More Than a Skeleton

by Paul L Maier

  “Oh ho ho!” yelped the young, crew-cut pundit who was Richard Ferris, the ICO’s general secretary. “You can’t believe how divided they are! Half of them not only are sure that Jesus has returned in His intermediate coming, but they want to tell the world about it ‘in these last days.’”

  “Hold it, Dick,” Jon interrupted. “How do they reconcile ‘intermediate’ and ‘these last days’?”

  “Many of them virtually equate the two: they think that ‘intermediate’ begins the end-times scenario. Anyway, this group—and it’s big—is held in thrall by the prophecy preachers, and everything Joshua does over there is some kind of fulfillment in their book.”

  “And the other group of evangelicals?”

  “Well, they and the Archies are against the very idea that—”

  “Hold it!” Sally Humiston called out. “Who in the world are the Archies?”

  “Oh! Sorry! The archconservatives. They’re just next door to the Fundies, and they’re all—”

  “Wait a minute!” she again inquired. “Just who are the Fundies?” “Oh—sorry again: the fundamentalists. In any case, both groups deny that Joshua could ever be Jesus, because the biblical signs heralding His Second Coming aren’t there—the trumpets, the clouds of heaven, and the like.”

  “They don’t buy the concept of an intermediate coming?” asked Jon.

  “Never. To them, it’s not part of Scripture and, therefore, not valid.” “So, put the case that Jesus actually has returned. They’d still deny it—on the basis of the Bible?”

  “Right. He could do a miracle in front of their very eyes, but they’d doubt their own eyes before they’d doubt the Bible. In fact, were He to ‘cast them into outer darkness,’ they’d still be pointing to their Bibles on the way down to perdition, crying, ‘It doesn’t say that here!’”

  Amid general laughter, Jon now called for the latest polls on whether Joshua was Jesus. Although no reliable worldwide sampling had yet been taken—a difficult project to bring off in any case—several ICO participants hauled out clippings from polls that both the Christian Century and Christianity Today had taken among Americans of all beliefs over the last month. Interestingly enough, the results of the surveys were within two percentage points of each other.

  Jon read the statistics, then typed out the number averages via PowerPoint onto a screen at the end of the conference table:

  Q: Do you think Joshua Ben-Yosef is the returned Jesus of Nazareth?

  A: Yes: 54%; Undecided: 21%; No: 25%

  “Incredible!” said Jon. “So more than half the country believes Jesus has returned?”

  “And can you blame them?” asked Mark Noll, one of the country’s brightest evangelical scholars. “I’ve taken reports from the media and your own web site, Jon, and made a list here of the extraordinary items associated with Ben-Yosef. May I read it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, but please tell me if I have anything wrong:

  • Born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth.

  • Parents: Joseph and Mariam, later claimed as Mariam only, with Joseph as foster father.

  • Prodigy in school.

  • A worldwide cyberphenomenon announces his return.

  • Addresses crowds with great authority and eloquence.

  • Uses beatitudes, warnings, parables very similar to those of Jesus.

  • Linguistic genius: speaks many languages without accent in any of them.

  • Apparent omniscience: seems to know the past history of everyone.

  • Signs and wonders similar to those of Jesus—miracles, if you will—including healings, sight to the blind, and exorcisms, not to mention party supplies at a Galilee wedding.

  • Indirect and later direct personal claims to be the returned Jesus.

  • Endorsement by a presumed voice from heaven.

  “Is that about it?”

  Jon nodded slowly, then stopped and shook his head. “No,” he admitted, “there are other items for your list.” He went on to tell of the Sepphoris mosaic, his Nicodemus interview with Joshua by night, and anecdotal reports of Joshua’s activities that he or Shannon had heard about but not witnessed. The ICO members were astonished and a bit amused by the flying pen episode, but totally mystified by the Sepphoris mosaic.

  “You mean that young Jesus, working with Joseph up at Sepphoris, knew even then that He would die and rise again?” asked von Schwendener.

  “Perhaps.”

  “No, wait; even more—that He would return twenty centuries after His resurrection?”

  Jon nodded and said, “That’s what the Sepphoris mosaic seems to suggest . . . if, that is, the Y abbreviation indeed refers to Jesus. The Israel Antiquities Authority is in the process of checking its authenticity to be sure no hoax or ‘plant’ was involved.”

  Silence and wonderment hung over the room like a low morning fog. Suddenly it evaporated into a babble of discussion, followed by a veritable hail of questions rattling onto Jon at the head of the table.

  Clearly, the conclave had lurched into phase two. ICO members wanted exhaustive detail on all the items cited on Noll’s list. Then, when Jon recalled further particulars not on that list, it evoked another cavalcade of questions that he fielded as best he could. Except for lunch, this consumed the rest of the afternoon.

  Just before breaking for dinner, an interesting puzzler reemerged that had been asked earlier in the impromptu press conference at Logan Airport.

  “Jon, in all your associations with Joshua, or from all reports,” asked Brendan Rutledge, “did you ever note an occasion in which he made a mistake—did something wrong, got something wrong, or made an error or miscue of any kind, however minor?”

  Jon sat back, rubbed his forehead, and pondered the query for some time, rehearsing all the points of contact he or Shannon had had with Joshua over the past months. Finally he shook his head and said, “No, not once that I can recall. Others may have, of course, but I’ve heard nothing of the kind to date.”

  A renewed buzz of discussion followed. It was now five o’clock, and they had not even reached segment three. They adjourned for dinner and were back at the conference table by seven-thirty.

  When Jon reconvened the meeting, he announced, “Thanks for your patience, all! We’re now at the last phase, namely, ‘What, if anything, should the ICO do in all of this?’ I remind you again: we’re not obliged to do a darn thing. This is no Vatican Council— just a scholarly think tank that proved helpful in the Rama crisis. At that time, you’ll recall, our suggestions were warmly received. So . . . the floor is open.”

  No one said anything for some moments. Then Rutledge volunteered, “I wonder if we should take a poll among ourselves. I mean, with all this evidence, shouldn’t we be able to come to some sort of . . . provisional opinion on the question of Joshua’s authenticity?”

  The suggestion was met with furrowed brows. Then von Schwendener responded, “Yeah, I guess we could take a straw vote, but what in the world would that prove? The press could get hold of it and set us up as believing or denying Jesus Himself, for gosh-sakes, and we don’t need that sort of publicity. Look out the window . . . see the reporters there? They’d water at the mouth if they learned about our poll.”

  Jon now weighed in on the proposal. “Whether or not we take a poll has no relationship whatever to the facts in the matter. Joshua could be Jesus even if we voted against it 100 percent; he could be an impostor even if we voted unanimously for his authenticity. Maybe we should avoid the mistakes of the Jesus Seminar and their stupid votes on whether or not Jesus could have said or done something.”

  “Hear! Hear!” The response was instant and enthusiastic.

  “All right, then, colleagues: do we take any action?”

  After some silence, von Schwendener stirred in his chair and said, “We have a heckuva lot of ‘proofs’ that Ben-Yosef is genuine, a really incredible amount of extraordinary signs! But we also have a big bundle of natural or even logical doubts
that this could ever be, or at least be the case in this way or at this time. Someone has said, ‘The greater the wonder, the greater the proofs necessary to substantiate it.’ Hey, I believe that! And I’ll admit: my favorite apostle in Jesus’ group is Thomas! He’s the scientist in that bunch. He was good for the first century, and I think he’s good for us now.”

  Silence greeted von Schwendener’s statement, until Sally Humiston asked, “And how is Thomas good for us?”

  “Well, it was Thomas who said of the risen Jesus, ‘Unless I put my finger in the print of the nails or touch the gash in His side, I will not believe!’ I think we need a smoking gun here. We need the strongest possible proof of the suspension of natural law from Joshua. Lofty claims won’t do, nor will charisma or eloquence, since we’ve had all these before. No hearsay cures either, nothing psychosomatic, but clear, obvious proofs of the supernatural dimension penetrating our natural order via things that we can see, hear, weigh, measure, and touch.”

  “What sorts of proofs?” asked Jon. “My wife and I have actually seen some of these very things.”

  “You may have, but I haven’t! Mind you, I’m not in any way impugning your powers of observation, Jon. But what if the wonders that you and Shannon saw were accomplished by some natural means? Even if I saw such things myself, I’d still have to ask that question.”

  “I agree. But again, what would qualify as an absolute proof?” Von Schwendener said nothing. He only tapped his right forefinger on the writing pad in front of him while looking out the windows at the sky over Cambridge, with stars starting to pierce the violet of dusk. Finally he curled his fingers into a fist, banged the table, and said, “Christianity itself is founded on Jesus’ resurrection—on life after death. And I guess it would take something like that—resurrection— as the ultimate sign.”

  “Has Joshua ever done that?” asked Mark Noll. “Raised someone from the dead?”

  “I asked him that very question on the rooftop at Bethany,” Jon replied. “He said, ‘No, not yet.’”

  “Does that mean he intends to raise someone in the future?”

  “I don’t know. He said he’d leave that to the will of his Father. You realize, of course, that if he does not do a resurrection, this in itself would not disprove his claims?”

  “Of course. But what other parallels between Jesus and Joshua do you think might occur? Do we, say, look for Joshua’s arrest by the Jerusalem authorities? Can we expect another crucifixion—or some such other ugly termination?”

  “No, although I also asked him that question.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that one sacrifice was enough. Anything more would diminish the original one, which was all-sufficient for all time.”

  “Hmmm, good theology,” said Noll. “Which, I might add, we’d expect if our source is authentic!”

  When the chuckling subsided, Jon tried to wrap things up. “All right then, colleagues,” he said. “It’s high time to get practical here, and so I ask again: What, if anything, should the ICO do in response to Joshua Ben-Yosef?”

  The members of the Institute of Christian Origins wrestled the rest of the evening for an answer. It had seemed comparatively easy to assign the various investigative panels in the case of the Rama crisis several years earlier. Then, the evidence was static, but now it was dynamic. They were trying to focus on a moving target that itself was generating more evidence by the month, the week, the day. Because everything was so provisional, therefore, the ICO decided not to issue a statement of any kind.

  The members did, however, authorize Jon to try to get federal help so that medical scientists could check on Joshua’s therapeutic activities in Israel. Perhaps, too, the CIA or FBI could assist Israeli security in combing through Joshua’s past. Some in the ICO who were nearly convinced that Joshua was genuine found such measures “distasteful, but probably necessary in the current climate of skepticism.”

  At home in suburban Weston that night, Jon called his parents in Hannibal. The phone was answered by a firm voice that had apparently escaped the ravages of time: “Erhard Weber here, proud father of the famous Jonathan Weber who saved Christianity. May I help you?”

  Jon was momentarily taken aback, then he burst out laughing. “Dad! When did you get caller ID?”

  “Heh heh.” Erhard chuckled. “Had to, Jon. You wouldn’t believe the number of calls I get simply because I’m your father! Where are you calling from?”

  “Home. I made a quick trip back to the States for an ICO meeting in Cambridge. I return to Israel tomorrow.”

  “Well, tell me, what’s the latest on Joshua? He’s all we talk about at St. John’s.”

  “Yes, and in a hundred thousand other churches across the world. You remember the big theological objection you had to Joshua: Joseph as his father?”

  “Surprise, surprise! He wasn’t after all, was he?”

  “So Joshua claims. Shannon’s now convinced that he’s Jesus, back again after two thousand years.”

  “Hmmm. Is she now?”

  “And what about you? You’re in touch, Dad. You read widely; you’ve seen the media reports—what do you think?”

  After a moment of silence, he replied solemnly, “Well . . . Trudi and I think . . . that Christ has truly returned, Jon.”

  “Quite a different response from the first time you called me about Joshua.”

  “Yes, but that was before I fully understood His intermediate coming. What do you think, Jon?”

  “I’m on the verge, Dad. I’m on the verge. You’ve finally gotten a computer, I understand?”

  “Yup. Good one, too! They finally dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century!”

  “Great! And you’re also on-line?”

  “Of course, Son. We even have electricity here in Hannibal! Horseless buggies too!”

  “Now that’s progress! Okay, I’ll keep feeding you our best information on Joshua via the web. You’ll get special, inside info—more than what we send out over the usual web site. Just click on ‘reply’ to respond in each case, whenever you like.”

  “Fine. Thanks, Jon. And if Joshua does prove to be Jesus, Trudi and I want to fly over there as soon as possible. You’ll have to pull some strings for us, since over at the Mark Twain Travel Agency they tell us we’d have an eleven-month wait!”

  “Will do. Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s off at a Lutheran Women’s Missionary League meeting.” “Hope the coffee, cookies, and green Jell-O are good! Do give her my love.”

  At Logan Airport, just before flying back to Israel, Jon pulled out his cell phone for an important call he should have made several days earlier. Reaching into his wallet, he pulled out an old card on which President Sherwood Bronson had written his private number during the Rama crisis in his first term. That number was supposed to bypass the White House switchboard.

  In view of all the new area codes since then, Jon wondered if the number was still good. He punched it in and heard a repeated ringing tone. Good: at least there was no annoying intercept. More ringing. Rats! Either the president was out, or the number was worthless after all.

  Then a voice came on loud and firm, “Hello! Woody Bronson here.”

  “Mr. President! This is Jonathan Weber—you may remember me from the Rama crisis several years ago?”

  There was silence. Then a mystified tone asked, “The Rama crisis, you say? How do you spell that? And who gave you this number?” Jon’s heart sank. “Well, you yourself did, sir. Remember that archaeological find in Israel that set the world on edge?”

  “Oh, oh, oh, yes, Professor Weber! Yes, of course I remember you! How could I ever forget the man who saved Western civilization?”

  “Oh-ho! Hardly that!” Jon laughed.

  “Or at least Christianity itself,” the president persisted. “What’s up, Jon? Remember, you gave me permission to call you that!”

  “I did indeed, Mr. President. It seems we now have another crisis on our
hands, and I was—”

  “Yes, and I’ll bet I know what it is . . . it’s about Joshua Ben-Yosef, right?”

  “Exactly. I was—”

  “Fact is, I’ve been meaning to call you about Ben-Yosef. That man is so Jesus-like! My pastor over at Foundry Methodist declared from the pulpit last Sunday that our Lord has most probably returned. The whole country’s excited, even that hotbed of cynical expediency called Washington, D.C.!”

  “But first, I think—”

  “Yes, but there’s a real downside, too: people are leaving their jobs in droves, assuming that the last days are finally here, and they actually want to cash in on their accumulated sick leave before the world ends! Can you believe it? Already the economy’s affected. So, what do you think, Jon? Is Joshua for real? And if he is, what should the nation and I do about it?”

  “First, of course, we have to answer the authenticity question, Mr. President, and that’s the reason for my call. You said the whole country is excited, so I do think it’s in the national interest that we know the truth one way or the other, and as soon as possible. If Ben-Yosef’s an impostor, we mustn’t be deceived any longer. But if he’s genuine, we shouldn’t be dragging our feet in recognizing that.” “Absolutely! I agree with every syllable! So how may I help, Jon?” “More than anything else, we have to know even more about Joshua’s past—ideally, all the details of Joshua’s past. If he’s a fake, he will have screwed up somewhere along the line, and we can find it out. But if he’s genuine, Jesus would make no mistakes. Bottom line: we need additional investigative help to coordinate with Shin Bet over in Israel in order to fine-tooth comb every trace left by Joshua in his thirty-plus years.”

  “Right! And you’ll have it! No question that this is in the national interest, so I’ll have both the FBI and the CIA send some of their best people.”

  Jon couldn’t resist asking, “Do you think this time they’ll . . . actually cooperate?”

  Bronson released his well-known, Paul Bunyan-style laugh. “There will be no turf battles on this one, I can assure you!”