I, Judas the 5th Gospel (17 page)

Gates shifted uncomfortably and looked up at the Intruder looming overhead on the northern horizon.

“Yes, yes,” Judas said. “You’re in a rush. Why? It’s coming at its own pace. Nothing we can do about it right now.”

“But there
is
something that can be done about it?” Gates asked.

Judas nodded toward DiSalvo. “Should we do something about it?”

“It is God’s Will,” DiSalvo said. “It cannot be changed.”

“But can’t we pray it away?” Judas asked.

“We can pray for salvation,” DeSalvo said.

“You can,” Judas said. “But let’s continue to talk about what happened to Jesus when he was crucified, so you understand the true price of salvation. Even with the aid of the sedecula, a large amount of the body weight is transmitted through the arms. And with them up and extended as Jesus’s were, breathing is rather difficult. The diaphragm must move up and down to make the lungs work. To breathe in, the diaphragm goes down, expanding the chest cavity—” here Judas took a deep breath as if modeling what had happened on Golgotha so many years ago“—and to exhale, the diaphragm has to rise. Hanging on the crucifix, the body weight pulls down on the diaphragm, so to exhale, Jesus had to push up on his legs, thus push up on the nail through his heels. Every breath, therefore, was agony, but you can’t stop breathing, can you? Have you ever tried? To just stop? You can’t. That’s why this was so ingenious. A crucified person caused a large portion of their own pain just from breathing.

“And Jesus was quite remarkable even then, because he actually spoke several times while he was up there. Speaking occurs in the process of exhaling, so each time he uttered something, he was pushing up on his heels. Sometimes I wonder if he did this to quicken his death. Because no matter how hard he was trying, he was slowly suffocating up there. Carbon dioxide was building up in his blood, which in turn increased the desire to breathe, which in turn increased his heart rate to circulate what oxygen he did have.”

Judas paused. “I didn’t know the science then. I’ve studied it in the years since, because I watched Jesus die on the cross. And many others in that century. It took six hours for him to die. When it looked like he was no longer breathing, one of the soldiers stabbed him the side with a spear to make sure. The other gospel writers got that right.”

Judas stopped speaking. There was absolute silence. Even the jungle seemed to have paused for the moment. The visitors were surprised to see tears in Judas’s eyes. He quickly brushed them away. He glanced up at the Intruder and a strange look passed over his face, gone as quickly as it had appeared. He shivered, and then refocused.

“Where was I? Ah, yes. The Apostles and their fates. I’ll complete it for you, priest, as I know more about it than you do, no matter how great your alphabetical Jesuit education was. James, son of Zebedee, was beheaded. John, who was exiled, was the only one of The Apostles who died of old age. Judas, the one they replaced me with after the Resurrection, was stoned to death. Matthew was speared to death. Peter was crucified upside-down as the Romans tried to insult his faith. Philip was crucified. Simon was crucified. Thomas was speared to death. And Matthias was stoned to death.

“They were good men,” Judas said sadly. “The best. Jesus sought out the very best.”

“Except for you,” DiSalvo said.

“You are a most ungracious guest,” Judas said without rancor. “I was the first chosen. And the last still alive. And sometimes I envy those who had quick endings rather than the torment of millennia I have had to experience.”

“Jesus cursed you,” DiSalvo said.

“He did indeed, because he trusted me the most.” Judas paused. “That’s not true. I was not the most trusted. Mary was. That’s someone
everyone
has gotten very wrong.”

Judas shifted his gaze to the jungle. A man came striding into the clearing. A white man dressed in faded khaki, an Australian bush hat on his head. Most intriguing, his face was covered with tattoos, an intricate swirl of shapes that seemed to have some pattern. He walked up to Judas and leaned over, whispering in his ear.

Judas said nothing, only nodding in response and the man went back the way he’d come, disappearing into the trees.

Judas stroked his short beard, lost in thought for a moment, then asked: “Do either of you know what the Smiling Budha was?”

“A statue?” Angelique ventured.

“Not even close.” Judas shrugged. “Sometimes humans surprise me, in a very good way. A man, a soldier just like you, Captain, has just done something very loving, by giving all he had: his life. It’s all any of us has. It’s the sum of all we’ve been and all we might be.

“Where was I? Ah yes, The Apostles and the gospels,” he said, getting back to the original topic. “A handful of people sat down and wrote gospels and letters and such. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are well known; James and Jude, supposed half-brothers to Jesus. Peter wrote his letters as did Paul who was made an apostle after the resurrection. All of these various documents were floating about the ancient world, being translated into other languages, some of the writing destroyed by those who sought to stomp out the burgeoning Christian faith.

“It took a while, quite a while, for someone to sit down and pull it all together. Over three hundred years. The year of our Lord, three hundred and sixty-seven to be exact, when a man named Athanasius formally put together the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. At least the books he chose to include. He did
not
choose to include what I had written. Not long after that, Jerome and Augustine also did the same thing with roughly the same results.

“So that, my friends, is how the book that is the basis of your belief system came into being. It is rather amazing that one person started it all. I can assure you that the…what’s the word? Ah yes, buzz. Jesus certainly knew how to create it. He was perhaps the greatest buzz maker of all time.”

“You’re speaking of our Lord,” DiSalvo said.

“He was my friend,” Judas shot back.

“And you betrayed him,” DiSalvo argued.

“I did my part of the plan,” Judas said. “If I had not gone to the Pharisees, would we even be sitting here having this discussion? Would there have been the crucifixion—as horrible as it was, it was necessary—and the resurrection and the ascension? Of course not. Would there even be Christianity?”

“But you had free will,” DiSalvo said triumphantly. “Just as you told us. God didn’t make you do that. You had a choice.”

“Yes, I had a choice,” Judas acknowledged. “And I made the right one, although sometimes I wonder.”

“Wonder about what?” Gates asked.

“Wonder if I did the right thing,” Judas said. “And not in the way you think. Jesus and I agreed—yes, we
agreed
—” he emphasized, cutting off DiSalvo—“that I had to turn him in for the next step of the plan to proceed.

“I’m talking long-term effects,” Judas said. “Here we are two thousand years later, and how much has man developed?”

“What are you talking about?” DiSalvo demanded. “The Christian Church is larger and stronger than ever and—”

“I’m not talking about the damn church,” Judas snapped. “I’m talking about people.” He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “All right, you want truth.” He paused suddenly, as a native dressed in just a loincloth and carrying a war club came scurrying out of the jungle. The man whispered something to Judas, pointing back anxiously at the way he’d come.

Judas nodded and dismissed the man with some quick orders. The man ran to the others gathered around, and within thirty seconds they had disappeared into the jungle.

“What’s going on?” Gates demanded.

“Visitors,” Judas said.

Gates grabbed his MP-5, as did DiSalvo. Just in time as two mercenaries broke out of the jungle, their own weapons at the ready.

“Drop them!” Gates yelled.

The two men halted, but didn’t lower their weapons. “What the bloody hell is going on?” one of them yelled. He nodded his head up toward the Intruder. “What is that thing?”

Judas sighed. “You’re interrupting, and that is most rude.” He held up a black stone and it emitted a red glow. The two mercenaries froze in place.

“What did you do to them?” Gates asked.

“They’ll be fine,” Judas said, lowering the stone.

“What is that thing?” DiSalvo demanded. “How did you do that?”

Judas laughed. “You’re worried about this trivial thing?” He held up the stone once more. “I’ve been alive for over two thousand years, you don’t think I can pull off some special things? This used to be Jesus’s by the way.”

“It’s a machine?” Gates asked.

“I couldn’t explain to you what it is. It was given to Jesus by the Father, and he passed it on to me before he was taken away.”

“What will happen to them?” Angelique asked, nodding toward the mercenaries.

“Nothing,” Judas said. “Unless a tree falls on them. They won’t remember anything that happens around them when they’re in that state. I’ll release them later. When everything has been resolved.” He turned away from the frozen men. “I’ll give you some truth.

“I’ve mentioned this but I don’t think you heard me. Both sides are wrong. You represent the Brotherhood. And there is the Illuminati. Yes, I’ve run into their agents in the past. How do you think you found me here? Because one of the Illuminati—yes, your enemy—found me here many years ago. And he wrote a damn book about it. Too many people writing too many things in my opinion, and your people got a hold of it.”

“Burton,” Angelique said.

Judas nodded. “Yes. But that’s getting way too far ahead in the story.” He closed his eyes. “Okay, the beginning. The beginning of this world at least. This is where your Bible starts and would have you believe it all starts. But Genesis one, verse one, is where you have to start asking questions. Does the beginning as indicated there mean the beginning of the entire physical universe? Or the beginning of this local group of galaxies we live in? Or just the beginning of this galaxy, the Milky Way? Or the beginning of the Solar System, or just the beginning here on Earth?”

Judas did not give any of them time for an answer as he pressed on. “Creationists argue this first question. So right away, we have five possible paths of ‘truth.’ Then we move on to the six days, the Biblical Creation Week. Some squirm out of whether the world could really have been made in six days by saying a God-day and a man-day might be vastly different. A lot of this depends on translation of Hebrew words, and not just the words, but the tenses of the translations. Tricky stuff to say the least. Which I am also not going to get into here, because although we have some time—” Judas glanced up at the glowing Intruder—“we don’t have
that
much time. And there are more important things for me to tell you before you make your decisions.”

“What decisions?” Gates demanded. He thumped his hand on the table. “We came to kill you, and you have gained the upper hand. What decisions do we have?”

“Did you come to kill me?” Judas asked, but he was staring at DiSalvo. He switched his gaze to Gates. “And did you? Is that in your true heart, Captain Gates?”

Gates gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white.

“If I do indeed have the upper hand,” Judas said, “then I have a captive audience, so you must listen. I could put you in stasis like them, but then you wouldn’t hear a word I’m saying and it’s necessary for you to hear.

“The marginal entries in older Bibles allows for six thousand and three years between Creation Week and the recent turn of the millennium. More recent calculations by modern biblical scholars say the Flood occurred in thirty-four-oh-two B.C., and total the age of our present world at around five thousand, four hundred years old. So, you’ve got plus or minus a thousand years to play with if you’re a creationist. One of those who believe man existed side by side with the dinosaurs.

“But early and contemporary Christians weren’t the only ones trying to get a handle on the age of the world. Plato in fourth century B.C. said the Great Flood occurred two hundred million years prior to his time. A rather large difference from the Bible.

“The Babylonian scholar Berossus who lived in third century B.C. put the world’s creation at two million, one hundred forty-eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-three B.C. Pretty damn specific, don’t you think? I’m not exactly sure what he or Plato based their numbers on.

“Applonius of Egypt wasn’t so expansive—he said the world at his time, in second century B.C., was only around one hundred and fifty thousand years old. On the other edge of the world, the Hindus manuscripts written in first century A.D. say the world exists in repeating cycles of four point three-two billions years, each containing one thousand and four point-three-two million year sub-cycles. Pretty sophisticated stuff there.”