A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  “Good, Billy!” said Mrs. Weber, now joining her husband in one-way conversations with picture tubes. “Billy Graham, at least, has managed to preach the faith all these years without the additional trash foisted on us by so many of the other TV evangelists.”

  Moderator Marty resumed, “Thank you, gentle-men, for your position statements. We now open the panel to discussion. Professor Avery.”

  What followed was one of the most memorable hours in the history of television—a debate that would become classic in time, since rarely were the various schools of Christian thought expressed so clearly or pointedly. Avery defended liberal theology with great skill, claiming that many mainline clergy agreed with him, but were silent in order to hold on to their positions.

  He continued: “According to one survey, about half the Methodist ministers in America don’t believe in a physical resurrection. Nor do a third of the Presbyterian and Episcopal clergy. You see, Jesus surely rose again, but He did so in the minds and hearts of His followers. And His life and death have had such a radical effect on the world since then that His cause certainly has been resurrected. And that, I think, is what Easter’s all about.”

  The debate grew progressively heated, opinions more sharply barbed. Mercifully, Merton was largely ignored in the exchanges, much to his evident disappointment. Cardinal O’Neill questioned whether the theology of the left had pervaded that great a segment of American Christendom.

  Avery responded quickly, “A professor at Berkeley claimed that of the nine Catholic and Protestant schools in the Graduate Theological Union there, he didn’t know of any in which a significant part of the faculty accepted a physical resurrection. You see, a vast chasm has yawned open between what theologians and scholars believe, on the one hand, and what church leaders, priests, and pastors teach their flocks on the other. Had they been more honest with their people, they wouldn’t be suffering such agony now!”

  Open applause from the studio audience greeted that remark, and equally vocal hissing. Referee Marty did his best to maintain order and keep the debate on track. Now he called for final summations. Avery reinforced his warning that the Christian world had better get ready to accept what “honest scholarship” had been telling it for years. “Some wit put it very well: ‘When a long-held idea is falsified, for the scientist, it’s a triumph; for the politician, an embarrassment; but for the theologian, a disaster.’ Well, clergy with intelligence are skirting the disaster by realizing the truth of our position. It’s now high time for them to help educate the laity. Jesus still has much to teach us. We don’t have to abandon His example now that His remains have been found. Indeed, the very bones prove Jesus more historical than ever!”

  In Hannibal, Jon squirmed again at the presuppositions now paraded as fact, though he also could not resist trying to project a Christianity without a bodily risen Christ. What would Sandy have to report?

  It was now five minutes to cutoff, and Billy Graham was given the honor of the last summation, as befitted the nation’s most famous religious figure. His face tanned from a recent crusade in the South and his penetrating blues eyes afire with conviction, he said, “Although I don’t claim the gift of prophecy like Dr. Merton here, I do predict that Rama will prove to be the most elaborate hoax ever concocted. As to Professor Avery’s attempts to teach a Christianity without a true Resurrection, a leading Jewish scholar, Dr. Geza Vermes, put it best. Those who believe Bultmann’s (and Avery’s) theology, he claims, ‘have their feet off the ground of history and their heads in the clouds of faith.’ Saint Paul had nothing so nebulous in mind when he stated: ‘For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any-thing else’—including fake discoveries, he would add—‘shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord’—our risen Lord, who truly triumphed over death on that first Easter, and whose victory over the grave is also our promise of life everlasting!”

  While his father burst into applause and his mother was wiping her eyes, Jon took the liberty of answering the phone, which had started ringing just after Martin Marty’s closing comments.

  “Pastor Weber’s residence,” he said.

  “Jonathan?”

  “Yes—”

  “This is Sandy. We have the results. Can we talk?”

  EIGHTEEN

  For weeks, Jon had been impatient to get the test results from Sandy, but now that he was about to receive them, he almost would have preferred one last evening of not knowing. Perhaps another beer with his father and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on the stereo would have served as pleasant counterpoint to Rama.

  “Jon, are you there? Can we talk?” the receiver repeated.

  “Sure. Shoot, Sandy. I thought you were going to call tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t know how long you’d be there in the morning. Did you see the TV special?”

  “Yeah. We just turned it off.”

  There was silence on the eastern end of the line.

  “Sandy? Are you still there?”

  “Ah . . . yeah. I just don’t know how to handle it, Jon. So incredibly much is riding on this. I mean, who am I—who are we—to act as the hinges of fate in—”

  “Can the ‘tools of destiny’ bit and give me the results, Sandy.” Jon tried to sound businesslike, al-though his pulse was racing, probably in even tempo with Sandy’s.

  “You’re sure we can talk? No wire taps?”

  “Not likely! They generally use smoke-signals out here in the boonies.”

  “Okay. Well, you’ll get all this in pages and pages of detail—377 to be exact—but I’ll just give you the upshot now.”

  “Fine.”

  “All right, then, the two ‘Joseph’ jar handles show an unevenness in the seal impressions consistent with ancient tools rather than modern ones. Thermoluminescence dates the one with Aramaic as fired circa AD 15, plus or minus 150 years. The other, with Greek, left the kiln about twenty years later. Same error range.”

  Both fell easily within the authenticity horizon. Sandy resumed, “We can tell you the kind of clay used in the jars, the temperature at which it was fired, and lots of additional data, but that’s all in the report.”

  “Yes, skip that for now. Just give me the high-lights.”

  “Okay, we’ll move on to the titulus parchment. We used PIXE on the ink and didn’t find any metal oxides. Then we checked it chemically and found that it’s the same sort of pure carbon ink with gum arabic binder used widely in the first century.”

  “What about the parchment itself?”

  “The pollen analysis was interesting. We isolated pollen from it and also from the grave cloths and then called in a botanist who specializes in the Near East. She found it all quite consistent with the floral sequence of that area.”

  “How nice!” Jon felt like responding, sensing again the irony that authenticity is invariably gladdening in archaeology, but for this, the only exception in the annals of that science.

  “The burial linens also contain traces of aloes,” Sandy continued.

  “That was Nicodemus’s contribution, according to the fourth Gospel.”

  There was a prolonged silence, until Sandy resumed. “The two oil lamps—thermoluminescence dates the ‘Herodian’ lamp to circa AD 40, plus or minus, and the decorated lamp to about 25 BC. That was an oldie. One of Joseph’s heirlooms?”

  “Probably. They stopped making that kind at the end of the BC era, so your testing seems validated.”

  “Now, on to the two flasks. Both tested closely with the Herodian lamp—not more than twenty to thirty years difference. Ditto the juglet.”

  “The juglet too, eh? What about the clay plug?”

  “We couldn’t do much with that plug, since it wasn’t fired. But it’s a different story with the Nero coin. No question that it’s genuine. We have another at the Smithsonian, and the copper:tin:silver ratio in the bronze is virtua
lly the same in both.”

  “What about the debris samplings in the packets?”

  “The particulate wasn’t as valuable as we’d hoped. But we didn’t find any spooks, although I, for one, was looking for a transistor or microchip, let me tell you!”

  Jon chuckled, but then another long silence muffled both ends of the line. Finally Jon said, “Well . . . thanks, Sandy. I’ll be flying there tomorrow noon. Call you when I get in.” After he hung up, Jon reported none of the conversation to his parents. Why spoil their Christmas?

  Jack Anderson, Woodward and Bernstein, Evans and Novak, Andrew Tully, George Will, and James Kilpatrick were stars in the skies of journalism, but Radford Morrison of The Washington Post, at least by his own claim, was “all of the above,” the whole constellation. His column was read across the world by statesmen and scholars, politicians and pundits. Morrison had the uncanny knack of uncovering “the big story” before anyone else through his own brand of investigative reporting. “Unnamed sources” were his only sources, detractors claimed, but his material had a .940 batting average for accu-racy. Even his letterhead boasted the slogan, “Ask not the source . . . but it’s true, of course!”

  Convinced that Rama and its consequences would be the story of the century, Morrison had shuttled between Washington and Tel Aviv for weeks now, gathering material for what would be “the authoritative book” on the dig. Half of his staff had been recruited from electronics laboratories and detective agencies, the other half from the CIA and cousin organizations. Some of the best exposés had come through the monitoring efforts of Willard Fenske, who read microchips like road maps, and he was the one Morrison picked for special services that Christmas.

  The Rama staff had never cooperated with Morrison. They wanted no one from the press under-foot at the dig while everything was still in flux. But somehow Morrison learned that the Smithsonian findings would be relayed to Jon around Christmas-time. Salivating at the possibility of learning them at the same time, Morrison put a tail on Jon both in Weston and Cambridge the week before Christmas, expecting that he would fly to Washington to get the results. Morrison’s travel agent kept putting Jon’s name into the computer to see which flight it might be, and the screen surprised them with details of a St. Louis destination. So it was that Willard Fenske watched Jon get off his jet at Lambert Field, shaded glasses almost identifying rather than concealing him. So, too, Fenske had rented a car just after Jon and tailed him to church in Hannibal.

  Unlike Jon, however, he had not stayed for the service. Obviously, sonny boy is going to have Christmas dinner back home, so we’d best make the necessary arrangements, he told himself. A quick check of the public phone directory steered him to the parsonage, where he parked in an alley behind the house—though not before he had fastened a large “SBC Communications” decal on both doors of the cream-white rental. Changing quickly into a phone repairman’s uniform, he rang the back doorbell. Good, no answer. Glancing about to make sure no one saw, he moved to the living room windows and slapped a small, self-adhering bug onto the corner of one of the lower panes, doing the same to the kitchen. Now both window panes would act as microphone resonators that would broadcast into one of the cassette recorders he had with him.

  Then he climbed the telephone pole looming over the rear of the parsonage. Rats! The back door was opening and a woman was throwing some crumbs to the birds. Suddenly she looked up at him and said, “My, my, do you people have to work on Christmas Day?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Fenske. “No rest for the weary. Something’s wrong along the line here. Had any trouble with your phone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Be finished shortly. Aren’t you supposed to be in church?” he trifled.

  “Oh, I just got back from early service. Let me know if you’d like a cup of coffee or anything.”

  “I will. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Fenske moved swiftly to the junction box and spliced in a three-wire lead to his own porta-phone. Then he climbed down the pole and dialed the Erhard Weber residence. His genial profferer of coffee answered. He assured her he was only testing, and all was well. She was ever so grateful.

  Fenske drove the car to another street and then walked back into the alley. He drew his wire lead into a clump of bushes at the base of the pole, where he was hidden from view. It became an afternoon and evening of state-of-the-art eavesdropping. He turned on one of his tape recorders when Jon arrived—the two bugs delivering an almost broadcast-quality signal into his monitor headphones. The other recorder was switched on only when the telephone was in use. More than anything else, he was grateful that the Webers’ taste in pets, if they had any, did not run to Dobermans or German Shepherds.

  There must be a better way to make a living, Fenske groused, as he sat shivering despite thermal underwear and sheepskin jacket and pants. What a way to spend Christmas!

  Morrison, though, would relish the juicy tidbits the younger Weber dropped about the Rama dig during dinner. But hearing them munch away was too much for his own growling stomach. Switching his equipment to automatic, Fenske drove into town for a hot dinner and several even hotter toddies. Then he returned to his lonely post and put on his headphones. Supper at the manse was just concluding with animated jabber about the forthcoming television special.

  “Oh, oh. Their reaction to that could be pay dirt,” he muttered to himself. Less than an hour later, his hunch proved correct, as he lovingly recorded every syllable of reaction from the three Webers. But he grew positively elated when the phone finally came to life with McHugh’s call, and he checked the modulation meter with a penlight to make sure he was recording every sacred syllable. Well briefed on Rama, Fenske smiled into the darkness as he listened to the results. He was not a religious man himself.

  When Jon hung up, Fenske turned off his equip-ment. He even managed to sneak back to the win-dows and remove the bugs. Then he returned to his car and Lambert Field in St. Louis, where he phoned Morrison.

  “Fabulous! Just fabulous!” Morrison exulted. “You get a very special bonus this Christmas, Willard, my boy. But only if you get your tail back to Washington by breakfast so I can hear those tapes!”

  Jon spent Monday afternoon and evening at Sandy’s place, digesting the bulky official report. At 10 PM he called the private number the president had given him, bypassing the White House switchboard. It rang and rang. Evidently the president was out.

  At 11 PM—6 AM Israeli time—he put in a call to Jennings in Ramallah. They had worked out a code for communication in advance. “Can you hear me clearly, Austin?” Jon opened.

  “Yes. Yes indeed.”

  “All right, then, I have the results.”

  ““You do? Fire away.”

  “Well, all items tested within the nominal range, except for H and I, which were indeterminate.”

  Jon heard nothing on the other end. “Are you there, Austin? Did you get that?”

  “Yes, Jonathan. All but H and I . . . nominal, you say?” He sounded a little vacant. Then again, it was early morning in Israel.

  “That’s right, Austin. How’s Shannon?”

  “She misses you terribly, dear boy. I do believe she’s in love. Shall I wake her?”

  “Well . . . no. Just assure the fair lady of my endless devotion when she arises. In any case, the report weighs in at 377 pages, and I’ll bring it along when I fly back there day after tomorrow, via the . . . ah . . . planned approach. I suppose we’ll have to unveil Phase III when I get back.”

  “Indeed. I see no other way.”

  “Take care, Austin.”

  He then translated for Sandy’s benefit. The “planned approach” involved his flying KLM to Vienna; Alia to Amman, Jordan; and into Israel via the Allenby Bridge, all to avoid the press that had been camping outside Ben Gurion Airport. But it took him a quarter hour to explain Phase III.

  Sandy approved it enthusiastically. “’Tis really the only way, Jonnie, me boy.” It was the first rotte
n brogue he had heard from Sandy in weeks, and it gladdened him as a kind of throwback to a less complicated and happier past.

  His last call in the wee-hours-Stateside-but-early-morning- Rome time went to Kevin Sullivan, as he had promised. After learning the main results of the Smithsonian test series, Kevin sounded shaken, almost despairing. Jon tried to firm him up. “Steady, sport! This isn’t over yet. We have lots more digging to do. Please assure the Holy Father of that.”

  “Great, Jon,” he replied, sardonically. “You sound like a deck steward on the Titanic, pouring tea into cups at a thirty-five-degree angle! Great balls of fire, man, do you think the libs have been right the whole time? Any physical resurrection was just mythology?”

  “Premature is the key word, Kevin.”

  “Haven’t you at least thought of that possibility?”

  “Yes, of course I have! And let me prove that. It just may be time for us to do a heavier exegetical study of John 20:26. Keep the faith, Kev!”

  “Carry on, Jon.”

  He knew that Kevin would be opening his New Testament to read about that post-Easter evening when the resurrected Jesus appeared to his disciples right through the walls of a closed room. You don’t need bones for that sort of mobility.

  Jon never made his flights on KLM or Alia. Nor did his alias, Ernst Becker. Early the next morning, Sandy’s phone started ringing incessantly. After answering it, Sandy stalked to the front door to pick up the morning edition of The Washington Post. Bleary-eyed, he stared at himself on the front page, his photograph next to Jon’s, under a banner head-line, “ARTIFACTS DATE TO JESUS’ TIME,” and sub-header, “Smithsonian Tests Add Further Credence to Belief That Jesus’ Bones Have Been Discovered.” The story opened: