“Of course I am.”
“Right, the story only appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written some eighty years after this miraculous birth supposedly took place, when the authors, who never themselves met Jesus, were trying to establish a community of followers. Oh, and the details of the birth story itself vary significantly in those two gospels.”
Brady raised his hand, as if to silence him. “A tired argument from the nonbelievers. Look, each New Testament author merely focused on different aspects of Jesus’ life. Just because one author chose to concentrate on different facts than the others doesn’t mean anything.”
“Or if they chose to omit Jesus’ travels during the missing twenty years?” Grant added.
“That’s not my point!” Brady raised his voice for the first time. “You’re twisting my words.”
“Well, Reverend,” Dawson interjected smoothly, “isn’t Mr. Matthews just demonstrating that because the Bible contains gaps in the story of Jesus’ life, as well as tales about him that some could interpret as mythology, then—”
“Mythology?” Brady boomed. “What you both fail to comprehend is that these other stories—be they pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist in origin—are irrelevant because the Bible is the only writing that contains the actual word of God!” He snatched his book from the table and shook it over his head as if he were brandishing a Bible. “I explain it all here.”
“I’m sorry”—Grant leaned into his microphone—“but that’s too convenient for me. The Bible is one hundred percent accurate, and any evidence suggesting otherwise is Satan at work?”
“Finally, we agree on something,” Brady quipped. Scattered laughter from around the audience returned him to his more relaxed demeanor.
“How can you say that?” Grant asked.
“I can say that, young man, because I have faith. Faith that the Bible is the absolute and inerrant word of God. I know that faith is anathema to you academic types, but faith guides my life. Faith lets me sleep soundly at night, knowing that God takes care of me.”
“Having faith in God is one thing, but taking the Bible literally as the only and infallible way God has spoken to the world just doesn’t—”
“It may not make sense to you,” Brady smoothly interrupted, causing Grant to shoot a quick glance at Dawson, “because you’ve closed your eyes to the truth. You come to the Bible with your preconceptions of the way the world should be. You either accept the Bible as is, or you don’t. It’s really that simple.”
“Reverend,” Dawson said, “how do you know the Bible is the one and only literal word of God?”
Without missing a beat, he responded, “Paul, in the first chapter of Galatians, verses eight and nine, wrote, ‘Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any gospel unto you than that which we preached unto you, let him be accursed.’”
“Can’t you see your argument is completely circular?” Grant said. “You say the Bible is accurate because it’s the word of God, and you believe that it’s the word of God because it says so in the Bible. You rely on the document itself for its own authenticity.”
A look of irritation crossed Brady’s face, but he spoke again in a measured tone, “No, son, I’m relying on my faith.”
“So every word in the Bible concerning Jesus is one hundred percent true and accurate?”
“Now, you said something intelligent.” Brady displayed his gleaming teeth. “But you forgot to add that it is also complete. If God had wanted us to have other information about Jesus, he would have guided the authors to include it.”
Grant shook his head. Arguing with Brady was like a distant echo of his adolescence. “The Bible must be read in the context of the age in which it was written,” he pursued. “During biblical times, earthquakes, droughts, floods, and windstorms were all believed to be caused by angry gods, not by changing weather patterns. People had no concept of microbiology, of germs. Disease was seen as God’s punishment for the sinful. Schizophrenia and other mental diseases were not viewed as imbalances of brain chemistry but as possession by demons who must be cast out.”
Brady raised his voice. “I’ve seen people with my own eyes who’ve been healed from these physical diseases by their faith in Jesus.”
“Doctors would call that the placebo effect,” Grant said. “Isn’t that why new drugs undergo double-blind research studies? If you give a sugar pill to a sick person and tell them it’s medicine, they’ll get better merely because they believe they are being healed.”
Brady’s ingratiating smile was still plastered on his face, but now Grant thought it looked strained. Small beads of sweat were starting to form along his well-coiffed hairline. He was human after all.
“Maybe in your world you can convert everything to a scientific theory or a mathematical formula. But I don’t want to live in a world where God becomes an equation. I see miracles every day in the lives of people who have accepted Christ. The proof is not just in the Good Book, it surrounds us today.”
“But even today, voodoo doctors in Haiti and medicine men in Africa are revered in their cultures because they perform healings similar to those you claim Jesus performed.”
Brady pulled a pale blue handkerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and wiped his brow. Replacing the cloth in his pocket, he took a long drink from his water glass, the first time he’d touched it the entire night. His voice turned venomous. “What you seek is the lust for knowledge of that which should be left unknown. You desire another bite of the apple.”
A murmur spread through the crowd at Brady’s last comment. Dawson raised his hands to quiet them. Grant knew he’d rattled the reverend.
Dawson cleared his throat and leaned into his microphone. “So, Mr. Matthews, your point is that the New Testament was never meant to be either a complete history or a scientific text about Jesus?”
“Precisely.” The words rolled off Grant’s tongue. He could feel his peers in the audience drinking in each of his arguments. He realized that he’d stressed over Brady for nothing. “Leaving aside both the missing years and the scientific problems, the Gospels also contradict each other about the details of Jesus’ life. In John, for example, Jesus’ ministry lasts three years; in the other Gospels it only lasts one. In John, Jesus cleanses the Temple in Jerusalem in the beginning of his ministry, but in the others, he does so at the end of his ministry. Even the details of the resurrection differ significantly from gospel to gospel.”
Grant expected the reverend to jump on his last comment, but instead he bent over and searched through the leather satchel by his chair. When he removed a file folder and began to flip through the pages, Grant taunted him, “So which gospel is correct, Reverend?”
Tim reached underneath his shirt sleeve and began to scratch. The burning on his arms almost matched the fire in his chest. How could this guy treat the reverend with such disrespect? At that moment, Tim regretted not having pulled the trigger when he stood over Matthews’s sleeping body a few nights earlier. Then he thought of the bombing at the CDC and its less-than-spectacular effects. Surveying the unbelievers in the audience, he realized a bomb in this auditorium would have yielded a more satisfactory result.
Blasphemy, he thought, every word out of the grad student’s mouth is blasphemy . Jesus wasn’t a man; he was God. That’s what Tim had learned as a child and what he knew was true. It had to be true. You don’t worship a man; that was idolatry. Tim vividly recalled the reverend’s description of God’s fate for blasphemers. Tim wanted nothing more than to kill Matthews at that very moment.
Watching the audience’s pleasure in the reverend’s obvious discomfort, he thought how he’d predicted this reaction in his email to the reverend and Jennings. Tim saw things that others were too dense to comprehend. From the moment he came across the web posting about these hateful Issa texts, Tim heard the calling. The voice he heard was one he’d been waiting his whole life to hear: the voice of Jesus leading him to his destiny.
He removed his hand from hi
s arm and attended to his forehead. Hooking his thumbnail under a piece of loose skin just over his eyebrow, he pulled the prize away and allowed it to drop to the floor. The itching subsided.
For the first time in his life, he understood his purpose—his larger part in God’s plan. And now he had supporters much more powerful than that doofus Johnny. He would achieve the redemption and recognition he’d prayed for. Erasing the photographs was just the first step.
“Well, Reverend,” Dawson asked, “why isn’t there room in the silence of the Gospels about Jesus’ young adult life to accommodate a spiritual journey to India?”
Brady turned his gaze from his paper to Dawson and then to the camera. “The Gospels simply cannot accommodate Mr. Matthews’s New Age fantasy. When the angel Gabriel came to Mary in a dream, the Gospels clearly state that Jesus was born the Son of God. The Only Son didn’t discover his spirituality from some Eastern mystics. I may not have the answers to every question that can be posed by twisting around the teachings of the Bible, but where Mr. Matthews looks at those questions and chooses to disbelieve, I simply choose to believe.”
Grant was surprised at how quickly Brady recovered the calm confidence with which he’d begun the evening.
“Mr. Matthews,” Dawson asked, “does this debate about your discovery boil down to faith in one’s religious beliefs versus faith in the scientific method?”
“Absolutely not. The reverend misuses faith to hide behind a wall of ignorance. It’s one thing to have faith in those fundamental questions to which we can never know the true answers: What is the nature of God? Is there life after death? But refusing to accept archaeological or other scientific evidence because it conflicts with one’s belief system is not faith. That’s called ignorance. Real truths, as opposed to imagined ones, are able to stand up to rigorous debate and questioning. What I sense in you, Reverend, is a deep and powerful fear.”
“Fear! With faith in Christ, I have nothing to fear!”
Grant resisted a smile. He’d achieved a similar reaction from his father many years earlier with the same statement.
Grant leaned toward the microphone. “If you were truly confident in your faith, you would welcome any evidence that might shed light on the life of Jesus. Instead, you seek to persuade people to reject without any study what we have found, because you fear where it may lead.”
“I have no such fear,” Brady said coldly, “because I already know that you have cooked up this entire spectacle as an elaborate hoax: either these texts do not exist or they were fabricated.”
“How can you say that!” Grant burst out, letting his frustration show for the first time. “We haven’t even begun to study them yet.”
“All we have to show from your so-called discovery are your own writings of what you claim to be a translation.”
“As I said earlier, we are very early in the process of—”
“We know you don’t possess the texts themselves; what proof do you have that they even exist?”
Grant hesitated. He thought he’d avoided this line of questioning earlier. Only a handful of people—he, Kristin, Billingsly, the police, and Karma—knew about the missing pictures. “We are still in the process of working through our notes, and—”
“More doublespeak. If you had proof, you would’ve published it. All we have to go on is your word right now. And we both know you have problems in that department.”
Grant froze. Brady couldn’t possibly know. A wave of nausea crept from his stomach into his throat.
Thankfully, Dawson intervened. “That’s a bold statement, Reverend Brady.”
“What Mr. Matthews hasn’t told you is that over a hundred years ago, a Russian journalist named”—Brady referred to the paper he had taken from his folder—“Nicholas Notovitch made a very similar claim to what Mr. Matthews has made today, but then the book he claimed to have seen mysteriously disappeared.” Brady now appeared as relaxed as if he were giving his Sunday sermon.
“Actually, the Notovitch report just supports our case,” Grant said, relieved that Brady wasn’t going where he feared. “But anyway our findings are different. You see—”
“My child, my child.” Brady held up his hand to quiet him, shaking his head. “Isn’t it time to give up this ruse? Confess that this ordeal was a mistake that just got out of hand.”
“What are you talking about!” Grant exploded. Refusing to accept the evidence of his findings was one thing, but accusing him of making it up was too much.
“I think you know what I’m talking about.” Brady stared at him with a smug expression. “This may be painful for you, my son, but if I don’t rescue my people from your shamefulness, then the blood of your sins will be on my hands too.” Brady pointed a finger at Grant like a criminal prosecutor pointing out the defendant and declared to the audience, “You see, Mr. Matthews here has a history of academic fraud.”
The blood rushed out of Grant’s head, causing a powerful vertigo. His mind screamed at him to run before Brady could complete his accusation, but every muscle in his body was paralyzed. A murmur broke out among the audience.
Brady waved the sheet of paper he’d studied moments before. “When Mr. Matthews was in college just a few years ago, he plagiarized an entire paper for a class. Copied someone else’s work as his own. Were it not for him pulling some strings, he would’ve been expelled. What we have here with all this Issa nonsense is just another example of his scholarly dishonesty.”
Grant sensed every head in the audience turn toward him, but he only saw Kristin’s horrified expression in the first pew. The weight of the silence in the hall as they anticipated his response squeezed the air out of his lungs like a straitjacket cinched too tight. He tried to swallow, but his tongue stuck in his mouth as if it were a foreign object.
How was he to explain?
His mind searched for the words, but he might as well have been randomly flipping through a dictionary. Nothing came to him. His eyes darted between Brady and Dawson—both wore curious and, he thought, amused expressions.
CHAPTER 22
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
THE COMPUTER’S LED screen cast a blue glow around Tim’s cubicle in the otherwise dark office. Tim had left Atlanta at the end of the debate and returned to Birmingham around midnight. After four and a half hours of sleep, he was the first one in the office, as usual. Today was special, however. Today would be his last day working for his imbecilic boss, Duncan Summers, and the other losers of the IT group. He’d been called upon to carry out a mission of supreme importance. He felt almost giddy when he thought about how far he’d come in just two weeks: from having to partner with a lowlife like Johnny to becoming a true soldier in God’s army.
He clicked through the airline’s website. His travel schedule over the next week would be grueling, but then he’d flown around the world in military transport planes for a decade. The passenger seat of a commercial airliner would be luxurious in comparison. He thought through the checklist of what he’d need for his travels. Some of the more specialty items he already possessed, but he had a new idea he was excited to explore after he finished his tickets. Tomorrow morning he’d fly to DC. Once there, he’d hurry to the Indian embassy for his travel visa. The following day he was scheduled to fly to New Delhi via London.
His online searches had revealed only two paths into Bhutan: fly through either India or Thailand. From the east coast of the United States, the India route was faster. Plus, he admitted to himself, Thailand held certain temptations for him—temptations that he would not expose himself to now that he was doing God’s work. Unfortunately, when he arrived in India, he couldn’t just continue straight into Bhutan. The Bhutanese government was stingy in handing out travel visas. The backlog in their New York consulate could take several weeks, he’d learned with a quick call. He didn’t have that much time. The firestorm over the heretical Issa texts was heating up. Even after Grant Matthews’s humiliation last night, the media would be clamoring to get to th
e texts. Tim had to find them first. Fortunately, he’d discovered he could obtain a visa from the Bhutanese embassy in New Delhi in only a few days. He would wait there, and once he had the visa, he would be much closer to his destination.
He clicked the onscreen button to finalize his itinerary.
“Damn it, William.” Brady slammed his open palm on the top of his nineteenth-century English desk. “You should’ve prepared me better. I looked like a fool up there. Look at me sweat.” He hit the pause button on the remote, freezing the image on the forty-two-inch flat-screen mounted to the wall between the cherry bookcases in his church office. The monitor depicted the reverend with a furrowed brow, flushed cheeks, and sweat-soaked temples.
“I warned you he’d be well prepared. But that’s irrelevant now. The focus of this story hasn’t been on the substance of the debate but on your revelation of his cheating.”
Brady clicked on the play button of the remote, and they watched the concluding scene of the previous night’s debate for the fourth time that day since CNN aired it at eleven AM.
“That was masterful, wasn’t it?” Brady grinned.
“We’ve received dozens of calls from news organizations wanting to interview you.”
Finally, Brady thought, I’ll receive the exposure I deserve. How else could he spread God’s word, if he was limited to one state? God had given him a gift and meant for him to share it. “Make sure you schedule the TV reporters before the newspaper ones.”
“Already done.” A smile spread across Jennings’s face, an unusual occurrence. “Our publisher has rushed more copies of your book to print. Sales will skyrocket.”
Brady relaxed into his leather desk chair. His election to the presidency of the NAE was now almost assured.
CHAPTER 23
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
SITTING AT THE ROUND dining table in his apartment, Grant swirled the Absolut and tonic in his glass. He watched the lime spin in the clear liquid, just as the thoughts spun in his mind. After CNN aired the previous night’s debate that morning, his apartment phone had rung constantly. He’d answered over a dozen calls from reporters asking the same questions; then he finally unplugged it. He still couldn’t shake the image of his pale face frozen on the TV, his mouth moving wordlessly. Dawson had stepped in, giving Grant an opportunity to rebut Brady’s charge, but Grant had only managed to mumble something about having gone through a difficult period in college. Then it was all over, except for the replays of his embarrassment that the news network seemed to show continually. Kristin and Billingsly had both tried to comfort him, but he’d just withdrawn into silence. He suspected that Billingsly had given her a quick summary of what had happened his sophomore year, and so far she hadn’t pried. Looking across the table as she began to eat, he knew that would change.
The Breath of God Page 16
