The Baptist's Head: Nimrod Twice Born, #1

By Lyn Pickering

The Baptist’s Head interweaves the dramatic events of Israel at the time of Jesus Christ with a World War II conspiracy thriller.     

The skills of a Magician, Simon Magus, win him the favour of the wife of Herod Antipas.  The magician initiates a conspiracy so intricate and so far-seeing that it will only reach its climax in our time. 

Matthias von Ingolstadt leaves the horror of the trenches behind at the close of the World War I and returns to a Germany humiliated by the events that have left the country bankrupt and vulnerable. He meets and falls in love with Anna Lejkin, a Jew.  What follows appears to solve their racial differences but ultimately leads to discovery, manipulation and disaster. 

A Jew in Frankfurt, Germany, Michael Segal is caught up in the events preceding the war.  His friendship with Gabriele have far-reaching consequences for them both. 

Heinrich Himmler, the future SS leader of the Third Reich, forms a relationship with Ernst Röhm a battle-hardened veteran of WWI who has a penchant for young men. He promises Himmler the one thing he most desires – power. 

 The Baptist’s Head is an intricate story of love, romance, witch-craft, power and intrigue.  Lyn J Pickering employs history’s trail of circumstantial evidence to combine both Christian conspiracy and historical fiction in one bizarre and riveting package.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forest of Lebanon Publications
• Release date: Dec 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519905994

Book preview

Prologue

Twice-Born

1988

It was not the first time since Chaim Freiberg’s death some thirty years ago, that Michael Segal wished he were still around.  Except for a handful of souls who chose to use it as a reference in their study of the Turin shroud, his own book was long since published and forgotten but Michael had never lost his fascination for the subject.  Freiberg would have brought his level-headed approach to the present report and between them they might have reached a conclusion.

The issues defied any logical answer.  Why had the Roman Catholic Church twice chosen to release findings pertinent to the Turin shroud on the anniversary of the suppression of Order of the Templars?  First the STURP findings on 13th October 1978 and now, exactly ten years later, this present report on the carbon 14 dating.  Obviously the Mother Church was speaking but exactly what was being said was more difficult to discern.

Segal’s book, written during the Second World War, had been one of the earliest investigations undertaken but since then there had been a number of significant advancements in the study of the shroud, not the least Dr. Max Frei’s report on the pollen samples.  Frei, a Swiss criminologist of international repute noted for his work on the analysis of microscopic substances, was granted permission in 1973 to collect dust samples from the linen cloth.  The result was an extensive list of pollens, among them plants typical to the area around the Dead Sea, specifically adapted to the high salt content of the soil, and species indigenous to the area around Edessa, modern day Urfa, as well as to Constantinople, or Istanbul.  His results had gone a long way towards strengthening Michael’s theory that Edessa’s Mandylion concealed the full length shroud under its tapestry backing.

Gabriele looked into the room.  I know you need time alone, she said, so I’ve arranged to meet the girls in town for lunch.  There’s a cold meal for you in the fridge.

Ever the diplomat, he laughed.  Come and give me kiss before you go.

He put his arms around his wife and looked down at her with affection.  Her blonde hair was now grey but the curls were as irrepressible as ever and, to Michael, she was as lovely as when they first met.

Enjoy your day, and give our grand-daughters my love.

I will.

He heard the door close behind her and settled back to his desk littered with dozens of clippings and copious notes.

The carbon dating report, which set the time of the cutting of the flax for the shroud between the years 1260 – 1390, made nonsense of Frei’s findings - and of his own less scientific study.  Interestingly, only three of the initial seven laboratories chosen to perform the tests were ultimately given the go-ahead; England’s Oxford University, a lab in Zurich and one in the United States.  Typically, Michael thought, the Catholic hierarchy had proffered no reason for the exclusion of the others.  This report placed a firm lid on the subject.  The single conclusion that could be drawn from the carbon 14 dating was that the shroud was a clever fake. 

Michael Segal returned to his own body of more circumstantial evidence and to Max Frei’s data, which clearly, if not conclusively, demonstrated that the linen cloth had followed the route from Israel via Edessa and Constantinople to France and Italy.  What Renaissance forger could have foreseen the need to source fabric in Israel for the manufacture of his fake?  And what of the documented presence of the shroud in Constantinople in 1201, well before the cloth was said to have been made?  The keeper of the relic collection in the Pharos Chapel had declared its presence, claiming that it ‘wrapped the mysterious naked dead body after the Passion’.  Could he have stated that the body of Christ was naked except for the evidence of the image on the shroud?

Two years later, a Frenchman, Robert de Clari who, as part of the Fourth Crusade, had been brought to Constantinople on a Venetian ship prior to the attack on the city wrote:

There was another of the churches which they called, My Lady St. Mary of Blachernae, where was kept the sydoine in which Our Lord had been wrapped, which stood up straight every Friday so that the figure of Our Lord could be plainly seen there...

These and other testimonies clearly suggested the existence of a shroud, which bore the image of Christ, before the carbon 14 dating evidence said it could have existed.

Was it then possible that someone had tampered with the shroud samples or the dating results?

The Vatican’s go-ahead for the shroud’s testing had been given in October 1987 and specified that the tests were to be carried out by technicians who knew nothing about the identity of the cloth until after the experiment was complete.  A centimetre wide strip, eight centimetres in length had been cut from the linen cloth and three strips of 1.3 centimetres were submitted for testing on April 21st 1988.  But although the findings under the accelerator mass spectrometer would have been received almost immediately, they were withheld for several months.

There were two possible ways that any ‘fixing’ might have taken place, Michael surmised.  Either the samples were switched and replaced by a cloth known to be of a far later dating, or the lab technicians were persuaded to provide a different date.  The former, presumably, would have been simpler to arrange than the latter.  The question remained, why?  What would the Roman Catholic Church possibly have to gain by deliberately manipulating the dates of arguably its most sacred relic?

And there, for a long time, Michael Segal was stuck.  He ambled into the kitchen made himself a cup of strong coffee and fetched his lunch from the refrigerator although it was still only 11.00 o‘clock and ate the cold chicken and salad absentmindedly.

If the Catholic Church believed that the shroud of Turin was genuinely the burial cloth of Christ, it would surely not be in their interests to do anything to undermine that belief.  Yet the deliberate nature of the release of two sets of reports, ten years apart, on the date of the attack on the Templars, had the immediate effect of disassociating the shroud from the time of Christ, setting it in a different time frame.  The first even before the carbon 14 dating had taken place, as though, years before, they anticipated the test and its result.

Why, what was their game?  Was the research of those outside the Church moving too close to the truth of the real nature of the shroud?  Had they stumbled unwittingly to the edge of a new discovery?  Or was the intention of Catholic hierarchy to draw adherents to a new faith, one no longer founded on the old tenets of belief in the death and resurrection of Christ but on the mysteries surrounding the Templars and the continuance of the Order beyond the time of their demise?  Relic worship had, apparently, been designed to drawn devotees of Catholicism into a belief in Christ; had the focus subtly shifted?

Perhaps, Michael Segal thought, as he drained the last of his coffee, the true face of Catholicism is about to be revealed.  The Catholic faith, like the shroud of Turin, rested upon an iconic reflection of Christ Jesus.  If the Turin shroud, the Catholic representation of his death and resurrection, was discovered to be based on a false premise, the emphasis could always be shifted to suit the new face.  Those faithful souls which had followed the teachings of Rome could find that their foundation, built on an indistinct image of Christ Jesus, had shifted like sand.  They would be worshipping the one Twice-Born.

PART I

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Chapter 1

Twice-Born

It pleased Herod Antipas to have the Baptist in his cells.  It was like holding a wild bird captive in a wicker cage; he could at any time create a pretext and go down to see the man.  Lacking the freedom of the common people, Herod had had to content himself with hearing about the prophet while being prevented from observing him at first hand.  He was younger than Herod had expected, perhaps only in his early thirties; heavily bearded, and his hair was long and unkempt.  And if the Tetrarch had anticipated that the Baptist’s eyes would be those of a mystic or a mad-man, he was disappointed.  No outward welcome of his captor was extended in his expression but neither was there any rejection; he seemed to accept Herod’s presence in the dungeons of Machaerus without question.  Why would the Tetrarch not seek him out?  He, the Baptiser, had the words of the Living God. 

Indeed, something about John bar Zachariah continually drew Antipas back.  Learned Jews, and Pharisees in particular, had always looked upon Herod the Tetrarch with undisguised contempt yet, surprisingly, the Baptist’s gaze held understanding.  He was completely unaffected by Herod’s status and spoke to him with an artless honesty as he had never been spoken to by any other man.  He read him as though he were an open letter.  Herod would sometimes slip down to the cells and converse with him, less as jailer to prisoner than as proselyte to teacher.  It was cool in the cells below Machaerus and the nights were often intensely cold.  One of John’s followers had brought him a cloak and Herod himself often brought food, which the Baptist accepted from his hand with no show of humility.  Antipas suspected his prisoner knew his charity to be the act of a man with a bad conscience.

From the first appearance of John the Baptiser in his territory Herod Antipas had been fascinated.  Here was a prophet and, by many accounts, a genuine prophet – the first since Malachi four hundred years before.  Some said that Malachi’s final words had come to pass in the person of John bar Zachariah.

Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. 

Do you believe this could be the return of Elijah?  When John first wended his way down the banks of the Jordan River challenging all who cared to listen with his preaching, Antipas had asked Herodias that question.

Superstitious nonsense!  The man is our enemy!  Do you willfully choose to ignore what he’s saying about us? Herodias tossed her head.  It’s evident that you admire him!  Does it not concern you that he condemns our marriage as incestuous?

In Jewish eyes it is.  You were my brother’s wife.

She shrugged contemptuously.  Half-brother!  And I was Herod Philip’s niece when I married him, but I never allowed that to bother me.  What has it to do with some ill-clad peasant, anyway?

He took her by the shoulders and kissed her.  Don’t allow him to disturb you, he said, he can’t damage us with words.

Words have the power to destroy kingdoms, she warned him.  Agrippa my brother is in Rome awaiting the right moment to seize your territory and that of Philip the Tetrarch.  If this Baptist arouses the people against us, Pontius Pilot may well report the matter to Caesar and you, my dear husband would be ousted in an instant.

Herod Antipas’ smile failed to disguise the unease her words aroused in him.  At the time of Herod’s marriage to Herodias, only Roman-ruled Judaea stood between Antipas and the remainder of his father’s realm.  The government of Judaea had changed five times during Herod Antipas’ thirty-one year rule of Galilee and Transjordan, and it was not unlikely that Rome would extend the Tetrarch’s rule in order to bring stability to the region.  One false move, however, could turn everything in the favour of Herod Agrippa.  It was this fear that was encouraged and fanned into flame by Herodias.

I don’t believe John is a rabble-rouser, he protested.  He seems sincere to me.  By his words, he intends to return the Jews to their keeping of the law.  I don’t see him as a danger.

Herodias drew away from him making no attempt to disguise her irritation.

You are more of a fool than I realised! she spat.

He raised his hands and dropped them helplessly, What do you expect me to do about the man, imprison him for preaching?

If you want to protect your position.  Yes!

I can’t do that, Herodias.  I know he has upset you, but I can’t throw him in prison because you don’t like what he says.

Her eyes met his and locked them in her glance.  You are afraid to do it, she said with scorn. There’s still too much of that Jewish upbringing in you.  What do you imagine will happen if you get rid of the man?  That your God will strike you down?

He turned away from her, humiliated by the sting in her words.  There was truth in what she said.  His father had insisted that he and his brothers be schooled in the Torah more, he knew, as an expedient and training to rule as king over Israel than as a code of conduct.  Something, some superstition perhaps, had remained.  If there was a god who governed this universe it was unlikely to be one of his wife’s gods of stone and precious metals, but far be it from him to suggest that Herodias herself might be involved in superstitious practises.  She was iron-willed and prevailed against him in every argument.  He sighed as she left the terrace. 

From the first moment of Herodias’ marriage to his brother, Herod-Philip, a businessman from Caesarea, Herod Antipas had lusted after her.  A witty and vital woman with intelligence that far outweighed that of her husband, Herodias was, of her choosing, the hub and focus of every gathering.  She was intensely beautiful, with lips perfectly shaped, and dark, smouldering eyes.  She wore her black hair loosely braided and in those moments when her eyes had sought his, flirting with Herod over the unwary head of her husband, she would finger the plait and allow the hair to escape from its bands only to gather it up and restrain it again.  It would command all of Herod’s will-power to keep his mind on his brother’s conversation.  It was obvious to him now that Herodias had used Philip as a necessary stepping-stone in her ambition for power.  Herod Antipas’ position suited her purposes better than Philip’s and, when she judged the time to be right, she had seduced her husband’s brother and left him thirsty for more.

Within weeks Antipas had divorced his Arabian wife, the daughter of Aretas, and taken for himself the wife of Herod-Philip his younger half-brother.  Herodias brought a sixteen year old daughter, Salome, into this new union. 

Herod’s hope that John the Baptiser would leave Galilee and never return did not materialise and it was more than his life was worth to threaten the tenuous security of his marriage.  At Herodias’ insistence, Herod Antipas had sent some of his men to warn the Baptist to cease speaking about his marriage on pain of imprisonment.

Chapter 2

Twice-Born

1918

Matthias von Ingolstadt was twenty-two years old when the Great War ended.  He crawled from his trench like a rat from its hole and attempted to see the devastation in terms of his new found liberation.  It would take nature a long time to heal the scars that their weapons had inflicted on the countryside.  It was divested of almost all colour or life.  Trees had been stripped to grey leafless stumps; the raw earth blemished and pitted.  Around him, the men were simply a reflection, he supposed, of the way he looked.  Their eyes, set into the muddied masks of their faces, were flat and lifeless.  Had there been a victory to celebrate, perhaps there would have been some jauntiness; some of those battered frames might have been able to hold themselves with pride.  As it was, nothing could be salvaged from those wasted years and wasted lives.

Von Ingolstadt was tall; half a head taller than most of his friends, and the muscle and sinew across his shoulders and upper arms granted a suggestion of power to a body that was too lean.  Blonde hair, closely cropped against lice, dusted his skull, emphasising the smudges of shadow hollowing his eyes and cheekbones.  His hands were of the sort never intended to handle a weapon.  They were gentle, with long fingers made to coax the best from a violin, or create ecstasy in the face of a woman.  They were the hands of a poet and a dreamer, but now, mud-encrusted, they appeared little different from the gnarled and broken stumps of the trees.  The war had generated men that were machines of slaughter and trained them to kill.  Von Ingolstadt lifted his hands to his face for a moment, almost without recognition, only to drop them loosely to his sides.  Would they ever respond again in human terms without the touch of death overshadowing every action?

From the front, the men began to go back home to their families.  After a four-year trench-war, their self-esteem was shattered, their spirit broken, and little remained of their national pride.  Demobilisation was sporadic and, when at last Matthias von Ingolstadt arrived in Berlin, it seemed that life had normalised for most people, rendering the remnant of the returning army an embarrassment.  Nobody needed to be reminded of what amounted to Germany’s defeat.

The butler met Matthias at the station and loaded his baggage into the waiting taxi.  Lack of income meant that most of the servants had been dismissed and home had become a shabby parody of its pre-war grandeur.  Even his parents unaccountably seemed like a familiar, faded image on an old photograph.  His mother dressed in brown silk and white lace, stood tall, slender and brittle as always, beside her husband in the lobby.  His father’s moustaches were sharply waxed and his white collar freshly starched but his eyes had become weak and rheumy beneath grizzled eyebrows; his skin was pale as parchment and deeply furrowed.

The welcome lacked warmth; gestures of affection and genuine words of endearment had never come naturally to his parents and von Ingolstadt had not expected anything to have changed.  His mother returned to her weekly routine of tea parties with chosen friends over the silver tea service in the drawing room and Matthias made plans to leave.  Any sign of weakness was frowned upon and he was locked in on himself, seeking to cope with memories that exhausted and threatened to engulf him.  He wanted to sleep until the feelings were gone, yet sleep was no longer restorative but haunted by night visions, sometimes elusive, often vivid with horror.  That which affected him most was the one that should have left him untouched.  In a village on the Meuse, he had stumbled across a cat, probably used by the last troops for target practice.  It was wandering aimlessly through the street with its face half-blown away, its remaining eye pleading with him to end its misery.  He had killed it with a single shot to the heart but the cat lived on in his dreams.  All the terrors of war had become bound up in that one image, which would not be erased.

The German High Command had sought the Armistice, not because their armies were being overpowered, nor even because of the stalemate in the ongoing trench war, but because of an imminent Communist uprising in Germany.  Just one year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg and her predominantly Jewish Spartacus Bund planned to repeat Lenin’s Russian success on German soil.  By 1918, Spartacus agents infiltrated the German fleet.  Rumours were spread of an impending battle against the full might of the Allied forces.  The purpose of the battle was to cripple the allied fleets so that they would no longer be able to defend Britain’s coastline against a German military invasion.

The British have developed a secret weapon, the crews were told.  They’ve got a chemical that can be fired from shore or dropped from a plane that will create a sea of flames.  If we don’t die from the flames and the heat, we’ll die from lack of oxygen.

The cells introduced their poisoning of the crews drop by drop until it became obvious to them that the only way to prevent certain death was revolution.  On 3rd November 1918, the German seamen mutinied, and a few days later, on their way to the Western Front many more deserted ship, believing they were to spearhead the final sea battle against Britain.

In Germany itself, uprisings had caused industrial shut-downs and in the ensuing conditions of defeatism, the Kaiser abdicated and the Social Democrats formed a Republican Government.  The Armistice signed on November 11th 1918 was a prelude to a negotiated peace.  Germany never intended it to be unconditional surrender.

Rosa Luxemburg’s agents created chaos throughout the armed forces.  Forcing the government to order the immediate demobilisation was her trump card, which ensured that the revolution could take place without military intervention.  Everything was in place for the final assault planned for January 1919.  Luxemburg’s failure came as they prepared to launch their onslaught.  Only then did she realise that she had been double-crossed by those who had financed Lenin’s revolution in Russia.  Spartacus had been betrayed.  The failure of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their Jewish-dominated revolution resulted in immediate reprisals against German Jews.  Thousands of men, women and children were rounded up during the night and executed.  The attempted revolution was confirmation of a Jewish-led revolutionary movement and Hitler would use these events to consolidate German hatred for Jews and Communists in the years that lay ahead.

Exacerbating Germany’s sense of isolation and hatred were the demands from the Allies for restitution; Germany must be made to pay - to be squeezed dry for what she had done.  The armistice, which President Woodrow Wilson said should make the world safe for democracy was destined to create the discontent which would spawn Europe’s dictators, and pave the way for the more horrifying war to come.

Matthias von Ingolstadt joined the Freicorps within the first two months of his demobilisation.  There were few jobs to be had, and the ranks of the Freicorps swelled with such misplaced officers and soldiers.  For some men, after the war, the return to normal society was plagued with difficulties, others never managed to make the adjustment.  They missed the comradeship of the army that had become their home.  Like Matthias von Ingolstadt, they needed the imposed discipline of the army as a bastion against an inner emptiness, until such time as they were able to move back into society on their own terms.

As a further backlash against the German defeat, the ranks of the Freicorps followed whatever flag happened to be flying, content to be soldiers of fortune, and their regiments obeyed or disobeyed government orders at will.

Von Ingolstadt had little desire to make the army his future.  The Freicorps however, welcomed him in and, on the strength of his past record, made him a senior officer.  Matthias von Ingolstadt had taken a step destined to be his first towards a long army career, which, ultimately, would result in a move into the German SS.

Berliners had chosen denial as a means of assuming change and a superficial, hedonistic society began to emerge from the confusion and pathos of the war.  A revival of the arts focused on the flippant and the fantastic.  Billboards and posters depicted lean, sensual women and men who were suave and well-groomed.  Multitudes had perished, Germany had been humiliated in the sight of the world, but those who survived shook off the memories and rose up with a grim determination to wring everything from the present.

Chapter 3

Twice-Born

John the Baptist struck a strange figure.  He was strong, fit and suntanned, and his hair surrounded his face like the feathers of an eagle, almost indistinguishable from his untrimmed beard.  He dressed in camel skins belted at the waist, and lived on what the desert area offered – wild honey and locusts.  An inquisitive crowd had followed him to the banks of the Jordan River close to the northern end of the Dead Sea where he was baptising all who would respond to his message.  His voice bellowed across the water as he waded out from the bank and the sun caught the ripples creating a kaleidoscope of fragmented light.

At Herodias’ insistence, a group of several soldiers, clad in the distinctive blue tunic of the palace guard, had been assigned to watch the Baptist and report back to Herod anything that was spoken against him.  Their presence was designed to pose a threat to every meeting, but John would not be intimidated into softening his message or leaving the area.  From his position on the banks of the river Jordan he would deliberately project his voice to include the silent line of men spread out across the ridge.  Within days there were those soldiers