Peter was the rock the Church was founded upon. Judas’ was the sacrifice the Church was founded upon. Could they be one and the same? Did it even matter, or was Schnur just playing with her, running theosophical rings around her?
The one thing she could understand was that if the Disciples of Judas didn’t believe the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then there was no need for them to believe in redemption from man’s sins by the suffering on the cross. It was all propaganda and lies, after all, wasn’t it? Made up to sell this new ministry and creling to faith in retrospect. What was it the toad had said? All of these random acts of violence, hate, war and death made him think we weren’t redeemed at all, we were damned. She wondered if he actually believed the stuff he said, or if it was a convenient excuse to strike back at the people he believed had hurt him, the people behind his wife’s murder? Attacking an entire system of faith seemed a little extreme for that.
No, surely in Acts, Peter, Prince of the Apostles, stood up and decried Judas as a traitor? In the same passage he described Judas’ death in gory detail, his guts rupturing in the field of blood as he collapsed. Didn’t the Apostles welcome Matthias in Judas’ place? She could almost hear Schnur’s counter argument in her head: the Gospel of Luke names Jude for Thaddeus; John doesn’t name any of the twelve and adds his own Nathanael. All these testimonies and they can’t keep their key players straight? Peter being described alongside Judas in these other texts and not in his own? Was it revisionist history, trying to erase the sinner from the course of history? Or was it a case of trying to hide something else?
These other gospels were the ones that promised the miracles, the healing of the sick, the driving out demons, even raising the dead. There was nothing like that in Peter’s passion. The story of Akeldama was preposterous, Judas rupturing and exploding was like something out of a bad movie. It’s not even a convincing lie. And of course there were the problems of language. In the original texts the vocabulary was quite limited, meaning that the translations could be very easily made more explicitly divine should the translator wish. For instance, the prepositions on and by were often the same word in Aramaic, which would completely change the whole walking on water thing. Walking by water was far less impressive a feat. So what was Peter hiding? What truth did he not want recorded? If he wasn’t Judas, then perhaps he knew the truth about Judas?
It came back to the word messiah, didn’t it?
And if a messiah really was no more divine or god-touched than the one who brings peace and restoration to Israel, well then it couldn’t exactly be claimed that Judas’ kiss brought peace. For almost a century after either Christ or Judas the Romans were still suppressing the names Judaea and Jerusalem. The Jews were still exiles.
Israel was in her blood. She knew its history and its pains as well as any Jew. She had studied the Diaspora and the destruction of the First Temple. She understood the effect the destruction of the Second Temple had on the people. And she understood the hope Simon bar Kokhba had represented. Bar Kokhba had reestablished a Jewish state of Israel seven centuries after the Diaspora began, a state which he ruled as Nasri for three years, bringing the scattered Jews home. Surely, by Schnur’s definition this made Kokhba more effectively a messiah than either Judas or Jesus? For two of those years he fought tooth and naihome. Suinst the Romans to maintain a free Israel, but for three years he gave his people a home, a place. He unified them. Of course after he failed history was unkind-the Jews were scattered, sold into slavery or driven out-and writers with little sympathy to his cause called him Simon bar Kozebah, or Simon, son of The Lie.
That was the way of the world though, was it not? History was written by the winners, not the valiant losers.
She didn’t have the answer.
Two millennia on no one did.
She didn’t think they were meant to.
It came down to faith. That was what all these contradictions came down to in the end. Some people needed to believe that Jesus suffered on the cross to redeem mankind’s sins. They needed to believe that there was a point, that the sacrifice of his earthly body meant something.
These words that so many clung to, so many drew faith from and believed in, could be twisted to say almost anything, and there was no way of knowing one way or the other what the truth was.
In the end it didn’t matter what she believed, what Schnur believed, what any of them believed. However improbable it was, Judas could be Peter, or he could be the Messiah, or a messiah; or he could be both or neither. It didn’t matter. People would find a way to twist the truth into whatever they wanted it to be.
That was the only truth.
And then it hit her, all of the messages, the prophecy of the Popes, the quatrains of Nostradamus, the lectures on the meaning of the word messiah, all of it. It wasn’t about Mabus ushering in the Antichrist, as Nostradamus had said, it was about a new messiah. Mabus was Caspi’s herald. He had said Caspi’s real name was Solomon. One sign of the Messiah was the restoration of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, and another was the rebuilding of the Temple. Who had built the First Temple?
Solomon.
It was Solomon’s Temple.
That was it. Caspi didn’t see himself as the Antichrist at al, he saw himself as the new Messiah. He was the man who was going to bring peace to Israel by creating a Jewish state. She didn’t believe for a minute that his real name was Solomon any more than it was Caspi.
Suddenly it all made sense. She saw how Gavrel Schnur had been recruited by Solomon to his cause. Dassah. It really had all been about his wife. That explained the shrine in his office and the shrine upstairs. She still dominated his life. Dassah Schnur had been murdered because of his vocal support of the Jewish presence on the West Bank and Gaza. He had never changed that position. He lived his entire life to that one fundamental truth. He wanted a homeland for the Jewish settlers. The PLO had murdered his wife because of it, which only made him want it more.
She understood Schnur’s role in her little triptych. He was the idealist who had been offered the one thing he always wanted.
Orla almost pitied him.
If Schnur was the idealist, the other roles were very easily defined. Miles Devere was the opportunist. There was money in death-there always had been-and he had started in Israel, in the very areas Schnur wanted to see a Jewish homeland. He understood the people and the politics and the needs of the region. Who better to help rebuild the infrastructure after the fallout? And, who better to be the grand architect and help build the new monument to Solomon’s messiah? Was that what he had offered Devere, the Last Temple? Surely it would be the most iconographic building of modern times. That would appeal to a man like Devere, even if the money and power didn’t.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was underestimating Miles Devere. There was a sinister undertone to his involvement. She recalled the payments into the Swiss bank made by Silverthorn and withdrawn by Caspi or Solomon or whatever his real name was. She remembered Humanity Capital and its modus operandi, how it stimulated unrest and promoted war for financial gain, and the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. Devere wasn’t some innocent attracted by Solomon, he was the money man. He was financing this war for a New Israel, pumping money into the Shrieks’ coffers, knowing that every dollar spent would in time be reaped five, six, eight, tenfold. It was what he did, he traded in human suffering and disaster.