by Paul L Maier
Alternate options boiled up in his brain. Go to the kitchen or refectory of the patriarchate and beg a steaming teakettle? But then their secret would be out, quite apart from the fact that the teakettle would lose its steam before reaching the geniza. Well, there had to be an outlet in the room somewhere. Surely the place had served some other purpose before being converted into a manuscript dump.
“Jon, look overhead at the light fixture,” Shannon advised.
And there it was: salvation hanging just above the lightbulb. It was a compound socket that included not only a screw-in cavity for the lightbulb but two regular outlets as well.
Jon smiled broadly. “Shannon, you’re a dream-also in the daytime!”
But where to get the water? Not a problem, since Gregorios had helpfully pointed out a little WC near the geniza.
The extension cord proved just long enough to reach from the light fixture to the table beneath it, so he plugged in the hot plate, set the teakettle upon it, and waited for the water to boil.
The light had dimmed visibly when he plugged the hot plate in. “Please, Lord, don’t let the fuse blow.” While the water was warming, Jon put a hose clamp over the flex tubing and screwed it tight over the circular nose of the teakettle.
Soon came the wondrous simmer of heating water and finally the welcome gurgle of boiling. When a clear jet of steam emerged, Jon and Shannon lugged the codex over to the table.
“There aren’t all that many stuck pages, honey, and here’s the first.”?Jon paged through to the end of Mark’s Gospel that adhered to the first page of Luke’s Gospel. Now he directed the jet of steam around the three available edges of the two stuck pages. Moment after moment passed. Jon tried to distribute the steam as gently and evenly as possible, but it seemed to have no effect whatever, raising the level of his frustration. “Rats!” he said. “I guess we’ll not be able to do it ourselves after all.”
“Look at the upper right corner, Jon.”
“Hey, it’s starting to part!” He aimed the steam jet to this vulnerable spot, opening it further. “Yessss…,” he crooned.
Slowly, and with admirable cooperation, the two pages started parting from one another, providing additional avenues for the steam to penetrate.
“Fabulous! It’s working.”
Soon the pages separated entirely. Jon quickly scanned the material for any damage, but while the uncial lettering was damp and even wet at places, the ink had not run. Evidently, a deposit of ink that had clung to its parchment for seventeen centuries was not going to be deterred by a little steam.
“Thank God!” Jon whispered. Triumphantly he put a paper towel under both parted pages and then small weights at the edges of the pages to keep them open. “Let’s go get some coffee, sweetheart,” he said. “We can’t do a thing until these pages dry.”
And they did remember to unplug the hot plate.
When they returned, the pages had dried, but just to make certain, they inserted paper towels between the now-parted pages to absorb any remaining moisture. Matthew and Mark were now ready for photographing. Starting at the beginning, they photographed each page digitally, then with film, and finally with ultraviolet and infrared light to detect whether any of the vellum had been used previously and erased-a palimpsest. While this was unlikely in view of Constantine’s commission, they would overlook nothing.
This consumed the rest of the day and might even have been deemed tedious were it not for the critical importance of the codex for future New Testament manuscript research. When they had finished, around 4 p.m., Matthew and Mark had surrendered their texts. Tomorrow, Luke, John, and perhaps Acts would hopefully do the same.
Under any other circumstances, Jon and Shannon would have spent the evening at one of the more prominent night spots in Istanbul-or perhaps on a dinner cruise along the Bosporus. In view of their enthralling project, however, they hardly felt deprived at the lack of time for such comparatively frivolous pursuits. They excused Ferris and al-Ghazali for that purpose. Instead, it was time to “view the rushes” of the day’s shooting-to borrow a phrase from Hollywood. Jon had brought along his Eberhard Nestle Greek New Testament-the latest edition of which contained the optimal readings of the ancient Greek manuscripts in attempting to provide the most exact version of what Matthew and the others had originally written down.
Jon found remarkable correlations between the readings in the codex and the latest Nestle edition. Again and again, as he plowed through Matthew’s text, he would comment, “Right on!… Yes… Three cheers for textual scholarship!” Still, there were a few interesting variations in the Constantinian text. “Future editions of Nestle will have to take these into account,” he told Shannon.
“Provided that all this is authentic,” she cautioned.
“Right. But I’ll bet my very life that it is.”
After their catered dinner, Jon said he was particularly concerned as to how well the adhering pages would show up in the photography after their steam treatment. Filling his laptop screen with the now-liberated last page of Mark’s Gospel, Jon said, “Look, Shannon, no difference from the others. They all reproduced very nicely.”
Then she noticed a growing frown on the face of her husband. He was staring so intently at the screen of his laptop that she wondered if some electronic genie might be hypnotizing him.
“What’s wrong, Jon?”
“Something’s… very strange here. We’re at Mark’s last chapter, but it should end with… with about a half of one column, not three.” Jon hauled out his Nestle and compared it with the codex. Then he seized a pen and began translating the three extra columns of the codex.
Shannon realized he’d be busy for a while, so she rinsed out the coffeemaker and put on a fresh pot to brew. She suspected it would be another late night. But who was complaining?
She glanced at Jon to see how he was progressing. He must be getting tired, poor guy. His hand seemed to be trembling as he wrote feverishly on the notepad beside his computer.
“Honey, would you like some coffee?”
Jon seemed to be in a trance as he responded oddly, “What time is it, Shannon?”
“Nine thirty. Why do you ask?”
“Remember that time well.” He put down his pen and turned in his chair to look at her. With an obvious tremor in his voice, he said slowly, “Seventeen centuries of New Testament scholarship will change from this point on, darling. You will not believe what we have here!”
“What? What is it?”
He shook his head as if trying to clear his thoughts. “This seems to be… seems to be nothing less than… the lost ending of Mark, the incredible, mind-boggling lost ending of Mark!”
“No way. What are you talking about?” Shannon knew that Mark could not possibly have ended his Gospel account with the downer clause “And they [the women] said nothing to any one, for they were afraid,” while describing the glorious resurrection of Jesus. And yet that was how the Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus, the Alexandrinus, and many other early manuscripts ended. It had been the greatest problem in New Testament scholarship for many centuries. To be sure, later hands added their versions after Mark 16:8. The King James Bible, for example, and many later versions included verses 9 through 20, but these were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts. The problem was even more acute in that Mark was probably the earliest evangelist to report the Resurrection.
Jon sat down and clasped his head in both hands. “Eusebius must have found a very early manuscript of Mark that had the complete text!”
Shannon stared in wonderment at her husband. “This is simply beyond belief, Jon! What in the world does the text say?”
Jon seemed to be in another world, from which he was returned by Shannon’s question. “The text? Oh yes, the text…”
For the next three hours, Jon pored over the new material and wrote out sentence after sentence in translation, occasionally consulting the Arndt-Gingrich-Danker Lexicon of the New Testament, which he had brought along on disk. Fi
nally he banged his fist on the desk, and with a great “YES!” he stood and said, with contrived pomposity, “Please take your seat, madam. You are about to hear words that the Christian world has not seen or heard since a generation or two after Jesus himself.
“This, of course, is a rough translation, which we’ll improve later on. It picks up after Mark 16:8, where the women flee from the Resurrection tomb and quote, ‘said nothing to any one, for they were afraid’-that puzzling and totally unsatisfactory ending. Now, however, read how Mark really continued his Gospel immediately after that verse.” He handed her his translation: But immediately Jesus met them on the way and said, “Greetings!” In great joy, they rushed to him and fell down on their knees and worshiped him. And Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. I told you that I would rise from the dead, just as the prophets had predicted. And now you must take heart and tell the brethren to go to Galilee, where I will meet them at the mountain where I was transfigured before their eyes.” And then they saw him no more. In glad exultation, they immediately rushed to tell the eleven disciples what they had seen. At first they did not believe the women but thought that their words were idle tales. But then Jesus himself appeared to them in the room where they were hiding in Jerusalem for fear of the Jews. He criticized them for their unbelief and showed from Scripture that he would indeed rise from the grave. He even ate something before their eyes to show that he was not a spirit, as they had feared. Then he left them again. In great joy, the eleven immediately went to the mountain in Galilee where Jesus had directed them. Again Jesus appeared to them and said, “Go and make disciples of all people in all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. You must also teach them to obey all my commandments, for I will be with you always.” Again he left them but reappeared to them and the other believers for forty days after he rose from the dead. At last, in Jerusalem, where they had returned, Jesus again reminded them that they, as his witnesses, were to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations. Then he led them out of the city to the Mount of Olives near Bethany, where he ascended into the heaven from which he had come. And the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy, telling the good news to all, and awaiting the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
Shannon put down the script and looked at Jon. He said nothing, clearly overcome with a profound sense of the sacred. Shannon found herself blinking back tears. It was some moments before their silence was broken.
She finally looked out the windows skyward and said, “Thank you, St. Mark! Your version of what happened at that first Easter will silence all the catcalls of the critics who bellyache about all the ‘discrepancies in the Resurrection accounts’ and whether the ascension took place in Galilee or Jerusalem.”
Jon nodded. “Mark does wind it up very nicely. Too bad that ending was ever lost.”
“But now it’s found, my darling!” Shannon jumped up and gave Jon a great hug. Then she asked him if she could read it again. Flipping open her own Bible, she compared the new Markan material with the Resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke. Meanwhile, Jon poured himself another cup of coffee and slowly savored it.
“Well, Jon-” she finally looked up-“the new material certainly seems authentic enough.”
“It does, but how did you come to that conclusion?”
“It’s the old Synoptic question, isn’t it? Most scholars assume that Matthew and Luke drew from the earliest Gospel-Mark-then added separate material on their own, especially more sayings of Jesus. This passage, interestingly enough, has the basic resurrection material common to both Matthew and Luke, plus Mark’s usual signature touches, especially that adverb immediately.”
Jon thought for a moment, then threw his arms around Shannon. “You’re right. I should have thought about the Synoptic issue immediately.”
“See, that’s why you need me, Jon,” she said with a sly little smirk.
“Was there ever any question about that?”
He gathered her in his arms and kissed her deeply, passionately.
The next morning, they finished all necessary steam treatments by noon, since there were only seven other conjoined pages in the codex, and all yielded their secrets this time, however, with the loss of a few words that had probably faded long before the adhesion. Jon was confident that he could reconstruct them. In the afternoon they photographed their way through the Gospels of Luke and John, as well as the book of Acts-the earliest history of the church. At the Hilton in the evening, they checked out the rushes-all of which were fine-so they decided to discontinue the infrared and ultraviolet photography, since all the parchment skins used for the emperor were apparently fresh and new, not palimpsests full of erasures. Using secondhand materials, of course, could have damaged the close relationship between the historian Eusebius and his close friend, the emperor Constantine.
Jon and Shannon calculated that they could finish the project in the next two or three days. The following morning, curiosity finally got the better of Brother Gregorios. He put it into quaint English as he opened the door of the geniza for them yet another time. “It is very bold to ask, Professor Weber, but what do you and Madame Weber find so… so interesting in our ‘manuscript cemetery’-we call it? We have much better volumes in the rest of our library.”
Jon smiled in what he hoped was a charming and innocent manner. “We’re just sampling the sort of debris that you store inside that room, Brother Gregorios. That information will help us in America if we decide to do the same with our old materials.” While that, of course, was only a half-truth, it would have to serve for now. The librarian nodded and left the geniza.
After lugging the big tome onto the table they’d been using, Jon and Shannon prepared their equipment.
“Well, since we finished Acts yesterday, Paul’s letter to the Romans is next, Shannon. Ready?” Jon opened the codex to the bookmark they had left. An unusual superscript that he hadn’t noticed earlier caught his eye. He stared at the page for a moment, saying nothing.
“What is it, Jon?”
“Strange. Look at that superscript. Shouldn’t it read ‘Pros Romaios’? ‘To the Romans’?”
“Yes…” Shannon peered over his shoulder at the page that held him transfixed. “Hmm. It looks like it says ‘Praxeis Apostolon B’ -‘Acts of the Apostles, Beta,’ Book 2. What could that mean?”
What could that mean indeed? Jon’s pulse pounded as the possibilities started to sink in. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his brow. Truth be known, he was suddenly feeling a little faint.
After giving Shannon’s hand a quick squeeze to ground himself in reality, he put a trembling finger onto the document’s opening words, words he knew he would never forget. Indeed this moment, which seemed to be unfolding in slow motion, would forever be burned on his memory. “Touton men triton logon, O Theophile…,” he read.
Shannon looked at him, eyes wide. In a hushed tone, she translated, “This third treatise, O Theophilus…”
They stared at each other for what seemed an eternity but must have been only seconds. “Third treatise, Shannon,” he repeated. “ Third. Luke’s first treatise to his friend Theophilus, of course, is his Gospel. The second is the book of Acts, so this third treatise must be a continuation of Acts, hence Acts 2 or Second Acts!”
“And it most probably picks up where Acts leaves off, just as Acts started where Luke’s Gospel ended.” Shannon sat down slowly, clearly overwhelmed by the implications. Propping her chin on two fists, she slowly shook her head from side to side. “Beyond… all… belief! Hegesippus and Eusebius-those leaves of manuscript from Pella-were right after all. There has always been a Second Acts, but we never knew it for certain until now.”
Jon met her eyes and voiced what both of them were thinking. “This… this and the end of Mark could make every Bible in the world obsolete.”
With a feeling of awe, almost bordering on worship, they started to photograph Second Acts. Jon felt somethin
g of a sacred tingling in his arms and fingers as he understood, for the first time, what the Jewish high priest must have sensed when he went into the Holy of Holies at the Jerusalem Temple just once each year. He and Shannon were penetrating something of a verbal inner sanctum in this process, treading onto freshly uncovered holy ground.
The new document seemed to be only about a quarter as long as the original Acts.
“This seems to be a sort of codicil appended to Luke’s main document in Acts,” Jon noted, “probably to cover what happened to Paul in Rome, because he really leaves us hanging where Acts stops in
chapter 28.”
“I really hope that’s it,” Shannon added. “I’ve always found the last verse of Acts the most frustrating passage in the entire Bible.”
“Well, darling, we may now be able to find out what happened next.” He flashed her an incandescent smile.
The quest for answers, however, would have to be delayed until the evening rushes. For now, they had to finish the photography with only three days left, and the final day was reserved for the report to the patriarch.
Immediately after the sacred pearl of their discovery-Second Acts-followed the expected epistles: Pros Romaios -Romans, then Pros Korinthious A -First Corinthians, and Pros Korinthious B -Second Corinthians.
After a break for lunch, they returned to photograph the rest of St. Paul’s writings, also appearing right where they should be: Pros Galatas -Galatians, Pros Ephesious -Ephesians, Pros Philippasious -Philippians, Pros Kolossaeis -Colossians, Pros Thessalonikeis A -First Thessalonians, and finally, Pros Thessalonikeis B -Second Thessalonians.
