The Fifth Gospel: A Novel

by Ian Caldwell

  * * *

  LEARNING THE GOSPELS BECAME Ugo’s mania in the final weeks we worked together. He studied them the same way he drank. I would be reading in bed after Peter had gone to sleep, and my mobile phone would ring: Ugo, asking whether Jesus really turned water into wine, since John is the only gospel to claim he did. Knocks on the door during breakfast: Ugo, wondering if Jesus really raised Lazarus from the dead, since John is the only gospel to claim he did. A message left at the pre-seminary: Ugo, trying to understand why John left out twenty of Jesus’ healing miracles and all seven of Jesus’ exorcisms.

  To buy myself respite, I gave Ugo a sheaf of Simon’s old homily paper—the same stationery on which he would later write the letter I found in Simon’s bag—and we invented an exercise for him to do: chapter by chapter, he began writing out parallel verses from the gospels, comparing them word by word, and crossing out the sections that must’ve been added or changed by the gospel writers. This thrilled Ugo, who believed that by weeding out theology he was coming closer to the historical facts of Jesus’ life. And though it saddened me to see him return each day with a new handful of pages in which whole phrases and lines from the gospels, especially John, had been crossed out, his command of scripture was becoming so strong, and his errors were becoming so rare, that I decided to let him continue until he reached the end.

  Meantime, the manuscript restorers told me they thought Ugo sometimes spent the night in the lab. They resented the way he refused to let the Diatessaron out of his sight, as if he didn’t trust them. Their concerns reassured me about Ugo’s true intentions. He didn’t really believe that by whittling the gospels down to their factual core he would reveal something new about how the Shroud had left Jerusalem. Instead, all our work together was preparation for reading the Diatessaron—and his hopes for that gospel were well-founded.

  The man who wrote the Diatessaron, Tatian, belonged to a Christian sect called the Encratites. Encratite is Greek for “self-disciplined,” and they earned the title: they were teetotalers and vegetarians who also outlawed marriage. Since one of Jesus’ first miracles was to turn water into wine at a wedding, it’s tempting to ask how well the Encratites knew their gospels. But Tatian knew them cold.

  It’s a daring feat to weave Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into a single gospel. But Tatian made it even harder on himself. His goal was to create a definitive version of Jesus’ life, to disprove the pagans who said the Christian holy books contradicted themselves. A century earlier, the gospel of Mark had been edited to create the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Tatian set out to edit all the gospels. One God, one truth, one gospel. And for anyone trying to prove the Shroud was in Edessa, his editorial changes were gold.

  In merging the gospels, he left behind a trail of clues about himself and the world he lived in. For instance, the gospel of Matthew says Jesus was baptized by a man known as John the Baptist, who lived on a diet of locusts and honey. But Tatian, being an Encratite, was a vegetarian, and he happened to classify locusts as a kind of meat. So he changed the gospel text: in the Diatessaron, John the Baptist survives on milk and honey.

  In the same way, it would take only a single word to prove that Tatian had seen the Shroud, or that the Shroud was in Edessa. The clue might be obvious, or it might be almost invisible. If anywhere in the Diatessaron Tatian described Jesus’ physical appearance, it could be the lead we were hoping for. The four gospels never say what Jesus looked like, so a description in the Diatessaron would suggest Tatian had seen an image he considered authentic. Thus every page of the Diatessaron became pregnant. Ugo and I hung on what the restorers were recovering from under the smudges each day.

  It was slow going. I convinced Ugo not to let the technicians remove the Diatessaron’s binding, even though it would let them work faster. The pope’s oldest Bible, Codex Vaticanus, was now just a collection of loose sheets under glass because someone had let the restorers disassemble it that way. But with the Diatessaron still bound, the conservators could restore only two pages at a time. So Ugo forced them to start on the pages that interested him most—the ones that described Jesus’ death—and one morning a technician sidled up to us and said, “Doctor, the section you asked about is ready.”

  * * *

  THE WORKROOM OF THE manuscript restoration lab was filled with wonderful contraptions. There were anvil-like things with hand-wheels as big as bicycle tires. Clotheslines sagged from the ceiling, draped with what looked like giant napkins. The conservators worked with vials of chemicals and huddled around the tiny manuscript with what appeared to be doll-size tweezers and brushes. Removing the smudges was painstaking work, and the manuscript had to be set open in an apparatus to recover overnight. Now, as the technician presented his work, Ugo stared. He had begun taking Greek lessons at a pontifical university, but he was too impatient to use that knowledge now.

  “Father,” he whispered, “tell me what I’m looking at.”

  Hazy clouds dotted the page where the restorers had removed the smudges of censorship. Before our eyes was the verse that had vexed Ugo most. The one he had been dying to uncover.

  “It says cloth,” I said. “Singular.”

  “Ha! That supports the Shroud!”

  He was excited but not jubilant. He’d had enough lessons by then to understand that Tatian could’ve chosen that word for other reasons. In fact, the word Tatian used—οθονίο, or “strip of cloth”—was John’s word, which Tatian had changed from plural to singular rather than using the completely different word found in the other gospels. Confronted by this discrepancy in the gospel testimony, Tatian had split the difference, and the Alogi had dutifully smudged it out. This proved nothing.

  But there was more here.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to a word on the page.

  According to Mark and Matthew, Jesus was offered a mixture of wine and gall to numb the pain of crucifixion. But Tatian was a teetotaler. He didn’t want the Messiah drinking wine. So the page before us had changed the word from wine to vinegar.

  “It’s happening again,” I said. “He’s changing the text.”

  Ugo signaled to a conservator and called, “Bring me the photos of the other pages in this section.”

  I scoured the pictures for other examples.

  ΚΑΙΠΛΕΞΑΝΤΕΣΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΝΕΞΑΚΑΝΘΩΝΕΠΕΘΗΚΑΝΕΠΙΤΗΝΚΕΦΑΛΗΝ.

  “And plaiting a crown of thorns,” I said, “they put it on his head.”

  Ugo watched but said nothing.

  ΚΑΙΕΤΥΠΤΟΝΑΥΤΟΥΤΗΝΚΕΦΑΛΗΝΚΑΛΑΜΩΙ.

  “They struck his head with a reed.”

  ΚΑΙΠΑΡΕΔΩΚΕΝΤΟΝΙΗΣΟΥΝΦΡΑΓΕΛΛΩΣΑΣΙΝΑΣΤΑΥΡΩΘΗ.

  “And having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.”

  “What are you looking for?” Ugo asked.

  These were the injuries that produced visible marks on the Shroud. So if Tatian had seen the Shroud, then he might’ve been tempted to enrich these verses with his own knowledge, just as he’d done elsewhere. The gospels don’t say how often Jesus was scourged or how badly his wounds bled. They don’t mention which side of him was stabbed by a spear or where each nail of the crucifixion pierced him. Only the Shroud maps this gore. And to Tatian, who wrote the Diatessaron at a time when Christians were suffering bloody persecution across the Roman Empire, it might have seemed important to make the gospels fully express the horror of Jesus’ torture.

  “I’m looking for anything different,” I said. “Added or taken away.”

  “Get a Bible for Father Alex,” Ugo called out.

  But I waved him off. “I don’t need it. I know these verses.”

  Yet there seemed to be nothing changed. Not a word.

  “What do you see?” Ugo asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure? Look again.”

  But
there was no need to look again. From the first torture until the last mention of the burial cloth, the account given in the gospels is scarcely a thousand words. I knew those words by heart.

  “Maybe we’re not looking in the right places,” I suggested.

  Ugo ran an anxious hand through his hair.

  “There are dozens of pages left to be restored,” I said. “It could be anywhere. We’ll just have to be patient.”

  But Ugo ran a finger under his nose, considering something, then whispered, “Maybe not. Come with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

  * * *

  I FOLLOWED HIM BACK to his apartment.

  “This is confidential,” he said, wringing his hands with eagerness. “Do you understand?”

  I nodded. Not since our initial meeting here, when he first described his exhibit, had I seen him so carried away.

  “I’ve always proposed that the Shroud,” he said, “was brought to Edessa after the Crucifixion. Around 33 AD, do we agree?”

  I nodded.

  “We don’t have to be exact,” he continued, “since the Diatessaron wasn’t written until 180 AD. The point is: Shroud first, Diatessaron second. When the book was written in Edessa, the cloth was already there.”

  “Okay.”

  “But,” he said with a glint in his eye, “what happens if we apply the same logic to John?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The gospel of John was written around 90 AD. So the same idea applies. Shroud first, book second. The cloth was in Edessa before John was written.”

  “But Ugo—”

  “Hear me out. Since you’ve shown me that John adds and subtracts material as he sees fit, what if John tells us something new about the Shroud in his gospel?”

  I lifted a hand to stop him. “Ugo, you can’t make that leap. There’s a geography problem. Tatian was writing in Edessa. If the Shroud was there, he would’ve seen it. But John wasn’t writing in Edessa. So how would he have seen it?”

  Before answering, Ugo stepped back toward a bookcase and unraveled a map that was waiting there in a scroll. It showed ancient Syria, from the coast of the Mediterranean to the Euphrates and Tigris in the east. His index finger stabbed at a familiar point.

  “The city of Antioch,” he said. “One of the likeliest places John was written.” His thumb moved an inch inland. “The city of Edessa. Where the Shroud was.” He glanced up at me. “Sister cities. If the Shroud arrived in Edessa around 30 AD, news would’ve reached Antioch long before 90.”

  I shook my head. “Ugo, I think this assumes too much.”

  “Why? We have plenty of historical records showing that news traveled between the cities.”

  I fidgeted in my seat, feeling flustered. It was true that John had incorporated new material into the gospel corpus—hints of gnostic ideas and pagan philosophies and new Christian attitudes toward Jews—but Ugo was proposing something different. Something worse: that John’s gospel was as tainted by personal prejudice and local color as the Diatessaron. The real problem wasn’t geography. It was personality. Tatian was a brilliant but eccentric loner, a man who drifted further and further from mainline Christianity. He changed the gospels to agree with his sectarian beliefs. The author of John, whoever he might have been, was a philosophical genius who set his sights on something different and much higher. Something essential to all Christians. The invisible truth about God.

  Yet Ugo said, “Please understand, I don’t suggest this lightly. Try to stand apart from your emotions. It’s a testable hypothesis: the authors of both John and the Diatessaron knew a disciple had brought the Shroud to Edessa and indicated this in their writings.”

  “Then let’s test the hypothesis,” I said. “Does John say the burial cloth had an image on it? No. Does the Diatessaron say that? No. Does John or the Diatessaron say the Shroud was brought from Jerusalem to Edessa? No. The hypothesis fails.”

  “Father,” Ugo chided, “you know that isn’t reasonable. These writers weren’t trying to persuade us, two thousand years later, of something they considered obvious. It would be ludicrous for them to make a big fuss about the Shroud if everyone knew it was in Edessa. As ludicrous as if you or I made a big fuss about the existence of Saint Peter’s Basilica.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we have to look for an allusion. A few details feathered in to make the gospels acknowledge what everyone in Edessa and Antioch already knew.”

  “So where are those allusions?”

  “Before I answer, tell me this: after the disciples found the Shroud, who do you suppose was allowed to keep it?”

  “I don’t know. It would’ve become communal property, I guess.”

  “But the disciples fanned out across the world to spread the Gospel. Which of them got to keep the Shroud?”

  “I would be speculating. The gospels don’t say.”

  “Don’t they? I would suggest to you that John gives us a hint.”

  He waited, as if I might guess.

  “How well do you remember the story,” he said, “of Doubting Thomas?”

  I recited, “Thomas, called Didymus, was not with the other disciples when Jesus came. So they said, ‘We have seen the Lord,’ but he replied, ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe.’ A week later Jesus came and stood in their midst, saying, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘See my hands. Put your hand into my side. Do not be unbelieving, but believe.’ Thomas answered, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus replied, ‘Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.’ ”

  “Excellent,” Ugo said. “Now, I ask you: does any other gospel give us the story of Doubting Thomas?”

  “No. There’s a similar story in Luke, but the details are different.”

  “Correct. Luke says Jesus appeared after his death and the disciples were all afraid. But he never mentions Thomas. Nor does he focus on this peculiar thing Jesus does, proving his identity by showing the nail marks and the spear wound. So why would John add those details? It’s almost as if he took Luke’s story and then specifically added Thomas and the wounds.”

  Here was the monster I had created. A man who now could dissect the gospels like a priest and test them like a scientist. These were exactly the right questions: How are the gospel accounts different? What do the differences mean? If a story isn’t factual, then why is it there? But rather than encourage Ugo, I said, “I don’t know.”

  Ugo leaned in. “Remember the question I asked you before? About which disciple received the Shroud? I think this story is our answer.”

  “You think Thomas got the Shroud?”

  He rose and pointed to a map of ancient Edessa on the wall. “This building,” he said, tapping a dot beneath the glass, “was the most famous church in Edessa. Built to house the bones of Saint Thomas after he died. Thomas was there, Father Alex. Later records suggest he sent the image to the king. All I’m suggesting is that the gospel of John agrees. Its author knew the story and added it to the gospel.”

  I squinted. “Ugo, there are other reasons John could’ve put Thomas in that story.”

  “True. But recite the beginning of the Doubting Thomas story one more time.”

  “Thomas, called Didymus, was not—”

  “Stop!” Ugo said. “That’s it, right there. Thomas, called Didymus. Let’s remind ourselves what that means.”

  “Didymus is Greek for ‘twin.’ ”

  “Yes. And why?”

  “They called him the Twin. It was his nickname.”

  “Whose twin was he?”

  “The gospels don’t say.”

  “Yet the gospel of John always identifies this man as ‘Thomas, called Didymus.’ Isn’t it odd to keep calling someone �
��Twin’ without ever explaining whose twin he is?”

  I shrugged. Jesus gave many nicknames. Simon became Peter, “the Rock.” John and James became Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder.”

  “But the story gets stranger,” Ugo continued. “As I’m sure you know, the nickname Didymus isn’t the only odd thing about Thomas. The name Thomas itself is just as strange.”

  “It means ‘twin,’ too,” I said.

  Ugo lit up. “Yes! T’oma is Aramaic for ‘twin,’ just as Didymus is Greek for ‘twin.’ So ‘Thomas called Didymus’ actually means ‘Twin called Twin’! Don’t you find that bizarre? Why would John call him that?”

  I smiled to myself. If Ugo hadn’t been a museum curator, he would’ve made a very popular pre-seminary teacher. “Sometimes John gives us the Aramaic and then its Greek gloss. It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

  “Father, the other times John repeats himself like this, he’s referring to Jesus. ‘The Messiah, the Anointed.’ ‘Rabbi, Teacher.’ So why is he doing it this time for Thomas?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Do you know,” Ugo said, “who this man’s twin was alleged to be?”

  “I do. The legend says it was Jesus.”

  Ugo smiled.

  “But that’s just a legend,” I added.

  The gospel of Mark says Jesus had brothers and sisters. Inevitably, some readers imagined that the mysterious “twin” nicknamed Thomas might’ve been one of these siblings.

  Ugo ignored me. “A twin of Jesus. A facsimile. A spitting image.” He lowered his voice. “What does that remind you of ?”