Skeleton 03 - The Constantine Codex (2 page)

When
A Skeleton in God’s Closet
was published in 1994 during the pontificate of John Paul II, I had designated his fictional successor as Benedict XVI, who appears also in
More Than a Skeleton
and in this novel as well. But in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger chose this very name for his pontificate—coincidence, rather than any prophecy on my part! The reader is therefore urged to distinguish between the two Benedicts, one fictional, the other authentic.

Special appreciation is due Marion S. Ellis, Maria Perez-Stable, Brian C. Bradford, Dr. Stan Gundry, Wayne Little, MD, Fr. Evangelos S. Pepps, and especially Dr. Timothy R. Furnish for their gracious technical assistance.

Paul L. Maier

Western Michigan University

May 2011

Prologue

Shannon Jennings Weber was enjoying her lunch under the shade of a juniper tree—much as the prophet Elijah had done. She was digging at Pella on the east bank of the Jordan River, about twenty miles south of the Sea of Galilee. This was new territory for the archaeologist, who had had a string of successes with her spade in Israel. She had organized this dig in hopes of finding something—anything—to help fill one of the most crucial gaps in church history: the later first century, when Christians managed to escape the horrifying Roman conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70 by fleeing to Pella before the war started. Here, she thought, in the very capital of the earliest church, there must be clues under the soil, artifacts that would illumine the decades during which Christianity first took hold in the Mediterranean world.

Her husband, Jon, could not have been more pleased, since he too thought Pella an excavation site with huge potential. While teaching at Harvard, he regularly sent Shannon such e-mail queries as
“Have you found the personal memoirs of Jesus yet?”
or
“How about Paul’s missing letter to Corinth?”
Even the messages that told of his love and loneliness usually had a playful tagline, such as
“Surely you’ve found one of Luke’s paintings of the apostles?”
or
“If you unearth the bishop’s chair of James, do excavate carefully.”

No sensational discoveries, however, had come to light, and tomorrow the team was scheduled to decamp. Before Shannon’s dig, teams from the University of Sydney and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities had uncovered several Bronze- and Iron-Age Canaanite temples, and the whole site sprouted white marble columns from the Hellenistic era that merely had to be restacked. Unlike the Aussies and Jordanians, Shannon’s team had focused on the fourth-century church of St. James. After clearing its base and discovering some interesting floor mosaics, curious ceramics, and a small cache of second- and third-century coins, they called it a season.

Few digs produced sensational results, and Pella was no exception. Shannon was satisfied with their results, though hardly elated. If only digs would produce treasures on demand! She grimaced, remembering a too-good-to-be-true find she’d been a part of several years previous. It had only proved the adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

As she munched on a pear, her eyes came to rest on what was likely the present-day version of the ancient church they were excavating—the Greek Orthodox Church of St. James the Just. There it sat, on a hillock just east of the dig, an aging, whitish gray structure with a blue dome that looked as if it had been plucked from an Aegean seaport. She had passed it daily en route to the dig and thought, playfully, how nice it would be if that church had kept continuous records across the centuries. It was a fanciful concept, of course, but if a church were, say, on fire, what were the two documents they would try to rescue? The altar Bible and the church records. There might be something worth seeing there before she packed up and headed home.

The next day, she paid a visit to the church and introduced herself to the priest in charge, who spoke surprisingly clear English. He was a spare little man, middle-aged, with a luxurious salt-and-pepper beard as if to compensate for his advancing male-pattern baldness. He had trouble making eye contact with Shannon, and the reason became clear when he said, “Yours is certainly the loveliest face to grace our premises in many months, Mrs. Weber. You must have Greek blood in you, no? Your dark hair, your—”

“I wish I could claim that distinction, Father Athanasius,” she replied. “But no, I’m just an Irish-English hybrid who moved to America. And I love old churches like this one. How long has it been standing here?”

He pointed a pensive finger to his chin. “This building went up in the 1700s, but it was built on . . . on foundations of the church before it.”

“And when was that one built?”

He smiled, shook his head, and said, “Centuries ago. Many centuries.”

Shannon smiled inwardly and wanted badly to surprise the cleric with word that she was excavating what was likely the grandmother church to this one. But that would be premature; first the official dig report had to be published. “Does your church have archives? A library?” she asked.

“Oh yes, of course.”

“I’m fascinated by old books. Might you be kind enough to let me see your collection?”

“But of course. Please to follow me.”

They walked across a sun-drenched courtyard rimmed with trellises of grapevines and entered a library annex. The priest showed Shannon row after row of books until they came to a section whose shelves were bending under the weight of ponderous old volumes, some bound in gray-white parchment skin. Here Athanasius stopped and explained why his church was named for St. James the Just. He picked out an ancient tome. “Here we have Eusebius’s
Historia Ekklesiastica
. You know Eusebius?”

“Of course! He’s the very
father
of church history.”

Athanasius smiled and nodded appreciatively. He laid the volume on a table and opened it to what seemed to be a bookmark of sorts, then translated the Greek that spoke of the martyrdom of James the Just of Jerusalem, Jesus’ half brother—or cousin, as some would argue—and the first bishop of the Christian church.

“Eusebius writes that he got this information from Hegesippus,” the priest continued. “You know Hegesippus?”

“Oh yes. My husband often raves about Hegesippus. He tells his classes that if we had the five lost books of that first-century Jewish-Christian historian, we’d know much, much more about the earliest church.”

Father Athanasius beamed. “Yes, yes—it is as you say.”

While he showed Shannon the text, her eyes quickly shifted to what was serving as a bookmark for the Eusebius passage: several brownish leaves of what seemed to be parchment of some sort. Their darker color showed that they had to be older than the Eusebius tome—
much
older. The writing in the text, however, was so faded as to be hardly legible.

“Have you read this material, Father Athanasius?” she asked, pointing to the dark leaves. “Have you even been
able
to read it?”

He shook his head. “I read only a few words of the ancient Greek. But it must be old. Very old.”

“Yes, indeed.” Obviously those pages had come from a larger collection—probably a codex, the world’s first book form—and Shannon could only wonder if that codex was somewhere in the stacks surrounding them. She asked, “Do you know where these leaves came from? Do you have more of them?”

Father Athanasius merely shrugged and held out open hands. “I don’t know. The former priest here showed me the old Eusebius book and how I could use it to show people why our church is named for St. James. I never thought to ask him about the pages.”

“You know, we have instruments in America that could easily bring out the text, Father. Anything this old, this ancient, could be important.
Very
important.” She stopped and knew she should not have been so direct, but the words escaped before she could restrain them. “Might it be possible for me to . . . to take these with me to the U.S. for a short time? I’d return them quickly—by international express—along with a clear copy of the restored Greek text.”

Father Athanasius had a wounded look, staring at the bookshelves and saying nothing.

“I would guard them with my very life, good Father. The text may or may not be significant. But if it
is
important, we might gain valuable information about the early church.”

He shook his head slowly and said, “Is it not for Greeks to translate Greek, Mrs. Weber? I will take these to Athens when I visit the archbishop. Surely he and his staff will be able to . . . to read this.”

Shannon’s heart sank. Who could quarrel with that logic? Well, one last effort. “Perhaps they could decipher the text, Father Athanasius. And perhaps not. The script seems to have vanished at places, and the rest is hardly legible. I fear that only ultraviolet light and other equipment in my husband’s office at Harvard University would be able to restore the text.”

“Your husband teaches at Harvard?” Athanasius stroked his beard. “What is his name, his first name?”

“Jon. Or rather, Jonathan.”

His eyes widened. “Jonathan Weber? Not
the
Jonathan Weber, who wrote
O Iisous apo tin Nazaret
?”

Shannon smiled. “Yes.” Before she married Jon, he’d already become an internationally bestselling author. His book
Jesus of Nazareth
had been translated into nearly thirty languages at last count. Clearly Father Athanasius was numbered among Jon’s worldwide fans.

“And you are his
wife
?”

When she nodded modestly, Athanasius broke into a great smile. “Yes, Mrs. Weber, you may certainly borrow those leaves of manuscript. Your husband’s life of Christ is the best I’ve ever read!” He stopped, a twinkle in his eye, and seemed to reverse himself. “But no, you cannot take them . . . unless you sign my copy of
O Iisous
.”

Shannon was about to object that she could hardly inscribe a book she had not written, but why quibble at the moment of success? Instead, she nodded happily.

Carefully, Athanasius removed the almost tobacco-colored leaves and hurried into his office, where the Greek edition of Jon’s book was on the shelf behind his desk. “I’ve read it three times,” the priest said proudly.

Shannon signed the book, then looked up and said, “A final favor, Father Athanasius. If you have time,
please
try to find and save any other ancient manuscript pages here, whether bound or unbound, because of their possible importance.”

He nodded instantly. “Oh, indeed, Mrs. Weber.”

Shannon gratefully accepted the five brown pages of manuscript, hoping they might shed a bit of new light on earliest church history. She could not know that they would, in fact, ignite a change in church history.

Jonathan Weber had experienced much more than the fifteen minutes of fame often allotted to mortals. The recognition brought about by his bestseller and his archaeological sleuthing in Israel that had “saved Christianity” (according to his fans) had given him entrée at the Vatican, the White House, and even Buckingham Palace. Yet despite a string of extraordinary adventures, Jon would always count the return of his wife from her dig at Pella as one of the summit events in his life. It was not only the joy of seeing Shannon again—that lithe, sapphire-eyed, pert-nosed, Irish pixie who had taken him captive—but what she had brought back with her from Jordan as a little memento of her tour.

A day after she had unpacked, Jon and Shannon took the manuscript leaves to his office at Harvard. In an adjoining room he had a small but efficient manuscript laboratory with an ultraviolet apparatus as the centerpiece. It had served him well in exploring palimpsests, vellum manuscripts on which the writing had been erased and the vellum reused. The penetrating, purplish rays of the instrument usually showed the original script quite clearly.

Shannon adjusted the window blinds to darken the room, while Jon turned on the UV apparatus. The hum of its fan covered the throb of his almost-audible pulse. “We’re not looking for erasures here, Shannon,” he said, “just the original script underneath those brownish accretions.”

“Obviously. We could hardly make out anything at home last night, even with intense illumination.”

“Okay. We’re ready. Bring the first page over.”

Shannon put on white gloves, opened a large portfolio, and—with care that bordered on a caress—lifted a protective muslin pad and extracted the first of the leaves. With both hands she laid it on the examining field below the instrument.

Jon peered closely at the document, studied it for some time, and then shook his head. “Here, have a look, sweetheart.”