More Than a Skeleton Read online

  MORE THAN A

  A SKELETON

  MORE THAN A

  A SKELETON

  A Novel

  PAUL L. MAIER

  © 2003 by Paul L. Maier

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-4016-8714-4 (2nd repackage)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maier, Paul L.

  More than a skeleton : it was one man against the world : a novel / Paul L. Maier.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-7852-6238-1

  ISBN 978-1-59554-003-4 (revised edition)

  1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. Jesus Christ—Resurrection—Fiction.

  3. Miracles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A382 M67 2003

  813'.54—dc22

  2003016349

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 QG 5 4 3 2 1

  To Dan and Edie Marshall

  BOOKS BY PAUL L. MAIER

  FICTION

  Pontius Pilate

  The Flames of Rome

  A Skeleton in God’s Closet

  The Constantine Codex

  NONFICTION

  A Man Spoke, a World Listened

  The Best of Walter A. Maier (ed.)

  Josephus: The Jewish War (ed., with G. Cornfeld)

  Josephus: The Essential Works (ed., trans.)

  In the Fullness of Time

  Eusebius: The Church History (ed., trans.)

  The First Christmas

  The Da Vinci Code—Fact or Fiction?

  (with Hank Hanegraaff)

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Very First Christmas

  The Very First Easter

  The Very First Christians

  Martin Luther—A Man Who Changed the World

  The Real Story of Creation

  The Real Story of the Flood

  The Real Story of the Exodus

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  Most of the characters in this book are fictitious, but some authentic personalities do appear. So that they might not be thought to endorse everything else in this novel, I have not sought their permission. All are famous enough to be “in the public domain,” and will, I trust, find their portrayal in these pages appropriate and congenial. The reader should know, however, that the dialogue I supply for them is mine and not theirs. While this novel follows A Skeleton in God’s Closet, it is complete in itself and does not require a reading of the prequel, which is referred to only as “the Rama project” in these pages without any divulging of the plot.

  When A Skeleton in God’s Closet was first published in 1994, I had named the successor to Pope John Paul II—who appears in both novels—as Benedict XVI. But in April, 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger chose this very name for his pontificate. The reader is urged to distinguish between the two Benedicts: one imagined, the other authentic.

  Special appreciation is due attorneys Elizabeth Meyer and Gregg Stover, as well as Professors Judah Ari-Gur, Karlis Kaugars, Walter A. Maier III, Samuel Nafzger, Walter Rast, and David Thomas for technical assistance. They should not be faulted, of course, for any opinions in this book that they may not share. A grateful word goes also to Marion Ellis, Monica Nahm, Susie Donnelly, and Robert E. Smith.

  P. L. M.

  Western Michigan University

  March 1, 2003

  It was the event for which believers had been waiting twenty centuries. Even skeptics knew that the second coming of Christ—if it ever happened—would certainly be the number one news story of all time. But what if that arrival were dimensionally different from what had been expected, with none of the Rapture, Tribulation, Antichrists, beasts, horrors, and demonic forces predicted by the prophecy specialists? Jesus said He would return when least expected. But could that return also be in a manner least expected?

  PROLOGUE

  Of the twenty archaeological digs taking place in Israel and Jordan, Sepphoris was the place to be. Perched on a lofty hillock in Galilee, the site was a paradise for excavators. In previous seasons they had uncovered broad colonnaded streets flanked by beautiful mosaic sidewalks, a four-thousand-seat theater cut into the side of a hill, an aqueduct, subterranean water systems, two baths, imposing remains of public buildings crowning its acropolis—in short, everything to enthrall those who uncover hard evidence from the past.

  Jenny Snow, an ancient history major from Wellesley, easily fit that profile. She was spending the summer digging at Sepphoris as a student volunteer—a smart move, she thought: not only would it look good on her résumé, but there was a certain thrill in finding new paths into the past, courtesy of a trowel. More than half of the other student volunteers at the dig were men, some of whom were taking as much interest in Jenny with her honey-blonde hair, sculpted features, and shorts and tank tops, as in the excavations. Coolly, she ignored them, finding much more interest in what her spade or brush was uncovering.

  Many of the archaeological greats had conducted digs at Sepphoris—Ehud Netzer, Eric Meyers, Ze’ev Weiss—but this season James F. Strange was back in charge. The famed University of South Florida professor had a glittering track record at Sepphoris. Jenny recalled his opening remarks at their orientation session earlier in June, when he introduced his staff to the twenty-six newly arrived students and other volunteers from eight different nations. They were sitting in Sepphoris’s excavated semicircular theater—much as spectators had done two thousand years earlier. A stocky, bearded figure in field khakis, who seemed to have freshly arrived from the Australian outback, Strange had walked to stage center. Adjusting his jaunty leather hat—its broad brim turned upward on one side—he announced in commanding tones, “Hello, all of you! I’m Jim Strange. Welcome to the most exciting dig in Israel!”

  Jenny had discounted his statement as a bit of friendly bluster, but not for long. Strange proceeded to give a brief history of Sepphoris, but in that short overview, jagged peaks of importance jutted out of the landscape of the past. Two millennia ago, Sepphoris had been destroyed by the Romans for refusing to accept Rome’s census, but the place was magnificently rebuilt by Herod Antipas, the most successful son of Herod the Great, and became the capital of Galilee. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, called the city “the ornament of all Galilee.”

  After the destruction of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70, the ruling council of the Jews—the Sanhedrin—moved to Sepp
horis. It was here, too, that the earliest portion of the Jewish Talmud, the Mishnah, was compiled.

  “Are you impressed?” asked Strange rhetorically, although some were nodding and even answering in the affirmative. “Then answer this question: who was the most famous resident of Galilee twenty centuries ago?”

  Jenny shot up her hand. “Jesus of Nazareth,” she replied.

  “Yes, indeed! And where do you suppose His mother, Mary, came from?”

  “Not . . . Sepphoris?” she wondered.

  “According to earliest church tradition, yes, Sepphoris. And where did Mary, Joseph, and young Jesus live? Answer all together now . . .”

  “Nazareth,” came the general response.

  “Correct. And where is Nazareth? Less than four miles that way!” He pointed to the southeast. “We’re in exactly the area where Jesus grew up.”

  Gene Hopkins, a preppy sort from Princeton who was sitting next to Jenny and trying hard to impress her, raised his hand and asked, “Is there any chance that Jesus ever came here?”

  Strange smiled, took off his hat to wave away some flies, and said, “Not just ‘a chance,’ as you say, but an overwhelming probability— say 999 out of 1,000. In fact, He must have visited here frequently. We know that young Jesus was a carpenter’s apprentice for Joseph, so if Joseph, say, broke a saw blade, he’d probably send Jesus to get a new one here at Sepphoris. Nazareth was only a tiny village in those days, while this was the big city.”

  A buzz of discussion arose until hushed by Strange’s next question. “By the way, what was Joseph doing up here in Galilee in the first place? The man most probably came from Bethlehem, didn’t he?”

  No one responded.

  “Think, team! I’ve already told you the answer ten minutes ago.” Jenny raised a timid hand and said, “I think you said Sepphoris was rebuilt by Herod Antipas, didn’t you? Maybe . . . Joseph was up here . . . to help in that?”

  “Bravo, young lady! Bull’s-eye! Joseph is called a tekton in the Gospels, which is not just a carpenter, but anyone in the construction trades, such as a mason or stonecutter too. It took Antipas only a dozen years to rebuild the city, so he’d need all the skilled labor he could find across the land.”

  “Yes, but Joseph and family lived in Nazareth, not here,” objected Hopkins, the Princetonian.

  “Of course,” Strange agreed, with a patronizing smile. “Joseph obviously parked his family in the safety of a suburb like Nazareth while he made the short commute to work here each day, probably taking Jesus along as He got older.”

  Louder discussion welled up from the bottom rows of the stone theater. Strange went on to regale the dig personnel with other intriguing possibilities lurking under the unexcavated overburden at their site. In closing, he said, “So, team: it’s by no means a flight of fantasy to suggest that the very stone benches on which you’re now sitting could have been cut out of the living rock by Joseph . . . or even Jesus. This is the dig that could help part the curtains for a better look at the so-called ‘silent years’ in Jesus’ life, the time He spent growing up. At the very least, we’ll understand His environment better.

  “So much for our opening orientation. We’ll now move on to archaeological methodology, and tomorrow we’ll survey our target for this season’s excavations: what we think are some shops just south of the synagogue.”

  Jenny adjusted quickly to life at the dig: the spartan accommodations at the tour house where they lived, three or four to a room; the early morning schedule of digging before the heat of the day set in; washing pottery finds in the afternoon; hearing lectures at night. Slowly, some of the commercial district south of the synagogue at Sepphoris was reemerging into the Mediterranean sun, thanks to the careful use of pick, spade, trowel, and brush. Wheelbarrow loads of overburden were removed, sifted for artifacts, and then dumped.

  At break time one morning, Jenny walked over to look at the excavated floor of the synagogue along the northern edge of their sector. A beautiful menorah—the seven-branched candlestick that often served as a symbol for Judaism—was the central mosaic on the tessellated floor. After admiring it for some time, she was walking back to the others when she noticed a low spot in the ground bordering the synagogue pavement. It had rained the night before, and the constant dripping from a column that stood over the area had evidently burrowed a small hole into the center of the declivity. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the hole, and as Jenny bent over she saw a glint of what looked like a piece of mosaic at the bottom. She ran for her trowel, knelt down, and started scooping away the surrounding overburden.

  “And just what, pray tell, do you think you’re doing, Jenny?” James F. Strange was looming overhead with a vast frown warping his otherwise friendly features. “What did we say about not touching any areas of our excavations that aren’t on our agenda?” “I’m . . . so sorry, Professor Strange,” Jenny replied, face reddening and tears starting to fill her blue eyes. “I think there’s a piece of mosaic down here, and I just wanted to look at it. I . . . I forgot about the rules.”

  “Where? Show me.”

  She pointed, then quickly added, her voice choking a bit in emotion, “I can easily put all the dirt back again, and no one will ever know. I’m really . . . terribly sorry.”

  Strange ignored her. He had taken Jenny’s trowel and was on his knees, clearing off more of the seven inches of muddy crust in obvious violation of his own rules. “Please fetch me a pail, Jenny,” he said, in a tone any uncle would use with his favorite niece.

  While Strange loaded trowelfuls of excavated dirt into the pail, his eyes were brightening. Now he asked for a broad brush. Jenny hopped over to her quadrant and returned with the item. Strange carefully brushed dirt away from the surface of whatever he had found, and his mouth parted in a smile. “Come look, Jenny,” he said. Peering down at a flat surface about eighteen inches in diameter, she exclaimed, “It’s a mosaic, all right! And it has some kind of lettering on it, doesn’t it?”

  “It does . . . yes. Would you mind going over to our trailer and bringing me a canteen of water? There’s a good girl.”

  Happy that she was not banished from the dig, Jenny returned with the canteen. Strange promptly dumped its contents across the mosaic. As if by magic, the mosaic took on color, contrast, and clarity.

  Both stared at their find in amazement, speechless for some moments. Finally Strange said, “The inscription, I think, is in Hebrew . . . Hebrew, Jenny! We’ve found a few bits of writing in Aramaic and Greek here at Sepphoris, but never Hebrew.”

  “What does it say?”

  Strange studied the text for some moments, then shook his head. “Pieces of the tessera are missing, so it’s difficult to make out. And I can’t really be sure it’s Hebrew. But if it is, it would have to be an early form of it, since the letters are archaic.”

  He lifted off the 35-mm Nikon camera that was dangling from his neck and used a whole roll of film in photographing the inscription from every angle, with a whole range of f-stops. Then he flashed a grin at Jenny and said, “You and I now have a decision to make: either we call all the dig personnel over here to see what you discovered . . . or we cover this up again to protect it while we try to decipher the inscription first.”

  Jenny thought for some moments, then shook her head. “It’s your dig, Professor Strange,” she said. “You’ll have to make the decision, obviously.”

  Strange nodded and said, “Well, let’s look at some supporting considerations for both options, shall we? Morally, I feel obligated to let all our personnel see what you found. The inscription may have little significance, or it could be important. If it’s the former, we shouldn’t hold out on the others. But if it’s the latter, word might leak out, and the whole context here could be trampled over by the curious. But we just don’t know which at this point.”

  “I think we should do what’s safest and best for the artifact, Professor Strange.”

  He unleashed a broad smile and said, “I was hoping you�
��d say that! Can you keep our secret, Jenny?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling.

  “All right, then, here’s my plan: I have a friend at Harvard University who knows Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions as if he’d learned the languages in kindergarten. He’s also a trained archaeologist, and he’ll be over here in late summer to teach at Hebrew University. His name is Dr. Jonathan Weber, and I want him to see our mosaic . . . in situ . . . and then help us translate the inscription.”

  “Oh . . . I’ve heard of him, I think. Isn’t he the one who unraveled that terrible skeleton mystery in Jerusalem a few years ago?” Strange nodded. “The same. Now help me shove all this dirt back into place, Jenny.”

  “Am I forgiven then, Professor Strange?”

  He merely gave her a happy hug.

  Was it Confucius who said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”? The mighty Mississippi starts with droplets of water in northern Minnesota. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a discovery of truly “biblical proportions,” began when a Bedouin lad, looking for his lost goat, threw a rock into a cavern at Qumran. Jenny Snow would soon join the ranks of those whose tiny acts led to stupendous results. Her trowel scraped far more than seven inches of the earth’s crust. It skewered the earth itself, for the mosaic she uncovered would soon become a crucial link in a chain of events that would fetter the world.

  ONE

  Some weeks earlier, Jonathan Weber was enjoying the morning drive to his office at Harvard. It was May Day in Massachusetts—though hardly a distress call, he mused, in one of his less successful attempts at humor. He was piloting a blue BMW Z4 convertible through balmy air along the Charles River; the car was the one big luxury he had allowed himself since his book Jesus of Nazareth became an international best-seller. But should a man holding the distinguished Reginald R. Dillon Professorship of Near Eastern Studies at Harvard University be sporting about in a transportation toy that better suited a pampered college undergrad? his Lutheran conscience inquired.