Prologue

I, Judas Didymos Thomas, having wandered a diseased world and witnessed the extent of humanity’s depravement and corruption, return at the ragged end of my days to a pile of charred rubble that once was Jerusalem, where I find my people scattered like chaff. No longer do I much care that anything here survives, or that anyone still breathes this filthy air, yet I must do one thing of paramount value: Before the peace of death silences me, it is imperative that I tell the true story of my twin, Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, also called the Christ by some.

After a century and a half of our rebellions and barren fields that would have been enough to drive away any respectable, profit-minded occupiers, and even after leveling Jerusalem and countless villages in Judea and the Galilee, the Romans still infest our land like fleas. The drunken, sodomite soldiers who razed the Temple and plundered our farms live in the shells of our houses while their idiot, nameless children shit in open view in the streets, and their swine wallow in the ashes of our civilization. Any of my people with sense fled this wasteland when they saw Jerusalem crumble along with the promises they could no longer believe their God would fulfill. A few fools remain, like me, spending their last days befriending death.

I am eighty years old, or perhaps older, as many shadows fall over my memories and darken my remaining eye. My family and my brother’s spineless followers are all dead. The only evidence of a minimally decent God is that my brother did not live to trudge through the ruins of his brittle dreams, kicking about for a shard of fractured hope.

No one may remember him if I do not preserve the story. To some, he was simply one of a thousand insurrectionist peasants who felt the culmination of their schemes tacked to a tree like a drying hide. Worse, Gentile charlatans have scandalized his memory and made him a Dionysus.

I would rather Jesus be completely forgotten than transformed into something he was not. Since I cannot erase the lies, I must try to combat them by offering truth. I shall write his story in Greek, for my people are disappearing into unknown lands and, if they survive at all, will probably forget their language as they by now should have forgotten their Lord.

Do not look for Jacob and Esau here. While my brother’s is indeed a story of jealousy, deceit, and betrayal, my connection to him was nothing so gauche as a newborn clutching his womb-mate’s heel. If I have grasped anything, it is a thorough understanding of the man with whom I am of the same flesh, yet who was an enigma I have spent half a century attempting to unravel. Many adored Jesus, and even more despised him—such is the fate of all who inspire—but no one else felt about him the way I did, a way that even I am unable to fully express.

The human world, however, is constructed of stories, and if we find any meaning at all, it is in how we shape our peculiar way of being by speaking it or, in this case, writing it. Perhaps the very act of writing this book will bring some order to the broken images of my brother’s life (as well as my own), his vision (as best I can understand it), and his legacy (as much as I may create one).