by Paul L Maier
Jon shook his head slowly in chagrin. He flashed a wan, apologetic look to Kevin in the backseat, but Kevin failed to return it. He was sitting with his head down, eyes shut, and hands folded. Was he deeply in prayer? Or deeply embarrassed at the scene in the front seat? If little had been said before, the Peugeot’s interior now had all the ambience of an undisturbed tomb. It was a return trip that could have been measured only in degrees of ugly.
Just before reaching Jerusalem, Shannon suddenly announced, “Gentlemen, I’m . . . so sorry for my performance back in Galilee.” Both men immediately broke in with assurances that they fully understood the high emotional stakes involved, she need not apologize, and other comforting et ceteras. By the time they delivered Kevin to his hotel, things had even begun to approach normality.
Over the next days, Jon took Kevin to the Pool of Siloam and other sights and sites associated with Ben-Yosef’s appearances in Jerusalem. One early, important stop was at the Israel Antiquities Authority, where Jon introduced his friend to Gideon Ben-Yaakov. He asked Gideon to close his office door and then related the entire Sepphoris development to both men. Opening his attaché case, he laid several color photographs of the site, the synagogue floor, and the mosaic on Gideon’s desk. He followed this with an explanation of his reconstruction of the text on the mosaic and his preliminary translation. Both Gideon and Kevin stared at Jon with wide eyes at hearing the name of David, but also failed to catch the meaning of the inscription.
“Please, of course, keep this totally confidential for now,” Jon cautioned.
“Obviously,” said Gideon. “But where do you peg it chronologically, Jon?”
“All I can say for certain is that we do have a first-century provenance for the mosaic. Mordecai Feldman concurs that the lettering reflects a style most appropriate to the first century B.C./A.D. Interestingly, that’s the same time a young Jesus could have frequented Sepphoris with Joseph.”
Gideon shook his head and asked, “Do you mean that this mosaic might have some connection to Jesus?”
Jon held up his hand. “No, it’s just that the time and place correlate with Jesus . . . but there isn’t any evidence that Jesus is part of this discovery. I’m still working on it. Nothing’s set in concrete here—whatever may be set in grout!”
As they stood up to leave, Jon added a postscript. “Speaking of grout, is there any chance, Gideon, that the world’s loveliest ceramicist might do a laboratory comparison test of the grout on the synagogue floor and in the mosaic?”
Gideon smiled broadly. “I’m sure Naomi would love to do just that!”
“Great! Jim Strange is spending the winter in Galilee this year, and I’ll set up the arrangements. I promised to get back to him anyway on the translation.”
A week later, Jon drove Kevin to Ben-Gurion Airport. En route to Tel Aviv, Sullivan commented, “I’ll be the first to say that we dare not give to any human being—let alone an impostor—the worship and praise that belong to God alone and His Christ, Jon. It is possible, I suppose, that the world is making a horrible mistake here. But . . . I don’t think so. True, I haven’t seen what you and Shannon have seen. But just from your reports on Ben-Yosef, I can rather easily re-echo John 7:31.” He said nothing more.
Jon smiled and asked, “And how does that verse go, Kev? You’ve always had a much better Lokalgedächtnis when it comes to Scripture than I. I had to admit that even in our student days.”
“‘When the Christ comes, will He do more miraculous signs than this man?’ So let’s list those signs, Jon. Joshua is born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth—something the lad could not arrange. He’s as brilliant as the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. He laughs at foreign languages and can speak them without any accent whatever. He knows people before they give him their names. He knows their whole backgrounds too. He does miracles of healing, gives hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, and he does exorcisms. He speaks beatitudes and parables almost exactly as Jesus spoke them. He even indulges skeptics like yourself with minor proofs of his divinity— flying pens, no less!—or major proofs, like God Himself opening up the heavens to declare His Son, just as He did in biblical times.”
Jon was silent as Kevin continued, “From what I saw on the Mount of the Beatitudes, Jon, I . . . I really think that Shannon may be right. Why do you still have problems with Joshua’s authenticity?” Jon flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I don’t know, Kev,” he replied. “A big part of me wants to join Shannon on her knees to concede the ultimate high: the Messiah has returned! Something cosmic is unveiling itself right before our eyes! How great that I chose my parents correctly so I could be born in this generation to see this—a divine drama unfolding in our very own theater! Who wouldn’t be excited?”
“But . . . ?”
“But there’s what I like to call the scandal of the immediate. How often you hear people say, ‘If only I could have seen the Lord Himself back in biblical days, how easily I would believe!’ But it’s a little different when it happens right under your nose—or maybe inside your own family. Why do you suppose Jesus’ half brothers had such a tough time believing in Him?”
“Good question. I never really had a proper answer for that.”
“You have an older brother, Kevin, don’t you?”
“Two, in fact.”
“Well, suppose one day your oldest brother came home and said, ‘Hi, Kevin, it’s time for you to know my big secret: I’m actually the Son of God and Savior of the world!’ What would you do?”
Kevin laughed. “I’d run to the yellow pages and check out the office hours of the best psychiatrist in town!”
“Exactly! So here we are. We meet a fellow who has no halo gracing his scalp—a very human being, who still claims to be God in the flesh. A little tough to digest, no?”
“Yes, except for the miracles.”
As they drove up to the departure concourse at Ben-Gurion, Jon cuffed his friend on the shoulder and said, “I’ll bet you’ll have some report for Benedict XVI, good friend!”
Kevin smiled and said, “And that’s an understatement! So long, sport! Let’s stay in touch . . . very close touch!”
FOURTEEN
Several days later, after arriving home from the university, Jon returned to his translation of the mosaic. He was staring at it when Shannon breezed through the door.
“Jon, are you all right?” Shannon asked when she saw him. Uttering several grunts, Jon seemed to be in a totally different universe— a cosmos that did not include his wife.
“Hello there,” Shannon said, her lips just inches from Jon’s right ear. “It’s Shannon Jennings Weber here, your beloved wife, you may recall.”
“Oh . . . sorry, darling . . . I think I have the final version of the translation.”
“Maybe you’re forgiven, then, spaceman. What does it say?”
Jon read the three lines aloud:
Y dies, but he lives,
He leaves, but he returns
Twice David to the star.
“Or two times David to the star,” he amended. “Either way, that line makes little sense. And it would be so helpful to know who in blazes Mr. ‘Y’ is—one solitary yod—who was merely the subject of this piece!”
Both studied the three lines. Suddenly Jon’s eyes narrowed and, in barely audible syllables, he said “I can’t believe it.”
“What is it, Jon? What are you thinking?”
“In just the first two lines—only two lines—you have the outline of a very famous life story.”
“Oh? . . . oh . . . OH!—Jesus Christ!”
Jon nodded slowly. Only Jesus, Christians believed, had died, lived again, and departed—with a promise to return.
“And this, of course, finally explains who our mysterious ‘Y’ might be,” he added.
“Yes! Yeshua, of course, Jesus’ name in his own Hebrew language!”
“But who could have laid this mosaic?”
“Some follower of Jesus?” she offe
red.
“Maybe . . . if the mosaic was laid later in the first century. Then it would be a kind of early Christian creed in miniature . . . like the words we say in the liturgy every week: ‘Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.’” He shook his head slowly from side to side, whether in wonderment or skepticism was not clear. “But the synagogue floor is from early in the first century,” he continued, “when Sepphoris was reconstructed by Herod Antipas in—”
“Wait,” Shannon interposed. “Weren’t Joseph and maybe even Jesus involved in rebuilding the city?”
“Quite a few scholars assume that possibility.”
“Well, then, Jesus could have laid that mosaic Himself.”
Jon frowned. “It is an early first-century artifact, a time when there were certainly no Christians around . . .”
“But if Jesus wrote it, why didn’t He use the first-person singular?” “Oh, Jewish sages often used the third person rather than the first in referring to themselves.” Jon paused, shook his head, and resumed, “Still, to think that this lad could predict His own death and resurrection by playing with tessera—maybe during a lunch break at Sepphoris—really strains all logical—”
“In the case of any other boy, Jon. But this one was Jesus, after all.” “But what about the third line? ‘Twice David to the star.’ That’s still a puzzler.”
“Could it have some kind of chronological significance?”
He thought for a moment. “Hmmm . . . chronological meaning. Okay, twice David to the star . . . David to the star . . . star of David . . . two stars of David. David was king around 1000 B.C. but neither the Bible nor Josephus mention any star in connection with his reign.”
“What if the star simply means the most famous star in history: the Star of Bethlehem? The birth of Jesus—and thus the star phenomenon—happened a thousand years after David. So twice David to the star would mean twice that period: hence, two thousand years.”
Jon thought for some moments. “It still makes no sense, Shannon. Y dies, but he lives. He leaves, but he returns for two thousand years. Yeshua—Jesus—returns for two thousand years?”
“Unless . . . how about this: Jesus dies, but he lives. He leaves, but he returns in two thousand years. Which would be . . . just about now, right?”
The blood seemed to drain from Jon’s face. He sat down and said nothing for some time as he pondered each startling detail again and again. King David, apparently, may not have been the star of the Sepphoris mosaic after all.
Jon had another semisleepless night. A new—totally unanticipated— vector of hard evidence was apparently buttressing Joshua’s claims. If “Y” was in fact Jesus. If the mosaic was authentic.
The world reaction to the episode on the Mount of the Beatitudes was more formidable than ever. For months now, Joshua had been an almost daily feature in print and broadcast media, but this time much of the world had seen and heard him “live.” Television cameras that day, many of them equipped with long, fat telephoto lenses, had zoomed in on him so closely that his distinguished, tanned features and fluorescent indigo eyes filled television screens in both hemispheres. When that booming bass voice—believed to be of God Himself—enveloped the theater at the close of the program, the TV cameras shook with it, the screen image of Joshua vibrating slightly as he lifted his eyes skyward in beatific gratitude. With much of the world watching, bizarre reports were bound to surface. Some viewers fainted outright in front of their television sets. A small army of women across the globe fell instantly in love with Joshua and understood for the first time Mary Magdalene’s plaintive song from Jesus Christ Superstar: “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Many reports of healings, conversions, and rededications followed the television special. Viewers now recalled the computer screen incursions months earlier that had announced the return of Jesus. Most now regarded them as additional proof that Jesus had truly arrived in the form of Joshua.
Clergy were bombarded with fresh queries, while seminaries scheduled new courses on “A Contemporary Christ?” Believers, of course, had to endure taunts and catcalls from agnostics, who suggested that Christians had to be addle-brained half-wits to identify Joshua with Jesus. But most of the believing faithful were too delighted that their Lord had returned not to turn the other cheek.
Travel agents now had a whole year’s backlog of jammed pilgrim tours. But since the bad always seems to follow the good, scalpers started booking blocks of tour reservations and then reselling them to wealthy but impatient believers at outrageous prices.
Melvin Morris Merton, of course, was on the ground floor when it came to pilgrim tours. Prior to the Joshua phenomenon, the State of Israel had awarded him a golden Star of David plaque for having led ten sellout tours of adoring followers to Israel in recent years, and he now was basking in the afterglow of “victory” over such prophecy-doubters as Jonathan Weber. Hardly a month passed without his newsletter publishing another editorial denigrating Weber and everything he stood for.
The latest edition, faithfully forwarded by Marylou, was so full of braggadocio and bombast that the target could only chuckle instead. It began with a garbled biblical quote, partially from Exodus 15, Moses’ Song of Victory after the Egyptian forces had been drowned in crossing the Red Sea:
“How have the mighty fallen! The horse and his rider have been cast into the sea!” So Moses sang in triumph when he had vanquished Pharaoh’s forces, and so we, too, can rejoice that the “mighty” scoffer, Professor Jonathan Weber, and his shameless attacks on prophecy-lovers across the world have now been silenced by none other than our returned Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ Himself! He who once held us up for ridicule is himself the object of derision! We who bravely predicted the return of Jesus are now vindicated by our Lord Himself! Pray and give, so that we can get His message out to everyone!
Which is where Jon stopped reading, tossed the newsletter into the nearest wastebasket, and said to himself, “I hardly think Joshua needs Merton’s help to get his message out.”
Though perhaps he did, after all? While reading the next morning’s Jerusalem Post, Shannon put down her coffee cup and gasped. Then she handed Jon the paper. “I don’t think you’re going to like this, dear!” Glancing at the lower front page where she was pointing, Jon read the headline: “MERTON RALLY TO FEATURE JOSHUA.”
“Will I ever be free of Merton?” Jon fumed. “I had no idea he was even back in Israel.”
Jerusalem, AP. The Reverend Dr. Melvin Morris Merton has scheduled a mass meeting this coming Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. just below the eastern slopes of the Temple Mount in the Old City. A friend of Israel who has led ten tours with some twelve hundred participants to our holy sites, Dr. Merton affirmed that Joshua Ben-Yosef has been invited to address an anticipated audience of some seventy-five to one hundred thousand.
“I will have the extraordinary privilege of introducing him,” Merton told the Post. “But this is not for me. This is for Him, the man whom most Christians now declare to be God’s Son, Jesus Christ, returned in the flesh as Joshua Ben-Yosef! Here, in Israel, we are witnesses to the greatest event in human history since God sent His Son into the world the first time twenty centuries ago!”
The article continued on page two with a complete rundown on all the reasons why, according to Merton, “a majority of Christians in the world” were now confident that Jesus had returned.
“I . . . guess you know what we’ll be doing next Wednesday afternoon, Shannon?” asked Jon. “Or is that a rhetorical question?”
“It is. I know, I know: we’ll both loathe the sight of Merton. But I’d never miss seeing Joshua again.”
“But I can’t understand why Joshua would ever lend respectability to a blowhard like Merton. This really shakes my opinion of him.”
Nearly a hundred thousand people were indeed gathered on the hillside that sunny Wednesday afternoon. As the crowd faced eastward toward the Mount of Olives, an afternoon sun baptized the hill in molten gold against
a sky of Kodachrome blue. Wearing sunglasses to avoid recognition, Jon and Shannon thought the view itself was a spiritual experience. Here was the very rise where Jesus, facing in their direction, had wept over the city of Jerusalem. Here was the hill down whose slopes He had entered triumphantly into the Holy City on the back of a donkey, to the frenzied cheers of people waving palm branches and crying, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Jon broke the reverie, reminding Shannon, “This, you’ll recall, is also the place where Merton assembled the faithful several years ago at an Easter sunrise service, which he predicted Jesus Himself might attend.”
“How could I ever forget that?” she whispered into his ear, giving it a soft kiss in the process. “Or the night before, when we were in the Seven Arches Hotel up there to the right.”
He smiled exuberantly, nodding at the memory.
At 3:35 P.M., several musical fanfares broke into their conversation. A raised platform just before the Kidron ravine to the east was decked out in the blue and white colors of Israel, with a Christian cross superimposed. The ruddy, trapezoidal face of Melvin Morris Merton was clearly visible on the dais, even at that distance, Jon and Shannon regretted to see. And now that oily, self-styled “anointed” voice of his boomed out over the PA system: “Hallelujah! This is a most blessed day!”
Day, Day, Day echoed across the Kidron Valley.
“My fellow Christians—and any unbelievers out there! As you all know, I’ve long declared that our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, would be coming back again soon. And so He has! ”
A tidal wave of cheering wafted up from the vast audience, and quickly the synchronized chorus broke out: “JOSHUA I S JESUS!” “JESUS I S JOSHUA!”
“Oh, blessed, yes!” Merton answered. “Joshua is Jesus indeed! And He has returned, bless His holy name, just as He said He would! Soon you will see Him in person! Can anything be greater than that? ” A thunderous, rolling wave of cheering split the afternoon air. A praise band and chorus now held forth in a favorite contemporary Christian anthem: “Majesty.” Other praise hymns followed, with their inevitable reiterations of God being glorious, glorious, and glorious. Jesus, in turn, was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, while the Holy Spirit was awesome, awesome, awesome, and even awesome, depending on how many identical verses followed.