The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Dr. Golban, I know they do believe, quite devoutly, and do their work as they say in their motto, ‘For the Greater Glory of God.’”

  “No. No. That’s what they say, so their religious order can support them in their important work. We all do some of it. They can’t be blamed.”

  “Well, I know you are wrong, Dr. Golban, because I am a Jesuit.”

  Sharon took a step back and looked at the priest again.

  “You’re a Jesuit?”

  “Yes, and I say the Mass, and being a priest is the most important thing in my life.”

  He could see she was thinking about something.

  “Perhaps the uneducated ones believe,” she said.

  “Have you ever heard of invincible ignorance?” said Jim. Soldiers were looking up now as his and Sharon’s voices rose this Yom Kippur morning at the dig.

  “What a wonderful phrase. It describes you people so well. You can’t be reasoned with.”

  “It was created by the Church to describe people who no matter what evidence is placed before them will not open their minds.”

  “That’s what I said. You.”

  “No,” said Jim. “You.”

  “Ignorance is not a function of the scientific mind,” said Sharon.

  “You win,” said Jim.

  “Why do you make it a question of winning?”

  “Because I give up.”

  “So do I,” said Sharon. “I think you ought to go down now and get a feel for the place. You know, we’ve got a couple of thousand years to climb.”

  Jim swallowed and went first, facing the earth as he climbed down, with Sharon explaining briefly the layers of civilization.

  When they got to bedrock and she announced they were at the Second Temple period, Jim noted that for Rome this area had been the northern access route to the grain of Egypt, which was as necessary for Rome as oil was now for America.

  “Good analogy,” said Sharon. “This has been a passageway and a dividing line between East and West intermittently since before Alexander, this eastern edge of the Mediterranean. It all comes together here.”

  “And went out from here,” said Jim, and suddenly he had an insight into the Bible. One of the great mysteries was why the Jews were the chosen people, and a mystery to them especially.

  Because, unlike the popular myth that the Jews felt they were chosen because they were in some way superior, the Torah said their God had chosen them specifically, not because they were either bigger or better than anyone else, but despite the fact that they weren’t. They were chosen only by God’s will and for His purposes.

  What if God had chosen them to put them at this crossroads of civilization? Weren’t the Jews ordered here? How many passages in their Torah told them to be here? It could well be in the plan of God that they were sent to this crossroads to give birth to the Word, to Jesus, and thence go forth to the world.

  If anyone wanted a word to go out to the world in the Second Temple period, here was the spot.

  “Well?” said Sharon, showing a flashlight into the tomb, down hewn steps of the hewn cave.

  “Okay,” said Jim, and lowered himself to get down through the small hole.

  “It must have taken a lot of work to carve this out, you know?” said Jim. He heard his voice resonate inside the tomb. A rich man could have afforded that, he thought. Jesus was hastily buried in a rich man’s tomb, hewn out of rock—Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23.

  “It doesn’t smell like it did the first day,” she said. “Which is bad.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the bones are terribly fragile and they should be protected from deteriorating once they touch the fresh air.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Polyvinyl. Very carefully coat them with polyvinyl.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “I would. You do it yourself.”

  “Would that destroy evidence, being under a coat of something?”

  “No. No. It would preserve it. It’s a very thin coat. Everything shows.”

  “All right, but where is the body?”

  Sharon pointed the light against the back wall where Jim saw a hole.

  “That’s the clay brick wall,” said Jim. “You know, you don’t notice it. You don’t, not right off, unless you’re looking at it.”

  “We can expand that hole I made just a bit and then coat, by hand.”

  “All right. Good. The disk is still in there?”

  “Oh yes. Nothing has been touched since the day I left it.”

  “I think we should get Mendel to put in a metal door instead of that stone. We’ll be coming here a bit.”

  “Good idea,” said Sharon.

  “One with a key,” said Jim. His mouth was dry.

  “Yes. They can build a frame into the hewn stone.”

  “Good,” said Jim.

  “Well,” said Sharon, pointing the light to the hole.

  “Okay,” said Jim. “You know I will be bringing in experts.”

  “I do.”

  “And another archaeologist.”

  “I understand.”

  “I guess I should take a look,” said Jim.

  “Yes,” said Sharon.

  “Who will handle the light?” said Jim.

  “Just look. I maneuver the light and explain to you what you are looking at.”

  “What if my head blocks the light?”

  “Then you’ll move it,” said Sharon.

  “Right,” said Jim. “Well, here we go. Just walk up?”

  “Just walk up,” said Sharon.

  “Okay,” said Jim and walked up to the hole in the clay brick wall, bricks so uneven in formation that they acted like a camouflage in the dark cave.

  “Well, look in,” said Sharon.

  “Yes,” said Jim, and the bright harsh light broke the blackness of the little niche behind the wall and there it was. Just a pile of bones, not even connected, so very small.

  He saw the orange mark on the legs beneath where the plaque lay, over a vertebra. Sharon was shining the light there.

  “See the orange mark? That’s oxidized iron. I think they used a smaller spike than usual because even though iron rusts it will tend to last as long as bones in these circumstances.”

  “I see.”

  “There might be a piece of wood underneath the tibia or vertebrae which then we could use to carbon-date.”

  “You can’t carbon-date the bone itself, you said?” asked Jim. He felt somehow reassured making such a technical comment.

  “No, no. Bone doesn’t carbon-date, but often they would bury the cross with the victim.”

  “Without removing him.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he obviously was removed?”

  “Apparently, but a piece of the cross might have come with him with the rough spike. You see, spikes were not necessarily smooth in those days. No machine manufacture.”

  “I know,” said Jim. He remembered his brief perusal on the unannounced Vatican report on the Shroud of Turin. Within that was a whole medical and historical study on Roman crucifixions on where spikes had to go, and all the gruesome variations.

  His eyes moved to the hands and something seemed missing. Something seemed missing from the feet, too. The little fingers and toes. The pinkies were gone.

  “The small bones are gone. Were they cut off?”

  “Very observant,” said Sharon. “No, for some reason, and we are not all that sure why, the small digits just never survive great lengths of time. We don’t find the dust they leave or anything. They just go.”

  Jim’s back ached and his feet were sore and he realized he had been standing rigid all the while.

  “Do bones shrink?”

  “No,” said Sharon, “but that looks smaller because there is no skin or hair, just the bottom of the heel bones to the skull. You lose maybe three or four inches sometimes. He actually would have been five feet five in your measurements.”

&nb
sp; “The tallest would be five feet five?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way he could have been taller?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What?” said Sharon.

  “Let’s go. Let’s close it up. I’ve got to go somewhere.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For now.”

  “Just leave? You’ve hardly examined it. I haven’t explained the disk.”

  “Later,” said Jim, and nodded toward the doorway.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Sharon, stepping hesitantly toward the light down the hewn-stone steps. “I don’t know. Even for a priest, this is strange. There is no way someone from your École Biblique could be brought in instead of you?”

  “No. Come. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sharon. “I just do not know. Occasions of sin, let’s see the body. Let’s leave the body. I don’t know.”

  The soldiers rolled back the stone on Sharon’s orders, and were happy to leave. Jim was the last one out of the dig and promised Sharon he would phone her as soon as possible.

  “You won’t forget the polyvinyl?” she said.

  “Oh no. No,” said Jim, and he practically bounced all the way back to Isaiah House. It was an act of will to force himself not to run there with screaming joy. He had it. He thought he had it.

  When his door was shut, and when the blinds on the single window that showed to the courtyard had been drawn, Jim Folan pulled out the Vatican report on the Shroud of Turin and, forcing himself to be thorough and methodical, reviewed the secret report to His Holiness Pope John XXIII. It was 212 pages, with a short conclusion, in Latin, which said:

  “There is no evidence available at this time to prove that this shroud, referred to as the Shroud of Turin, did not cover the body of Jesus, the Christ. More pointedly, it is in complete conformity with the Gospels, science, and history. It is the opinion of this papal commission that the shroud, known as the Shroud of Turin, did in all probability cover the body of Jesus, the Christ.”

  By logic the shroud was at least as valid as anything in the Haneviim Street dig. And if that was the case, already he might have the one significant contradiction that would cast solid doubt on any claim that those bones had to be Him. Jim wanted to race but he knew he had to force himself to be methodical.

  He read page by page, making sure he understood it all.

  How this shroud had come to the West was still a mystery. That had been unverified. One story had it being brought back from the Fourth Crusade in 1203. Some, earlier.

  The shroud, 4.3 meters by 1.1 meter, of herringbone-weave linen, had the markings on it as though it covered the body of a crucified man. It showed scourge marks on the back of the man, and blood marks indicating a crown of thorns, and blood where the ribs had been.

  The scourging, the thorn marks, the wound on the side, the historical acceptance as the shroud referred to in the Gospels led many to believe it indeed had been the shroud that covered Jesus, the one in which the crucified body had been wrapped when laid in the tomb.

  The Church never took a position on the relic during a time when relics of all manner of authenticity flooded Europe. But in 1950 an American pharmacologist established that shreds of cloth attached to tape taken from the shroud showed signs of iron oxide, an element of red pigment. He declared it was a clever painting.

  And that brought up questions about why the bloodstains appeared so red after two thousand supposed years. They should have been brown.

  Jim remembered just a bit of the controversy, and that vaguely some scientists had proven that indeed the red color was blood. And that was that. The shroud went back out of sight from the public after having appeared only twice in the twentieth century.

  The Church still had taken no public position on the shroud, and Jim had thought the Church had just chosen to ignore questions of its validity.

  Now he was seeing in detail what really happened.

  At least twenty scientists, none of them informed of the project on which they worked, had done extensive research in their fields. It struck Jim as funny that he had thought he was bringing something new to the Church in his manner of investigation. But apparently this supervisor of the investigation had been chosen, just like Jim, for his organizational skills.

  He knew this because each report began “While I am not an expert in this field,” and then went on to attribute what each scientist said.

  The reports on the shroud were in many languages but had been translated into an old universal language, Latin, which Jim could read.

  What had been done on the shroud was something only the twentieth century could have provided. Radiocarbon dating, microchemical analysis, fluorescence, radiography, infrared radiometry, optical microscopy, ultraviolet fluorescent photography, infrared spectroscopy, and mass spectroscopy.

  Of all of them, Jim had recognized only the last, because someone once had said there was a machine over at MIT, across the river in Cambridge, that could measure flavor and air.

  On pages eighty through ninety-five were graphs and other findings, proving without any qualification that the red stains on the shroud were indeed blood. Jim did not understand the graphs, but they seemed laborious beyond human endurance.

  Different laboratories were used for different analyses. The linen had been carbon-dated by a lab in England, fixed at 50 B.C.E., plus or minus 100 years, which would put it within the historically correct time of Jesus’ crucifixion, 30 to 40 C.E.

  The body had apparently been rubbed with olive oil. Minute particles were found throughout the shroud. Olive oil was the staple of the Mediterranean. Particles of spices were picked up, common to preparing the Jewish dead, myrrh and aloe. The weave was common to the finer linen of Palestine at the time, herringbone. There was an entire paper on linen manufacture in Judaea, and Jim forced himself to read it all.

  There were five examples of blood older than a half century which remained red, including the blood on an American President’s sleeve, that of Abraham Lincoln.

  There were other samples going back twelve hundred years that stayed as red as the shroud.

  There was also that investigation of what was known of common crucifixion practices, and this would augment Jim’s work.

  The common form of crucifixion was either tying or nailing a person to a cross, then breaking his bones to increase the trauma, bringing about slow death. Scourging, too, was common. What was uncommon was the crowning with thorns, and the wound on the right side.

  “A death by blade was considered a punishment of a much higher level and would defeat the purpose of crucifixion, which was humiliation.”

  The Gospels, therefore, had described an unusual form of crucifixion. And the shroud conformed to its unusual specifics.

  In the opinion of the investigator, a priest who would go as nameless as Jim would, this shroud indeed, in matter of physical evidence, had covered the body of Jesus.

  And the height of the man was five feet ten inches.

  That was five inches taller than the find of Dr. Golban, and bones didn’t shrink. She said so herself.

  If the shroud was valid in accordance to the Gospels, then the smaller bones were not. And if this find should not prove a flaw, still there would always be the shroud itself, covering a five-foot-ten-inch frame, establishing enough doubt so the find could never be declared the unrisen Christ.

  There was enough room now guaranteed for the Faith to live in. The gates of hell had been once again shut.

  He had never doubted Jesus had risen, but he had feared he might prove inadequate to proving the bones were not His. He wished the man in whose room he had discovered this was alive for him to explain it.

  Nevertheless, Jim felt all the energy of the universe now course happily through his body. He hid the Vatican report quite carefully among Father Lavelle’s books and then almost danced all the way to the apostolic delegate’s residence.

  Father Wins
tead glanced at the message the American priest asked to be coded and sent, and then back to the priest. Father Folan was sweating.

  “Where have you been running from?”

  “Haneviim Street,” said Jim. He had actually been running in one way or another, with feet or mind, since Haneviim Street. And he felt great.

  “That’s quite a run,” said Father Winstead.

  “Sometimes you feel like running.”

  Father Winstead repeated the message in a low voice: “Blessed are those who have seen. Major countervailing evidence discovered.”

  He looked up to Father Folan’s eyes, questioning.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to clarify that?” said Father Winstead.

  “No,” said Jim.

  When the American had gone, Father Winstead went into his code room, translated the message into code, and then punched it into the keyboard of a teletype. Before the afternoon was out, the Secretary of State’s office was back with congratulations and a request for specifics. If ever there was a cross to bear for Father Winstead, it was not knowing what was going on with that American priest with such easy access to funds and power.

  After dinner, he went back to the code room to type out the evening’s messages that were to be left in the wastebasket, which the nuns would pick up and throw away with the regular trash, and which the Arab gardener would sift through and take to his superiors. This little trick was suggested by the Israelis. One could not stop the scrutiny of other powers, but one could keep them more occupied with chaff than with the wheat of what was going on. The Israelis, of course, wanted something for this suggestion, namely the inclusion of certain specifics in one of the messages, and this of course was declined.

  There might be something that would link the Church to one of the Israeli secret operations, and even though the Mossad was supposed to know better, it was Father Winstead’s duty to observe discretion for them.

  Once, a visiting bishop had asked Father Winstead if he thought the Israelis had penetrated the delegate’s office.

  Father Winstead couldn’t control a laugh.

  “Of course. They watch us, Cardinal Pesci must have people watching them, everyone else watches us watching each other. This is the Middle East,” Father Winstead had said.

  This evening, as every evening, Father Winstead created a message specifically for the trash, specifically to be discovered by the gardener and sold to whomever the Israelis knew the gardener was selling it to.