On the third day, Jesus rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.’
If this is so, then it follows as an article of faith that he left nothing behind, except perhaps those dubious secondary relics religiously treasured for more than two millennia. If he didn’t ascend into heaven, if he was not the son of God but in fact another Mr Smith, one more among the rest of us, then he must have left behind his bones.
‘I doubt,’ Moholy said, ‘if in today’s changed world, to large numbers of people, a disproof of the ascension would come as a vast surprise.’
The past could change. Virgin birth and resurrection were increasingly seen as symbolic events, even by Christian theologians. Nobody was special. Nobody went straight to heaven. Moholy and other professional collectors had keenly followed the debate, and then thought it through: if Jesus didn’t ascend, son of God or not, there were other qualities he might also share with the mortal Mr Smith. His earthly flesh would rot, his bones would stubbornly endure.
Where then were the bones of Jesus Christ?
For 2000 years until now, but especially during the Middle Ages, the last great heyday of relics, this question would have been a blatant heresy, punishable by drowning, burning, hanging and drawing and quartering. Inevitably, in such inauspicious days for questions, the bones of Jesus became a secret too perilous to tell.
‘This was always my objective,’ Moholy said. ‘Nothing else but this. All I ever wanted, even as a boy in the churches of Budapest, was to have and to hold the bones of Jesus.’
‘Of course,’ Helena said, nodding. ‘You could name your price.’
‘Please. I’m not a philistine.’
‘But I’m right, aren’t I?’ she pressed him. ‘They’d be the most valuable of all relics, wouldn’t they?’
‘You limited little person. They’d have the most power.’
The historical Jesus went missing in Jerusalem on the day of his execution. That was the place and time at which ambitious collectors therefore began their quest. The event itself was diligently recorded by Josephus, the Jewish historian, and also by Tacitus, a Roman, and between them they provide enough contemporary evidence for even the most sceptical to accept an actual crucifixion of a real Jesus, with those vague yet familiar characteristics, in about the right place at about the right time.
It’s immediately after the crucifixion that details become scarce.
After Jesus died on the cross, he may have been buried. The reality for every other crucified Mr Smith, in Palestine in about AD 30, was a ritual humbling to a status so low that all rights to dignified burial were refused. Soldiers stood guard until Mr Smith died on the cross, then abandoned him for a short time to the crows. As a penultimate indignity, and the final discharge of their responsibilities, the soldiers then hauled Mr Smith down and dumped his corpse in a trench. At night-fall, the dogs came.
By Easter Sunday, after running away on the Friday, those who cared about Jesus wouldn’t have known where to find him. Those who knew, the soldiers, couldn’t care less.
‘So even if Jesus didn’t ascend into heaven,’ Helena protested, ‘his bones were lost at the start. What’s the point of looking for them now?’
‘Because maybe Jesus didn’t die on the cross.’
If a routine crucifixion was going too slowly, the Romans would break Mr Smith’s legs, then cut him down and bury him alive.
‘It’s not my idea,’ Moholy said, defensively spreading his hands. ‘It says so in the Bible. Now have a look at this.’
He fetched the bag of bones from the corner where he’d kicked it. He unzipped the bag and upended it, clattering the body of bones to the hard wooden floor. The smaller ones scattered like buttons. Moholy picked out the long thigh bones, then the bones of the lower leg Helena had used for the I-Ching. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Unbroken. No evidence of fracture. I thought you might have broken them yourselves, to make me believe it was Jesus.’
Actually, I’d wanted him to believe it was Calvin, which at least explained why my Calvin impersonation, which both Helena and I thought rather accomplished, hadn’t convinced him. Moholy had been expecting me to do Jesus, however that was done.
‘Then I realised you’d be cleverer than that,’ Moholy said. ‘You’d have known I’d already worked out that Jesus didn’t need his legs broken.’
‘And why was that?’
‘Because he was poisoned.’
The vinegar on the sponge. And when his side was stabbed to check he was dead, blood flowed. The Roman soldiers were ignorant, thinking Jesus must be dead because he didn’t flinch.
‘The Jews were smarter than the Romans,’ Rifka said, coming back from the kitchen. Like Helena and me, maybe out of solidarity, she sat on the floor, but out of the way and under the window, next to her muddy shoes. ‘The Jews knew that if Jesus was dead, there wouldn’t have been any bleeding.’
He was hauled down from the cross, hands in tatters and head lolling, buried alive in the famous tomb with the stone sealing its entrance. On the third day, he was gone. Either he’d risen from the dead, or at some stage during a three-day period, which gave ample time for planning and preparation, he’d been moved in secret by Simon Magus and others among the disciples. Hidden away in a nearby cave, Jesus was then fed a purgative of up to one hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe.
‘It’s all there,’ Moholy said. ‘In the Bible.’
‘Quite a mouthful,’ Rifka said dryly. ‘That’s lots of aloe. I wouldn’t recommend it.’
Jesus was nursed, nourished, slowly brought back to life.
The sightings of the resurrected Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, insisted on his physical reality, eating and drinking. His literal survival was further supported by the registered birth of his two little sons.
‘And one daughter,’ Rifka added. ‘Sweet little Phoebe, who later married Paul, Paul of the road to Damascus, letter-writing Paul.’
There was also the less joyful record of his divorce from Mary Magdalene, and his subsequent remarriage. ‘To Lydia,’ Rifka said helpfully, ‘a female bishop from Philippi. Quieter than Mary. Less to report.’
All of which suggested a type of survival. An obscure and messy survival, silently endured, largely unknown. A standard Mr Smith existence, in which the virgin birth was explainable. The miracles. The Resurrection. All of it could be explained away. Jesus did not die on the cross. He was married and middle-aged with children, he was divorced and old and crippled. There were no special people marked out by the heavens for greatness, not even Jesus the son of God.
The last time Jesus was seen in public, as recorded in Corinthians, he came as an apparition to Paul. Paul was in Rome at the time, and that would have been in AD 64, when Jesus was feeling his age.
‘So he died in Rome,’ I suggested, beginning to see the connections Moholy was trying to make. And considering I was effectively his captive, with a folk memory of the fate of the Iraqi antiquities dealer, I was prepared to suspend some if not all of my disbelief. ‘In Rome the relic trade would already have been active, and that’s why his bones could well have survived.’
‘No, no, no. It’s never as simple as that. You’d know as much if you’d taken an interest for as long as I have.’
‘First he has to get to Rome,’ Helena said. ‘How did he do that?’
‘Easy. With Peter and John of Zebedee, hidden below decks in the ship carrying their Christian mission from Jerusalem to Patmos. After a brief stay in Philippi, they were joined by Paul at Corinth, and Paul led them on to Ephesus before a final journey to Rome the capital of the world, the new Jerusalem.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ Helena said, ‘if he was alive, why didn’t he just come out into the open and reveal himself, as the second coming everyone wanted?’
‘Because Paul was a political realist. He kept postponing the second coming. The legend of the Ascension was spreading, and the more it took
hold, the less Jesus felt able to deal with the pressure of being Jesus. And then suddenly it was too late.’
In July of AD 64, the year of the final recorded sighting of Jesus, Rome burned. The Emperor Nero, accused of fiddling, needed a scapegoat. He decided (um, eenie, meenie, minie, mo) on the Christians. The leaders Peter and Paul were hunted down and murdered, martyred. Miraculously, items of their clothing and various bones were immediately saved as relics, despite the testimony of Tacitus who describes Christians at that time being strapped into the skins of wild beasts, and torn to nothing by dogs. Others were crucified, and set alight at dusk to save fuel on street-lamps for the benighted citizens of Rome.
‘It was terrible,’ Rifka said. ‘Just terrible.’
‘But if Jesus escaped being eaten by dogs,’ Moholy went on, ‘and he wasn’t crucified a second time and used as a street-lamp, there’s no reason to think that some astute Christian survivor wouldn’t have cherished that tired old man, his bones dwindled by nothing more violent than regret and old age. I’ve spent many years working on what happened next, and I can tell you as a fact, without the aid of carbon-dating, that the bones of Jesus did not end up in your tacky blue sports-bag. Look.’
He picked up a bone from the floor, any bone, but long enough to hold between his fists. Flexing it over his knee, he silently counted to three, then abruptly snapped it in half. He then ground one of the jagged ends into the other, setting our teeth on edge. He stamped on other bones, any bones, then stood on top of others, rocking backwards and forwards. An elbow cracked, and then a vertebra. Moholy was too heavy a burden for Mr Smith’s back, and a popped shard of bone scooted beneath the chair.
‘See? I can be so cruel. The bones of Jesus would be just like these ones, to look at. But they’d also have the effect of making me a better person than I am. And I can tell you, I’m not feeling good. The relics of Jesus are out there, and those are the bones I want.’
‘And you’re sure they’re out there?’ Helena was braver than I was. Always had been. ‘Millions of people would say they weren’t.’
‘Do you believe in the Resurrection?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you believe that Jesus was sucked up into heaven? Do you? Leaving behind only his vials of blood and his milk teeth and the Holy Navel and the Holy Prepuce. Is that what you believe? The carne vera sancta. Is that really all that’s left to us?’
After Rome, as the Church began to establish itself around stories of resurrection and ascension, the Jesus bones needed to be hidden. Perhaps, at the beginning, no one thought it would last for long. It was only a temporary measure, until sense prevailed. But, every year, the bones of Jesus became a greater heresy and danger, and the organised Church was as eager to find them as anyone. The good men protecting Jesus therefore had to devise increasingly angular and intricate codes, which when deciphered revealed the various secret resting places of these most holy of relics. Many an occult text is in fact a narrative and map of the secret travels of Jesus.
‘Other people know more about this first stage than I do,’ Moholy said. ‘But it lasted well into the Middle Ages. My own detailed interest is in the period when the story starts all over, in 1538, right here in Geneva.’
Several years into his private collection of relics, not long after the acquisition of Isaac Newton’s treasured cranium, Joseph Moholy experienced a moment of outright revelation. For some time, he’d been aware of the observable influence of relics. Thinking logically, he made a conjecture that the bones of Jesus should therefore have left a trace of their influence in history, in the few places in the world at any one time where people were acting well. Why in one place and not another? Because certain people, in certain places, had briefly been swayed by the bones of Jesus.
Moholy tracked the sixth-century emergence of the prophet Muhammad, and the moral improvement which spread back to Europe in defiance of its hateful crusades. He lost the trail in the dark of the Dark Ages, but found it again in the open improbability of the Italian Renaissance. Quickly followed by the robust improvements of the Reformation. And then: nothing. The Enlightenment had been a step backwards, justifying industrialisation, industrialising war. It was not a tendency full of love, full of Jesus.
Since the Reformation, there had been no great movement for goodness, only isolated instances of resistance to what we accepted as our natural depravity. These were small steps, which often faltered. In the last hundred years, all we’d managed were feeble global attempts at living well, like the United Nations and the World Council of Churches, most of them based in Geneva. It was like a bulb flickering, almost but never quite shedding light.
I thought back to my first impressions of Geneva, the world’s graveyard of good intentions.
‘This is where the trail went cold,’ Moholy said, ‘with John Calvin in Geneva in the 1540s. There is no doubt in my mind,’ he went on, ‘considering the authority and detail of his early teaching, that John Calvin had come into possession of the bones of Christ.’
The single most important Protestant reform was Calvin’s insistence that everyone had a personal relationship with God. Just like Jesus. The idea seemed to have come from nowhere. It was certainly a shock to the Catholic hierarchy. Calvin persevered. He opened the city-gates of Geneva to refugees from all across Europe. He fed the poor. He arranged for the healing of the sick.
At that time, as a capital of dissent, Geneva attracted all Europe’s dissidents and heretics: Gnostics, Hermeticists, Jansenists. Full of hope, in the fever of reform, one of these seemingly marginal groups had decided that at last the time was right, after 1500 years, to make public the primary relics of Jesus. It was the resurrection of the body, the second coming, though not in the way the faithful were expecting.
‘In that case,’ Helena asked, ‘why did Calvin write his pamphlet against relics, making them into objects of ridicule?’
‘John Calvin was a very brave man,’ Moholy said. ‘Very brave. But it was too hard, even for him.’
The bones made him the extraordinary man he was. In less than ten years a minor French cleric, by nature scholarly and withdrawn, had created a miracle city of God. He was a foreigner, and not even properly ordained. It was an achievement so unlikely that some people, both friends and enemies, suspected supernatural assistance. They were right. Calvin had the bones.
He found it exhausting, a daily struggle, all that power and the constant obligation to be good. Despite his miracle recovery from many illnesses, being Jesus wasn’t all that easy, or comfortable. Far easier to hide the bones away, take the credit for reform, and start lending money at interest. At heart, John Calvin was also Mr Smith. He crumbled under the pressure of being different, special, and eventually, resentful of the overwhelming influence of Jesus, he attacked all relics to hide the frustrating truth that none of his success was his, his destiny not his, that alone without help he was nothing.
‘It worked out better than he could ever have hoped,’ Rifka said, apparently as familiar with the story as Moholy. ‘Calvin’s spiteful posturing against relics meant that for a long time Geneva was the last place on earth anyone would have looked for Jesus.’
Calvin and his immediate Swiss circle were the new guardians of the secret. The influence of Jesus was irrepressible and compelling, but still they hid him away. They were frightened of the possibilities, of power to the people, and what all of us might one day become, every Mr Smith a Jesus.
‘Hold on a minute,’ Helena said. ‘If they’re so powerful, and Calvin hid them in Geneva, wouldn’t the city itself have seen some benefit, however faintly?’
‘Quite right. There’d be a trace, like radioactivity, a low hum of goodness beneath the surface. How about this: since 1538, Switzerland hasn’t been involved in a single war. Think about that. This tiny medallion of land has survived untouched for half a millennium between the most rapacious nation-states in history. Meanwhile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, of all places, but ridiculed f
or believing that men were naturally good. Later, the Red Cross was founded, to grow and flourish, soon followed by the United Nations. None of this is coincidence. My parents were good Hungarian people expelled from Budapest with nothing. Homeless and hungry, their immediate instinct was to aim for Switzerland. Jesus is here. The whole world knows it. That’s why nations come to Geneva seeking peace. Think about it.’
‘Amazing,’ Helena said. For some time, we’d both been following Moholy without blinking, a captive audience as he paced back and forth, explaining the world and everything in it.
‘I am this close,’ he said, turning side on, holding out his finger and thumb with a space in between about as narrow as a toe-bone. ‘And you two are the only remaining obstacle.’
Threatened with understated pain, with imaginable agony, and with no gods to answer my prayers for rescue, my instinct was to copy all the desperadoes I’d ever seen pleading. In moments of crisis, that was all I had: what other people did, what other people had always done.
‘We’re not an obstacle,’ I said. ‘We’ll do anything we can to help.’
‘You were first to open the grave.’
‘It was empty. I swear. I had no idea about Jesus.’
‘Of course you did. Only a half-wit could have missed it. That’s where Calvin arranged to hide the bones. Don’t you see? There were always rumours, right from the start, that Calvin’s body wasn’t there. But if John Calvin was buried somewhere else, then who was under that unassuming little stone of his in Geneva? He said he didn’t want a stone, and in Geneva his word was literally law. What was the real reason for erecting a stone against his stated wishes?’
Moholy was sweating. He was exciting himself, and had to shake some air between the buttons of his shirt.
‘Remember how the headstone’s marked? No dates. No place of birth. Just J.C. J.C. The most obvious clue was there all the time. I can’t believe no one else has ever seen it. Jung saw it. It’s so obvious even you saw it. You stole the bones. You are the new owners of Jesus.’
Dry Bones Page 24