“His Resurrection is our hope,” said Jim. “He was not the perfect nice guy, and no one of us should believe in Him because of His philosophy or niceness. Nice guys don’t curse fig trees. But God, wanting to demonstrate that we should bear fruit, cursed fig trees. God, wanting to show us we should do good, curses fig trees. Nice guys remember they owe a cock to Asclepius,” said Jim, referring to the last recorded comment of Socrates, who, facing his death, showed such calm acceptance that he could care enough to settle a small personal debt.
“God cries out, tasting manhood in the fullest, ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’”
“Yes, but He did provide a way of life for people. A good way of life, of understanding and forgiveness and an awful lot of common sense,” said Sharon. “Yes, common sense.” She felt her lips tremble. She felt trapped in the very day itself, trapped by this man who knew what he was doing.
“You are avoiding what I am trying to say, Sharon. He was not another philosopher. He was not another good guy. Sharon, I believe He is God. Millions of others do, and billions have gone to their deaths believing He is God. Do you follow me?”
“I don’t want to,” said Sharon, turning her back, looking for a place to be away from him.
“You understand now.”
“I don’t want to understand.”
“They have lived their lives believing He is God, and everything about God that is God. They have died for this belief. This central belief.”
“Leave me alone, Jim,” she shouted. “What are you doing to me?”
“There are countless numbers who cannot get through the day without believing in Him, Sharon. You take away His Resurrection and you kill the God of Christ. The Romans only did the body,” said Jim.
“Jim. Jim,” said Sharon, her face twisted in tears. “Leave me alone. I’m off this dig. I’m off. I don’t want it. I’m out. Good-bye.”
He saw her throw the coffee cup on the street as vendors looked up and Arab women with their fruits to sell stared quizzically at the yelling. She ran into the compressed crowd, trying to get through the corner of the Damascus Gate, but he caught her.
“You understand now what it means, what you found?”
“I didn’t find anything. I don’t know anything. Leave me alone. I’m just an archaeologist, you fucking holy man. You bastard. You knew what you were doing. I’m just an archaeologist. Give me a stone, damn you. Take your God.” Sharon was sobbing. She would not look at Jim, she would not look at anyone.
Jim took her in his arms and moved her out of the traffic until the crying stopped. He patted her back like a baby’s and she did not resist. Finally he whispered in her ear.
“I do,” she sobbed. And then she pushed away, and by now everyone was watching, so he pulled her away farther into the Old City. She nodded him up to a street that seemed relatively empty but for some nuns leading Arab children in blue smocks down a stone street, with two high walls on either side. There they stopped.
“Jim, all my life I didn’t want to do anything that could hurt someone. Can you believe me?”
Jim nodded.
“And in this profession, unlike law, or medicine, or the military, people’s lives wouldn’t depend on me. I was free. I could do anything, deal with anything, because I knew it had all happened before. I could come to understandings of peoples and places without one jot hurting one soul, or even affecting one soul. I was free. It was pure research. And now, I don’t want to find out what may be down there under Haneviim Street.”
“And now you understand.”
“I am now not the right person for this dig.”
“On the contrary, Sharon, now you are.”
“Oh, no. Don’t you say that. Don’t you say that, Jim Folan. I know you are my friend. Don’t do this to me, don’t you dare,” said Sharon.
“Think about it, Sharon. What are my interests? Where am I coming from? You are going to do that, with Pilate, and Herod, and the rest, today. What about me, now, the Vatican’s man? My problem is to keep this secret as much as possible. Who is the most dangerous link in this whole process? The archaeologist. He must know all the pieces. I didn’t know whom I could bring in. I didn’t know whom I dared bring in. Until today. I don’t have to bring in anyone now.”
“Of course you do.”
“Oh no. I have a top archaeologist, one who apparently is reliable at keeping secrets, and now I know one who does not want to prove who the find is.”
“An archaeologist should not have emotions, either way, toward a find.”
“Right, but this isn’t Archaeology 307, or some other course. I’ll take those emotions in the Church’s favor, thank you.”
“But what about you? What happens if we prove … Well, you know how you were just over a piece of cloth.”
“You’re not worried about me, Sharon. You’re worried about your watching me. You’re worried about your not being able to disprove who that body is. I see now we don’t, I see now we may just not have all that room to prove whatever we wish.”
“I can’t lie on a conclusion. I just couldn’t do it. ‘Can’t ’is the word, not ‘won’t.’”
“And the Church doesn’t want a lie. The Church will go with the girl who wouldn’t let other students copy.”
“I did worry about you the other day.”
“But not now?”
“Now you can die on the spot with my blessings, Jim Folan, bastard.”
“I am sorry, Sharon.”
“And if I refuse?”
“It will always be the Golban dig, and they will come after you with questions. Now, do you trust other archaeologists to be more thorough than you in finding evidence so that we know for sure what the bones are not? Could you name someone who has as much vested interest in proving a certain point, in sparing nothing to prove that point?”
“You.”
“With your abilities and credentials, Sharon.”
“It should not have been ‘seek and ye shall find,’ you know. It should be ‘avoid and ye shall get.’”
“Can you believe that, if I had a choice, I would spare you?”
“I don’t care. You didn’t.” She shook her head angrily. Her eyes were red from the tears.
“Well, it is all real now to you, for the first time,” said Jim. “So let’s get on with your historical tour of the Gospels, where it all happened.”
“We can do it at the end of the dig, if we have to,” said Sharon. She lit a cigarette, and started back toward Damascus Gate.
Jim noticed a street sign. They were on the Via Dolorosa. He grabbed her elbow.
“C’mon. Let’s do it. We’re on the street already.”
“They are just suppositions,” said Sharon.
14
The Gospel According to Golban
Jim had known of the trial of Jesus since childhood. There wasn’t a time he could remember that he didn’t know it, how Jesus was unjustly condemned and then Pilate, with a heavy heart and much guilt, ordered the just man crucified.
“Pilate may have felt guilty, but he had to wash his hands for other reasons, and he had to do it publicly,” said Sharon.
Using the same Gospels Jim had been brought up on, Sharon showed with eerie strategic insight why Pilate had to do what he did that Passover two thousand years ago.
They were on a stone street surrounded by either high walls or buildings. Sharon pointed south, saying just over the walls and a few more buildings was the Temple Mount, where the Second Temple had been. Therefore, the area they were standing on had to be Antonia Fortress, where Christ was condemned.
“Okay, why a Roman fortress here?”
“High ground,” said Jim.
“Yes, but specifically in relationship to the Second Temple, because that was where trouble among the Jews would occur if it were going to occur. And the worst time for trouble was Passover. Even today, you can feel the city heat up at that time. Loads of pilgrims congesting in high religious fever. Okay, wha
t were the Romans doing here at all?”
“Palestine was a crucial roadway,” said Jim.
“Excellent,” said Sharon. “It was the northern route to Egypt, and Egypt at that time was the grain basket of the Roman world.”
“And Rome, no longer self-sufficient in grain, depended on Egypt for grain. It was crucial because the whole city could go if the mobs didn’t get their grain dole,” said Jim.
“Excellent,” said Sharon. “And what Rome wanted from this northern route was for nobody else to have access to it, specifically the Parthians or any Eastern kingdom.”
“Like the Persian Gulf today,” said Jim. “Rome didn’t want any rebellion getting out of hand, because then the rebels might invite in one of the Eastern kingdoms. I taught a bit of Roman history.”
“Pilate had another ongoing interest, as did every Roman procurator here.”
Jim thought a moment. “They were known to try to make a personal profit, but this was not a rich land.”
“Right,” said Sharon. “Each procurator wanted to be on the side of whoever was in power, and also on the side of whoever might replace him. They wanted to be on all sides.”
“Yes. That would be logical for someone controlling the northern route to Egypt.”
“All right, we’ve got Pilate. Now imagine, in comes this man, at this most dangerous time of religious passion, charged with a religious crime that the Sanhedrin want the Roman authority to punish him for. Now, who are the Sanhedrin, Jim?”
“The Sanhedrin were the religious judges of the Temple. And the one thing I would imagine Pilate would not have wanted was to get into a Jewish religious quarrel.”
“Exactly,” said Sharon. “But now we come to why Christ was sent here in the first place from the judges of the Temple, the Sanhedrin.”
“Because He refused to deny He was the Son of God, and God Himself, which was a religious sin.”
“No,” said Sharon. “Those were the grounds, but not the reason. Can you imagine if I were to go to your Vatican, and announce your Pope was an impostor and that I was really Pope, what would happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Jim.
“Think. You know.”
“I imagine you would be given a sedative and referred for some sort of therapy.”
“Right. But imagine thousands of Italians were following me and I had believers all over the world. A little different scenario, eh? With a mob at my back, storming St. Peter’s Square.”
“You think Christ had a large following then?” said Jim. “Are you sure?”
“What about the multitudes in Galilee? If we can believe the Gospels, which seem highly accurate, He was doing good deeds up and down the land. He was known. People awaited His coming. This is a man popular among the people. No one wants to be responsible for executing a popular man.”
“But they certainly want Him out of the way if He has followers,” said Jim. “So they pass the buck to Pilate, who also doesn’t want to be the one responsible for His death. Rome has no vested interest in taking sides in a religious quarrel.”
“Exactly,” said Sharon. “Pilate gives Him all the opportunity to get out of it. He doesn’t want to be the one to crucify Him. But Christ won’t defend Himself. So, Pilate tries to throw it on the backs of the people in the street.”
“And the people want Barabbas freed, not Christ,” said Jim.
“Or, at least the voices in the mob, and there is evidence many different power centers might have planted them there, to force the Romans to do what they wanted done. Not that the Romans didn’t want it done.”
“They just didn’t want to be the ones to do it,” said Jim.
“Exactly,” said Sharon. “So, what does Pilate do after the mob cuts off his last escape from being the one to crucify Jesus?”
“He publicly washes his hands and declares Jesus innocent,” said Jim.
“He may have felt guilty, too,” said Sharon.
“I don’t think so,” said Jim. “You know, politically, Jesus was crucified not because the Jews were against Him but because so many of them were for Him.”
“Exactly. Now let’s go into the church. There’s something you should see.”
The stone inside the church was one flight down and was part of an ancient Roman street.
“This isn’t as deep as Haneviim Street, is it?”
“No,” said Sharon. “The depths vary because Jerusalem is made up of hills, and hills mean valleys, and valleys get filled up faster with human debris.”
She pointed to one stone in the pavement that had been covered with a clear thick plastic, bolted into the old floor by modern brass screws.
“Here, see, look,” said Sharon.
Jim noticed a circle intersected with lines.
“This is the game of Kings, you see. Do you remember when I told you the crown of thorns was not that unusual, because the Romans had this execution game called Kings? Here is the board. And this is where they probably played dice for His robes. Here,” said Sharon.
“I just realized I am standing on the Second Station of the Cross. The original one,” said Jim. And then he explained that, when Christians in Europe could not make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to follow in the footsteps of Christ, they made what were called the Stations of the Cross, modeling them on the original Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem. They were the physical places of Christ’s suffering.
“Catholic churches have little models of each station around the church, where people stop and pray, reminding themselves of the places here, what happened to Christ at each place. He got the cross here.”
“Probably,” said Sharon. A guide was coming with his group of pilgrims and Jim saw several women in black enter the room where this street paving was and kneel down, kissing the floor.
“Does it bother you to be here? I can talk outside,” said Sharon.
“No. This is all right,” said Jim. “It’s good. I’ve got to start thinking like this.”
They followed the Via Dolorosa only a short way before it turned sharply south. North, to the right, less than a thousand yards, was the dig on Haneviim Street. A man could carry a cross on his back to there, thought Jim.
“What are you thinking, Jim?” said Sharon.
“I am thinking that Jesus could have reached what is now Haneviim Street. Damascus Gate is right up here to the right, it’s closer than the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but don’t jump to conclusions.”
“I’m not jumping, I’m just saying,” said Jim.
“This is all nebulous conjecture.”
“You weren’t too nebulous about Pilate.”
She took his hand and guided him left, along the Via Dolorosa. It was not known for certain Christ took this way, but the Crusaders had connected the point of Antonia Fortress with the site of the Holy Sepulcher, and declared a winding way between the two as Christ’s Street of Sorrows.
In this age, the streets were shop-crowded, smelling of sweets, and sewage, and animal blood.
Arab butchers had the shorn heads of lambs, the dark eyes open in such innocence, stacked on trays, with the blood running down to the tilted ends.
Shops hawked olive-wood crosses and Stars of David. Confectioners showcased large trays of creamy sweets, with the attendant swarms of flies. Arab men sat in front of their shops sipping small cups of sweet coffee.
Arab women, wearing black shrouds decorated with colorful flowers, knelt on the sidewalks selling baskets of fruit, which Sharon warned Jim against because of amoeba poisoning.
Sharon suddenly turned off Via Dolorosa and led him through a narrow side street, where soldiers examined her purse and all the bags of everyone passing through. Jim had gotten used to this now, and hardly noticed when soldiers checked parcels for bombs at public places.
Occasionally a terrorist bomb would go off somewhere and someone would be killed, but it had become somewhat like auto accidents. And Jim thought people could really get use
d to anything.
The small checkpoint opened to a broad immaculate expanse of limestone descending down to the Wailing Wall on the left and an archaeological dig on the right. Above them were two domes, one gold and one silver. Jim followed the groups of people descending toward the Wailing Wall, then felt Sharon’s hand pulling him back.
“Wait,” she said. “Up here you can see it all. The whole area is the Temple Mount, and this is where we get to Herod, and Caiaphas, who is the high priest, and the Sadducees and Pharisees.”
“I used to get them confused as a kid. Especially when you throw in the Sanhedrin.”
“There is one thing they all had in common,” said Sharon.
“What’s that?” said Jim.
“The ordinary Jew didn’t like them.”
“Then Jesus becomes more dangerous.”
Sharon made an arch with her hands signifying a great expanse in front of them.
“Now, today, on top, it is all Islamic. The gold dome on the left is the Dome of the Rock, where Muhammad was said to have risen up to heaven on his horse, leaving a footprint in a rock there.”
“I’ve seen pictures of the gold dome. It’s quite large. And the silver dome on the right?”
“That is Al Aksa Mosque. Those two mosques could easily have fit into what the Second Temple was. It had the finest woods and imported marbles and basalt. We have found some of the columns through excavations. It was glorious. And it was Herod the Great’s gift to the Jews and to the priests.”
“But he was on bad terms with his subjects, wasn’t he?” said Jim.
“Absolutely. That’s why this great builder, one of the truly great builders of the ancient world, gave them the Temple. But the Sadducees, who were in charge of it, didn’t trust him and were always plotting against him.”
“The Sadducees were the priests of the Temple,” said Jim.
“Hereditary priests from the line of the Maccabees,” said Sharon. “Caiaphas was the high priest, and that is something special to the Jews, so special that the post hasn’t existed since the fall of that Second Temple.”
“The Orthodox believe the Temple cannot be rebuilt until the Messiah comes, and therefore, without a temple, they cannot have that high priest, correct?”
The Body Page 21
