by Paul L Maier
Placed together at the crack line, the slab measured over two feet in length by one in width. Lettering appeared on three lines, some characters nearly faded.
Jon stared at the writing for some time, but then shook his head. “I can’t quite make it out. Can you, Austin?”
He also shook his head.
“You don’t have an ultraviolet lamp here, do you?”
“Yes! Jolly good idea! Clive—”
Brampton hauled out a small ultraviolet apparatus, waited several minutes for the lamp to gain intensity, and then shined it on the parchment.
“Better! That’s much better,” said Jon. “We certainly do have Greek on the middle line. But . . . but Aramaic below it?” He leaned over and studied the lettering for some time. Then he looked up and asked, “And what about that top line? It’s . . . it’s . . . by George, it’s Latin! ”
Silence followed, as all eyes adjusted to the ultraviolet light. Most of the lettering was now recognizable.
“Oh . . . my . . . Lord,” whispered Jon, for he deciphered it first.
“I still don’t have it, Jonathan,” said Jennings, although I do make out ‘Nazareth’ . . . ‘king’ . . . Oh! Oh! . . . Oh, oh, oh, dear boy! Saints preserve us! I have it now!” Jennings dropped his arms, and his mouth sagged open in wonderment. Then he staggered to the nearest chair and sat down, holding a hand to his forehead. Jon felt his own legs turning gelatinous and he slumped to the floor, sitting on a throw rug with legs spread apart.
“Is this going to be some professional secret?” Shannon groused. “Translation, please! My Aramaic’s a bit rusty.”
Her father said nothing. Jon finally muttered, “It’s the titulus, Shannon, the titulus. ”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jon explained in tones of awe. “It’s the sign Pontius Pilate nailed to Jesus’ cross on Good Friday, when—”
“‘And Pilate had an inscription written and put it on the cross,’” Jennings interposed, quoting John’s gospel. “‘It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS . . . And it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.
’”
“Now we know that the remains are those of the biblical Joseph of Arimathea, Austin, don’t we?” asked Jon, triumphantly.
“Oh, yes indeed! Fabulous, Jonathan, just fabulous! This confirms it!”
“I . . . don’t quite follow,” Brampton admitted.
“Well, Clive,” Jon explained, “Joseph of Arimathea must have preserved the titulus as a sort of sacred memento of his services in burying Jesus that evening in Jerusalem—even to the point of directing that it be buried with him in his own tomb here.”
Now Brampton beamed enthusiastically, and said, “Incredible! This is one dig that’ll go down in history—”
“Right up there with the Dead Sea Scrolls!” Shannon chirped.
“Notice that ‘of the Jews’ is partially missing in the Latin top line, as well as the Aramaic bottom,” Jon noted. “We ought to search the sarcophagus for the two missing corners.”
“You haven’t excavated it all, then?” Brampton wondered.
“No. We still have a little to do.”
By now, the numbness in the group had faded, replaced by waves of elation. Jennings, however, still urged caution. While they had no doubts about the authenticity of their discoveries—something like this was beyond contrivance, after all—anyone not present at the dig would, almost viscerally, have to greet anything as phenomenal as this with massive skepticism. The more extraordinary the find, the greater the demand for its verification.
“Until all tests are completed,” Jennings warned, “we simply must withhold the news—even from other members of our own staff, I regret to say. This is just too spectacular to announce, even in-house, until we have validation. Can we please agree on that?”
Shannon, Clive, and Jon nodded emphatically.
“Oh! Someone else will have to share our momentous secret. Clive, go and fetch Dick Cromwell and his photo equipment. He’ll have to be privy, of course, but he can keep a confidence.”
In clearing the sarcophagus base the next morning, they found a missing corner of the titulus that completed the first or Latin line. Because it had been protected by a bunching of grave linens, the ink of that lettering was much darker than the rest of the sign. Several other fragments of the parchment were also sifted out.
Since most of the titulus was now recovered, Cromwell took a series of photographs against a neutral matte background, using both panchromatic and color film. Then he repeated the process using infrared and ultraviolet light and corresponding film.
Jon scanned the lines intensely under ultraviolet, recalling a similar effort at the Vatican. Had the parchment been a palimpsest—written on previously but erased for reuse—the earlier writing would have left visible traces under UV illumination. “I see nothing else,” he said, finally. “Pontius Pilate, evidently, was no chintz. He used fresh parchment on Good Friday.”
Late that night, Cromwell delivered a series of maximum-contrast prints that brought out the lettering more distinctly than the parchment itself:
“Excellent!” said Jennings. “We’ll work with these right after breakfast tomorrow.”
The five could barely sleep that night.
“Let’s get on with the paleography, Jonathan,” Jennings urged, the next morning. “What do you think?”
“Well, let’s start with the top line. The Latin is very similar to lettering I’ve seen on the election posters at Pompeii, and since those signs got buried by hot ash in AD 79, a first-century origin for the Latin here would seem logical enough.”
“So far, so good,” said Shannon. “What about the Greek?”
“Greek lettering style didn’t change that much between the Hellenistic and Roman periods, so it’s a little difficult to pin it down to a century. But hand-written notices I’ve seen at Athens from the first century resemble this quite closely.”
“We’re in the ballpark!” Cromwell enthused. “But look at the bottom line. The Aramaic separates the words, like we do today. Didn’t the Jews run them together at that time? The Greeks and Romans obviously did.”
“No, they were strangely modern about that. They separated their words as early as the fifth century BC . . . Now, as to style, there’s no question but that this is a somewhat crude first-century Aramaic in Herodian script.” Jon stopped and tapped his nose in thought. Then he wrinkled his brow and said, “But we do have two problems here, friends. The first is minor: John’s gospel tells us the sign was in ‘Hebrew, Latin, and Greek,’ but our sign here has Aramaic rather than Hebrew. . . . Well, on second thought, that’s nothing serious. Aramaic is sister to Hebrew, and we know it was the language spoken by the common people in Jesus’ day. The sign was put up for their benefit, after all. But now the second problem is more serious—”
“Yes, the order of languages is different in John versus this sign,” said Brampton. “This has Latin first.”
“Oh, that’s not significant, Clive,” Jon replied. “Pilate would inevitably—officially—have put Latin on top, whereas John would give first place to his own tongue. In fact, I think that adds a touch of credibility. . . . No, my concern is the third line. Don’t you find the Aramaic a little off-key, Austin?”
“You mean the lettering?”
“No, I mean a grammatical error: that should be malkah for ‘king,’ not melek, shouldn’t it?”
Jennings scratched his head and said, “I do believe you’re right.”
“Oh, jeez. It’s a fake, then?” Cromwell asked. “All that film down the tube?”
A long silence ensued. Suddenly Jon broke out laughing. “No, no, no. We all missed something, and it just occurred to me. That error in Aramaic helps prove its authenticity, I think. What, pray tell, were the circumstances behind that titulus? Pilate, a non-Jew, or, more probably, one of his non-Jewish aides, wrote the inscription. Now, a Gentile would write the errorless Latin and Greek that we
find here, but likely not Aramaic too.”
The room was quiet until Brampton broke the silence. “That certainly makes sense to me.”
“Yes. Brilliant, Jonathan,” Jennings concurred.
“No, anything but. We’d all have thought of it.”
Jennings smiled and said, “Well, then, on to the scientific tests. I propose that we take a fragment of the parchment with no lettering—a bit of the wood rot backing too—and send them to the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot for radiocarbon testing. Why are you frowning, Clive?”
“It’s just that I’d hate to see any part of this extraordinary discovery destroyed.”
“I, too, Clive,” Jon agreed. “If this were an ordinary find, we wouldn’t even bother with carbon 14, since the evidence from the pottery and the writing styles all point to the Herodian period. But in view of what we have here, the world would demand radio-carbon testing. But how much will the Weizmann Institute need by way of samples, Austin?”
“Let me check. I have their schedule here some-where.” He opened one of his filing cabinets, extracted a manila folder after a brief search, and read the requirements. “Of the items we could supply one hundred grams of human bone would be necessary, fifty grams of linen, two grams of wood, two grams of parchment or papyrus—”
“Well, even if it’s only two grams, that would be a very sizeable fragment,” Jon observed. “So why don’t we do this: since they use the conventional C-14 tests at the Weizmann, let’s send them only materials we have in quantity—the grave linens and wood-rot backing. But let’s save the precious parchment for testing by the mass spectrometer method. That system requires a sample only one-thousandth as large. That’s the method we used for testing the Shroud of Turin.”
“Excellent, Jonathan,” Jennings concurred. “Just splendid.”
“But is the Weizmann reliable?” asked Jon, who would have preferred his own team, were they not thousands of miles away.
“Oh, they do fine work. The British School of Archaeology, the American School, the École Biblique all use them.”
“I’ll throw in the towel, then,” Brampton con-ceded. “But let’s make sure Dick has a ‘take’ on all the photos first.”
“Obviously.”
EIGHT
Two weeks later, Shannon and Jon drove to Rehovot to pick up the radiocarbon report. Rehovot lay to the west in the Plain of Sharon, about an hour-and-a-half drive from the dig. Jon was playfully probing Shannon’s relationship with Gideon Ben-Yaakov as their Land Rover sped down the hills west of Jerusalem.
“Have you told Gideon what you and I pulled out of Joseph’s tomb, Shannon?”
“Don’t be silly! He doesn’t even know there is a ‘Joseph’s tomb.’ Did you tell the people at the Weizmann Institute?”
“Touché!” Jon laughed. “So how are things between you and Gideon? When do you plan to get married?”
“Tomorrow, if Gideon had his way.”
“I can sympathize with that.” The words were out before, on second thought, he would have held them in check.
Shannon looked at him curiously and asked, “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Not ‘supposed to be’ . . . is. ”
“Well . . . thanks, in that case. I thought you had eyes only for Aramaic and dusty inscriptions, and—”
“Delightful little Irish terrorists who scamper about digs in white shorts, hopelessly distracting all males within range.”
“Oh. I never thought of that. It gets so hot out there. You disapprove?”
“Yes, Shannon. I’d really recommend a chador. Arabs have this marvelous way of keeping their women gowned, veiled, and quite undesirable.”
She laughed. “Male chauvinist goat! ”
“I thought it was a ‘pig.’”
“We’re in Israel, remember?”
Jon chuckled, and commented, inwardly, You’re some lucky fool, Ben-Yaakov! He remembered the time Shannon was working next to him at the sarcophagus, and their hands and arms, even faces brushed against each other as they were extracting the material, and how each contact induced a tiny tingling in him that had nothing at all to do with the excitement of archaeology.
“Tell me more about your wife, Jon,” she said, ending his reverie. “I was so sorry to learn about her terrible accident in Switzerland.”
They were just driving into the plain when Jon began a long answer to Shannon’s query. It was a little difficult to manage—telling of a lost love to a woman for whom a strong attraction was building, despite the frustratingly bleak prospects of any reciprocation. He kept looking ahead and to the left as he drove, so she would not see the film in his eyes. Finally, he changed the subject abruptly and asked, “What do you think they’re going to tell us at Rehovot, Shannon?”
“It’s a test of their equipment, not our samples. We know they’re authentic.”
“Yes, the context is overpowering, especially the random nature of the find itself.”
“You’ll think me a dunce, Jon, but—one last time—tell me how they do a carbon 14 test.”
“It’s not a dumb question, because they’re continually improving on the old Willard Libby method. He was the genius who discovered the technique in the 1950s. Now, when cosmic rays strike the earth’s outer atmosphere, they hit nitrogen—the commonest gas in the air—and convert bits of it into carbon-14 atoms, a radioactive isotope of regular carbon that will disintegrate over time. Are you with me so far?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, all living things are carbon-based. Plants take it in from the atmosphere via carbon dioxide and pass it on to animals. And so both absorb not just regular carbon but carbon 14 as well—until they die—at which time ingestion ceases. After that the carbon 14 in their systems slowly disintegrates back into nitrogen, according to the half-life of radiocarbon, which is about fifty-seven hundred years. . . . Follow me?”
“Meaning that half of the carbon 14 vanishes every fifty-seven hundred years?”
“Exactly. So Libby had this brilliant idea of simply measuring the amount of radiocarbon still present in any sample to determine when it died—the less carbon 14, the older the sample. And this, of course, applies to any part of the plant or animal—lumber from a tree, animal skins turned into leather or parchment, linen—like our sample—whatever. Libby got the Nobel Prize for that hunch, and he should have! He gave archaeology one dream of a time-piece—a clock that runs backward.”
“But how did he know the normal amount of C-14 in something still alive?”
“To get a base level? Believe it or not, he started measuring it from methane gases provided by the sewage works in Baltimore—the bowels of the people there providing the first evidence of normal C-14 levels in living creatures.”
“How kind of them—excretions as evidence!”
“How genteel, my dear! You could have used the S word! . . . Next, Libby demonstrated that the levels of C-14 were virtually identical across the globe, and back in time too. He tested objects of a known age—wood from early tombs in Egypt, for example—and the scheme worked! Not perfectly, of course. Some Egyptian artifacts dated a couple centuries ‘too young,’ but they adjusted their standards to allow for variations in cosmic ray bombardment that produced greater or lesser amounts of C-14. So it’s a superb tool for—oh, oh, we’re coming to a high-security zone.”
“You bet! It’s the Weizmann Institute that develops the nuclear warheads for Israeli missiles.”
“I thought they did that down at Dimona in the Negev.”
“That’s where the uranium’s processed.”
“My, we’re well informed!”
“It’s an open secret. Soon everyone will have ‘The Bomb,’ Arabs included. Thank God Saddam Hussein didn’t quite get the hang of it.”
Their mission explained at the guardhouse, they were waved through the gate to the Isotope Laboratories. Dr. Reuben Landau met them in his office, a kindly-faced, white-bearded patriarch who looked like Sigmund Freud.
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“Ah, my friends, sit down, sit down,” he invited. “Would you like some refreshment? Yes? Some tea?”
“No. But thank you, Dr. Landau.”
“And how is my good friend, Professor Jennings?”
“He sends you his warm regards,” said Jon. “Did you have any problems with our samples?”
“A little. We had hoped to use only half of the wood and linen you brought us, but it just wasn’t enough. We needed most of the linen, and this small fragment is all we have left.” He handed them a piece four centimeters square on a steel tray, which Jon put into a lead-lined pouch. “And we had to use all of the wood sample.”
“No problem.”
“Otherwise, we had quite normal readouts. The wood had traces of calcium carbonate that could have added ambient carbon, but we were able to clean the linen thoroughly. In any case, it seems your linen came approximately from the Second-Temple era—the wood a little earlier—both give or take the usual century.”
Jon and Shannon looked at each other, eyes taut with excitement.
Landau continued, “Here’s our full report. We date the linen at about 50 CE, and the wood at about 5 BCE, plus or minus the usual hundred years.”
“Smashing!” Shannon whispered to Jon. “Right on target!” Then she said, “You have fine equipment here, Dr. Landau.”
“Thank you, Miss Jennings. Ah . . . might I be so bold as to ask where the samples came from?”
Jon cleared his throat and replied, “It’s just . . . material from Professor Jennings’s dig at Rama, Dr. Laundau. We found this at a . . . at a separate site there, and wanted general confirmation of the time frame.”
“I see, I see.” Landau was peering curiously at Jon. “But in preparing the wood sample—it’s olive wood, by the way—we noticed bits of what seemed to be parchment embedded in the wood. Did you find parchment too?”
Instantly Jon would have to decide between truth and falsehood, reality or cover-up. If he admitted to the parchment, the next question would have been, “Was there any writing on it?” He looked over to Shannon and found only an anxious stare. No, there was a third alternative.