A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  “I love you, Jon. I love you so much!”

  “Ani maaritz otach,” he replied, holding her snugly in his arms.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s Hebrew for ‘I adore you’.”

  SIXTEEN

  The tidal wave struck more ferociously than anyone had forecast. Over the next days, the world shook. Not a newspaper on earth failed to give the story front-page headlines, including Izvestia and the Peking People’s Daily. In the United States, the story dominated all network newscasts, with full-hour ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and CNN specials after the evening news and again in the morning, when much of the Jerusalem news conference was replayed on television. Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report brought out special editions featuring photographs of the dig, background stories on the principal excavators, interviews with parents and relatives, and a galaxy of quotations from leading church officials, theologians, and politicians. The same media saturation blanketed Latin America, Europe, and Australia, with Africa and Asia providing only a shade less coverage. Rama covered the earth.

  The New York Stock Exchange suffered its worst one-day loss in the history of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, while the London Stock Exchange delayed opening by more than half a day. The Tokyo Exchange was flooded by waves of sympathy selling, the bond market was devastated, and only gold and precious metals attempted a rally. The public mood curdled into surliness, boiling up into weird demonstrations and riots, particularly in the Bible belt. Worried cabinets convened in many of the Western capitals, as queens, kings, prime ministers, and presidents puzzled over a proper response to the crisis. Rama shook the earth.

  Then Newton’s Third Law took effect: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Now the shock waves were reflected back to Israel in general, the dig personnel in particular. Jon felt the first jolt through an overseas call from Hannibal, Missouri.

  “Jon? This is your father.” His tone was hollow, weak, disoriented. “What have you done, son? What-ever have you done?”

  “Please don’t overreact, Dad. I know this is a ghastly shock, but it’s all too premature to—”

  “Overreact, Jonathan? Do you know what day this is?”

  “September 10. Why?”

  “Well, it’s Sunday noon here in Hannibal. I just came home from church. I don’t know how I got through the service. When I was leading the congregation in the Apostles’ Creed and we came to ‘On the third day, He rose again from the dead,’ one of our elders, Martin Fischman, yelled out, ‘Maybe not!’ Then he ran out of the church weeping. I could barely preach—my throat kept closing up.”

  Jon’s stomach knotted as he groped for words. Then he asked, “How did the rest of the congregation react? What kind of attendance did you have?”

  “You’d have thought it was Christmas. Or Easter. It was absolutely packed because people want to know. They’re looking to us for answers. . . . Oh, their response? Stunned beyond belief. You’d have thought I was conducting a funeral.”

  “Dad, you’ve got to tell the people not to jump to conclusions. It’s much too early to—”

  “What else can they do? Your tests are all positive. The radio, TV, magazines, newspapers all make it seem like a lead-pipe cinch that those are Jesus’ bones you’ve found.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t. I warned them not to!”

  “I guess the worst part of it is”—his voice began to crack—“is that I’ve spent my whole life serving our Lord, and here my own son destroys the Christian faith!”

  “That’s not fair, Dad. I tried my darndest to keep this secret, but—”

  His father broke out sobbing. “Here, talk to your mother.”

  The conversation with his mother was even more excruciating, and a chilling perspiration moistened his body as he hung up. “Kevin was right,” he muttered. “It’s a tidal wave. Nothing less.”

  Ben Gurion Airport was jammed with news and media people from all over the world. Their hotel at Ramallah was under siege again by a fresh wave of reporters hoping to get additional statements from the staff. The Rama dig site was so thronged with press people and photographers that the military had to erect an electric barbed-wire perimeter. The congestion in Jerusalem was suffocating, with religious leaders, luminaries, and writers converging on the city from all points of the globe, desperately seeking interviews with Jennings, Jon, or any of the dig crew who would give them the time of day.

  The fanatic element streamed into Jerusalem like iron filings to a magnet. As he left the Rockefeller one afternoon, Jon was hit by a stone that left a two-inch bruise on his left temple. Huge rallies of Fundamentalists, fed by chartered aircraft from America’s South, publicly denounced Jennings and Jon as antichrists, almost exactly as Kevin had predicted.

  All hotels were sold out when the World Charismatic Congress, scheduled coincidentally for October, now had five times the expected registration. Their closing rally on the slopes of the Mount of Olives saw thirty-five thousand of them dressed in white and waving their arms in prayer. The air was filled with a torrent of glossolalia. One of their leaders interpreted the tongues with a great bull-horn: “The abomination of desolation has now been revealed near God’s holy temple mount! Antichrist has made his appearance! Impious devils are trying to snatch our Jesus away from us, but they shall not succeed!”

  “Amen!” the multitude responded, “and amen! ”

  Prophecy fanatics across the world were busier than ever relating Ezekiel, Daniel, and the book of Revelation to the recent events. Hal Lindsey seemed a stodgy conservative compared to the claims they now made. Jesus would return, not in a matter of years or months, but in weeks. People were selling their businesses, cashing in their stocks and bonds, donning white robes, and—the most complicating factor of all—coming to Jerusalem for “the last days.”

  The tidal wave was splashing.

  “The situation is nearly out of control,” said Israeli Premier Mordecai Zevulon, a dapper chub of a man with wavy gray hair. He was addressing not only Jennings and Jon, who were invited as guests, but the whole Israeli cabinet. “Our facilities are taxed to the breaking point. The crowds are impossible, and even our Hasidim are demanding to know where ‘The Body’ is so they can give it a decent burial! I’ve never seen anything like this, and here we thought those Scud missiles in the Persian Gulf War were the worst thing we’d have to face! Now, we have a crisis center set up at the King David Hotel, and we’ve called up some of our reservists so your police can be relieved, Teddy.”

  Teddy Kollek, the resilient, crisis-inured mayor of Jerusalem, smiled and nodded. The genial magistrate seemed to have been in charge of the Holy City ever since Creation, and had been summoned out of retirement.

  “But our priority concern,” Premier Zevulon continued, “is that this crisis be resolved. And soon! And so, Professor Jennings and Professor Weber, when can you complete your tests?”

  “We probably would’ve been finished with many of them by now if the media hadn’t gotten involved,” said Jennings. “Professor Weber will soon be returning to America for their completion.”

  Avram Heshbon, the interior minister, offered a suggestion. “Because of the gravity of these discoveries, gentlemen, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to have our Antiquities Authority take over control of the Rama excavation and its finds. I’d never suggest this under normal circumstances, but, as we’re sadly aware, the circumstances are not normal! They are in fact chaotic!”

  “You’re suggesting what?” Jennings thundered.

  “Please understand, Professor Jennings, that this is no reflection on your fine work at Rama,” Heshbon continued. “It’s just that we now have extraordinary problems because of an excavation in our sovereign territory, so I think it’s the government’s responsibility to step in.”

  “Hear, hear!” several voices echoed. Zevulon seemed to be nodding slowly.

  Though as shocked as Jennings, Jon momentarily analyzed it as a quick fix for the
gargantuan problems that had surfaced. But no. Didn’t they realize what a disaster that would create?

  One did. Moshe Breitenstein, minister of tourism, raised his pencil and was recognized by the prime minister. “Gentlemen, I find this an appalling suggestion for several reasons,” he said. “One, it would be lunacy for Jews to control this dig, which seems to be so embarrassing to Christians. If the discoveries do prove to be authentic, we’d still be accused of ‘a master Jewish conspiracy’ to undermine Christianity. Anti-Semitism would rear its vicious head, as it always does in times of crisis. All Jews beyond Israel would be in danger. Or, the opposite scenario—if we demonstrated that the finds were fraudulent, we’d be accused of a cover-up, with one monotheistic religion helping another. In either case, a no-win situation.”

  A general nodding of heads around the cabinet table heartened Jennings and Jon, for the logic was unimpeachable. Breitenstein paused briefly, then resumed: “The second objection is a simple question of expertise. Who would be more qualified to ferret out the truth in this business: those who dug from the start, or those who come in at the end? And if this affair is botched, or if Christianity really suffers, let me add an economic footnote to this discussion. Do you know how much income religious pilgrim-age brings to the state of Israel? More than a billion dollars annually! Tourism ranks just after diamonds as our largest industry. If the pilgrims stop coming, our economy will be in even worse shape, if that’s possible! And the balance-of-payments deficit will take on heroic proportions.”

  Silence blanketed the cabinet room, until Avram Heshbon said, “I withdraw my suggestion.”

  “Good, I agree,” said the prime minister.

  “May I have the floor, Mr. Prime Minister?” asked Jon.

  “Certainly, Professor Weber.”

  “Professor Jennings and I have had some lengthy discussions on the most appropriate modus operandi here. Our plan is simple but, we hope, effective. First, we want to expedite the testing, and we’ll announce the results as soon as the analysis is firm, unlike some archaeologists who take years to publish their results. We all remember the forty-year delay in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls!

  “Now, the week after next, I’ll be driving down to El Arish and Cairo, so that I can fly Egyptair to the States and avoid the swarm of reporters waiting for us at Ben Gurion. I would ask your government’s help in alerting your frontier post on the border to wave us through. I’d also ask you to contact your Egyptian counterparts so that they permit similar courtesies at El Arish and Cairo Airport.”

  “Yes . . . excellent,” the prime minister observed. “We should be able to arrange that.”

  “Then, when a very comprehensive series of tests has been completed,” Jon resumed, “our staff will publish the results, and invite scrutiny by the world’s scholarly community. We’ll be providing a ‘manual,’ as it were, for specialists across the world to ponder over the next months . . . or years. Let an international consensus draw the final conclusions.”

  Zevulon nodded. “Good,” he said. “And you have our sympathy, Professor Weber. If only you and Professor Jennings had been left alone!”

  “How very true, Mr. Prime Minister! Our task is now complicated. Severely complicated.”

  Several calls to Sandy McHugh resulted in a general “shopping list” of what his panel at the Smithsonian required for the test series:

  A. A complete file of all photographs ever taken at the villa and the cavern at Rama.

  B. The two “Joseph” jar handles.

  C. Another piece of the titulus parchment, including a quarter-inch incursion into one of the darker letters, and any of the wood rot backing.

  D. More of the grave linens and matting.

  E The two clay oil lamps.

  F. The two flasks, now differentiated as F-1 (the unguentarium) and F-2 (the oil flask).

  G. The juglet in which the papyrus was found.

  H. The clay plug of the juglet.

  I. Packets of material debris from inside the sarcophagus, its pit, the floor of the cavern, and the earth just outside the threshold.

  Despite the length of the list, it was no massive cargo that Jon would smuggle into the United States, with the approval of all governments concerned. It all fit inside two fat attaché cases that were stuffed with cotton and foam rubber and lined with lead foil. Those valises would not leave his side until he was safely inside the Smithsonian in Washington.

  Clive Brampton sat at the wheel, driving Jon to Cairo. The border between Israel and Egypt at El Arish, once the scene of fierce tank battles in the Sinai Desert, was now a tranquil tourists’ crossover. The Israeli border guards waved them through, and the Egyptian frontier police detained them only momentarily. Above all, they eluded the world’s press. No flashbulbs. No television minicams.

  They filled the hot desert kilometers with chitchat about Jennings, Brampton providing a wealth of additional detail on the celebrated archaeologist. Now they reached the Suez Canal tunnel and then took the desert road to Cairo Airport, where they stayed overnight at the Sheraton.

  The next morning, Clive saw Jon off. “You’d best wear those sunglasses Shannon bought you, Jon,” said Clive, as he was about to drive off. “You’re an international celebrity now, you know.”

  “Oh, beyond all doubt,” Jon chuckled. “But you’re part of the same constellation, Clive!”

  “The desert hyenas are unimpressed.”

  “Give my love to Shannon. You knew her before I did—as an adult, that is. How could you fail to fall in love with her yourself?”

  “Who says I didn’t? But she was ‘the boss’s daughter,’ so I fled for safety into the arms of Naomi. Still, well, I’ve never told you this, Jon, but I’m really glad you’ve replaced Ben-Yaakov in her life.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Clive. Take care on the return trip.”

  “I will. But put those shades on.”

  “Okay . . . there. Do I look like Paul Newman?”

  “More like Omar Sharif. He goes with this territory. Cheerio!”

  While waiting for Egyptair’s flight 201 to New York, Jon bought a copy of The Cairo Telegraph, Egypt’s English-language daily. He looked at the front-page feature and winced. “ISLAM NOW THE WORLD’S LEADING RELIGION?” the header ran, just over a photograph of Cairo’s chief mullah, Muhammed Abu-Bakkar, who was quoted as saying:

  Islam’s views of the prophet Jesus are now a proven fact. Muhammed taught that Jesus of Nazareth was not a divinity who rose from the dead, but only a prophet like our fathers Abraham and Moses. It was the Christian heresy that sought to make him something more, bestowing on him the honors that belong to Allah alone. And now the very dust of the earth has proven the prophet correct! The recent discoveries in Israel will surely sound the death knell for Christianity as the world’s largest religious system, opening the way for Islam to assume that role. With 2 billion adherents, Christianity had twice the following of Islam’s 1 billion. But no longer, thanks to archaeologists Jennings and Weber and their discoveries several months ago.

  Jon shivered, even in the boiling heat, as he climbed the ramp onto the Egyptair 747. Now he had a new role: killer-of-Christianity. Why had life lost its symmetry?

  Having logged hundreds of thousands of flight miles, Jon had long since abandoned any fear of flying. For the first time in years, however, he wondered what would happen if the 747 packed it in some-where over the Mediterranean or Atlantic. Or terrorists continued their noble sport of “My bombs can slaughter more people than yours can.” His concern was less for himself and more for his attaché cases and their curious contents: an assortment of objects that were already changing the world’s culture.

  What if the stuff finally did prove genuine? What difference would it make in his own life, Jon wondered, as the jet climbed out over the Mediterranean. If Christianity became mortally wounded, what about basic theism? Would it fall too? Was there a God, after all? Or not? Planes did furnish a welcome oasis of time, a good
chance to think. Rather than thumb through a travel magazine full of mummified pharaohs, Jon gazed out at the endless blue blanket of sea, nicely pockmarked by tufts of ivory clouds. It was time to sort through his real beliefs . . . or doubts.

  Why not begin as Descartes did? Doubt every-thing—not just God, but any so-called “reality”— space, time, material, his own existence, for that matter. Not too convincing, thought Jon. He was, after all, doubting and thinking. And so, like the French philosopher, he too had to agree: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist). And if he existed, as truly as the 747 he was flying in and all people aboard, then it could well follow from the argument of cause and design that there must be a supremely intelligent, powerful, and rational Being, since neither the jet nor its human cargo could be self-created or self-existent. In short, God exists. Sum, ergo deus est (I am, therefore God exists). Descartes had also affirmed that, and Aristotle long before him with his arguments for a First Cause. Creation intuits a Creator.

  Or does it? Descartes had not said, Malum est, ergo deus non est (Evil exists, therefore God—at least a good, all-powerful God—does not exist). Once again, Jon was on the tenterhooks of the ultimate arguments pro and con Deity. Put simplistically, creation proves God; evil disproves.

  He admitted that there were plenty of reasons to doubt God’s existence: Andrea’s death, evil and dis-aster in any form, the cruelties and periodic insanities of history, no contact with God through any of the five senses. Those cheap evangelists on the tube or in the tent who claim regular conversations with God (in which He replied audibly) had to be hypocrites, liars, or blooming idiots, thought Jon. Yet why did their hearers, who heard no such voices, ever believe them? Or contribute to their support?

  But he was digressing. He had always finished the volleys of arguments pro and con God’s existence with the same conclusion. Until I can find another answer as to where I came from, I’ll side with Deity. Pascal’s wager had never been disproven, namely: By all means, believe, because if you win (God exists), you win everything; if you lose (God doesn’t exist), you lose nothing.