Gospel, page 14
Yes, very much! It is the very reason, I told him, that I had embarked upon these travels! To recover the truth of those few precious years when He was among us.
“You always had too much money,” Jude said to me, I believe in jest.
42. Tell me, I asked of Jude, why haven’t you gone with the evangel through the land?
He laughed. “The way I speak? Sometimes I am so unable to deliver my voice that I merely nod yes and no to pilgrims’ questions. I wonder that I have given out incorrect information because some of the old and infirm have heard fantasies, have heard fictions. Two days ago a woman with an issue of blood, clothed in stained bandages, her face pale as new cotton, came to this house. She had heard that Our Master said that any who have such an infirmity are sure to reach Heaven for they are already washed in blood. You see how she was confused.”
And you corrected this crone?
“No, I did not,” Jude said to me, reclaiming his stammer.
From what I made out, Jude confirmed her mistaken notion of Our Master’s teachings. Indeed, he was sure Our Lord would have told the woman the same thing or perhaps have healed her, although it was mysterious why some He healed and some He walked by. I recall Thomas asking Our Lord that if God were a God of love, why did Our Lord not visit the leper colony outside of the city and heal every sufferer? Our Lord made no answer. Mysteries too profound to consider!
43. Repeatedly Jude said to me: “Don’t you see, my friend, it was enough that she had faith to come? It is such faith that God will reward. No, I could not help her, even after she walked from her village across the sands to my door. In the next world, though, she will walk into the Kingdom.”
I confess here to a certain desperation with this laxity concerning Our Master’s teachings. I do not feel good about it now, but I am afraid I was rather unpleasant to Jude and I asked if with his whimsical innovations of Our Master’s philosophy, he had brought as much as a single soul into the Kingdom-to-come. What of Moses and his stutter—he delivered a people!31 Why was Jude at all chosen by Our Lord?
Jude gave me the brotherly kiss of peace. He then said, “Is it not possible that the soul Our Lord intended to save was mine?”
44. I explained to Jude that it seemed unlikely with only Twelve Disciples to choose amid all the world, to commence all the chores assigned us before the coming End Times, that Our Teacher should be so inefficient but to gain only one small soul for the New Kingdom by Jude’s selection.
“You think it a waste,” Jude replied to me, “that only myself was gathered to Our Lord’s flock by my selection. But I tell you, I believe that to be sufficient. Could it have been that Our Master looked out upon the world and saw me lost and brought me to Him the only way He knew how?”
But how impractical!
Jude laughed and said: “But that is precisely the sort of thing He was always doing.” Jude then put a hand upon me and with his other hand touched his heart. “For all your learning, my brother, I believe it is I who knew Him better.”
45. And as I left Beersheba that evening, I looked over at Xenon asleep on his mule plodding by my side, and I looked out upon the vast wastes of the Negev and wondered that God should send His True Prophet to personally redeem the likes of Jude and, if so, that the Most High Father must love His children very much indeed. But then to what purpose was I brought near Our Master as a Disciple? What did He gain through such a wretch as me?
IRELAND
There was a beggar boy used to be in Burren that was very simple like and had no health, and if he would walk as much as a few perches it is likely he would fall on the road. And he dreamed twice that he went to St. Brigit’s blessed well upon the cliffs and that he found his health there. So he set out to go to the well, and when he came to it he fell in and he was drowned.… It is likely it is in heaven he is at this time.
—An ancient Irish holy legend, collected by LADY GREGORY (1906)
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort.
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell,
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
—from “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”
Last Poems (1939)
W. B. YEATS
This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
—from “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” North (1975)
SEAMUS HEANEY
In name of the Former, and of the Latter
And of their Holocaust. Allmen.
—Finnegans Wake (1939)
JAMES JOYCE
JUNE 26TH, 1990
Lucy found Dublin more modern-looking than she imagined, but still more of a large town than a city, which despite its recent thousandth birthday was not full of the ancient winding alleyways or cobblestones of quainter European capitals. It was staid and Georgian where it was grand and monumental, and shabby where it was not grand. Standing at the River Liffey and O’Connell Street she fought off disappointment that the legendary, much-invoked Dublin was not somehow more, well, Parisian or at least visually equal to Oxford, endearingly ancient.
(Give it time. Dublin grows on you.)
It was early evening. The airport shuttle bus had deposited Lucy at the Tourist Information office and there she acquired a simple city map upon which the nice woman circled Mulligan’s Pub for her. Then she strolled by the modern fast-food franchises and the post office … was that the Post Office of the 1916 Uprising? She had crossed the main bridge over the Liffey, noticing the giant neon signs one finds in all Times Square equivalents, and then had turned to amble along the riverbank, listening to people talk—some of the Dublin speech sounded American and broad, surprisingly—and looking at the ruddy faces, the lovely pale women with yellow-blond hair, the redheads, and Ireland’s great world export, the old drunk, with a creased caricature of a face, old sack clothes, scooting along at his own addled pace toward the next Guinness.
“Kin ye help me out, miss?”
“Sorry, no change on me.” Lucy walked quickly by.
“God bless yer sweet heart anyways,” he said, tipping his cap politely.
A few blocks from the river, in a shadowy, grimy alley was Mulligan’s. Lucy peeped in, wondering if this was solely a male bastion of darts and pints quaffed by red-faced laborers, but to her relief there was a good mix of people within. Lucy noted the tin ceiling and tile floor, the ornate, dark wood liquor cabinet and frosted mirror that ran the length of the bar. Other countries invested their cathedrals with altarpieces and sculpture—here in Ireland, apparently, the greatest craftsmanship was expended on these baroque pub masterpieces. Aha. There in the back, Rabbi Hersch on one side, Father Keegan on the other side, and a young fellow at their table sharing their laughter, was her man.
“I refuse to believe it,” the priest was saying, “that there’d be something ye can’t work up a taste for, alcohol, I mean.”
The rabbi insisted that mou-tai was undrinkable.
“In Korea,” O’Hanrahan concurred, “the army captured a crate of the stuff from Red China. A whole platoon of drink-starved soldiers. We couldn’t do it, Father. One taste would convince you.”
“I am shocked,” he said mournfully, “to hear you of all people taking this line with me, Paddy.”
“Not just mou-tai, but pulque down in Mexico. In 1964, I was cataloguing the fascinating Jesuit Library at Guadalupe, Zacatecas, in which one can view—”
“Who gives a damn, man,” said Father Keegan, single-mindedly. “What of this drink?”
O’Hanrahan: “It’s called pulque and it looks like milk, made from the juice of the maguey plant, but this batch had moonshine-strength fermented cactus fruit in it as well. I was in this true, primitive cantina. Along the base of the bar was a trough, a urinal that drained in the street.” The men roared with tipsy laughter. “You didn’t have to move, Father. As you drank, you pissed right at the bar.”
“Mother of God,” said the priest, “they’re ahead of us in technology now in Mexico, wouldn’t you know?”
“You took Beatrice on such a trip?” asked the rabbi.
“No, left her in Chicago, like I always did,” said O’Hanrahan.
“No wonder your marriage was in trouble,” said Father Keegan, so plain-spoken that it was impossible to take offense, though it prompted a change of subject matter in O’Hanrahan:
“Whose round is it?”
Lucy cleared her throat: “It’s mine.”
O’Hanrahan stared up at her incredulously. “You? Who among my followers has betrayed me?”
“Aw,” said Father Keegan, rising, “your daughter, Paddy. And a lovely young thing she is—”
“She’s not my daughter.”
Lucy explained that with all the talk of Mulligan’s back at Oxford she figured O’Hanrahan would hardly be anywhere else. Privately she noticed the young man across from her, about twenty-six or so, with lightly freckled skin, vibrant red hair, gray-green eyes. He bowed his head to her, “Introduce me, Paddy.” Was everyone on a first-name basis with Dr. O’Hanrahan but her?
“She’s not staying long enough for you to meet,” said the professor.
“My name’s David McCall,” said the young man unaided.
“Lucy Dantan. What are you guys drinking?”
Guinness!
“Right,” she said. And as she left the table, she added, “When we get back we’ll talk about St. Matthias.”
That ought to keep them from running out the door, she figured as she made her way to the bar. But Lucy learned Guinness-pouring is a different matter in Dublin and it takes minutes to draw, settle, and refill up to the top, the publican wiping away the foam. So she placed her order and walked back to the table.
“You didn’t give me my last guess, sir,” she said, taking a low pub stool. “But that was just as well, because it made me take the time to figure out that the disciple in question was Matthias.”
“You mean Matthew?” asked David, unclear what guesses she was referring to.
“I mean the thirteenth of the Twelve Disciples.”
“Father,” appealed David, “I thought I learned there were only twelve.”
“Acts, Chapter 1, verse 20-something, Matthias was number thirteen,” said Father Keegan, not too interested, wishing the conversation would return to the beverages of the world. “The replacement for Judas after he killed himself. Matthias is a what ye might call a New Testament trivia question.”
“I called up,” explained Lucy, “the books you ordered at the Codrington Library.” She briefly noted O’Hanrahan’s scowl. “I saw the Andreas and books in Amharic from Ethiopia. I also knew from credit-card receipts the Theology Department has back in Chicago that you were in Trier. I talked to this don about the Andreas and he said it was about the adventures of Andrew and Matthew—and you’d told me neither Andrew nor Matthew was the subject of this gospel.
“But then I started looking at some of the Greek apocrypha you ordered from the library, and I found in one volume a Fourth-Century Acts of Andrew and Matthias. Matthew and Matthias—the names got switched through the years since they were so similar. The Anglo-Saxon poem as well as the Greek Acts tells of Andrew and Matthias’s adventures in Ethiopia.”
“Oh, she’s quite a detective,” marveled David.
O’Hanrahan surrendered with a sigh. “Where’s my Guinness?”
Lucy went back to the bar, paid for the beers and carried two back. Then David hopped up to get the other two, giving her a wink as he passed her.
Man alert, Lucy determined: he’s cute.
“The rest fell into place,” she told them, back in her chair. “The relics of Matthias were enshrined by the Emperor Constantine in Trier, West Germany. That explains your going there to look at the archives.”
“I was checking out this year’s Piesporter Riesling,” O’Hanrahan said innocently.
“I’ll drink to that,” said the father. “Now as for this mou-tai libation, Paddy, you were referring to…”
Lucy opened her big carpetbag and pulled out the dog-eared notepad and flipped through pages covered with scrawled notes.
“Ah, mercy,” said Father Keegan, “it’s getting serious at this table. Now don’t ye be forgetting our appointment, Paddy, at midnight.”
“Who could forget?” said the professor. “You’re not leaving now, are you, Father?”
“No no nooo,” he said heavily, wishing perhaps he could.
Lucy began, “The Gospel of Matthias is mentioned first by Clement of Alexandria, so it’s at least as old as 170 A.D. Clement mentions the work has a strict antisex morality—”
Father Keegan barely hid a belch. “Hmmm, so that’s who we have to blame for that. Thought it to be an Irish doctrine alla these years.”
Lucy went on. “There’s a mention of St. Matthias in Irenaeus, but it’s not very revealing. And then finally we have Eusebius, the first great Byzantine historian, circa 324—”
O’Hanrahan tartly: “We know who Eusebius is.”
“He lists all the known gospels of the day. Of course, the New Testament as we know it didn’t exist then and there were all kinds of gospels, heretical and otherwise, floating around. He classifies Matthias’s as heretical, though it doesn’t seem he actually read it. Which means in the next few decades probably all copies of it were burned.”
Lucy put down her notebook.
“But I think we know,” she said, having everyone’s attention, “that if you want to preserve something forever, you ban it and drive it underground. The Early Church and, for that matter,” she added, glancing at the rabbi, “the Mishnah and Talmud are examples of how writings of an intensely persecuted people endure. So I think someone translated the Gospel of Matthias into an obscure African language and the scroll survived.”
“What makes you think that?” asked O’Hanrahan insecurely.
“Because you ordered up all those African books, and besides, the way you and Rabbi Hersch talk, I can tell it hasn’t been translated. And you guys, between you, can read anything.”
“What are we doing in Dublin then?” asked the rabbi, curious to see just how obvious their moves were to an outsider.
Lucy gambled. “Whoever had the scroll last after Rome—some German fellow you said, right, Rabbi? Whoever had that scroll must be willing to sell it to you. Though…” She looked sidewise at Father Keegan. “… Father Keegan I overheard saying that ‘money wasn’t necessary.’ So maybe someone just wants to give it to you.” It just occurred to her: “Or maybe is at such a loss to translate it themselves, they’ve contracted you guys to do it.”
O’Hanrahan turned cross: “How do you know about the German guy and Rome?”
The rabbi patted his leg. “I told her a bit, thinking she was going home, Paddy. My fault.”
David smiled, but then seeing the fearsome lack of levity of O’Hanrahan, he swallowed it.
Everyone remained quiet a minute.
“Not bad,” said O’Hanrahan. “What do you plan to do with this illuminating report?” O’Hanrahan looked deep into his Guinness for guidance. “I don’t suppose,” he began, “you’d humor us by conveniently being hit by a bus and developing amnesia.”
The festive spirit seemed to have drained away from the table and no one had anything to say. Father Keegan rose to be on his way, reminding O’Hanrahan portentously once more that they had a meeting, a rendezvous with fate and destiny!
“I’m bushed too, fellas,” said the rabbi, also rising from the table. “I’ll get a cab back to Mrs. O’Feagh’s.”
“That’s where everybody’s staying?” asked Lucy.
They glared at her as if to say: everyone but you.
“David, my boy,” said O’Hanrahan, buttoning his overcoat, “I’ll see you out front of Mrs. O’Feagh’s tomorrow at eleven.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
O’Hanrahan and Rabbi Hersch departed, leaving David there with Lucy. Now there was another silence, but a friendlier one.
“Well, I could, uh, walk ye to the bed-and-breakfast, you know,” said David helpfully. “I gotta check me posthole in college, see if anyone’s dropped me a note, and then we could uh…”
“Walk over there.”
“Yeah, that’s what we could do.”
Lucy was suddenly seized with an urgent need to look in a mirror. She excused herself and stood before a distorted reflection of herself in a small mirror attached to the hand-towel dispenser. Her auburn hair was windblown from her walks on the ferry deck and it looked accidentally stylish, wild and contemporary. Her long coat obscured the particulars of her figure and the scarf wrapped around her neck aided a slight double-chin problem, though she was expert in keeping her head erect in the presence of attractive guys. Oh, this was being ridiculous, wasn’t it? Heck, she better get out there so he won’t think she’s primping like she’s doing.
The streets of Dublin were loud and rowdy.
Lucy, still with her heavy bag, walked by David’s side; he steered her clear of a teenage boy, his face the picture of all human suffering, kneeling in the gutter in order to be sick.
“Bet it’s his birthday,” said David, explaining. “It’s painful to watch someone like that—I see meself there, you know?”
