by Tom Bissell
Because the graffiti wall’s bones did not amount to anything near a complete skeleton, the type of information their study stood to reveal was limited. Determining matters such as sex and height and body type was possible but difficult. Discovering any information related to cause of death was impossible. The examiner soon determined that to the best of his knowledge the graffiti wall bones represented the remains of one man and one nearly complete mouse.*12 Of the human fragments, the most intact were all leg bones. The panoply of skull fragments and finger bones led the examiner to conclude that the collective remains had been transferred into the wall within some type of bag or receptacle, because any manual transport was liable to have shed such tiny bones. The examiner’s final findings held that the bones were those of an older man of stout build. Two of his most suggestive findings hinged on the bones’ interaction with their surrounding environment. Unlike the clean white mouse bones, the graffiti wall bones were caked with ancient, hardened bits of earth, which suggested that they had been interred for some time in loose dirt—much like the dirt you might find in a shallow rut into which an executed and hastily buried criminal would be heaved. A number of the bones were, moreover, stained a dark red, possibly from dye, which suggested that after the bones had been disinterred they had been wrapped in purple, gold-threaded fabric.
By all available evidence, the bones had been buried, removed from the earth, wrapped in cloth, and hidden in the graffiti wall. All of this happened in uncertain order, at unknowable times. Guarducci, after pondering these findings, remembered the PETROS ENI graffito. She reinvestigated the phrase that had initially mystified her and learned that in some types of ancient Greek, “eni” had occasionally been used as a contracted form of a verb that meant “to be within.” According to this reading of the inscription, the graffito scanned differently: “Peter is within.”
Soon after she formulated her theory, she went to the new pope, Paul VI, who happened to be a family friend, to share its particulars. After hearing her out, the pope asked for new analyses to determine whether the soil on the bones matched that of the soil at the base of the red wall (it did) and whether the tiny filaments of fabric found among the bones were in fact pure gold (they were). Given the clumsiness of the bones’ discovery and mishandling and the Vatican’s niggardly release of certain information, these findings left holes large enough for the moon to pass through. Why could the bones not have been those of another prominent early Christian? If they were Peter’s, why were they hidden so inexpertly? Exactly how old were the bones? Carbon dating would provide a two-hundred-year window for the bones to fit into temporally, which is not nearly precise enough to answer the question.
There is, moreover, another twentieth-century discovery that could place Peter’s tomb in Jerusalem, in a Franciscan monastery known as Dominus Flevit. In 1952, a digging monk accidentally broke into a crypt that contained sarcophagi belonging to one Mary, one Martha, one Lazarus, and one Simon bar Jonah. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were the names of prominent early followers of Jesus, but they had never before been so closely linked to Peter. The belief that this Simon bar Jonah sarcophagus holds the remains of the historical Peter has never escaped fringe-theory orbit, most wonderfully exemplified by F. Paul Peterson’s 1960 anti-Catholic tract Peter’s Tomb Recently Discovered in Jerusalem! (From its pages one learns, among many other digressions, that “Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Roman Catholic and that all those in that terrible conspiracy were either Catholic or Catholic taught.”) Yet a few Franciscans to whom I spoke in Jerusalem appeared willing to entertain the possibility that Peter’s tomb was not in Rome. I asked one Franciscan what such an upheaval of Roman Catholic tradition would mean for him. “Nothing,” he said.
X.
Again I followed Zander as he approached Peter’s tomb. The imperial Roman splendor of the necropolis now gave way to the harder, antiseptic stylings of modern architecture. The dirt courtyard through which the Vatican’s excavators had once pawed was now covered by a softly lit platform of metal grating, the central part of which was a checkerboard that allowed visitors to look down upon several broken chunks of marble that dated from the second and third centuries.
While Zander and I walked into this area, I asked him about the lingering questions surrounding Peter’s bones. “This,” he said, looking around, “is Peter’s tomb. Whose bones? This is Peter’s tomb. We don’t stake our reputation on whether these are the actual bones of Peter. The important thing for us is that the place has been identified so absolutely.” He looked over his shoulder. “And there they are.”
Behind a bronze gate, once again in the graffiti wall crack from which Monsignor Kaas had sixty years before unsuspectingly rescued them, and wrapped in purple fabric, the bones the Vatican believed to be Peter’s were kept in nineteen rubber-padded Plexiglas boxes, all of which bore the papal seal. The bones were boxed in accordance with the part of the body from which they derived. The largest box, and the most visible, contained the best-preserved bone—the left tibia. Another, smaller box contained the mouse skeleton, making it the holiest Mus musculus domesticus in all of Christendom. These bones had been here since 1968, after a brief ceremony presided over by Paul VI that restored them to their ancient hiding place.
The history traceable to these flakes of calcium and fragile marrowless tubes was as difficult to quantify as all the places reached by star-emitted light. The restored complex within which they rested was only slightly less unreal. First largely pagan, eventually wholly Christian, built over not once but twice, lost, and rediscovered. It was a near-perfect analogy for Christianity itself: its origins seemingly clear but in fact profoundly opaque, its message apparently obvious but in fact deeply mysterious, its contemporary influence outwardly secure but in fact seriously compromised.
Before any mighty basilica stood in their city, Roman Christians had one thing: their experience within a tradition. They, like all people of all faiths, processed their experience by what attended it, the details that surrounded it, but also from the inferences, the sensations, they drew from it. Their religion, like all religions, was an experience-decryption device: belief necessarily precedes any story that it intends to explain. The first Christians did not abandon Judaism because they saw the man they knew as Jesus risen in Jerusalem; every account of the resurrection is secondhand, and everything known about the women and men, such as Peter, who first followed Jesus suggests that their break from Judaism was prolonged, difficult, and often resisted. The first Christians who knew neither Jesus nor Judaism believed because others came to them with stories that intended to explain the confusion of their world and ease the painful placement of all individuals within it. One of the most consistent figures in these stories was, of course, the hardheaded, stubborn, frequently mistaken believer they knew as Peter.
I wondered if Zander might speak for himself and not the Vatican. “What,” I asked him, “do you believe?”
He thought about this, looked away, pondered it more, and drew in a short, decisive breath. “Speaking archaeologically, I think these are probably the bones of Saint Peter.”
Christianity begins with a missing body. Today one of its oldest and most federal expressions bases its legitimacy on the remains of an existing one. Whether that was progress or a regression, I could not say. Zander and I returned aboveground, and I walked home across the piazza of Saint Peter’s Basilica. It had not stopped raining. The witnesses of Bernini looked sightlessly on.
* * *
*1 Again, pagans who took an interest in the god of the Jews, attended synagogue, or maintained some of Judaism’s behavioral requirements.
*2 Many scholars doubt that Papias is even referring to Mark’s gospel, but rather to some early “sayings” text attributed to Mark.
*3 Augustine would later argue that Peter wanted to know the traitor’s identity because he sought to make a preprandial assault on him.
*4 One interesting aspect of Acts is the pains it takes to turn Pete
r into a surrogate Jesus. In one example, Peter is summoned to Joppa, where a woman named Tabitha has recently died. After praying beside her body, Peter says, “Tabitha, get up.” In Mark, Jesus heals an unnamed little girl with the words, “Talitha cum,” an Aramaic phrase that translates as “Little girl, get up!” (Tabitha, in Aramaic, means “gazelle.”) Earlier in Acts, Peter’s healing of a lame beggar on the steps of the Temple first draws the Jewish authorities’ notice, just as, in the gospels, Jesus’s miracles spook the authorities into acting against him. Peter (with John) argues before the Sanhedrin just as Jesus debates the Pharisees. Peter, too, undergoes a highly familiar persecution, suffering arrest (during Passover) and a resultant confrontation with the authorities (indeed, with Herod).
*5 Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, mentions a faction among the Corinthians devoted to Cephas, but what exactly this signifies is not clear. The context in which Peter comes up concerns Paul’s wish that the quarreling Corinthians “be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you are united in the same mind and the same purpose.” Later in the letter he cautions, “Let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” That the Corinthian party that claimed to “belong to Cephas” was the result of Peter’s missionary work is certainly possible. It is equally possible that those Corinthians who claimed allegiance to Cephas were attempting to distinguish themselves from the followers of the two most prominent local leaders of the Corinthian community: Paul and Apollos. Possibly, these Corinthians were high-mindedly attempting to appeal to Cephas as a less partisan figure.
*6 Supposedly written by Peter himself, 1 Peter claims to have been composed in “Babylon.” It also mentions two figures familiar to us from Paul’s letters: Silvanus (probably Silas, the Jewish Christian minder assigned to Paul by the Jerusalem church) and Mark (whom Paul, according to Acts, refused to take on a journey for fear of being abandoned by him but whom the author of 1 Peter refers to as “my son”).
*7 Traditionalists point out the letter’s citation as having been written “through Silvanus,” a native Greek speaker, as getting around this small pertinence. But language is as much conceptual as it is grammatical, and very little of 1 Peter has the feel of a Galilean fisherman’s mind. These are subjective matters, certainly, but not entirely subjective. The Peter of the gospels rings far truer to his purported background, even during spasms of the miraculous, and Paul is such a living, breathing presence in his authentic letters that he practically leaps from the page.
*8 Aliturus (which was likely a pseudonym) befriended Josephus while he visited Rome as a young man, and Poppaea helped Josephus secure the release of the Jewish priests he had traveled to the city to rescue. (See page 376.)
*9 What appeared in some tombs to be Christian imagery did not make it so. Other tombs’ mosaic images of shepherds, meal taking, and scroll-holding women are sometimes indicative of, for instance, Orpheus worship. Bucolic scenes depicting shepherds, after all, were Christian symbols only to other Christians. For many years in early Christianity, the Egyptian ankh was used to symbolize Jesus.
*10 “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”
*11 The Catholic position on biblical inerrancy is particularly refreshing. According to the Biblical Commission Instruction of 1964, readers are not to understand that the gospels report everything literally or that the events described in them necessarily took place in the manner depicted.
*12 The mouse bones had apparently never been exposed to soil, which suggested that the creature had worked its way into the graffiti wall hiding place, become trapped, and died.
ANDREW
* * *
Saint Andrew’s Church: Patras, Greece
CORINTHIAN CHRISTIANS • MANLY ANDREW • THE PRESS SECRETARY OF THE TWELVE • SAINT ANDREW’S CHURCH • ANDREW’S TRAVELS • FATHER SPIRIDON • CHRIST PANTOKRATOR • THE ACTS OF ANDREW • YEHOHANAN BEN HAGKOL • FRIENDS
I.
Many journeys around Greece are beset by twisty, chaotic itineraries involving half a dozen trains, but traveling from Athens to Patras was a straight shot on splendid new rails built for the 2004 Athens Olympics. The ride itself was almost entirely coastal, crossing over a slender isthmus before entering the Peloponnese Peninsula. After passing through yet another hideously enchanting Greek town, I turned to Arman, a young opera scholar from Chicago, and said I could not imagine living in such a beautiful place. It would drive me insane.
“For what it’s worth,” Arman told me, “Camus said roughly the same thing.”
Arman and I had been living in Italy for four months—two of several dozen recipients of a bizarrely extravagant prize given every year by the American Academy in Rome, which puts up writers, artists, and scholars in a mansion and feeds them and otherwise lets them be for an entire year. To our mutual frustration, Arman and I were getting almost nothing done in our hilltop Roman mansion. When I mentioned my trip to Greece, Arman volunteered to join me.
When our train briefly stopped at Corinth, I removed from my bag my New Revised Standard Version and reread Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians. Southern Greece comprised the Roman province of Achaea, and first-century Corinth was its sleepy capital, primarily known for its crafts. It was also the southernmost point of Paul’s known mission. The beliefs of its church, and the difficulties it faced, are today the most confidently reconstructed of early Christian communities, thanks to the sheer amount of detail Paul provides in his letters to the believers there.
Paul wrote 1 Corinthians after a months-long stopover, though it was apparently his second letter to the community. He eventually came to Corinth again but was gravely insulted during his visit. He wrote another letter, now lost and referred to as the Letter of Tears, that is conjectured to contain Paul’s reaction to his shabby treatment. Paul eventually calmed down and wrote 2 Corinthians, which is thus his fourth letter to the community.*1 What prompted Paul’s first—technically second—letter to the Corinthians was a request from his local supporters for guidance on several issues.
There were serious divisions in the Corinthian church, with some Christians claiming allegiance to Paul and some Christians claiming allegiance to others. A few of the Christians claiming allegiance to Paul claimed to have been baptized by him, which Paul, high-mindedly attempting to make peace, says is not possible, given that he baptized “none of you except Crispus and Gaius.” The pro-Paul Corinthian faction also informed Paul that there was “sexual immorality” within the community, including one man “living with his father’s wife.” In the letter, Paul reminds the Corinthians that he has previously asked them to avoid “sexually immoral persons.” One Corinthian faction, however, was claiming that sex itself was immoral. Paul argues that this is simply not the case, though he does note that “he who refrains from marriage will do better” than he who seeks marriage. A few Corinthians, it seems, were using the Eucharistic meal as an excuse to get drunk. Paul: “What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in?” During these Eucharistic meals, rich Corinthians were apparently unable to abide eating alongside their socioeconomic lessers. Yes, at the very origin of the religion itself, we find Christians humiliating other Christians during the Lord’s Supper for the high crime of being poor, but this should come as no shock: citizens of the Roman Empire belonged to one of the most economically stratified and class-conscious societies the world has ever known. Even so, Paul’s temper reaches its breaking point: “What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!” Finally, the use of prophetic visions and tongues had apparently gotten so out of hand that one Corinthian, while in a visionary state, cursed Jesus himself, which resulted in Paul’s long, carefully worded harangue against the abuse of visions and tongues, which he claims render t
he mind “unproductive.” Perhaps the most amusing portion of the entire Pauline corpus is the ground rules he sets down governing the use of tongues: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn.”
In 2 Corinthians, Paul was again forced to address the fact that many Corinthians remained unimpressed by him. Paul quotes one of his opponents—“His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech is contemptible”—and reminds his audience that while other, more physically impressive and pedigreed teachers might have spent time with the Corinthians, Paul, unlike these otiant men, “did not burden anyone” with a need for free food and shelter, even though Paul believed he had an evangelist’s right to both. These other visitors, moreover, preached a different gospel from Paul’s, which moves Paul to compare them to Satan, who “disguises himself as an angel of light.” While Paul admits he “may be untrained in speech,” he goes on to note all that he has suffered during his mission, from “imprisonments” to “countless floggings” to having been “shipwrecked.” On top of all that, Paul says, “I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches.” He promises a third visit, during which, he says, he “will not be lenient—since you desire proof that Christ is speaking in me.”
These letters are remarkable not only for their wealth of information about the Corinthian community’s confusions and struggles but also for how revealing they are of Paul’s sugar-and-salt personality. When they are read not as scripture but as the loving, sometimes aggrieved words of a man addressing the accusations and concerns of a specific historical audience, they reverberate with the privileged energies of an intercepted missive—which is, in fact, what both texts are. I could, for a moment, see and hear both the Corinthian Christians and Paul himself. In leaving Corinth for Patras, and in closing my Bible, I was stepping from the floodlights of actual Christian history and through the drowsily velvet curtains of Christian legend. According to tradition, Andrew, the apostle whose obscurity was the least historically explicable, was martyred in Patras.