent concept when it confronted him. And so he had usurped it, cleansed it of everything that non-Jews might find offensive, and then built it inexorably into a self-perpetuating organism, such a potent force for revolution and reformation, but ultimately for gathering revenues, that centuries later the emperor Constantine—Paul’s equal, at least, in self-serving opportunism—had been inspired to adapt it to his own benefit.

By the time of that transformation by Constantine, however, three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, the families that nurtured the Order of Rebirth had lived in the south of ancient Gaul for more than fifteen generations, on the land where they had settled after their arrival there, and no one, including themselves, would ever have suspected that their ancestral origins lay far from where they now lived in prosperity. The Friendly Families, as they called themselves, had blended seamlessly into their adopted society and had become friendly clans, for while the thirty original families were still there, their numbers had expanded enormously, and while all were aware that the bonds that held them in such close amity were ancient and even sacred in some arcane and unknowable way, few of them ever wondered over the why of such a thing. Their relationship to all the other Friendly Families was a given, a fact of life that had existed before the parents of their grandparents were born and would continue to exist long after they themselves and their own grandchildren were gone. They took their interrelationship, and their undoubted Christianity, for granted.

Only in the deepest recesses of their families’ most close-held secrets, guarded jealously and conscientiously by perhaps one single member of each family in each generation, was the truth about their origins enshrined and passed down through the generations in compliance with a sacred duty. And it was a truth that none of their relatives would have believed.

Their ancestors, the founders of the Friendly Families, had all been priests of the Jerusalem Assembly, adherents of the original Ecclesia of Jesus and James the Just. The death of Jesus, at the hands of the Romans, had been taken in stride by the people of Jerusalem and of Judea, but when his brother James was brutally murdered in turn, beaten to death with a fuller’s club by unknown assassins, the resultant outcry had precipitated the final Jewish uprising against the Herodians and Rome, and had brought Vespasian and his son Titus, with their remorseless armies, to wipe out the Jewish troublemakers once and for all time.

Towards the end of the siege of Jerusalem, when the destruction of their city and its temple was seen to be inevitable, the priests of the Assembly had hidden their most sacred artifacts, records, and relics deep beneath the ground, securely beyond the reach of the rapacious Romans. Only then, when they were sure they had done all that they could do to safeguard what they could not carry with them, did they join the thousands of people fleeing Judea. They made their way through the Mediterranean lands, traveling for many years as a large and seemingly loose but none the less tight-knit and self-sufficient group, until they reached the south of Iberia, and from there they struck northward into southern Gaul, settling eventually throughout the area known as the Languedoc. And there they remained, consolidating their possessions, their knowledge, and their most sacred traditions, finally entrusting the guardianship of their most precious secrets to a secret guild that they formed from the most trustworthy men among their families.

St. Clair found it bitterly ironic that he, who had been raised, to a great extent, by monks and warriors, and had dreamed himself of being a Christian monk in his ancestral province of Anjou, should now be numbered among the nine most anomalous beings in the annals of the Christian Church: the warrior monks of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ. He found it even more ludicrous, however, that he should have been the one to become so obsessed by the history of Christianity that he was now close to having the ability, if not to destroy it, to cast genuine doubts at least upon the authenticity of its central tenets.