A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  “Aahhh . . . thanks, Sandy.”

  “You don’t look very pleased.”

  “I’ll . . . explain shortly.”

  “We’ll send you both a detailed statistical report, of course,” said Fraser. “You’ll learn, for example, the exact number of C-14 ions we counted, that sort of thing.”

  “We can’t thank you enough, Professor Fraser,” said Jon. “Also for using some of your precious bristlecone samples. We’re deeply in your debt! When I’m finally at liberty to reveal the nature of those fragments, I promise that you’ll be the first to know. They are of incalculable importance.”

  “I certainly understand.”

  On the flight back to Washington, Jon felt the same roiling, corrosive, emotional acids that had overtaken him when translating the papyrus for the first time. If, or rather when, the news was announced, the impact across the world would be staggering, and his own future would be held hostage to Rama.

  McHugh was showing admirable restraint in not badgering him for further information, and Jon told him so. “Great of you not to harass me for the facts, Sandy. I’ll spill everything when we get back to Washington. Can we have dinner someplace with lots of privacy?”

  “Sure. The wife and kids are up at Chesapeake Bay. I’ll get us a back booth at Hogate’s.”

  By the second Tanqueray martini, Jon had given the history of the dig. By the salad course, Sanford McHugh was wearing a huge grin at the news that Joseph of Arimathea’s estate, tomb, and even remains had been discovered, along with the titu-lus. A staunch Roman Catholic, he found the tidings ever so congenial to his faith. It was during the entrée that Jon looked about to make sure he was not overheard and then read his translation of the papyrus.

  The transformation in Sandy’s appearance was so quick and alarming that Jon feared for his health. Globules of sweat erupted across his freckled brow and cheeks. His ruddy complexion had drained off to a pasty gray. The man was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly he got up from the table and hurried to the rest room, where he reached the toilet just in time to surrender his dinner.

  “Hold on, Sandy,” said Jon, as he helped him back to the table. “There’s still a . . . a very remote possibility that a forger could have used the blank beginning or end of a genuinely ancient papyrus for writing material, and we’d get the same C-14 results. That’s why we have to discuss other tests as well.”

  That seemed to revive Sandy somewhat. He fired a volley of questions at Jon concerning the tests at Rehovot, and asked for a detailed description of all artifacts that had been discovered inside the cavern. They spent the rest of the evening discussing the most appropriate tests for each.

  When Sandy saw him off at Dulles the next day, Jon’s closing comment hardly needed expression: “You see, now, why all this had to be kept utterly confidential?”

  Sandy merely threw up his hands and bowed his head, almost in despair.

  THIRTEEN

  Again, Jennings’s tall dome crowned with orange sun hat towered above the waiting crowd at Ben Gurion Airport. Again Jon told him he should have sent Clive Brampton or one of the students instead.

  “Not on your life, Jonathan. I had to know the results, obviously! What did you find?”

  “Tell you on the way back to Ramallah.”

  Jon’s report on his experiences in Arizona and Washington took half the trip. At first, Jennings said very little in response, but then he groaned, shook his head, and warned, “Maybe we no longer have a dig, Jonathan, but a snarling, hissing fuse instead, which is about to set off a catastrophic explosion! You’re sure the tests were managed properly?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. In fact, the results were quite impressively proven by comparison with samples from a bristlecone pine that was growing in Nevada just about the time Herod the Great was finishing the Temple in Jerusalem.”

  Again Jennings shook his head. “Well, what now?” he asked.

  Jon detailed some of the testing plans he and Sandy McHugh had projected for the other artifacts they had uncovered in the cavern.

  At the hotel that night, he scrutinized papyrus prints for the dozenth time while Jennings paced the workroom, hands behind his back, trying to decide his next move. “If only we could somehow test the writing alone—the ink—to see if it’s ancient or recent. But I suppose that’s impossible, Jonathan?”

  “Afraid so, for two reasons. One, no archaeologist would ever destroy any writing for such a test. And two, what if he did? He’d get only an infinitesimal amount of carbon from the ink—too small even for TAMS. No, I think we’ll have to go back to writing style for an answer. And we still have that dialect problem with our ‘untranslatables.’”

  Jennings stopped, stretched out his arms, and said, “Well, then, we’d best make that pilgrimage down to Mount Sinai, don’t you think?”

  “I think so. Alexandros could well be our last resort. Why not call Montaigne and have him arrange an appointment with our archimandrite friend?”

  When she heard that her father and Jon were planning a trip to Mount Sinai, Shannon begged to go along. Why miss seeing the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments?

  “Fine, my dear. You can help us drive,” said Jennings.

  “And cook our meals if we get marooned in the desert,” Jon added.

  “Then you’d starve,” she retorted smartly. “I go along as an equal or not at all.”

  “Only kidding, Shannon! Only kidding.”

  “So was I,” she laughed. “I’m really not that hard to get along with, Jon.”

  They stocked their Land Rover with extra jerry cans of gasoline and water jugs, since the trip across the Sinai Desert to Saint Catherine’s would not be easy. They also carried emergency food supplies and first-aid materials, as well as two spare tires, since the wadi shortcut to Mount Sinai was studded with flint rock that had a great appetite for rolling rubber. The most important part of the cargo, however, were the papyrus photographs. Cromwell had done a second set of the document under glass, as well as special enlargement photos of the remaining “untranslatables,” along with the sentences in which they appeared.

  Setting out well before sunrise, they reached the Negev in the stillcool of the morning, Jennings providing a running commentary on the topography all the way to Elat and the Gulf, where they had lunch. Since all three had valid Egyptian visas, the border crossing at Elat went smoothly enough, and they continued south along the coast until they turned westward onto the wadi road that led to Mount Sinai.

  Here the trip turned into first-class adventure. Although it was getting unbearably hot, Jennings had fallen asleep, his lanky frame sprawled across the backseat. Jon was perspiring at the wheel in front with Shannon, using the four-wheel drive to all possible advantage in maneuvering the vehicle through a lunar landscape of hills in polychrome earth tones. While dodging boulders and vehicle-devouring chasms at the very shoulders of the wadi road, he resumed his favorite sport—probing Shannon’s personal relation-ships, especially including Gideon Ben-Yaakov.

  “Why are you always asking me about Gideon, Jon? Do you disapprove? Are you anti-Semitic or something?”

  “No, of course I don’t disapprove. And even if I did, what difference would it make? And no, I’m not anti-Semitic. I was only wondering if you’d checked everything out. Would your children, for example, be raised Christian or Jewish?”

  “Gideon’s a secular Jew, not a religious one. Since I’m a Gentile, the kids wouldn’t automatically be Jewish—you have to have a Jewish mama for that. But they could become Jews—and Israeli citizens—later.”

  “Are those your plans?”

  “I don’t know, Jon. At first I wanted any child of mine to be baptized Christian in general, Church of England in particular. My mother was an Irish Catholic, of course, but I was raised Anglican by my father.”

  “You say, ‘at first’ you wanted your kids baptized. What now?”

  “Well . . . so far as my faith is concerned, I . . . I’m reeling, Jon.
Reeling. Now I don’t know what to think . . . what to believe. When you get down to basics, the reason Christianity succeeded so incredibly is because it promises ‘the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’—those phrases at the end of

  The Creed. Now it seems that even Jesus, the Founder, didn’t make it. Which would also cut out his divinity, of course—”

  “Hold it, Shannon. Let’s not draw any conclusions—theological or otherwise—until we’re sure of what we have here.”

  “Yes, yes . . . I know. But, between the two of us, how in bloody blazes could anyone have faked all this? We troweled it all clear, Jon. We were there! ”

  “I . . . we . . . don’t have the answers yet, Shannon, if there are any. But back to you and Gideon—”

  “You’re a blinking broken record, Jon! I may marry the man. I may even convert to Judaism if Christianity is shot. Or I may not.”

  “May not convert? Or may not marry the man?”

  “All of the above.”

  “Don’t you love him?”

  “Yes . . . but not all the time. I think love comes and goes. Maybe I’m not entirely sure what love even is.”

  “I’m sure,” said Jon. Love, to him, now began and ended with the radiant woman sitting next to him. Love was Shannon. Shannon was love.

  “Why are you so sure?” she asked, “And—”

  Suddenly a huge cavity yawned open in the road that threatened to devour the front end of the Rover. Jon screeched his brakes, swerved to the left, and missed it by inches.

  Jennings, jolted awake, cried, “Merciful Minerva, Jon! I know we have a problem on our hands, but let’s not get suicidal!”

  “He couldn’t help it, Papa,” said Shannon. “We shouldn’t have used the wadi route. This road was designed in hell. So was this climate!”

  After grinding, grueling hours that exhausted their water supply, they finally arrived at the broad, sloping plain in front of Mount Sinai.

  “Here, presumably, the Israelites pitched their tents while Moses went up into the mountain,” Jon explained. “And see that walled compound on the lower side of the mountain? That’s the Monastery of Saint Catherine—our goal—a fabulous place! See those walls? They’re a meter thick, and still the very same ones the Byzantine Emperor Justinian erected in the sixth century to guard the monks from desert marauders.”

  “Tell her about Tischendorf, Jonathan,” came a voice from the backseat.

  “Aha! I give you the tale of Constantin Tischendorf,” said Jon, magisterially. “He was a German scholar in the last century who got fed up with critics claiming the Gospels were late writings and untrustworthy. He would have loved nothing more than to discover the original Gospel manuscripts. But, failing that, he correctly assumed that the earlier the manuscript, the better. And so he came here on camelback in 1844, suspecting that the holy men of the desert might have some ancient documents in their archives. Well, they certainly did, but—idiotically—they were using parchment pages of what proved to be the world’s oldest Bible as waste paper! Tischendorf rescued what was left of those precious parchments and later borrowed a volume of them—the Codex Sinaiticus—in order to publish his critical edition.

  “The Russian Czar gave the monks nine thousand rubles for it, you English bought it from the Russians, and today it’s in the British Museum. Meanwhile, the monks here want it back, and quite obviously they’re no longer in the lending library business!”

  “What’s the date on the Sinaiticus?” Shannon inquired.

  “A little before AD 350. In 1975 they even dis-covered some of the missing pages of the Sinaiticus here. With any luck, we may get to see them.”

  “Quite a tale! You know, Jon, you’d do well as a tour guide,” she quipped. “So you’ll still have some-thing to fall back on when our discoveries blow Christianity out of the water.”

  “Try to control yourself, Shannon,” said Jennings.

  “Don’t be such a fuddyduddy, Papa. You’re far too serious! In another life, you were William Gladstone.”

  Jon stopped the Rover at the monastery gate, got out, and pulled a cord that rang a small bell. “Be glad we have a gate,” he said. “When Tischendorf got here, there was no door. They lowered a bar imbedded in a rope for him to stand on, and then winched him up over the wall!”

  An ancient porter with black skin and white beard appeared, clothed from neck to toe in a cream-colored galabiya. Opening the gate, he beckoned them inside and led the way across a stone courtyard. But they stopped following when they came to a well. Jon wound up a bucket of crystal cold water, and they drank it dry.

  At the door of the monastery, a stocky, bearded figure received them, clad totally in black. He was the abbot, Archbishop Paulos Kalaramas, who greeted them with quaint formality. “Our abode is your abode, my friends, and our food and drink are yours as well. Our fare is humble, but you will, I think, find it wholesome.”

  “Thank you, Beloved-of-God,” said Jennings, hoping the English translation of the Greek form of address to an abbot would suffice. “It’s very kind of you to extend this hospitality.”

  “I regret, honored friends, that Brother Alexandros is not here to greet you personally. He was very tired and has returned to his quarters. You may find this strange, but his vast learning has made him—how do you call it—a little ‘eccentric’ . . . yes?”

  “No matter,” said Jennings. “We’re grateful indeed that no less than the abbot himself extends us this welcome.”

  After a simple supper, garnished with a little palm wine, the abbot took them on a tour of the premises, identifying the various mosaics and icons inside the Chapel of the Burning Bush, as well as the library where Tischendorf discovered the Sinaiticus. Then he conducted them to separate monastic cells and bade them good night.

  “Anybody know where I can get a cold beer?” Shannon whispered to Jon.

  “Ah-ah-ah! It all begins with self-denial.”

  “Shut up, Jon!”

  “And we must also cleanse our speech patterns in this holy place, Miss Jennings. There’s a good little girl.” He gave her a chaste good-night kiss on the check. She giggled and tickled his ribs.

  “Ky-ri-e elei-son . . . Chris-te elei-son . . . Ky-ri-e elei-son.” The chanting that implored the Lord and Christ to have mercy awakened them at dawn the next morning. The monks were already at matins, and the rich melodies of Greek Orthodox worship resonated throughout the compound. Jon found himself torn between admiration for the centuries-old liturgy and concern for what would happen to that liturgy—indeed, all liturgies—should the papyrus finally prove authentic.

  After a simple breakfast of tea, dark bread, and honey, the Archimandrite Alexandros presented himself, a tall, gaunt ascetic, gowned like the others in black, from cylindrical edged hat to shoes. His mane of hair, like his full and flowing beard, was a silver-gray and black mix, and his eyebrows were two minor forests of the same.

  “I bid you welcome in the holy name of our Lord,” he said, bowing to his guests. His voice was such a deep and resonant bass, it might have been the Lord Himself speaking. “Père Montaigne said that my small talents might be of some use to you in appraising a papyrus you have discovered. Please to join me in my office.”

  Alexandros led them to a study cell lined with books from floor to ceiling on all four sides. After brief amenities, Jon asked him to view first the enlargements of the few remaining phrases that had resisted all efforts at translation. In the process, he asked him also to evaluate the time frame for the scripts in question, providing samples from both the letter and the Nicodemus postscript.

  Alexandros studied the photographs for some time and then replied, “I am pleased to answer your second question first. These are the work of two different hands, but both hands wrote, I would judge, from the time of Herod until . . . I would say . . . until the Roman conquest.”

  “About AD 70?” Jennings inquired.

  “Of course.” He studied the photographs intensely. “Yes . . .
without question. I would place them at that time. Your first samples seem to come from the hill country of Palestine . . . how you say . . . a countryside version of Aramaic?”

  “Rural dialect?”

  “Yes, rural dialect. Exactly.”

  Jon, Jennings, and Shannon exchanged meaning-ful glances.

  “And this last sample, I think, came from Judea, probably the Jerusalem area.”

  “Are you able to translate these sentences, hon-ored Archimandrite?” asked Jon, pointing to the “untranslatables.”

  “Why do you not show me the whole document?”

  “We will very shortly.”

  “Well, then . . .” He studied the phrases that Jon had circled with red pen. “Your sentence reads, ‘The rabbi Yeshua whom we buried in my sepulcher a score and seven years ago during the . . . ah . . . the government, the administration of Pontius Pilatus.’ The Aramaic is a corruption from the Greek hegemonia. Is that clear? Yes?

  “Well, then, we go on to your second problem: ‘The next morning we drove them—ah—we drove the wagon to Rama, where we put . . . put into the ground again the rabbi . . . in the sarcophagus I had—ah—built for myself.’ Does that make sense for you?”

  “Yes, it surely does,” said Jon. “And I must congratulate you on your great command of Aramaic!”

  “It is nothing,” he protested. “Then, to your final problem. Let me see. It reads: ‘We were not able to kill by drowning the very’—what is the word in English?—‘the very corks, the very floatings’ . . . fishermen use them in their nets . . .”

  “Buoys?” Shannon volunteered.

  “Yes, ‘the very buoys that had defeated your grief.’”

  Jon looked at Jennings and said, “Well, that’s it. We have it all now.” He also continued to marvel at Alexandros, a very much living fossil who could read primitive Aramaic on sight almost as if it were the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. He made Montaigne and himself look like amateurs. “Again, I must express my astonishment at your superb command of Aramaic, Brother Alexandros!”