EPILOGUE
THE NEW WORLD
And that is the story of his life. What came after was afterlife, new life, and those who have tried to explain it make the matter more confusing. Tales of earthquakes on a Sunday morning, and debates as to was he dead three days, a day and a half, what did three days mean? What did life mean? For, if I saw him, I certainly never saw him the way I had when I knew him before, and I am loathe to speak too much about it. Everything that happened on the other side of that morning on the first day of the week was best spoken of by Mark, years later, when he said the women, and by women he meant me, came and found a tomb rocked open and empty, winding sheets and a headcloth abandoned, and fled in terror.
John was not content to leave it there. Almost, he should have been. All I will speak of is losing myself for once, for all I had left of him was that body, and then it was gone, and then there was the man in the garden, familiar and yet unfamiliar. And at the sound of my name I knew who he was,and it was almost as if, for the time I knew who I was as well. He did not say, but it seemed as if he said, “That old story is ended. Tell a new one.”
And I will not tell you the story you know, for that was told by a man who was not even a Jew, who was in league with a disciple who was never a disciple. And I wish that Paul or Saul no ill will, only he and his lot were not there, or his sycophant Lucanus, and the story that Gentile told of what happened next was not the only story. He told of Cleophas traveling on the road to Emmaus, leaving behind accursed Jerusalem and being stopped on the road by a teacher who revealed himself as the Lord, and many told such tales. Suddenly the Jesus we had known was gone forever, but he was everywhere, and in everyone. Most assuredly. Seth, the son of the widow of Nain, until he was an old man, told the story of being in the temple of Eshmun, and Jesus appearing to him in white, wreathed in a crown not of thorns, but of roses, the wounds in his hands and feet bright as rubies. That was the same time he appeared upstairs in the house of Mariah, in what was eventually called the Upper Room, and would be the first of what they now call churches. That night Thomas was not there, and did not believe, but as the story goes he said, “Unless I put my fingers in his side, I will not believe.” And then Jesus appeared to him and Thomas had no need to slip his fingers in places they didn’t belong. He simply said, “My Lord and my God.
Luke and the others tripped over themselves trying to explain. Forty days Jesus was risen to match with the forty days after Pesach, and then one day in Galilee—or was it Jerusalem?—he ascended, and then ten days later, said the Luke who was not there, fire descended from heaven and so his version of the new world began.
But what if I say it was happening all at once, and what if I say that Pentecost was only one of the new beginnings? What if I say that the strange story of Jesus and John and all of them remaining in the city that hated them and facing Caiaphas and Annas and being beaten by them and preaching to them was… an embellishment? Yes, the Nazareans, who would be called the Christians, lived in Jerusalem, but they lived in all places. And yes, the disciples came to Jerusalem and made life most uncomfortable for those priests who thought they’d heard the last of Jesus, but Galilee was their home, and Galilee was where the church was born. In the house of the Alphaeus brothers, in Zebedee’s home, in Arimathea, in Sychar, in Nain, in Capernaum, up into Caesarea Philippi, Tyre, Sidon, at last Damascus. Everywhere Christ of the Road had traveled, known and loved, there came the mystery of his living, dying, and living again. In all those places men became priests and women became priestesses, though some are forgetting that last part. In the temple of Eshmun, Seth lifted bread and wine and his own body, and re enacted what Jesus had not only in the Upper Room, but in the pool of my family’s house when he and Seth had first known each other.
But what of the rest of us? The ones about whome Luke forgot or simply made up lies? What of Judas, for later it was said that he hanged himself that day in great grief, and it was said he was given thirty pieces of silver for Jesus. A most romantic story had him throwing the money at the priests and repenting, and Caiaphas, sly as ever said, “This is blood money,” and then bought the potter’s field with it. Another said that Judas bought the field himself, but then he fell and his innards exploded. Some, reconciling these stories, said he hung himself, and then his innards spilled, and I have even heard that all of the disciples, his former brothers, found him and stoned him to death.
There is another story though that says that Judas was the only one who knew all of Jesus’s secrets and Jesus told him he must be the betrayer, and there is even a tale which says that Thomas himself was Judas, his own Twin. The Church that lives now, two or three generations removed from us and from the true tale and even from Jews is the Church that wants Judas to pay for his necessary sin. They want him dead and remember how Jesus said it was better if his betrayer had a millstone tied around his neck and was flung into the sea. But Jesus was love, and he loved Judas and Judas loved him, and the Jesus on the other side of this story, on the other side of the tomb, had no room at all for hating those whom he had loved. Thomas went out of the story of Luke and Paul altogether, quickly traveling east and further east and gathering followers of Jesus to him. And Thomas, always called the Twin, would have had no knowledge of those roads on his own, but Judas would have. When they were children, Judas once said, one would play the other, and even in Galilee they did the same with the apostles. Those brothers could not stand to be separated for long, and Jesus could not stand to be separated from either of them. That is all I will say.
John learned to live as a man on earth while the one who loved him was his lord in heaven. The comfort in the night he took with Mark, he would take again and again and they were nearly inseparable. John gained many disciples, and though he always had a strange and high flung way of speaking, they added to it, and I have seen passages of what are now called Gospels, where Jesus spoke in ways he never spoke and knew things he never knew and where John is made to have hated Judas, to have called him a thief. And there might have been some jealously, for both he and Judas shared Jesus’s bed. But John never hated him. He loved him. They all did. There was veiled talk of this Paul of Tarsus not getting on with Mark, and for those who believe that all things center around this bald, little man I never met, that matters, but I believe it was because Mark was beautiful, eagle nosed and thick lipped, with lovely black hair up and down his limbs, straight backed and full buttocked, and Paul, stuck with his cousin Barnabas, was jealous that John had him.
But of Magdalene… what of me? I have held off on this the longest. How does one look at one’s own life, especially now that it has been reflected back at me so often and so strangely. These days I hear, as Jesus predicted, that I was a whore, and also that I was possessed by demons. I heard a tale that I once took a red egg to the isle of Capri where lived the Emperor Tiberius in his old age and debauch. There I declared to him that Christ the true king had risen. But that is nonsense. Tiberius was a monster. Everyone knew that, and the further from him and Rome you were, the better. There is a tale that a fisherman climbed all the way up to his palace to offer him a large pike. The tale goes on to recount how that emperor took the pike, rammed it down the man’s throat and tossed him from his mountaitop palace to his death, and I believe it.
Some of these new Christians court death. Jesus died, yes, and others around him did and do as well. Sometimes, indeed, we are killed. But thay have made a fetish of it I was not eager to die. I was eager to rest. After those first heady days, after churches—let’s call them that—began springing up, and in place of one miracle worker there were several—I went to Joppa, and Joseph came with me. So did Sebastian and Simon and Rufus. Simon and Rufus took ship for North Africa. We for Asia. On that one trip John was there, with Mary as well, and Mark and Mariah, and we set sail with the wind in our hair and it was good! It was excellent. John and Mary and Mark and his mother departed from us in Asia Minor, but we traveled on. My heart was full of joy, and now, when Sebastian reached for my hand I squeezed his back. I had been a monk and a nun, but now I rejoiced in being a woman and under the stars I knew his touch and so arrived in Massalia to meet Lazaros and Marta, Benjamin now a young lad, and Sara.
Now the words of Jesus have proved true. Annas, Caiaphas, their temple, their Sanhedrin, and their families are long gone, Jerusalem razed to the ground by the very men who became the emperors who replaced those old Julian emperors. All that was powerful in that world is dust in the new one. Now I am so ancient my grandchildren have children, wheat haired and dusky and dark eyed. Some of these are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of John the Bapsitst, whose very killers found themselves exiled to the colder climes of northern Gaul. There Herod and Herodias died, quite unhappy and quite chilly, revealed as traitors to the emperor Caligula by their own kinsman. Years before that, Pilate was called back to Rome, and though I never stood before Tiberuis in judgment, Pilate was about to. The emperor died before it could happen, which must have relieved Pilate. But Caligula killed him anyway, so the relief was short lived as was he. Such is the power of this world, and Caligula himself was killed, perhaps by his uncle Claudius, and during the reign of that same Claudius, Joseph of Arimathea, quite old now, traveled to Britain, but first he came here, and I sent with him my alabaster cup, though I could not say why.
But I sense you saying: wait now? What about Jesus? When did you see him last? What happened once he left the world? But you see, when he left it he took us out of it with him. We were never again the same. When he ascended, so our ascent began. Never was he as he had been, but never has he been gone. He is the bread and the wine every day when I offer it. But he is in the rock and in the leaf, and in the silence, yes the silence. And the other day a letter finally arrived from halfway around the world, for we are nearly out of the empire and this missive is definitely out of the empire, far to the east, and I say to one of my grandchildren, read it love, read it to me: and he begins:
“These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, ‘Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death. It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.’”
