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So we’re getting warmer.
The Balearic Hemingway in the accompanying photo stares moodily right of stage,
and indeed he did have rather an unusual archaeological quarry in his sights.
The column against which he is leaning belongs to Ses Estaques, Norman Lewis’s
recently-abandoned writer’s den just outside Santa Eulalia del Rio
(see Ibiza History Culture Archive article Part Thirteen in Weekly Edition 075 of
Saturday 3rd August 2002). A revealing location indeed for a photo-shoot: quite
apart from the connection with Lewis and local archaeologist Carlos Román
(who built it) ses Estaques lies at the foot of the Punta de s’Esglèsia
Vella - ‘Headland of the Old Church’ - which according to local lore
marks the spot from which the settlement’s original church fell into the
sea just after the local population had emerged from mass one bright Sunday morning.
This colourful legend perhaps set Goldston on the trail of how and when Christianity
first arrived on Ibiza. Carthage and neighbouring Numidia, early strongholds of
the faith, lay just across the sea while the Dead Sea scrolls (discovered between
1947 and 1956) were very much in the news. The hot historical subject in 1957
were the Essenes, a splinter sect which formed a missing link between Judaism
and early Christianity. If one of Jesus’ brothers, James, did indeed sail
to Spain shortly after the crucifixion, then what about the other more obscure
(and reviled) sibling, Jude? This is the teasing riddle around which Goldston
has built this unusual work of fiction.
Little more is know
these days about early Christianity in the Pityuses than was the case in 1958,
so the field was - and remains - wide open. In the opening chapter our sleepy
fisherman’s village (a thinly-disguised Santa Eulalia) is jolted to life
by the arrival of an academic caravan made up of Dr Wilfred Carrol (a respected
archaeologist from Philadelphia), his redhead daughter Stephanie, two student
assistants from Heidelberg (palaeographer Hans Kreuger and Polish architect Clopec),
a butler who answers to the name of Mr Simpson and a sheep dog called Mithridates.
The local team includes expatriate American archaeologist-turned-wino Frederick
De Vries, a sympathetic and popular priest called Don Carlos, a bossy lesbian
condesa, the Secretary of the local Falange (Don Miguel), Catalina the maid, Pedro
the fisherman and ex-Republican Antonio Serra, who owns the general store and
cheats a little on the side. Carrol has been drawn to
this remote backwater by De Vries’s discovery of an Essenic ring and the
remote prospect of coming to the end of a ten-year treasure hunt, which began
when he purchased an ancient scroll in Palestine. The plot thickens when Don Carlos
mentions an old document among church papers describing the ceremonial burial
of a man he assumes to be James the Apostle. At this point a slight detour for
history buffs may be in order: legend has it that James was the first person to
bring the Christian gospel to Spain around 40 AD and that the Virgin Mary appeared
miraculously to him in Saragossa, leaving as material proof the sacred pillar
which became the focal point of the nation’s metropolitan basilica. Although
James was later beheaded by Herod Agrippa in Palestine, the corpse miraculously
made it back to his adopted land thanks to a sail-less boat, was deposited near
the Galician coast and discovered by a hermit eight hundred years later (813 AD),
becoming a rallying symbol for the Reconquista and the object of Europe’s
most important pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela. Are you still there? Goldston’s
original ploy is to find a role for Judas Iscariot and ‘San Pedro’ (i.e.
Santa Eulalia) in this celebrated legend. We will take a look at the historical
Judas later on, but for now let us return to that fictitious Palestinian scroll
which introduces Judas as the Messenger to the West (replacing St. James)
and identifying his place of burial beneath the main turret of a castle. By the
light of the full moon our intrepid American archaeologists set about looking
for ‘the shadow of the needle’ mentioned in Don Carlos’s document.
With a little help from the nose of trusty Mithridates they indeed find the burial
vault of Judas. The catafalque itself has long been reduced to worm-eaten fragments,
but there is a gold death mask as well as a sealed pottery jar - Carrol’s
‘holy grail’. In the following exegesis about the Essenes and the Early
Church, half-Jewish Goldston presents Judas as a James-like figure who escaped
the Roman dispersal of the sect at Qumran after the First Jewish Revolt (AD 68)
and was ‘sent to a place in the West, bearing sacred documents’. Having
come to grips with all this background info on Proto-Christian splinter movements,
the reader is naturally curious about the contents of the ‘Judas Scroll’,
but Goldston will have none of that. Instead he devotes the second half of his
novel to sub-plots and flashbacks involving expiation of Nazi or Fascist guilt.
There is also a Spanish Civil War element, carrying on where Elliot Paul left
off in The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937, subject of a future
article): while diving off the headland, quisling Clopec chances across a watertight
metal box which contains ten typewritten pages listing locals, many still alive,
involved in an underground Republican organization. After offering it to the fascist
condesa for $25,000, he has a sudden change of heart and flings it back into the
sea, only to be shot dead by Antonio Serra, who is far more concerned about his
daughter’s virginity. Then we have the arrival of a Jesuitical Don Luis from
Madrid, ostensibly sent by the Bishop to inquire into the unorthodox practices
of Don Carlos. Other deviations from the plot include a description of a concentration
camp to which a shell-shocked Kreuger (ironically, a Jew) is sent as a guard,
and Don Miguel’s project to build a road and tourist centre for busloads
of culture vultures at Es Cuyeram. Towards the end there
is a sudden acceleration of pace: Don Luis reveals that he is also an official
from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, empowered to take possession of the death
mask and manuscript on behalf of the Spanish state. They will be forwarded to
Madrid and eventually Rome being ‘of mild interest as records of heretical
sects’ rather than earliest known version of the Christian gospels. Carrol
has a nervous collapse during which De Vries’s affair with his wife and the
reason for her death during an archaeological campaign in Persia come to light.
Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Castle Don Carlos stumbles into a geographical
time warp and is transported to the monastic fortress above the Dead Sea on the
eve of its destruction by Roman legions. He eavesdrops on a conversation in which
Judas is taken to task for his betrayal, but counters with information about the
Roman attack and urges the other apostles to hide their precious documents in
nearby caves. He also presses them to take the gospel further a field, to Alexandria
and Rome where money and support will be forthcoming. In
the final scene manly De Vries assumes responsibility not only for Stephanie (still
trembling after an ordeal with the lesbian countess in Tanit’s sanctuary)
but for the entire expedition so as to prevent the Judas Scroll being consigned
to dusty oblivion within the Vatican. The Countess takes her final leave of Don
Carlos (on his way to a remote Asturian mining village - thanks to Don Luis’s
report) with an impassioned tirade about female sexuality: Woman
does not exist in Spain, does she, Padre? You think that. You have taught that,
all of you. But they do. I could mention names that would shock you. One finds
love where one can. It is not so simple as you think. You think you can frighten
me with goblins and threats. But you cannot. Do you know why? Because I am not
a Catholic! I have not been a Catholic since I learned to love … Beautiful
faces with full lips. Am I shocking you, Padre? Then listen more … I am very
strong. Stronger than many men. Stephanie excited me in a particular way.
p.
299
Heady stuff for 1958. In fact the
author was to pay a stiff price for his caricature of Franco on page 172: “…
the fat fratricide sitting on a gilt throne in Madrid, staring past his stuffed
Jefes into the black regions promised him by the half men bishops ... those puffed
and fearful eyes that gazed paternally from the faces of newspapers and posters
and postage stamps and coins.” He was expelled the following year and only
allowed to return after the intervention of local resident Henri de Vilmorin (De
Vries?) and Franco’s own brother. As the crestfallen expedition is departing
for Barcelona, Simpson reveals that fifty photographs of the mask and scrolls
are safely stowed in a box of sanitary napkins. The Spanish customs officers will
hardly think to look there. The worldly and sophisticated Don Luis is appalled
to find that he is to be the new priest of San Pedro, a fitting punishment for
his duplicity and lack of Christian principles. So much
for the novel. What about Judas Iscariot? Who was the historical figure behind
the Gospels and where might his body have been laid to rest? The linguistic and
textual complexities of biblical scholarship have had to wrestle from the very
beginning with deeply-entrenched religious dogmas, leaving historical truth at
the very back of the academic agenda for centuries - if not millennia. Traditional
scholarship pairs Judas with the Judean town of Kerioth (identified by one nineteenth-century
scholar as Khirbet el-Quaryatein in the southeast Judean wilderness), making him
an outsider from the start among the Galilean disciples. But recent investigators
have been intrigued by a possible connection with the Zealots who spearheaded
Roman Palestine’s freedom movement. A little-known version of Judas’s
nickname in early manuscripts is ‘Skarioth’ or ‘Skariotes’,
which appears to derive from sicarius (Latin for ‘dagger-man’), a contemporary
Zealot nickname which evoked that of their predecessors, the Maccabeans (from
the Hebrew maqáb, ‘hammer’). John and James had similar warlike
epithets (boanerges meaning ‘Sons of Thunder’, Mark 3:17), while Simon
was simply ‘the Zealot’ (zelotes, Luke 6:15). Not exactly what you’d
have expected of the world’s prototype pacifist movement. Jude
was not only an exceedingly obscure disciple, but probably the unluckiest - victim,
it would seem, of the Pauline Church. The political and literary agenda of any
propaganda war requires villains as well as heroes and Antioch at the time of
Paul – like Geneva at the time of Calvin - did not shrink from blackening
reputations elsewhere to further its cause. The original apostles (some still
in Jerusalem) were depicted as naïve followers with semi-political leanings,
while the special role of Arch-traitor was reserved for Judas, then head of the
ad hoc regency awaiting the Messiah’s return. Following the crucifixion,
Jesus’ brother James had been in charge of the Jerusalem church, but what
is often overlooked is that another brother, the apostle Judas (there was probably
only one) was the third regent. Moreover, Judas’s very name bore a close
resemblance to that of the Jewish kingdom at a time when the gentile church was
distancing itself from those seen as responsible for the crucifixion. Little
is known about the later life of Judas, although he could well have been the author
of the brief and elegantly-written epistle which bears his name. He is supposed
to have preached the gospel in Judaea, Samaria, Syria and Mesopotamia before returning
to Jerusalem in 62 AD to help with the selection of its bishop. His martyrdom
in Sufian in Persia is described in an apocryphal work, The Passion of Simon
and Jude, together with that of Simon the Zealot (they share the same feast
day). Other legends claim he was killed by a saw or curved sword in Syria and
Armenia, hence the fact that he is often depicted holding an axe or halberd. It
seems more likely that after Hadrian’s destruction of the holy city in 70
AD, he presided over a scattered community of Jewish Christians in Aleppo and
Damascus, known as the Ebionites after the Hebrew word for ‘poor’, ebyon.
Because their observance of Jewish law was regarded as heretical, their writings
were mostly suppressed by the Church. Little wonder that their leader Jude was
defamed and well and truly buried by religion and history alike. Matthew (27:5)
had him hang himself in shame, giving Cercis siliquastrum (a close relative
of the carob) the name of Judas Tree, its white flowers blushing purplish-pink
forever after in shame. Acts (1:18) bestowed on him a truly bizarre fate whereby
he stumbled headlong and then self-exploded in the middle of a field bought with
the thirty pieces of silver. Other, more reliable, gospels maintain a tight-lipped
silence. And the ‘Castle of the Kings’? There
is a Balearic ‘Castell del Rei’ in Mallorca. It occupies a truly majestic
site 1,500 feet above the waves just north of Pollensa, and its origins are indeed
shrouded in mystery. It became a key stronghold from 1229 to 1231 when an Arab
chieftain took refuge after James the Conqueror stormed Palma, again in 1287 when
Alfonso III of Aragon took the island, and finally in 1343 when forces loyal to
Mallorca’s last king James III held out against the Catalan ruler Peter II.
The courtyard has a deep well. There is also, of course, Ibiza’s ancient
Castle at the top of Dalt Vila. Archaeologists are digging there right now. Spanish
ones. Next time you’re enjoying the panoramic
view from the summit of the Punta de s’Esglèsia Vella, spare a thought
for the first evangelisers of the Pityuses. Perhaps James the Apostle - or even
Judas himself - may have stopped off on his way to Spain. And in case you’ve
ever wondered who or what exactly was behind the Beatles anthem, click on http://www.epinions.com/musc-review-6D50-B56CBA7-3A198BC2-prod4.
Goldston beat the Fab Four to it, though, by ten years: Take a sad song, and
make it better. | 
