The Demas Revelation

by Shane Johnson

  Anna breathed easier. “Oh.”

  “Would you like to get dressed, dear?” Mrs. Mercer asked.

  “Yes,” Anna said, realizing her present state of dress and folding her arms across her chest. “I was upset, and …”

  Mrs. Mercer smiled at her, as did the dean.

  “You get dressed, and we’ll find a nice lunch somewhere,” he said. “Then we’ll go to the museum and start our analysis.”

  “Okay,” Anna agreed. “Give me about twenty minutes.”

  She walked briskly back to her room and heard the Mercers’ door close behind her.

  I guess that makes sense, protecting the scrolls …

  Still, she felt a nagging doubt and scolded herself for not trusting this man who, time and again, had proven himself to her. A man with whom she had felt safe sharing such a crucial confidence.

  And then she grew angry with herself for allowing the wretched scrolls to influence her confidence, her judgment, her faith.

  Let’s just get this over with!

  Anna stood at the dresser mirror, her mind racing as she finished getting ready. Her hands were on autopilot as they pulled her thick hair back, fixing it into a ponytail with a red scrunchie.

  Suppose they are true. What happens then?

  She dreaded the very thought, more determined than ever to proceed as if the documents were hoaxes.

  If you’re real, you’re gonna have to prove it to me—and it won’t be easy.

  The mascara wand tickled along and between her lashes, leaving behind a dark and feathery trail, a dramatic amplification of her natural beauty.

  How can they be genuine? There are a thousand logical and historical proofs supporting the Christian faith!

  A few rapid strokes of a wide, soft brush across her cheeks left shimmering, ruddy traces of color, further defining her already striking contours.

  Based on statistics alone, the odds of any one man fulfilling so many established prophecies in a single lifetime are beyond astronomical.

  She twisted a tube of lipstick, bringing its deep shade out of hiding. In a few smooth motions she glided the rich, scented color down and across, coating her full lips. They glistened in the light.

  What about all the prophecies fulfilled beyond Jesus’ control, incontestably written hundreds of years before his birth?

  She closed the tube, dropped it into her purse, and reached for a small jewelry box. She raised the velvet lid. A sparkle shone inside.

  What about the prophecies of his death by a form of execution still to be invented? The specific piercing of his hands and feet? The guards casting lots for his garments? His death alongside two other men, whose legs were broken as they hung there, while his weren’t?

  She slipped a fragile silver chain around her neck, from which dangled a little gleaming cross of silver, reminiscent of the cross at the dig site. Her fingers, reaching behind her neck, worked the tiny clasp with practiced precision.

  Even the place of his birth, his lineage, and his betrayal for thirty pieces of silver?

  She slipped the posts of a pair of small, delicate hoop earrings through the piercings in her lobes and fixed them in place. They had been her mother’s.

  All this is to be rendered meaningless by a few leaves of papyrus?

  A dab of perfume, a final tug at her bangs. Then, meeting her own gaze in the mirror, a flash struck as she recalled Mercer’s question of the night before.

  “You mean there’s another time bomb out there waiting to go off?”

  Anna reached into her purse for her phone. Pressing a speed-dial button she had pressed many times before, she heard only one ring, followed by a welcome voice.

  “Anna?” asked Jack Dyson. “Hey, how’s Italy?”

  “Jack, I need you.”

  “Be still, my heart. You want to clarify that a little?”

  She smiled, seeing in her mind his mischievous grin. “Behave, now. What have you heard about the dig at Rome?”

  “Only that you made the find of the century. Paul’s church. Outstanding! It’s all anyone at the university’s talking about. No way they’ll pull the plug now. Schools everywhere are going to want you. Good going, girl.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Like what?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s all I’ve heard.”

  “Okay. Well, to fill you in a little, Dean Mercer’s here with me now. We’ve got to run tests on some artifacts unearthed at the site, and that’s got me tied up. But I need a favor from you. I need you to go to Pompeii.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible. You can get a connecting flight here in Milan … I’ll need to fill you in, in person.”

  “I can be there in a couple of days or so,” Jack said. “I have business to wrap up on this end. What’s in Pompeii?”

  “Let’s just say you’re my personal bomb squad.”

  “Come again?”

  She gave him the barest basics, telling him only that a further relic was indicated as having been buried there. As the call ended, she looked into the mirror and found herself looking back, lovely and ready to face the world.

  “Huh,” she whispered.

  She had no memory of putting on her makeup.

  The museum lab had been sealed. A disgruntled Laneri stood outside, complaining to a museum staffer and taking occasional peeks through the door’s small rectangular window.

  For two days Anna, Dean Mercer, and Roberto had carried out a battery of tests on one of the scrolls, doing all the museum’s equipment would allow so as not to reveal to the outside world the focus of their analysis. Anna, after careful consideration, had decided to take the grad student into her confidence and had invited him to join her and the Mercers for lunch before the tests began. His acceptance of the issue at hand had been as professional as she could have hoped for, though the young man’s concern about the implications for his own faith, and that of others, had been evident.

  “The Raman spectroscopy results are in,” Mercer said, studying a computer display. Not far across the room stood the analyzer itself, mounted atop a mobile stand.

  “What’s the verdict?” Anna asked, studying a sample of papyrus under a microscope.

  “The ink is carbon based. Soot, as was common with ancient inks, bound with a gum adhesive. No metal-gallic constituent. That dates it prior to medieval times.”

  “It also possibly dates it to the first century,” Anna said, her displeasure evident in her sarcastic tone. “Why couldn’t it have been India ink? Or even ballpoint?”

  “Several tests yet to go,” Mercer reminded her. “The transmission electron microscopy data won’t be back until Friday.”

  Anna focused the microscope and continued studying the structure of the paper. “No visual sign of pigments. The chemical tests gave no indication of sodium hydroxide or any other substance having been used to age the material artificially. Looks for all the world like genuine papyrus from the era.”

  “I think it is,” said Roberto, entering from another room and holding a printout. “The MSI results match those of confirmed ancient papyrus samples. I checked through the museum’s catalog and found a Roman sample from the first century that matches exactly. They could even have been made at the same time, in the same place.”

  Under normal circumstances, Anna would have considered multispectral imaging almost conclusive. But not now.

  You’re gonna have to prove it to me.

  “You ran every wavelength?” she asked.

  “Yes, as you asked,” he said. “Even those that didn’t strictly apply.”

  With every result they got, the evidence for authenticity mounted. Anna and Mercer did little to hide their disappointment, holding out hope tha
t, ultimately, the documents would be proven false. Anna prayed continually, fearing for the first time in her career that she might have unearthed a genuine article.

  Please, Lord …

  “When do we get the AMS results?” she asked. Another lab, possessing carbon-dating equipment the museum lacked, had been sent a small piece of the papyrus. The lab hadn’t been told of its origin, or of the nature of the writings in question.

  Mercer checked his watch. “The radiocarbon dating lab promised they’d have something for us by six. That’s just over half an hour from now.”

  The minutes ticked past slowly. Too slowly. Anna and the others knew the carbon dating might be their last hope of proving the papyri too recent to be genuine, though hopes of that weren’t flaring as brightly as they had the day before.

  It can’t be true … please!

  “What if it’s real?” Roberto asked as they sat together, still sealed within the lab. “What do we do? How do we tell the world that Jesus was a fake?”

  “He wasn’t a fake,” Anna insisted. “Lies have been written for as long as men have walked the earth.”

  “It may not matter if they’re lies,” Roberto pointed out. “The world wants to believe that Christ was just a man, if he existed at all. Look at the staggering popularity of The Da Vinci Code. And all the attention the Gospel of Judas got back when it was released. The world loves this stuff. If you want to make money, slam Christ.”

  “Sadly, he’s right,” Mercer said. “Every year newspapers run stories questioning the Christian faith, and they usually do it on Easter, when believers are most focused on the resurrection. They never write such things regarding Islam or Buddhism. Science is always trying to explain away the miracles of the Bible, claiming that the Red Sea was parted by natural winds or that the plagues of Egypt were caused by fungus in the grain storehouses. Even something as absurd as claiming that Jesus walked on ice, not water.”

  “Stands to reason they’d say as much,” Anna sighed. “All the faithful were promised was that the world would hate them, because it hated him first.”

  “True enough. The unbelieving will embrace these confessions like nothing that came before them. It won’t matter if reams of historical and statistical evidence support the assertion that Christ was who he said he was. If they can point to supposed confessions from the apostles stating they made the whole thing up—”

  “They’ll use it as a battering ram,” she said, completing the thought. “How will the believers maintain their faith in the face of that? Can they?”

  “Faith is far more than fact,” Mercer said. “It is also embodied in things not seen. In things one cannot catalog or quantify.”

  “I understand that, Albert. But knowing that and believing it are two different things.”

  “If the documents are true, we must share them with the world,” Mercer emphasized. “It isn’t our place to conceal such truth. All our lives we’ve devoted ourselves to the dissemination of genuine knowledge, however painful or inconvenient doing so might be.”

  “Inconvenient?” Anna asked. “This would go way beyond inconvenient! I say again, do we have the right to take it upon ourselves to destroy so many lives? Can the Christian church stand up to a seeming overwhelming amount of contradicting evidence? Even if some question remains, will we be dealing a blow that ultimately will be fatal? How will my faith fare? Or yours? Or Roberto’s?”

  The phone rang. Mercer looked at his watch.

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  He walked over and picked up the receiver. Whatever was said was brief and to the point. He thanked the lab for their effort, hung up, and returned to where the professor and the grad student breathlessly waited.

  “They got a solid date range,” Mercer said austerely. “AD thirty to ninety.”

  Anna closed her eyes. Roberto rose from his stool and walked into the other room, from which soon came the loud crash of something forcefully striking the floor.

  Mercer picked up the papyrus Anna had been examining under the microscope and considered it for a long moment before setting it down.

  The phone rang again. And rang. And rang. Roberto emerged from the side room and apathetically crossed to the phone.

  “Laboratorio,” he answered. He listened. A look of surprise and alarm crossed his face.

  Anna looked up.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Who is it?”

  “It’s the press,” he said, stunned. “Il Giorno. They want your comment on the confession of the apostle Peter.”

  Anna’s heart stopped. In a panic she hurled herself at her purple gym bag resting on the worktable, almost knocking Mercer off his feet as she swept past him. Roughly pulling the papyri out of the bag and free of their protective tube, she rifled through them.

  “Paul,” she read aloud. “Philip. Matthew. Thomas. James …”

  Her eyes went wide.

  The leaf bearing Peter’s name was missing.

  Six

  Dyson again looked at his watch. His layover at Kennedy International was well into its second hour, with the promise of two more to come. The trip from his arrival gate at Terminal 7 to Terminal 1, where he now waited, had been an endurance test, thanks to a temporarily inoperative interterminal travel system. What should have been a comfortable ten-minute ride had become a tiring forty-five-minute walk, and his feet had made their protest known.

  He sipped coffee in a small café, passing the time by reading a paper, watching a news channel on one of several wall-mounted televisions in the terminal, and glancing at the arrivals-and-departures board. His Alitalia flight would be on time, it still said, though delays had a knack for prying their way into the schedule even at the last minute.

  I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you, Anna.

  Finishing that section of the paper, Dyson considered doing the crossword puzzle. It had been a while since he had worked on one, and as he scanned the clues, sizing up its relative difficulty, he figured he would give it a shot.

  As he opened his briefcase and fished for a pen, words spilling from the television speaker caught his ear.

  “Shocking news out of Rome—”

  He looked up. As the woman on the screen read from a teleprompter, a level of astonishment became woven into her voice while she herself became aware of news for the first time.

  “An ancient document verified as having been written by the scribe of the apostle Peter, unearthed in what may have been the first church in Rome, is purportedly a confession that the resurrection of Jesus was a hoax carried out by the apostles themselves—”

  So what else is new? Dyson scoffed, not surprised in the least. No wonder you didn’t tell me, Anna.

  Not even he had ever believed. Out of respect for her faith, he had remained silent on the issue, changing the subject whenever religion came up, as it often did. He didn’t want to see her hurt, ever, in any way, and wanted even less to be the cause of that pain. He knew what her faith meant to her, and at times he wished he could share in it.

  He loved her. He had from the moment he had laid eyes on her.

  “Initial tests, conducted in Switzerland, have verified the document as authentic. The archaeologist who made the discovery, Dr. Anna Meridian, an American, is at Milan’s Museum of Archaeology, working to further verify the papyrus. If these tests all confirm its authenticity, the ramifications of the find, for Christians worldwide, could be catastrophic. Our Roger Stine is standing by at the Vatican …”

  An image of St. Peter’s Square appeared, filled to capacity with frightened Catholics hoping for assurance from the pope. It was a sea of turmoil and wailing, agony and fear, with uncounted hands and rosaries raised to the heavens.

  “This is Roger Stine, reporting from Rome. The shocking news became public less than an hour ago, but already
hundreds of thousands have come here to St. Peter’s Square, seeking guidance and comfort that their long-held faith is not in vain. As of yet, the pope has not made an appearance, but we are told that he is on his way and that arrangements have been made for an address like none other in the history of the Catholic Church—”

  Dyson looked away, knowing that in that hour the world had changed.

  “Bomb squad,” he whispered.

  Anna’s students sat transfixed, huddling around a small radio in a small restaurant near the museum, where they had gathered for an early dinner. Their professor had told them to meet her in the museum’s lab that evening at which time she would inform them of the exact nature of the find at Rome.

  But to their surprise, the English-speaking station they had tuned in while seeking the American Top 40 had stolen her thunder instead.

  “No wonder she freaked out,” Beth said, visibly shaken. “A confession by an apostle …”

  “Peter,” Neil clarified.

  “I know that,” Beth said, slapping at him. “Declaring the whole thing a fake … the whole resurrection … This can’t really be happening. I mean, we found evidence for Paul’s church! That was supposed to confirm Christian history, not destroy it! How did we get from that to this?”

  “The stone box,” Craig said. “The stupid scroll must have been put inside to hide it. No one was ever supposed to find it at all.”

  “There were several scrolls in there,” Neil recalled, “all rolled together. Teach said so. Remember? One was written by Paul. We know that. But it must have been something harmless, since the press is focusing on this one.”

  “She didn’t react like it was harmless,” Beth said.

  “Maybe not, then. I’m just saying it’s weird that no one’s mentioning the others.”

  “So why did Peter write the thing in the first place?” Beth wondered. “Why leave something like that lying around if you never want it to come out?”

  “Why did Nixon tape all his meetings?” Craig offered. “Important people do stupid things all the time.”