The Fifth Gospel

by Ian Caldwell

  Popa stared at me with a crawling sadness in his eyes. He said, as if Ugo weren’t even in the room, “Is this really what you believe, Father? That the gospels don’t agree? That they lie to us?”

  “The gospels don’t agree. And that doesn’t mean they’re lying.” I picked up the stack of books again. “Ugo, I’ll come back later sometime when—”

  But all three of us knew, even before Ugo interrupted me, that it was done. Most Orthodox hew to the traditional way of reading the gospels: there are few new answers, mainly just faith in the old ones. Catholics used to share that belief, until we recognized the power of biblical science.

  “Father Alex, wait,” Ugo said. “Stay a moment. Please.”

  He didn’t need to say another word. Popa and I knew which path he had chosen.

  * * *

  IT WAS AS IF Ugo’s accusations in the mess hall had never been spoken. Our lessons were broad at first. Like most laymen, he had only a basic understanding of how the gospels should be read, and not enough confidence to apply it. So we began at the beginning.

  But for me, unlike for Father Popa, that meant the hard evidence. The oldest unchanged facts. The books.

  Before the Diatessaron, and before the Alogi, there were our four gospels, named after the men who were believed to be their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John were disciples, Jesus’ closest followers. Tradition says Mark took dictation from the chief disciple, Peter. And Luke tells us that he gathered his information from people who saw Jesus firsthand. This means our gospels, if they were really written by these four men, give us a portrait of Jesus’ life based almost entirely on eyewitness testimony.

  But it isn’t so simple. Three of the four gospels are so similar that they seem less like independent accounts than like replicas of each other. Mark, Matthew, and Luke not only record Jesus’ words almost identically, they translate those words almost identically from Jesus’ Aramaic into gospel Greek. Their thumbnail sketches of many minor characters are verbatim duplicates, and at times all three gospels stop midstream, at the same point in the same sentence, to offer the same stage directions and asides:

  MATTHEW 9:6:

  MARK 2:10–11:

  LUKE 5:24:

  “But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, take up your bed and go home.”

  “But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.”

  “But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—“I say to you, rise, take up your bed and go home.”

  No wonder Tatian, the author of the Diatessaron, wanted to combine the gospels into a single text. In many passages the gospels already share a single text. But why? Forty percent of Mark’s gospel appears wholesale in Matthew—the same words in the same order—which suggests that an eyewitness like Matthew copied a large part of his testimony from another source. Why?

  Biblical science provides a surprising answer: he didn’t, because the gospel attributed to Matthew was not really written by him. In fact, not one of our four gospels was written by an eyewitness.

  Scholars have gathered together our oldest surviving gospel manuscripts and found that, in the most ancient texts, the four gospels are not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They’re anonymous. Only in later copies do the names of their would-be authors appear, as if tradition or guesswork has added them. A close comparison of the texts shows how they were really written. One of them—the one we call Mark’s—is raw and unrefined, presenting a Jesus who sometimes becomes angry, sometimes performs magical incantations, and is considered by his own family to be out of his mind. Two of the other gospels—the ones we call Matthew’s and Luke’s—make these embarrassing details disappear. They also correct Mark’s small lapses of grammar and vocabulary. Matthew and Luke borrow whole passages from Mark, word for word, yet they systematically fix his weaknesses. This leads strongly to the conclusion that Matthew and Luke aren’t independent accounts. They are edited versions of Mark.

  The gospel of Mark, in turn, is a patchwork of individual stories that seem to come from older, fragmentary sources. This is why most scholars believe—and most Catholic priests are taught in seminary—that our four gospels are not memoirs of the men whose names they now carry. They were assembled, decades after Jesus’ ministry, from older documents that recorded an oral tradition of stories about Jesus. Only at that earliest, deepest level of testimony would it be possible to find the actual memories of the disciples.

  This means the gospels do stretch back to Jesus’ life—but not directly, and not without additions and subtractions. Understanding this editing process is crucial to anyone searching for the pure historical facts about Jesus’ life. This is because the changes were often theological or spiritual: they reflected what Christians believed about the Messiah, rather than what they actually knew about Jesus the man. For instance, the gospels of Luke and Matthew disagree about the details of Jesus’ birth, and there’s reason to believe neither account reflects the facts. But the authors of both gospels—whoever those authors really were—believed Jesus was the Savior, so He must’ve been born in Bethlehem, as the Old Testament predicts.

  This ability to separate theology from fact is crucial, especially in the last and strangest of the gospels—the one that would become the focus of Ugo’s Diatessaron work: John.

  “So the Alogi took issue with the gospel of John,” Ugo said, pulling at his thinning hair.

  “Yes. And only the gospel of John.”

  “They tried to snuff John out of the Diatessaron.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  I explained to him that John was the last of the gospels to be ­written—sixty years after the crucifixion, twice as long as Mark had been. It set out to answer new questions about the fledgling religion of Christianity, and in the process it revolutionized Jesus. Gone is the humble carpenter’s son who heals the sick and exorcises the possessed, who speaks simple parables with a common touch but never says much about his own identity. In his place, John offers a new Jesus: a high-minded philosopher who never performs exorcisms, never speaks parables, and talks constantly about himself and his mission. Scholars today agree that the other three gospels trace their roots to an original layer of factual memories—historical events that were recorded at an early stage and edited over time. But the fourth gospel is different.

  John paints a portrait of God rather than man, removing facts and replacing them with symbols. The gospel even leaves guideposts to teach its readers what it’s doing: John says the bread we eat isn’t true bread; Jesus is the true bread. The light we see isn’t true light; Jesus is the true light. John’s word true almost always means the invisible realm of the eternal. In other words, the fourth gospel is theological rather than historical. And for many readers, that theology comes as a shock. After reading three gospels rooted more strongly in history, it’s perilously easy to read the fourth and fail to see how these facts have been transformed into symbols.

  For that reason, John has always been the black sheep of the gospels. Only one Christian scholar before Tatian tried to write a gospel harmony like the Diatessaron, and he didn’t use John at all. No group, however, made its opposition to John clearer than the Alogi.

  “And you’re telling me,” Ugo said, “that for our purposes the Alogi were right. If all I care about is history—facts—then I should toss John out.”

  “It depends. There are rules.”

  “Father Alex, I’m a good Catholic. I’m not trying to take a pair of scissors to the Bible. But the other
three gospels say Jesus was buried in a cloth. John says cloths. They can’t both be right. So John is out?”

  It was as if he didn’t even want to see the words that his team of conservationists was uncovering from beneath the smudges of the Diatessaron. I should’ve sensed the pressure on him, the urgency he felt.

  “Or,” he said, “to take another example, John says Jesus was buried in a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. The other gospels say the burial spices weren’t used because Jesus was buried in such a hurry.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because the chemical tests that disprove the radiocarbon dating also found no myrrh or aloe present on the Shroud. Which is exactly what we have if we remove John’s testimony.”

  I rested my head in my hands. It wasn’t that he was wrong. It was that he was moving too quickly. The creed of any Bible student is humility. Caution. Patience. Sixty years ago, the pope let a small team of men dig beneath Saint Peter’s to look for Peter’s bones. Today, gospel teachers are those men, entrusted with digging under the foundation of the Church, allowed to search where searching is most dangerous. Anything less than immense care is reckless.

  “Ugo,” I said, “if I gave you the impression we use these tools lightly, then I made a mistake.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder, as if to comfort me. “Father, don’t you see? This is good. It’s very good. Everyone who has ever studied the Shroud assumed the four gospels were all factual. The world has been making the same mistake as the Diatessaron without even realizing it: we weave together the four gospels even though John isn’t historical. There must be a dozen aberrations in his version of the burial story alone: Jesus is buried by a different man, on a different day, in a different way. You’ve changed the future of the Shroud, Father Alex. You’ve found the skeleton key.”

  But instinct told me otherwise. It told me the tool I had placed in his hands wasn’t a skeleton key but a battering ram. Having taught the gospels to hundreds of students of all ages, I had never come across a man so fearless about the truth. He felt a heroic, almost militant, compulsion to side with it. To explode the most cherished beliefs if they were mistaken. No doubt, this was what so attracted him to the defense of the Shroud in the first place, this rage against the injustice of error.

  It worried me, though, for his sake. Sometimes I wondered if he would sooner make an enemy than assuage a friend so long as the smallest crumb of factual truth hung in the balance. He was relentless, ruthless, even with himself. He admitted to me once that it saddened him to relinquish the gospel stories he’d grown up believing to be historical; some childish part of his heart sank to know that the manger and wise men existed more in a little nativity scene than they ever had on that magical night two thousand years ago. But he smiled with pride and said, “If the pope’s behind it, then so am I.” And he insisted on beginning all our lessons by saying, “Time to put away childish things.” He was eager to give up his manger and wise men if it meant winning back the Shroud for the world.

  Deep in the marrow of our religion is the conviction that loss and sacrifice are noble. To surrender something beloved is the highest proof of Christian duty. I always admired this quality in Ugo. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that his bravery contained an undercurrent of self-­flagellation—and that this was an important insight into how he’d become such fast friends with my brother.

  CHAPTER 13

  PETER SLEEPS IN. He’s usually up first, marching into the bedroom and rowing my limp arm like the oar of a Greek trireme. I’m out of practice sneaking out of bed, but I manage not to wake him. While ironing my cassock, I can’t help cracking the front door just to be sure.

  Fontana is still on duty.

  An hour later, Peter and I have breakfast in the dining hall. As he enters the room, old bishops and cardinals look up from their plates and smile. There are more men here over the age of eighty than under the age of thirty. And all of them are Roman Catholics. Peter and I sit at a conspicuous table where any Eastern Catholics passing by might notice us and decide not to flee. But in vain.

  Midway through the meal, my mobile phone starts beeping. Simon has left a message.

  Alli, something’s come up. Meet me at the exhibit hall as soon as you get this.

  I set my napkin beside my plate and tell Peter to grab a last bite for the road.

  * * *

  IN PREPARATION FOR UGO’S exhibit, a whole wing of the museums has been closed. Work trucks idle outside the galleries like war elephants, making the air shimmer with their exhaust. Inside, a highway of carts and dollies carries paintings and display cases and raw lumber, all moving at the same speed like cars in a funeral caravan. Wooden frames are being raised, hiding ancient frescoes behind makeshift walls, turning gold corridors into empty white pipes. Art that hasn’t been moved since Italy became a country is suddenly gone.

  A service elevator opens. Two art restorers appear from downstairs. In the distance, workmen tape drywall seams. Electricians check lights. This many people, from this many departments, working together at short notice, gives the vague feeling of a state of emergency. This must be why Simon called. Ugo seems to have left a lot unfinished.

  The deeper we get into the galleries, the more curious I become. On the wall is a billboard-size photo of the scientists who announced the radiocarbon results in 1988. Behind them in the photograph, written on a blackboard, is the official date range established by the carbon tests, punctuated by a snide exclamation mark: 1260–1390! I don’t understand why Ugo would’ve mounted this here, until I see a glass cabinet resembling a jeweler’s case, padded with black satin. Hovering on gold armatures inside it is a row of ancient books, one of them sitting higher than the rest. A Hungarian Mass book, a placard says. It’s opened to a black-ink illustration showing Jesus’ dead body being prepared on its burial sheet.

  The burial sheet is strikingly consistent with the Turin Shroud: it has the right dimensions, the right method of wrapping the corpse, the right posture of Jesus’ body with his hands modestly crossed over his genitals. It even gets right a rare detail that Ugo once explained to me: no thumbs are visible. Modern medical examiners have found that a nail piercing a particular nerve near the hand causes the thumbs to retract involuntarily. Almost no painting in Western art gets this correct—but the Shroud and this little drawing both do. Most amazing of all, the cloth in the illustration has four dots in the shape of an L. These are the unexplained “poker holes” in the Holy Shroud, just below Jesus’ elbow. The artist of this book must have studied the Turin Shroud up close. Yet the placard beside the illustrated Mass book says, in modest type:

  MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN IN 1192 AD.

  1192 AD. Sixty-eight years before the earliest possible radiocarbon date.

  Scanning all the placards in the case, I suddenly understand. Ugo is making a point. The giant photo on one side of the gallery is facing off against the manuscripts on the other. We will pit our library against your lab. Your science is young and has no memory, but our Church is ancient and forgets nothing. These books virtually prove that the radiocarbon tests are wrong: every book in this case mentions a relic seemingly identical to the Shroud, and all of these books were written before the earliest possible radiocarbon date.

  I stare at the strange, fanciful names of their authors. Ordericus Vitalis. Gervase of Tilbury. These manuscripts are starlight from an extinct universe. Original copies of Latin authors writing in the age of the Crusades. The schism between Catholics and Orthodox is usually dated to 1054, when an angry papal messenger in the Orthodox capital of Constantinople took it upon himself to excommunicate the patriarch. But it would never have happened if Westerners hadn’t already become disconnected from the East and its Christian traditions. The Crusades, decades later, were what reopened the West’s eyes—and the manuscripts I see here, written in the 1100s, capture that exact moment. My rusty Latin is just enough to make out the news trick
ling in from the Holy Land, the news that again and again seems to have captured the Catholic imagination: there is a city called Edessa, in which is kept an ancient cloth imprinted with a mystical image of Jesus.

  I didn’t realize the extent of the evidence Ugo had found. And the Diatessaron is yet to come, probably in the final gallery that lies ahead.

  Suddenly Peter’s hand breaks out of my grip. “Simon!” he cries.

  I look up to find my brother moving toward us quickly, descending like a bird of prey—blade-thin, with his cassock feathered out behind him.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  His blue eyes swirl with emotion. He sweeps up Peter in one arm and slips the other behind my back, ushering us back outside to the rear entrance to the museums. Then, in a low voice, he says, “Last night Lucio had a visitor at his apartment. A messenger from the Rota who had news about Ugo.”

  I hang on his next words. The Rota is the second-highest court of Catholicism.

  “They’re empaneling a tribunal,” he says. Then he continues in Greek, to prevent Peter from understanding. “To try Ugo’s killer.”

  “Who did they arrest?”

  Simon looks at me impatiently. “No one. They’re making it a canonical trial.”