The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Father, you are absolutely correct,” said Sharon. She smiled in slight surprise.

  “I studied a bit of Judaism,” said Jim.

  “Grade A, Jesuit,” said Sharon. “So, now look at what we have. A Herodian dynasty the subjects hate, priests committed to the purity of the most sacred site really being swingers in their own way; rabbis who are supposed to bring Judaism to the people being involved in legalism; a Roman procurator who only wants to be on all sides and keep the peace, and into this all …”

  “Into this all at the most heated time of Passover,” said Jim, “comes Jesus of Nazareth.”

  “Who is said to raise the dead, heal the sick, feed the hungry, and claiming to be ‘King of the Jews.’”

  Sharon threw up her hands as though she had completed her scenario proving why Jesus had so many political enemies. She headed down toward the giant retaining wall that had marked off the area of the Second Temple, the left of which is now revered by the Jews as their Wailing Wall.

  But this time, Jim did not follow.

  “You didn’t finish,” he said.

  “I did. I did,” said Sharon. “That’s just who everyone was. You have it.”

  “I have more. I have the clay wall in the tomb. That’s what you were working on.”

  “I am a senior lecturer at Hebrew University, and I will tell you when I have something worked out and when I don’t.”

  “But you did, Sharon. You showed me how everyone wanted Jesus out of the way, and why no one wanted to be the one to do it. But Pilate, in the Gospels, was also warned of claims that the body might rise. That’s why the stone was there, and the soldiers were there.”

  “I am the archaeologist, and I don’t want you going any further until we complete more technical work.”

  “But all of a sudden, Roman soldiers, the most disciplined possibly in all history, fall asleep. And the stone, the great stone, is rolled aside,” said Jim.

  “The Bible is full of miracles,” said Sharon. “I don’t like to smoke here, and I need a cigarette, so let’s see the big dig now, near the old Second Temple steps.”

  “Sharon, all those who feared Jesus in life feared what would happen to the body. They even had to get the body out of politics. So, what did they do to hide it best? They hid it in a niche of a cave behind a wall the color of the cave.”

  “It wasn’t their cave, it was Joseph of Arimathea’s, a friend of Jesus,” said Sharon.

  “It was their friend Pilate’s soldiers, and their stone.”

  “Ah, but you see how it backfired on them? Would they do something that backfired?” said Sharon.

  “I am at a loss as to what political harm ever came to either Pilate, Herod Antipas, Caiaphas, the Sadducees or their judges, the Sanhedrin, or the Pharisees from the crucifixion and believed Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

  “You don’t believe that,” said Sharon.

  “No,” said Jim. “You do.” And on that he followed Sharon down to the dig.

  Heading toward the Wailing Wall was a group of young Hasidic boys in dark coats and hats, a few of them carrying guitars. Sharon said it was a new movement among the Hasidim to sing what she described as “almost rock songs” to God.

  The boys went to the left of the path that led up to the Islamic holy places, while Jim and Sharon went to the right.

  Previously, the path had been part of a hill, which ended at the exposed retaining wall, for centuries the holiest spot in Judaism. “Only because they didn’t know the rest of the wall was under the ground. But the left side is now the holy spot, and the right, a dig showing the beauty of Herodian stones.”

  “You didn’t terrify me with your scenario, Sharon. I am still here.”

  “Maybe you scared me after you told me it is all on my head.”

  “No, Sharon. It’s been on mine. It is mine.”

  Jim saw tourist groups enter with a guide. One guide with a Canadian group pointed out in English that that was Dr. Sharon Golban of Hebrew University, an archaeologist who had given a lecture once to a group of guides.

  Jim could see Sharon was a bit embarrassed. He also noticed his own arm was around her waist. He took it away.

  The steps Christ had walked on were south of the retaining wall partially reconstructed for tourists. Sharon explained to Jim that the City of David went on down into the Kidron Valley, and there were raging debates among archaeologists as to where certain levels were.

  The entrances to the Second Temple had been stoned over centuries before, but Sharon pointed to their outlines.

  “Christ drove the money changers out through those portals, didn’t He?” asked Jim.

  “Yes, and do you know what they were doing there?”

  “Blaspheming, I guess.”

  “Only partly. They were also stopping blasphemy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jim.

  “All right, a clue. We had a diaspora, even then. My family was in Persia, and we made a pilgrimage to the Temple for Passover. So did the Jews from Alexandria, Athens, and Rome. What did they bring with them as a donation to the Temple?”

  “Sacrifices?”

  “Come on, Jim, you are so smart. They couldn’t bring jars of fruit and cattle those distances. What travels well?”

  “Money.”

  “Right. Now, why was the Pilatus coin we found with just the ‘P’ on it real, and that coin with Emperor Augustus you bought strange to this area? Why didn’t Pilatus mint coins with Augustus on them?”

  And then Jim suddenly remembered the Dominican chapel with only the book in it and no statuary to offend Muslim and Jewish sensibilities.

  “The coins had graven images on them. The coins of Athens, Persia, and Rome had to be exchanged for ones without images on them,” said Jim.

  “The money changers were there to exchange currencies.”

  Sharon led him back along to the dig to the excavated extension of the western retaining wall.

  Jim already knew what the colors of stones meant. Those blackened above on the retaining wall on the south side of the Muslim path in the middle were those exposed to the air for centuries. But the richer, golden stones were those unearthed by an archaeological dig. He was amazed at the great size and perfection of the Herodian stones, giant multiton blocks between which not a knife blade could fit.

  Jim looked at the stone with the face sheared off. He tried imagining a fire so hot that it could do that to the very stone. It must have been an awesome horror, he thought. The people must have thought it was the end of the world.

  And then, strangely, the stones began to sing. Voices came from them. The voices were all around him. They sang in Hebrew. And he heard the guitar beat, and the joy, the rousing joy of the Hebrew song. He knew the words.

  “Purify my soul, O Lord, that I may do Thy will.”

  But it was so joyous, like a cheerleading section at a football game, and it was coming from the Temple Mount.

  Jim looked to Sharon, stunned. The top was Muslim.

  “Acoustics. The stones carry the sound. Herod put the stones dead set against bedrock. Vibrations carry. They aren’t muffled by earth. On the other side of the path is the Wailing Wall. The religious boys we saw are singing.”

  Jim looked up at the dark layer of earth, cinders from burning, earth from waste, and the stones seemed to sing with the joy of the young Hasidic boys.

  The greatest army in the world had destroyed in a single holocaust the greatest temple in the land, driving out the Jews from the city.

  And yet, from the ashes came the living voices of the Jews, singing the praises of the Lord. Christ had outlived the Temple, as He predicted. And the Jews had outlived the Roman legions, as no one could have predicted.

  When God chose, no man could put asunder.

  Jim understood now the mystical union Brother Maurice had talked about. The Jews, like the Church, would be here till the last, labored tick of time, and Jesus returned with the first morning of forever.

&n
bsp; Jim looked at Sharon pressed against the wall. The critic of all holy men had her face against the stones. She was kissing them and crying.

  And when she noticed Jim was looking at her, she said:

  “The sun collects heat on the stone. You can feel it if you put your face there.”

  And he understood now why she had been so willing to give up her dig. She loved her country, even if she didn’t love the politicians.

  At the other end of the Via Dolorosa was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which by tradition enclosed both Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, and the tomb from which He rose, the Holy Sepulcher.

  It was a large, dark old church that seemed to ramble on in many directions. Where Golgotha was supposed to be, a Greek Orthodox priest was offering candles for sale. They had the left side of the altar. The Franciscans had the right. The Armenians had incensing rights.

  The Copts had the back of the tomb, where they sold crosses, and someone else had the glittery marble front.

  Upstairs were the Abyssinians and Copts, one of which had locked the other out of their praying quarters. There had been fights here with brooms over who swept where, indicating territorial rights, and many Easters ago there had been a riot and fistfights over the holy flames.

  Jim knew the whole sorry tale. But while it bothered him, Sharon seemed oblivious. She went into rapturous detail about the positioning of old stones proving this spot was more likely the Holy Sepulcher than another tomb found later, even though the other tomb looked much more like what a Second Temple tomb should look like. It was limestone, and the one in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was imported marble.

  “But you see the original tomb and hill of Golgotha were cut down by the mad Caliph of Cairo, Hakim. That desecration of Christian sites helped bring on the Crusades. Whereupon the Crusaders did some desecrating of their own when they arrived, which helped bring on the Arab response. And so on, et cetera.”

  Jim remembered what Pesci had said about the Crusades not really ending here. Nothing seemed to end here.

  And yet people lived here. They got along here and they did business here, despite the furious divisions.

  Jim tried to explain why it bothered him that there was such contention about rights to spaces.

  “What is valuable here is not who has which right to which space in time, because we’re really dealing with eternity. It is not the rocks, but the soul,” said Jim.

  “Look, we all have some special thing we like to believe makes us more prone to good than others. But why should Christians be any better than anyone else?”

  “We should be better than we are,” said Jim.

  “So should everyone else,” said Sharon.

  “That bothers me and I don’t know why.”

  “Because I am not going to argue with you,” she said, and took his hand and led him from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  Out in the courtyard, she explained that it was the Roman Emperor Hadrian who really provided the best evidence for supporting this as the spot of the Holy Sepulcher. He built pagan temples on all Jewish and Christian holy spots, and what he covered up was a limestone cave and a little hill.

  “How did he know which was the spot?” asked Jim.

  “Good question, Jim. We don’t know. We can only surmise. Maybe Christians told him, but would they tell him the right spot? After all, he was an enemy.”

  “Weren’t the Jews driven out of Jerusalem a generation after Jesus’ death?”

  “Very shrewd, Jim. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’ve done more work.”

  “This guess is just a guess and let’s not go into it,” said Sharon.

  “Let’s have it,” said Jim:

  “You know it is just supposition.”

  “I do.”

  “All right, I don’t think the tomb of Jesus was revered at the beginning. I think it was avoided, like the cross itself.”

  “It doesn’t bother me that there would be no reliable witness to tell Emperor Hadrian that this was the real place of the Holy Sepulcher. This is just stone here. You are onto something more.”

  “Remember, Christ was not really a martyr in the traditional sense. He was the movement. His apostles had given up everything to follow him. They were totally invested in Him.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means they had to be incredibly distraught, and in that state a Mary Magdalene could see the back of an empty tomb, and then imagine a risen Christ, and then go on to the apostles in that awful state they were in and tell them, ‘He is risen.’ And then they too would see Him.”

  “And that is a scenario,” said Jim, controlling all his feelings, putting on his best of faces.

  “I mean, Peter had given up his fishing, and Matthew his tax collecting, and …”

  “I know,” said Jim. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. Thank you,” said Jim. “Is there anything else?”

  “It was just one of many, many possible scenarios,” said Sharon.

  Jim smiled at her. She was doing her job. She offered many other possible scenarios that afternoon, but they all seemed somewhat desperate, and they were all delivered while intently watching Jim’s eyes for reactions.

  The rains came again and they were cold. The winter rains of Jerusalem had a special bitterness all their own.

  15

  Righteous Gentile

  Jim knelt and raised his hands before the body on the stone.

  He held a thin-edged palette that he was supposed to push forward along the base of the niche very gently, while Sharon, with a board padded with gauze and cotton underneath, ever so carefully tried to keep the bones in place. What they were hoping for was that the polyvinyl coating would hold everything in place, with the help of the light pressure from the cotton and the gauze. If he heard any breaking, Jim was to stop and they would pack each bone separately.

  Sharon was on one side, and had to lean over. Jim could feel her breast press against his forehead as he moved the palette forward. It was distracting. She was wearing only an old shirt and slacks. She had taken off her old army jacket and dumped it by the chemical pots, which had become laborious by now to empty. They were filling up with moisture too rapidly, and it was good that the cases were now ready for the movement of the bones and disk.

  Already, the disk was in its small case. It would go to a safe in Hebrew University. The body had a moisture-controlled lab waiting for it just south of the city. Sharon had come up with an even better idea for the lab. Why not rent another in the Galilee, where so many crucifixions occurred, and thereby the pathologist would assume that body was unearthed there?

  Jerusalem and Christ were just too synonymous, especially since Jim had said he was leaning toward an American or European pathologist, because at this point in civilization Europe and America provided the best doctors. And that meant Christian-oriented.

  The palette inched along the stone. It went under the bones just at stone level. Jim thought he heard something.

  “Go ahead. Go ahead, it’s alright,” said Sharon.

  Jim pushed farther, steady, his body moving the thin palette, waiting to hear a break from the fragile bones, waiting to hear even a turning.

  “Careful, careful. That’s it. Go ahead. Go ahead. Slow.”

  Sharon guided him. In all, it took fifteen minutes to ever so slowly get the palette between the stone and the bones.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” said Sharon, straightening. “My back is killing me.”

  “I’m use to being on my knees,” said Jim. “Remembering who I am.”

  “Yes,” said Sharon. “Well, you see you have good training for something, then.”

  They taped the board to the palette, so that they had a sandwich of their protected material, and then, with Jim on one end and Sharon on the other, they moved the bones to an open, black plastic case with sides as thick as auto tires.

  If downed at sea, it would flo
at. A knife could not puncture it and it could withstand an auto accident.

  “Did you notice the jaw still didn’t move at all?” said Sharon. “You think we definitely have carbon-dating material then?”

  “I think we do,” said Sharon. “We might even get some of the cross.”

  She photographed the empty niche, and then carefully, with a magnifying glass and a camel’s hair brush, whisked whatever she could find into a case.

  “There’s no wood there,” said Sharon.

  “Oh,” said Jim, not thinking about the wood, but thinking about how her hair this day fell over her shoulders.

  “Well, not finding wood won’t matter if we can get material holding that jaw in place,” said Sharon.

  The disk was already in its case by the door, a shiny metal traveling case that Sharon had suggested when the plastic cases were taking too long to manufacture. Because the disk was so hard, the extra precaution would not be needed as much. Packing it with cotton would do.

  “Well, I guess we can leave,” said Sharon.

  “I guess we can,” said Jim. He had entered this tomb more than three months before, not even knowing about loci and coins of the Second Temple period, and the politics of the place. He could now often tell one stone from another, the Herodian being large with a border like a picture frame, and the Maccabees preferring to dress the faces of their stones with pick marks, like iron rain upon the face.

  He could use Hebrew easily, and he had learned that if he had turned away from a fact his Church would have to face it on harder terms later. It would now be science that would carefully examine things the human eye could not perceive. Nowadays, they could even tell what the bones had done for a living.

  In the history of man, never had the knowing powers of science been so abundant. The more Jim had discussed with Sharon what was available, the more he was sure that disproving evidence was going to be available.

  Sharon lowered herself to walk up the steps, putting the metal case before her. The light was dreary from the winter day. Jim followed, pushing his black case in front of him lengthwise, and thus the body left the tomb after centuries.