The Source

by James A. Michener

  “I take it you’re rather strongly opposed to progress?” Cullinane suggested.

  “Oh, there ought to be some progress in the world,” Brooks conceded, “but it does seem a shame to ruin a land that is so much beloved by people everywhere. I can remember when we first came here, you could find in almost any village a water well which looked exactly as it must have in the time of Christ. We got some of the most extraordinary pictures of women walking to the well with great earthenware jars on their heads. You could have sworn it was Miriam or Rachel. Now it’s nothing but deep artesian wells.”

  “Your home’s in Davenport, isn’t it?” Cullinane asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “When we can find some time for ourselves,” Mrs. Brooks said. “Mostly we travel.”

  “Hasn’t Davenport changed pretty much … in the last thirty years?”

  “Davenport’s different. It’s not a holy land to anyone. But Palestine … I hate to say this, John, since you’re working on this side, but Mrs. Brooks and I felt much more at home on the other side of the border. In Jordan. They’ve kept their land pretty much as it used to be. One gets a much better sense of the Holy Land in Muslim Jordan than he does over here in the Jewish sector.” Cullinane noticed that Brooks clung to the old English terminology: the Jewish sector.

  “What we mean,” Mrs. Brooks explained, “is that in Jordan today you can still find hundreds of scenes with people in Biblical costume … little donkeys … heavenly-faced children playing by the open wells. You can point your camera almost anywhere and catch a Bible picture. It makes your heart feel warm.”

  “You don’t get that feeling in Israel?” Cullinane asked.

  His use of the current name for the new nation seemed to offend the Brookses, and the professor quickly re-established the accurate terminology. “This part of Palestine is frankly disappointing. I might almost say irritating. You go to a historic spot like Tiberias, hoping to find something that will evoke for people in Iowa the romantic quality of the place, and what do you find? Housing developments … bus stations … a tourist hotel … and on the very edge of that sacred lake, what? A kibbutz, if you like.

  “And if you do try to take a photo that will catch the essence of the place, you don’t find people dressed as they are on the other side. Those wonderful garments that make you think of Jesus or the disciples. No, you find men and women dressed just as they would be in Davenport. Carrying plastic bags back from the supermarket. I saw not a thing in Tiberias that reminded me of the Bible.”

  “There were a lot of Jews,” Cullinane said.

  “I don’t think that’s funny, John,” Brooks said. He tried to avoid using the word Jew; he had been instructed that the people of that religion preferred to be called Hebrews.

  “Aren’t you saying,” Cullinane asked, “that the Muslims on the other side look more like Biblical Jews than the living descendants of the Biblical people do?”

  “I’m not saying that at all,” Brooks protested. “But when a land has a special meaning for so many, it ought to be kept … well … rural.”

  Cullinane bit his lip and tried to keep from smiling. “A good deal of Christ’s ministry must have been spent in cities,” he pointed out. “Jerusalem, Jericho and Caesarea Philippi. And when you get to St. Paul, he seems to have spent most of his time arguing Christianity in the great cities like Corinth, Antioch and Caesarea.”

  “That’s true,” Brooks said, “but I believe that most Americans like to think of Bible figures as living in the countryside. It seems to make them more … well … reverential.”

  Cullinane thought that that might be one of the reasons why Christianity was having such a difficult time with some of its urban adherents, that they could not visualize Christ as inhabiting cities, where more and more of the population chose to live. He said, “When Jesus was in Jerusalem or Paul in Athens those cities must have been much like New York. I know that when we dig here at Makor we have to remind ourselves all the time that this was an urban settlement, while Akko down the road was always a fairly substantial city. And I’m not at all sure that Jesus went around, or Paul either, looking like a modern-day Arab.”

  “I’m fairly well satisfied that they did,” Brooks said. Then, to ease the tension a bit, for he felt that Cullinane was being obstinate in not understanding his basic argument, he said, “The trip wasn’t a failure. Grace and I caught some wonderful shots at Jericho. What a marvelous spot. You could almost feel Old Testament people moving among those ancient ruins.”

  “I suppose you got some Arabs to pose for you,” Cullinane said.

  “Two handsome fellows. When they took their shoes off they looked just like prophets from the Old Testament.”

  “I still wonder if Jeremiah dressed like an Arab.”

  “Our audiences think he did,” Mrs. Brooks retorted. “Now, I’m sure you’re doing some excellent work here, John, but we couldn’t photograph it. Not for our purposes. Because the young people I see out there look like ordinary Americans. It would kill the atmosphere.”

  “I suppose in years to come,” Cullinane said, looking up at the ceiling, “you’ll take more and more of your photographs outside of Israel.”

  “We’ll have to,” Professor Brooks said. “The Hebrews here simply don’t look right. And every new town or factory eliminates one more possible landscape. We’re forced to work in the other side.”

  “But when Jordan succeeds in transforming itself into a modern nation, then what?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Brooks said. “As a matter of fact, right outside Jericho there’s some building going on that pretty much spoils that landscape. So next year we’re coming back with a great deal of film, and we’re going to shoot everything we can and keep it on file.”

  “And after that?”

  “We’ll probably find some backward area of Arabia,” Brooks suggested. “I think we’ll still be able to get some great shots of water wells and caravans down there.”

  At the airport, when the Brookses were about to climb aboard the jet that would fly them home to Davenport in less than fourteen hours, Cullinane experienced an irrational urge that he knew at the time would get him into trouble. As his board member started toward the huge airplane, loaded down with cameras and color slides that would evoke the Holy Land for thousands, Cullinane asked, “Did you get a good shot of our airport?”

  The humor of the question escaped the professor, who took it as a personal insult. He was about to say something but the sudden vision of a color slide of the large airport, with taxis delivering Jewish officials with briefcases and soldiers in Israeli uniform, overwhelmed him. He remembered when he had first seen the Holy Land, at the old port of Haifa, where his ship had docked and where a shrouded figure dressed much as Jesus must have dressed two thousand years before, had come ambling along the quay. In that pregnant moment Professor Brooks had sensed what his life mission was to be: to lecture throughout America with slides of the Holy Land showing people how the great religions had originated. And he was now convinced that this could not be done by showing slides of cities or modern developments. The Bible was something ancient. The men who composed it, or who participated in its adventures, were different, and he doubted that he would ever again bother to return to the Jewish portion of Palestine. This brash young digger, Cullinane, irritated him, too, and he thought: I’ll speak to the board about him when I get home. Is he really the man we want representing us in the Holy Land?

  Cullinane, watching the bewildered man waddle onto the plane, thought: It would break his heart if he knew that when the disciples met in Tiberias, St. Peter probably said, “Look, James. We can’t possibly get to Jerusalem in three nights,” and James had probably replied, “We can if we scramble.” He thought of Makor, and reflected on how difficult it was to comprehend any past age: If a town of a thousand people exists for six thousand years, as Makor had, this means that nearly a quarter of a million different human beings must have lived inside our walls.
How impossible it is to remember that they were ordinary people, who helped evolve and diffuse Judaism and Christianity and Islam. They didn’t go through life posing in bedsheets, and many of their greatest decisions must have been made when they traveled to mighty cities like Antioch and Caesarea, or to significant ones like Jerusalem and Rome.

  “God,” he cried, as he uttered the prayer of the archaeologist, “I wish I could see Makor for one day as it actually was.”

  But the vast plane thundered in its chocks. Its jets reverberated. Men covered their ears and the great machine lumbered down the long runway, gaining speed until it rose from the Holy Land, turned gracefully toward the sea and headed for Davenport, Iowa.

  As he drove back to the dig, brooding upon Professor Brooks’ image of religion, which would condemn an area and a people to ancient ways of life, he became aware that a car was following him and he looked back to see a red-painted jeep that was famous throughout the Holy Land. At the wheel, hunched up like a giant flying through space, sat a very tall blond man, hatless and wearing a dark brown sackcloth clerical habit. His hands grasped the steering wheel as if they were going to crush it and his jeep bounced along at a careless speed. Obviously it was headed for Makor, and Cullinane was pleased to see it coming. He sped ahead, parked his own jeep at the door and ran into the office, crying, “Father Vilspronck’s coming! Tell the architect to get the drawings ready.”

  In a moment the door slammed open and the huge brown priest began greeting Eliav and Tabari in the comradeship established through years of working with them at one dig or another. He dropped into a chair, leaned across the desk and caught Cullinane’s two hands. “What contradictory things have you been digging out of my ground?” he demanded, and the question was not preposterous, for by dint of continued intellectual effort Father Vilspronck had made the Holy Land his own in a strange and meaningful way. Nineteen years before, as a young priest from Holland, to which he would return one day a cardinal, he had arrived in Palestine on the same boat that had brought Professor Brooks, and he had asked himself: Would it be possible to determine in a non-hysterical way what happened in the Holy Land during the first four hundred years of Christianity? He had started then to piece together all fragments of knowledge relating to the problem, and as the years progressed he became the world’s leading authority on this subject. During one period he had served as a parish priest in Germany, and this had kept him from his chosen work; other years he had spent in Rome close to the powerful cardinals, who had spotted him for preferment, and although he was able there to study the great Vatican documents on Christianity’s beginnings, he was unable to proceed with his digging. But always he had managed to find some wealthy Catholic layman who would provide him with the funds necessary to return to Palestine for his researches. Now he smiled at Cullinane, whom he had known years before in the Negev when they both had worked for Nelson Glueck, and he said in the manner of a bad little boy cajoling his father, “Well, John, you know what I want.”

  “I have them coming,” Cullinane replied, and he asked Tabari to speed up the architect, but before the Arab could do so, the expert from Pennsylvania entered the office with rolls of drawing paper, which he spread upon the desk. They were, as Father Vilspronck had hoped, detailed drawings of the foundation lines uncovered at Level VII, where a Byzantine basilica had ridden over a Jewish synagogue. Giving only a cursory glance at the former, Vilspronck carefully traced out the relationships of the synagogue stones. When he had done this he asked to see the lintel stone that had been found in the basilica wall, and for some minutes he studied the remarkable find in silence. Then he asked, “Where’d it stand in the wall?” Photographs were produced and the giant priest reconstructed what the men had seen that day. Finally he turned to the architect and asked, “Have you attempted any projections?”

  The Pennsylvanian coughed and said, “After all, the length of wall we uncovered was only …”

  “I know,” the priest interrupted. “But I take it you did make some guesses.”

  And the architect flung out a large sheet of paper on which the two walls were shown as found, rock by rock, prolonged into full-scale guesses as to what their finished edifices must have been. If an observer had wanted to witness the true mystery of archaeology, the manner in which living men fight to penetrate the minds of men long dead, he should have seen that drawing of the Pennsylvania architect. As a basis for his deductions, the architect had merely twelve feet of basilica wall running from northwest to southeast; below that he had a right angle marking the earlier synagogue, and using only these slight clues he had drawn the completed buildings, and in doing so had come very close to what the future digs at Makor would uncover.

  Father Vilspronck studied the synagogue and asked, “Why do you make it this size?”

  The architect replied, “Judging from all the synagogues we’ve uncovered so far, our lintel stone is not large enough for a main entrance. So I must conclude that it rested over one of three small doors. That yields a facade like the one I’ve drawn. The thickness of the walls is exactly what we’ve found elsewhere. Working from these hints, I’ve spent a lot of time in the old synagogues at Baram, Kefar Nahum and Beit Alfa. This is about what we’re going to find.”

  “I agree,” the priest said, twisting the paper so that he could study the synagogue from fresh angles. He was paying no attention to the later basilica, and Cullinane received the distinct impression that as a priest the big Dutchman was disappointed in what he was uncovering at Makor but as an archaeologist he was gratified. “Remarkable,” he said finally. “It bears out what we’ve found everywhere else.” He shrugged his shoulders, then asked abruptly, “You done any carbon dating?”

  “No need to,” Cullinane said. “Our date of 351/2 C.E. for the destruction is as good as if they’d left a signed copy of the orders. Our guess as to 330 for the original building of the synagogue … plus fifteen or minus fifty as you wish.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Father Vilspronck said. Brushing away the architectural drawings he asked, “I suppose you’ve made a table of probable populations?”

  “We have,” Cullinane answered guardedly. “Care to let me take a look?”

  “We’d rather not … at this point.”

  “How about the synagogue level?”

  Cullinane smiled. “I said we’d rather not, but you knew we would. Usual restrictions?” The priest agreed and Cullinane drew from a locked drawer a document which in the army would have been classified Top Secret. He handed copies to each of the archaeologists and watched with amusement as Father Vilspronck darted his eyes directly down to Level VII, where he checked the population figures. As soon as he had completed this, the big man studied the other figures casually.

  PROVISIONAL ESTIMATES OF POPULATION AT SITE 17072584

  “I notice that in 1560 C.E. you have the tell standing six feet higher than it does now?”

  “Probably did,” Cullinane said. “Bedouins seem to have mined the place for cut stones in later years, and the height must have dropped considerably.”

  The blond priest asked a few more irrelevant questions, then came back to Level VII. “Would you say that these figures for the Byzantine period are pretty accurate?”

  “Just educated guesses,” Cullinane confessed. “But if the synagogue was that big, it had to serve about eight hundred fifty Jews. Of course we’re extrapolating from Kefar Nahum and Baram.”

  The perplexed Dutchman placed the sheet of figures, which summarized so much learning, on the table and slapped it with his big hands. “At least you’re consistent!” he growled. “Every dig for the last thirty years has confirmed this story of Jewish persistence, and sooner or later we’ll have to adjust to it.”

  Eliav lit his pipe and asked, “But you adjusted to it years ago. It’s your discovery.”

  The priest laughed. “Half of me accepts. The other half doesn’t.”

  “Is it so difficult?” Eliav asked.

  Father Vilsp
ronck returned the estimates to Cullinane, who collected the other copies and locked them in his desk. For any level the figures might be wrong by fifty per cent, but as the years passed and refinements were made, savants throughout the world would have to adjust their theories to these Makor facts, as the Dutch priest now prepared to do: “When I went to university the professors had an absolutely clear understanding of the Holy Land. A group of excellent Hebrews lived here for some two thousand years. Their religion grew stagnant and Jesus Christ appeared, luring about half the Jews to Him. The others clung on desperately and in 70 C.E. rebelled against Rome, and Vespasian destroyed both them and their temple. In obedience to God’s command that they be a perpetual witness, they wandered homeless through the world while Christianity took over, and it was their punishment to wander until they finally converted to Christ. It was a neat, clean theory and that’s what the world believed. My first shock came when I found that in 135 C.E. the Jews, none of whom were supposed to be here, launched an even bigger revolt against Hadrian, and the recent discovery of letters actually written by Bar Kochba, who led the revolt, have had a startling effect on all of us. Once more we were told, ‘All Jews were driven out,’ but now we begin to excavate these synagogues of the fourth century and we find there were more Jews here than before. The synagogues were big, handsome buildings. Serving a very large population. Kefar Nahum, Baram, now Makor. All tell the same story. And three hundred years after that, when the Muslims come, we still find large Jewish populations. And four hundred years after that, when the Crusaders came, there were still Jews around.” He stopped and his face revealed his perplexity. “Something was going on here that the history books did not tell us.”

  Father Vilspronck had begun his labors in the Holy Land intending to assemble the testimony that would reinforce Christianity, and it had become the major irony of his life that his work served primarily to tell the world more about Judaism; yet he persisted in his researches, for he knew instinctively that when the honest relationships were revealed, both Christianity and Judaism would be more meaningful and the ultimate conversion of the Jews closer at hand. He also knew something which he buried in his conscience, leaving it to others to develop: the arrival of Jesus Christ in the Galilee did not mysteriously signal the disappearance of competing religions; they survived with stubborn vigor, and if the testimony of the synagogues could be trusted, actually increased their power. It was not until the Greeks, doubling back with the great messages of St. Paul, reached the Holy Land that Christianity got much of a hearing in its place of birth. But that was for others to narrate.