A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  “It is nothing. I learned old Aramaic at some villages in Syria. But when may I see the whole document?”

  “Now.” Jon handed him Cromwell’s most recent photographs of the papyrus. “But please be prepared for a shock, Brother Alexandros, a very great shock.”

  The monk looked at Jon strangely and started reading. Almost maddeningly, his face registered no response but for a tightening of the eyes as he reached critical sections of the text. Having read the document, he now reread it, his lips silently mouthing a translation into his native Greek. When he had finally finished, Alexandros looked up and asked, “Where did you find this?”

  Jon recounted the history of the dig, the discovery of the cavern, and all its contents. As he did so, the constriction in Alexandros’s eyes seemed to tighten. Then he studied the copy of the papyrus text for another considerable time, during which not a sound was heard. At last he stood up and walked slowly back and forth across his study, lost in thought, and seemingly oblivious to their presence. Again he stopped abruptly and devoted another quarter hour to a close scrutiny of the papyrus copy and particularly the enlargements, using a magnifying glass.

  Again he paced the chamber, chin in hand. Abruptly he stopped and said, “I will consider this further. Please to meet me after lunch?”

  “Certainly.”

  After lunch, however, Alexandros asked for more time. “I must consult other old works in Aramaic to . . . to compare the writing. Please to meet me after supper.”

  As they left, Shannon leaned over and whispered to Jon, “His voice sounds like a laryngitic hippo gargling at the bottom of a cave.”

  “A boy soprano he is not,” Jon agreed.

  Jennings and Jon spent the afternoon examining the monastery library. First they would build confidence in their hosts, they decided, and on the morrow ask for permission to look, however briefly, at the newly discovered Sinaiticus parchments. Jon wondered if they might somehow have a bearing on the Vaticanus problem. Shannon, meanwhile, went out to climb the foothills of Mount Sinai.

  Just before dinner, the abbot graciously conducted them to privileged sections of the monastery not shown to visitors at St. Catherine’s, such as the kitchen, disciplinary cells for recalcitrant monks, and the charnel house. The last, in the rear of the compound, sheltered the remains of hundreds of monks from earlier centuries, their bones stacked up in one area, and their skulls neatly pyramided in another, all awaiting the great day of resurrection.

  Jon and Jennings shot immediate glances at each other, shouting what remained unsaid: “Are we just in the process of destroying the very hope for which this charnel house—indeed, this monastery—was built?”

  On the way to the dining hall, Jon whispered, “All those smiling skulls, Austin . . . each of them seemed to have eyes in those hollow sockets . . . eyes that seemed to know what we’re about . . . eyes that seemed to plead, ‘Don’t take the Resurrection away from us!’”

  “‘Our one and only hope!’ Yes, Jon, I heard them too. Good Lord! In that environment, Easter is no theoretical nicety!”

  Alexandros asked them to come up to his study cell after supper. When they were all seated, he touched the tips of his long fingers together, stared at them with deep brown eyes that had an almost fearful fluorescence, and said, “Your papyrus is false. It is a . . . an invention . . . how you say? . . . a forgery. It is a forgery.” He said nothing more.

  Jon, who was stunned when the evidence had so strongly supported the authenticity of their finds, was nearly as stunned by Alexandros’s statement.

  “What leads you to that conclusion?” he asked.

  Instantly, Alexandros clenched both his fists and pounded them down on his desk, shrieking, “Because our Lord rose from the dead! How could His bones be in any grave? How, I ask you?” His lips trembled, his hands quivered, his eyes filled with tears. Then he stood up and shouted, “And so that papyrus is either a modern forgery, an ancient forgery, or an invention of the devil!” He waved his arms as if he were preaching to a multitude of thousands rather than three people.

  Shannon and the men were too shocked to respond. Jon studied the floor of the cell to avoid having to look at the manic monk. But at last Alexandros seemed to gain control of himself and said, “Please to excuse me for a moment.”

  He walked into an adjoining bedroom cell, where he bent over a basin of water and splashed sobriety and composure onto his face. Then he returned to them and said, “I beg your forgiveness, my friends. The papyrus . . . troubles me very deeply.”

  “It troubles us, too, Brother Alexandros,” said Jennings.

  “But again,” Jon persisted, “how did you detect a forgery?”

  “It is a matter of how the pen was held in the writing, for one thing. I can show you when I see the original. Where do you have it?”

  “At the Rockefeller Museum laboratory.”

  “Yes, of course.” Alexandros sat down slowly and stroked his long black beard. “Ah . . . would you please to present me a note of authorization so that I might look at the papyrus when I go again to Jerusalem?”

  “Yes . . . we’d be glad to send you an authorization,” said Jennings. “Agreed, Jonathan?”

  “Agreed. Of course.”

  “Ah . . . my problem is this, honored friends. I plan to be in Jerusalem very shortly, and I would prefer, if possible, to have your written permission now. I will, of course, call you when I reach the museum.”

  Jon opened his attaché case, took out one of his letterheads, and handed it to Jennings, who wrote out the authorization, which Jon countersigned. Alexandros received it with thanks and then asked, “Who knows about the papyrus besides you three? Père Montaigne?”

  “Yes. But we’ve tried to keep this as secret as humanly possible.”

  “Yes. You surely must! ”

  “And the photographs, the negatives. Where are they?”

  “At our headquarters in Ramallah.”

  “Fine, fine. But now, my friends, I think you should retire early, because I would like to do you a favor, perhaps to . . . how you say? . . . make up for my poor behavior. Have you ever seen the sunrise from the top of Mount Sinai?”

  “I’ve never climbed Sinai,” said Jennings. “Nor has Shannon. Have you, Jon?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, I would like to guide you up the holy mountain. It is a . . . a magnificent spiritual experience. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, indeed!” Shannon cried, as the men smiled their assent.

  “But we must arise very early. Otherwise it will be too hot to make the climb.”

  “Fine.”

  “The porter will knock on your doors at two o’clock in the morning. We begin to climb a half hour later.”

  They started their trek in total starlight. The blazing oven of the daytime desert had cooled to an enchanted realm of fragrant breezes, spangled with the greatest profusion of stars they had ever seen and arched by a broad, snowy belt of Milky Way.

  “Good heavens! This is majestic . . . awesome!” Shannon sighed.

  “There’s no pollution in the desert,” her father explained. “No competing city lights.”

  “‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Alexandros bellowed in front of them, “‘and the firmament shows his handiwork,’ just as the psalmist says!”

  “That voice of his spooks me out,” Shannon whispered to Jon. “He’d make a good Boris Godunov.”

  “More like Rasputin, I’d say.”

  The path of pink granite rock was strangely visible in the starlight and led ever upward. It began as a comfortable grade, but soon the nearly three-hour climb grew precipitous and demanding. Yet the towering silhouette of their guide stalked on, taciturn and relentless. Several times Jon had to beg him to halt so that Jennings could catch up and regain his breath. Alexandros stopped only grudgingly, but then quickly resumed the climb, almost as one possessed.

  They were beginning to have second thoughts about this “favor” of Alex
andros when dawn finally exploded over the mountain peaks, precipices, and valleys about them, unveiling a panorama of breath-taking splendor. Twenty minutes later they finally reached a tiny chapel at the summit, just as a ruddy golden yolk of sun orbed onto the eastern horizon.

  “Behold the hand of God,” said Alexandros, sweeping his arm in all directions. “Moses may have used this path up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. Or he could have used a steeper one to the south. Let me show you. Come here to the other side of the chapel.”

  Alexandros guided them to the edge of the summit precipice and pointed downward. As they craned their necks warily over the edge to peer at a drop-off hundreds of feet down the southern face of Mount Sinai, he moved behind them and suddenly rammed into Jennings and Jon with both arms, pitching them headlong over the edge of the cliff.

  Shannon screamed, and he lunged for her. She dodged him desperately and ran down the mountain path they had just used. Recovering instantly, Alexandros pulled up his confining robe with one hand and pivoted across the rocks with the other, scampering over ledges to cut across several switch-backs on the path to intercept her.

  Pulling out of a hairpin turn, Shannon saw the lofty hulk blocking her way. Shrieking, she ran back up the path. She was almost to the summit again when a powerful hand locked onto her right shoulder and pulled her to a halt.

  Crying for help but with no one to hear, she turned to fight him off. But it was no contest whatever. He sneered at her desperate pummeling and grabbed her around the waist, dragging her toward the precipice. She screamed, struggled, and kicked, trying to break his hold, but he merely locked on to her left wrist with a grip of iron and hauled her over the ridge of stone before the edge of the cliff. Suddenly she planted both feet on the rib of rock for leverage and drove her right fist into his genitals with all her might.

  Alexandros groaned heavily and released his grip as he shielded his anguished scrotum with both hands and hunched over in agony. Shannon picked up a large rock and smashed it onto his skull again and again until he collapsed in a great heap of black linen. Then she ran to the precipice.

  Her father had somersaulted over the edge and begun a slide to the death on the nearly vertical slope when his outspread legs caught a spur of rock jutting out from the precipice and he jerked to a halt. But Jon had tumbled past him, his back and buttocks scraping the cliff and his arms flailing in a desperate effort to find something—anything—to hang on to. But there was nothing.

  The speed of his slide increased. His brain boiled with thought. So this is how life will end? Just like Andrea’s—on a mountainside? Another part of his mind screamed, Stop the slide or you’ll die!

  At least I’ll die trying, he vowed. Looking down, he saw his one and only chance—a narrow vertical gully of sand and gravel nestling in a hollow on the mountain face. But it was just to the right of the path of his fall. He started kicking and heeling in with his left foot, which finally veered him to the right. The next instant he felt sand and dug in both heels and elbows with all his might. They scraped and burned fiercely, but they slowed his fall.

  Still he didn’t stop, and the agonizing slide continued again. He was losing heart when at last his feet hit a small ledge and he stopped abruptly, doubling his legs and flaying the skin off his kneecaps.

  “Thank you, Lord,” said Jon, his first prayer in months, he realized ruefully, as he checked his shaking, bruised, and bleeding limbs to make sure they were still attached. “And thank you, Harvard Mountain Climbing Club.” There he had learned that desperate maneuver back in his college years.

  “Jon! Are you all right?” Shannon screamed from the summit.

  “Yes,” he called up to the tiny figure in white at the crest. “What about the monk?”

  “I’ve either knocked him out or killed him!”

  “Great, Shannon! What about your father?”

  “He caught himself on a rock up here. He seems okay!”

  “Well, I’ll probably survive,” Jennings called down to Jon. “But my bum may never be the same. And I don’t know how in ruddy blazes I’m going to get out of here!”

  “Shannon!” Jon called. “You’ve got to run down to the monastery as fast as you can. If that bearded maniac is still alive, he may come to. Tell the abbot to send help . . . men with lots of rope. Hurry! ”

  “Okay! Hang on, both of you! I’ll be back as soon as I can!”

  Then the waiting began. It would be several hours before help could arrive, Jon realized. Survival was no problem, but what about the murderous monk? Mistake! He should have asked Shannon if he were still breathing. What if the reptile recovered and started dropping boulders on them?

  “Austin, can you hear me?” he yelled.

  “Yes—”

  “If that madman’s alive and comes to, he may try to stone us. Do you have any way to protect yourself?”

  “Well, not really. It’s awfully precarious here.”

  “Okay, stay put and hug the cliff! I’ll think of something. But why in the very devil did he do this to us?”

  “God only knows! The papyrus, probably.”

  “You have an extraordinary daughter, Austin! Do you know that?”

  “I’ve no idea how she ever did it!”

  Jon studied his situation. He looked up toward the summit. He was too far down the precipice for anything but the longest rope to reach him. Would the monks even bring enough? Then he looked down and scanned the terrain below him. It all looked hopeless, a sheer and dizzying drop-off with murderous outcroppings of rock, broken only by . . . Incredible! Why hadn’t he noticed it before? A narrow pathway threaded its way diagonally down the face of the mountain. Probably it was Moses’ southern route the crackbrain wanted to “show” them.

  How to get to it? He searched the face of the cliff for a route. Aha! There, perhaps. Take I-75 south to Atlanta, then head east on I-20 to Columbia, then south again to the Promised Land. Weird humor was the ally of sanity, he told himself, while also thanking God that he had never suffered from acrophobia, or he would have died ten deaths ere then. I-75 was a long crack running down the rock face, into which he could jam some oblong stones lying on the ledge where he was standing. These would serve as pitons, and he could use a flat rock near his feet as hammer. The traversing parkway eastward—I-20—was another small ledge, and the final route southward to Moses’ pathway, another gravel gully.

  Slowly, he inched his way downward, and some-how the weird journey held together until the final bar of gravel, which proved too shallow to have much holding power. He started to slide again, even though he was facing the mountain this time and digging in his toes while his hands clutched two flat stones that were madly combing the gravel as brakes. But the pathway itself saved him after a painful landing.

  Salvation! Now he could get down the mountain safely. But no, he’d have to climb instead, to protect Jennings. That black-draped devil masquerading as a man of God might revive and smash Jennings’s skull. The southern ascent of Sinai was much steeper, he saw, but it was also quicker for someone in condition, and Jon was in condition, thanks to his weeks at the dig. Despite his lacerated arms and legs, he made the climb in a frenzied fifty minutes.

  Drenched in sweat, heart pounding, and lungs screaming for air, he finally gained the summit. He searched desperately for Alexandros, but the monk was nowhere to be seen. Then he hurried to the edge of the precipice. To his immense relief, Jennings was still there, riding the rock spur as if it were a docile donkey.

  “Are you okay, Austin?” he called.

  “Yes, thank the good Lord! But how did you ever get back up here?”

  “Where’s Ivan the Terrible?”

  “No idea!”

  Again Jon scanned the whole summit area, but saw nothing. Then he heard some anguished croak-ing from inside the little granite stone chapel at the crest of Sinai. Dashing inside, he found Alexandros on his knees at an oratory, shaking his head to and fro in tortured worship, tears streaming down hi
s face and matting his beard. He looked at Jon only momentarily and then returned to his Lord with the words “Pater, heymarton eis ton ouranon kai enopion sou.” Jon recognized them as the words of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s gospel: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before You, and I am no longer worthy to be called Your son.”

  While climbing back up Sinai, Jon had vowed vengeance on the wretch who had tried to murder them, but the broken figure before him made for a poor target.

  “Why, Alexandros?” Jon cried. “Why did you try to kill us?”

  “I pray to God that your colleague is also safe?”

  “He is, but why did—”

  “I was acting as a tool of Satan, yes? With the three of you dead in a terrible ‘accident,’ I had planned to go to the museum in Jerusalem with your authorization to examine the papyrus, and then tear it to shreds. That document can destroy the Church. I had to save the faith . . . save our Lord . . . and His resurrection.”

  “But you claimed it was a forgery. You said you could prove it a fake if you saw the original.”

  Alexandros buried his face in his arms and sobbed. “I lied. I found nothing . . . nothing wrong with it.” Then he looked up at Jon and cried, “But it must be false! It must! Our Lord lives! He lives! ”

  “But there were photographs of the original . . . and negatives. How could you hope—”

  “After destroying the papyrus, I would have placed the tray back in the vault—as if the papyrus were intact—and then gone on to Rama and tried to destroy the photos as well. Even if I did not find them, they could no longer be . . . how you say . . . supported . . . verified.”

  Jon thought it unnecessary to tell him about Brampton and Cromwell and how sadly impossible was his whole weird scenario. Instead he asked, “But murder three people? In cold blood?”

  “Yes. Three martyrs, if you please, to save the faith of millions. To my mind, the mathematics were . . . acceptable. But it was a horrible, horrible sin, for which I must—”

  Shannon suddenly burst inside, followed by the abbot. “Jon! Thank God! Are you all right?”