More Than a Skeleton

by Paul L Maier

  Jon looked at Shannon with raised eyebrows and whispered, “Maybe he shouldn’t have attempted this one.”

  “Have some faith, Jon.”

  Several moments later, however, the wind died down to a whisper. In less than a minute, the rain and hail stopped. Seconds after that, the sun reappeared, surrounded by a clearing sky in glorious Galilean blue.

  Shannon looked at Jon, her face transformed. “What manner of man is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?” she asked, as had Jesus’ disciples twenty centuries earlier.

  A barrage of questions continued in the great hall after lunch. Patiently Joshua fielded them all, even some that were less than apt. Since he had never held a press conference and did not intend to, this was as close to one as this privileged group would ever get.

  By midafternoon, someone in Jon’s marginal category inquired of Joshua, “Which of the various divisions in Christianity comes closest to God’s truth in their beliefs, Rabbi? The Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or one of the Protestant denominations? And, if the last, which one?”

  A great silence descended on the room. Probably it was the one question the world’s two billion Christians most wanted answered— each one, of course, assuming that his or her own church body’s doctrine and practice came closest to what Jesus had taught.

  Laughter suddenly pierced the silence, Joshua’s laughter. “Do you realize that if I answered that question by announcing some sort of ‘winner,’ the rest of Christendom would be deeply disappointed? And the winner would be ruined by pride and arrogance in telling everyone else, ‘See: we’ve been right the whole time!’”

  Joshua paused to let that sink in. Then he continued, “In His great and permissive providence, our heavenly Father knows that humanity is not a monolith. He knows that people will respond to His revelation in widely different ways. Some believers are more emotionally driven in their personalities and therefore in their worship. Others are more rationally attuned and value the head over the heart. And so we must thank God that there are the various Eastern Orthodox church bodies that stress the mysteries of the faith and cultivate their unbroken link with earliest Christianity. We must thank God that there are Roman Catholics who take their statistical majority so seriously and value the traditions and liturgies of the church. We must thank God that there are Lutherans who, like Saint Paul, accent the central importance of how God truly forgives sins by His grace and through faith in Christ Jesus. We must thank God that there are Anglicans who celebrate the historical leadership of the bishops, as well as their Methodist heirs who specialize in sanctification. We must thank God for Baptists and their zeal for missions, Presbyterians and Reformed for their worship of the sovereignty of God. And so it goes—right down to South Sea Islanders in grass skirts, beating their drums in resonance to the Creator.”

  Silence reigned again. “Not that disunity is God’s ideal,” Joshua continued. “In the Upper Room on that terrible Thursday night, I prayed that you might all be one. And you are all one, at least regarding the essentials of the faith. Greater unity will certainly come before I return to the Father.”

  The rest of the conclave was devoted to practical directives as to how the Seventy and others could missionize successfully in what many were calling a post-Christian world. Finally, Joshua closed the conference with a brief devotion and benediction that again held everyone in thrall.

  It had been Jesus’ way with words that had captivated crowds the first time around, Jon recalled. And it was Joshua’s way with words that was doing the same thing now. It was, far and away, the most extraordinary weekend any of them had ever spent.

  On the drive back to Jerusalem, Jon and Shannon did not converse much. She was smart enough to quit trying to bring him to a decision regarding Joshua. A nagging “Okay, you’ve seen all the evidence! How can you possibly doubt?” would hardly have been helpful.

  For his part, Jon was starting to see his qualms being suffocated under massive layers of proof. At one point that weekend, he thought that he had spotted the chink, when Joshua had apparently not known about the Sepphoris mosaic being found. Yet not only had he explained that perfectly, Jon reflected, but everything would have been much less credible had Joshua immediately cited the mosaic in telling of his youth. In that case, he might conceivably have “planted” the piece as part of his delusionary scheming. Jon was no stranger to archaeological frauds. But it was he himself, not Joshua, who had brought up Sepphoris in their discussions.

  When they reached Tiberias, Jon said, “Let’s do the Plaza for dinner, okay?”

  “Yes, darling!” She smiled. “More than okay!”

  They drove into the hotel parking lot and exchanged a long, lingering kiss. Once again they recalled that dinner several years earlier when they had fallen so totally in love. The week that followed was a magnificent mélange of the greatest joy they had ever known. In the dining room, Jon asked the maitre d’ for the table at the northwestern corner, and he kindly obliged. “Have you been here before?” he asked, while lighting the candles.

  “Oh yes. Yes indeed!” Shannon replied with a great smile.

  As he picked up the menu, Jon looked at the wall and said, “I wonder what they did with the plaque . . .”

  “What plaque?”

  “The one that says, ‘At this table, Jonathan Weber and Shannon Jennings fell hopelessly in love.’ ”

  She reached over to caress the back of Jon’s hand. “I have an idea,” she whispered. “Let’s do the Plaza for overnight too, okay?”

  “More than okay, my darling!”

  They ate dinner in haste, passing up dessert. Fortunately, a room was available so that Jon would not have to physically evict its occupants. Once inside the room, he enclosed her in a rapturous embrace— until she whispered, “Do you think Joshua will see us?”

  He stopped, broke out laughing, and said, “If so, he’ll be mighty jealous!”

  “Jon!”

  “Sorry, darling! Forgive the impiety?”

  “I love you, Jon.”

  His kiss said the same thing.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sam Rosenzweig, FBI,” said the tall figure with dark glasses as he stood in the doorway of Jon’s office at Hebrew University, flashing his identification.

  “Sol Falkenburg, CIA,” said the man next to him, a head shorter but just as quick with his credentials.

  “Welcome, gentlemen! Come in, come in!” said Jon, closing the door behind them. “I’m Jon Weber, and this is Gideon Ben-Yaakov, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.” After a round of handshakes, Jon ordered a carafe of coffee and asked them all to sit down. Turning to the visiting Americans, he said, “Thanks for flying over here so quickly, gentlemen.”

  “As if we had a choice?” said Falkenburg. “The president was quite insistent—command performance stuff.”

  “And for good reason,” said Jon. “You’re clued in to the general situation?”

  “Sure, like much of the world, it seems,” said Rosenzweig. “It’s hard to believe that one of our people could attract so much attention— unless, of course, he’s . . . the Christ Himself!”

  “ ‘One of our people’ is the key phrase,” said Jon. “You’re both Jewish, I hope? You both know Hebrew?”

  “As well as English in my case,” said Rosenzweig. “The CIA will have to speak for itself.”

  “Here too,” said Falkenburg.

  “Excellent. By the way, are you religious Jews or secular?”

  “We’re secular,” said Rosenzweig. “Why?”

  “Fine. Nothing whatever against Judaism, mind you. It’s just that we don’t want any anti-Semites down the pike complaining that the Joshua investigation was stacked with ‘Jewish anti-Christians.’

  We badly need you and Gideon Ben-Yaakov here for your linguistic skills: Hebrew in all its dialects, especially Ashkenazi and Sephardi, okay?”

  All nodded.

  “Fine,” Jon resumed. “Now let’s begin with confessio
n . . . always good for the soul. We may have muddied the waters a bit in the early phases of this investigation. It started with my checking on the circumstances of Ben-Yosef’s birth in Bethlehem and several investigative reporters from U.S. News doing the same for his youth and education up in Galilee. Still, I think we uncovered some rather important information, all of which is spelled out in these files you’ll each receive.

  “Dr. Ben-Yaakov here became involved when we wanted to determine if Shin Bet was doing any surveillance on Joshua, and he continues to be our link with Israeli security. And yes, Shin Bet has had a tail on Joshua over the past months, with little more to report than what we all read in the newspapers.

  “Meanwhile, my wife, Shannon, and I have had some very significant personal contacts with Joshua. In all of them, we’ve found that the man is anything but subversive. In fact, he’s one of the most extraordinary—no, the most extraordinary—individual we’ve ever met, a multi-faceted genius with incredible charisma and so many other positive attributes and skills that—”

  “Pardon me, Professor Weber,” Rosenzweig interposed, “but we’re trained to go after spies, criminals, subversives, saboteurs. Why are we checking up on Mr. Wonderful?”

  “Well, I think you know the answer. Quite soon, two billion people on this planet are going to have to decide if Mr. Wonderful is just some bright guy—or the returned version of Jesus Christ, whom Christians call the Son of God. And the other four billion in the world are going to be impacted as well. I’m sure President Bronson has filled you in on the rest and how our national economy got involved: people leaving their jobs, selling everything they have to pack up and come here as pilgrims, et cetera?”

  Both agents nodded.

  “Well, our investigation should try to get a leg up on the rest of the world and find evidence on Joshua one way or the other.”

  “I think we have the picture,” said Falkenburg.

  “All right, then. Gideon, you were brilliant in the Rama crisis. Let’s hear your thoughts on how we should coordinate this investigation.”

  Gideon pulled the pipe out of his mouth—which he had been smoking near an open window, in deference to the others—and said, “Shin Bet will cooperate in any way we think best, Jon. They’re ready to add personnel, if necessary, and more importantly, they’ll put their labs at our disposal. I’d suggest that we convene a meeting of the U.S. News people—they’re still here in Israel, I understand— together with Noah Friedmann, the director of Shin Bet, and all of us here. Then we can decide on our best strategy and mark off appropriate investigational vectors—who’s in charge of which turf— that kind of thing.”

  Falkenburg nodded and said, “That’s the best way to go. The CIA can provide additional manpower, if necessary, as can the FBI, I’m sure. Our best contribution could be to provide any exotic lab tests that may become necessary.”

  “Good.” Jon nodded. “So the FBI and CIA will cooperate and share information? Pardon the question, but you do remember what happened before 9/11?”

  “Who can forget?” said Rosenzweig, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Fine,” said Jon. “We’re all in agreement, then. Where shall we hold our first meeting?”

  “Not here,” said Gideon. “There’s always a bunch of media people.”

  “How well I know!”

  “Why not meet in our Israel Antiquities Authority conference room at the Rockefeller Museum? That should confuse the media hounds, no?”

  “Good!” Jon agreed. “Please give me your local addresses and phone numbers, gentlemen. I’ll have my secretary call around for an optimal date and time. Meanwhile, I need not tell you how important absolute secrecy is in this matter. If the world learns that criminal investigative agencies are on the trail of the man many believe to be the holy, innocent Savior of the world, it would be a public relations nightmare!”

  Their agreement was obvious.

  “And more than that,” Jon continued, “our own lives could also be in danger from fanatics—of which organized religion, unfortunately, has too many!”

  Two days later, Jon’s cell phone rang as he was walking to his university symposium.

  “Jon? Naomi Ben-Yaakov here.”

  “Hello, lovely one! I hope you’re calling about the grout up at Sepphoris . . .”

  “Precisely. I asked two of Gideon’s lab colleagues in the IAA to be part of the team, and our test results just came in.”

  “Great! What did you find?”

  “Well, the mosaic seems authentic enough. I only wish we could have checked something organic up there: then carbon-14 could have been used, of course, to find the age of the mosaic. But stone is stone. Grout is grout. The assay comparison, however, went very well. We took small samples of the grout in the mosaic, as well as from the synagogue floor, and compared them in our laboratory here. We found the same gypsum/lime materials and very nearly the same ratios of materials in the mix.”

  “Okay, but what about the tessera themselves? Do they match those in the synagogue floor?”

  “Yes. The same pale yellows, the vermilions, and the rest. Those on the synagogue floor are first cousins, if not siblings.”

  “And the shapes?”

  “Same cuts. Same angles.”

  Jon was silent for several moments. Then he asked, “Well, no question then, is there?”

  “None that I can see. The mosaic looks to be the real thing.”

  A jumble of staggering thoughts jostled one another in Jon’s mind. Was it really possible, he asked himself again, that young Jesus was already so sure of His messianic role that He could predict not only His own death and resurrection, but also His next coming? And how completely Joshua had confirmed it—and, in fact, how had it confirmed Joshua?

  “Jon? Are you still there?”

  “Oh, sorry, Naomi: I was woolgathering. My . . . profound thanks to you and your staff!”

  Jon skipped lunch that day for a solo stroll along the summit of the Mount of Olives. In a very real sense, the more the evidence piled up in support of Joshua, the greater the problem for him. He felt the acids of stress starting to sear into his very soul. For weeks now, he had tried what he admitted were various “alkalines of avoidance” to neutralize them, but without success. Joshua—sham or Savior, quack or Christ, guller or God? Decide he was Christ when he was not? That would be a devastating blow to his reputation, imprinting a haunting defect onto his scholarship and theology. Still, people can recover from their errors.

  But decide Joshua was not Christ when he was? Here there were cosmic consequences. In episode after episode, the Gospels were not very supportive of those who rejected Jesus. It wasn’t fair. Jesus’ first time around, two thousand years ago, should have been enough. Now, it seemed, a double dose of faith was required of believers. Not fair. Not fair at all!

  “God help me!” he said aloud, while walking back slowly to the university. It was not an expression for Jon. It was a prayer.

  The first meeting of the investigation panel took place four days later. Aside from Jon and his associate, Richard Ferris, Jeffery Sheler was there with two of the other U.S. News personnel. They passed out several files of material to other panel members, asking only for first publication rights once the investigation was complete. Several more Hebrew-speaking CIA and FBI operatives had arrived from the States to join forces with Shin Bet and its representatives, including the director, Noah Friedmann.

  Jon was particularly impressed with Friedmann, a well-built veteran of the Six-Day War who had lost an eye in combat and now sported a patch in the tradition of another Israeli hero, Moshe Dayan. With leather-tan skin, hair the color of gray steel, and a crew cut, Friedmann never had any trouble getting people to listen to what he had to say. Certainly he spoke for Shin Bet—Israel’s FBI—but, most convincingly, he spoke for himself.

  Three women were also present: Naomi Ben-Yaakov, to report on the Sepphoris mosaic; Shannon, to tell of her encounters with Joshua; and Esther Meir, Jon’s
office secretary at Hebrew University, who would take notes. Jon asked Gideon to chair the conference, because, as he said, “my own mouth will be too active for the objectivity and restraint necessary in a chairman.”

  Early in the conclave, Naomi asked what her test of the Sepphoris mosaic had to do with the Ben-Yosef phenomenon. Almost gingerly, Jon reported the meaning that he and Shannon had teased out. His words were met with gaping stares of incredulity.

  Finally Gideon exploded, “Do you mean, Jon, that young Jesus, an apprentice maybe helping his father build the synagogue at Sepphoris, played around with tessera to predict His own death, resurrection, and return?!”

  “That’s merely one option—admittedly, a wild one. All we can say for certain is that we do have an early first-century provenance for the mosaic.”

  Gideon threw up his hands. “All right, but I hope you’ll pardon me if, as a non-Christian, I find that explanation borderline bizarre! ” “Of course!” Jon laughed. “I, as a Christian, find the very same thing!”

  “Still,” Shannon interposed, “according to Christian theology, the young Jesus could have accomplished exactly that, however weird it may seem.” She now went on to report Joshua’s response to the mosaic up in Galilee.

  Gideon stared at Shannon boggle-eyed. Then he smiled a little indulgently and said, “Ah yes, we have our miracle stories in Judaism also.”

  The conference debate continued. One day, the transcript of those deliberations would form an intriguing chapter in Sheler’s book. Now, however, it meant unpacking a crate-load of information on Joshua, sifting through it for evidence, and then evaluating that evidence. The conference became a two-day affair.

  At the close, Jon wearily summed it up: “Obviously, our information is still spotty in places. We should have done a rundown on Joshua’s twelve disciples as well, and that’s the first order of business. Even at some points in Joshua’s career, our data is thin, particularly his university years in Haifa. For both of these shallow spots, our Hebrew-speaking agents will be especially necessary. And, of course, anything new from Joshua’s childhood and youth will be more than welcome.”