The Gospel Of Judas by Simon Mawer Read Free Book Online

granted, it was his cousin Jesus who took up the baton on behalf of the family. “Are you the one, or do we look for another?” they asked of Him.’
    He eyed the audience with a certain curiosity, as though they not he were on show. ‘Never doubt the claim,’ Leo Newman warned them. ‘It has come down to us through the centuries, through the telling and the texts, through the copying and the glossing and the interpolations and the excisions: there it is in three languages on the titulus above His head when He hung on the cross: T HE K ING OF THE J EWS. ’
    Some members of the audience crossed themselves.
    ‘That was the claim for which He died. If the whole thing was mere history and the gospels merely historical texts, Our Lord’s ministry would be put down as nothing more or less than an attempt to take the throne of Judaea back from the colonial rulers and the satraps, an appeal to the God of Israel, a return to the spirit of the Maccabees.’
    And he paused at that point, for here the merely heterodox trespassed over into heresy. For the signal fact is that after Jesus’ death his brother James inherited the leadership, and the Church admits no siblings in the family of Nazareth, no other children of the perpetually virgin Mary. And yet there it is, in the Acts of the Apostles and in Josephus: John to Jesus; Jesus to James. Inheritance and succession: the Janus feature of families. Inheritance and succession: the grindstones that crush the child to dust.
    Family, and the power of family. Madeleine’s family had its own curious argot, its own exclusive customs. Like a stranger in a foreign land, Leo Newman, priest of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, began to learn. ‘Beano,’ they said,‘pass the beano,’ when they meant wine. ‘
Issma
’ signified ‘come here’ because they had spent some time in Cairo where Jack was First Secretary; Madeleine was ‘buffled’ when she was confused, and things were ‘famulus’ when they were good, and Jack was ‘jabber’ when he was telling the rest of them off. Jack was brisk and jovial, a man with both brain and brawn, a man who had the word
ambassador
engraved on his heart. The elder of their two daughters, seasonal orphans at a boarding school in England, had been christened Catherine because that was the name of Jack’s Oxford college, which was where, he assured Leo, he had come to loathe Anglo-Saxon and love Madeleine. He treated Madeleine with mild amusement – Maddy, he called her, with its faint suggestion of amiable madness – while to his children he granted an impersonal affection, as though there was little difference between the two of them, as though they were both some kind of household pet. The younger daughter, for reasons that were never clear, was called ‘Boot’; but
acushla
was either of the girls, for it comes from
a chuisle mo chroidhe
and is Irish for ‘pulse of my heart’.
    The metamorphosis of a relationship is a mysterious thing, much too mysterious for a simple naming. One may interpret it in retrospect, as a historian will look over the trace of past events and descry a thread, a logical development; but at the time, in time, there is no thread, is there? There is nothing more than the contingent facts of existence, the small moment as significant as the large, the detail dictating to the whole. Leo was an acquaintance, he became a friend. Family outings; the occasional party; a concert or two, that kind of thing. And whereas acquaintance may be shared with others, friendship is an exclusive thing, with its own cryptic dimensions, its own assonance. Hewould start a sentence and find his own words trampling on Madeleine’s identical ones. He would glance at her, and find her watching him with bewilderment there in her expression, as though she was trying to puzzle out words from a language she didn’t fully understand. They smiled and watched each other smiling. Casual contact – the merest touch of a wrist, arm brushing