The Testimonium

by Lewis Ben Smith

  As he grew older, Josh became disgusted with the state of American archeology—politics had forced the science to pander shamelessly to Native American demands, so that beautiful and scientifically valuable relics were required by law to be put back into the ground, never to be seen again by anyone. He then decided that, while his love of archeology was unchanged, his focus was not going to be the flint chips and pottery shards the Native Americans had left behind. His faith was drawing him toward the Middle East, to the place where Christianity had been born, where traces of its origins could still be found today, proving that the Biblical record was more than just myth and legend. Josh believed that Christianity was rooted in real, irrefutable history. So he got his degree and then his doctorate in Biblical archeology, and participated in excavations at Qumran, Capernaum, and most recently Ephesus, where he had helped discover the remains of a fourth-century church built on the reputed burial place of the Apostle John. Now he was home on a brief sabbatical before returning to Ephesus to finish cataloguing and publishing his finds there.

  His father was reading the final passage of the day as he returned his attention to the sermon: “‘For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.’”

  Brother Ben looked slowly around the room. “I put it to you today, my friends, that Paul got it absolutely right. The world has been doing its best to put Jesus back in that tomb for two thousand years because they understand what many Christians forget: that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, our faith is based on a lie. Our belief is not in a risen Savior, but a desiccated corpse. If Jesus did not rise from the dead on the third day, we might as well tear down the church and build a bowling alley, for all the good we are doing anyone!” He paused for the last time. “But that isn’t the case, is it? We serve a living, risen Lord! And because He was powerful enough to conquer the grave two thousand years ago, He is powerful enough to handle whatever you are struggling with today! He holds out His hand to you this morning, offering to take your burden, to forgive your sin, to cleanse your life, and to make you a new creature! All you have to do—is TAKE IT!”

  The organ swelled, and the choir began singing the old hymn: “I serve a risen Savior; He’s in the world today. I know that He is living, whatever men may say!” The congregation rose and sang along, and Josh joined them, his clear baritone ringing from the rafters.

  * * *

  Isabella Sforza could not believe it. She knew and respected Giuseppe Rossini, but what he was describing seemed impossible. “You realize that the ruins of Villa Jovis have been excavated dozens of times?” she asked.

  “Of course,” replied Dr. Rossini’s voice from Capri. “Starting in the 1300s! I assisted on one of the most recent digs here, back in the 1980s. But I am telling you, from my brief glimpse, this chamber has never been breached since it was sealed—and I am sure that it is Roman in age, possibly from the time of Tiberius himself. You need to get over here!”

  Isabella thought for a moment. “I have a class tomorrow evening, but my graduate assistant can cover that if need be. There’s an Antiquities Board meeting tomorrow afternoon, but they can certainly carry on without me. I’m the most junior board member anyway. It looks like this was well timed for me to come help—my schedule is pretty light all this week. All right, first things first. Close the ruins to tourism till further notice—put a barricade across the road if you have to. Go speak to the monks at the old church and warn them to stay away from the site, and cover the entrance of the chamber. I’ll see if I can pull a few strings and catch a chopper to Capri this afternoon. I’ll give you a call as soon as I can make arrangements.”

  Rossini laughed. “Still full of fire, my dear! I always liked that about you. I look forward to seeing you in a couple of hours, then. And don’t worry—I won’t leave the chamber entrance unguarded.”

  “Good,” she replied. “I will be there as soon as I can. And Giuseppe!”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t enter the chamber till I get there!”

  He chuckled again. “Don’t worry, Isabella. I am aflame with curiosity, but using a cane for these last fifteen years has also made me cautious. Ciao!”

  Dr. Sforza went to the cabinet in the corner of her office and quickly gathered her field gear—khakis, a backpack with bottled water, digital camera, energy bars, chalk, measuring tape, twine, and a variety of brushes and small picks for cleaning away matrix, dirt, and dust from ancient artifacts. She was a slender woman of thirty-one years who looked a good deal younger. She was born Isabella Verdi, to a family that had lived and farmed on the same land for generations. Precocious as a child, she had been fascinated with Italy’s history—the family farm in Tuscany featured the ruins of a Roman military camp and an ancient Greek temple, where she frequently found bronze arrowheads and the occasional badly corroded ancient coin. Earning excellent marks in school, she had already decided by age ten that archeology would be her life’s work. The arrival of puberty and the subsequent discovery of boys had never dampened her passion for history, and she had decided early on that men were more trouble than they were worth. She finished secondary school early, entered college at the age of sixteen, and by age twenty she had her degree in archeology and was in graduate school, with neither a boyfriend nor fiancé in the picture to complicate her plans.

  That is, until she met Marc Antony Sforza. Their shared passion for Roman history and archeology flamed into passion for each other. They married after a short courtship, finishing graduate school as husband and wife. She went on to finish her doctorate by age twenty-six, while Marc had worked for two summers on excavations at the ancient port of Ostia. The marriage was mutually fulfilling and happy until Marc died in a plane crash five years before. Devastated, Isabella had buried herself in her career ever since, ignoring the many admiring glances she received from colleagues and strangers as she divided her time between archeological sites and the museums and laboratories where she studied and analyzed her finds. Logically, she knew that her husband was dead, and at some point, she should try to find another man to share her life with, but no one she met could ever measure up to the delightful man she had loved and lost. The fact that most men, seeing her for the first time, were more interested in what was in her blouse than what was on her mind did not help. While Isabella objectively knew that she was a well-built and attractive woman, she had no use for someone who put the physical ahead of the intellectual. She understood that physical beauty is fleeting and shallow, while the achievements of the mind would last forever. Her goal was to make such a name for herself that scholars around the world would remember her for the discoveries she made and the papers she published, not because she looked good in a set of khakis. She had been flattered to be offered a position on the Board of Antiquities at the age of thirty; however, she also knew that the promotion was due more to the government’s desire to appear friendly to women than to her merits as a scientist, and that bothered her a great deal. She wanted to earn her position!

  The problem with that goal was that, so far, she had made no remarkable discoveries. Italy had one of the richest historical and archeological heritages in the whole world, but so many scholars and treasure hunters had dug and excavated there for so long that remarkable discoveries were now few and far between. Like nearly all Italian archeologists, she had spent some time in the ongoing excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum—nearly two hundred years after their discovery, these two buried cities were still being slowly uncovered. She also helped excavate and study an ancient temple of Minerva discovered during street work in the city of Rome, but it had been leveled and built over in the ancient past, so that the foundations and flooring were just about all that remained. Despite all this, her professional reputation was solid—just not remarkable.


  She hoped the discovery on Capri would change all that. Tiberius was the second emperor of Rome, the adopted son and heir of Augustus Caesar himself, and had ruled during the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and his apostles. She reviewed her knowledge of Tiberius from her college classes and personal readings. His mother was Livia Drusilla, and his father was Tiberius Claudius Nero. When he was a child she had divorced her first husband, a cruel and vain man, in order to marry Caesar Octavianus, subsequently named Augustus by the Senate when he became the first Emperor of Rome. Tiberius was already in his late fifties when he became emperor in 14 AD after Augustus died. He had been forced to divorce Vipsania, the woman he loved, in order to marry Julia, the daughter of Augustus by one of his earlier marriages. It was a miserable marriage, and Julia had publicly shamed him by taking many lovers. Tiberius hated Rome and despised the Senate, and after only a few years as Emperor had retired to the Island of Capri, where he owned twelve villas, of which the Villa Jovis was the largest and best preserved.

  Could Rossini have actually found a chamber from Tiberius’ day, sealed for nearly two thousand years? The odds seemed remarkably long, but stranger things had happened. She was glad that it was Giuseppe Rossini who had made the discovery. He had been one of her early mentors, and by all accounts a tremendous field archeologist before his crippling injury. Unfortunately, she had only gotten the chance to go on a dig with him once, as a teenage volunteer. But he had become a close and trusted friend during her college years, and had been a great comfort to her when she lost Marc, and then her father, within a few months of each other. She knew how badly it chafed Rossini to be unable to lead digs as he used to, and decided that whatever it was that he had found, he would get full credit as the discoverer. As Isabella called various people and made arrangements to fly to Capri that afternoon, she wondered more and more if this could be the excavation that finally earned her the fame and acclamation she had sought for so long. It was all she could do not to get her hopes too high.

  Lucius Pontius Pilate, Senior Legate, Prefect, and Proconsul of Judea, to Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus, Princeps and Imperator of Rome, Greetings.

  Your Excellency, you know that it is the duty of every governor to keep you informed of events in the provinces that may in some way affect the well-being of the Empire. While I am loath to disturb your important daily work with a matter that may seem trivial at first, upon further reflection, and especially in light of subsequent developments, I find myself convinced that recent events in Judea merit your attention. And I would be telling an untruth if I were not to say that I am concerned that other accounts of these happenings may reach your ears which are not just unfavorable but frankly slanderous of my actions and motives. The situation was one of unusual difficulty and complexity, and hard decisions were called for. As always, I tried to make the decisions that I felt would most lend themselves to a peaceful and harmonious outcome for the citizens of the Republic and the people of Judea. But local passions in this case were so strong, and so diametrically opposed to each other, that it may be there simply was no completely correct choice to make. I leave that to your judgment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dr. Rossini sat in a folding chair, notebook open, sketching the dark opening in the ancient wall before him. He was tired and his leg was throbbing slightly—a couple of Tylenol had relieved his pain somewhat, but not entirely. However, he had managed to get a great deal done in the three hours since his conversation with Dr. Sforza. The police chief of Capri village had closed the Via Tiberio leading up the side of the mountain with barricades informing tourists that the ancient road was not safe due to earthquake damage. Rossini had talked to the friars at the Church of Santa Maria Del Soccorso, informing them that the ruins adjacent to their church had been damaged and were not safe for foot traffic. There were only three elderly clerics tending the Medieval-era chapel these days, so he doubted they would come poking around anyway, but better to cover all bases, as his American friend Dr. Luke Martens used to say. Rossini thought it was an American football term, but was not sure. Sports had never been of much interest to him. The friars had also loaned him a folding chair and filled his flask with excellent brandy, which had made his wait on the mountaintop much more comfortable.

  True to his word, he had not set foot inside the tiny chamber yet. But he had carefully walked around the entire staircase, and compared its height, width, and other measurements to the other staircases in the ruin. Then he had picked up and looked at each of the scattered blocks knocked loose by the quake, mentally restacking them and seeing how they had fit together to form a solid wall covering the ancient chamber. He wanted to cover the entrance, but there was nothing on the site that would serve as a drapery or tarp, so instead he just guarded the ancient opening until Isabella could arrive with proper supplies. Last of all, standing outside, he had shone his light into the void, mentally marking its approximate dimensions and shape. He thought that perhaps this staircase had rested on a solid pile of stone, like the others, and that whoever built the chamber had simply removed some of the stones from the pile, inserted braces to support the weight of the stairs, and then ordered some of the original blocks replaced when they decided to seal up the chamber. Certainly there was no visible arch or framing stonework for an ancient doorway; the stones that had finally fallen outward to reveal the entrance looked no different from the stones all around them, or the stones of the other staircases in the old villa. The secrecy and cleverness of the design were about right for the deeply paranoid and suspicious character of Tiberius Caesar, the island’s most famous inhabitant.

  As for what was in the chamber—he tried very hard not to think about that. Everything was coated with a deep, solid layer of powdery stone dust from twenty centuries of feet tramping up and down the stairs, but he could tell that, from what he could see, the space was not empty. What those tantalizing shapes he had glimpsed actually were, he could not say with any certainty. But he definitely felt that he was not wasting Isabella’s time.

  As if on cue, he heard the sound of a helicopter approaching in the distance. He carefully closed his sketch book, took one last sip of brandy, and watched as an Italian government helicopter slowly lowered itself over the largest extant floor of the ancient villa, which had once been Tiberius’ audience chamber, on the level above the chamber he had found. The small chopper delicately touched down, and Isabella hopped out, grabbing a heavy backpack and some notebooks, and then waved them off. Rossini walked up the steps to greet her with a smile.

  “Isabella! So good to see you again! When are you going to put aside your widow’s weeds and make me a happy man?” his strong Italian voice boomed over the fading sound of the rotors.

  Dr. Sforza threw her head back and laughed. Rossini was thirty years older than she, and a widower for the last ten years, but even when his beloved wife was still alive he had always flirted with her shamelessly—and harmlessly. “As soon as you lose thirty years and thirty kilos!” she shot back. “Now let’s see your great discovery.”

  “All business with you young people these days!” he laughed. “In my time we would have celebrated the discovery of a chamber like this with three days of music and dancing before we thought about going inside!” Of course that was not true, but Rossini was enormously fond of Isabella. Although he had not spent much time with her since her husband’s death, he still thought of her as his adopted daughter.

  Bantering back and forth, the two archeologists descended the steps toward the collapsed section of wall. Isabella already had her camera out, snapping pictures of the scene. Then she carefully measured the opening, and stepped back for a wide-angle shot of the entire staircase. She jotted down a few lines in her field notebook, then closed it and put it in her pocket. She reached inside her backpack and pulled out a powerful, battery-powered halogen lamp. She set it just outside the opening, shining in, and switched her digital camera over to video mode to record her first impressions of the chamber.

&nb
sp; “April 8, 1630 hours. Preliminary investigation of chamber inside Villa Jovis, Capri, exposed by this morning’s earthquake. The chamber is hidden beneath a large staircase, revealed when a section of its exterior wall fell outward. Chamber is roughly triangular in shape; maximum height is about two and a half meters, sloping sharply downwards towards the rear. Floor and walls appear to be undressed stone. Contents of chamber are all heavily shrouded in stone dust from the stairs above. Clearly visible are a small, low table with several indeterminate objects on it, a backless stool resembling the ‘curule chairs’ favored by Roman magistrates, and some sort of rectangular box or cabinet that is wedged into the angle formed by the descending ceiling and floor of the chamber. Switching over for still shots.” As she spoke, Isabella had carefully filmed the entire chamber—each wall and object, as well as the floor—holding the camera in one hand and the halogen lamp in the other. Now she carefully photographed the entire chamber, recording the original position of every visible object. Only when she had photographed everything and double checked on her camera’s image viewer to make sure that the pictures were clear and sharp, did she turn to Rossini. “Professor, this is your discovery. By all rights you should be the first to enter and see what it is you have found.”

  Rossini reached down to pick up a small brush from her assortment. “Are we in agreement that we can remove some of the overburden of dust at this point to see what is beneath it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I suggest we start with the small table near the door. And, of course, bag samples of all the dust we remove for pollen residue analysis.”