by Paul L Maier
“I’ve got to know what you and your crew have discovered since our last chat, Jeff, but let me go first. I’m really full of this because of what happened yesterday on the Mount of Olives.”
Jon now downloaded for Sheler all the fresh information on Ben-Yosef he had learned since their last meeting, including the strange circumstances of Joshua’s birth in Bethlehem, the reports of his vintage contributions to the wedding festival in Galilee, his healings in Jericho, and the encounter with Ben-Yosef’s Twelve at Gesthsemene. Sheler’s eyes widened and narrowed repeatedly during the telling, but when Jon reported Shimon’s statement that Ben-Yosef was the returned Christ, his jaw sagged, he seemed to blanch, and he shook his head slowly.
“You actually interviewed his crew?” he finally managed. “We’ve been trying to get to them for weeks but could never pin down their whereabouts.”
“Blind, dumb luck, Jeff! But what do you have?”
“Well, our medical specialist interviewed some twenty or so people who were supposedly cured by Ben-Yosef. All of them showed no signs of disease or handicap. Then again, it was hardly scientific, since he hadn’t seen them before their presumed cures.”
“What sorts of illnesses were involved?”
Sheler pulled a pad out of his coat pocket and read off a list. “Two pneumonias, four cancers, three deaf mutes, two blind, two cardiac insufficiencies, a cripple, two AIDS, one STD, and several exorcisms.”
“Were those psychosomatic cures or physical cures? Real or assumed?”
“I don’t know. He’s staying on here to dig deeper.”
“What else have you learned about Ben-Yosef’s background?”
Sheler looked about warily, then confided, “Hardly anything in Jerusalem, but a little more at Tel Aviv and Haifa. It turns out that Ben-Yosef was an only child—so there’s at least one nonparallel with Jesus, unless the Catholics have it right with their teaching on the ever-virgin Mary. Later, he studied at the Technion in Haifa, where both his father and mother were on the faculty—both brilliant biochemists.”
“Biochemists, eh? Love in the laboratory?”
Sheler smiled and nodded. “That’s where they met, evidently. But their research focused on enhancing crop yields, so much of the year they lived near Nazareth to supervise botanical experiments in the Valley of Jezreel just below Nazareth. That’s why young Joshua grew up there, specifically in a Jewish settlement in a modern part of Nazareth—a place called Nazareth Ilit.”
“Good detail, Jeff! Did any of your people interview his teachers or professors?”
“Affirmative.” He nodded. “The principal of his school in Nazareth remembers Joshua well.” Again Sheler flipped several pages in his notebook and read aloud:
We never had a student like him—before or since. What a mind Joshua had! Almost too many talents in one young lad. The boy was a living prodigy and regularly corrected his teachers on how they handled biblical Hebrew. When he was only nine years old, he won Israel’s national television Bible quiz. At thirteen his parents took him to Jerusalem for his bar mitzvah. There, just after reading the Torah in front of the Western Wall, Joshua started to argue fine points of Jewish law with several rabbis nearby. They finally threw up their hands and stalked off.
“Just like the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple? You’re spoofing about the last, aren’t you, Jeff?”
Sheler smiled grimly and shook his head.
“What about his higher education?”
“We’re still trying to fill in all the details, but we do know that he enrolled at both the Technion and the University of Haifa. He took a brace of scientific and technology courses at the Technion, along with history, humanities, and literature courses at Haifa. His total class schedule each semester was almost twice the normal course load.”
“Well, that was some kind of well-rounded education!” Jon observed. “Where did he get his terminal degree?”
“The Technion.”
Jon stroked his chin in thought. Finally he said, “One thing’s perfectly obvious: we’ve got to interview his parents, Professor and Mrs. Yosef Ben-Yosef. Are they still in Nazareth? Or Haifa?”
Sheler shook his head. “They were both killed years ago in an early terrorist attack, on the road past Netanya. Their car was blown up in a roadside ambush.”
Jon clenched his fist and banged the table: a major source of information was now eliminated. Finally he asked, “Where was Joshua at the time?”
“We’re not entirely sure, but it seems he was out camping with friends along the Dead Sea.”
“Of course! Every prophet—real or imaginary—has to have his desert experience!” Jon observed sardonically. “What else do you have?”
“That’s it so far. When I write the story, I’ll send you e-mail copy before we go to press. Then would you be kind enough to compose a sidebar for us on the significance of it all?”
“Glad to, Jeff. Let’s stay in touch . . . close touch.”
Too much was coming together in a vector that seemed to point to the incredible, thought Jon. Here were twelve apparently sane people who were so convinced Jesus had returned, they changed their names and modeled their personalities on His original band of disciples. “Jesus the Second” was speaking and acting in direct congruence with the original, addressing similar concerns with similar language while authenticating his mission, evidently, through powerful demonstrations of the miraculous. He also had a background no Jesus wanna-be could ever have arranged: born in Bethlehem of Galilean parents—virtually named Joseph and Mary—and raised at Nazareth. Nor had he dropped out of the blue: the man did have a past, however sketchy.
But more! Jon had almost forgotten about the baffling cyber-announcements on the world’s computers regarding the returning Christ and how extraordinarily they seemed to be in line with Joshua Ben-Yosef’s sudden public fame. Just for a moment he tormented himself with the thought that Melvin Morris Merton could conceivably be right after all, but quickly cudgeled that thought until it was quite unconscious. But it was time, in any case, to get back in touch with Rod Swenson regarding the Jesus Bulletin.
He looked at his watch. It was 6:00 P.M. Israeli time. “Good,” Jon told himself. “It’s 11:00 A.M. in Cambridge. I should be able to catch him before lunch.” Murphy’s Law was in remission that day, and the strategy succeeded: Swenson’s Swedish-American “Hello” was unmistakable.
“Oh . . . it’s you, Jon,” he continued. “I just sent you a fax detailing what we have so far on that cyberincursion a couple months ago.”
“Thanks much, Rod, but the fax machine is in my office at Hebrew University. Could you summarize it briefly over the phone?”
“Well, it’s pretty detailed . . . even though we simplified it for a layman like yourself!”
“I won’t even take offense at that, Rod!” Jon laughed. “But a recessive Scottish gene in me says I shouldn’t spend more phone money to hear your insults.”
“A bonny plan, laddie!” Swenson continued in a fake Scottish accent, “An’ do let mi know if ya dunna understan’ mi fax.”
The next morning, Jon read the fax twice:
Hello, Jon! Here’s where we are on the cyberincursion.
Some sender’s address is always indicated at the beginning of communications sent on the World Wide Web. In this way, messages can be traced back to their source. But nothing seems to have been usual in this case, since the sender’s name and address on the Jesus Bulletin was simply “The Forerunner.” We don’t know how he got away with that. It’s just one of many riddles in this case.
So we had to do a global search using a time grid instead. All web messages show the time that they were sent, so we collated the times that the Jesus Bulletin appeared in various countries. Interestingly enough, the second series of bulletins occurred at the same times and in the same orders, country by country, as the first.
Both times, Israel turned out to be the very first, time-wise. Other countries followed, including the U.S. Is
rael is very hi-tech, it’s fully wired, and probably the only place in the Near East with the cyber-capability to bring something like this off.
As to the identity of the sender, even a secular Swede like myself remembers enough from his Sunday school days to see that someone is trying to play John the Baptist when he calls himself “The Forerunner.” When we find the hacker, he’ll probably be sitting in the desert, dressed in camel skin, girded with a big leather belt, and chomping on locusts. We may criticize the guy’s diet, but boy, can he ever crunch numbers!
Stay tuned, Jon. We’ll solve this yet!
Jon filed Swenson’s fax in a special drawer he had created inside one of his file cabinets code-labeled “The Enigma Variations”—in honor of a favorite composer, Edward Elgar.
Two weeks later, Jon found the e-mail draft of Sheler’s cover story on Ben-Yosef so accurate that he had to correct only a couple of Hebrew transliterations. He immediately wrote a sidebar for the article, as promised—or rather, rewrote it, since the first draft seemed hopelessly biased against any possibility that Ben-Yosef could be the returned Jesus. “True scholarship must be dispassionate,” he told himself. The final draft was better balanced, carefully listing conclusions pro and con, along with their implications.
He saved the most powerful negative argument for the last, knowing well enough that this doomed any serious claim that Ben-Yosef could be Jesus in any sense. If this were the returned Jesus, he wrote, where were the other spectacular symptoms attending His Second Coming that are cited in the Gospels: the darkening of sun and moon, His arrival on the clouds of heaven “with power and great glory,” the loud trumpet call, Judgment Day, and the end of time?
It was only after he had e-mailed the piece to Sheler that he had second thoughts about that final argument. Some of the more outspoken prophecy advocates, including Merton, had affirmed a prior “secret” or less obvious return of Jesus—in some connection with the Rapture—prior to His formal final return in glory after the Tribulation. That earlier arrival, of course, would not be heralded by heavenly clouds or loud trumpets.
Jon, however, did not believe in such a preliminary arrival: the Second Coming would be the final coming. He did not change his text. “Like Pilate,” he told himself, “what I have written, I have written.”
EIGHT
U.S. News & World Report scooped the other newsmagazines by one slender week. The cover showed a smiling, head-and-shoulders, full-color photograph of Joshua Ben-Yosef in a royal blue, open-necked sport shirt—an undeniably attractive figure with a pleasant, tanned face, piercing cobalt eyes, a generous mouth, and a closely cropped beard edging his squarish jawline. Perfect white incisors showed through slightly parted lips, while thick, brownish hair— carefully parted in the middle—fell almost to his shoulders. His nose, the feature that can so easily detract rather than enhance, rather gracefully did the latter. It was neither Semitic aquiline nor Gentile straight. Some called it “international” or “everyman.” Around his neck was a small gold chain with cross attached, leaving no doubt as to his religious affiliation.
Shannon and Jon read the overseas edition of U.S. News just a day after it appeared on newsstands in America. Sheler had managed to garnish his article with a gallery of photographs he had evidently picked up from the Israeli press, which had been focusing on Ben-Yosef weeks before the West even knew he existed. One of the first pictures was a wedding photograph of his parents, which Jon studied for some time. Yosef Ben-Yosef appeared as a youthful, pleasant-looking groom, waiting to conquer the future, while Mariam was an Israeli woman whom anyone would call attractive, a poised bride with a shy smile and soulful eyes. Joshua’s distinguished features, clearly, had not developed out of a vacuum.
The other photographs were equally intriguing. There was even a shot of the basement olive-wood factory at the Nissan emporium in Bethlehem, with an inset showing Afram and George Nissan arm in arm. Joshua’s boyhood home near Nazareth looked comfortable and more than large enough for a family of three. The elementary school he had attended had been newly rebuilt of white stucco in Nazareth Ilit, and stock photographs showed the administration buildings at both the Technion and the University of Haifa, where Joshua had pursued his university studies.
Jon was astonished, however, to see photographs also of six of the Twelve: Shimon, Yakov, Yohanan, Andru, Thom, and Yudas. All portraits seemed to do the men justice, except—predictably—Yudas, whose frown showed that he was really throwing himself into the role of the “heavy” in this strange scenario. Clearly, Sheler’s investigative colleagues had sent him some excellent fresh material and photos since Jon’s last meeting with him at the Jerusalem Hilton.
A sidebar brought readers up to date on the worldwide cyber-phenomenon that seemed to herald the appearance of Ben-Yosef. Was the incursion coincidental, or not? The investigation, thus far, had yielded no absolute results, although Rod Jensen was quoted at length regarding Israel as the source of the web event. A reward of one hundred thousand dollars had now been posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for any solid information on the origin of the cyberepisode and how it was accomplished.
Jon’s own views on the Ben-Yosef phenomenon formed another sidebar. At second reading, his comments seemed to have the balance he had tried to convey. While conceding some of the extraordinary elements in the Joshua phenomenon, he added enough cold sobriety to deflate the more excessive claims being made about Israel’s new religious luminary.
After Shannon had finished reading the story and discussed it with him, Jon commented, “I really don’t know if the world is ready for this. Or maybe it’s too ready!”
“What do you mean, Jon?”
“Well, many in the Christian public had already been stoked to red-hot anticipation by the prophecy fanatics before anyone even heard of Joshua Ben-Yosef. Then the cyberthing happened. And now comes a serious article on the Jesus candidate himself, giving some substance to what had only been frothy conjecture before. If people went ape over fantasy, what will they ever do over presumed fact?” “So you think Joshua may really be Jesus, then?”
“I hardly think so, Shannon!” He smiled indulgently. “But the masses may.”
* * * Jon proved to be a prophet himself on that prediction. The story in U.S. News provoked a tidal wave of reaction. Perhaps inevitably, the first phone call came from Hannibal, Missouri. His father was not in a jocular mood.
“Jon,” he demanded, “what have you gotten yourself into this time?”
“Hello yourself, Dad! What seems to be the problem?”
“Well, the loonies are on the loose around here, telling everyone who will listen to prepare for the end of the world! Jesus has returned! And people are actually believing them, thanks to you and that magazine.”
“What do you mean, me? ”
“Jon, how could you have made any favorable comments about that impostor? You surely don’t believe he’s Jesus, do you?”
“Of course not, Dad. I was only trying to be as fair and objective as possible.”
“Well, there’s one big argument against any identification of this Joshua with Jesus,” he huffed. “And I’m really shocked that you didn’t mention it in your sidebar!”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, Jon, do I have to draw you a picture? Weren’t you listening when I taught you in confirmation class? The magazine shows a picture of Joshua’s father! But Jesus had no—” “I know, Dad. Jesus’ father was God. But even the Gospels sometimes call Joseph the father of Jesus when referring to the holy family. And the only reason I didn’t mention that in my piece was because I didn’t want to introduce the virgin birth debate at this early a stage in our investigation. I wanted to save it for later on, maybe as the clincher.”
“Hmmm. Well . . . I guess that makes sense . . . just so you don’t forget it.”
“I won’t. But hey, how about cutting me a little slack, Dad? I do think I was on the side of the angels on this
one, don’t you?”
“Well . . . yes, Jon. You did show that many of the other signs of
Jesus’ triumphant return at the end of time are not present in the case of this Ben-Joseph. Good boy!”
“Well, thanks! And do tell Mom not to sell everything she has and put on a white robe to spruce up for Judgment Day, okay?”
“Heh heh. I’ll do that. Bye, Son.”
The phone rang again almost immediately. It was an operator at the Vatican in Rome, asking if Dr. Jonathan Weber were available. Soon he was on the line with a friend he had not seen for several years: Monsignor Kevin F. X. Sullivan. Both had been Harvard undergrads, and both had gone on to graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, after which their parallel pathways parted. While Jon returned to teach at Harvard, Kevin went on to become a Jesuit scholar at the Gregorian in Rome. His brilliance there soon gave him entrée with the power brokers at the Curia, and he had been Jon’s personal liaison with Pope Benedict XVI during the Rama crisis.
Sullivan began their dialogue in much the same way as Jon’s father. “Okay, Jon, what in God’s name—and I say that with no hint of blasphemy—is going on over there? And how did you ever get involved in this latest sacred sensation?”
“I was wondering when you’d ask, Kevin . . . I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“No, it’s more like the right place and the right time where you are concerned, good buddy. So . . . what’s the buzz? Should Ben-Yosef be called Ben-Hoax? He couldn’t possibly be legit, could he?” “Do you want the five-minute version or the fifty-five? It’s your nickel.”
“You’d best give me the longer one, since the Holy Father is very concerned.”
For the next half hour, Jon gave Kevin a complete briefing on everything that had developed to date. When he had finished, Kevin gave a soft, low whistle and said, “I . . . guess I’m surprised that there’s that much in his favor—the geography of his birth and youth . . . which he couldn’t arrange, the man and his message, the healings . . .You know, Jon—but please don’t quote me—as I see it, this is sort of the way Jesus would speak and act if He were to return again prior to His final coming.”