The Fifth Gospel

by Ian Caldwell

  I reopen the diary. In the next entry, the whole logic of Ugo’s exhibit surfaces for the first time.

  The disciples discovered the Shroud and carried it to Edessa, whose king had once invited Jesus to visit him.

  Ugo, however, is full of doubts.

  Don’t these Orthodox recognize a medieval legend? They really believe our most precious relic was kept for centuries in a second-rate Byzantine border town?

  The irony of this question seems to have escaped him. More than a thousand years later, it was in a no-name French village that the Shroud first surfaced in western Europe. Like its maker, the relic was never in a hurry to visit the great cities.

  But Ugo continues:

  Had dinner again with Andreou. Confronted him with my suspicions. No surprise: it’s political. He didn’t even bother to deny it. He doesn’t care where the Shroud came from. Only how we got our hands on it. If the relic’s past can be brought to light, he says, it will be a rallying cry for all Christians. A stepping-stone in our relations with other Churches.

  I’m stung. These few sentences conjure the essence of Simon: the familiar agenda; the lack of guile; the breathless assurance that the future of Christianity could be at stake. My brother comes off as utterly candid—which makes it harder to understand how he and Ugo both withheld this information from me for months. A stepping-stone in our relations with other Churches. Surely Simon was referring to the Orthodox, in which case Michael may have been right. Simon might’ve found it irresistible to finish the work our father left behind sixteen years ago in Turin.

  Then there’s this:

  He doesn’t care where the Shroud came from. Only how we got our hands on it.

  Michael Black said the priests who attacked him believed Ugo had found something. They wanted to know what it was. I fan the pages forward, searching for entries from around the time of Ugo’s final e-mail to me.

  They come near the end, where his notes are shorter and less personal. The Diatessaron seems to preoccupy him. Then, one week before the e-mail, a familiar diagram appears. The caduceus of entwined gospel verses. Below it is the disturbing hint I’ve been looking for.

  Fr. Simon must’ve told Fr. Alex the news. They both refuse to answer me. I’m all alone now. I suppose they’re happy to have the exhibit end with the Crusades.

  Nothing is written in the diary after these words. The pages are blank. But that final word—Crusades—is enough. In the context of the Diatessaron, I can think of only one thing it might mean.

  The Shroud appeared in western Europe for the first time right after the Crusades, surfacing inexplicably in medieval France. Where had it come from? The answer was right under Ugo’s nose: Edessa. The city he believed, from the beginning, the Shroud and Diatessaron had both called home. For centuries, Eastern Christians and Muslims had battled over control of Edessa—but at the end of the First Crusade, something unprecedented happened: the city fell into the hands of Catholic knights from the West. Edessa became Christianity’s first crusader state. The experiment lasted less than fifty years before Muslims retook it, but in the meantime those Catholic knights would’ve packed up everything valuable and sent it home—which means the Diatessaron and the Shroud might’ve been shipmates on the trip west. If Ugo found records of the Diatessaron’s arrival in our library, then he might’ve found records of a relic that came west in the same shipment. In which case, the explanation for the Shroud’s sudden appearance in medieval France would be tidy: it came back from Edessa during the Crusades.

  Yet even as I feel the thrill of this possibility—an elegant solution to one of the cloth’s most puzzling mysteries—something inside me rattles. A new and darker problem, which Ugo may not even have understood when he made his discovery.

  If he was able to prove that the Shroud came west after the Crusades, then he was stepping onto an ancient religious battlefield. Catholics and Orthodox were united back when Muslims first took Edessa from Christendom—but by the Crusades we had split. This means we lost the Shroud together, but the knights who retook Edessa were Catholic, so the Shroud ended up in Catholic France. The Orthodox claim to ownership of the Shroud is just as strong as ours—yet the Orthodox ended up with nothing.

  This is the first time since Ugo died that I feel the reason for his death might be devastatingly familiar. Relics are a flashpoint in Church relations. John Paul has tried to placate the Orthodox more than once by returning saints’ bones that Catholics allegedly stole. But if I’m right about Ugo’s discovery, then it could’ve created a custody battle around our greatest relic and fed the long-standing Orthodox grudge that Catholics are bullies, that we go where we don’t belong and take what isn’t ours. The missionaries who converted Orthodox into Eastern Catholics were only following in the footsteps of these Crusaders who brought home the Shroud and Diatessaron—all of them just tentacles of the great, hungry mouth that is Rome. Some Catholics would certainly have opposed publicizing a discovery like this. Especially mounting it in the pope’s museums.

  Maybe there was a reason Ugo told me a very different story: he claimed the Diatessaron came to the Vatican from a collection of cursed manuscripts in an Egyptian monastery. I wonder now if that tale—like the one about his first meeting with Simon in the desert—was meant to keep me at arm’s length, off the scent of a difficult truth he wasn’t sure I could accept.

  I close Ugo’s diary and fold it into my cassock. Down in the small hotel courtyard, an Eastern Catholic priest is sitting alone on a bench. Three Roman priests bustle past in conversation, paying him no more attention than the potted plants. I watch him for a moment, then close the window. Remembering the way Ugo’s apartment was broken into, I lock the shutters. I turn on Radio Uno for the rebroadcast of yesterday’s Supercoppa soccer match. Then, wedging myself into the toothpick of space Peter has left on one side of the bed, I close my eyes and listen, trying to drift away on the current of familiar voices and rhythms. Trying to pacify the feeling that everything is suddenly foreign. That, in my own home, I have become a stranger in a strange land.

  IN THE BLACK OF night, I’m wakened by screaming.

  Peter is rigid. Upright. Staring at something in the darkness.

  “What?” I shout. “What’s wrong?”

  There’s a noise. I don’t understand what it is.

  “He’s here!” Peter screams. “He’s here!”

  I pull him to my chest for protection. I fling my other arm into the murk.

  “Where?”

  “I saw his face! I saw it!”

  The sound is coming from beyond the door. From the outer room.

  “Shhh,” I whisper, drawing Peter to my shoulder.

  The shutters are still locked. The door is still closed.

  “Father!” comes the voice. “What’s happening in there?”

  “It’s okay,” I whisper. “Nightmare, Peter. Nightmare. Nobody’s here.”

  But he shakes. The fear is so strong, his body is stiff.

  “I’ll show you,” I say, turning on the bedside lamp.

  The room is untouched. Agent Fontana beats on the main door again.

  “Father! Open up!”

  I stagger out to the door, Peter clinging to me. When I open it, Fontana makes a fluid movement: his hand, moving away from the holster at his hip.

  “Nightmare,” I say. “Just a nightmare.”

  But Fontana isn’t looking at me. He’s looking over my shoulder. He goes first to the bedroom, then checks his way back out. Only when the examination is done does he say something for Peter’s benefit.

  “Everything looks safe, Father. Very safe.”

  I kiss Peter on the forehead. When we close the door again, though, I hear Fontana say into the radio, “Send someone to double-check the courtyard.”

  It’s half an hour before Peter gets back to sleep. He leans against me while I stroke his head. W
e keep the lights on. At home, there’s a book we read to ward off nightmares. It’s about a turtle who survives a thunderstorm. But the turtle isn’t here, so I gently knead the bridge of his nose and sing him a song. As I do, I wonder if Michael Black was right.

  “Maybe,” I think out loud, “we should take a vacation.”

  He nods. “America,” he says dreamily.

  “How about Anzio?”

  A beach town thirty miles south of Rome. I’ve saved enough money that two or three days won’t break us. I’ve been considering a special trip anyway. My boy will be leaving for primary school soon.

  “I want to go home,” Peter says.

  A flashlight down in the courtyard sends a beam strafing across the shutters. There’s the faintest hiss of a gendarme radio.

  “I know, Pete,” I whisper. “I know.”

  CHAPTER 12

  MY OWN DREAMS are uneasy. They’re all of Ugo.

  For a time, after the night he and I spent down in the Vatican Library, we worked together so closely that I mistook our acquaintance for friendship. The morning after our adventure in the library vault, we went together to explain his discovery to Uncle Lucio. The Cardinal Librarian was the man we should’ve told, but His Eminence would never have let Ugo keep his job, let alone keep his hands on the manuscript. All lay workers have to sign ninety-five moral conditions of employment, and librarians tend to be sticklers for the ones about papal property. Lucio, though, had a moneymaking exhibit on the line and could be counted on to protect the golden goose. What I hadn’t predicted was what else he would do.

  No public announcement was ever made about the Diatessaron, because Ugo lobbied hard against one. But forty-eight hours after our meeting with my uncle, an article appeared in a Rome paper: FIFTH GOSPEL DISCOVERED IN VATICAN LIBRARY. The following Friday, three dailies picked up the story. That weekend, our discovery ran above the fold in La Repubblica. That was when the TV networks started calling.

  Priests underestimate the appetite of laymen for cheap thrills about Jesus. Most of us roll our eyes at the prospect of new gospels. Every cave in Israel seems to contain one, and most turn out to have been written centuries after Christ by little sects of Christian heretics, or else forged for the publicity. But the Diatessaron was different. Here was a headline the Church could get behind. A legitimate and famous text, discovered in an extremely ancient manuscript, preserved thanks to the popes’ centuries-long devotion to books. Lucio had foreseen that it was a story everyone inside the walls would want to tell. So he made sure no one but Ugo could tell it.

  Someone in John Paul’s apartments must’ve rubber-stamped Lucio’s decision to give custody of the Diatessaron to Ugo, because the whole arrangement made the Cardinal Librarian furious. Ugo hid the manuscript under lock and key in the restoration laboratory, where a team of conservationists under his command started removing the mysterious smudges. Thus the one book everyone wanted to know about, no one was allowed to see. Library staff went off the record with reporters to complain that the book might not even exist; the whole thing might be a stunt. Ugo, in retaliation, released a photo of the manuscript. Experts quickly studied the style of penmanship and declared it authentic. The major European dailies reprinted the photo, and now the questions intensified.

  The attention scared Ugo. He knew the Diatessaron might be the keystone of his Shroud authentication, one of the pillars of his exhibit. But now it was threatening to become the exhibit. The Shroud had waited sixteen years for redemption and was now being overshadowed by its supporting cast. Wishing he had kept as mum about the Diatessaron as he had about the rest of his exhibit, Ugo decided to correct that mistake. From now on, he would stonewall. He would choke the flame. It must have seemed reasonable at the time, but he had forgotten that nothing fans a religious delirium quite like Vatican silence.

  Peter and I, walking the streets of Rome over the summer, heard laymen discussing the Diatessaron. Was it right for the Vatican to withhold information? Didn’t the patrimony of Christianity belong to all of us? What needed hiding, anyway? Headlines in leftist tabloids seized on the opportunity. They wheeled out the usual conspiracy theories in the guise of proposing what the Diatessaron’s secret might be. Jesus was a married man. A gay man. A woman. One professor at a secular university was quoted as saying that the Diatessaron failed to report that Jesus was ever seen again after his death. Later the professor clarified that he was talking about the gospel of Mark, not the Diatessaron, since early manuscripts of Mark do indeed fail to report this.

  Day by day the hubbub grew. Finally a panel of forty Bible scholars wrote an open letter to John Paul, calling for the manuscript to be studied. And so it came to pass that Uncle Lucio, having dealt the cards, now played his ace. In response to public pressure, he announced, the Diatessaron would be publicly displayed for the first time—at Ugo’s exhibit. Overnight, advance ticket sales quadrupled.

  Ugo was beside himself. I told him there was no shame in letting a new gospel share the pedestal with the Shroud—after all, they were ancient brothers, both leading us back to first-century Jerusalem. But I’d let my enthusiasm for the Diatessaron carry me away. Ugo was irate. He growled that the Diatessaron was not a new gospel and that I obviously didn’t understand his exhibit’s duty not just to redeem the Shroud but to show the world where it belonged in the pecking order of ancient Christian testimony. “The gospels weren’t written by Jesus,” he snapped. “They aren’t Christ’s testimony about Himself. Only the Shroud holds that honor. So if every church on earth has a copy of the gospels, then every church on earth should have an image of the Shroud, and that image should be revered above the gospels. I’m surprised at you, Father Alex. It’s an insult to God to let a second-class gospel—a man-made thing—be celebrated on par with our Lord’s gift.”

  I realized he was paralyzed by this idea. Horrified with himself for having allowed the Shroud to be betrayed. Not until then did I understand the fatherly protectiveness he felt toward it. And though I didn’t feel the same way, I could identify with the strength of that emotion. Unfortunately, it squeezed something to the surface in Ugo that I’d never encountered before. In his eyes, my enthusiasm for the Diatessaron had revealed me as a traitor. So he approached me one day in the mess hall and grabbed me by the cassock.

  “If you hadn’t twisted my arm to tell your uncle about the manuscript,” he growled, “none of this would be happening.”

  “We made the right choice,” I told him.

  But he turned his back to me and said, “I don’t think we can work together anymore. I’ll be finding someone else to teach me the gospels.”

  I RAN INTO THEM only by accident, teacher and pupil, huddled over a Bible in a private study room beside the manuscript workshop. Ugo’s new instructor was an ancient priest named Popa who spoke with an accent and wore an Eastern cassock. I didn’t recognize him; Popa is a Romanian name, and there are fifty thousand Romanians in Rome. I just assumed he was Eastern Catholic. But I was wrong. He was Orthodox. And in gospel scholarship that made all the difference in the world.

  “Father, please,” I overheard Ugo saying, “we need to get to the burial. The cloth. I know these early parts are important, but what interests me is the Shroud.”

  “Don’t you see?” Popa answered. “The two are connected. The birth of Jesus anticipates his rebirth, his Resurrection. The liturgy and the Church Fathers agree th—”

  “Respectfully, Father,” Ugo said, “I don’t need the liturgy or the Church Fathers. Just the hard facts of what happened in 33 AD.”

  Popa had a mystical, lovable way about him. His soft white beard looked jovial when he smiled. But neither he nor Ugo seemed to understand what was separating them.

  “Remember, my son,” Popa said, “the Bible didn’t create the Church; the Church created the Bible. The liturgy is older than the gospels. Now, please, let’s begin at the beginning. To understand the tomb, w
e need to understand the manger.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Ugo,” I said, “Jesus wasn’t born in a manger. Factually speaking.”

  Suddenly Popa looked a bit less jovial.

  “We don’t even know the city where Jesus was born,” I continued. “Factually speaking.”

  “Father, that’s not true,” Popa protested. “The gospels agree it was Bethlehem.”

  “Show me two gospels that say so, and I’ll show you two that don’t.”

  Popa frowned. He said nothing more; he just waited for me to finish my business and leave.

  But I had caught Ugo’s attention. “Father Alex,” he said, “please explain.”

  I lowered my stack of books onto his table. “Jesus grew up in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. All four gospels agree about that.”

  “The question is where he was born,” Popa objected, “not where he grew up.”

  I held up a hand to quiet him. “Two gospels never say anything about where he was born. The other two tell different birth stories. Draw your own conclusions.”

  Ugo looked as surprised as most seminary students on their first day of scripture class. “You’re saying those stories are fiction?”

  “I’m saying read them carefully.”

  “I have.”

  “Then which one says Jesus was born in a manger?”

  “Luke.”

  “And which one says Jesus was visited by three wise men?”

  “Matthew.”

  “So why does Luke not mention the wise men, and Matthew not mention the manger?”

  Ugo shrugged.

  “Because they’re both trying to explain how Jesus could’ve been born in Bethlehem even though he grew up in Nazareth. And they come up with completely different explanations. Matthew tells us about an evil king named Herod who wants to kill baby Jesus, but when the wise men won’t tell him where Jesus is, Herod kills all the babies in that whole region. So Mary and Joseph flee, and that’s how they end up in Nazareth. Luke, on the other hand, says Jesus’ family started in Nazareth. But the Roman emperor declared a huge census, and for some reason everyone had to go back to their ancestral hometown to be counted. Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, because that’s where Joseph’s family came from, and that’s why Jesus was born in a manger: because there was no room at the inn. The stories are completely different. And since there’s no evidence Herod really killed those babies or Caesar Augustus really declared that census, it’s likely that neither story actually happened.”