The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Because you are the most formidable Christian sect.”

  “Why did you want formidable?”

  “You’ve got to ask yourself what we wanted from the body, Father Folan.”

  “That’s what I am doing.”

  “Think of our history, yours and mine. All right. We have been looking at each other for two millennia,” said Hirsch.

  Jim noticed the voice drop an octave. It became leaden and strong. Each word must have been felt many times. It was like a giant wall without enough space between the blocks to insert a sheet of paper. There was no room here in what he said for any leeway.

  “In the Diaspora, in your Europe, there have been some hard times. Not the least of which, Father Folan, were done with religious overtones. Easter for you is a happy holiday. I remember pogroms as how it was celebrated. Easter and the Good Friday of the crucifixion. You know who was blamed?”

  “You are also aware of the Jewish schema whereby Vatican II absolved the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. That the death of Our Lord was for all mankind, for the guilt of all mankind.”

  “Yes, I know, but I am talking of memories that go deeper. Do you know what our first reaction was? Our first reaction was, ‘Oh, no, not this!’ We didn’t want to be blamed for this. We thought Christians would be saying, ‘Look at what the Jews are doing.’”

  “Why didn’t you bury it?”

  “That was not undiscussed.”

  “You considered it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t do it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even if it is buried, it is still there.”

  “Why not destroy it?”

  “Can you believe that if we destroyed it, and ultimately word got out that we destroyed it, it would be considered an act of aggression against Christianity?”

  “That’s farfetched.”

  “For computers, Father Folan. Not for people,” said Director Hirsch.

  “Father Folan, we explored a multitude of possibilities should we proceed with this dig either as a normal archaeological dig or a special one. In either case, word would have gotten out about the nature of the body. Here in Israel, when we plan, we go through scenarios. Best case, worst case, most probable, least probable, et cetera.”

  “I am aware of that planning tool,” said Jim.

  “In this matter there was not one good thing that could come to us from being associated with this find. The negatives were inexhaustible. The best possible thing that could have happened, if we had let this proceed and become public, would have been a massive controversy and only modest blame on Israel limited to the ever-present anti-Semite. That, my good Father Folan, was the best case.”

  “And so you decided as a first step to call us in as part of the solution to your problems.”

  “Oh, no, Father Folan,” said Director Hirsch, beaming. “You are not part of the solution. You, Father Folan, are the solution. It is your dig. We are here only to assist. No Jew, no Israeli will have any authority over this dig.”

  Jim Folan glanced at Dr. Golban. She put her cigarette out in her coffee cup, and announced:

  “Please, excuse me from this, thank you.”

  Then she left the room.

  Director Hirsch apologized for her being a scientist and not a woman of the world.

  “I can see her point,” said Jim. “I can see it very well.”

  “Of course, Father. We do too. Now what shall we do with your dig?”

  Sharon Golban got a phone call two days later at her apartment that Jim Folan, do not call him Father, call him Jim, would like to see her the following day to interview her and discuss the dig.

  “All right, come on over. I’m at Beit Vagan. Do you know how to get here yet?”

  “Is that your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes. No one will overhear.”

  “Let’s meet somewhere else. Perhaps more open,” said Jim.

  “It’s open enough. I’ll open a window. I have my books and notes here.”

  “I’d prefer somewhere else, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I do mind. It’s a nice apartment. Messy a little, but I’ll clean it up.”

  “Do me this favor. Please.”

  “No. What’s wrong with my apartment? You haven’t even seen it.”

  “It’s not your apartment. I shouldn’t be alone with you in an apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “For me it is an occasion of sin.”

  “Why? What have I done?”

  “Nothing, Sharon. I am a priest. For me to be alone with a woman in her apartment would be an occasion of sin.”

  “That’s incredible. That’s insulting. That assumes I am going to jump on your penis the minute no one is looking.”

  “Dr. Golban, where can we meet?”

  “Do you want me to wear a chador, Ayatollah Folan?”

  “I will meet you at Mendel’s office.”

  That night Sharon bought a bag of new autumn apples, and with an extra packet of cigarettes and a glass of wine settled down with her old textbooks in preparation for the meeting the next day with the Vatican’s man.

  She could see her dominant student interest scrawled over the first chapter of St. Matthew, the beginning of the Gospels.

  “Test Sunday on the Synoptics!!!!”

  And somehow, as it always did, it all came back, how the professor had stressed that the Pentateuch, called the Torah, was what the Christians called part of the Old Testament, indicating, of course, that there was another one.

  And somehow, as it always did, it all came back, how good the Synoptic Gospels were as reference in large areas of Second Temple period history.

  She noticed her old notes about the political struggles of the time, and how the Gospels helped place many factions so accurately.

  She focused on that Passover when the Nazarene had come to Jerusalem, and why the Romans were there, and what Caiaphas, the high priest, wanted, and even the interests of the Pharisees and Herod himself. Things started to make sense in relation to the dig.

  She made more notes. “Review attitude of apostles toward crucifixion shortly before and after believing they witnessed resurrection … Negative attitude toward tomb as toward cross … How many centuries before cross could be acceptable as Christian symbol? Unique nature of early Christian movement.”

  And she thought briefly about the clay wall, how well it blended in with the cave. She made notes. She could not do a scenario of probability until she went back and saw exactly how well the wall blended, and performed other tests. One did not jump to neat answers or one found oneself neatly stupid.

  Holy men needed neat answers to the universe. Archaeologists had to deal with minute disputable facts. That was the glory of truth. It was so rich.

  Sharon lit another cigarette and wrote down “Holy Sepulcher.” That, too, had to be reexamined.

  There was a Church of the Holy Sepulcher that, until now, archaeology had shown to be the place of the probable tomb of Christ. But why?

  Weren’t the Jews driven out of Jerusalem during the destruction of the Second Temple? And that would mean Christians too at that time, because then they were considered another Jewish sect.

  And if they were all out of Jerusalem, who would be left to say a certain tomb was the tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulcher? And the less certain the accepted site of the Holy Sepulcher, the greater possibility another one was, perhaps one on Haneviim Street.

  Sharon went to a wall in her bedroom-living room-study combination and got the history book she wanted. She was right. There was a period during Roman administration that Christians were not in the city either.

  These things were facts to be explored further, by either herself or that priest, if ever he got around to it. The old excitement was back even if she had to work with that man.

  She took another apple, and went back to
her Gospels.

  Sharon liked the Gospels for another reason. She liked the common sense of the man Joshua, called Jesus by the Greeks, and the Christ, which meant in Greek the anointed one, or Messiah.

  “It wasn’t what went into a man’s mouth that made him holy, it was what came out of it.” Beautiful. So much for the kashruth, the dietary laws.

  “Let the dead bury the dead.” He could have been talking to the Orthodox sects, who would kill people today for disturbing a Jewish cemetery. The fuss they made over proper burial. And they would stone him today if he told them that.

  She could see Jesus coming to an archaeological dig and telling the crazy Orthodox sects they should worry about the living and not the dead. And she could see them accusing him of being blasphemous, first, if he spoke Hebrew at all, because some thought that was only for holy uses, and then throwing stones at him or even using knives if he told them their first duty was not to the bones in the earth, bones of people dead not for days but for centuries.

  The use of the Old Testament prophecies was interesting because the Christians took all the prophecies about the suffering to mean it would happen to a man, the Messiah. The Talmud taught that the prophets had talked of the people of Israel in the Torah. Man and people, two interpretations.

  She read until three in the morning because she had no class the next day, or for the duration of the dig. And each time she came to one passage she felt as moved as the night she had reviewed the Gospels, cramming for a test:

  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  It was so incredibly human, she wanted to cry. She had felt that despair herself. It was just what she would want to cry out at times of extreme loneliness, if she could cry out, if she hadn’t felt so utterly abandoned and useless to the world when her Dubi had left her that day, that dismal rainy winter day, without even a note, just his clothes and personal possessions gone from the closets and two thousand Israeli pounds she had been saving. Not even a good-bye. Not even a nasty note. Not even the least bit of an argument.

  It was not the money loss that remotely bothered her but the fact that he did not care that she needed it. He didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

  A year and a half later he had phoned with the most ridiculous story of gangsters being after him, and he had to take the money to run and live. And, to save her life, he had not left a forwarding address, because she might be in danger if they knew.

  “Dubi,” she had said on this transatlantic call, “that is so much nonsense.”

  “I swear.”

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  “I need money to come home. I’m tired of America. I miss you, Sharon.”

  “Then come home.”

  “I can’t without money.”

  She wanted to send him the money. Even remembering how she felt talking to him on the phone, her body ached for the want of him. There never was a lover like him. Never. None of the men touched what he could do for her. And she had thought, to hell with it, I’ll send him the money and at least I’ll have the man I want. I’ll have him here.

  So he was a liar. She had never loved him for his intellect anyhow.

  She sent him the money and didn’t hear from him for another six months when he came up with another transatlantic call, collect, and an equally urgent plea for more money.

  “Come here first, then maybe we’ll talk about money. I know if I send it it will be gone.”

  “All right, then how about money for a divorce? You can’t get married again unless you have me for a divorce. That must be worth something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will I get it?”

  She had hung up so he would not hear her cry. He phoned a year later, with another fancy story, but wanting only $100 American to settle a divorce in Israel. She agreed. But he had to be here. And they’d talk. She was sure the talk would take place in the bedroom.

  And all right, she wasn’t proud of it, but dammit, she wanted him. It wasn’t her fault he had made in her an appetite for him that never left, and never quite got satiated with another man.

  He didn’t come but he did call for more money again, and this time she just didn’t send it at all.

  Helpless was the awful word for it, and while Jesus, this prophet or God, or Son of God depending on the Christian belief, was made helpless in more noble circumstances, nevertheless Sharon Golban could feel what he felt there in those last moments. Humiliated. And she had done this to herself. She knew who Dubi was, and if she thought about it she probably knew who he was the day she married him.

  But even thinking about him now, she wanted him. And that was the most humiliating part of it all. Still wanting him.

  If she were correct, those of Jim’s faith, Roman Catholicism, believed Christ was God, not just the Son of God, but God Himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

  And that brought up a question. If Jesus were God, how could the Catholic Church explain why He had felt despair, how could He think the Father had forsaken Him?

  Also, there was a proven miraculous prophecy. Any historian could check it out. Matthew wrote before the fall of the Second Temple, one of the gigantic structures of the ancient world, that Christ had said his words would outlast it.

  Now if Christ had known that, why didn’t he know in that moment of despair that he would be resurrected?

  Was that despair on the cross an act of a man who expected resurrection?

  She would have to ask the priest these questions. If she were going to be assigned to his dig, then she would learn something, too.

  But Sharon did not get a chance, and in the end that next day, she would not even care about that.

  She met Jim at Director Hirsch’s little office. She had her notes, and her big question, in a small handbag.

  Mendel Hirsch was there, Jim Folan was there, and an ashtray was there, near where she sat.

  Jim Folan asked the first question:

  “On the first day of the dig, what did the ground look like?”

  “It was a partially excavated empty lot.”

  “And what did you wear?”

  “What?” said Sharon.

  “What did you wear?”

  “I don’t know. Clothes. I wore clothes. Why are you asking this?”

  “Please bear with me. I have my own questions, which might seem unreasonable to you, but they are reasonable to me. What did you wear? Do you remember specifically?”

  “No.”

  “All right, what was everyone else wearing? Who was there and what were they wearing?”

  Sharon looked to Director Hirsch. She asked him in Hebrew:

  “What is this going on?”

  “I understand a little bit of Hebrew,” said Jim in English. “I understand this is difficult for you but please bear with me.”

  “All right,” said Sharon, “they wore clothes too.” The interview went on for hours like that. Hirsch left. It was a pack-and-a-half-of-cigarettes interview.

  She put aside completely any thought of asking Father Folan about Jesus’ despair on the cross, the theological explanation.

  Finally he took out a special notebook, in which there was no discernible writing. It seemed like a combination of abbreviations. It was code, of sorts.

  “What are your reasons that make you think the bones are those of Jesus Christ?” he asked.

  “I never said they were. Not exactly.”

  “What?” His head jerked up. He had very open blue eyes. In other circumstances the man could be quite attractive. There was something very strong and honest about him. But of course he was a priest and therefore so professionally warped in his thinking that he would be worse than Dubi Halafi. Dubi was an outright ignoramus. This man had to go through years of training to get that way, and it must have been years before she noticed how apparently disconnected questions on trivia always came together in some intelligent form of cross-reference. He was not stupid. She was sure he was asking similar questions of others.
He would have made a wonderful policeman.

  “I said I never declared openly that it was the body of Jesus Christ. I said, formally, that what was discovered conformed at that point to the Gospels.”

  “You mean there is more to be done?”

  “Absolutely,” said Sharon. “But first let me explain that I jumped to that conclusion in my own mind, which was highly unprofessional of me.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I was so excited about finding the disk with the writing that I started to do broad analysis on the spot, that is, figuring out what it meant. And I just raced along mentally and then it hit me. Who was the Jewish king crucified? There was no Jewish king crucified. It was a mock sign. The man was Jesus.”

  “So you think it is Jesus?”

  “I think there are tests to be done, scenarios to be explored.”

  “What tests?”

  “Hallelujah, hallelujah, a question I am most fit to answer,” she said.

  He smiled. He did have a reasonable sense of himself, she thought.

  She started to explain the difficulties of carbon dating the bones. The substance most amenable to that dating was collagen, and that was found in the connecting tissue and skin, which apparently had all gone in time. They were the very elements that made radiocarbon possible.

  But the disk itself could provide perhaps the best dating, since it was kiln-fired, and that lent itself to the new process of thermoluminescent dating, incredibly accurate if one had the time and money to find a matching piece of kiln-fired pottery for which a singular date was known.

  “You see, what you are looking for is the amount of light emitted by a crystalline material above the normal incandescence, which in itself can give you a variable time, but when you match with …”

  “So the disk can be used for dating?” asked Jim.

  “I thought you wanted to know the process.”

  “Later. Right now I am just looking for the broad outlines.”

  “Fine,” said Sharon, slumping back into the very hard and uncomfortable chair. She looked at her watch. She had been here for hours.

  “Now, what would you say is the main archaeological source book for this dig?”