The Last Templar Page 30

  “None of the Gnostic Gospels had a passion narrative,” Vance pointed out, “but the four gospels Irenaeus chose did. They spoke about Jesus’s death on the Cross and about His resurrection, they linked the story being promoted to the fundamental ritual of the Eucharist, the Last Supper. And they didn’t even start off that way,” he scoffed. “In its earliest version, the first of them to be included, the Gospel of Mark, doesn’t talk about a virgin birth at all, nor does it have the Resurrection in it. It just ends with Jesus’s empty tomb, where a mysterious young man, a transcendental being of some kind, like an angel, tells a group of women who come to the tomb that Jesus is waiting for them in Galilee. And this terrifies these women, they run off and they don’t tell anyone about it—which makes you wonder how Mark or whoever wrote that gospel would have ever heard about it in the first place. But that’s how Mark originally ended his gospel. It’s only in Matthew—fifty years later—and then in Luke, ten years after that, that elaborate post-Resurrection appearances were added to Mark’s original ending, which is itself then rewritten.

  “It took another two hundred years—to the year 367, in fact—for the list of twenty-seven texts that comprise what we know as the New Testament to be finally agreed upon. By the end of that century, Christianity had become the officially approved religion, and possession of any of the texts considered heretical was held to be a criminal offense. All known copies of the alternate gospels were burned and destroyed. All, that is, except for the ones spirited away to the caves of Nag Hammadi, which don’t show Jesus to be supernatural in any way,” Vance continued, his eyes riveted on Reilly. “They were banned because the Jesus of these texts was just a roving wise man who preaches a life of possessionless wandering and of wholehearted acceptance of fellow human beings. He’s not here to save us from sin and from eternal damnation, He’s here to guide us to some kind of spiritual understanding. And once a disciple reaches enlightenment—and this notion must have given Irenaeus and his cronies a few sleepless nights—the master is no longer needed. The student and the teacher become equals. The four canon gospels, the ones in the New Testament—they see Jesus as our Savior, the Messiah, the Son of God. Orthodox Christians—and Orthodox Jews, for that matter—insist that an unbridgeable chasm separates man from his Creator. The gospels that were found in Nag Hammadi contradicted this: for them, self-knowledge is the knowledge of God; the self and the divine are one and the same. Even worse, by describing Jesus as a teacher, an enlightened sage—they consider Him a man, someone you or I could emulate, and that wouldn’t do for Irenaeus and his lot. He couldn’t just be a man, He had to be much more than that. He had to be the Son of God. He had to be unique, because by His being unique, the Church becomes unique, the only path to salvation. By painting Him in that light, the early Church could claim that if you weren’t with them, following their rules, living the way they wanted you to, you were doomed to damnation.”

  Vance paused, seeming to study Reilly’s face before leaning forward, his whispery voice slicing the air.

  “What I’m telling you, Agent Reilly, is that basically everything Christians believe in today and have believed since the fourth century, all the rituals they observe, the Eucharist, the holy days—none of it was part of what the immediate followers of Jesus believed in. It was all made up, it was all tagged on much later—rituals and supernatural beliefs, which in many cases were imported from other religions, from the Resurrection to Christmas. But the Church’s founders did a great job. It’s been a runaway bestseller for almost two thousand years, but…I think the Templars were right. It had already gotten way out of hand in their days with people getting butchered if they chose to believe in something different.

  “And looking at the state of the world today,” he announced with unsettling conviction, “I think it’s definitely past its sell-by date.”

  Chapter 68

  “Is that what you think they were carrying on the Falcon Temple?” Reilly asked pointedly. “Proof that the Gospels are, as you put it, works of fiction? Proof that Jesus wasn’t a divine being? Even if that were possible,” he argued, “I can understand how that would undermine Christianity, but how would that have helped the Templars unify the three religions—assuming that is what they were really planning?”

  “They started with the one they knew,” Vance countered assuredly, “the religion that was within their reach, the one whose excesses they had personally witnessed. Once that was…debunked, I imagine they had already forged alliances with insiders within the Muslim and Jewish communities, partners who would work with them to instigate similar questions about their own creeds and pave the way for a new, unified view of the world.”

  “By picking up the pieces of the disillusioned masses?” It was more a statement than a question on Reilly’s part.

  Vance seemed unmoved. “In the long run, I think the world would have been a better place. Don’t you?”

  “I doubt that very much,” Reilly fired back. “But then, I wouldn’t expect someone who places so little value on human life to understand that.”

  “Oh, spare me your righteous indignation and grow up, would you? It’s all so ludicrous,” Vance insisted. “We’re still in the realm of fantasy, here, today, in the twenty-first century. We’re really no more advanced than those poor bastards in Troy. The whole planet’s gripped by mass delusion. Christianity, Judaism, Islam…people are ready to fight to the death to defend every word in these books they hold sacred, but what are they really based on? Legends and myths going back thousands of years? Abraham, a man who, if you believe the Old Testament, fathered a child at the tender age of one hundred and lived to be one hundred and seventy-five years old? Does it make sense that people’s lives should still be ruled by a collection of laughable hokum?

  “Polls consistently confirm that most Christians, Jews, and Muslims today are unaware of their religions’ shared roots in Abraham, the patriarch of all three religions and the founder of monotheism,” Vance explained. “Ironically, according to the book of Genesis, God had sent Abraham on a mission to heal the divisions between men. His message was that regardless of different languages or cultures, all of mankind was to be part of one human family, before one God who sustains the whole of creation. Somehow, this lofty message got perverted,” Vance said mockingly, “like something out of a bad episode of Dallas. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, couldn’t have children, so he took on a second wife, his Arab maidservant Hagar, who gave him a son they called Ishmael. Thirteen years later, Sarah manages to have a son, Isaac. Abraham dies, Sarah banishes Hagar and Ishmael, and the Semitic race is split between Arab and Jew.”

  Vance shook his head, laughing to himself. “The galling thing is that all three religions claim to believe in the same God, the God of Abraham. Things only got screwed up once people started squabbling over whose words were the truest representation of God’s tradition. The Jewish faith got its beliefs from its prophet, Moses, whose lineage the Jews trace back to Isaac and Abraham. A few hundred years later, Jesus—a Jewish prophet—comes up with a new set of beliefs, his version of Abraham’s religion. A few hundred years later, yet another man, Mohammed, shows up claiming that he is, in fact, God’s true messenger, not the first two charlatans, and he promises to bring about a return to the founding revelations of Abraham—as traced through Ishmael, this time, mind you—and Islam is born. No wonder Christian leaders at the time considered Islam a Christian heresy and not a new, or different, religion. And after Mohammed died, Islam itself split in two—Shi’ites and Sunnis—because of a power struggle over who should rightly succeed him. And so it goes, on and on.

  “So we have Christians looking down on Jews,” he proclaimed, “considering them to be followers of an earlier, incomplete, revelation of God’s wishes; Muslims deriding Christians in much the same way—although they, too, revere Jesus, but only as an outdated messenger of God, not as his son. It’s so pathetic. Did you know that devout Muslims bless Abraham seventeen times a day? The Haj—the pilgr
image to Mecca, every Muslim’s holy duty—millions of them braving stifling heat as well as the distinct possibility of getting trampled to death—do you know what it’s all about? They’re there to commemorate God’s sparing of Ishmael—the son of Abraham! You only need to go to Hebron to see how absurd the whole thing’s become. Arabs and Jews still killing each other over the most hotly contested piece of real estate on the planet, all because it’s supposedly the site of Abraham’s grave, a small cave that has separate, isolated viewing areas for each group. Abraham—if he ever really existed—must be turning in his grave at the thought of his squabbling, small-minded, petty descendants. Talk about dysfunctional families…”

  Vance heaved a dire sigh. “I know it’s easy to blame all the conflicts in our history on politics and greed,” he said, “and of course they play a role…but beneath it all, religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning. And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we’ve become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions. These primitive tribesmen and women, thousands of years ago—they were scared, they needed religion to try and understand the mysteries of life and death, to come to terms with the vagaries of disease, weather, unpredictable harvests, and natural disasters. We don’t need that anymore. We can pick up a cell phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. We can put a remote-controlled car on Mars. We can create life in a test tube. And we could do a lot more. It’s time we let go of our ancient superstitions and face who we really are and accept that we have become what someone from just a hundred years ago would consider a God. We need to embrace what we’re capable of, and not rely on some arcane force from above that’s going to come down from the sky and make things right for us.”

  “That’s a pretty myopic view you’re taking, isn’t it?” Reilly argued back angrily. “What about all the good that it does? The ethical code, the moral framework it sets down. The comfort it provides, to say nothing of the charitable work, feeding the poor, and looking after the less fortunate. Faith in Christ is all that a lot of people out there have, and millions of people rely on religion to give them strength, to help them through their days. But you don’t see any of that, do you? You’re just obsessed with one tragic event, the one that ruined your own life, the one that’s jaundiced your view of the world and anything good that’s in it.”

  Vance’s expression turned distant and haunted. “All I see is the unnecessary pain and suffering it’s caused, not just to me, but to millions of people over the centuries.” After a brief moment, his gaze settled again on Reilly, and his tone hardened. “Christianity served a great purpose when it was conceived. It gave people hope, it provided a social support system, it helped bring down tyranny. It served the needs of a community. What needs does it serve today, apart from blocking medical research and justifying wars and murder? We laugh when we look at the preposterous gods that the Incas or the Egyptians used to worship. Are we any better? What will people think when they look back on us in a thousand years? Will we be the subject of the same ridicule? We’re still dancing to tunes created by men who thought that a thunderstorm was a sign of God’s anger. And that,” he seethed, “that all needs to change.”

  REILLY TURNED TO TESS. She hadn’t said a word during Vance’s diatribe. “What about you? What do you think? Do you agree with all that?”

  Tess’s face clouded. She avoided his look, obviously struggling to find the right words. “The historical facts are there, Sean. And we’re talking about things that have been widely documented and accepted.”

  She hesitated before continuing, “I do believe that the Gospels were initially written to pass on a spiritual message, but that they became something else. They took on a bigger purpose, a political purpose. Jesus lived in an occupied country in a terrible time. The Roman Empire back then was a world of glaring inequalities. There was great poverty for the masses and immense wealth for the select few. It was a time of famines, of sickness and disease. It’s easy to imagine how, in that unfair and violent world, the message of Christianity caught on. Its basic premise, that a merciful God asks humans to be merciful to one another, beyond their families and even their communities, was literally revolutionary. It offered its converts, regardless of where they came from, a coherent culture, a sense of equality and of belonging, without asking them to abandon their ethnic ties. It gave them dignity and equality with others, regardless of their status. The hungry knew where they would be fed, the sick and the elderly knew where they would be cared for. It offered everyone an immortal future free from poverty, sickness, and isolation. It brought a new conception of humanity, a message of love, mercy, and community to a world that was rife with cruelty and gripped by a culture of death.

  “I’m not as big an expert on this as he is,” Tess continued, as she motioned toward Vance, “but he’s right. I’ve always had a problem with all that supernatural stuff, the divinity of Jesus, the idea of His being the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary. The uncomfortable truth is that none of it appeared until dozens, even hundreds of years after the Crucifixion, and it only became official Church policy at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. It was like…,” she wavered, “they needed something special, a great hook. And in a time when the supernatural was something most people accepted, then what better than to suggest that the religion you were selling wasn’t named for a humble carpenter but for a divine being who could give you the promise of an immortal afterlife?”

  “Come on, Tess,” Reilly countered indignantly, “you’re making it sound like nothing more than a cynical propaganda campaign. Do you really believe it would have carried as much power, or lasted as long as it has, if it were all based on deception? Of all the preachers and wise men roaming the land at the time, He was the one who moved people to risk their lives to follow His teachings. He was the one who most inspired those around Him, He affected people like no one else had, and they wrote and talked about what they saw.”

  “But that’s my point,” Vance interjected, “there isn’t a single first-person account of it. Nothing that can definitively prove it.”

  “Or disprove it,” Reilly shot back. “But then you’re not really considering both sides of the equation, are you?”

  “Well, if the Vatican was so terrified of the Templars’ discovery coming out into the open,” Vance scoffed, “I think I can guess which way its thinking leans. And if we could only finish what the Templars set out to do,” he turned to Tess, beaming with an alarmingly infectious fervor, “it would be the final step in something that’s been brewing since the Enlightenment. It wasn’t that long ago that people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around us. When Galileo came along and proved that it was the other way around, the Church almost had him burned at the stake. The same thing happened with Darwin. Think about it. Whose word is the ‘gospel’ truth today?”

  Reilly fell quiet as he weighed the information. It bothered him that everything he had heard, no matter how hard he tried to dismiss it, seemed not just possible, but uncomfortably plausible. After all, there were several major religions vying for adherents all around the planet, all claiming to be the real thing, and they couldn’t all be right. He guiltily recognized that he was so ready to dismiss other religions as mass delusions…why should the one he happened to believe in be any different?

  “One by one,” Vance announced, his eyes locking onto Tess, “these falsehoods, these inventions of the early founders of the Church, they’re all crumbling. This would be the final one to fall, nothing more.”

  Chapter 69

  Reilly sat alone, perched on a craggy rock face overlooking the clearing where the pickup was parked. He’d watched the sky gradually darken, unveiling countless stars and a moon that was bigger and brighter than any he’d ever seen. The sight was enough to stir the soul
of even the most cynical observer, but right now Reilly wasn’t in the most inspired of moods.

  Vance’s words still rang loudly in his ears. The supernatural elements of the story at the heart of his faith had always sat uncomfortably with his rational, questioning mind, but he hadn’t ever really felt the need to subject them to such scrutiny. Vance’s disturbing, and, much as he hated to admit it, convincing arguments had opened a can of worms that would be difficult to close.

  The truck was barely visible now, Vance’s shadowy form beside it where he’d left him. Reilly couldn’t stop running the man’s tirade through his mind, looking for the crack that would cause the whole sordid edifice to crumble, but he couldn’t find one. Nothing about it was counterintuitive. If anything, it made too much sense.

  A scattering of pebbles behind him snapped him out of his reverie. He turned to see Tess clambering up the ridge to join him.

  “Hey,” she said. The full beam that had entranced him was gone, replaced by a troubled expression.