Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine

by William Roskey

  “No. No, it won’t make a bit of difference.” I sighed heavily, suddenly feeling very old. “You’re right. Most would say that a trip such as this is impossible, and that it was all just a hoax, no matter how much evidence was amassed. The handful who could understand and accept the trip as a genuine occurrence, would say that the report, the ‘fifth gospel,’ as you call it, was written by a man who was deranged or had his own theological ax to grind, or both. It was all so stupid, wasn’t it? So very stupid. It was all for nothing.”

  His eyes softened, and He smiled a gentle, loving smile. “Any endeavor, any endeavor, that brings even just one more soul into the Kingdom of God is worth it.” That smile and those spoken words brought me greater happiness than I’d ever known.

  “Me?” I asked. He nodded. I felt as if my heart were going to burst.

  “Perhaps,” I said, feeling the beginning of a powerful revitalization, the birth of a new and boundless enthusiasm, “perhaps the ‘fifth gospel’ can bring a few more to you. And for their sakes, I will continue to stay by your side, and I will write it. Even though nearly all will reject it, why there’s still those on the project team who know that this trip took place. Maybe they’ll believe the words I’ve written. Once they open the canister …”

  Jesus raised his hand to interrupt. “There is, for those on the project, for those very logical and scientific people, a more graphic way, a more powerful and forceful way to reach them.”

  “How?”

  “Deliver the fifth gospel to them in person.”

  Outright shock was my initial reaction until I remembered that I was speaking to the Son of God. Then I paused and considered for a moment. My reply surprised even me.

  “That would make quite an impression, and, if you’d have offered me the opportunity to return to my own time a few weeks, even a few days ago, I’d have jumped at the chance. But now … now, I’d prefer to stay with you.”

  “To write the Fifth Gospel?” For the first time, I noticed the crinkling laugh lines around His eyes.

  “To be with you.”

  He shook His head. “My Father in heaven calls different people to do different things. There is a Plan. You are called upon to do several things in your lifetime, and one of them is to be a messenger. Go back and tell people the Good News, Lightfoot, but more than that, live the Good News. Some of the seeds will fall on fertile ground.”

  “I will do what you tell me to do. But before I go, there is another matter. The leader of my country has asked that you give us a message. Ours is a confusing time. We’ve come a long way very quickly. Some say too quickly. We want to do what’s right, but sometimes we just don’t know … that is, things just move too fast …”

  There was a mild reproof in His voice. “But you already have the message. The message is the Good News. The message is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That is the message of the Fifth Gospel, as it is with the four gospels which precede it. Nothing has changed. And now,” He said, raising His right hand in preparation.

  “Wait! There is one more thing that …”

  He nodded and smiled reassuringly. “Even now the child is being healed. I will do no less for her than I have just done for the daughter of Jairus. She is sleeping now, but will awake whole and healthy.”

  My eyesight began to fail. Things were fading. I felt lightheaded, as if I were going to pass out. As things began to go black, I kept my eyes on His face. He was regarding me with a sorrowful, an inexpressible love that I’ll never forget. His eyes. I suddenly, in a rare flash of insight, realized what His eyes told me. What they told everyone who looked into them.

  Then I slipped and was falling into a dark tunnel, but was unafraid. All I could think of was those eyes. They said to everyone who gazed into them, “I know exactly who you are and what you’ve done, but I love you anyway. I love you with a boundless, eternal love that you can’t even begin to understand, and it causes me great pain to see you hurt yourself whenever you turn away from me. But always remember that even if you were the only human being who had ever existed, I’d still go through pain and suffering and death just for you and you alone. I love you.”

  The universe swam around me with dizzying speed, but I felt only peace. For the first time in my life, I felt true and total peace. Then all was darkness and as still as the grave.

  41

  For a moment, I couldn’t believe that I was still on my feet. But I was. Still harder to believe was what I saw as my eyes refocused. No longer was I on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but I now stood on the parking lot of the L-2 Facility in Oak Ridge. As I turned to take in my surroundings, I was astonished to see Clarence, head down, treading heavily toward me. He was carrying the B-4 bag he had used to bring me my first century clothes.

  “Clarence!”

  Look like he’d seen a ghost? He sure did. When he looked up to see me, he dropped the B-4 bag along with his jaw. He stood frozen like a rabbit caught in the middle of a flashlight beam. I thought his hair was going to turn white right on the spot. I ran up to him.

  “Lightfoot! How … what … in God’s name are you doing here?”

  “He sent me back! Clarence, I saw Him, I spoke with Him! He’s God, and He sent me back!”

  Quickly recovering, Clarence summoned up something resembling composure, but he was still as wound up as a five-dollar watch.

  “You mean it worked? You saw Him? You really spoke to Him?” I could only keep nodding, my head bobbing up and down like a cork in a stormy sea. Then I burst.

  “The mission was a success, Clarence! A complete success. We’ve got our documentation; all my notes are in the large inside pocket of the cloak I’m wearing. We’ve got ourselves a miracle and a healing, and I even got a message for our time, although I doubt it’s the kind of message Ike had in mind!”

  “A healing?” Clarence’s tone was cautious, yet eager. I grinned and pointed to the B-4 bag at his feet.

  “You’ve got the clothes I changed out of in there?” He nodded.

  “But what about …” I had already hefted the bag up onto the hood of the nearest car, unzipped it, and was rummaging through it.

  “I’m getting to that … here they are.” I pulled out my twentieth century pants and fished the keys to my rental car, a ’58 Ford, out of the right front pocket. “My car’s over there,” I said, tossing the keys to him. “You drive; I’m a bit tired and we’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Are we going where I think we’re going?”

  “Right. The Jones residence in College Park, Maryland.”

  “Cindy?” he asked excitedly. “We’ll have to get on the phone right away to see if it really—”

  “No, we don’t,” I cut him off. “He told me. That’s enough.” I was right and Clarence knew it. He looked properly chastened.

  “Lightfoot,” he said, thoughtfully looking down at the keys in his hand, as if they unlocked something far more valuable than an automobile, “I do believe that, as we say in Christian circles, you have come to know the Lord.”

  Clarence started the engine, put the car in gear, and then sank back in the seat for a moment in silence.

  “You know, we really shouldn’t be doing this. We should go right back in the facility and get on the horn to the Old Man.” I was already in the process of changing back into my twentieth century clothes as I answered him.

  “Aw, Clarence. Look, no matter where we are, the first step is a thorough debriefing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And who should be debriefing me?”

  “Well, of course we had never expected that you would come back, so we never made any provisions for it. But I guess that Ike would probably want me to take care of the initial debriefing.”

  “So debrief me while we head north.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” he smiled, as he let out the clutch and we began moving.

&nbs
p; “How long have I been gone, Clarence?”

  “I closed the cowling on you,” he glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch, “twenty-two minutes ago.” I whistled.

  “How long were you there? Judging by the growth of your beard and hair, I’d guess about four months.”

  “Closer to five.”

  “Amazing. O.K, Lightfoot. Start at the very beginning, and don’t leave anything out. Not a single detail. Day by day. Everything.”

  So I began. I talked for literally hours. I talked myself hoarse. We stopped for gas and coffee, and then I continued to talk. Clarence’s concentration was absolute. I knew that remarkable memory of his was recording my every word and inflection, with all the fidelity of a tape recorder. He wouldn’t forget or misplace a single syllable. Somehow I managed to stay awake long enough to finish the story. I had just finished telling Clarence Jesus’ last words to me before I lost consciousness.

  “Lightfoot! We’re here! Come on, you can sleep all you want when we get you in bed!”

  “Huh? Where are we Clarence?” I replied sleepily.

  “My house, where else?”

  That galvanized me. “Why didn’t you say so?” I demanded unreasonably, springing out of the car.

  I won’t keep you in suspense, because we weren’t kept in suspense. In fact, she was the one who opened the door for us. Not only did she look healthy, she looked robust, vibrant, radiant. The big Secret Service agent gathered her up in an enormous bear hug and began to weep.

  Between Clarence, Cindy, Marge, Clarence Junior, the twins, and the dogs, all was pandemonium. And, being a wily Apache, I took advantage of the noisy confusion to make good my escape.

  42

  I’d first heard his approach when he was still about 150 yards off. He might have been adept at stalking men in cities, but, out here on the desert, he was as clumsy as the day is long. Pebbles crunched beneath his boots, the nocturnal animals fell silent at his passage, and the change in his pocket jingled.

  Lying on my side, I gazed into the campfire I’d built for the sole purpose of guiding him in, for I’d known he’d come before too many days had gone by. This was the sixth day I’d been out, and my camp was atop a rocky hill I shared with a family of coyotes and some other assorted denizens of the desert, animal, bird, and reptile. Aside from the man now laboring up the hill, the nearest human being was more than twenty miles away. The night breezes were cool, almost chilly.

  Now he was no more than twenty yards away. I rolled onto my back, and my eyes drank in the cold and silent beauty of the velvet canopy of thousands of silvery stars. “‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork,’” I said softly to myself.

  “Lightfoot,” he said, breathing heavily, “when you get a notion to be alone, you sure don’t do things halfway.” He shrugged off his backpack and sat down.

  “It’s good to see you, Clarence.”

  “It’s good to see you, too. You left quite suddenly, quite suddenly indeed. The Old Man was hopping mad.”

  “I needed to be alone. I needed to think. The desert is the only place a man can think.”

  “You came real close to seeing how well a man can think in a federal penitentiary. Stealing that fighter plane was a bad move, Lightfoot. I had to do some fast talking to square that.”

  “I didn’t steal it; I borrowed it,” I said reasonably. “I’m still an officer in the United States Air Force. Since my temporary assignment was completed, I returned to my permanent duty station, using government transport.”

  “Yeah, and then as soon as the plane came to a stop, you checked out on thirty days of leave and were off in a cloud of dust.”

  “I had accrued the leave; in fact, I had forty-two days of leave accrued,” I said, just as reasonably. Clarence just shook his head. “How’s Cindy?” I asked.

  “Perfect. Completely, totally healed. Happy. Very happy.”

  “The doctors?” I ventured. Clarence snorted and set his jaw.

  “Since acute myeloblastic leukemia can’t be cured, the doctors say that it obviously follows that they were wrong in their initial diagnosis. She must have had some strange disease, the symptoms of which are identical to those of acute myeloblastic leukemia, but a disease they know nothing about, except that one can apparently recover from it. Case closed.”

  “The canister?”

  “The archeological team dug it up right where you buried it. Portions of the dating elements embedded on its exterior were sent to the laboratories of the Smithsonian, the British Museum, MIT, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the National Center of Scientific Research in Madrid, the Center of Forestry Research and Analysis in France, the Department of Prehistoric Studies at the University of Bordeaux, the Cairo Museum, and the National Scientific Academy of Japan. All tests were conducted independently, and, and except for Dr. Linstrom in the Smithsonian, none of the labs were told the origin of the samples of the dating elements. The dating elements, as you may recall, were primarily different types of wood. Wood, as you may recall Dr. Linstrom telling us, is what we’re most successful in using to determine the age of an item. New techniques have already made Carbon 14 dating obsolete. The Smithsonian, along with the other institutions I’ve mentioned, have used four relatively new testing methods to date Tutankhamen’s coffin, Egyptian canoes, and ancient wooden implements, with most impressive and extremely accurate results. I refer to measuring the degree of lignite formation, the gain in wood density, the degree of fossilization, and cell modification—”

  “Clarence, you haven’t changed a bit. What’s the bottom line?”

  “That canister has been in the ground for 1,950 years, plus or minus thirty years. Period.”

  “There can be no doubt?”

  “No.”

  “What about Ike? What’s he going to do?”

  Clarence wore a pained expression as he began to pack his pipe with Cherry Blend. He didn’t answer until he finished packing it, lit it, and had taken a few long draws.

  “Well … he’s not going to do anything, Lightfoot,” he said softly. “He’s not going to do anything at all.” Clarence finally broke the long silence that followed with a heavy sigh. He went on. “As he sees it, there’s nothing he can do. You see, your reports were not in the canister, and the whole point of the dating elements embedded in the canister was to establish exactly when the reports were written, or, to be more precise, when the reports were sealed in it. When the seal was broken, lo and behold, there would be your reports, or the fifth gospel as you referred to it in your debriefing. And we’d then be able to establish, to prove, that they were written in the first century.

  “Instead, you brought the documents back with you, on your person. And neither your body nor your clothes can be proven to be two thousand years old. For all anyone knows or can prove, you could have written those reports last week in Newark.”

  “But the fact that the canister itself was in the ground for two thousand years …”

  “Proves nothing. It’s just another anomaly of space and time, like the Piri Reis map, the Salzburg Cube, and certain pre-Incan artifacts.”

  “What?”

  “Piri Reis, also known as Ahmet Muhiddin, was a famous naval officer in the Ottoman fleet of Suleiman the Magnificent. He was, by avocation, also a map maker. His most famous map was drawn in or before the year 1513, but the fun didn’t begin until three years ago, in 1956, when a visiting Turkish naval officer gave a copy of it to the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office. Surprise. Even though the existence of Antarctica wasn’t verified until 1819, the map accurately showed its coastline, including islands and bays underneath the ice sheet, that we’ve only recently begun to chart using seismic echo soundings.

  “In 1957, after the Western Observatory of Boston College had examined the map, they announced that so great was the detail that it showed an Antarctic mountain range that wasn’t discovered in modern times until 1952. There are other quite remarkable featu
res of the map, but you get the general idea.

  “The Salzburg Cube. Not a true cube, but an object composed of a steel and nickel alloy, measuring 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighing 1.73 pounds, and having a specific gravity of 7.75. Found in 1885, when a block of coal dating from the Tertiary period was broken open.”

  “What’s the Tertiary period?”

  “It’s comprised of the Paleocene to Pliocene epochs.”

  “That helps.”

  “Sorry. That means that it would appear that the machined metal cube had been around for anywhere from two to sixty million years ago.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Sure it is. But you explain it.”

  “You also said something about pre-Incan artifacts?”

  “Yes. There are a lot of curious ones, but one of my favorite is something that the government of Columbia sent as part of a collection on tour to six of the major museums in the United States. This was in 1954. This particular item is at least a thousand years old, made of solid gold, about two inches long, and worn as a pendant on a chain around the neck. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a modern jet aircraft. Others have been uncovered since, not only in Columbia, but in Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “With your recent experiences, it seems to me that you’d be the last person to dismiss anything as impossible. At any rate, the point is, that without your reports sealed inside it, that canister is merely a very unusual and very interesting, very curious hunk of junk. The world is full of strange artifacts that we know nothing about, things which we can’t even begin to explain. Theories abound: lost civilizations of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria, prehistoric practical jokers, people from outer space, time travel, you name it. What I’m trying to tell you, Lightfoot, is that the mission was a failure. As least from where the Project Council sits. Some very strange things happened, sure, but there is no concrete proof that you traveled back in time. And because of all the time, money, and resources devoted to it, it has become nothing more than a potentially profoundly embarrassing incident. The lid is on.”