UNDER TIBERIUS
A work of dangerous and haunting beauty by America's last real literary outlaw.
Under Tiberius is a thrilling story of
crime and deceit involving the man who came to be called Jesus Christ.
Deep in the recesses of the Vatican, Nick Tosches unearths a
first-century memoir by Gaius Fulvius Falconius, foremost speechwriter
for Emperor Tiberius. The codex is profound, proof of the existence of a
Messiah who was anything but the one we've known -- a shabby and
licentious thief.
After encountering him in the streets of Judea,
Gaius becomes spin doctor to Jesus, and the pair schemes to accrue
untold riches by convincing the masses that Jesus is the Son of God. As
their marriage of truth and lies is consummated, friendship and wary
respect develop between these two grifters.
Outrageous and disturbing, Under Tiberius is as black as the ravishing night, shot through with fierce and brilliant light.
Some years ago, in the spring of 2000, I was spending my days in the
Vatican, studying several unique manuscripts in the course of my
research for a novel.
Access to these manuscripts required high academic credentials. I had
none. But in the end, after several meetings and interviews that seemed
at times to be interrogations, the Vatican Library had given me
identification cards authorizing the access I needed to both the
Archivio Segreto and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. These cards,
which bore the seal of the Vatican, attested that the Vatican had
bestowed an honorary doctorate on me.
I was under constant supervision, or surveillance, during the days
of my research. But I was very fortunate that the guardian who had been
appointed me was a kindly old prelate who was more devoted to
librarianship and learning than to the Head Librarian in the Sky and the
recondite hierarchical ambitions of the Vatican, all of which he seemed
to have waved away long ago.
One afternoon, as we walked toward a destination in the vast
underground maze of one great chamber that on this day was eerily
deserted and silent, we passed a long, high wall of partitioned shelf
upon partitioned shelf of strapped-shut leather tubes that cast a soft
penumbral patinated glow in the dim lighting from the vaulted ceiling
above them.
The old prelate and I upon first meeting had begun our brief,
tentative conversational exchanges in Italian. Slowly, by interjecting
phrases of English into our talk, he let it be known that his English
was more fluent than my Italian. And so, after a few days, we spoke
almost exclusively in English.
“What are these?” I asked, gesturing to the leathern tubes that
seemed to be countless in their dark wooden places of rest in the wall
that seemed to be endless. I was sure that they were papyrus scrolls.
Very, very ancient scrolls, as the leather cases that held them were
ancient themselves, and the wood of the shelves appeared to have been
there for centuries.
He nodded with a slight smile, as though sensing what I had
surmised, and affirming it.
“No one knows all that is here. Some of them are three or four
thousand years old, maybe older.” He paused, then slowed his pace as we
proceeded. “The even older writings, the clay tablets, are in a vault in
a room that diverges from the start of this passage. Back there. We
passed it a while ago. Some of these scrolls may be as old as some of
those tablets. No one knows. That’s the trouble with this place. There
has never been a complete and serious inventory of what is here.”
The passage of leather-cased scrolls led to a wider passage. He
called this the place of books before paper. Piles and piles of the
earliest codices: sheets rather than scrolls of papyrus or parchment,
bound together between wooden covers. Most of these were from about two
thousand years ago, among the oldest codices to have survived.
“Look at this,” he said. “The first books. Heaped and strewn like trash in the basement.” He mumbled something about ratti—rats, something about uno caseggiato bassifondo—a
slum tenement; then he shook his head. “They say that Pius VIII sent
his servants down here to fetch kindling to keep his fireplaces roaring
in winter.”
Looking at this mess, he turned still as stone, as if he had been
looking at it all his life.
I picked up a codex. There was very little wood left of its original
covers. The dust of the ages seemed to be the only solvent holding it
together. The old man did not mind that I had raised it in my hands. I
very carefully opened it, turned its friable, torn leaves. My fingers
were filthy with its dirt. I slowly, gently turned a few pages, looking
at what remained of the faded ink on those pages. It was written in
Latin, in an elegant hand. I tried to make out the words, tried to make
sense of them.
The elderly priest joined me in looking at the page. “Good parchment.
Good atrament: looks like cuttle-fish, the best the Romans had. And the
hand-writing: adept. A bit shaky, but adept. No cheap job, this one.”
He placed his own fingers to the pages, and, while I continued to
hold the codex, removed my free fingers from the pages and let his take
their place. He was reading the Latin far more ably and with far more
alacrity than I had managed, and he pronounced the words in a whisper as
he read.
“Tristissimus hominum,” he whispered. He repeated the phrase, no longer in a distracted whisper: “Tristissimus hominem. ‘The gloomiest of men,’” he translated. He seemed stunned. “This is a book about Tiberius,” he said. “By someone who knew him. Knew him.”
His fingers moved backwards through the pages with a professional
care that did not hide his intent and rising but expressionless
excitement.
Suddenly he stopped, his eyes fixed on a single word. The word was Iesvs, the Latin form of Jesus.
“Iesus. And here, again, in the accusative: Iesum.”
He muttered something to himself in Italian, something that I could
not clearly hear. Then he looked to me. It was as if he had discovered
something that made every other discovery in the last two thousand years
seem as nothing.
“This piece of overlooked kindling is the memoir of a man who knew
both Tiberius and Jesus. It may be the only real proof that Jesus ever
existed.”
He put the codex in his black briefcase. “You must say nothing of this,” he told me.
I nodded. We made our way to the file cabinet that held one of the
medieval manuscripts I wanted to see for my research. We were both so
fouled by the soot and dirt of the codex that we went first to a large
wash-sink nearby. He was with me; he located the manuscripts for me. But
he was a thousand miles away.
When I called him the next morning, he told me that we would not be
able to meet again for another two days. And that we should meet at a
certain café in a certain secluded little piazza a considerable distance
from the Vatican.
At the café he explained that he had torn two pieces from two sheets
of the codex and had them tested at the library’s laboratory. He had
told the chief technician nothing about these scraps, only that that the
analysis was a matter of urgent importance. Every analytical test had
been performed. The frail scraps had been exactingly examined by
transmission electron microscope, by scanning electron microscope, by
ion and electron microprobes, by energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer.
Microscopic particles of the ink had been subjected to chemical
analyses. The scraped-goatskin parchment and the black ink on it were of
the same age, and dispersive penetration tests showed that the ink had
been laid to the parchment since their making. Furthermore, the visual
evidence of the nature of the pen that had been used—a calamus of the
internal shell of the cuttle-fish—and the form of uncial script of the
fragments corroborated the technical conclusions.
“It’s real,” he said.
Seeing that he had somewhat lost me along the way, but not knowing
quite where, he paused, then said: “This calamus, the ancient Romans
called it a calamarius, a sort of horny flexible pen made from the bone in the cuttle-fish, the ink-fish. The word calamari comes from this, but calamari is squid; cuttle-fish are seppie. Latin, Italian: the cuttle-fish is seppia. Somebody got confused. Probably an American.”
He smiled, then was silent and drank his coffee. A double espresso
with a lot of sugar. Then, pointing to his heart, he took some pills,
drank some water. He asked the waiter for another double espresso.
“And while they were doing this, I was doing this.”
He unclasped his briefcase and removed a fat dark-brown
button-and-tie kraft envelope. Placing it on the table, he then placed
his pale, spidery veined hand upon it. He unwound the string from the
closure, then carefully withdrew the topmost of the sheets of paper
within it.
It was thick fine white paper, and the image on it—the first page of
the codex—was far more clear, darker and sharper, than the original. To
be sure, the torn areas and the black smears here and there were also
more striking; but the text had magically been restored, from faded to
vibrant characters.
“They set it up for me, the scanner in the laboratory, tuned it to do
this with one of the scraps I gave them. While they worked on the
scraps, I worked on this. And while I did, I translated it.”
Again he placed his hand on the envelope. He raised the second little
cup of espresso to his lips and drank as I tried to translate the
Latin. I found the uncial script to be daunting; and years away from
this most powerful of languages had taken from me much of my familiarity
with its declensions and cases.
The first words that appeared, the first words that emerged after
those words forever lost to the attrition of the ages, on a worn-away
area of parchment that appeared as a gray stain on the scan, were sub Tiberio: “under Tiberius.”
“It’s real,” he repeated. “The laboratory dates it to the first
century, to about two thousand years ago. It’s the memoir of an old man
written for his grandson. An old Roman aristocrat of equestrian rank.
What he writes dates it to about the middle of the first century. He
wanted to leave this behind for his grandson, who was a child at the
time. He wanted his grandson to read it when he grew to be a man, so
that he could come to know his grandfather after he was gone. Nowhere
does he address his words to anyone else. It is all for the grandson.
And it seems to me to be at times as much a sort of—obliquo, perverso, how do you say?”
“Oblique, perverse.”
“Yes, yes. It seems to me to be at times as much a sort of oblique last-rites confession as it is a memoir.”
He looked to the sky, breathed as deeply as he could, smiled as his
eyes followed the movement of a swallow over a small, medieval church
across the piazza.
“All my life,” he said—to me, to the sky—“I have doubted Jesus: the
reality of Jesus, the historical existence of the Jesus of this Church.
There was simply no real evidence. He appears nowhere in any record or
document of the day. The odd, cursory references to him in Josephus and
Tacitus have long been regarded as insertions by monastic scribes in the
Middle Ages. Even the greatest of modern theologians, biblical
scholars, and Christologists, from Crossan to Sanders and the rest, now
agree that most of what is in the gospels could never have happened, and
never did happen.”
He moved his hand across the dark-brown envelope. “This proves that I
was wrong. This, and only this, proves that I was wrong.”
His smile deepened, grew more serene, as he became more immersed in
the blue sky and the slow movement of the wispy clouds of this lovely
spring morning.
“In fact, it is the earliest portrait of him, older even than the gospel of Mark. And the only portrait of him drawn from life.”
“I see a raise in your future,” I said with a grin. “I see one of those white cassocks and red beanies.”
“And I see danger.” He was no longer smiling, no longer facing the
sky. He looked directly into my eyes. “If I were so much as to be
suspected of having any knowledge of this thing, I’d be out of here on
my ass. And worse,” he added cryptically.
“Then why are you trusting me?”
“Because you once wrote a book about Michele Sindona. It is not that
he trusted you enough to talk to you. It is because it was a book
involving many secrets and many people. And you are still here. And that
is because you betrayed no one.” After a pause he added: “And because
there is something about you that I like.” He shrugged. “Homo sum.”
“Where is the original?”
“I threw it back where we found it. Where you found it.”
“And what do you want me to do with this?” I gestured to the envelope, handed him back the sheet he had given me.
“Give it to the world.”
“I don’t think my command of Latin is up to the job.”
He placed the page I had returned to him in the envelope as gently as
he had taken it from the envelope. From the bottom of the envelope, he
pulled out sheets of cheaper paper that were folded into a bundle.
“Notes I made while reading it as I scanned it,” he said. “These will
help you with some of the difficult words and sentences and passages.
As for the rest, that is up to you.”
“If it is all that you say it is, if it proves that there was a
Jesus, if it is the earliest and only first-hand account of that
Jesus”—and I still did not really believe that any of this was
true—“then why is it so dangerous?”
“Read it and you will see.”
He closed the envelope and gave it to me.
About a year later, at home in New York, I finished the novel I was
working on. The old prelate and I kept in touch, but the codex or the
contents of the envelope he had given me were never mentioned again.
Only in 2004, after receiving word of the death of the old man, did I
turn in earnest to what lay in that envelope. Almost every Saturday
morning for three years I studied for at least an hour with a Latin
tutor. I took again to reading the red-covered Loeb editions of my
favorite Latin authors, trying to shift my eyes as little as possible
from the Latin text to the facing English text of these volumes.
One day I rediscovered my favorite opening line of Catullus, in his nameless Poem XVI, written as a response to critics:
“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo”—“I
will fuck your ass and fuck your mouth.”
This sort of thing, as much as
re-reading Virgil and Ovid, renewed my love of Latin and fueled my
enthusiasm.
Then, finally, I read what had been given me; and then, as had been foretold, I knew.
I was fortunate that what I read had been written at a time when the Romans were not commonly writing in scriptura continua,
a style of writing without word dividers, without spaces or other marks
between words or sentences. What I read and worked with was written
with interpuncta, crude dots used to divide words and
sentences, a style that fell into disuse during the second century, when
most writers in Latin reverted to continuous script.
I translated, then I translated again. I studied the translation
until I was confident. Then I studied it until I was sure. I decided to
use only one long section of the codex, for much else in it, the earlier
parts of it, seemed somewhat prosaic and of slight interest except to
historians of early first-century Rome. I decided to use the first two
legible words of the original ancient work as its title. I also decided
to put my name to it, rather than the name of the man, Gaius Fulvius
Falconius, who nearly two thousand years ago wrote it in Latin for the
eyes of his grandson, and for his grandson’s eyes alone.
“Tosches’ novel takes the form of a translation of an
eyewitness account of Jesus’ ministry, a brilliant, dark journey that
takes almost every piece of the well-worn gospel stories and turns them
on their heads….not since The Last Temptation of Christ (1960)
has there been a book with so much potential for offending believers.
But there’s far more to it than shock value. This is also a meditation
on the extraordinary strength of both lies and belief, and it shows how
truth can sometimes grow in the shadows between them. Disturbing,
audacious, and powerful.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Blows the doors off the historical novel with an
unflinchingly blasphemous, mirthfully vulgar, and ultimately brilliant
story of Jesus….Tosches is taking eloquent aim at the way history,
religion, and political fantasy obscure the persistent realities of
humanity. This novel succeeds where every neutered passion
play–depiction of Jesus fails, simply by showing us a man.
—Publishers Weekly
“
Under Tiberius by Nick Tosches might be the most insane book of 2015.”
—
Publishers Weekly via Twitter
“Clever, historically sound…a bawdy tale of grifting, gambling and serious sin.”
—The Globe and Mail
“One of the greatest living American writers.”
—The Dallas Observer
“Superb.”
— The New Yorker
“An Olympian mastery of language.”
— Library Journal
"Blindingly brilliant.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Unbelievable. I read everything by Nick Tosches... words and wisdom that I shall carry with me into the fucking dirt.”
— Johnny Depp
“There are, in fact, very few writers who have Nick Tosches’ singular gift.”
— David Hare, The Spectator
“Great...a triumph!”
— James Elroy
“Tosches works wonders.”
— The Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“Brilliant.”
— The New Statesman
“Extraordinarily compelling.”
— The London Times
“Fascinating.”
— The New York Times Book Review
"Nick Tosches is a beautiful thug [who] has always beaten back a demon while inhabiting the very soul of the beast.”
— Philadelphia City Paper
“Wonderful.”
— Rolling Stone
"Tosches strikes gold.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Terrific...beautiful...one hell of a
poet...Nick Tosches is such an extraordinary writer he could write about
the Staten Island phone book and make it interesting. It is the
vastness of Nick Tosches’ heart that makes it possible to reveal the
darkness...I feel speechless in the face of such perfection. I have
never read such a beautifully constructed and written document in my
life.”
— Hubert Selby, Jr.
“L’homme-serpent...the revelation of these recent years.”
— Rage
"Masterly.”
— The Chattanooga Times
“An American classic.”
— Greil Marcus
“Terrific.”
— The Washington Post
“Sets a new standard.”
— The Los Angeles Times
“Erudite, visionary [...] Nick Tosches
reigns supreme as the King of Hipster Lit. Not to read him, quite
simply, is to remain lame.”
— Shout
“Grandmaster of Grit Lit, Nick Tosches writes eloquently about America’s underbelly.”
— The Boston Globe
“[Tosches writes] without illusion and yet
with real sympathy, call it a form of love. That is a real achievement
of writing and feeling.”
— David Remnick,
editor of The New Yorker
“Compelling.”
— The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Breathtaking writing.”
— Time Out New York
“Audacious.”
— The Dallas Morning News
“Muscular and incendiary.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“As versatile, soulful, tough and funny as any writer at work in America today.”
— The New York Daily News
“A testament to the power of Tosches’ writing.”
— The Arizona Republic
“A feat.”
— Esquire
“Tough, tender, knowing, and tense.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
“Tosches’s book is a work of art.”
— Esquire
Definitive.”
— Time Magazine
“The story-teller of hell.”
— L’Officiel Homme
“Riveting.”
— New York Newsday
“The ultimate epic bard of Little Italy."
— L’Express
“Wonderful.”
— Loaded
“Nick Tosches stands out as the kind of writer
other writers only dream of becoming—amazing at fiction, unparalleled
in journalism and biography, and possessed of a stature and genius his
lessers can but crouch beneath, gazing up in wonder, awe, and more than a
little terror at what this man, in a single, unfinished life, has been
able to accomplish on the page.”
— Jerry Stahl
“A new vision.”
— Options
“Plunges to the heart of the forces of evil.”
— Le Monde Livres
“Unforgettable.”
— Booklist
“Darker than the dark.”
— Libération
“Tosches can't write a dull book.”
— Washington Post Book World
“Nick Tosches knows the devil as well as any man has.”
— Keith Richards
“The single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril.”
— Anthony Bourdain
“I’m an admirer of anything and everything Nick Tosches writes.”
— Tom Robbins
“Nick Tosches’s extravagant and evocative biography is a superbly told
story that makes sense of the wildest, most messed-up survivor in the
history of rock ’n’ roll. They don’t make them like that any more. And,
perhaps for that very reason, they don’t write them like that anymore. A
killer of a book.”
— The Observer,
in declaring Hellfire to be the greatest rock-’n’-roll book ever written
“Will burn the skin off your fingers...compelling...you’ll go the distance.”
— Maxim
“Tosches can't write a dull book. He sets his foot firmly on your throat
from the start; he wont let up, and you won’t want him to.”
— Washington Post Book World
“A writer of rare humanity.”
— GQ
“Rich, fully dimensional, psychologically revealing.”
— Variety
“Approaching genius.”
— The Buffalo News
“Literate, poetic, dark, shocking, wonderful.”
— Tim Robbins
“Nick Tosches doesn’t just report the wised up lingo of low-biz, he uses
it, sometimes to almost poetic effect... And he also has a gift for
recounting the social history of anti-social people.”
— Richard Schickel,
The Wall Street Journal
"Inestimable.”
— Robert Birnbaum,
The Morning News
“Nick Tosches’s pen is a knife that can whittle anything well!”
— Alexander Theroux
—Nick Tosches
