A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  The days and weeks following were laced with loneliness and pain. The only glimmer of gladness was his success in dodging the press. Every other magazine in the world, it seemed, wanted “the inside story” on how he had come to suspect and then unmask Jennings.

  Jon hid out in Galilee for a while, until he could stand it no longer. Each time he looked at the blue Sea of Galilee, he felt another searing stab of recollection and then grief. Shannon was everywhere: along the beaches, behind the waterfall at Panias, in a becalmed sailboat on the lake, in the glorious hotel at Tiberias. Love was a fearful equalizer: what it gave in joy and ecstasy, it took back in heartbreak and agony.

  Cromwell, who was helping him close the dig, was the one confidant with whom he could bare his heart. Dick thought it “easily possible” that Shannon might change her mind, but the Jerusalem psychiatrist who had helped Noel Nottingham pointed out that the traumas she had suffered could well have upset all her previous emotional attachments.

  “La donna e mobile,” said Jon, trying to wax philosophical. Too keenly he remembered his first great love in college, who had simply flown out of his life one day, without so much as a good-bye kiss. Was history repeating itself?

  Even though he knew it would only add torture to his grief, Jon could not help himself. He opened the booklet of love poems Shannon had sent him months earlier and read them over and over again. He easily memorized his favorite:

  I long to wake

  in the shelter and comfort

  of your strong protective arms.

  I await the day

  when our union will be complete,

  and our souls together for all time.

  “For all time?” he whispered, over a new stab of sadness.

  I breathe for you,

  and because of you I live

  more fully than ever imagined.

  I want to capture your heart

  and hold it prisoner

  within my soul eternally.

  “Is eternity so short?” he asked his empty room.

  Just before Christmas, he phoned Glastonbury and asked if he could try to locate Shannon for him, “as a personal favor.” The odds, after all, were strong that she had gone to Britain. Glastonbury had a surprisingly difficult time of it, but he finally identified her whereabouts as Drogheda in Ireland. Evidently, Shannon was trying to discover her roots. Jon wanted to fly there at once, but Glastonbury wisely counseled against it. “She needs time to recover, Jonathan,” he said. “Come on the scene too soon, and you’ll ruin any chance to win her back.”

  The following spring, the last field and paperwork had been done in closing Rama. Jon embraced Achmed Sa’ad and Ibrahim for the last time, asking them to extend his thanks to the Arab labor force for having worked so diligently. Cromwell had left for the States a week earlier. During his last morning in Jerusalem, Jon bade good-bye to Nikos Papadimitriou at the Rockefeller, and even Claude Montaigne at the École Biblique.

  “See,” the little Frenchman said, “I told you it was a forgery, no?” His eyes twinkled happily.

  “Vous avez raison, mon cher Père!” affirmed Jon. He embraced him and took his leave.

  He thought of paying Jennings a final visit in prison, but then vetoed the idea. Someday, perhaps.

  His last official act was to witness the reburial of the Christlike remains at the Qumran cemetery, from which Jennings had removed them. His last visit was to Clive Brampton’s grave.

  Gideon Ben-Yaakov and Naomi Sharon saw him off at Ben Gurion Airport. “Thanks, Gideon,” said Jon. “Thanks for being such a prince despite all the flak I sent your way!”

  “No! Thanks to you in behalf of archaeology, Jon. We should be able to handle fraud much better in the future. We’ve learned a few things.”

  Naomi threw her arms around Jon and wept. But they were tears of joy. “Tell him, Gideon,” she squealed.

  Gideon beamed and said, “Naomi . . . has consented to be my wife.”

  Jon exploded with surprise. “Delighted for both of you! Now, that’s a match made in heaven! May you parent a whole dynasty of diggers!”

  “This summer!” Naomi exclaimed. “If you come back for the wedding, we’ll make you the best man, Jonathan. Won’t we, Gideon?”

  “Absolutely!”

  It was the nicest bon voyage he could have received, Jon mused, as his 747 took off for the States. His sabbatical was over. At two years, it surely had been a long one.

  Easter came late that year. It would be the first Festival of the Resurrection since the Rama expo-sure, and the Christian world was preparing for the most exuberant celebration ever.

  “Shannon is checking her roots,” Jon mused. “I ought to get back to mine.” He recalled how he had surprised his parents two Christmases earlier. This time he would do it for Easter.

  Déjá vu. The same flight brought him to St. Louis, the same highway to Hannibal. Only this time, Missouri 61 was rimmed in a green bursting with wildflowers, rather than snow and ice. The 11 AM service at St. John overflowed with jubilant worshipers. Again Jon donned sunglasses and hunkered into the last pew, next to a phalanx of new parents with howling babies.

  This time the figure in the wheat-colored alb who mounted the pulpit had a spring in his step and a smile on his face. His father also delivered what was probably the finest sermon of his life, trying hard not to refer to his own son too proudly or too often.

  At the close, the Reverend Erhard Weber waxed eloquent. “‘Why did God permit something like Rama to happen?’ you may well ask. Since I don’t advise the Almighty, I can’t really say. But the old adage ‘You never appreciate anything unless it’s taken away from you’ surely applies here. Christians across the entire world, who almost lost the very heart of their faith, are now cherishing it as never before. We see a new wave in all denominations and in all lands. We see massive outpourings for worship, and not just on Easter Sunday. We also see a great movement toward Christian unity now sweeping the Church. Just last week, Pope Benedict XVI invited all those scholars and church leaders who had worked so hard in Jerusalem to come to Rome and lay plans for a great ecumenical council—Vatican III—which will aim for much greater unity in Christendom.

  “And so, once again, God has taken human plans for evil and turned them into blessings. This Easter, we have a Deliverer again—not a deceiver. We have the assurance of life after death—not just dissolution and dust. We have the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting! Amen!”

  “Amen!” the congregation responded, in most un-Lutheran fashion. His father closed the Bible and stepped down from the pulpit. But suddenly he returned, smiled, and shouted, “He is risen!”

  “He is risen indeed!” the congregation replied, in the classic Easter response.

  Although he had heard the phrases hundreds of times since childhood and Sunday school, they never carried as much meaning for Jonathan Paul Weber as at that moment.

  His eyes were too blurred to notice a figure who walked over from the other side of the sanctuary, and now crowded into the pew next to him. “Why don’t you take off those silly glasses and let the people see one of God’s greatest heroes, Jon,” she whispered. “Or shall I get someone else to introduce me to your parents?”

  Shannon had never looked more beautiful. She was radiant with the new spring, the new Easter for both of their lives. Jon clasped her to himself in a delirium flooded by torrents of total joy. Later would come any questions about how she came to be there. For now, heaven had descended to earth.

  “Such carrying on—in church, no less!” someone whispered. But the rest of the congregation was singing the final hymn, triumphantly:

  “Lives again our glorious King!

  Where, O Death, is now thy sting?

  Once He died our souls to save;

  Where the victory, O grave?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Paul L. Maier is a best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction. A professor of ancient history at Western Michigan
University, he graduated from Harvard (MA) and Concordia Seminary (MDiv.), before he took his PhD summa cum laude at the University of Basel, the first American ever to do so. He has several million copies of his books in print—in twelve languages. His popular novels include A Skeleton in God’s Closet, More Than a Skeleton, Pontius Pilate, and The Flames of Rome. He also penned the best-selling trilogy of books on the life of Jesus and earliest Christianity, now included in one volume, In the Fullness of Time. His translations of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and the father of church history, Eusebius, are widely used. His children’s book, The Very First Christmas, received the Gold Medallion Award in 1999, and was followed by The Very First Easter and The Very First Christians. Dr. Maier travels and lectures widely, appearing frequently in national radio, television, and newspaper interviews. He and his wife, Joan, have four daughters.

  What if Jesus returned for an interim appearance before His final coming? And in a manner least expected? Once again, Dr. Jonathan Weber must determine the truth at all costs.

  Joshua Ben-Yosef attracts a huge following. He speaks more than a dozen languages—fluently and without accent. His words ripple with wisdom and authority. And the crowds that follow him are enthralled as he heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, casts out demons, and even raises the dead.

  More Than a Skeleton, from the #1 best-selling author of A Skeleton in God’s Closet, pulls the reader into a world where all assumptions about Christ’s return seem to be fulfilled in a mysterious figure who is . . . much more than a skeleton.

  ISBN: 1-59554-003-2