Chapter 10: First and Second Degrees

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part Two–Young Man
                                      

After Jesus’ bath, the high priest led him to a small, bare cell lined with slabs of limestone. A large, fat candle sat on a small table in the middle of the room, making the walls glow a pretty gold from its lotus-scented light. Writing and ancient Egyptian symbols were carefully painted at eye level on three of the walls. There were no windows.

The high priest put his hand on Jesus’ shoulder. “You will stay here,” he told Jesus. “Once a day a priest will bring you food, water, and when you need it, another candle. Each day that priest will ask you a question. ‘Who are you?’ he will ask. When you answer that correctly, or admit that you can’t, you may leave the room. But only if you answer it correctly will you pass. For this is the first degree of your initiation, that you discover who you are, and tell us.”

Jesus was enclosed in the limestone room.

He sat on the bench against one wall and put his chin on his fists. His elbows were on his knees. He briefly thought of John, and wondered if he would soon be going through this same thing in a similar room.

Jesus wondered what the high priest wanted. “Who are you?” was the question. Jesus knew the answer couldn’t be, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Nor could it be, “The Messiah.” Both answers were obvious. The high priest already knew them. He expected more.

Jesus wondered if he was supposed to remember some of his past lives. The Essenes on Mount Carmel had taught him about reincarnation of the dead. But he had no idea who, if anyone, he had been in past lives. Judy had said that could wait. So if that was the answer, Jesus decided, then he would have to admit he knew nothing and return home defeated.

He shifted restlessly.

He glanced at the writing and drawings on the walls. His eye caught on one inscription. “Seek inside,” it said.

Inside what? he wondered.

Another symbol showed a heart pierced by an arrow. Under it were two ancient Egyptian symbols that, thanks to his language studies with Judy, he could translate. They said, “The center” and “The lightning bolt.”

What is “the lightning bolt?” he asked himself. He saw the arrow symbol again, off to the left and over a column of sentences in both Greek and Egyptian. He read the Greek quickly:

THE LOTUS OF THE HEART, WHICH LIES IN THE CENTER OF THE BREAST, MUST BE BREATHED UPON. LET THOUGHTS LINGER THERE, PIERCING THE GLOOM, LET THE RIVER FLOW THERE, LET THE GOD AND THE GODDESS JOIN THERE, LET THE SONG OF THE SOUL CONCENTRATE THERE.

He leaned back, confused. He was used to studying ideas, philosophy, prophecies. He was not accustomed to words that gave practical directions for thinking and feeling.

He closed his eyes and, unsure of himself, tried to concentrate on this mysterious central point in his breast. He became aware of his breathing. He pretended he was breathing in and out from the center of his breast. After a while, his breathing slowed.

He was about to give up when suddenly he noticed his body was growing cold. His first impulse was to reach his hands out and hold them over the flame of the candle. He forced himself to keep his hands down.

His chill increased until his whole body felt like it was becoming numb. His whole chest began to feel heavy and flattened, as if a great weight was pushing against it. He ignored the feeling and kept concentrating.

Gradually he became aware of his thoughts. They were rushing very fast, flipping up one after another, talking all by themselves in his head about everything from important ideas to little comments on how his body felt.

He kept concentrating on the center of his breast.

Soon all the little and big thoughts in his head slowed down. Instead of rushing by quickly, they began bubbling upward, one after another, in slow progression. He could almost feel them coming, before they burst into full bloom in his head. Many of them seemed to be coming from a certain direction–from below his throat. In sudden irritation at the constant stream of these useless words coming up, he imagined a great wooden door closing his throat and keeping the words from rising.

His head was suddenly filled with silence.

A sense of awe slowly came over him. Deep in the inner quiet he had created in his head, an unthinking but always aware part of himself realized he had never felt such total silence before.

He realized he was still aware. What part of him could be aware, he wondered, without thinking? Slowly, like a huge beast turning gradually on itself, he sought the part of him that could be aware.

He looked for his own awareness and found it. It turned on itself, like an eye looking in a mirror. It watched itself calmly; then, in total surprise, it merged with itself and exploded with a blinding flash of darkness in which stars appeared, and the sun. The sun rapidly came closer and closer and then became everything, heat, light, pleasure, a total knowing. As if this were not enough–the knowing–the awareness expanded to include Everything: a strange and impossible but true combining of all opposites. Truth and falsity existed side by side, beauty and hate, love and fear. All were the same, yet different; all were together at once.

Hours later, so it seemed to Jesus, he gradually became aware of himself once again. His eyes were full of water. He opened them and blinked. Slowly he raised his numb and heavy hand and wiped his face, which was wet with tears. He looked at the candle. It had burned down only a small fraction of a finger’s breadth. He realized his eyes had been closed only minutes.

Slowly he stretched and tested his limbs. His left leg began to sting terribly as the circulation returned to it. He walked on it for ten minutes, around the small table, until his whole body felt warm. Then he lay down on the rush mat against the far wall.

He was filled with energy that was mixed with excitement and fear.

He closed his eyes and carefully remembered as much of his strange new experience as he could. He went over it three times in his head as Judy had taught him to do for remembering something well. Then his dreams began mixing with it. Gradually he slipped into a deep, restful sleep that lasted twelve hours.

The next morning, a young priest entered the room. Jesus woke up and rubbed his eyes. He noticed his candle was still burning. He lifted himself to a sitting position.

“Good morning,” said the young priest. “Did you sleep well?” He frowned. “Most people do not sleep through their first night in this room.”

Jesus watched him put a bowl of hot barley cereal on the small table, along with a small urn of wine, wheat bread, and a bunch of fresh grapes. The hot cereal smelled pungent and comforting.

The priest turned to him.

“Who are you?” the priest asked.

Jesus looked up at him. “My Poppa and I are one,” he told the priest.

“Your father is not here!” the priest chided him.

Jesus shook his head. “All of us have the same Father. He is within us,” he told the priest.

The man frowned again. “If I have understood you correctly,” he asked, “are you saying that you and God are one?”

“Yes, if you wish to put it that way.” Jesus stood up.

“There are many ways to put it,” said the priest. He smiled. “I shall consult the high priest to see if yours is an acceptable answer.

He bowed and left.

Jesus turned his head and looked at the writing on the wall again. “Let the River flow there, let the god and the goddess join there,” it said. He thought of the River of awareness that had suddenly burst open to reveal things to him. And both “the god and the goddess” had been a part of it, if a person could think of God as both male and female. He had felt comforted and held by a female part of God, just as much as he had been in awe of the energy and power of the male part of God.

As for the “song of the soul” in his heart, well, wasn’t that what he was feeling this morning? He felt overwhelmingly free and pure. Yet he knew it could be stronger, much stronger.

As he waited for a priest to come, he was determined he would make this experience grow, somehow, into a regular way of life.

Several hours later, the young priest who had brought him food appeared again. He bowed to Jesus. “Your answer is acceptable. Come.” He smiled. “All of us are waiting for you.”

Jesus was led to the sunlit hall with the chairs again. This time it was filled. Interested priests sat in a row on either side down the length of the hall, watching Jesus carefully. They had heard of him. They all, sceptics and believers alike, wanted to see him.

No one spoke. At the end of the hall, the high priest rose from his throne chair as Jesus was led forward. His gaze was stern.

Jesus went down on both knees before the high priest. The priest reached out his large, dry hand and laid it firmly on Jesus’ head. Then he withdrew the hand and, with his other, gave Jesus a scrap of parchment with symbols on it. The parchment was both an award for passing the first degree, and an identification paper that would allow him to participate in all first-degree ceremonies in the temple and throughout Egypt.

The high priest lifted Jesus to a standing position. Then the young priest was at his side again, making a sign for Jesus to follow him.

The young priest led Jesus to a comfortable room with a window through which the sun was streaming. The priest left him there. Before Jesus could do more than sit down, the tall high priest strode silently through the door.

“You did a good job,” said the high priest.

Jesus snapped his head around, then smiled.

“Thank you, Holy One.”

“You may rest here for several days before returning to the school in Heliopolis.” The priest smiled back.

“When may I take the second degree?” Jesus asked.

“When you are ready,” the high priest said.

“I will take it now, Holy One.”

The priest lost his smile. His eyes opened wide. “Surely not yet! You have just come from the first!”

“Is it so difficult?” Jesus asked.

The priest frowned. “Yes. It is the first great dividing of those who really wish to follow our priestly way, from those who wish merely to know God. Many grown men fail.”

The priest’s frown deepened. “You should,” he continued, “live on meager food, and meditate, at least a week before taking this degree.”

Jesus nodded. “I meditate each day, Holy One. And I eat sparingly anyway. I am ready.”

The high priest shook his head. “Men have left the room screaming because of this test.”

Jesus said nothing.

The priest’s mouth tightened. “Come, then.”

He took Jesus down several flights, and further back near the center of the Great Pyramid. He carried a light, for no sunlight entered here. The walls became increasingly cool to the touch and slightly damp. They were slippery.

He led Jesus inside a small, dark room with a sleeping mat on the cool floor, a wool blanket, a jug of water in one far corner, and a jar in another for relieving himself. Otherwise the room was bare stone.

“This,” he told Jesus, “is the test of total seclusion. You will stay here. The door will be shut but not locked. If you leave the room without our permission you have failed.”

Jesus nodded.

“Once a day,” the high priest continued, “a priest of high degree will bring you food and peer at your face to see if you still are rational. He is not allowed to talk to you. You may scream or shout, beat the walls, or even inflict pain upon yourself except for permanent damage, and the test still goes on. The only way you may end it without our permission is by leaving this room, or by going mad.”

Jesus protested. “I will not act in any of these ways, Holy One. Why should I?”

The high priest did not smile.

“You will have no light,” he told Jesus. “No sound comes down to this cell. One of every five men who come here loses his mind for a while. Two more out of five walk out the door before the time is up. Of the other two, who succeed, half never go on to the third degree because they are afraid of even worse tortures.”

He stared hard at Jesus. “It really is torture, my son. The Romans came several years ago to study this method. We made them take this degree to learn it. Most of them failed. One killed himself. Several others returned to Rome and use it now to successfully question traitors and enemies of the state.”

“And yet there is a good purpose for this?” Jesus asked.

“You will learn what is real and what is not,” the high priest answered, “if you can last through the test. One of us will come for you after a week, if you are still here.”

“I am ready, Holy One.”

The priest left Jesus inside and walked to the door. Before he closed it, he leaned forward. “I wanted to ask you, is it common in your nation to call God ‘Poppa’?”

Jesus shook his head.

“I thought not,” said the high priest. “Why do it?”

Jesus shrugged. “I feel he is close to me, like my father in the flesh. I want him to be close to me like that, Holy One.”

“It may get you in trouble,” the high priest said. “Some of our priests here already consider it disrespectful.”

“I will be careful,” Jesus said.

The high priest stared into his eyes. “Think of your ‘Poppa’ long and hard in this room, Jesus. What you learned in the first room is the only thing that can get you through this.”

He closed the door.

The darkness closed in.

Jesus waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark. After five minutes he gave up waiting. There was no trace of light for his eyes to focus on. He closed them. It was the same as if they were open.

He found his way with groping hands to the corner where he had seen the jug of water. He drank. Then he returned to the sleeping mat and sat down with crossed legs.

The darkness pressed in. His thoughts began drifting. He tried to concentrate on the center of his breast as he had done in the first room. But he was too distracted.

He thought of John. Surely, he believed, by this time John was taking his first degree or even finished with it. Would John take the second degree right away, too?

His thoughts strayed to his home. He thought of his parents and of his new brother or sister being born about this time. Josi would be taking of it, and also of his brother James.

His thoughts drifted on. For several hours they strayed, and he let them. Finally he became bored.

He began reviewing some of his more interesting Essene lessons, especially from the prophetic books. He did this for several hours until he grew tired. Then he slept.

Jesus awoke suddenly. He opened his eyes. At first he thought he was still dreaming, for everything was totally dark. Then he remembered where he was.

He had no idea how long he had slept or what time of day it was. There were no sun and stars to rise and set here, no sound of birds or people calling or preparing for sleep. He imagined the dim stone walls of the corridor outside his cell stretching away endlessly, going nowhere except t other equally dark corridors. The darkness in his eyes seemed to press inward upon him, as if it was a huge, groping animal that was reaching for the center of his head.

He closed his eyes and pressed them with his fingertips. The darkness went away, was replaced by bright balls and particles of blues, reds, and yellows. When he pressed very hard, he found, he could get a dazzling white. He stopped, for fear of hurting himself.

He shifted restlessly, reached out for the jug of water, and remembered it was still in the corner. He groped to it, took a minute to find the other jar and relieve himself, and then brought the water just back to his sleeping mat. He drank from it long and deep to get rid of the hunger pangs in his stomach.

He tried once more to concentrate on the center of his breast. The darkness still was too distracting, too enclosing. He thought of some scholarly problems he had encountered recently in the Laws. He decided to focus on them. He thought about them for what seemed like forever. At one point he surprised himself by discovering he was talking out loud. He decided it was all right to do so. The sound filled the little stone cell, giving it a definite size and shape in the total darkness.

Later on he was interrupted by a priest coming with food. The door began opening and suddenly a light ten times brighter than the sun pierced deep into Jesus’ eyes. It hurt him. He closed his eyes, waited a minute, and then slowly opened them. The light was nothing more than an oil lamp. The priest was bending over in front of him, trading the jug of water for a fresh one and laying down a loaf of rough, dry-looking bread. It smelled stale.

The priest stood and peered into Jesus’ face.

Jesus let his whole body fill with the light from the oil lamp and the small sounds the priest made as his robes rustled and his bare feet quietly scraped against the bare stone floor.

The priest nodded, satisfied, and left. He had seen no sign of madness on Jesus’ face.

The darkness closed in even more deeply. Jesus reached for the loaf of bread, running his hands over the hard, smooth surface on the outside and slowly breaking it open. It was dry and unsweetened, at least a day old, but still warm from the hotter temperatures of the air above the ground.

Jesus ate it thankfully. Then he worked on scholarly problems in his head again, going for many hours until his head nodded and he dropped off to sleep.

This next time he awoke, he knew he had not slept long. The dark no longer was pressing in on him. His eyes were filled with flashes of pretty colors.

He watched the colors for a while, but then became scared. What if, he asked himself, seeing colors like this was a sign of madness?

He tried to make the colors go away by concentrating on his scholarly problems. It didn’t work. He pressed his eyelids hard, thinking maybe he could fight the colors with more colors.

As soon as he took his fingertips away from his eyes, the colors were as before.

He stood up. He felt for the wall, found it, and slowly began walking around the small cell with one hand always on the wall. The cool, slightly damp stone comforted him, made him more alert. The colors didn’t go away, but at least he felt he was the master of them. He kept walking and walking, tiring himself, until he was ready for sleep.

The next time he awoke, he knew he had slept a long time. He glanced quickly at the door and saw it was shutting. A shadow of light from beneath the door was quickly fading. He had just missed the priest! He jumped to his feet and fought against an overwhelming urge to run after the man, to grab his light and drink in the brightness, to listen to the man talk, complain, anything.

He sat down again.

The colors returned, flooding his vision. This time, voices came with them.

Jesus grabbed for his food, began eating it. The voices were coming closer, growing more distinct.

He heard one voice repeating like an echo, “time, time, time.”

He shook his head.

The sound of his mother crying out in labor came to him, then quickly disappeared.

The voice of the high priest saying, “It may be too difficult for you!” passed by him loud and quickly. He even looked up, thinking he might find the door opening and the high priest standing there. Then he realized the voice came from no single direction. It was in his head.

He fought the voices. At first he tried thinking of things, anything, to make the voices go away. He wove great fantasies in the air. This worked for a while, but son his fantasies were becoming more real and uncontrollable than the voices.

He tried pacing. For a while, as before, it at least gave him a feeling of mastery over the voices. He walked around his little room for unending hour after hour until his feet ached and he was stumbling. He fell on his mat. The blood was pounding in his body and temples, making his eyes throb with alternating yellow and orange bursts of light. He was farther away than ever from tiredness and sleep.

Suddenly one voice made him sit up straight. It called loudly, “You are the son of God.”

Laugher, strange and frightening, followed it.

“I wonder what Jesus is doing?” another voice asked. It sounded like John’s.

A third voice yelled, “I am not going mad!”

Jesus put his fingers to his lips, tried to speak out loud. His tongue and throat were so dry he barely croaked. He wetted his mouth with water, then drank.

“It is poison!” a voice told him. The image of a great frog from the Nile River, bloated and floating in a bucket of water, appeared before his eyes. He raised his free hand and tried to brush the image away. It slowly faded.

His eyes picked out an image of a distorted, crippled old man at the far end of the cell. Jesus closed his eyes. The image was still there. It was in his head.

Really scared now, he almost dropped the water jug on the floor in his haste to be done with it. He threw himself into a cross-legged position on his mat and tried concentrating intently on the center of his breast.

This time, whether from fear or need, it worked. Immediately he felt and saw a blue explosion of energy in his breast and saw the blue spread quickly everywhere around him, clearing his space of both voices and other colors.

He rested his awareness in the center of this blue light, clinging to it hard, until he finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

He awoke from this sleep because of a grating noise. Stone was rubbing against stone. A section of wall in his cell was moving. He could just barely see the outline of the wall section because a think light was behind it.

The light suddenly flared into a painful brightness. Jesus shut his eyes.

When he opened them again, the grating noise had stopped. Two men of unknowable age stood before him in priests’ robes with deep hoods. They held thin candles in their hands, shading the light from his eyes. Their faces were so far back in their hoods that only the vague shadow of noses and foreheads were visible.

“You are Jesus,” the taller one said.

Jesus pressed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Were the men a dream? He wasn’t sure.

“We have come to warn you,” the tall man said. “You may die here, if you do not leave soon.”

A creeping fear began to spread over Jesus’ skin, tightening it and causing his heart to pound wildly.

“What danger is here?” he asked the tall man.

The man lifted his candle a few inches. His forehead came more into view. It was high and refined.

“The priests,” said the man, “are deceiving you. They wish you to never leave the temple. Not until you are one of their slaves.”

“Slaves?” Jesus asked. He felt cold. One of his leg muscles began twitching involuntarily.

The tall man hissed.

“Yes. They mean to force you into their way of doing things!” The man moved his free hand around the bare cell.

The light of his candle stabbed into Jesus’ eyes. He closed them.

“This,” said the tall man. “In this cell you are seeing things, hearing things, are you not?”

Jesus nodded once.

“Soon,” said the tall man, “they will come when the visions are too much for you to stand. They will torture you until you accept their purposes. Look!”

Jesus opened his eyes. The tall man was pointing at his shorter comrade who was holding something up. It was a leather whip that tapered to numerous small strands. Each strand was tipped by little pieces of sharp bone.

Jesus’ mouth dropped open. “Why should they do this to me?” he asked.

The tall man hid his candle flame from Jesus’ eyes again. “Why should they not, Jesus of Nazareth? They sacrifice animals daily, killing sheep and goats and offering the blood to the gods. Did you not know they sacrifice men, too?”

Jesus stared at the man in surprise.

“In secret rooms of the temples throughout Egypt they do this. If you do not accept their plans for you, you may become one of the sacrifices.”

Jesus felt his muscles knotting. He was shivering.

“This room is itself a form of torture,” the tall man said. “They have even given their methods of torturing to the Romans!”

Jesus felt the exact spot on the center of his chest that earlier had flashed with blue light. Now, as if he were still having visions, he imagined it was flashing a hard white. His trembling quieted some. He took several deep breaths.

He looked at the men as he concentrated on his chest. They now seemed like threats to hs quieted feelings, as if the danger came from them and not from others.

“How did you get here?” he asked them.

The tall man answered. “We use secret tunnels that only we know.”

Jesus shook his head. “You wear priests’ robes, yet you fight against all the other priests. You use secret tunnels that you hide from others. You are deceivers. Liars. Yet you say it is all other priests who deceive and lie to me. Whom should I believe?

The tall man held out his scarred arm and pointed to the whip in the short man’s hand. “Are these not proof enough?” he asked.

Jesus concentrated on his breast center even harder. His feeling of danger increased as he watched the men.

“No,” he said. “I would rather mistrust the confessed liar who stands before me, than mistrust those whom he accuses. Go.”

“You will die!” the tall man exclaimed.

“That is my chance that I take,” Jesus said.

The man strode to the secret door and motioned to his comrade to follow him. “We will ask you one more time,” he told Jesus. “Come with us now, Jesus of Nazareth, or forever suffer the tortures of the doomed.”

Jesus watched them with mixed feelings of fear and anger. He wished they were not taking the light.

“Go,” he told them.

They cursed him and left. He was in the total dark again.

Gradually, the visions and voices came back. So did the priest with food and water much later. The priest looked at him with a curious glint in his eye, then left.

Jesus tested the door. It was not locked.

He sat and meditated on his breast center. Sometimes he got up and paced, feeling the alternating rough and smooth textures of the stone walls as his fingers passed over flat surfaces and rough joints. The visions and voices were gentle. He could stand them. Some of them were psychic, real thoughts of others that he was accidentally picking up. This wasn’t important to him. What was important was the fact that he could tell the difference between these real psychic impressions and his unreal visions. The difference was one of feeling. He could feel it only when he was concentrating on his breast center.

He slept. He ate. The priest came again. Jesus meditated and slept more. His life became an endless routine of meditating and sleeping. Every once in a while he checked the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t.

One day the priest who brought the food had a different look in his eyes when he peered into Jesus’ face. The priest looked satisfied.

The next day Jesus was released. The priest led him up the stairs and inclines of the underground passages, reaching out to catch Jesus whenever he stumbled. The light and long spaces were disorienting.

Jesus was led into the great hall. The lights from all the oil lamps blinded him. He was allowed to stand several minutes until he could see again.

All the priests were gathered there again, watching him with interest and approval. He was dirty and unshaven, his hair uncombed. He slowly walked toward the high priest, who rose from his chair and stood waiting.

When Jesus reached him, the high priest smiled down on him and handed him a piece of parchment.

On it were written the symbols and badges that stated he, Jesus, had passed the second degree.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.