Fifth Gospel(21)

On the last day he fell ill, faces came and went, but his soul was awake only to the process that was mysteriously and cautiously working its way through him.

And his question to it was:

Am I?

And the answer was:

Not yet.

He did not understand this voluntary leaving of his body but he was not afraid, his concern was for his mother.

When she had shown him Jerusalem she had spoken of the Sanhedrin, of its Temple and palaces, of its gardens and of its people. She had expected that it would quicken his heart with excitement. But his heart was grown too big in his body to be excited and it could only strike a slow rhythm.

When they entered the city, all around him he heard the clamour of the pilgrims, the calls of the merchants in the bazaars, the noise of the camels and horses and entertainers, the chanting of the priests and the clanging of bells – all these sounds were seeking to bring him back to life and to entice him from his task but the will of God was set. Death, he knew, lay at the end of the way, and he walked this long road with Jesus to his Father’s house, where it would be accomplished.

Once over the twelve steps of the Temple, he followed Jesus through the Beautiful Gate whose massive double doors were made of brass. Now in the courts of the Temple, the world was left behind them and amid the dissonant cacophony of sounds his mind began its unravelling so that his soul rose up from his bones and his muscles, and his eyes grew blind, little by little.

He turned to Jesus but could not see his friend. Tears flowed over his cheeks. He bowed low and fell upon his knees. What had sustained him until now was spent, burnt up and consumed.

‘Am I?’ he asked his friend. He took a breath, allowing it to enter deep into his lungs, so that it filled every corner of his being, right down to his very finger tips, until he could hold onto it no more and his heart felt as if it would burst. How could he let go? And yet he must! He must let go. But in a moment between one breath and the next, a memory came; a memory of himself as a great king standing on a ziggurat observing the sun. Something told him that what had been prepared for aeons could now come to pass. A sense of peace came over him. He remembered!

Now he could forget.

He breathed out.

All of his learning, his wisdom and his selfhood, moved completely out of him then – his treasures. They stood before him a moment and made a descent into that other self, into the soul and body of Jesus.


And, as Jesus looked down upon his dearest friend with concern, he felt his heart torn open now and he took a breath in, and by way of it something entered into him and he knew. He knew that somehow he and Yeshua were truly united, like two sparks meeting in a gentle flame, pellucid and brotherly. From now on Yeshua would see the world through his eyes, and there would be no need for words between them.

Am I you?

Jesus asked Yeshua now, his gaze full of the familiar and unfamiliar.

And the answer came from within his heart:

We are Tzelem and Demut…image and likeness.

‡

‘And so it was – a metaphysical conception.’ Lea said to me, ‘And so, what had been written in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs of Jerusalem came to pass: that a priest would come from Levi and a King from Judah, and they would become one for the salvation of Israel.’

‘The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs...’ I said, pausing in my writing and extracting my eyes from the images she had conjured before them. ‘I do believe I know it!’ Now my mind was on something else. ‘What you have just told me makes sense! I realise why the Gospels of Luke and Matthew differ. I realise why Magi visited one child while the other was known only to the Shepherds! Poor old Eusebius would laugh now to hear it, since this had caused him so much pain.’

‘Matthew has Yeshua born at the time of Herod, pairé, while Luke has Jesus born two years after that, at the time of Quirenius, and the census.’

‘Yes…that’s it! That’s it, my child,’ I thought it over. ‘Even their genealogies are different, yes...! Matthew has it ending with Abraham, while Luke ends it with Adam. I always thought it a curious thing but now I think it must signify that Jesus is…somehow related to the first man. That he is angelic.’ I shook my head with astonishment. ‘There have always been men who believed that Jesus was not a man at all, you know, that he was a phantom…others have thought that he was nothing more than a man…now all is reconciled…they were only seeing different sides of the one face. That is, two persons in one body, image and likeness combined!’

The elegance of this solution caused me to feel a cautious elation. Still, I had to find proofs and so, in the days that followed, I resolved to search through our library of scrolls and parchments and rats and rat dung to find the Twelve Testaments. In my search the first thing I found was a forgotten gospel, called the Gospel of Thomas, and it occupied me for some hours. When I found that it also spoke of how two must become one, I hit the side of my head with such force that I saw stars! Again, on searching further, I found the Testament which Lea had spoken of, written by the Twelve Patriarchs of Jerusalem, and she was right, it foretold the coming of a king and a priest – one from the line of Levi, and the other from the line of Judah!