The Codex Magdalene

By W. Howard Reed

"The story starts with Jesus and Mary Magdalene marrying, bonding and beginning a family. Thirteen years later, he finds what God had in mind for him. She follows him on the road. She learns the Gospel. Then comes the day Jesus is arrested, trialed and crucified.
Afterwards she becomes Apostle to the Apostles teaching them thing Jesus did not tell them. She and Jesus brother, James, found the Jesus Movement, the Way. Eventually she is forced to leave her homeland. She continues to teach across the Roman Empire from Ephesus, Athens to Rome. After a year teaching she is called before a 17 year old Nero. She escapes his persecution with the aid of a Praetorian Officer. They all escape to southern France. There she continues to preach and convert Jews and Gentiles in there until her own death."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453542323

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Copyright © 2010 by W. Howard Reed.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010910683

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4535-4231-6

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4535-4230-9

ISBN: Ebook 978-1-4535-4232-3

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CONTENTS

1.    An Ancient Find

2.    The Family

3.    The Wedding

4.    The Calling

5.    John the Baptist and Temptation

6.    Jesus Begins His Ministry

7.    The Last Festival Season

8.    The Supper and the Garden

9.    The Trials

10.    Crucifixion—Resurrection

11.    The Second Ministry Begins

12.    Marseilles

AN ANCIENT FIND

1

"Today in my old age I begin the story of my life, of a happy marriage, of my jubilation in our children, of the good news delivered by Yeshua, my husband, and of the deep anguish I felt at his death. I tell my story so that you might know the true story of the man I traveled through life with. I will tell you about the man whom I had both a fraternal and spiritual bond with during our lifetime and whose legacy and teachings I continued to profess and spread even after his death. These are the true things about him that you would not know unless you were there with him, his gifts of health and life and his flaws as a human being. This is the true story of the wonders he brought to the people of Israel. To do this today I leave the outside world behind and enter a new contemplative life of seclusion, reflection, and remembrance.

"I will recall the early years of my life before his ministry before the Sanhedrin and the changes our lives took throughout his ministry. I will also tell you about my ministerial life after his death. Let this be the true story about Yeshua bar Joseph’s life and the message he was given to bring to the people and to the disciples and the Council of Twelve and all the others he touched.

"Many of his followers both disciples and apostles have written letters to various religious communities. These ‘Gospels’ and ‘Epistles’ have been written some many years after the Master’s death; and they are now used to teach their converts to the Way, the Christian Way, or Christianity as it has come to be known. Some of this information was passed down through word of mouth and has been written down by men that never met the Nazarene. What they have written has changed from the original oral messages.

"Some of his followers have found things about his life to proclaim important other than his message. Some have linked his name with that of God, saying that he was perhaps the Son of God or God himself who came to earth in flesh and blood. Some base their teaching on the fact that he died, was buried, and rose from the dead, that resurrection was the most important thing in his life. They spread ‘resurrection’ and little of the message of the Living God that was given them by the Nazarene. Some say that it is not the Master that is important but John the Baptist that is more important than the Nazarene. Some say the Nazarene was nothing more than a rebel, a zealot pent on overthrowing the Romans and Herod and establishing his own empire. Only a few, like me, talk about his message, the ‘Gospel,’ to the people; but we are few in comparison to the others.

So across the Roman Empire many voices are heard today that reflect many different stories about the Nazarene, Jesus, who he was and what his importance was. But from my perspective Jesus was nothing more than a simple man, a teacher, a rabbi, or the Son of Man.

*     *     *

My name is Richard Allen Smith, and these are the first few pages of several papyrus manuscripts that I found crammed into a ceramic jar in a French cave several years ago. It was written by someone that claimed to know Jesus personally. Here was another ancient writing that has come to light in the last century that speaks of Jesus. Here was a document called a codex, something that could shake up Christian religion, as much as the Da Vinci Code got people talking. Here was a document that could prove that Jesus was not only divine in spirit but human in flesh and blood. So now let me relate how I came to posses such a cache of documents.

*     *     *

A little over six years ago I sat resting on a raised rock outcropping in a cave in the south of France. The shelf was about six foot in length by four foot wide and about two foot off the floor of the cave. It was rather lumpy, and I wondered if it was natural or hewn by the hand of man. I remember wiping the sweat and dust from my forehead and face with my shirtsleeves and the tail of my shirt; what a job for the laundryman to clean. I had dusted off centuries of filth that covered every bit of me and my clothing with my hands.

Sitting there, I just stared at the sealed ceramic jar that sat in front of me. It had taken more than two hours of digging, wiggling, jiggling, and jostling to loosen the jar from the earth that had entombed it for centuries. And in the end it took just plain brute force to break it free of its tomb although I was trying not to be so rough with it as to break it.

It was then that I began to wonder, what was inside this jar that I had spent all afternoon digging out? And I pondered it in that short bit of time. It was a big jar, about two and a half feet tall with two ceramic loops on the topside for running ropes through so the jar could be carried on a pole between two men. The jar would bounce and swing slightly as it was carried suspended from a heavy wooden pole. One loop was broken, the only damage I could see. I measured its circumference by putting my arms around it, and my fingers barely touched each other as I did. And the last thing that was strange about this ceramic jar was it had a flat bottom unlike many other Roman amphora of the era.

Before the jar was fired, someone had carved into the upper portion of it about a dozen fish. Each fish was standing on their tails, their heads facing the lid of the jar. These were ancient Christian symbols used to recognize each during times of Roman persecution. It would be many years before Christians began using the cross or crucifix as a symbol of their religion. Also present were what appeared to be letters or sets of letters between each fish. I couldn’t decipher them, but all the groupings appeared to be the same and like the fish were scratched into the wet clay before it was baked. Now it sat in front of me as I took a break from digging it out of the floor with my fingers and pocketknife. Dirt was caked under my fingernails, and the knife was now as sharp as a spoon.

The question on my mind then was what did it contain? Was it a burial urn for someone of importance? No, it was way too big for that unless it was a family bone casket, but those were usually rectangular stone boxes. Did it contain food like the famous Roman fish sauce? No, again it was too large for that. Could it be a container for vintage wine? Again the answer was no since it was the wrong shape for that too. It had a flat bottom, so it couldn’t be a wine amphora since they always had cone-shaped bottom. There was only one way to find out what was contained inside, crack the seal and open it. But then the question was do I notify the French Antiquities Department or open it myself, and as I wandered I thought of how I ended up here in the first place.

Now you know what I found, let me take a minute or two to tell you why I kept the codex and did the translation myself. It was a cold gray October day with occasional snow flurries as I began typing this manuscript into my computer a year ago at my dining room table. The table was covered with piles of books, magazines, and papers here and there. One pile contained research papers, many from the Internet, and others pages from books. Another pile was two reams of paper. Fifty or so books about the subject were in various piles on the table each with tabs marking various pages with information too. In another pile were sealed glass panes; they contained the pages of what I found in that cave. Other glass sandwiches were stored in a makeshift climate control room. Most everything on the table was in some semblance of order at least as far as I was concerned.

An early winter storm had descended on our community as I looked out over my laptop and through the sliding glass doors of my house and saw the world as a mystical place. What leaves remained on the oak tree in the backyard ranged in color from faded greens to yellows to orange and blood red as they died and fluttered in the stiff wind to the snow-covered ground. The tree limbs were a shiny black from the near-freezing drizzle interspersed with the flurries.

Mystically the gray shingled roof of the house in back of me blended perfectly with the storm clouds that were sweeping in across the distant city skyscrapers. The house I know to be on the other side of the privacy fence almost disappeared into the mists of time.

Six years ago a drunk driver ran a red light in Dallas and broadsided my car. After seven years of marriage, my wife, Sarah, was taken from me in that fleeting moment. I was unconscious in the hospital for weeks when I woke up and found out the outcome of the accident. I was devastated to say the least.

Sarah and I had met each other in our freshman year of college and married two years later. We decided to put off children until my career in architecture and hers in computer technology took root, sometime in our early thirties. But now at twenty-seven I was alone with nothing but good memories of our life together. At twenty-nine I decided to break out of the shell and attempt to start a new life with a trip abroad. I would escape my old life and attempt to forget my tragedy with a long vacation to France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Benelux area. Maybe the Old World could erase memories built up in the new one.

I booked a three-week fly-and-drive vacation with a travel agent. My new life began when I landed in Paris, France. It was early October; and the weather in France was perfect, not too hot and not too cold, shirtsleeves in the daytime and a light jacket at night. The French were off to their summer vacations, and the tourist sights weren’t very crowded since the European children were back in school. After I arrived I spent four pleasant sunny but cool days in Paris taking in all the typical tourist spots, the Eiffel Tower, a cruise on the Seine River, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the modern art gallery of the Musee d’Orsay and many other museums like the modern Pompidou Centre.

One morning I departed Paris from the Gare d’Austerlitz train station on the French high-speed train, the TGV, for Bordeaux on the southwest coast of France. After a couple of days of sightseeing around Bordeaux and sampling the local red wine with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I picked up a French Peugeot automobile to begin driving through the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains toward the southern coast of France and the Riviera.

I headed into the mountainous region of southern France and spent an afternoon and night in Lourdes. Next I drove to Arles and on to Marseille on the south coast of France. I left Marseille after a couple of days and found myself one afternoon on a road east-northeast of there near the plateau of the La Sainte-Baume Massif, or the Central Massif, a few miles off the Mediterranean coast. After several hours of driving, I came across a beautiful little waterfall tucked away in the hills above the highway. I decided after driving the twisting, winding up and down narrow blacktop highways of the region to pull over in a lay-by for a rest break.

I snapped a few pictures from the base of the small but beautiful falls, then I began the short climb up over the rocks and roots to the top of the falls. Once there I took a few more pictures of the falls from the summit of the vineyards to my left and fields that stretched down to the Mediterranean coast. On the other side of the falls, my eye caught sight of a shiny object behind some foliage, and I decided to check it out. I carefully crossed the stream on some stones and peered through the bushes. Centuries of thick growing vines, tree limbs, tall wild grasses, rotting foliage, and overgrown thornbushes hid the entrance to a cave.

Someone had lived there once upon a time but not recently. Dust and dirt covered everything in the area. I pushed the vines aside and crawled through. The floor of the cave was covered with more dust and dirt; and there were no visible footprints other than small animals like raccoons, skunks, or squirrel tracks. Near the front was a jumble of rocks that appeared at one time to be the remains of an old fire or cooking pit. A large rusted concave iron cooking surface was broken into several pieces and would have been used as a stove top to cook things like flat bread on. There hadn’t been a fire in the pit for a very, very, very long time either. A crumbling beehive oven appeared to fill an outside corner of the cave. Then I saw the shiny object that had caught my eye. It was nothing more than a small puddle of water glistening in the afternoon sunlight. The vines and foliage at the entrance had partially covered it. Between the fire pit and the vines were broken and discarded pottery shards that were covered by still more dirt, debris, twigs, and rotted vegetation.

As I explored deeper into the cave, I found faded early Christian religious symbols either carved into or painted on the walls of the cave. On the other side of the cave, I saw what appeared to be a discarded lid of a ceramic jar that was three-quarters buried in dirt. I dusted it off and found simple line drawings of fish facing inward on the reddish clay lid. I dug down a little deeper and found the lid still attached to a much larger jar.

I carefully dug out the jar, and that is where we are now. I made the decision to open it; and using my rather dull pocketknife, I broke the dirty gum, pitch, and wax seal between the lid and the jar. When I opened the jar, I counted about twenty or twenty-five leather-wrapped bundles of papyrus books. These were called codices or what we would consider books today. They were ancient. How could I tell they were ancient? Because no one I know of has used papyrus for over fifteen or sixteen hundred years. These codices were very old and slightly brittle as I soon found out when I began to carefully unwrapped one. I knew that they would need the care of a document-restoration expert. I also figured they might be something of mammoth value seeing there were so many and that they were hidden in a cave so far from civilization.

Thinking nothing about French antiquity laws, I wrapped one or two books together and mailed them home to Texas from various postal offices from around Europe. On the customs declarations, I called them exactly what I was shipping home books or history books when I sent them. They were after all that; it’s just that they were very old books. Back home with the help of friends and acquaintances, I would begin a long process of finding out first how old the codices were, second in what language they were written in, and finally and maybe most importantly and possibly the most difficult of all, who wrote them and what they were about.

First of all I can clearly state that the codices were written by a person of a supreme religious prominence to that period. The books were written by someone who had as much to do with the formation of a religion than any other person. This was a person that was an early leader in the spirituality and the doctrine of the Jerusalem Church.

I think you all should know that I have no bias in writing this book. I am not a zealous believer in church dogma, any church dogma for that matter, and I should probably be the last person to write a book on religion or on a religious personage. I have never been enthusiastic about organized religion, except when I was married, and that was for my wife and any kids we would have had. Today I am what you might call an Easter and Christmas Catholic. I believe in a god or a superior being, someone with more common sense than the rest of us have, or was he in his comedic mood when he created humans?

Do I believe in creationism or evolution? I don’t know, maybe a little bit of both? I don’t know but humans do some pretty strange things at times. We stomp on the ground, we beat our chest with both hands, we bare our teeth, and sometimes when we are drunk enough, we bark at the moon.

Once back home I picked up my saved mail and began work on the ancient codices. For assistance I contacted some friends I knew from the University of Texas at Arlington. My friend introduced me to a professor in the History Department. As Dr. Samuels and I examined the codices, we found that the pages were made of Egyptian papyrus. They were brittle but not as brittle as one would imagine after two thousand years; the jar had maintained some semblance of humidity control, so if handled gently and with care, the pages would not break. Most of the pages were in excellent condition with very little damage from insects. Still I placed them between glass sheets and sealed each page to preserve them as instructed.

We cut off a small piece of a manuscript page and a piece of the leather wrapper and had them radiocarbon-dated by another friend in the Science Department in Austin, Texas. They were indeed old, verified at the first century sometime around the time of Christ, give or take fifty years. This would have covered the Imperial period of the Julian Caesars of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and Titus Flavius Vespasian and Titus, his son, of the Flavian Caesars. The last two were also military commanders in Judea around the time of the Jewish revolt. Herod Antipas and Herod Agrippa I and II were the local kings in Judea while the apostles Paul, Peter, Andrew, James the Lesser, Matthew, and the other apostles spread the Gospel throughout Palestine, Asia Minor, India, North Africa, and southern Europe.

The language was not familiar to any of us, so my friend put me in touch with another professor, Janet Blake, in the Linguistics Department at the university. We put our heads together, and over the course of several nights we started eliminating languages one by one. We started by considering Mediterranean languages; it wasn’t Phoenician, Greek Linear A or B, or Latin. Next we considered Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic from the Middle East and Persian and other eastern dialects and ruled all of those out. Next we looked at cuneiform and its derivatives from the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys and other pictographic languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics and hieratic writings which we also discounted. The only other civilizations we could think of with written languages came from the Western Roman Empire. These people were the Goths and Germans and the Franks that had been slowly oozing into the area of southern Gaul and the northern Iberia peninsula for the past two centuries.

Now the professor and I tried to think of who lived in southern France and would have had a written language other than the Romans. There were some local Gauls, some descendants of the North African Carthaginians, the Roman conquerors, the transplanted Jews that populated southern France in the first century before and after the birth of Christ.

The Goths lived in the area but had no written language and besides the books I had were two hundred years older than their incursion into the vicinity. So we were able to eliminate the Goths and Visigoths. In the end we were brought down to a written form of old Germanic or Frankish, or an even more ancient and unknown language. In our research of documents we found examples of Runic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Friesian from the north of Europe. Finally in an obscure book we found an example of Frankish written language in the college library. Talk about your dead languages, any one of them would be a nightmare to translate into English. Further research on the college Internet sites finally turned up a match of most of the symbols. It was undoubtedly the Frankish sub-dialect of Sicambrian. Now the real task began—learning enough of a two-thousand-year-old dead language to translate the two-thousand-year-old codex.

Why, you might ask, would I attempt to translate such a document in the first place? Have you ever looked at something so hard and intently and not been able to get it off your mind? Have you ever been so intrigued that you wouldn’t dedicate your whole being to accomplish that goal of knowing everything about it? Have you ever been so absorbed that you didn’t want to be told about it by someone else but had to gain the knowledge yourself? The thought of what might be written on those pages sucked me in hook, line, and sinker. The very first time I saw the codices, I knew that this was something that I had to do.

Sure I could have just as easily given the books to the university or back to the French and let them do the job. But the French might have taken decades to translate them, and there was no guarantee that they would release a translation of them. Likewise the university might have kept the fact they had the documents secret and still taken years in translation. Both choices seemed to me to be too clinical or so academic. I wasn’t too worried that the university would turn me over to the authorities because they didn’t know I had the books. The professors were only aware that I had my hands on something very old. Now besides work I had nothing else to do. So I began the laborious task of translating the documents until they slowly consumed me.

Once I got started translating the codices, I knew these weren’t cookbooks or sales brochures. It didn’t take long to understand that because of the number of books, the care in the handwriting, and the care in preparing the books for storage, this was the life story of someone of significance, how important I could not begin to imagine. So now I seriously began to learn a dead language, with the aid of Dr. Janet Blake of the Linguistics Department at the university, and began to translate the document. Initially the job of translating the books was a slow process; there was no dictionary. I also had to learn how to prepare and process the pages of the codices for conservation and posterity as I went along.

After a while my knowledge of the language increased and my speed in translation of the codices also grew. In the end it has taken me five years of nights and weekends to translate the numerous books. But as they say, the ends justify the means. Once I got into the translation, every minute I spent on the project excited me more and more. When I finished I was so astounded that I began a second translation of the whole document again just to make sure I hadn’t missed translated it.

Many religious finds are made out of dumb luck by people not even looking for them. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a shepherd looking for lost sheep. The Nag Hammadi Library was found sticking out of a sand dune in Egypt. Some of the books were used as fuel for a cooking fire before it was decided to see if they were worth anything in the antique bazaar of Cairo. My find was one of these dumb luck moments. But the other documents were found in Israel and Egypt. How could such a document as this have ended up hundreds of miles away from the Holy Land in, of all places, southern France?

After dating the papyrus to between 50 and 100 CE, we next worked on the language it was written in. Between me and Dr. Blake, we verified the language after much research; it was a sub-dialect of Frankish, a language called Sicambrian.

With all of this and the translation of the books, I found out the name of the individual that was responsible for it. The name of the person that wrote or dictated the codices has been verified by us . . . but no, not yet . . . that I will keep a secret for just a little bit longer.

No, this person was alive and lived through the lifetimes of the Julian emperors and into the lifetime of the Flavian Caesars. This person lived from the time of Herod the Great to Agrippa II of Judea.

In 14 CE, the emperor Augustus died and his stepson, Tiberius Caesar, became emperor of the Roman Empire. He appointed Pontius Pilate to be procurator of Judea in 26 CE and recalled him in 35 CE because of reports of his brutality against the Israelis, but he died before he could extract any judgment on Pilate for the way he handled Palestine. Pilate’s problems were known to Tiberius’ successor, Caligula; and he was held in disfavor and banished to Lyon, France, where it seems many people of notoriety were also banished. It is said that Pontius Pilate ended up committing suicide a few years later in southern France.

Little Boots, Caligula, assumed the role of emperor in 37 CE after having Tiberius poisoned, an occupational hazard for the Caesars. He only held on to the throne for four long years however. He was considered to be insane; he named his horse as proconsul of the Roman Empire, and that spelled his downfall. He, his wife, his sister, and his children were finally assassinated by his own Praetorian Palace Guard in 41 CE.

The next emperor of Rome was the stammering and seemingly dim-witted old man, Claudius Caesar. He ruled the empire from 41 to 54 CE when his younger wife, Agrippina, poisoned him. Nero, her son, would now become emperor by that act. He was young, only about seventeen years old at the time, and at first was a great contrast to the previous Caesars. But five years later, Nero had his own mother killed. Three years after that, Nero had his own wife, Octavia, murdered. Finally in 68 CE, Nero was forced to commit suicide or be assassinated by his own palace guard. The line of the Julian Caesars had come to an end with Nero.

Then came a year when four different men bought or killed their way to the Imperial throne. Each claimed the title of Caesar. But none could maintain the loyalty of the legions until in 69 CE when Vespasian, commander of the Tenth Legion in Palestine, fought his way from Palestine to the gates of Rome. There his soldiers forced him to believe that he could claim the title of Caesar and hold it. It was that year that saw the passing of the one that dictated the codices. But the author of the codices’ life was remembered long after her death.

Vespasian left his son in Judea to clean it up. Titus did end the Jewish revolt he was left to fight in Palestine. Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Temple was burned to the ground for a second time, and the Jews in Jerusalem were either killed or sold into slavery. Then Titus concentrated his forces on the last holdouts at the Herodian palace called Masada. Nine hundred Jews are said to have killed themselves rather than become slaves of the Romans. Rome now entered the period called the Pax Romana under the Flavian Caesars where she was now not only the master of the Mediterranean but master of the world, and peace ruled.

There are other historical figures mentioned in the Bible and other books of antiquity that are of equal interest because they had an impact on the early Christians. In 47 BCE, a man named Antipater was made king of Judea; he died in 40 BCE. Marc Antony, commander in the Eastern Roman Empire after Julius Caesar’s death, made Herod the Great tetrarch, or rulers of fourths, king of Judea. A young and immature Herod lost Judea for a short time to the invading Parthians. But once again Marc Antony came to his rescue a second time and with his eastern legions defeated the Parthians and restored Herod to governorship of Galilee. With the approval of the Roman Senate in 37 BCE, Herod the Great was once again made king of Judea. Marc Antony in collusion with Cleopatra conspired against Rome with Herod as his ally. This alliance brought about the official end of the Roman Republic. A deadly battle at Actium in 31 BC then the suicide of the pair near Alexandria brought about the empire. Although Herod had sided with Marc Antony, Augustus Caesar confirmed Herod’s position over Israel for a third time.

Herod was a megalomaniac. He was an Idumaean Arab, a race that had only been subjugated to Judaism by the Maccabbes of Judea about 126 years earlier. He had little loyalty to the Jewish nation or the Jewish religion. Because of this, he became a Roman citizen as well as Judea. He now prayed in Roman Temples as well as Jewish ones, playing both ends against his own conniving. The Jews considered him a foreigner and detested him almost as much as their Roman occupiers. But for thirty years he administered the kingdom in relative peace.

His building projects almost brought financial ruin to Israel however. He built several fortified palaces, the Temple in Jerusalem and two cities, Sebaste Augustus in Samaria and Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. He further alienated the Jewish people by naming the cities for the pagan emperor of Rome, Augustus Caesar. Then he added icing to the cake by building a Roman Temple dedicated to Augustus at Caesarea to ingratiate himself to Rome.

Like most successful despots, Herod used cunning and violence to eliminate his rivals. He flattered some people to get results and used terror to control the rest of his subjects if the flattery didn’t work.

Herod was a power-hungry tyrant; and no one—friend, foe, or family member—was safe from his suspicions. To legitimize his claim to the throne, he married the beautiful Marianne, a princess of the Hasmonean royal household. He appointed Aristobulus, his new brother-in-law, as Temple high priest. When he saw that Aristobulus was more popular than himself, Herod had him drowned. Another relative was his uncle Joseph, and he was executed also, and he framed Hyrcanus II for plotting with the Nabateans against him and executed him as well.

Intrigue and fits of jealousy filled his court. He took a trip to Rome; and after his return he framed his wife, the Hasmonean princess Marianne, on charges of infidelity with other men including her own brother while he was gone. Marianne’s own mother testified against her to save her own life. Marianne was found guilty, and Herod had her executed. After her death it is said that he almost went crazy.

During this time Marianne’s mother attempted a coup d’etat in the wake of his sickness and confusion. It failed, and she in turn was executed by Herod for her part in the plot. Finally Herod had his last three sons by the Hasmonean line eliminated. With their deaths, he had eradicated the whole of the royal Hasmonean family.

One of his last tyrannical acts was reported by the apostle Luke in the Bible. Luke claimed that Herod ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents in Bethlehem after Jesus’ birth. If true, it sounds terrible; but because of the population of towns and cities then, the innocents may have amounted to less than two dozen male babies. It was not worth mentioning in any other historic accounts of the day. After thirty years of ruthless power, Herod finally died in the fall of 4 BCE not long after the slaughter about three years after the birth of the child he intended to kill, Jesus.

After his death his kingdom was divided between his remaining sons. Archelaus got control of Judea and Samaria while Herod Antipas received the lands of Galilee and Perea. Herod served in that capacity from 4 BCE through Jesus’ crucifixion until his own demise came about in 39 CE under the emperor Caligula. At that time he was banished from Galilee and lived out the remainder of his life in Lyons, France. Archelaus remained on the throne a far shorter time and was banished to Vienne, France, in 4 BCE.

Judea became one of the failures of the Roman system of rule. This was a system that allowed local religions and rule and only established Imperial rule from Rome when necessary. Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome, made that decision in the year 6 CE; and he placed Judea under a special Imperial official, a procurator.

One of those procurators prominently named was Pontius Pilate. Pilate was one of the harshest procurators to oversee Roman power in Israel and made many mistakes in dealing with the Jews. He was determined to fulfill his mandate of maintaining law and order over the stiff-necked Jews at all costs. He served in his position as procurator of Judea for ten years until he was recalled by Tiberius. After a short stint as a retired civil servant in Rome, he was exiled to Gaul by Caligula. He remained there for the rest of his life, and that is where he died.

Finally after finding this manuscript, I became interested in the beginnings of the Christian religion. After some study on the side, I found that the Roman emperor Constantine the Great became the first Christian emperor of Rome. It was Constantine that called the First Council of Nicaea because the early religion was fragmented. Here the Orthodox religion defeated the Gnostic bishops and adopted the Nicene Creed and the canon laws that all of our present Christian religions are based on.

Around 400 CE, another council of bishops adopted the list of books to be included in the Bible’s New Testament pretty much as we see it today. Once that task had been completed, the council ordered the destruction of all other Gospels and letters that were not selected for inclusion into the New Testament. They also declared all remaining writings and the Gnostics to be heretical. But this document was two hundred years older than the books the council debated over and probably wasn’t even known or considered at that time.

In about 500 CE, the Roman Church under Pope Gregory put a certain religious person, the author of this codex, in the category of a repentant sinner. In fact this person was cured by Jesus of seven demons according to the Gospels, nothing was said about sins. It was only in 1969 that the church finally reversed itself and redeemed this lady. For one thousand six hundred years the church destroyed the reputation of one of the very persons that was the founder of a new Jewish religious movement, the Way, that became the Roman Catholic Church.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading; it was earth shattering. Before me was a document that if true, and I saw no reason to dispute it, would shake the roots of the Roman Catholic Church—no, it would shake the very roots of Christian theology no matter what denomination.

In this person’s lifetime hundreds were acknowledged as disciples of Jesus. From about one hundred twenty disciples he chose just twelve to be his apostles, the Council of Twelve. These men had been with him from the beginning of his ministry, and after his death, they were the ones that spread his word and became the founders of the new Christianity.

But this person was also with Jesus from the beginning like his apostles. More importantly this person was there at the end of his life and after the resurrection took the news that he had risen to the apostles. She guided the new Jewish religious sect until forced to flee for her and her family’s lives. She was to become known as the Apostle to the Apostles. Today millions around the world call this person saint.

I found one person, after translating the codices and reading some supporting documents, that gave her much higher consideration; to him she was his companion, his wife. That person was Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One. He and Mary Magdalene are believed by many Gnostics and various Christian and Orthodox authorities as well to have been married.

French legend says that they were the progenitors of kings, queens, nobles, and common men and women that still rule and live throughout the Western world to this very day.

To him I believe she was a woman who was his equal and an equal to his apostles. After reading this document, I believe that she was a strong and independent woman when they married; and after his death, she continued his mission and converted as many people over to the new religion as her husband and his apostles had. She was the cofounder of the Way, as it was called then. She was a woman that was not afraid to stand squarely in the face of the enemy whether it was the rabbinical Jews, pagan Romans, or her own Christian brethren.

I did not translate and write this book to challenge Christian faith; this was never my purpose. I just translated what I found. I added nothing. As for me, nothing in the codices destroys my concept of a Christian religion that I had. The belief I have in a God has not changed; my belief in Jesus has not changed. I believe he was a rabbi, and to be a rabbi he must have been married so that he could feel the needs of his congregation. The only thing that has changed is my respect for Mary Magdalene. What is it they say, behind every great man is a greater woman?

Jesus’ conception may have been brought about by the spirit, but he was a man. Many Christians contest that point. When did divinity come upon him? Did he receive his divinity at conception or birth and live with it all his life? Did he receive his divinity when he was baptized by John the Baptist? Did he receive his divinity after his forty days in the desert with Satan? Did he receive his divinity upon his crucifixion and his resurrection? This point is debated to this day.

These were the people I learned about in Sunday school when I went or from movies or books. There were heroes, villains, and just ordinary people. With these codices I learned more about the people of the New Testament. I see the early church and the parts that were played in building it and nurturing it.

The remaining chapters will be hard, no, for some impossible to believe, especially those in fundamentalist Christian religious groups. Many who believe in the literal translation of the Bible will not believe any of what’s written. Those that believe in Christian history but do not have a liberal belief will find it hard to believe. Jews, I’m not sure since they only believe Jesus was a prophet, not the Messiah. Well, I’m not sure how they will take it. But those that are open to new Christian ideas may be skeptical at what is written. Again it may take years of wrangling, concaves, and ecumenical councils before beliefs will change.

For all those that read this book, this translation is as close as I can come with the limited knowledge I have with the language it is written in. One last note, the original codices have been returned to the French consulate in Dallas, Texas, and are probably secured in a French or Vatican vault as we speak. I did this because I found the codices in France to begin with, and they do therefore belong to them after all.

I believe in what I translated or I wouldn’t have finished the project. My agent believes in me and the codices or they wouldn’t have taken me on as a new client in the nonfiction genre. The publisher believes in the agent and me or they wouldn’t have spent the big bucks to print this book. None are fluent in Sicambrian, so they have to believe in what I have written.

THE FAMILY

2

Since the loss of my husband, my family, friends, and some disciples have encouraged me to write down the history of our lives before I join him in his kingdom of heaven. I have resisted in favor of spreading the Gospel. I can read and write a little. I am gifted of speech although he was the one that did most of the speaking. After his death I addressed crowds although I was not very comfortable in doing so. Now my eyesight is failing, and all such activities are difficult for me. But now as my life comes closer to the end and farther away from my first breath of life, I have thought over the idea once again and now give in to their wishes.

My childhood would be of little or no interest to anyone that I know. My daily life as a wife under Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, and the various Roman prefects of Judea might be of some historic interest to a few. But my life as a disciple and an apostle of Yeshua/Jesus, now called by many the Christ, I am sure might be of considerably more interest. Of greater interest might be my life after his death as I continued his ministry and became one of the co-leaders and founders of the fledgling Jerusalem Movement, known as the Way and by some as the Church. Some say that the Way would have collapsed if I had not set my mark on it. But I think all of us were responsible for ensuring the survival of the Way each in his own right.

During my life as a widow in Jerusalem and Galilee, I was a woman hated by Herod Antipas and the Jewish high priest Caiaphas; later I was wanted by Herod Agrippa for being a rebel, for being an evangelist of the Gospel, and for treason by the Roman prefects of Judea for spreading a new religion that did not recognize the Roman Gods. All of this could be of some interest.

Since the death of Jesus, there has arisen a divide in the Jerusalem Movement. Simon, the man now called Peter, was a jealous Jew who ministers to Jews and converts in and around Palestine and believes that all converts to the Way must become Jews first before they join our sect. A former Pharisee, a man named Saul of Tarsus, who says that Jesus changed his life and gave him the name Paul. He says he became a convert to the Jerusalem Movement after he had a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus while hunting sect members for the Sanhedrin. Now he ministers to the Gentiles in Antioch of