In the often strange world of Middle Eastern antiquities, there have always been rumors, always new findings of value, always deals to be made.
And swirling around in hints and thirdhand rumors has always been talk of the existence of some documents that are dangerous to the Vatican, documents that, in touching upon Jesus in an unspecified manner, are it is suggested, some sort of ‘smoking gun’. No one quite knew the details. But the rumors persisted, and I was interested in tracking them down.
It was not until eight years after the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail that, with the help of contacts in the trade, I reached the source of the rumors and the owner of the documents that were the subject of the rumors.
He was an Israeli who had lived for many years in a large European city. He was a wealthy businessman, but his real love was ancient objects of religious symbolism, which he collected with no regard for price. He explained his reasoning to me: ‘All mankind is searching for a way to get direct communication with the Divine. We can use symbolism to help us to jump to the Divine.’
He was very cultured, impeccably mannered, highly intelligent, and possessed of great cunning and intuition. Only a brave man would try to outsmart him on an antiquities deal. He welcomed me into his home and offered me coffee. Sitting on a sofa, I looked at the low table in front of me. It had a transparent glass top. Beneath was a large, gray ceramic tableau: it was a complete model of an entire Canaanite temple ritual frozen in time. The sacred stones stood at the end of the sacred space, and many small ceramic figures were depicted in the act of ritual worship, presumably at that moment. Each figure was unique, performing a different function in the ritual. I gazed at this, aware that it was utterly extraordinary. From it one could tell how the ritual worked. But so far as I knew, no scholars had ever seen this piece – not officially at any rate.
The house was filled with temperature- and humidity-controlled cabinets that contained many unique objects – the kind any museum in the world would have loved to get its hands on. He showed me around and pointed out a number of particular treasures before we returned to the sofas. There his wife brought us some more coffee, and he told me something of his history.
In the past he had been a friend of Kando’s, the dealer in Dead Sea Scrolls. He used to be the middleman between Kando and the Israelis, and he had been involved in the affair of the Temple Scroll, which had soured Kando against the Israelis. Kando was trying to sell the scroll. My friend went with a piece of it to Yigael Yadin, who told him to purchase it at any price. Negotiations were progressing when the Six-Day War broke out; after the seizure of the West Bank by the Israeli forces in June 1967. Yadin went to Kando’s house in Bethlehem to seize the scroll himself. He knew that it was hidden there somewhere. Kando was taken away and interrogated for five days. The scroll was ultimately found stuffed up a chimney, which is why the ends had become damaged.
Kando, furious at this treatment, refused to deal with any more Israelis, but he did not tell my friend that he had a big collection of scrolls and fragments and that he had transferred all of them to Damascus. He also said that there were other caves unknown to archaeologists in which the Bedouin had found even more scrolls. Regrettably, the practice of the Bedouin has been to cut the texts up and sell them fragment by fragment. This way they get a better price. My friend told me that over the last year he had received a twenty-centimeter piece of a larger scroll – specifically described as sectarian rather than biblical – but the price for the piece was $500,000; the entire scroll was offered at $10 million. Of course the price was negotiable.
My friend then told me a story about Yigael Yadin that I had also heard from other sources. When Yadin excavated Masada, he found many fragments of texts there. He certainly translated a number of them, but others he took to London, where he placed them in safe-deposit boxes in several banks under false names. My friend also said that he had sold Yadin a large scroll piece that he knew for certain Yadin took to London for safekeeping.
Unfortunately, Yadin died in 1984 and left no records of the banks in which he held boxes or the names under which they were registered. So, until the banks open up the boxes and discover them, these texts will be lost to scholarship.
Then my contact brought up the subject of the ‘Jesus papers’.
At this, his wife became almost hysterical, waving her hands in the air and yelling loudly and angrily as she stormed out of the room. I could not speak her language, so I did not know what she was saying, but it was very clear that she did not want these papers to be discussed.
He told me the story. In the early 1960s, in his search for antiquities, he had bought a house in the Old City in Jerusalem. He proceeded to excavate the cellar out to bedrock, digging down into what had been the environs of the temple area in early Christian times. In 1961 he found two papyrus documents bearing an Aramaic text, together with a number of objects that allowed him to date the finds at about A.D. 34.
The papyrus texts were two Aramaic letters written to the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin. The writer, my friend explained, called himself bani meshiha – the Messiah of the Children of Israel. I was stunned. Was I really hearing this? I listened intently to what my friend was saying. He continued to explain:
This figure, the Messiah of the Children of Israel, was defending himself against a charge made by the Sanhedrin – he had obviously been accused of calling himself ‘son of God’ and had been challenged to defend himself against this charge. In the first letter, the messiah explained that what he meant was not that he was ‘God’ but that the ‘Spirit of God’ was in him – not that he was physically the son of God, but rather that he was spiritually an adopted son of God. And he added that everyone who felt similarly filled with the ‘spirit’ was also a ‘son of God’.
In other words, the messiah – who must be the teacher we know as Jesus – explicitly states in these letters that he is not divine – or at any rate, no more than anyone else. This, we can be sure, is something the Vatican would not like to be made public.
While listening to this story, I was struck by the similarity with a very curious incident described in the Gospel of John (10:33-35): in a short passage, it describes the ‘Jews’ as being intent upon stoning Jesus for blasphemy. They hurl an accusation at him, saying, ‘You are only a man and you claim to be God.’ Jesus calmly answers their challenge, quoting from Psalm 82: ‘Is it not written in your Law: “I said, you are gods?” So the Law uses the word gods of those to whom the word of God was addressed.’ Is this Gospel reporting some garbled residue of this investigation of the meshiha by the Sanhedrin?
Having discovered these two papyrus letters, my friend showed them to the archaeologists Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad and asked their opinion of them. They both confirmed that these letters were genuine and important.
Unfortunately, they also told some Catholic scholars – very likely one or another of the members of the École Biblique, consultants to the Pontifical Biblical Commission – for word reached Pope John XXIII. The Pope sent word back to the Israeli experts asking for these documents to be destroyed.
My friend refused to do this, but he was prepared to make a promise that they would not be published for twenty-five years. This was done.
At the time I met him the twenty-five years were long expired, but my friend still refused to release the texts because he felt that releasing them would just cause problems between the Vatican and Israel and inflame anti-Semitism.
I could see why his wife had become upset.
Naturally I was desperate to see the Jesus papers for myself. I wanted to be certain that they truly existed, and I wanted to be able to say, ‘Yes. They exist. I have seen them.’ But my friend declined; he said that he was not prepared to show me at that time. But he had many other treasures that interested me greatly, and so, over the next few months, I travelled several times to his place to chat and to look at what he had recently purchased. Then one day, just as I arrived, he came out of his door putting on his coat.
‘Come with me now,’ he said. ‘You have the time?’
Oh, I had the time all right.
We drove to another part of the city, where he led me to a large safe that was big enough to walk into and, like his cabinets, temperature- and humidity-controlled. I followed him in. There he presented me with two framed papyrus documents covered with glass. Each was about eighteen inches long and nine inches high. I held them. These were the Jesus papers, the letters from Jesus to the Sanhedrin. They existed. I had them in my hands. I was silent as I fully enjoyed the moment.
But it was also one of those moments of supreme frustration when I wished above all that I might have a familiarity with ancient languages, like some experts I know. It’s like holding a treasure chest but not having the key to open it. There was, regrettably, nothing I could do. Despite my many years of experience with manuscript material, I was overcome with the significance of what I held in my hands. I was awestruck and speechless as I thought of the changes in our history that these letters might cause were they to be released publicly. But at least they were safe. I handed them back to him. He smiled. We went to lunch.
I have no idea what we ate that day because I was so utterly consumed by the implications of what I had just seen. I wanted everyone to know about the papers. I wanted to stand in the street and cry out to every passer-by that the ‘smoking gun’ exists. I have seen it and held it!
From The Jesus Papers, text © 2006 by Michael Baigent. Published in the UK by HarperCollins.
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