A Skeleton in God's Closet Read online

  Dinner aboard the 747 offered pasticcio, prosciutto, and melon as appetizers, with tortellini as the pasta course. Only an Italian gourmet could decipher the courses that followed, each served up with choice vintages from the vineyards of Italy. Jon thought the dessert a little showy, if not risky—flames shooting up from the “Vesuvio Surprise.” A strolling violinist in Tarantella costume accompanied the after-dinner brandy. Clearly Alitalia was going all-out for its new direct flight to Rome.

  Jon doused the overhead light and tried to sleep several hours before the too-early Atlantic dawn intercepted the plane somewhere over Ireland. His mind, however, would not disengage. He felt a strange interplay, a curious volley between two quite contrary moods—elation over the current success, yet also a relentless pain over the loss that had gnawed a gaping hole in his life. What should have been the glad late springtime of his career could not be shared with the one who had mattered most to him.

  Why? Again he asked himself the nagging query raised ever since Job. In his younger, more religious days, he had asked it of God. But God had not replied.

  Andrea deserved to share his success, he reminded himself. She was such a great part of it all. The album of his sleepless mind opened again to the July he’d spent at Heidelberg during his Oxford days. The first snapshot showed an exquisite, petite blonde caressing a book in the university library—north German or Scandinavian, he had opined at the time. The next zoomed in on the girl at a party in the Roter Ochsen, hoisting a stein of suds and blowing them in his face when he doubted that she was a Fulbright from Virginia! (She’d refused to speak English, and her German was so good.) A gallery of photographs followed, progressive enlargements of an outrageously rapid romance.

  It was all straight out of Sigmund Romberg, The Student Prince revisited. Germans might call it schmaltz, but every syllable of the old university song had applied to Andrea and himself in spades:

  Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren

  auf einer lauen Sommer Nacht . . .

  English could never convey the mood: “I lost my heart in Heidelberg on a mild summer night . . .”

  He proposed to her on one of those nights, blazing with stars, as they stood at the parapets of the great castle overlooking the Neckar River. She hesitated, worried over the mad pace of their courtship, but then wrapped her arms around him and murmured, “A year from now I’d feel exactly the same way. Yes, Jon! I want to be your wife with all my heart!”

  As if timed for the event, half the skyrockets in Germany seemed to explode over the valley below in one of the Schlossbeleuchtungen or castle illumination/ fireworks displays Heidelberg offered each summer. “Now, that is music to suit the occasion!” said Jon, enclosing the lithe, willowy figure in an embrace of exuberant joy.

  When they married and moved to Baltimore and Cambridge, the promise of happiness was easily fulfilled in fact. Andrea proved versatile in her roles as housewife, colleague, and critic, equally at home in the kitchen or the study. She also wanted to become a mother, but they waited until the ICO had been launched. Then, in November, Andrea happily announced her pregnancy, and they celebrated by spending Christmas as a second honeymoon in Davos, Switzerland.

  Both were excellent skiers, but neither had ever skied Davos. Blizzards in early December had blanketed the Alps with an unusually heavy base, and during breakfast on the final morning of their holiday, Jon and Andrea had heard the echoing booms of cannon setting off controlled avalanches before the lifts started up. A warming wind from the south-east proved this a wise precaution, but someone had overlooked a bulbous snow mass looming over a hidden run on the expert course.

  Jon twisted in his seat on the jet, his stomach taut, his hands gripping the armrests like two vises, trying desperately to warp the past into a different channel, a new vector in which he and Andrea would simply have left Davos after breakfast and taken the next plane home. He even constructed a fresh scenario of the time since then, tableaus that featured Andrea at her vital best, and now sleeping on his shoulder in the adjacent seat.

  But no. Blast the inexorable past! Curses on history for its inevitability! He and Andrea were determined to conquer the expert run before leaving Davos. Just as they skied around a steep, brutal curve, the sodden snow mass parted from its frozen base and started to grind, then thunder its way down upon them. Jon, who was some distance behind Andrea, shouted, “AVALANCHE!” with every rarified breath in his lungs as he took refuge under a crag. But while he looked on helplessly, his precious Andrea was swept off the trail and buried under forty-five feet of snow. To no avail the shouts of “Lavina! Lavina!—Avalanche! Avalanche!” that rattled across the valley and brought helicopters, rescue teams, dogs, long probing poles. Too late, Andrea’s uninjured but lifeless body was located and dug out. Three hours of hypothermia had killed her. And their tiny offspring-to-be.

  It was now almost a year and a half since the disaster, months in which Jon had driven himself maniacally to finish his book, both as a memorial to her and because hard work tended to blunt grief. And yet, when the completed manuscript was to be dedicated, he could not, for some reason, bring himself to write in memoriam after Andrea’s name. He decided to write someday on love and dedicate that book to her instead.

  Just before finally falling asleep, he wondered if there had been a deeper reason for not dedicating a book with so religious a theme to his beloved. Perhaps ire at a God who “guards and protects us from all evil,” as Luther explained The Creed, yet who must have been fast asleep that early Alpine morning? Or even nonexistent?

  But no; a girl like Andrea easily proved that God did exist.

  TWO

  Attenzione i prego! Tutti passagieri . . .”

  “Attention, please! All passengers should fasten their seat belts for landing.” The voice of a flight attendant filled the cabin speakers first in Italian, and then English. Jon stretched himself awake, reset his watch from 2:30 AM Massachusetts time to 8:30 AM Italian time, and looked out the window. Creamy clusters of clouds were parting to reveal the lazy green snake of the Tiber River below, beset on both sides by the brick and stone and marble that were Rome.

  This was not his first visit to the Eternal City, yet each approach to Rome seemed to quicken his pulse. Not to pay the city homage was to play the barbarian. Saint Paul in chains had stopped along the Appian Way to gather in her wonders. Later on, a Saxon monk named Luther knelt down on the highway at his first glimpse of “Holy Rome,” as did hordes of pilgrims before and since. The plane banked over a satin Mediterranean, descended across the ruins of Ostia Antica, and glided onto the runway at Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

  Just after Jon cleared passport control, a familiar voice penetrated the announcement chimes and cacophony of the terminal, “Benvenuto, Jonathan!”

  Jon turned to see waving arms and a smiling face that pried some happy memories out of the past. “Hello, Kevin!”

  Nattily attired in summer clerical grays, Sullivan gave Jon the sort of hug that might have crushed the rib cage of a lesser man. The Irish are enthusiastic about anything they undertake—even airport wel-comes—and the dark-haired, ruddy-faced Sullivan hardly seemed the Jesuit prodigy who had the ear of Curia power brokers, including Pope Benedict XVI.

  “Well, Kevin,” said Jon, “you’re some far cry from the haggard grad I used to hoist beers with in Baltimore! Still teaching at the Gregorian?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “How’s your commentary on First and Second Maccabees coming?”

  “Moving along. You certainly stay well informed, Jon!”

  “It’s our ICO operation in Cambridge. We have spies everywhere!”

  Baggage in hand, they bantered their way out of the terminal and into a waiting limousine. Jon looked at the long, black Mercedes fluttering yellow-and-white Vatican pennants atop each fender and smiled. “Some transportation you’ve arranged, Kev! Are you sure this isn’t some kind of Palm Sunday entry into the Holy City with a Calvary lurking at the weeken
d?”

  “Aw, you hit upon our plan,” said Sullivan, raising his palms in mock dismay. “Yes, it’s all a Jesuit plot—kidnap one of the world’s finest Protestant minds and then bend it to Rome’s bidding!”

  The ten-mile trip into the city was a festival of reunion, both rehearsing memories from Johns Hopkins days. Since then, Sullivan had continued his graduate studies in Rome, where an address he delivered at a Jesuit conclave had intrigued the Father General, who soon had Kevin taking the Fourth Vow and becoming a Jesuit himself.

  Before reaching Rome, however, Jon started to probe the why of his visit. Kevin first swore him to secrecy and then led off, “Let’s talk about how Mark’s gospel ends in the New Testament.”

  Jon thought for a moment, then responded, “You mean the abrupt ending at 16:8 in the great uncial manuscripts? The ephobounto gar in the Codex Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus?”

  “Exactly.”

  The two could speak openly, even if their driver knew English—which he did not—since the conversation would have sounded like Outer Mongolian to him. In fact, however, Sullivan was verging on one of the thorniest problems in biblical scholarship—the fact that two of the earliest and most important Greek manuscripts of Mark’s gospel do not contain the crucial verses 9 through 20 in the last chapter, which report Jesus’ resurrection appearances. One of these manuscripts, the Codex Sinaiticus, was discovered at Mount Sinai; and the other, the Codex Vaticanus, at the Vatican Library. Jon’s reference to ephobounto gar was not a lapse in brain function, but the last two Greek words in these manuscripts describing the reaction of the women at Jesus’ empty tomb, “for they were afraid.”

  “Ephobounto gar!” Jon repeated. “What a way to end the Easter story!”

  “If indeed it ended there. No wonder the other manuscripts and papyri add verses 9 through 20!”

  “Yes, but those verses hardly seem part of the original. So, again, what shakes, Kevin? How am I involved?”

  Sullivan was silent for some moments. Then he replied, “This involves the Codex Vaticanus.”

  “And . . . ?”

  At that moment, the Mercedes was skirting the west bank of the Tiber and now turned sharply into Vatican City. “That’s all for now, Jon,” said Sullivan. “We’re putting you up at one of our VIP apartments, okay?”

  “Fine, but give me some idea what’s going on!”

  “Well, think of how we involved you last time. Now it’s something similar, though maybe in reverse. But here are your digs. Settle in, and I’ll pick you up for lunch at noon. And I hope you don’t have too much jet lag, Jon; our visit with the Holy Father is at 3:30 this afternoon. Can you handle it?”

  “No problem. If, that is, you give me a refresher course in protocol over lunch.”

  “Not to worry! You’ll find Benedict congenial. He’s quite a scholar, you know, really keeps up theologically. He even read your Jesus—in English, no less—before it came out in Italian!”

  Benedict XVI—Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Sovereign of Vatican City, and Servant of the Servants of God—was the sort who would have winced had his official titles (and there were more) been formally announced. Like his saintly predecessor, John XXIII, and the engaging John Paul II, the 265th incumbent of Peter’s chair was determined to maintain a broad outreach to the world while charming it in the process. However, unlike his immediate predecessor, Benedict was a traditional Italian once again, but with a very untraditional openness on some of the thorny issues pricking the consciences of Catholics across the world. Jon had been delighted to find that this pope, at last, was encouraging fresh discussion on such matters as birth control, Holy Communion for divorced Catholics, and the role of women in the church. Some thought Benedict XVI—the former Ricardo Cardinal Albergo, Archbishop of Naples—might even review the issue of clerical celibacy.

  It was exactly 3:30 PM when Kevin Sullivan brought Jon inside the Apostolic Palace, up to the papal apartments, and introduced him to the spiritual leader of a billion faithful. The face of the late-middle-aged pontiff bloomed with a warm smile as he extended his right hand. A simple white cassock, caped at the shoulders, and white skullcap sufficed the pope this day, as on so many other days. The linen was tailored perfectly to his five-foot, ten-inch frame and only marginally rotund girth.

  “I bid you welcome, Professor Weber, in the name of our sovereign Lord.” The papal English was flawless, though garnished with a delightful Italian accent.

  “Io sono molto onorato di incontrarla, Sua Santita,” replied Jon, hoping the Italian for “I’m very honored to meet you, Your Holiness” was correct. Then he quickly added, “But since your English is clearly superior to my Italian, let—”

  “Oh, I doubt that. But let me add my appreciation for your Gesu di Nazareth. Your pages combine scholarship with faith, or at least strong respect for faith. You have not abandoned the one for the other, as happens so often.”

  Jon reddened a bit at the accolade, but Benedict immediately put him at ease by adding, “And to think a Lutheran could have accomplished this!”

  They both chuckled and went on to a variety of topics as they sat down to espresso in the private reception room. Asked about his plans in Israel, Jon told of the Jennings dig at Rama.

  “You mean the Rama of Samuel? Ramathaim in Ephraim?”

  “Yes indeed, but I’m astonished that you—”

  “Oh, I’m a—how do you say it?—a ‘dirt archaeologist’ at heart. I almost took up the spade instead of the staff. Finding paths into the past is such a luxury, finding them for the future such a burden!”

  The pope now glanced pointedly at Sullivan, who picked up his cue and said, “Santissimo Padre, I’ve briefed Professor Weber on the problem in Mark’s gospel and that the Codex Vaticanus may be involved, but I’ve told him nothing more.”

  Benedict nodded. “And the matter of confidentiality?”

  Jon interposed, “I shall respect it categorically, Your Holiness.”

  “Fine. Then, shall we go?”

  They walked through a series of ornate corridors until they reached the great wooden doors of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the illustrious Vatican Library. The curator of the restricted archives met them at the entrance hall, a grizzle-bearded Dominican who bowed to the pope and conducted them to the guarded sanctum where the Vaticanus was stored. Then he left the chamber, locking the door after him.

  The Vaticanus stood open on a desk, its leaves covered with a large black cloth to prevent light deterioration of the precious manuscript. Sullivan carefully removed the cloth, and said, almost in a tone of reverence, “It’s open to Mark 16, Jon.”

  Approaching the Codex, Jon reflected on the rare privilege that was his. For four centuries until the modern era, the Vaticanus had been virtually inaccessible to the world. He peered down and admired the fine vellum of the open leaves, each a little less than a foot square. He was amazed at the clarity of the beautiful uncial lettering in capitals, three columns to the page. Instantly he saw where the Gospel of Mark ended at verse 8, and the last two words were indeed ephobounto gar: “for they were afraid.”

  “Look, gentlemen, at how much space follows the end of Mark before Luke begins,” commented Jon. He was too engrossed to notice a possible slip in etiquette in using collective address for the pope, but no one in the room cared. In that place, respect for a document from the fourth century reigned supreme.

  “It’s almost as if the scribe left a space after Mark in case ‘the lost ending’ ever did turn up somewhere,” Jon continued. “It could then have been written in.”

  “It’s possible,” Sullivan admitted, then exchanged glances with the pope that had some obscure meaning, Jon assumed. Sullivan now went to the corner of the chamber, wheeled over a large apparatus, and plugged it in.

  “Ultraviolet?” asked Jon. “Hasn’t UV already been used on the Vaticanus?”

  “Not this sort. It’s the latest—l
aser-assisted—for a very pure and intense beam.” Then he drew the curtains, turned off the overhead lights, and turned the machine on.

  “Now take a look, Jon. You’ll soon understand the reason for all this cloak-and-dagger routine.”

  Jon bent over the manuscript. Squinting a bit, he now saw the vague outlines of some ghostly, chalky lettering appear after Mark’s concluding verse. Slowly, haltingly, he tried to make it out—no easy task, since the Greek left no spaces between words but ran them alltogetherlikethis.

  In the hush of the chamber, Jon now read aloud, “Ho . . . de . . . to . . . soma . . . iesou . . . anelaymphthay.”

  No one said anything, until Jon translated aloud to himself, “‘But the body of Jesus . . . was taken.’ Or ‘taken back . . . retrieved.’ Removed? . . . Good heavens!” Jon whispered, reaching down to the table to steady himself. If the meaning were ‘removed’ or ‘stolen,’ it would place a dagger at the very heart of Christianity. It was the oldest pagan explanation for what happened to Jesus’ body on Easter Sunday morning.

  “But the same verb form, anelaymphthay,” said the pope, “is used for Jesus’ ascension, in the meaning ‘taken up’.”

  “True.” Again Jon peered down at the lettering, and said, “The uncials certainly look like they came from the same hand as the rest of the text. Have you taken photographs and checked that out, Kevin?”

  “Yes. So far it looks like the same scribe.”

  “But why the eradication? Who deleted the line, and why?”

  “Who knows? Someone, obviously, who feared that the verb could be interpreted as ‘stolen,’ which would undermine Jesus’ resurrection.”

  “And that could be anyone who had access to the Vaticanus for the past . . . how many centuries has it been here?”

  The pope smiled and said, “Unfortunately, we don’t know that either. The first Vatican Library Catalogue was published in 1475, and it lists the Vaticanus. We have no idea when or how it came to the Vatican. It could even date back to Constantine.”