Excerpt - Author's Cut Fifth Gospel - A Novel

EVIL COUNTERPARTS

‘He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good

and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’

Matthew 5:45

AT THE MOMENT the mother of God was receiving the essence of virgin-hood from the far-spread dominions of the Divine Sophia, leagues away upon an Island that faced Vesuvius called Capri, Caesar Tiberius was making room in his soul for a demon.

Some time ago, fascinated by the occult, Tiberius had become addicted to the pagan cults and rituals of the mysteries belonging to his conquered peoples. Ill prepared for the accelerated initiations to which he had subjected himself, his ignoble nature, already impetuous and prone to indulgence, became unfettered through a loosening of the mind from the heart and the will.

This loosening caused his thoughts to become crowded with hallucinations and delusions. He saw enemies around every corner, he heard of conspiracies, all men lay in wait to put a dagger into his back. Having succumbed to madness and fury, he plunged into a chaotic program of revenge. In the night his men seized unwary men, women, sometimes children, those whom his disordered mind suspected of treachery and in the day, loved ones would drag the countless bodies with hooks from the Tiber River, afraid to burn their loved ones or even to grieve, lest it be seen as a sign of treason. Some poor victims were made to drink poison, others were strangled and those young virginal women, who were protected by the law while inviolate, were first raped by his torturers before Tiberius’ sentence was carried out.

Not only delusions but also fits of excitement seized him, where his self love soared upwards in grand overestimations of his divine powers, of his status as a superhuman being whose surroundings in Rome could not hope to match his intoxicating grandness! In Capri he abandoned himself to sensual excesses, treating his deviant guests to grand orgies of food and wine that lasted days, with scores of naked dancers engaging in multiple lurid unions for entertainment, or with romps in the woods and groves where, in feverish stupor, his guests could find those boys and young women who, dressed as Pans and nymphs, would solicit their attentions in any way they desired.

At other times he experienced a pitching of his gloom into an abyss of despair. Unfettered by clarity of thought, he fell into states of anguish and hopelessness, which he sought to console through acts of cruelty against others. More and more did a depraved delight in suffering surface from out of the depths of his volcanic temper, whose volatile hungers increased with the distortions of his deranged thoughts and the fire of his disordered passions.

One day, he was taken by a stroke of genius, he ordered his guards to drag the half living and tortured carcasses of his imagined enemies and their supporters to the high cliffs where he had them cast headlong onto the rocks below. He was surprised and elated when he experienced the profoundest sexual raptures on observing his men break the bones of the dead with boathooks and oars!

Thus was his Satanic empowerment accomplished while at the same time two other events were occurring, side by side in Judea - the sublime spirit of the Sun was entering into the soul of Jesus, and not far off, in the province of Perea, the son of Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, friend and admirer of Tiberius, was taking his demonic sister in law, Herodias for a wife.

It was a resplendent wedding, followed by a feast to rival those feasts on the isle of Capri. Midway through the banquet, whose excess could have fed an entire village for months, Herod stood, with a goblet in hand and made a toast.

‘To Caesar Tiberius! The noble Wolf!'