by Paul L Maier
“It certainly did. And your different shadings gave the impression of random preservation. But what about the papyrus? How could you ever—”
“The papyrus itself came from one of the minor Dead Sea scrolls that had a ridiculously long blank trailer, so I used part of that. It was all I could do to keep from telling you, ‘Don’t bother testing the papyrus for C-14! Anyone with genius enough to do the Aramaic wouldn’t be fool enough to use the wrong paper!’ But you finally realized that yourself, I believe.”
The weird conversation continued, Jon calling up to the face at the edge of the orifice overhead. For his part, Jennings seemed almost delighted finally to be able to reveal his great—if macabre—secret.
“But what about the incredibly accurate Aramaic in Joseph’s ersatz letter?”
“Well, thank you, Jonathan. Again you surmised the truth. I knew far more Aramaic than anyone realized. Well, it’s beyond all debate. I know more Aramaic than anyone on earth . . . and certainly more than that fool Montaigne, who blathered about my so-called ‘lapses in grammar.’ I know, you almost caught me there. I did drop my guard in taking him on, didn’t I?”
“You seemed to change character, Austin. You really did. But how did you get Nicodemus’s script to look so different?”
“I wrote it with my left hand. I did Joseph’s letter with my right.”
“Well, even though your whole venture is demonic, Austin, I must say that the papyrus was a masterpiece. I truly believe that if Joseph had written such a letter, he’d probably have used your vocables and syntax.”
“It did take my best efforts, Jonathan. I worked almost a year on that papyrus, and it is rural, first-century Aramaic, you know. But I almost lost my patience when it took you and Montaigne so long to get those final phrases translated. I nearly whispered the proper renderings into your ear!”
“But I think your masterstroke was using the cavern rather than some sector at Rama.”
“Oh, I had to, Jonathan. If I had salted this in one of Clive Brampton’s five-meter squares, he’d have noticed the shift in stratification and blown the whistle. This way I could salt the cavern, and then drive in a truckload of mountain surface fill to cover the cavern entrance, letting the winter rains com-pact it naturally.”
“But what if I hadn’t discovered the cavern?”
“I’d have ‘worked you’ closer and closer to it until you did discover it. As it happened, you couldn’t possibly have been more cooperative.”
“And it was you, of course, who left the darkroom open and the papyrus prints exposed?”
“Of course! How to let the world in on this was really a sticky wicket! But Gideon and his snooping cousin provided such a serendipitous solution!”
Jon was silent for some moments. Then he said, “Well, Austin, I have to congratulate you, albeit in a perverse sense. You certainly fooled the entire world, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I must admit, it all came off rather nicely, I think.”
Hearing Jennings’s revelations had held Jon in such morbid thrall that he had given little thought to extricating himself from mortal danger. But now he had to seek quick options for himself, he realized with mounting desperation. What did Jennings have in mind? Abandoning him? Killing him? If so, how? A gun? A boulder? Or, conceivably, was he trying to convert him?
First, though, he had to ask the second question. “All right, Austin,” he called up to that great hair-less dome watching him at the mouth of the shaft, “now tell me why you ever did this.”
“Well, dear boy, that one has a rather long explanation,” he sighed. “You see, I began school as a very dedicated and believing Christian lad. I admired my clergyman father enormously. What a gifted preacher he was! He inspired me to study for the ministry, and so I went to Oxford to do just that. I returned home for Easter holiday that first year. On the morning of Holy Saturday, he was out at the edge of our lawn, fixing the mailbox along the roadside because some car had damaged it. If only he’d been facing the opposite direction, he would have escaped. Some driver, who’d had too much to drink the night before, fell asleep at the wheel, veered off the road, and plowed into my father with his car, killing him only partially. After excruciating pain, he died on Easter Sunday.”
“How horrible! Tragic! But . . . but what does that have to do with my question?”
“Everything, really. To me, that event shattered any belief in a protecting deity. Such a tiny divine intervention would have saved my father that it wouldn’t even have passed for a miracle! All God had to do was let the driver go to sleep one fraction of a second earlier or later, and the car would have plowed harmlessly into our lawn, hurting no one, least of all, the sodden driver. But there was no divine intervention whatever, obviously. Had God existed, there would have been. Ergo, there is no God.”
“That doesn’t necessarily follow, Austin.”
“I thought it did at the time. I still do, for that matter. But back at Oxford, I immediately switched out of the ministry. In my youthful idealism, I decided then and there that I’d now devote my life to the great task of liberating the world from all religious superstition. I conceived the general outline of Rama at age nineteen, and started mastering Greek and Aramaic as if they were my mother tongues.
“Oh yes, I did try something of a ‘shortcut’ that required much less effort than Rama. After joining the Oxford faculty, I did some research in Rome and gained access to the Codex Vaticanus. When no one was looking, I took a lemon-based concoction of mine and added a final line to Mark’s gospel to the effect that Jesus’ body had been stolen.” Jennings chuckled, then continued. “The citric acid was invisible, of course, because I wanted it to appear as if the Church had expunged it.”
“Another problem solved!” Jon wanted to shout, but first he asked, “Well, what happened with your maiden voyage into the world of forgery?”
“Oh, it must have been too sophisticated, I sup-pose. The dolts at the Vatican never used ultraviolet on it, apparently.”
Jon was about to tell him differently, but why give the wretch that satisfaction? Instead, he said, “Something doesn’t make sense, Austin. If you opposed all ‘religious superstition,’ why did you attack Christianity specifically?”
“It’s far and away the most formidable system of belief in all the world and in all of history. Take away that keystone and the other religions will eventually crumble as well. Yet, Christianity is also the most vulnerable of the lot because of Jesus and His ‘Resurrection.’ No Rama could ever disprove Judaism or Islam, you see.”
“What about the ‘new theology’ of a spiritual resurrection?”
“That will satisfy only the intellectuals. Take away Easter and the bodily Resurrection, and Christianity’s doomed. Your John Updike said it rather well in his Seven Stanzas at Easter: ‘Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.’”
“That’s it? Your father is killed accidentally, and so you dupe the world?”
“No. There’s much more, and this quite closely affects the girl you love—”
Jennings proceeded with the story Jon had already learned from Glastonbury, but Jon let him finish so he could learn any fresh details. Jennings’s voice wavered as he told it, particularly sections involving the wife he cherished.
“And so there you have it, Jonathan,” he concluded. “That wretched abbess imprisons my Colleen, drugs her with laudanum, and kills her—all in the name of the Lord—and the Church slaps her hand! As follow-up, the IRA kills my mother and brother and burns down our homestead—all in the name of the Lord! Religious fanaticism simply has to be uprooted, Jonathan, no matter what pain it causes. You see, this is the only generation that will be affected. In the God-free world of the future, there will be no pain.”
“You have my profound sympathy for all these horrors, Austin. I just wonder how you can take a private tragedy, like yours, and
magnify it exponentially to make the world suffer with you.”
“The suffering will be brief, but so very profitable. It should be very much like childbirth—the pain fades for the joy of a new life. The world has to come of age, Jonathan. Religion is an outmoded crutch of the past, and that crutch has impeded progress—scientific and otherwise—from Galileo’s time on. And don’t tell me the Church has learned from past mistakes. When you have a pope as recent as John Paul II inveighing against birth control in countries like India with its wall-to-wall people, you know that religion is simply suicidal. I’m only helping it along into the grave it rightly deserves.”
“I think John Paul was simply wrong, Austin, and you’re certainly overplaying the science-versus-religion bit. Modern Christianity doesn’t stand in the way of any science I know of. You rather have these great, overarching convergences, like the ‘Big Bang’ theory and a linear universe complementing Genesis very nicely.”
“Be that as it may, dear fellow, your own ears have heard the death rattle of religion most recently when those millennialist pilgrim masses descended on Jerusalem, orchestrated into frenzies by their doomsday prophets. There’s the quintessence of how damaging religion can be to the intellect, and every right-minded person should want to join me in subverting it! And your charismatic congresses here, these people who have the audacity to believe God supernaturally intervenes to move their tongues in heavenly ways. What, pray tell, do you hear? Gibberish, Jonathan, gibberish—word salad! If there were a God behind that phenomenon, let Him utter some sense . . . say, the formula to defeat cancer, or at least avoid danger. One word in the earphones of that Dutch pilot—‘Stop!’—would have prevented those two 747s from crashing into each other on the Canary Islands some years ago, saving hundreds of lives.”
“We have no argument there, Austin. These are merely fringe elements in the Church. But against the background of world Christianity, you’re taking a miniscule percentage and implying it represents the whole. That’s like saying all Jews on earth dress in black and wear fur hats, like the Hasidim.”
“What I am saying is that religion is the mother of fanaticism—religion and insanity are next-door neighbors in the brain—and it does devious things to people. A Spanish bus driver leaving Fatima supposedly shuts his eyes and takes his hands off the steering wheel for twenty miles of night driving as a test of faith! Or some believers in the Philippines have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday! Or a Polish woman receives the bloody stigmata on her hands and feet, ‘like Jesus’ wounds’!”
“Every institution on earth has its horror stories, Austin, but in America, we—”
“But not in America? You people are the cult capital of the world! I don’t mean only a Jim Jones who can coax nine hundred of his idiot followers down to Guyana to sip cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, or those ‘made-in-America’ religions like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons or what have you. I’m also talking about your faith healers who reject medical science and let people die without antibiotics or insulin—all in the name of the Lord! And your vaunted ‘mainline’ or evangelical churches? You have decay in both wings there. Your liberals have abandoned any gospel for social activism and politics. But your religious New Right are fast following in their footsteps—never abandoning their gospel, of course, but rather cramming it down the throats of the masses with their outrageous use of television and the media.”
As Jennings ranted on and on, Jon urgently surveyed his situation. The shaft was really an old cistern, evidently, and its walls were too smooth to gain any hand-or footholds. Climbing without a ladder would be out of the question. If the shaft had been just a little narrower, he might have tried to shinny up, one foot on each side. He had been a blooming idiot, a stupid imbecile to have followed Jennings here with-out first contacting Dov Yorkin, he realized. Instead, he had been so mesmerized by the prospect of ferreting out the truth that he had thrown precaution to the winds. Now he had to gamble everything on one defensive trump, which he’d have to play out very shortly.
He looked up and saw Jennings’s large ruddy face still looming over the opening. He had stopped talking, waiting, evidently, for some response. Jon picked up as best he could recall. “Well, Austin, you certainly seem well informed about American religion.”
“Oh, I keep a fat file on all your foibles!”
“But again, you’re tarring all Christians with the same brush, and that’s neither fair nor logi—”
“Look from the present to the past, then, Jonathan! What’s Church history but the unholy saga of oppression and wars over the faith—Christians from Venice looting Christians in Constantinople; the Spanish Inquisition burning heretics and Jews; Catholic armies versus Lutheran armies in the 1500s, drenching the countryside in blood; French Protestants getting massacred; witch trials from Joan of Arc to Salem, Massachusetts; and thousands of other grisly events in history—all in the name of the Lord! And what are green and orange doing to each other to this very day in that cesspool of religious fanaticism called Ireland? Can’t you see that what I’m doing is the most humanitarian gesture I could possibly offer the world?”
“No, I don’t, Austin! Now, I’ll be the first to say that the Church’s record is hardly spotless—I’ll surely grant you that!—but it’s due to that nasty item called ‘sin’ that permeates every institution in society including the Church, so if—”
“Oh, please, Jonathan, spare me a sermon, won’t you?”
“Hear me out! I’m only saying it’s unfair to blame the Church for all the violence on this planet. History would’ve been much bloodier if there had been no Christianity. It was Christians who insisted on truce days in the Middle Ages, built hospitals to care for the wounded, intervened in quarrels to keep the peace, erected orphanages, shelters for the homeless, and—”
“Yes, yes, yes . . . I know the minor credits, but—”
“That’s just it; you’ve totally ignored the credits, Austin! You’ve forgotten all about the Church’s single-handedly keeping Western culture alive during the Dark Ages, civilizing the barbarian invaders of Rome, recopying manuscripts in monastery libraries so that we’d even have such things as books written before Gutenberg. Here you are, one of the world’s greatest Semiticists, and you gnaw away at the cul-tural hand that fed you!”
“Now, see here, Jonathan—”
“No, it’s worse than that, Austin. You’re trying to chop that hand off entirely! Have you forgotten that Christianity is the alma mater of Western civilization, the ‘nourishing mother’ that built the schools and invented the university? That its record, after all, is far more positive than you seem to recall? Christianity lay behind many of the greatest accomplishments in the last two thousand years, ranging from basilicas and cathedrals in architecture, to Leonardo and Michelangelo in art, to Johann Sebastian Bach in music. The Church has fostered some of the greatest minds ever to enlighten our world—Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton—”
“We’re getting off track, Jonathan,” Jennings interposed. “I’m not saying the Church hasn’t accomplished some worthy things. Perhaps for that day and age, it was better to have had Christianity than not. What I am saying is that we’re now into the twenty-first century—the world has ‘come of age,’ and it’s finally time to put the fairy tales aside, or at least regard them for the fantasies they are. We’re alone in this universe, Jonathan, alone. There is no God, and the sooner mankind realizes this, the more responsible we’ll become—must become. Rather than relying on ‘pie-in-the-sky-in-the-great-by-and-by,’ as you Yanks put it, it’s high time to improve the world solely by our own efforts now—not in some mythical eternity. And not by imploring supernatural assistance, which will never arrive . . . cannot arrive.”
“You’re so very sure of that?”
“Yes I am—no deus ex machina, since there’s no deus in the first place! Evil proves that. When disaster strikes, it’s not the great statistics that move me—not the three or four
thousand killed in the Italian earth-quakes of 1980—but the twenty-five bodies of children removed from that church east of Naples, when the walls collapsed during evening Mass. And it’s not that God is anti-Catholic; it’s just that God doesn’t exist! The sooner we all realize that, the better.”
“The existence of evil doesn’t disprove God’s existence, Austin. On the contrary, Christianity offers a solution, a remedy for evil. Your view has no remedy whatever. And the Godless world of the future that you envision wouldn’t be any paradise, let me tell you. It would probably resemble hell itself! And by the way, whatever happened to your concept of truth? How can any shred of your conscience approve such a diabolical fraud? How could you live with yourself after Rama?”
“Oh, I’ve solved that very simply. Jesus’ bones really are out there somewhere, Jonathan. We just haven’t found them yet and probably never will. Therefore I had to . . . to supply the evidence.”
“And what if your premise is flat-out false? You’ll then have been guilty of tearing the faith out of millions of lives, to say nothing of the suicides, nervous breakdowns, and other catastrophes you’ve already caused! Now, drop that rope ladder back down here so I can climb out and we can continue this conversation on the way back to Jerusalem.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Jonathan. I really can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well . . . now you know how Rama came to be. The world doesn’t. It’s really that simple.”
“What do you plan to do, imprison me here for the rest of my life? Drop groceries by helicopter?”
“No. I won’t put you through that, Jonathan.”
“Well?”
There was a long pause. Then, in a soft voice, Jennings replied, “I’m really terribly sorry it had to be you, Jonathan. Now that I’ve come to . . . to really know you and cherish you more than I thought possible, I wish I’d have trapped von Schwendener of Yale instead. I really did want to welcome you into the family. I know Shannon will be crushed. But the cause, Jonathan . . . the cause is paramount.”
