In seminary, we learned about the Gnostic gospels. Namely, we learned that they were heresy. And let me tell you, when a priest hands you a text and tells you this is what not to believe, it colors the way you read it. Maybe I skimmed the text, saving the careful close analysis for the Bible. Maybe I whiffed completely and told the priest who was teaching that course that I'd done my homework when in fact I didn't. Whatever the excuse, that night when I cracked open Joel Bloom's book, it was as if I'd never seen the words before, and although I planned to only read the foreword by the scholar who'd compiled the texts--a man named Ian Fletcher--I found myself devouring the pages as if it were the latest Stephen King novel and not a collection of ancient gospels.
The book had been earmarked to the Gospel of Thomas. Any mentions of Thomas I knew from the Bible certainly weren't flattering: He doesn't believe Lazarus will rise from the dead. When Jesus tells His disciples to follow Him, Thomas points out that they don't know where to go. And when Jesus rises after the crucifixion, Thomas isn't even there--and won't believe it until he can touch the wounds with his own hands. He's the very definition of faithless--and the origin of the term doubting Thomas.
Yet in Rabbi Bloom's book, this page began:
These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Didymos Judas Thomas, wrote them down.
Twin? Since when did Jesus have a twin?
The rest of the "gospel" was not a narrative of Jesus's life, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but a collection of quotes by Jesus, all beginning with the words Jesus said. Some were lines similar to those in the Bible. Others were completely unfamiliar and sounded more like logic puzzles than any scripture:
If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
I read the line over twice and rubbed my eyes. There was something about it that made me feel as if I'd heard it before.
Then I realized where.
Shay had said it to me the first time I'd met with him, when he'd explained why he wanted to donate his heart to Claire Nealon.
I kept reading intently, hearing Shay's voice over and over again:
The dead aren't alive, and the living won't die.
We come from the light.
Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone; you will find me there.
The first time I had gone on a roller coaster, I felt like this--like the ground had been pulled out from beneath my feet, like I was going to be sick, like I needed something to grab hold of.
If you asked a dozen people on the street if they'd ever heard of the Gnostic gospels, eleven would look at you as if you were crazy. In fact most people today couldn't even recite the Ten Commandments. Shay Bourne's religious training had been minimal and fragmented; the only thing I'd ever seen him "read" was the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. He couldn't write; he could barely follow a thought through to the end of one sentence. His formal schooling ended at a GED he'd gotten while at the juvenile detention facility.
How, then, could Shay Bourne have memorized the Gospel of Thomas? Where would he even have stumbled across it in his lifetime?
The only answer I could come up with was that he hadn't.
It could have been coincidence.
I could have been remembering the conversations incorrectly.
Or--maybe--I could have been wrong about him.
The past three weeks, I had pushed past the throngs of people camped out in front of the prison. I had turned off the television when yet another pundit suggested that Shay might be the Messiah. After all, I knew better. I was a priest; I had taken vows; I understood that there was one God. His message had been recorded in the Bible, and above all else, when Shay spoke, he did not sound like Jesus in any of the four gospels.
But here was a fifth. A gospel that hadn't made it into the Bible but was equally as ancient. A gospel that espoused the beliefs of at least some people during the birth of Christianity. A gospel that Shay Bourne had quoted to me.
What if the Church forefathers had gotten it wrong?
What if the gospels that had been dismissed and debunked were the real ones, and the ones that had been picked for the New Testament were the embellished versions? What if Jesus had actually said the quotations listed in the Gospel of Thomas?
It would mean that the allegations being made about Shay Bourne might not be that far off the mark.
And it would explain why a Messiah might return in the guise of a convicted murderer--to see if this time, we might get it right.
I got out of my chair, folding the book by my side, and started to pray.
Heavenly Father, I said silently, help me understand.
The telephone rang, making me jump. I glanced at the clock--who would call after three in the morning?
"Father Michael? This is CO Smythe, from the prison. Sorry to disturb you at this hour, but Shay Bourne had another seizure. We thought you'd want to know."
"Is he all right?"
"He's in the infirmary," Smythe said. "He asked for you."
At this hour, the vigilant masses outside the prison were tucked into their sleeping bags and tents, underneath the artificial day created by the enormous spotlights that flooded the front of the building. I had to be buzzed in; when I entered the receiving area, CO Smythe was waiting for me. "What happened?"
"No one knows," the officer said. "It was Inmate DuFresne who alerted us again. We couldn't see what happened on the security cameras."
We entered the infirmary. In a distant, dark corner of the room, Shay was propped up in a bed, a nurse beside him. He held a cup of juice that he sipped through a straw; his other hand was cuffed to the bed's railing. There were wires coming out from beneath his medical johnny. "How is he?" I asked.
"He'll live," the nurse said, and then, realizing her mistake, blushed fiercely. "We hooked him up to monitor his heart. So far, so good."
I sat down on a chair beside Shay and looked up at Smythe and the nurse. "Can we have a minute?"
"That's about all you've got," the nurse said. "We just gave him something to knock him out."
They moved to the far side of the room, and I leaned closer to Shay. "Are you okay?"
"You wouldn't believe it if I told you."
"Oh, try me," I said.
He glanced over to make sure no one else was listening. "I was just watching TV, you know? This documentary on how they make movie theater candy, like Dots and Milk Duds. And I started to get tired, so I went to turn it off. But before I could push the button, all the light in the television, it shot into me like electricity. I mean, I could feel those things inside my blood moving around, what are they called again, corporals?"
"Corpuscles."
"Yeah, right, those. I hate that word. Did you ever see that Star Trek where those aliens are sucking the salt out of everything? I always thought they should be called corpuscles. You say the word, and it sounds like you're eating a lemon ..."
"Shay. You were talking about the light."
"Oh, right, yeah. Well, it was like I started boiling inside, and my eyes, they were going to jelly, and I tried to call out but my teeth were wired shut and then I woke up in here, feeling like I'd been sucked dry." He looked up at me. "By a corpuscle."
"The nurse said it was a seizure. Do you remember anything else?"
"I remember what I was thinking," Shay said. "This was what it would feel like."
"What?"
"Dying."
I took a deep breath. "Remember when you were little, a kid--and you'd fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That's what I think it's like to die."
"That would be good," Shay said, his voice deeper, groggy. "It'll be nice to know what home looks like."
A phrase I'd read just an hour ago slipped into my mind like a splinter: The Father's kingdom is
spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it.
Although I knew it wasn't the right time, although I knew I was supposed to be here for Shay, instead of the other way around, I leaned closer, until my words could fall into the shell of his ear. "Where did you find the Gospel of Thomas?" I whispered.
Shay stared at me blankly. "Thomas who?" he said, and then his eyes drifted shut.
As I drove away from the prison, I heard Father Walter's voice: He's conned you. But when I'd mentioned the Gospel of Thomas, I hadn't seen even the slightest flicker of recognition in Shay's eyes, and he'd been drugged--it would have been awfully hard to keep dissembling.
Was this what it had felt like for the Jews who met Jesus and recognized him as more than just a gifted rabbi? I had no point of comparison. I'd grown up Catholic; I'd become a priest. I could not remember a time that I hadn't believed Jesus was the Messiah.
I knew someone, though, who could.
Rabbi Bloom didn't have a temple, because it had burned down, but he did rent office space close to the school where services were held. I was waiting in front of the locked door when he arrived just before eight a.m.
"Wow," he said, taking in the vision in front of him--a red-eyed, rumpled priest clutching a motorcycle helmet and the Nag Hammadi texts. "I would have let you borrow it longer than one night."
"Why don't Jews believe Jesus was the Messiah?"
He unlocked the door to the office. "That's going to take at least a cup and a half of coffee," Bloom said. "Come on in."
He started brewing a pot and offered me a seat. His office looked a lot like Father Walter's at St. Catherine's--inviting, comfortable. A place you'd want to sit and talk. Unlike Father Walter's, though, Rabbi Bloom's plants were the real thing. Father Walter's were plastic, bought by the Ladies' Aid, when he kept killing everything from a ficus to an African violet.
"It's a wandering Jew," the rabbi said when he saw me checking out the flowerpot. "Maggie's little idea of a joke."
"I just got back from the prison. Shay Bourne had another seizure."
"Did you tell Maggie?"
"Not yet." I looked at him. "You didn't answer my question."
"I haven't had my coffee." He got up and poured us each a cup, putting milk and sugar in mine without asking first. "Jews don't think Jesus was the Messiah because he didn't fulfill the criteria for a Jewish messiah. It's really pretty simple, and it's all laid out by Maimonides. A Jewish moshiach will bring the Jews back to Israel and set up a government in Jerusalem that's the center of political power for the world, for both Jews and Gentiles. He'll rebuild the Temple and reestablish Jewish law as the governing law of the land. He'll raise the dead--all of the dead--and usher in a great age of peace, when everyone believes in God. He'll be a descendant of David, a king and a warrior, a judge, and a great leader ... but he'll also be firmly, unequivocally human." Bloom set the cup down in front of me. "We believe that in every generation, a person's born with the potential to become the moshiach. But if the messianic age doesn't come and that person dies, then that person isn't him."
"Like Jesus."
"Personally, I've always seen Jesus as a great Jewish patriot. He was a good Jew, who probably wore a yarmulke and obeyed the Torah, and never planned to start a new religion. He hated the Romans and wanted to get them out of Jerusalem. He got charged with political rebellion, sentenced to execution. Yes, a Jewish high priest carried it out--Caiaphas--but most Jews back then hated Caiaphas anyway because he was the henchman for the Romans." He looked up at me over the edge of his coffee mug. "Was Jesus a good guy? Yeah. Great teacher? Sure. Messiah? Dunno."
"A lot of the Bible's predictions for the messianic era were fulfilled by Jesus--"
"But were they the crucial ones?" Rabbi Bloom asked. "Let's say you didn't know who I was and I asked you to meet me. I told you I'd be standing outside the Steeplegate Mall at ten o'clock wearing a Hawaiian shirt and that I'd have curly red hair and be listening to Outkast on my iPod. And at ten o'clock, you saw someone standing outside the Steeplegate Mall who had curly red hair and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and listening to Outkast on an iPod ... but it was a woman. Would you still think it was me?"
He stood up to refill his coffee. "Do you know what I heard on NPR on the way over here today? Another bus blew up in Israel. Three more kids from New Hampshire died in Iraq. And the cops just arrested some guy in Manchester who shot his ex-wife in front of their two kids. If Jesus ushered in the messianic era, and the world I hear about on the news is one of peace and redemption ... well, I'd rather wait for a different moshiach." He glanced back at me. "Now, if you don't mind me asking you a question ... what's a priest doing at a rabbi's office at eight in the morning asking questions about the Jewish Messiah?"
I got up and began to walk around the little room. "The book you loaned me--it got me thinking."
"And that's a bad thing?"
"Shay Bourne has said things, verbatim, that I read last night in the Gospel of Thomas."
"Bourne? He's read Thomas? I thought Maggie said he--"
"--has no religious training to speak of, and a minimal education."
"It's not like the Gideons leave the Gospel of Thomas in hotel rooms," Rabbi Bloom said. "Where would he have--"
"Exactly."
He steepled his fingers. "Huh."
I placed the book he'd loaned me on his desk. "What would you do if you began to second-guess everything you believed?"
Rabbi Bloom leaned forward and riffled through his Rolodex. "I would ask more questions," he said. He scribbled down something on a Post-it and handed it to me.
Ian Fletcher, I read. 603-555-1367.
Lucius
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The night Shay had his second seizure, I was awake, gathering ink that I planned to use to give myself another tattoo. If I do say so myself, I'm rather proud of my homemade tattoos. I had five--my rationale being that my body, up until three weeks ago, wasn't worth much more than being a canvas for my art; plus the threat of getting AIDS from a dirty needle was obviously a moot point. On my left ankle was a clock, with the hands marking the moment of Adam's death. On my left shoulder was an angel, and below it an African tribal design. On my right leg was a bull, because I was a Taurus; and swimming beside it was a fish, for Adam, who was a Pisces. I had grand plans for this sixth one, which I planned to put right on my chest: the word BELIEVE, in Gothic letters. I'd practiced the art in reverse multiple times in pencil and pen, until I felt sure that I could replicate it with my tattoo gun as I worked in the mirror.
My first gun had been confiscated by the COs, like Crash's hype kit. It had taken me six months to amass the parts for the new one. Making ink was hard to do, and harder to get away with--which was why I had chosen to work on this during the deadest hours of the night. I had lit a plastic spoon on fire, keeping the flame small so I could catch the smoke in a plastic bag. It stank horribly, and just as I was getting certain the COs would literally get wind of it and shut down my operation, Shay Bourne collapsed next door.
This time, his seizure had been different. He'd screamed--so loud that he woke up the whole pod, so loud that the finest dust of plaster drifted down from the ceilings of our cells. To be honest, Shay was such a mess when he was wheeled off I-tier that none of us were sure whether or not he'd be returning--which is why I was stunned to see him being led back to his cell the very next day.
"Po-lice," Joey Kunz yelled, just in time for me to hide the pieces of my tattoo gun underneath the mattress. The officers locked Shay into his cell, and as soon as the door to I-tier shut behind them, I asked Shay how he was feeling.
"My head hurts," he said. "I have to go to sleep."
With Crash still off the tier after the hype kit transgression, things were quieter. Calloway slept most days and stayed up nights with his bird; Texas and Pogie played virtual poker; Joey was listening to his soaps. I waited an extra few minutes to make sure the officers were otherwise occupied out in the co
ntrol booth and then I reached underneath my mattress again.
I had unraveled a guitar string to its central core, a makeshift needle. This was inserted into a pen whose ink cartridge had been removed--and a small piece of its tip sawed off and attached to the other end of the needle, which was attached to the motor shaft of a cassette player. The pen was taped to a toothbrush bent into an L shape, which let you hold the contraption more easily. You could adjust the needle length by sliding the pen casing back and forth; all that was left was plugging in the AC adapter of the cassette player, and I had a functional tattoo gun again.
The soot I'd captured the previous night had been mixed with a few drops of shampoo to liquefy it. I stood in front of the stainless steel panel that served as a mirror, and scrutinized my chest. Then, gritting my teeth against the pain, I turned on the gun. The needle moved back and forth in an elliptical orbit, piercing me hundreds of times per minute.
There it was, the letter B.
"Lucius?" Shay's voice drifted into my house.
"I'm sort of busy, Shay."
"What's that noise?"
"None of your business." I lifted it to my skin again, felt the needle working against me, a thousand arrows striking.
"Lucius? I can still hear that noise."
I sighed. "It's a tattoo gun, Shay, all right? I'm giving myself a tattoo."
There was a hesitation. "Will you give me one?"
I had done this for multiple inmates when I was housed on different tiers--ones that had a bit more freedom than I-tier, which offered twenty-three rollicking hours of lockdown. "I can't. I can't reach you."
"That's okay," Shay said. "I can reach you."
"Yeah, whatever," I said. I squinted back into the mirror and set the tattoo gun against my skin. Holding my breath, I carefully formed the curves and flourishes around the letters E and L.
I thought I heard Shay whimpering when I started on the letter I, and surely he cried out when I tattooed the V. My gun must not have been helping his headache any. Shrugging off his moans, I stepped closer to the mirror and surveyed my handiwork.
God, it was gorgeous. The letters moved with every breath I took; even the angry red swelling of my skin couldn't take away from the clean lines of the letters.