The Last Templar

Chapter 67

"What you need to realize," Vance explained, "is that the early days of Christianity are just one big scholarly black spot, when it comes to verifiable, documented facts. But if there isn't much we can definitely say did happen in the Holy Land almost two thousand years ago, there's one thing we do know: none of the four gospels that make up the New Testament was written by contemporaries of Jesus. Which," he remarked as he noted Reilly's reaction, "never fails to take followers of the faith, like you, by surprise.

"The earliest of the four," he clarified, "the Gospel of Mark—or rather, the one we refer to as the Gospel of Mark, since we don't even really know who wrote it, as it was common practice at that time to attribute written works to famous people—is thought to have been written at least forty years after Jesus's death. That's forty years without CNN, without videotaped interviews, without a Google search turning up scores of eyewitness reports from those who actually knew Him. So at best, what we're talking about here are stories that were passed on by word of mouth, over forty years, without any written record. So you tell me, Agent Reilly—if you were running an investigation, how accurate would you consider such evidence, after forty years of primitive, uneducated, superstitious people telling stories around their campfires?"

Reilly didn't have time to answer, as Vance quickly continued. "Far more troubling, if you ask me, is the story of how these particular four gospels actually came to be included in the New Testament.

You see, over the two hundred years following the writing of the Gospel of Mark, we know that many other gospels were written, with all kinds of tales about Jesus's life. As the early movement grew more popular and spread among the scattered communities, stories of Jesus's life took on local flavors that were influenced by the particular circumstances of each community. Dozens of different gospels were floating around, often at odds with one another. We know this for a fact because, in December 1945, some Arab peasants were digging for fertilizer in the Jabal al-Tarif mountains of Upper Egypt, close to the town of Nag Hammadi, and they discovered an earthenware jar almost six feet high. At first, they hesitated to break it, fearful that a djinn—an evil spirit—could be trapped inside. But they did break into it, hoping to find gold instead, and that led to one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of all time: inside the jar were thirteen papyrus books, bound in tooled gazelle leather. The peasants, unfortunately, didn't realize the value of what they found, and some of the books and the loose papyrus leaves went up in flames in the ovens of their homes.

Other pages were lost as the documents found their way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. What did survive, though, were fifty-two texts that are still the subject of great controversy among biblical scholars, as these writings—commonly referred to as the Gnostic Gospels— refer to sayings and beliefs of Jesus that are at odds with those of the New Testament."

"Gnostic?" Reilly asked. "Like the Cathars?"

Vance smiled. "Precisely," he nodded. "Among the texts found at Nag Hammadi was die Gospel of Thomas, which identifies itself as a secret gospel and opens with the line: 'These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.' His twin. And there's more. Bound in the same volume with it was the Gospel of Philip, which openly describes Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene as an intimate one. Mary has her own text—the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene is regarded as a disciple and a leader of a Christian group.

There's also the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the secret book of John. There's the Gospel of Truth, with its distinctly Buddhist undertones . . . the list goes on.

"A common thread in all these gospels," he continued, "apart from attributing acts and words to Jesus that are pretty different from those in the gospels of the New Testament, is that they considered common Christian beliefs, like the virgin birth and the Resurrection, to be naive delusions. Even worse, these writings were also uniformly gnostic, because, although they refer to Jesus and His disciples, the message they conveyed was that to know oneself, at the deepest level, was also to know God—that is, by looking within oneself to find the sources of joy, sorrow, love, and hate, one would find God."

Vance explained how the early Christian movement was illegal and needed to have some kind of theological structure if it was going to survive and grow. "The proliferation of conflicting gospels risked leading it to a potentially fatal fragmentation. It needed a leadership that was impossible to achieve if each community had its own beliefs and its own gospel. By the end of the second century, a power structure started to take shape. A three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons emerged in various communities, claiming to speak for the majority, believing themselves to be the guardians of the only true faith. Now I'm not saying these people were necessarily power-hungry monsters," Vance declared. "They were actually very brave in what they were trying to do, and they were probably genuinely scared that without a set of widely accepted, rigid rules and rituals, the whole movement would wither away and die."

He told Reilly how, at a time when being a Christian meant risking persecution and even death, the very survival of the Church became contingent on the establishment of some kind of order. This grew until, around the year 180 and under the leadership of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, a single, unified view was finally imposed. There could be only one Church with one set of beliefs and rituals. All other viewpoints were rejected as heresy. Their doctrine was straightforward: there could be no salvation outside the true Church; its members should be orthodox, which meant

"straight thinking"; and the Church should be catholic, which meant "universal." This meant that the cottage industry of gospels had to be stopped. Irenaeus decided that there should be four true gospels, using the curious argument that as there were four corners to the universe and four principal winds, so there should be four gospels. He wrote five volumes, entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge, in which he denounced most of the existing works as blasphemous, settling on the four gospels we know today as the definitive record of God's word—inerrant, infallible, and more than sufficient for the needs of the religion's adherents.

"None of the Gnostic Gospels had a passion narrative," Vance pointed out, "but the four gospels Irenaeus chose did. They spoke about Jesus's death on the Cross and about His resurrection, they linked the story being promoted to the fundamental ritual of the Eucharist, the Last Supper. And they didn't even start off that way," he scoffed. "In its earliest version, the first of them to be included, the Gospel of Mark, doesn't talk about a virgin birth at all, nor does it have the Resurrection in it. It just ends with Jesus's empty tomb, where a mysterious young man, a transcendental being of some kind, like an angel, tells a group of women who come to the tomb that Jesus is waiting for them in Galilee. And this terrifies these women, they run off and they don't tell anyone about it— which makes you wonder how Mark or whoever wrote that gospel would have ever heard about it in the first place. But that's how Mark originally ended his gospel. It's only in Matthew—fifty years later—and then in Luke, ten years after that, that elaborate postresurrection appearances were added to Mark's original ending, which is itself then rewritten.

"It took another two hundred years—to the year 367, in fact—for the list of twenty-seven texts that comprise what we know as the New Testament to be finally agreed upon. By the end of that century, Christianity had become the officially approved religion, and possession of any of the texts considered heretical was held to be a criminal offense. All known copies of the alternate gospels were burned and destroyed. All, that is, except for the ones spirited away to the caves of Nag Hammadi, which don't show Jesus to be supernatural in any way," Vance continued, his eyes riveted on Reilly. "They were banned because the Jesus of these texts was just a roving wise man who preaches a life of possessionless wandering and of wholehearted acceptance of fellow human beings. He's not here to save us from sin and from eternal damnation, He's here to guide us to some kind of spiritual understanding. And once a disciple reaches enlightenment—and this notion must 153

have given Irenaeus and his cronies a few sleepless nights—the master is no longer needed. The student and the teacher become equals. The four canon gospels, die ones in the New Testament—they see Jesus as our Savior, the Messiah, the Son of God. Orthodox Christians—and Orthodox Jews, for that matter—insist that an unbridgeable chasm separates man from his Creator. The gospels that were found in Nag Hammadi contradicted this: for them, self-knowledge is the knowledge of God; the self and the divine are one and the same. Even worse, by describing Jesus as a teacher, an enlightened sage—they consider Him a man, someone you or I could emulate, and that wouldn't do for Irenaeus and his lot. He couldn't just be a man, He had to be much more than that.

He had to be the Son of God. He had to be unique, because by His being unique, the Church becomes unique, the only path to salvation. By painting Him in that light, the early Church could claim that if you weren't with them, following their rules, living the way they wanted you to, you were doomed to damnation."

Vance paused, seeming to study Reilly's face before leaning forward, his whispery voice slicing the air.

"What I'm telling you, Agent Reilly, is that basically everything Christians believe in today and have believed since the fourth century, all the rituals they observe, the Eucharist, the holy days—none of it was part of what the immediate followers of Jesus believed in. It was all made up, it was all tagged on much later—rituals and supernatural beliefs, which in many cases were imported from other religions, from the Resurrection to Christmas. But the Church's founders did a great job. It's been a runaway bestseller for almost two thousand years, but ... I think the Templars were right. It had already gotten way out of hand in their days with people getting butchered if they chose to believe in something different.

"And looking at the state of the world today," he announced with unsettling conviction, "I think it's definitely passed its sell-by date."