Knights of the Black and White (53 page)

“You still have said nothing about how all this has anything to do with Saint Paul.”

Sir William raised his injured arm high and cupped his shoulder with his other hand as he flexed the joint, grimacing in discomfort. “You phrased your comment wrongly, Stephen. It was
Paul
who had to do with all this,” he said through gritted teeth. He lowered his arm and released pent-up air explosively between his lips.

“Paul changed everything, Stephen, from what it was then into what it is today—from Jewish to gentile. It was all Paul’s doing. He stripped what was there in Jerusalem—the movement that Jesus and his followers 510

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

called the Way—of all its Jewishness, and thereby of all its true meaning, and turned it into something inoffensive and innocuous, an idea bland enough to be accepted by the Romans. He stripped away all the rigid, unyielding, and unpopular Jewish morality and rewrapped the story in the style of his ancient Greek ancestors, with their love of fantastic, dramatic, fictitious, and completely implausible tales. And in so doing, he changed Jesus from a simple Jewish man of high ideals and stern patriotism into the Son of God, born of a virgin.”

The Count rose to his feet and stretched mightily.

“You have heard enough here this afternoon to set your head a-spinning,” he said to Stephen. “So much information, and all so sudden and so unexpected. I know that, and so does William here. But remember what we said earlier, about time. You have your entire lifetime in which to explore and reexamine what we have told you, and you have full access to all the records in our archives, together with equal access to our most learned brethren, who will be happy and honored to share their knowledge and their studies with you.

“All that we require of you is that you keep an open mind and be aware that there are always other points of view on any topic that the human mind can countenance.

In this particular instance of the man known as Saint Paul, you will learn that there are voices from the past, from his own time, that state quite clearly that he was not who he appeared to be, and that he was not altogether wholesome in many aspects of his character, including his truthfulness. There are others, equally strong and co-

Confessions

511

gent, who maintain that his vaunted Romanness led to his being a toady and a confidant and a spy of the emperor Nero. Still others indicate—and I make no accusations here, I am merely saying they
indicate
—that he may have been directly involved in the murder of James, the brother of Jesus. After the death of Jesus, James took his place as leader of the movement that we in the Order call the Jerusalem Assembly. James had no time for Paul and made no secret of his disapproval of the man, while Paul clearly saw James—and said so in his own writings—as a threat, a deterrent and a hindrance to the spreading of God’s word to the gentiles. He denounced and deni-grated James accordingly as being worthy of arrest and punishment. There is no doubt that he was right about the hindrance, for James was a Jew, one of the people chosen by God to be His own, and there was no place in James’s world for gentiles.

“There is far more to all of this, of course, than most men know, but we in the Order, who can trace our direct descent from the Essenes, the Poor Men of the Jerusalem Assembly itself, and who acknowledge the Way that they perceived and by which they lived, have a duty to maintain a clear line of sight from here to where this all began.

Bear that in mind at all times from this moment on, and be true to the vows you made in being Raised.” He stopped and eyed Stephen sympathetically. “You look baffled. And so you should. But now you need to go away and think about everything we have said here today.

And if you have more questions, come back and ask them, of either one of us. Go now in peace.”

SIX

The seeds that had been sown in Stephen’s mind that day rooted strongly, and in the two years that followed, before he was shipped off to join the new fraternity in Jerusalem, Stephen St. Clair developed an insatiable appetite for any information that bore upon the Jerusalem Assembly, the Way of the Essenes, and the earliest days of what would, thanks to the man Paul, become Christianity as the world knew it twelve hundred years later. He soon lost count of the hours spent in a score of locations throughout the country, listening to his elder brethren, the archivists of the Order of Rebirth, recounting and translating the Lore that they safeguarded. The archives were a source of constant amazement to him, for although they were extensive in their scope, they were surprisingly small in physical mass, being mainly, although not exclusively, in the form of 512

Confessions

513

scrolls, which were far lighter and less bulky than the heavily bound books known as codices. They were de-centralized, too, scattered among the main houses of the Friendly Families and guarded painstakingly by the senior brethren who had undertaken to study and conserve them.

He became thoroughly versed in the politics of Judea in Herodian times and in the aims and beliefs of the various sects and subsects at all levels of the Messianic movement, and he quickly learned to trust his own judgment in evaluating information, and to rely upon his intuitions when they were backed by intensive reading and re-search.

He had quickly discovered, for example, that one of the archives, near the ancient town of Carcassonne in the Languedoc, contained copies of the original writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, and from his studies of those, with the assistance of his mentors who had studied them for years, he came to appreciate that, uniquely self-serving as his writings were, Josephus had provided minute and exquisitely detailed recordings of the political and military situation within Judea and Palestine in his own time. It was by comparing Josephus’s viewpoints and depictions in his two best-known works,
The Jewish War
and
Antiquities
, to those in Christian teachings and writings that Stephen had come to understand, and to believe beyond doubt or question, how Paul the Evan-gelist had sanitized the Jerusalem Assembly’s teachings and used them to create Christianity in his own image and for his own ends, soon after the destruction of 514

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

Jerusalem, stripping the old religion of its original anti-Roman Jewish nationalism and its anti-gentile prohibitions to make it politically acceptable to the Imperial authorities and to the polyglot citizenry of the Roman Empire.

He had also been fascinated by the emergence of Imperial Christianity hundreds of years later, from the moment in the fourth century when the emperor Constantine had romanized the Church, extracting and destroying the revolutionary teeth that had attracted his attention to it in the first place. In an act of what St.

Clair’s predecessors in the Order had conceded to be unprecedented political genius, Constantine had made the Church an integrated part of the establishment of the Empire by transforming its Pope and cardinals into imperial princes, and the crowning achievement of his stratagem had lain in endowing them with an earthly palace that would forever afterwards symbolize their worldly importance and would mark, for those few who cared, or dared, to look, the true death of the movement established by Jesus, James, and the other original adherents of the Jerusalem Assembly.

St. Clair would never forget the exhilaration he felt on first reading and hearing such things, for this was heady and frightening information, reeking, at first, of apostasy and heresy. But it had been made clear to him by then, by his sponsors, that the Order of Rebirth had documented everything of which it spoke, and the evidence it possessed, smuggled out of Judea by the fugitive priests and their families, was impressive in its scope, its great age, Confessions

515

and its obvious authenticity. There was sufficient material there, as Stephen had since seen for himself, for several lifetimes of study, and many of his predecessors, archivists and antiquarians down through an entire millennium, had dedicated their lives to investigating, translating, and interpreting what was there.

He now believed implicitly that the ancient Order of Rebirth in Sion was the sole legitimate descendant of the Jerusalem Assembly remaining on earth, and that should its existence be discovered, it would be eradicated instantly by Saint Paul’s creation, the Christian Church, which in the course of twelve hundred years had system-atically rooted out and destroyed all opposition, even the most supposedly benign, in a ruthless and sustained effort to protect its own power and values and to keep the entire world subjugated to its will—a will that had been indisputably created and formulated by men. That latter was an important point, for these so-called representatives of God, whether they called themselves bishops, archbishops, cardinals, popes, or patriarchs, were all men, mortal men who, by their lives and actions, demonstrated daily that they knew little and cared less about their supposedly immortal progenitor, the man who had lived so long ago in Judea and died on a cross for fomenting rebellion against Rome.

Paul, St. Clair now believed, had been much more a self-serving cynic than he had been a saint. He had had the acumen, and an opportunistic instinct, that had enabled him to recognize a magnificent concept when it confronted him. And so he had usurped it, cleansed it of 516

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

everything that non-Jews might find offensive, and then built it inexorably into a self-perpetuating organism, such a potent force for revolution and reformation, but ultimately for gathering revenues, that centuries later the emperor Constantine—Paul’s equal, at least, in self-serving opportunism—had been inspired to adapt it to his own benefit.

By the time of that transformation by Constantine, however, three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, the families that nurtured the Order of Rebirth had lived in the south of ancient Gaul for more than fifteen generations, on the land where they had settled after their arrival there, and no one, including themselves, would ever have suspected that their ancestral origins lay far from where they now lived in prosperity. The Friendly Families, as they called themselves, had blended seamlessly into their adopted society and had become friendly clans, for while the thirty original families were still there, their numbers had expanded enormously, and while all were aware that the bonds that held them in such close amity were ancient and even sacred in some arcane and unknowable way, few of them ever wondered over the why of such a thing. Their relationship to all the other Friendly Families was a given, a fact of life that had existed before the parents of their grandparents were born and would continue to exist long after they themselves and their own grandchildren were gone. They took their interrelationship, and their undoubted Christianity, for granted.

Only in the deepest recesses of their families’ most Confessions

517

close-held secrets, guarded jealously and conscientiously by perhaps one single member of each family in each generation, was the truth about their origins enshrined and passed down through the generations in compliance with a sacred duty. And it was a truth that none of their relatives would have believed.

Their ancestors, the founders of the Friendly Families, had all been priests of the Jerusalem Assembly, adherents of the original Ecclesia of Jesus and James the Just. The death of Jesus, at the hands of the Romans, had been taken in stride by the people of Jerusalem and of Judea, but when his brother James was brutally murdered in turn, beaten to death with a fuller’s club by unknown assassins, the resultant outcry had precipitated the final Jewish uprising against the Herodians and Rome, and had brought Vespasian and his son Titus, with their re-morseless armies, to wipe out the Jewish troublemakers once and for all time.

Towards the end of the siege of Jerusalem, when the destruction of their city and its temple was seen to be inevitable, the priests of the Assembly had hidden their most sacred artifacts, records, and relics deep beneath the ground, securely beyond the reach of the rapacious Romans. Only then, when they were sure they had done all that they could do to safeguard what they could not carry with them, did they join the thousands of people fleeing Judea. They made their way through the Mediterranean lands, traveling for many years as a large and seemingly loose but none the less tight-knit and self-sufficient group, until they reached the south of Iberia, 518

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE

and from there they struck northward into southern Gaul, settling eventually throughout the area known as the Languedoc. And there they remained, consolidating their possessions, their knowledge, and their most sacred traditions, finally entrusting the guardianship of their most precious secrets to a secret guild that they formed from the most trustworthy men among their families.

St. Clair found it bitterly ironic that he, who had been raised, to a great extent, by monks and warriors, and had dreamed himself of being a Christian monk in his ancestral province of Anjou, should now be numbered among the nine most anomalous beings in the annals of the Christian Church: the warrior monks of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ. He found it even more ludicrous, however, that he should have been the one to become so obsessed by the history of Christianity that he was now close to having the ability, if not to destroy it, to cast genuine doubts at least upon the authenticity of its central tenets.