The Fifth Gospel: A Novel

by Ian Caldwell

  The other half is Simon. Two entire walls, floor to ceiling, filled with pictures. A toddler walking through the Vatican gardens, holding Lucio’s hand. Riding a tricycle in Lucio’s dining room. A baby in his proud uncle’s arms. In that picture is something I’ve never seen before: my uncle truly smiling. Then comes every stage of Simon’s priesthood. Academy milestones. Nunciature posts. And, finally, an empty frame containing nothing but a silk skullcap. It is amaranth red. The color of a bishop.

  My eyes return to the hospital bed. To the platters of plastic vials and the breathing apparatus. Only when I hear the door open behind me do I turn.

  Lucio hobbles in on his cane. He bears no resemblance to the cardinal who tried to save Simon’s life from the witness table. He struggles to make it to his bed. Yet he waves Diego away and stops when he’s beside me.

  “Uncle,” I murmur, “I found his cassock in my apartment. I found the gun case.”

  His eyes fall. They seem so tired.

  “You knew?” I say.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “For how long?” I ask.

  “Two days.”

  “He told you? Even though he didn’t tell me?”

  And yet, seeing everything on these walls, I begin to understand why he might.

  Lucio removes his pectoral cross and places it in a small jewelry box by the bed. “Alexander,” he says, “you know better than to think that. Your brother never confides in me. His only family is you.”

  He moves the four-legged cane so that he can reach a tube of ointment in a drawer. Each hand struggles to rub the medicine into the withered joints of the other.

  “Then how did you know?” I say.

  “Would you mind opening that for me?” he says, gesturing at the wardrobe.

  It’s filled with old cassocks and the smell of mothballs.

  “See it there?” he says.

  “Which one?”

  Then I realize he isn’t talking about the cassocks. He’s talking about what’s behind them.

  Propped against the back wall of the wardrobe is a giant photographic enlargement of a page from the Diatessaron. The one Simon took down from Ugo’s exhibit.

  “When I was in seminary,” Lucio says in a scratchy voice, “I was a gospel man, like you.”

  I spread the hangers apart. My arms reach inside and edge the photo out. I feel rigid.

  “I don’t know what he did with the Diatessaron,” Lucio says. “I could’ve sold many tickets to an exhibit about that manuscript. But once it disappeared, my fears were confirmed.”

  The page is nearly as tall as I am. I prop it against the wall, against the pictures of my own childhood. And almost instantly, I feel as if a glass has shattered inside my heart. Because seeing the ghost of the ancient stains that our restorers removed, I understand.

  I scrabble in my pockets for the letter Ugo mailed to Simon.

  “If you’re looking for a Bible,” Lucio says, “I have one here.” He reaches under his pillow and produces it. “Ignore my notations. I’m sure you’ll see it before I did.”

  But all I feel is a lancing pain in my chest. “A pen,” I whisper. “Give me a pen.”

  He hands me one from the nightstand.

  I kneel and unfold the letter across his cold marble floor. Then I do exactly what the Alogi did almost two thousand years ago. In his letter, wherever I see verses from John, I cross out the text.

  3 August 2004

  Dear Simon,

  Mark 14:44–46

  You’ve been telling me for several weeks now that

  John 18:4–6

  this meeting wouldn’t be postponed—even if

  Matthew 27:32

  you were away on business. Now I realize you were

  John 19:17

  serious. I could tell you I’m ready for it, but I’d be

  Luke 19:35

  lying. For more than a month you’ve been stealing

  John 12:14–15

  away on these trips—which I know has been hard on you—but you need to understand that I’ve had burdens too. I’ve been scrambling around to mount

  Matthew 26:17

  my exhibit. Changing everything so that you can

  John 19:14

  now pull off this meeting at the Casina will be difficult for me. Yes, I still want to give the keynote. But I also feel that doing it compels me to

  Mark 15:40–41

  make some grand personal gesture toward the Orthodox. For the past two years I’ve given my life to this exhibit. Now you’ve taken my

  John 19:25–27

  work and given it a much larger audience—which is wonderful, of course—and yet it gives this keynote a heavy significance. This will be the moment when I officially hand my baby over. The moment when, with a great flourish, I sign my

  Matthew 27:48

  life away.

  So, then, I need to share with you what I’ve been doing while you were out of town. I hope it

  John 19:28–29

  agrees with your agenda for the meeting. First, I’ve taken my gospel lessons from Alex very seriously. I study scripture morning and night. I’ve also kept up my work with the Diatessaron. These two avenues of investigation, together, have repaid me richly. Brace yourself, because I’m about to use a word that, at this late stage in the process, probably

  Mark 15:45–46

  horrifies you. I’ve made a discovery. Yes. What I’ve found erases everything I thought I knew about the Turin Shroud. It demolishes what we both expected to be the central message of my

  John 19:38–40

  keynote. It might come as a surprise—or even as a shock—to the guests you’re inviting to the

  Luke 24:36–40

  exhibit. For it proves that the Turin Shroud

  John 20:19–20

  has a dark past. The radiocarbon verdict killed serious scholarship on the Shroud’s history before 1300 AD, but now, as that past comes to light, I think a small minority of our audience may find the truth harder to accept than the old idea that the Shroud

  Luke 23:46–47

  is a fake. Studying the Diatessaron has taught me what a gross misreading we’ve been guilty of. The same gross misreading, in fact, that reveals the truth about the Shroud.

  My discovery is outlined in the proof enclosed here. Please read it carefully, as this is what I’ll be telling your friends at the Casina. In the meantime, I send my best to Michael, who I know has become your close follower.

  John 19:34

  In friendship,

  Ugo

  I hear my voice shaking when I utter those two words.

  “A fake?”

  Lucio doesn’t answer.

  But I realize, as I stare at the lines of Greek on the photographic enlargement, that I don’t need him to. My heart has gone cold. My body feels brittle. This is what Ugo meant. This is what he found.

  The page of the Diatessaron before me combines the testimony of all four gospels about the end of Jesus’ life. About his final moments on the cross. But not his burial. Not the Shroud. Not yet. Ugo spent weeks studying every detail of the burial accounts, only to make his discovery where he didn’t expect it.

  The damning fact isn’t what
the gospels say about the cloth. It’s what the gospels say about the wounds on the cloth.

  THERE ARE NINE LINES of text on this Diatessaron page that stand out. The reason they stand out is that our conservators removed the blot of censorship left by the Alogi but couldn’t get it all. A hint of the ancient stain remains, making these nine lines darker than the ones around them. Thus any passerby can tell they must’ve come from the only gospel the Alogi objected to: John. And this simple observation is what will doom the Shroud.

  The seven lines include John 19:34, the last verse Ugo quoted in his letter. The significance of John 19:34 is hard to see straight-on. But it’s much easier to see when approached from the very spot where Ugo was the last time we worked together: the story of Doubting Thomas.

  Doubting Thomas is John’s creation. No other gospel claims Thomas needed to see and touch Christ’s wounds. But there’s an oddity about the Thomas story that Ugo had noticed in our final meeting: namely, a very similar story is told by Luke. According to Luke’s version, Christ appeared to the frightened disciples after the Resurrection, and in order to prove that He was a resurrected man rather than a terrifying ghost, He showed them His wounds. Ugo realized that a comparison between Luke’s story and John’s story would reveal the details that John had changed. And the most visible difference was that John had focused the story on Thomas—so that was where Ugo, in turn, focused. Later, though, he must’ve noticed the much smaller, and yet far more destructive, difference: that the wounds mentioned in Luke are not the same as the wounds mentioned in John.

  In Luke’s story, Christ shows the disciples His hands and feet. His wounds from the crucifixion. But John adds something more. Something new. He says Thomas put his finger in a lance wound in Christ’s side.

  Where did the lance wound come from? No other gospel mentions it. Only John himself does—earlier in his own narrative, at a crucial symbolic moment: the moment where the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God are finally fused together. These are the very verses shown on this Diatessaron enlargement, John 19:32–37:

  So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the men crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust a lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth so that you also may believe. For this happened so that the scripture passage might be fulfilled: “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced.”

  No other gospel says that either of these two incidents ever happened. So where did John get this?

  Not a bone of it will be broken: this is what the Old Testament says about the Passover lamb.

  They will look upon him whom they have pierced: this is what the Old Testament says about the Good Shepherd.

  John’s theology has reached its summit. At the moment of Jesus’ death, Shepherd and Lamb converge. The two snakes of Ugo’s caduceus meet. The gospel stops dead in its tracks to point out that these are symbols, that they come from the Old Testament. John is saying, emphatically, This is why Jesus died. Like the shepherd, he laid down his life for his flock. Like the lamb, he saved us with his blood. John even says these events came straight from the testimony of the Beloved Disciple. In other words, they express a symbolic truth that is essential to understanding Jesus Christ. On earth, however, in history, they didn’t really happen.

  Of all the wounds on the Turin Shroud, the bloodiest is the spear wound in Jesus’ side. Yet the earthly Jesus was never pierced in his side. This wound is no more historical than the armed mob that Jesus magically knocked off its feet by saying, “I AM.” No more historical than the sponge raised on the limp stalk of hyssop. They all belong together, to the same family of symbols, because the writer of John made all these changes for the same reason: to make his point about the Shepherd and the Lamb.

  Which means that the forger of the Shroud—whoever he may have been, whenever he may have worked—made the same mistake as the author of the Diatessaron. By merging the testimony of all four gospels together, he erased the difference between theology and history. He created a terrible, heartbreaking mishmash. Putting the spear wound on the burial cloth is no different from putting a crook in Jesus’ hand because he was the Good Shepherd or a coat of wool on his shoulders because he was the Lamb of God. When the Beloved Disciple says his testimony is “true,” he means it in the same way John does when he calls Jesus “the true light,” or when Jesus himself says—only in the gospel of John—“I am the True Vine” and “I am the true bread.” To be literal about these symbols is to miss their beauty and importance. The genius of John’s gospel is that it refuses to be bound by an earthly straitjacket. John’s spear wound gestures at the truth that lies beyond mere facts. The Shroud, then, does the same. It is a powerful symbol—but it has never been a relic.

  I’ve spent my life combing these verses for meaning. Yet when Ugo came to me, wanting to show me what he’d found, I closed my eyes. And Simon did infinitely worse. So this is why my friend died. Because I taught him how to read the gospels. And because he had the bravery to speak out about what they revealed.

  CHAPTER 40

  I WANT TO FALL to my knees. I have never been so blindsided by my own failure. The anguish is a cord wrapped around my chest, tightening, tightening. My body is unsteady. But my eyes are fixed on the Greek letters of the Diatessaron photograph. They accuse me of having been a hypocrite. A fool. I ask my own students to read carefully, to search for complexity and meaning in the evidence God puts before us, and here I have known my own gospels as dimly as I knew Ugo, who suffered with a secret that would have tortured and haunted any believer in the Shroud but that must have been unspeakable hell to him, salting the whole earth of his life, laying waste to him before he ever arrived at Castel Gandolfo. And Simon, who knew how he suffered, seems to have chosen to end his life with even more suffering. If that’s true, then it makes my own brother, whose heart I thought I understood as well as I understand my own, as much a stranger to me as the man on the Shroud.

  The words slip out into the stillness of Lucio’s bedroom.

  “What do we do, Uncle? They want me to testify tomorrow.”

  He lifts himself off the bed and hoists himself up on his cane. He doesn’t put a hand on me. But he comes and stands by my side, unmoving, as if to remind me I’m not alone.

  “Do you still have his cassock?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “And the gun case?”

  I nod.

  He lets go of the cane. For a moment he stands on his own legs. Peering at the verses of the gospels, he frowns the same way he does when reading the newspaper for its obituaries. These old friends. These memories of happier times.

  “If you bring those items here,” he says, “I can arrange to have the garbage trucks come at dawn.”

  “He killed Ugo! How can you not care?”

  “He took a fish to feed a multitude. You think he should sacrifice his entire future for that?”

  I jab my finger at the photo of the Diatessaron page. “He killed Ugo to hide what we were giving the Orthodox!”

  Lucio cocks his head and says nothing.

  “Does the Holy Father know?” I ask.

  “Of course not.”

  “Does Archbishop Nowak?”

  “No.”

  The air is still. Nothing moves except a red dot on one of the medical machines, racing forward, forward.

  “Did your mother ever tell you,” he says finally, “that your great-grand uncle led the voting after the eighth ballot in the conclave of 1922? He almost became pope.” Lucio smiles foggily into the air. “And that man was nothing compared to Simon.”

  “Don’t, Uncle.”

  “He could wear the white someday.”


  “Not anymore.”

  Lucio raises an eyebrow, as if I’m missing the point.

  “I don’t see that you have a choice,” he says.

  I stare at him. Maybe he’s right. He has put words to this powerless feeling. Nothing remains but different ways to reconcile ourselves to what must come next.

  “We’ll give them what they want,” Lucio says. He points to the Diatessaron page. “We’ll explain that they made a terrible mistake by giving the Shroud to the Orthodox. And when they ask us to keep quiet, we’ll agree. As long as Simon isn’t punished.”

  I shake my head.

  “Alexander, even without the cassock and gun case, they have enough evidence to convict him. There’s no alternative.”

  “He killed for this. Ugo died for this. Simon would rather be convicted than let a reunion with the Orthodox fail.”

  Lucio sniffs. “It would be naïve to assume the Holy Father will tell the Orthodox just because we tell him. The Orthodox don’t even read the Bible the same way we do. To them, it’s all factual.”

  I glare at him. “The Shroud is a fake! He’s not going to give them a fake.”

  Lucio pats me on the back. “Bring me the cassock and the gun case. I’ll take care of everything.”

  I stare over his shoulder at one of the photos on the wall. Simon, at about Peter’s age. He is sitting in our father’s lap, looking up at him. In his eyes is a perfect admiration. Beside them is our mother, who peers into the camera and smiles. There is something indefinable in her eyes, mischief and wisdom and peace, as if she knows something no one else does. Her hands are covering the slightest bump in her belly.