The Avignon Palimpsest: The Testament of Brother Aldric, Anno Domini 1348

As discovered in the Papal Library at Avignon, transcribed from the margin notes of a palimpsest, whereunto this poor scholar’s confession was inscribed in letters so small as to escape notice for six hundred and seventy-eight years.

3rd of September, 1348

I have been a faithful servant of Our Lord for thirty-two years, and in that span I have touched the sacred word made manifest in vellum and ink some four thousand times. I have scraped clean the profane, that the divine might be written atop it. I have illuminated the margins with such devotion that my eyes now water at candlelight and my fingers bend as the roots of ancient oaks.

Today, the Abbott delivered to my scriptorium a manuscript salvaged from the Abbey of Saint-André, where pestilence has rendered the cloister silent as the grave—all within perished of the black swelling. The text is listed in their catalogue as The Martyrology of Saint Erasmus of Formia: a minor work, yet worthy of preservation.

Yet I confess—here begins my deviation—I felt a frisson I dare not name when first I opened the codex. The vellum was of uncommon quality, the binding older than the text inscribed upon it. And there, at the margin where the scribe’s knife had scraped away some previous work to make room for the good saint’s torments, I observed a phantom of older letters bleeding through—Aramaic characters, unless my eyes deceive me, which have never done in matters of script.

I said nothing to the Abbott. This, I think, was my first sin, though I named it prudence at the time.

7th of September, 1348

Four days I have spent with alum and thistle-water, gently coaxing the palimpsest to reveal what lies beneath Saint Erasmus’s tiresome catalogue of disembowelments. The underlying text emerges like a body surfacing from deep water—first a limb, then a face, then the whole corpse.

It is written in three hands: Aramaic, Greek, and a Latin so archaic it predates Jerome’s Vulgate. The Aramaic is... I hesitate to commit this to writing, yet as I have already crossed the threshold of deception, I may as well go through.

It claims to be the testimony of Judas Iscariot.

Not the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, which our Holy Mother Church has rightfully condemned as heresy—I read that apocrypha in my youth, that I might recognize and refute it. No, this is something other: the plain speech of a man unburdening himself before death, rather than the baroque mysticism of Gnostic invention.

It begins:

I write this in the certainty that I am damned, and in the hope that one who reads may understand that damnation freely chosen is the highest love.

I should burn it. I have burned lesser heresies with satisfaction. Yet I find myself instead mixing fresh ink, sharpening my quills, and preparing to translate in full what Judas has written.

The Abbott believes me at work on Saint Erasmus. Let him believe it yet a while longer.

12th of September, 1348

The pestilence spreads through Avignon like ink through water. Three brothers have died this week. The Abbott orders all who show symptoms removed to the pest-house beyond the walls, lest contagion spread to the Papal court. His Holiness has sequestered himself, admitting none who have not stood in juniper smoke.

I work through the night. The testimony is not long—perhaps five thousand words—but each passage demands contemplation; its implications twist in my mind like serpents coupling.

Judas writes that in the garden of Gethsemane, three days before the arrest, Jesus came to him alone. The Master wept—Judas is most insistent upon this detail, that Jesus wept—and said that the hour approached when prophecy must be fulfilled: the Son of Man delivered unto the Gentiles, and one of the twelve made instrument of that delivery.

Jesus asked:

Who among you loves me enough to be despised by all men for all time? Who will shoulder the burden of my necessity?

Judas writes:

I said I would. I said it before I understood what I had promised. But even after understanding, I did not recant. For this was my purpose—I see it now. From the moment He called me from my father’s counting house, I was chosen not for glory, but for this: to be the hinge upon which salvation turns, and to be forever broken in the turning.

The Greek portions, in a different hand, are commentary—perhaps by one who possessed this text in the second or third century. This commentator writes:

If God’s plan required evil, and if Judas enacted that evil in obedience to divine will, then wherein lies his sin? And if he sinned not, why is he damned? And if he is damned despite obedience, what becomes of divine justice?

I have not eaten in two days. The questions devour me more efficiently than any hunger.

17th of September, 1348

Brother Tomasso came to my cell, concerned for my health. He said my eyes had a fevered cast. I assured him I was well, merely devoted to my task. He asked to see the martyrology, that he might understand what absorbed me so completely.

I refused him. I said the Abbott had given me specific instructions regarding the manuscript’s handling. This was a lie—my second, or perhaps my twentieth, I have lost count.

Tomasso’s face registered hurt, then suspicion. We have worked side by side for twelve years. He knows me to be many things—pedantic, exacting, tedious in my precision—but never secretive, never possessive of knowledge. The scholar’s virtue is to illuminate, not to occlude.

Yet when he reached for the codex, my hand went to my knife—not the scribe’s knife, but the dagger I carry on the road. I did not draw it. But my hand was there, and Tomasso saw.

He left without further word.

The Latin sections of the manuscript describe the aftermath: Judas bargains with the chief priests, leads them to Gethsemane, and kisses Jesus—my Judas-kiss was a benediction, he writes, the last kindness I could offer before consigning myself to eternal hatred. The Master looked at me with such profound sorrow that I wished the earth had opened and swallowed me whole.

But it is what comes after the crucifixion that freezes the blood in my veins.

Judas writes that he approached Peter and the others in the upper room, told them what Jesus had asked of him, begged them to tell the world he had acted in obedience, not treachery.

Peter struck him. The others joined in.

Peter said:

Better you be damned alone than the church damned with you.

Judas understood. He went out to die, not in despair, but in obedience to the role assigned him: the eternal villain against whom the disciples’ virtue would shine bright.

The manuscript’s final lines, in Judas’s own hand:

I am the foundation upon which the church is built, the stone the builders rejected. I am glad of my rejection, for the house of God cannot stand on love alone—it requires also the scaffolding of hatred. I am that scaffold.

22nd of September, 1348

The pestilence has reached the library. Brother Tomasso sickened three days ago; this morning they carried him to the pest-house. The glands in his groin swelled black as olives. He screamed that truth whispered in his ears—voices of the damned calling him to judgment.

I visited him this afternoon, though the Abbott forbade it. I told myself it was charity, but in truth I sought absolution—some sign my deception had not poisoned the innocent.

Tomasso did not recognize me. His eyes, yellow with corruption, rolled in their sockets. He raved about foundations cracking, about false witness, about the framework of malice upon which the church was built. The pestilence brings delirium; I have seen men speak prophecy and madness in equal measure as the black swelling claimed them.

Yet his words—by chance or by God’s cruel irony—mirrored my own thoughts so precisely that I fled the pest-house trembling. Does guilt make us hear our fears in the mouths of the dying? Or does the plague strip away the veil between men’s souls, letting them speak truths they could not otherwise know?

I cannot say. I know only that Tomasso never saw the manuscript, and yet he died speaking of its contents as clearly as if he had translated it himself.

There are twenty manuscripts in the library showing signs of palimpsest; I have examined twelve in the past week. In each, beneath the sanctioned text, I found fragments—different hands, different languages—describing the same essential truth: that God’s plan required the creation of perfect villainy; that those who enacted that villainy were chosen for their love, not wickedness.

One fragment, in Coptic, suggests that Cain did not murder Abel in rage, but at God’s instruction—that the first death introduced mortality to mankind, and that Cain volunteered for eternal blame.

Another, in Syriac, claims that Pontius Pilate wept when Jesus asked him privately to carry out the execution, saying:

I know you do not wish this. But it must be you. Take my blessing, though history will give you only its curse.

If these are true—if even one—then the entire architecture of sin and redemption collapses into paradox. We do not fall from grace; we are pushed. We do not choose damnation; we are appointed to it. And those most loyal to God bear the heaviest burden: eternal vilification, that others might be saved.

28th of September, 1348

The Abbott is dead. Forty-three brothers have perished.

The pestilence came to Avignon in January, though we did not name it such until spring; it ebbed in summer, then returned in pockets. It traveled up from the ports—Marseilles—along the Rhône like fire. By August, half the city had perished. The papal court lost twenty-five cardinals. They say in the Jewish quarter that God has abandoned His creation. I venture to believe it. The pestilence takes the righteous and wicked alike; it makes no distinction between the devout and heretic. If this is divine judgment, it is as indiscriminate as it is absolute.

His Holiness has fled to the papal palace at Châteauneuf with the cardinals, leaving us to God’s mercy—which appears to be in scant supply.

I am the senior scholar remaining. The library is mine by default, if not by design.

In a catalogue dated 1243, I find reference to a Testimonium Maledictorum—a Testament of the Cursed. It was held here in Avignon until 1309, when it was brought from Rome to the Apostolic Camera in Avignon on order of Pope Clement V. The description is brief:

Forbidden gospel. Burn unread. Do not permit transcription.

Yet they did not burn it. They hide them, scrape them away, and write saints’ lives atop them. But they do not burn them.

They know, as I now know, that these texts are necessary. The church requires its villains to be irredeemable, its heroes unsullied. But somewhere in the archives, the truth must be preserved—not for revelation, but as a kind of ballast, a counterweight to the beautiful lie that keeps the faithful, faithful.

4th of October, 1348

I have made my decision.

Brother Paolo arrived yesterday from the Curia, sent by the Prefect of the Secret Archives to collect “certain sensitive materials” from our library before the pestilence consumes all. Paolo is a hard man—narrow of face and narrower of sympathy. He asked me directly if I had encountered any heterodox materials in my preservation work.

I said I had not.

He did not believe me. I could see it in the way his eyes traveled to the codex on my desk, still opened to Erasmus’s martyrdom. He asked to examine it.

I showed him the surface text—Saint Erasmus suffering persecution, his entrails drawn forth upon the torturer’s wheel, described with that excessive detail the Church so favors in its tales of holy agony. Paolo grunted and moved to turn the page.

I closed the book. Said the vellum was fragile, that only I possessed the skill to handle it properly. This was not a lie. But it was not the truth either.

Paolo said he would return in three days, and that if I had discovered anything “irregular,” it would be better for my soul to confess it now rather than face inquisition later.

After he left, I sat in my cell and understood fully what Jesus had asked of Judas. Not merely to betray, but to know the betrayal was necessary and to do it anyway. To be partaker in one’s own damnation.

I face two choices, and both befall me with condemnation.

I can reveal the manuscript—give it to Paolo, demand study. The church will fracture. In this time of pestilence and fear, when men already question God’s mercy, this would shatter what remains of Christendom’s foundation. Thousands, perhaps millions, would lose their faith. Without the comfort of the church, how many more would despair or choose the quick horror of suicide over the slow terror of plague?

Or I can hide it—scrape away Judas, write piety atop him, give Paolo the other palimpsests cleaned of their secrets, and burn what cannot be scraped. Let the beautiful lie continue. Let Peter’s version stand—that Judas was simply wicked, that betrayal is always betrayal, that good and evil are uncomplicated absolutes.

In choosing the second path, I become Judas. I possess the truth and I bury it. I am party to the perpetuation of a fiction I know to be false. And unlike Judas, I cannot claim I act on divine instruction—I act only on my arrogance, my certainty that mankind cannot bear the weight of this knowledge.

But is that not what Jesus asked of Judas? To make the impossible choice alone, without certainty, trusting that somehow the choice serves a greater good even as it damns the chooser?

7th of October, 1348

It is done.

I have scraped away Judas’s testimony and written a dull commentary on Erasmus. The other palimpsests I purged; what I could not scrape I burned. The ashes I mixed with water and drank, that the words might at least live in me, even as I destroy their external form.

Paolo returned this morning. He examined the manuscripts with a scholar’s eye and found nothing to trouble him. He departed for the fortress with several texts of genuine heterodoxy—Montanist prophecies, Arian commentaries—things that challenge doctrine but do not demolish it.

He does not know what I have destroyed. He does not know what I preserve, here in these margin notes, written so small that only one who knows to look will ever find them.

I write this as Judas wrote—in the certainty that I am damned, and in the hope that one who reads may understand.

If you have found this testament, you face the choice I faced. You may reveal what I have written and watch the edifice of faith collapse, or do as I have done: scrape away these words, write something innocuous atop them, and carry the weight of truth in silence.

There is no right choice. There is only the choice that damns you least—or perhaps the choice that damns you most usefully.

I hear Tomasso’s voice in the library sometimes, though he is ten days dead. He whispers that the house is falling. But I think—I hope—that I have shored it up for a while longer. I have become the foundation stone, rejected and glad of my rejection.

The pestilence is in my groin now; the swelling began this morning. Tomorrow I will be unable to write; after that, to think. This is my last entry.

Brother Aldric Montevergine, paleographer, faithful servant of a truth he chose to hide.

May God forgive me. Or may He not. Perhaps I am beyond the reach of either forgiveness or damnation—suspended in that peculiar purgatory reserved for those who love the church more than they love the truth.

Memorandum from the Office of the Prefect, Vatican Apostolic Archive, 8 January 2026

Re: Manuscript AVG-1348-PAL-042 (The Erasmus Palimpsest)

These marginalia were discovered during routine digitization of folios transferred from the Avignon collection. Carbon dating confirms mid-fourteenth century composition. Handwriting analysis matches authenticated exemplars of Brother Aldric Montevergine (c. 1295-1348), paleographer.

Multi-spectral imaging confirms the presence of erasure beneath the surface text. Aramaic, Greek, and archaic Latin characters are partially recoverable using current technology. Preliminary analysis suggests heterodox theological content consistent with Brother Aldric’s description.

Per Protocol 7 (Sensitive Historical Materials), I consulted with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding potential recovery and study of the underlying text.

Their recommendation, which I have accepted, is as follows:

No further imaging. No recovery attempts. No scholarly access.

The manuscript will be re-catalogued under Restrictive Class III and returned to climate-controlled storage. Brother Aldric’s marginalia will be preserved as a historical curiosity—a record of one scholar’s crisis of faith during the Black Death—but the palimpsest itself will not be subjected to additional analysis.

I note for the record that this is the forty-seventh such manuscript we have identified in the Avignon collection showing deliberate erasure of pre-existing text. In each case where recovery was technically feasible, the decision has been made to preserve the erasure rather than the original.

Some have questioned whether this constitutes suppression of historical evidence. I would argue instead that it represents continuity of institutional judgment. The scholars who first erased these texts—men like Brother Aldric—made a considered choice about what truths serve the faithful and what truths serve only to destroy faith.

Seven hundred years later, we are merely honoring their decision.

The work continues.

Dott. Giuseppe Cardinal Ferrara Prefect, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano