Mission (48 page)

After The Man had rested up for a few days, Joseph of Arimathea returned from Jerusalem and persuaded him to join his own party which was taking the road north through Samaria to Sebaste, the capital of the region. A mere thirty-five miles from Nazareth. As a result, The Man did not get to call on Johanan-Gabriel. It would have been a wasted journey. The Essenes had moved their base from Aenon near Salim on the Jordan to more secure quarters on the forbidding slopes of the Wadi Qumran on the edge of the Dead Sea. And Johanan-Gabriel was some eighty miles further north, checking out their abandoned landing module which lay buried under a snowcovered plateau near the summit of Mount Hermon.

Gabriel was responding to a signal he had received from the lead vessel of the rescue fleet, now only twelve months out from Earth. On
his arrival at the hidden landing-site, he found that the mysterious malfunction that had forced their abandonment of the module had cleared itself, enabling the craft to be recharged by a burst of power transmitted via the chain of longships. For the first time since entering the World Below, Gabriel was in two-way contact with the Empire. To his surprise, the Empire knew of The Man's return to Palestine, and they gave Gabriel precise instructions on what to do when they met.

Joshua-Ya'el, the Jesus-figure who now made his way from Sebaste to Nazareth bore no resemblance to the gentle, smooth-faced supplicant portrayed in devotional literature. This was a lean, ravaged, fiery-eyed wayfarer, with calloused hands and feet, and whipcord muscles like the miners of West Virginia under a skin that wind, sand, snow and rain had turned into weathered rawhide. When he arrived home, Mary, his mother, was overjoyed to see her eldest son alive and well. Despite his strange, other-wordly genesis inside her body – which she had accepted with a kind of child-like wonder without ever fully understanding – he was still her favourite son. Like the rest of the family she had long given him up for dead and now, here he was. Scarred from his travels, but still with the same intense gaze that, in The Man-child, had filled them with awe and, behind the outward show of diffidence, the same defiant air of authority that had amazed the priests all those years ago in Jerusalem.

The welcome from his brothers and sisters was less than tumultuous. After all, seventeen years is a long time to be away, but they thawed out considerably when they learned that he had no intention of claiming his share of Joseph's estate.

His surrogate-father had died, still bewildered by his starring role in the Nativity Play. During his lifetime, when the young Joshua-Ya'el had been in his care, Joseph had been constantly troubled by what he took to be signs of madness in his adopted starchild. He did not know, and probably would not have understood that his son's erratic moods were caused by the conflict between The Man's meta-psyche and the earth-oriented Ain-folk soul-fragment who shared their host-body and who also answered to its given name.

With his mother, sisters Ruth and Sarah, and brother James, The Man went out to the cemetery where Joseph lay buried and said prayers. Afterwards, they talked about old times and The Man gave them a brief outline of where he'd been. James accepted it without question but the others tended to take it with a large pinch of salt.
Mary, his mother, had been deeply hurt by the fact that he had disappeared without a word to his family but she was, nevertheless, immensely proud of her wayward son. There were not many Jewish boys who had travelled further than Alexander and had seen more things than a Roman emperor had dreamed of.

The Man asked if they had news of his cousin Johanan. They had indeed. Johanan had become a holy man who, it was said, spoke in the manner of the great prophets. Some even claimed that the spirit of Elijah was upon him. He had become a wild man of the desert, wandering the barren hills of Judea, dressed in rags with hair like a mangy lion, subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey. In the last year, he had acquired a small group of disciples and the title of Johanan the Baptiser. People flocked to hear him speak whenever he appeared on the banks of the Jordan, waiting patiently in line to receive his blessing and undergo, in a simple ceremony, a symbolic rebirth by immersion in the waters of the river. Johanan spoke of the coming deliverance of the people of Israel. The age-old prophecies were to be fulfilled. He was but a messenger, sent to prepare the way for the Messiah who would baptise them not with water but with the transcendent spirit of God.

As they sat around the fire, talking about their remarkable but eccentric cousin, none of Mary's children had the remotest idea that the Saviour prophesied by Johanan was sitting amongst them. But Mary, his mother, knew. She looked into his eyes and remembered the angel who had spoken to her in the dream, the star that had appeared at the time of his birth then had vanished from the sky, and the three wise men who had journeyed so far to kneel before him, and she trembled. Her heart was full of joy at his return and grief at the knowledge that she was to lose him again – this time for ever.

Towards the end of the evening, as we wound up the recording session, The Man dropped another bombshell into the conversation when he made a slighting reference to Paul.

‘Wait a minute,' I said. ‘Which Paul are we talking about? Not the Paul that was – '

‘Yes,' he nodded. ‘Saul of Tarsus.'

I became confused. ‘But, surely, Paul was one of the great founding fathers of the church. He wrote a big chunk of the New Testament, he was imprisoned – '

The Man shook his head. ‘One of the best moles ‘Brax ever
recruited. Believe me.' He paused and looked at us both. ‘I was never on that road to Damascus.'

I put a hand to my forehead and stared wide-eyed at Miriam. ‘I don't believe it. Do you realise what he's saying?'

‘Don't argue,' said Miriam. ‘Just listen.'

‘And another thing,' continued The Man. ‘I never told Peter that he was the rock upon which I would build my church. That was all written in later by Paul and his friends to legitimise their takeover of the movement that the disciples had begun.'

‘I'm beginning to understand,' I said. ‘Less than a hundred years later, you've got presbyters, deacons and bishops issuing orders and rewriting the rules. The theologians start arguing over the wording of the message and by three hundred and something AD when Theodosius gives it his seal of approval, the whole thing goes down the tube.'

The Man smiled. ‘Not entirely. We managed to keep the message alive through the Sufis.'

There'd been the hint of a connection before but this was the first time he had mentioned it directly. But the implications were tremendous. ‘Do you mean to say that – ?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘The Empire put the fear of God back into the Christians by sending someone to talk to a man called Muhammad. It was the Muslims who kept the flame of awareness alive for the next three hundred years.'

I sat there, slack-mouthed.

‘What do you think world history is about?' said The Man. ‘The Second War of Secession didn't end with the destruction of Atlantis. I've already told you this. It's still going on. Through you, around you, over you.' He wasn't smiling now. ‘Man is the prize.
That's
why Earth is so important to us. If we don't win here …' He waved the thought away leaving the sentence uncompleted. Another of his cliffhangers.

‘The Holocaust, and the new wave of violence against Jews by neo-Nazi groups, even the re-creation of a Jewish homeland in the cauldron of the Middle East, and the fundamentalist intransigence of parties like the
Gush Emunim,
are all part of'Brax's latest counterattack,' explained The Man. ‘The Promised Land was never part of this earth. It was a symbol of deliverance of the Ain-folk by the Empire. It was the metaphysical acreage of the World Above. But you've allowed yourselves to be drawn into fighting for some rockladen
real-estate when the real battle is over the control of your hearts and minds.'

‘Yes, but come on,' I protested. ‘You know how these people feel about Jerusalem. This is what the Old Testament is all about.'

The Man shook his head again. ‘It's important to remember what I told you about The Word. The Old and the New Testament were written by men. The Book is not The Truth, but The Truth is in the Book. A subtle, but very important difference.'

‘You're beginning to sound like Leo,' said Miriam.

‘True,' smiled The Man. ‘But the point I'm making is absolutely fundamental to your understanding of the statements made by the various authors about what God, I, and other Envoys like Michael and Gabriel are supposed to have done and said.'

‘It's going to annoy those people who claim every word of the Bible is true,' I said. Thinking of the Jehovah's Witnesses who kept stuffing their
Watchtower
pamphlets into my mailbox.

The Man smiled and threw up his hands. ‘I'm always annoying people. A few more won't make any difference. The Book is not something to be learned parrot-fashion. If you read it in the wrong way, you can read it a hundred times and still be none the wiser. Yet if you approach it correctly, The Truth will often leap from the pages at the very first reading. If you would know The Way, you must think of yourself as a traveller lost in a forest that is so dark and impenetrable it blocks out the sun. To free yourself, you must cut a path through the ‘Braxian undergrowth towards The Light.'

I nodded. ‘What you're saying, in other words, is that there are a lot of ‘Braxian lines that need to be weeded out of the Book.'

‘Exactly,' said The Man. ‘Take nothing for granted. Not even the things I've been telling you. Just open your minds and let The Word work on your soul. Believe me, it knows more about The Truth, The Presence and the power of God than you ever will.'

Sunday, 10th of May. When I came downstairs, I found The Man still with us, sitting in his usual cross-legged position in front of the TV set with the sound muted and a glass of wine within easy reach. To this day, I never found out where it went. Neither did anyone else for that matter. Maybe I should have asked him but somehow, we never got around to it. In the same way that neither Miriam nor I pressed him on the details of his relationship with Mary of Magdala even though, in the published extracts from the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, much had been made of the claim that ‘
Jesus kissed her on the mouth'.
Big deal.

I've mentioned that she was the disciple that The Man loved. So those of you who've read the Gospels will know that it was she who had her head on his chest during the Last Supper. And you may also have been struck by the fact that although ‘
the disciple whom Jesus loved
' knew that Judas was going to betray The Man, he/she did not tell the others. Because she was the only other person, apart from Judas, who knew
why
it had to happen. But we'll get to this later.

Looking back, I realise that there were all kinds of questions I should have asked him but didn't. As to the wine and the mysteries of his digestive tract, your guess is as good as mine. I know that poor old Jeff Fowler was left with his researcher's tongue hanging out and his thirst for knowledge unassuaged. I think it was a deliberate ploy on the part of The Man to teach us that it is our obsession with the nuts and bolts questions about the Universe that prevent us from getting at the fundamental truths of existence.

There is a reluctance to face up to reality; to the meaningless activity that so many of us are engaged in. To avoid, by constant
movement, ever having to think. The plain speaker is anathema. Public debate of fundamental issues is cocooned in cotton-wool syntax that prevents the participants from reaching any meaningful conclusion. Very few have the courage to stand up and tell it like it really is. And those who do usually end up being gunned down, or crucified by the Establishment, the media, by hostile pressure groups. All of us are gagged by a reluctance to offend. For to do so triggers frenzied cries of outrage, hostility; even threats of physical violence. It's like The Man said – ‘
Brax will do anything to stop The Truth getting out
'. He's even prepared to let us blow the world to pieces rather than hand it back to the Empire.

The Man sat with us on the porch while we ate our egg, bacon and fried potato omelettes, followed by coffee and a side-order of toasted English muffins and apricot jam. And we listened as he told us some more about his homecoming.

Since leaving Gabriel at Aenon, The Man had not seen the inside of a synagogue and, until he had arrived at Nicodemus's house in Jerusalem, he had not performed any of the prayers and rituals that were part and parcel of orthodox Jewish life. He had returned to Palestine as ‘unclean' as the Samaritan who had rescued him, the Gentiles of the Roman and Hellenic world, and the barbarians beyond.

The Man was still aware of the Jewish identity he had absorbed through Joshua, his companion-psyche and their earth-host. He also understood and sympathised with the aspirations of his nation race. But he now saw, more clearly than ever, that the whole elaborate panoply of religious rituals had not prevented the Jews from losing sight of The Truth; indeed, they had helped conceal it. The Jews still held fast to the idea that they were God's chosen people but their hopes for salvation were now pinned on a secular triumph over their many oppressors. It was the thought of vengeance that lay behind their prayers for deliverance. The New Jerusalem would be built, quite literally, upon the Old. Out of solid stone, and with real bricks and mortar; mixed with the blood of their enemies.

The Man was not against the ritual prayers and observances that were the outward demonstration of our faith. He knew they were the cement that had held our people together whenever the nation had fallen into alien hands; had been enslaved and scattered to the four winds. He was trying to show us that much of it had become a meaningless mumbo-jumbo that was leading us away from enlightenment
instead of towards it. We had allowed our spiritual mission to be translated into a temporal quest for political independence and economic prosperity. We had succumbed to the lure of Greek intellectual arrogance and the material wealth of Rome. That was why The Man had those head-on collisions with the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The two things he could not stomach were rampant hypocrisy and the closed minds of those who responded to the notion of God, or The Presence, with the mental agility of blind parrots.