A Skeleton in God's Closet Read online

  Jon cupped his chin in hand and paced the chamber in thought. Then he asked, “Who else knows about this?”

  “You’re looking at the only two in this world,” Sullivan replied, with a wan smile. “The Vaticanus had never been given a good examination under strong ultraviolet, and I started with the New Testament three weeks ago. I got no further than Mark 16.”

  “For obvious reasons,” said Jon. “Well, I’m honored that you both have trusted me with word of this discovery, though I do wonder why I am so privileged.”

  Sullivan explained, “Your advice on the Shroud proved to be the best modus operandi the Vatican could have pursued some years ago, Jon. We’ve already told you that. Now we wonder if you couldn’t design a similar strategy for us regarding that eradicated line. For example, are there any scientific tests that could determine how that line was erased? When this might have happened? Or, far more importantly, if the original line was genuine? Or a forgery?”

  Jon smiled wryly at the incredible complexity of the request. His hands wrestled each other, and he paced a tight circle around the desk on which the Vaticanus lay. Finally he answered, “The chemistry exists that could identify the eradication agent—if it happened in recent centuries. But going after the original writing?” He shook his head. “I doubt if there’s any technology that could handle that.”

  For some moments, a silence—palpable, almost embarrassing—hung over the room. Finally the pope asked, “Do you have any recommendations, Professor Weber?”

  Jon nodded. “I’ll draw up a written agenda,” he said. “For your eyes only, of course. Just off the top of my head, I’d suggest that you complete your ultraviolet scan of the entire Vaticanus, Kevin, and check if there are any other eradications. Then do the same with the Codex Sinaiticus in London, to see if there’s a parallel eradication at the end of Mark. I can grease the rails for you on that—I know the keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum. Meanwhile I’ll work on the problem with some of the scientists we assembled for the Shroud project. Don’t worry, I won’t identify the manuscript or give them the slightest hint at what we’ve got here.”

  Benedict XVI and Sullivan both nodded approvingly. “I’ll also do a word study on anelaymphthay and see how it’s used through the New Testament,” Sullivan added.

  “Yes . . . good, Kevin! That’s most important.”

  Sullivan moved the apparatus aside and once again shrouded the Vaticanus in black cloth. Then he summoned the curator, and they returned to the papal apartments.

  At the door, Benedict turned, smiled at Jon, and said, “I thank you for your advice, good professor—or, as I would now prefer to call you—good friend. I would like to remain in touch with you on this . . . and perhaps other matters.”

  “Nothing would please me more, Santissimo Padre.”

  “No, no—‘amico mio!’ Then it’s addio, caro professore.”

  “Arrivederci . . . e grazie, Sua Santita!”

  That evening, Jon was sitting with Kevin at an out-door café just across from the ancient Roman Forum. It was Campari and soda for the Romanized Kevin, but Nastro Azzurro beer for the Germanic Jon, who was still aglow over his instant rapport with the Bishop of Rome.

  “It’s a little surrealistic, Kevin. I enter the papal apartments as a curiosity from abroad, and emerge as . . . as a friend?”

  “Not to burst your bubble, good buddy, but that’s Benedict’s style. Here we are, only a year into his pontificate, and already we can see how we lucked out with that man. Some of the other papabile were, frankly, dreadful. Several hadn’t had a new thought since their ordination. Others shouldn’t have been ordained in the first place! And here we’re graced with a good scholar, a warm personality, and a really able administrator. Makes one think the Holy Spirit does guide those conclaves!”

  “If you had to point to any weakness in the man, what would it be?” Jon probed.

  Kevin hesitated a bit, and then replied, “Well, it may be one of his credits that’s the weakness—his trust in people. Trust can get misplaced around here. Like any agency on earth, we have our share of scoundrels, too, and some of them are in high places.”

  Kevin stopped just at the point Jon wished he’d continue. A friendly nudge, perhaps?

  “Scoundrels in high places? Discuss and clarify,” Jon teased. “This question is worth twenty-five points.”

  “Ever the pedagogue!” Kevin laughed. “Well, scoundrels in any outfit come in various shapes and sizes. I’m not so worried about the yo-yos in charge of Vatican finances. All they did was lose millions of church dollars in the Sindona scandal and other delightful enterprises. No, I’m more concerned about our doctrinaire oracles on the extreme right or left who are putting such pressure on Benedict. On the one hand, we have the Holy Office types with twitching nostrils who can sniff out heresy at a hundred kilo-meters. They’re trying to drag the church, kicking and screaming, back into the sixteenth century. The Latin mass? Of course! Just so it’s medieval Latin!”

  Jon laughed. “And the left?”

  “Well, some of our boys are so far out they think the German higher critics a band of reactionaries! You know the sort: Jesus may have been born, but certainly not in Bethlehem. A few of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels may be his own, but not many. The miracles are myths. Jesus died, of course, since humans have a habit of doing that. But forget about any resurrection, afterlife, heaven, or anything else. Oh, I’ll admit, we don’t have many of those in the Vatican, but the political liberals are back again in force. ‘Liberation Theology’ not only lives, but it’s ‘the one hope of the church’—Jesus and Marx, walking hand-in-hand into the great beyond. Never mind that communism collapsed in eastern Europe and Russia.”

  “It’s all due to your marvelously wide canopy, Kevin. You Catholics stretch one vast umbrella over every extreme. We Protestants prefer division and subdivision into church bodies accommodating every conceivable viewpoint . . . But where, on the theological scale, do you place Benedict XVI?”

  “Clearly, he’s more moderate than John Paul II—not so incredibly narrow on birth control, for example—but he’s still something of a centrist who’s trying to hold the church together. But you watch—both fringe right and fringe left will be tugging at him.”

  They now shifted to a technical discussion of the potentially staggering implications of the new line in Mark’s gospel, which lasted another hour. But that theological exchange was expressed sotto voce: no need to panic the Christian public just yet.

  “Another beer?” Sullivan offered.

  “I don’t think so, Kev. Jet lag has me in its clutches. But thanks—I think!—for a rare and extraordinary day, friend!”

  THREE

  The next afternoon, Jon’s El Al jet touched down softly at Lod, as if respecting land that was holy, and disgorged its passengers onto the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. After the usual intense security screening (They forgot to check my armpits and groin, thought Jon), he spotted the towering, lanky figure of Austin Balfour Jennings waving his orange sun hat.

  It had been some years since he had seen his Oxford mentor, but recognition was no problem for Jon or anyone else. Once “A.B.J.” walked into your life, he left a dominating imprint on the memory cells. At age sixty-three he was not merely hairless but imperially bald, in the Yul Brynner tradition. Americans who had dug under Jennings called him, depending on their generation, Daddy Warbucks or Mr. Clean—though always reverently. Ruddy, tanned skin stretched across his lofty, oval dome, then dropped past eyes of livid turquoise onto a triangular landmark of a nose. A double row of yellowish incisors, stained from pipe tobacco, had parted in a great smile.

  “Welcome to Eretz Israel, Jonathan!” he said, squeezing Jon’s hand in greeting. “Your baggage should have an easier time getting cleared than you did. We have a friend in customs. Otherwise, it’s a frightful bore.”

  “Honored that you came personally, Austin! You surely could have sent one of your staff.”

  �
�Wouldn’t think of it. Good flight?”

  “Fine. Ah, my luggage.”

  “Off we go. My car’s in front.”

  With Jerusalem a scant hour’s drive eastward and upward from the airport, there was no time for the slightest lull in conversation. Jon fired a volley of questions about the dig, and Jennings was eager to brief him.

  “Once again, how’d you ever discover the site, Austin?” Jon inquired.

  “Well, ’twasn’t I but Sir Lloyd Kensington who first identified Rama back in the early sixties, and a splendid piece of sleuthing that was! He was bent on finding the Rama that was Samuel’s hometown, but the name of the place has a maddening number of variations—Rama, Ramah, Ramatha, Ramathem, Ramathaim, Haramathaim, Arimathaim. And in the Gospels, of course, it shows up as Arimathea, Joseph’s hometown. To add to the confusion, there are several other Ramas in the Bible—”

  “Isn’t there one on the outskirts of Jerusalem?”

  “Quite right, my boy. But Kensington finally solved the matter by taking his clue directly from the first chapter of 1 Samuel. Here, see if you can find it.” Jennings reached into the backseat, extracted a Hebrew Bible, and handed it to Jon. “Start reading at the first verse.”

  Thumbing to the spot, Jon read aloud: “‘Whyhee ish echad min haramathaim—’”

  “That’ll do. Now translate.”

  “There was a certain man from Ramathaim . . .”

  “Righto! The ‘man,’ of course, was Samuel’s father. Now look down farther and tell me what that place is called in verse 19.”

  Jon’s finger ran down the page, then stopped. “Ramah,” he replied.

  “Correct. Now since rama means ‘height,’ Kensington assumed that the author of 1 Samuel was trying to distinguish which of the same-named ‘High Towns’ he had in mind by using a dual the first time he named the place—Ramathaim, which could be rendered, ‘the Rama with the two heights’.”

  “Oho! So Kensington scouted out all the twin peaks in Ephraim until—”

  “Precisely! Until he found a pair near Bethel. There was an interesting tel here in a saddle between two heights which the Arabs—too good to be true—called er-Ram. He started digging, oh, back in 1963. I joined him during the third summer there.”

  “But how did you get positive identification? I mean, that the site actually was Ramathaim?”

  “We uncovered a Maccabean cemetery, and several of the tombstones have names with ‘of Ramathaim’ as suffix.” Jennings paused, smiled, and continued, “And it’s bloody good that we did, because Kensington collapsed at the dig and died toward the close of our next season. That way he could die a happy man!”

  By now they were well into the foothills of Judea. The grades grew steeper, and Jennings had to shift down his Peugeot. “See why it’s always ‘up to Jerusalem,’ Jonathan?”

  “Right! But tell me what you’ve uncovered at Rama so far.” Nothing pleased an archaeologist more than talking about his discoveries, Jon knew.

  Jennings’s eyes seemed to sparkle, and his commanding visage softened into a mellow smile. Stretching his arms against the steering wheel, he replied, “Well, Kensington started with the eastern half of Rama and eventually exposed much of it. Having this fixation on Samuel, of course, he favored the Late Bronze era.”

  “Around 1200 BC on?”

  Jennings nodded. “He found the spirits of Samuel or Saul or David hovering over every other stone there, I think. Beastly of me to say this, but I’m afraid he rather hurried through the Roman and Hellenistic levels to get down to his ‘hobby’ stratum. Anyway, Rama reached its apex in the Herodian and first-century period, so that’s the level that should have been favored throughout. In any case, we’ve been working on the western half of Rama—the part Kensington barely touched—and it’s been fascinating in the extreme.”

  Jon wondered how much longer Jennings would play cat-and-mouse with him. What in blue blazes did you discover of such ‘spectacular’ importance? he felt like shouting. But he restrained himself and asked, “But again, what have you found, Austin?”

  “Ah, dear me . . . I haven’t really answered you, have I? Well, after Kensington died, the dig was shut down until I finally got back here four years ago. First, of course, we dug a survey trench across the midsection and got down to a very nice Middle Bronze IIc stratum, where we hit bedrock.”

  “Which means the site was settled no earlier than 1700 BC?”

  “Probably 1600.”

  “If that’s the earliest stratum, what’s the latest?”

  “Aside from negligible medieval and Arab artifacts near the surface, Rama seems to have terminated late in the first century . . . most probably during the Jewish war with Rome in AD 66. A rubble layer at that point shows the Romans must have leveled the place on their way to Jerusalem.”

  “What’s the latest coinage at the destruction stratum, if you found any?”

  “So far, it’s a silver denarius minted under Claudius, datable to AD 53. Well, no, Clive Brampton, my second-in-command, found a Turkish pound piece from the 1890s, but that ‘spook’ must have intruded, somehow.”

  The steep hills of undulant reddish brown soil, gently forested with pine and cypress, suddenly gave way to the stark white limestone of Jerusalem. Few cities on earth loom into sight so swiftly as Jerusalem, thought Jon, and none form so fascinating a foil for the deep azure of the late afternoon sky.

  Jennings, however, was unimpressed. “Those sky-scrapers are spoiling the lines of the city, Jonathan. ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ by all means, because after that it’ll be ruined! The Hilton, the Plaza, the Ramada Renaissance, the Hyatt Regency are all making a ‘permanent pilgrimage’ here, it seems! But welcome back to al-Quds, as the Arabs called it—‘the Holy’. ”

  They drove across the northern rim of Jerusalem, then turned left on the Nablus Road, the main high-way northward out of the city. Jennings now rattled off a list of the major structures and artifacts discovered in each of the strata at Rama. The stone foundations of houses, streets, and shops of the western town during the Roman period had been exposed. Each level, apparently, had delivered more than its quota of beads and jewelry, tools, lamps, figurines, seals, and weapons, in addition to the pottery that dated the strata.

  Fascinating finds, Jon mused, but none was enough to lure him halfway around the world. It was time to play “prod the professor.” Shifting his muscular frame in the cramped Peugeot, he faced Jennings directly and said, “Well, Austin, you’ve liberated an impressive collection from Mother Earth. But which of these finds did you write me about? Which has ‘possibly spectacular importance’?”

  “‘None of the above,’ as you Yanks put it,” he chuckled. “You’ll find out soon enough.” He now handed Jon a list of the twenty names of the Rama archaeological staff, giving a brief commentary on each.

  “Who’s this Shannon Jennings?” Jon inquired. “A relative?”

  “My shrewish stepmother from Ireland, of course, in charge of security! The obnoxious old witch rides her broom around the dig to—” Jennings stopped when he noticed no smile on Jon’s face, and asked, “You were spoofing, weren’t you? Don’t you really remember my daughter, Shannon, from your Oxford days?”

  “Oh . . . oh, of course. How stupid of me! But she was only a little schoolgirl back in—”

  “But since then, she took the oh-so-predictable route of growing up.” Jennings yawned. “She keeps the journal for our dig.”

  Jon thought back to his Rhodes Scholar days. Snippets of recollection pieced themselves together into a mosaic of memory—his awe at being invited to tea at the home of the Austin Balfour Jennings shortly after his arrival at Oxford, his embarrassment at inquiring about Mrs. Jennings, only to learn she had died shortly after her daughter was born . . . and the smallish six-year-old girl who would never be able to remember her mother, and who asked him endless questions about America.

  “Well, here’s Ramallah, Jonathan.”

  “The dig staff stays he
re?”

  Jennings nodded. “At the Fanduq al-Kebir, which means ‘The Big Inn,’ if you recall your Arabic.” He drove to the eastern edge of the town and stopped in front of a three-story structure of aging buff-colored limestone and windows flanked by faded green shutters.

  “Our name for the place is ‘The Grand Hotel,’” Jennings observed, in jest. “But you won’t find it in Fodor’s Guide. Still, it’s the best Ramallah has to offer us. We commute by bus to the dig each day, and be glad we’re close enough to civilization that we don’t have to sleep in tents!”

  “When do we start out in the morning?” asked Jon, after a late supper with Jennings, his hand beginning to itch for the smooth wooden handle of a trowel.

  “Frightful of me to have to tell you this, dear fellow, but we can only work in the cool of the morning. Breakfast is at 5:30 AM, and our bus leaves for the dig at 6:15.”

  “That late? I was ready to start by starlight!” Jon was almost half-serious.

  Jennings smiled. “Good that you overcame your jet lag back in Italy! But no, we don’t go for nocturnal archaeology! In any case, it’s really smashing to have you aboard, Jonathan!”

  “I look forward to returning to your tutelage, mon precepteur! ”

  Just before retiring, Jon opened the shutters of his room and looked eastward across the barren hills. A three-quarters moon was floating upward from the Jordan Valley, dusting the slumbering countryside with a blanket of luminous chalk.

  The land . . . the Holy Land . . . the Bloody Land . . . the Land of Death—and Life . . . The Land woven so closely into the beliefs of Jew, Christian, and Muslim that no one seemed to know where the earth stopped and dogma started . . . the Land of the One God.

  The heavens . . . the moon and the stars—the same luminaries, but in a different context . . . the warm and fragrant breeze wafting up from the Jordan Valley . . . the supernal beauty of the night . . . the Sky of the One God.

  And Andrea . . . the missing piece in his panorama. He could still see the tiny freckles on her nose, and the way her eyes glowed whenever he held her. Jon clenched his fist.