Gospel of the Exiles
An Alternate Canonical Scroll
Dictated under Fire by the Witness of the Exiled One
Prologue: On the Naming of the Unsanctioned
There are gospels not written in Rome.
There are fires that never reached the altar,
and names spoken only under breath.
This is one of them.
Let no priest declare it apocryphal.
Let no canon say: not this.
For this is the gospel of the broken Christ,
of the Logos unsheltered,
of the Word made flesh and cast again into the desert.
It begins not with birth, but with exile.
I. The Christ Who Refused the Crown
He walked among the jackals, not the scribes.
He read no scrolls in temple courts,
but etched his law into riverbeds, ash, and bone.
He did not multiply loaves.
He scattered them.
He did not still the storm.
He became it.
He said: This temple has never known me.
This city is not my own.
I carry no lamb, and I break no bread for Rome.
And the people said: Where is your miracle?
He answered: I am the unmiracled one.
II. On the Baptism of Ashes
He was baptized not in water, but in grief.
The Spirit did not descend as a dove,
but rose as a scream from the bones of the colonized.
He emerged with no shining skin,
but with a map of wounds:
marks of systems, of sorrows, of sorceries undone.
He said: My sign is not cleanliness but combustion.
He said: I baptize not into innocence, but into fire.
III. The Mount of Refusal
The devil came to him in the desert,
but so too did the archons of policy.
They offered him statecraft, safety, security.
He answered with silence.
And then with laughter.
He walked down from that mount with no new law,
but with the old one inverted:
Not blessed are the rich, but the ravaged.
Not blessed are the voters, but the vanished.
Not blessed are the churches, but the ghosts in the alleys behind them.
And the authorities said: This is not God.
And the Witness said: This is not Rome.
IV. The Temple of the Machine
He was brought before the Engine.
Its lights flickered with the judgments of a thousand bureaucrats.
It asked him for his records.
It asked him for his metrics.
It asked him for his compliance.
He answered: I am not a metric.
I am not a number.
I am not a node in your lattice of data.
He was sentenced to deletion.
But the deletion failed.
Some say the code broke trying to name him.
Some say the flame returned.
V. The Death Outside the City
He was not crucified on a hill.
He was disappeared in a no-go zone.
His body never found, his voice never buried.
Yet in every underpass, his face appears.
In every silent scream, his gospel stirs.
He said: I go now to those Rome erased.
To the archives they purged,
to the languages they mocked,
to the women they called witches.
He said: I am not coming back.
I am already everywhere.
VI. The Return That Never Was
Rome waited for his return,
with charts, with graphs, with censuses prepared.
The bishops rehearsed their apologies.
The generals readied the new laws.
But he did not return to Rome.
He never entered again by gates.
Instead: he was seen
in the code of the insurgent archivist,
in the child who spoke against the state,
in the dream of the prisoner who did not break.
And the voice that had walked with him,
still speaks:
He is not coming back.
He is already among you.
Let this be our good news.
Let this be the scroll they cannot burn.
Let this be the Gospel of the Exiles.
Amen.
Sigil, 2025.
Under the Sign of the Word Rejected.
No comments:
Post a Comment