by Paul L Maier
And, granting God’s existence, Jon found Christianity equally credible; no other religious faith on earth had such strong historical and archaeological credentials. Unless, that is, archaeology and faith were about to part company.
The Cleopatra, flagship of Egyptair, dropped through scudding clouds over eastern Long Island, glided onto runway 31 Left at JFK, and taxied to its gate at the international terminal. While the jet turbines wound down their deepening dirge at being deprived of fuel and ignition, the voice of the chief steward filled all eighty speakers in the plane’s PA system. “Attention, please: Will Mr. Ernst Becker please identify himself?”
“Rats!” Jon muttered. Ernst was his father’s middle name, Becker his mother’s maiden name, and it was his alias for tickets, for the “special” passport the American embassy had issued him, and for clear passage through customs by all governments concerned. He raised his hand. The steward walked over and said, “Please take all your belongings and follow me, Mr. Becker.”
Jon grabbed his attaché cases and the garment bag he had stowed in a forward compartment and followed the steward to the exit. There, filling the doorway, stood a brute of a fellow with whitish, crew-cut hair and ruddy skin.
“Mr. Becker,” said the hulk, “I’m George Tollefson, with the Central Intelligence Agency.” He flashed his credentials. “Did you check any luggage?”
“No. I have everything here—”
“Fine. Then please put on those sunglasses and come with me. Here, let me carry your bag.”
Convinced that he would fail miserably in the world of international espionage and intrigue, Jon sheepishly put on the glasses and let the CIA carry his garment bag. When they reached a secluded corridor, Tollefson stopped and confided, “The president would like to see you as soon as possible, Professor Weber. We have Air Force Two warmed up and waiting just outside this terminal.”
“But . . . but I was simply going to take the shuttle to Wash—”
“Yes, yes, we know that. But we took the liberty of canceling your reservations in view of the devel-oping crisis.”
“Our discoveries in Israel?”
“More than that. The president will inform you, I’m sure. Now, we’ll fly to Andrews Air Force Base, and one of the marine helicopters will shuttle us to the White House from there.”
Jon studied the bluish carpet in the arrival lounge, scratched his head, and said, “Let’s go.”
There was a strange feeling of déjà vu about it all: the sleek 707 that had been Air Force One, carrying presidents and their parties in convenience-laden luxury; the dark-green chopper whirling down onto the White House lawn like a giant maple leaf; and the majestic façade of the White House itself. But such scenes had always come via the television evening news. Now, strangely, he himself was within the frames of those familiar backdrops.
By now it was almost midnight, Cairo time, but only late afternoon in Washington. He no longer looked like a savage, thanks to the shaving facilities in the president’s former private restroom in the plane. He had even dared place his buns on the presidential padded toilet, recalling that this was his first cheek-to-cheek contact with any of America’s chief executives. But now would come the more socially acceptable encounter. The door of the helicopter opened.
“What, no red carpet? No marine band?” Jon asked Tollefson, who only looked at him strangely. Then again, the CIA never was known for its sense of humor.
They were escorted westward to the Oval Office in the executive wing of the White House, where the dour Tollefson finally took his leave. Ushered inside by the president’s secretary, Jon was greeted by The Man himself.
President Sherwood Bronson was a Republican from Michigan who had a bodily frame similar to JFK’s, projected piety-in-the-presidency as did Jimmy Carter, and was a media master like Reagan or Bush in expounding the New Conservation that still held the nation in thrall. His rugged good looks reminded some of the man in the Marlboro ads, but without cigarettes and assorted livestock. Having ridden to power on his promise to balance the federal budget, “Woody” Bronson astonished the pundits by only moderately failing to achieve that utopian goal.
“Nice of you to drop in on us, Professor Weber,” said the president, extending his hand.
Nice of you to have such a great sense of humor, thought Jon. What he said was, “Honored to meet you, Mr. President.”
“I’m sure you recognize our secretary of state, Mr. MacPherson, and our secretary of defense, Mr. Hammar.”
“Indeed. Glad to meet you, gentlemen.”
“Please sit down, everyone,” the president beck-oned. “And please forgive us for this detour in your travel plans, Professor Weber, but we have some-thing of a crisis on our hands. Scott, perhaps you’ll be good enough to brief Dr. Weber?”
“Certainly, Mr. President,” said MacPherson. “Shortly after your first press conference in Jerusalem, Dr. Weber, Pravda published a front-page editorial that—”
“Pravda?! Didn’t they shut down years ago?”
“Of course. This is the first issue of what they call Novaia Pravda . . . New Pravda. Here, maybe you’d best read it first before we go any further.” He handed Jon a photocopy of the original, along with English translation:
MARXISM IS VINDICATED AT LAST!
Communists across the world can now celebrate the truth of Karl Marx’s statement that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The discovery of the very bones of Jesus of Nazareth, announced in Jerusalem two weeks ago, proves that Christianity—the misguided faith of the majority in the decadent, counterrevolutionary, capitalist West—has no basis in fact. (The Christians have a myth that Jesus came back to life again after he died, and believers expect the same for themselves.)
Whereas the Christian church tries to hide the ills of the working classes with nebulous promises of how much better things will be in “heaven” after death, Marxism has the honesty to inform workers that there is no “heaven,” and that they must rather band together to improve their lot in this life, since it is the only life. We have made our advances through truth and collective effort, not through empty myths and promises, as has capitalist Christianity.
But now the world knows the truth. Socialism has been correct about religion all along. We now have a marvelous opportunity, comrades, to seize the present advantage and win the world back to the truth of Marxism-Leninism. “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Even as these are the last words in the Communist Manifesto, so we would now cry, “People of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your outmoded superstitions!”
“Incredible!” said Jon, when he had finished reading. “This sounds like something straight out of the Cold War . . . certainly not glasnost, perestroika, and the new Russia. Is anybody buying this rot?”
MacPherson smiled wanly and replied, “A cabal of diehard communists in Moscow is trying to orchestrate this into a campaign to regain control of Russia, then the former Soviet republics, and then the world. The Russian ambassador to the UN seems to be coming down on their side! He delivered a major address in the General Assembly a couple of days after this appeared. The neutrals, the Afro-Asians, and the Third-World bloc were very impressed. They disagree with the atheistic part of this campaign, of course, but they have no great love for Christianity because they favor their own native religions instead. And now we have a new wind of anti-Westernism blowing across the globe.”
“But this isn’t the new Russia!” Jon objected. “It’s just not Rozomov’s style!”
“You’re right, and it’s not his doing. He’s still on a long state visit to North Korea, but he may well get booted out of power when he gets back. If he gets back. This all broke while he was gone. It’s the work of disgruntled diehards in the KGB, the military, and Stalinist apparatchiks in the Kremlin who are much better organized this time than they were during their fizzled coup against Gorbachev some years ago. They’ve never forgiven Gorby for losing eastern Europe,
and now they’re madly trying to use Rama to breathe new life into the corpse of communism.”
“Those ding-bing hardliners will exploit any and every weakness they can manage to find in the West,” the president added. “The old-guard red ratfinks did it to us every time they could years ago. And now those bleeding Neanderthals seem to be taking on new life.”
Jon noted that Bronson seemed to have attended the Richard Nixon School of Rhetoric. Then Jon asked, “What’s the mood here in the States?”
“We have nothing less than a morale crisis here,” said President Bronson. “Church attendance is plummeting, worship services are getting disrupted—people cursing the clergy for misleading them—and every atheist or freethinker on the block is screaming, ‘We told you so!’ at the top of his effing lungs. Not a day passes that we don’t get a horror story. Like last Sunday: the cardinal archbishop of New York is celebrating the Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and one of his parishioners throws the wafer back in his face as she cries, ‘Enough of this sham!’ and stalks out.”
Harold S. Hammar, the secretary of defense, joined in. “We all have our personal horror stories, Dr. Weber. My uncle was a missionary in Mozambique. He’d worked there twenty years for three converts. A week ago, my aunt found him hanging from a banyan tree in the jungle. His suicide note read: ‘All for Jesus, the Great Deceiver. All for nothing! Forgive me, Sarah’!”
Jon clenched his teeth and shook his head. “This is all premature . . . ridiculously premature!”
“Yes, but meanwhile, the Church—and maybe the country—seem to be going to the warm place in a handbasket,” said the president. “And that’s not all. Harold, tell him the rest.”
Hammar cleared his throat. “The old guard in Moscow seems to be doing more than just cackling over our crisis. One of their idealogues quoted Sun Tzu of ancient China, who said something like: ‘Fighting on the battlefield is stupid. The highest art of warfare is not to fight at all, but to subvert your enemy’s culture. Then, when he is demoralized, destabilized, confused, you may strike.’ We think they’ll use this crisis to try to pull a Sun Tzu on the West—America in particular—if they win out in Russia.”
Jon shook his head. Never had he anticipated a political fallout from Rama. Then he said, “Well, gentlemen, I . . . much appreciate this update. But how am I involved in all this? What can I do?”
It was the president who responded. “To make a long story short, Dr. Weber, we’d like to know how long it’ll take for you archaeologists and scholars to come to some conclusions on this thing. America and the Western world are in suspense and pain. Personally, I’m a practicing Methodist, and I feel like the very heart’s being ripped out of my faith. Now, if your discoveries do test out authentic, then we’ll just have to try and rebuild one way or another. Maybe the liberal theologians will have some ideas. Haven’t they been telling us for years that it’d make no difference to the faith if Jesus’ bones were discovered? Or, better yet, if your finds prove to be a hellish hoax, we ought to know that as soon as humanly possible so that we can go back to the business of being a great nation. At the moment, there’s panic and malaise in the air. So when, I ask, will you know?”
Jon took a deep breath and said, “Well, gentlemen, I owe you an update too.” He then gave them a synopsis of all tests projected, and when they hoped to have the final results. He also put his two attaché cases on the president’s desk and opened their lids to identify some of the ceramic pieces, explaining the tests for each.
The president and the two secretaries stared at them without saying a word.
“So this is the bric-a-brac that’s tearing our world apart!” the president finally muttered. “I’d love to smash those knickknacks beyond recognition. All right, Dr. Weber, tell me this: Is there any way our government can assist you in the tests? Or otherwise?”
Jon thought for a moment, but then shook his head. “No. Beyond greasing the rails with customs for my return flight to Israel, the government should give us a wide berth. Otherwise, the world would suspect political intrusion.”
“All right,” said the president. “But you will get those tests under way as soon as possible, won’t you?”
“Certainly.”
As they were all leaving the Oval Office, the president caught Jon’s arm and asked him to stay for a moment. Shutting the door behind him, Bronson said, “I just have to get a better handle on the probabilities here so I can try to guide the ship of state through some heavy weather. If necessary. At this point in your investigation, and on a scale of one to ten for authenticity—ten being absolutely genuine—how do you rate your discoveries as of now?”
Jon wrinkled his brow, opened his arms, and said, “I really wish I could answer that question, but—”
“Come on, man! This is for my ears only. You’ll never be quoted.”
“But—”
“Is it a nine or ten?”
“No.”
“An eight?”
“Well . . . no.”
“A seven?”
“Well . . . no comment.”
“I see you’ve learned to speak government language!” Bronson chuckled. Then he grew serious and said, “I hope you’ll work as hard as you can to . . . ah . . . demonstrate a fraud or hoax here, Dr. Weber. The stakes are enormous, I’m sure you realize. You’d be doing your country a favor—an enormous service—if you could end this nightmare by blowing the whistle on these discoveries of yours. Would to God you’d never opened the ground over there!”
“Yes. I’ve often thought the same thing.”
Now the president took his arm and almost whis-pered. “Dr. Weber, may I call you Jonathan?”
“Certainly. But make it ‘Jon’.”
“Fine, Jon. Now, wouldn’t it be possible for you to . . . couldn’t you see your way clear to . . . find something wrong with those artifacts of yours?” He pointed to the two attaché cases. “That really would cut the Gordian knot. The world, certainly the Christian world, really wants to believe in their resurrected Lord—”
“What are you saying? Are you suggesting that I . . . falsify the evidence?”
“Now, Jon, I . . . didn’t say that. But if you chose to assign, let’s say, maximum weight to any possible flaw in your evidence, the Western world and certainly the whole Christian church on earth would be in your debt.”
“I’ve been searching for any flaws, I can assure you, Mr. President. But I intend to remain deadly honest in dealing with the evidence. The stakes are too high, too incredibly high.”
“I know . . . I know.” The president wrung his hands and now started pacing the Oval Office. Then he stopped, looked at Jon, and said, “And yet it’s been said that no one approaches any project, any-thing . . . with total neutrality, without some bias. I only hope your modicum of bias inclines in the proper direction.”
“It does, Mr. President. And let me prove that. If this were any other excavation, any other discovery, we wouldn’t have bothered with all these additional tests.”
“Why not?”
“Because the circumstantial . . . the surrounding evidence is overpowering. The ceramic typology, the paleography, the anthropology, and the radiocarbon tests are also overpowering. We’d probably have rated all this a solid ten some time ago!”
“My God!”
“Exactly.”
President Sherwood Bronson hung his head over drooping shoulders as he looked down at his desk for some moments. Then he pulled out a card and wrote on it. “Here, Jon. This is my private phone number. It bypasses the White House switchboard. Call me the moment you have your test results. Will you do that for me?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“One of the limousines will take you wherever you wish. Send us any expenses. Ah . . . I’d ask you to dinner, but we’re due at the French Embassy this evening. Another time?”
“Another time. Thank you, Mr. President.”
SEVENTEEN
The White House limousine delivered
Jon to the address he had specified in Georgetown. Sandy McHugh wouldn’t hear of his staying at a hotel, though Jon did have one proviso: that evening, when he would be fighting jet lag, they would simply enjoy themselves, sipping the margaritas for which Sandy was famous. Maybe for one night only they could for-get Rama and its tyranny over their lives. Sandy cheer-fully indulged the scheme—his wife and children were visiting her parents in Philadelphia—and that evening he recited so many ribald limericks that Jon, already punchy from jet lag, was reduced to tears of laughter.
But it was all business the next morning. McHugh had assembled a panel of twenty of the nation’s fore-most scientists at the Smithsonian, and he introduced each of them and their specialties. Jon now unloaded his attaché cases onto the large, mahogany conference table, explained each item, and passed the photographs around for all to study. Next he gave a color slide presentation of the Rama dig that focused on the cavern area and its artifacts, after which he detailed the carbon 14 tests that had already taken place in Israel and Arizona. Then he fielded technical questions from the scholarly specialists.
After a break for lunch, they reached a consensus on testing procedures. “As to the specific samples,” Sandy announced to the group, “we’ve agreed on the following schedules. Let me read the list again so that we all concur: ‘For the two jar handles inscribed “to Joseph”: magnification survey of the inscribed seals to determine if they were fashioned by ancient or modern tools, followed by optical emission and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, neutron activation analysis, and thermoluminescence, to determine the age from kiln firing. The two oil lamps, unguentarium, oil flask, juglet, and clay plug: ditto the above, omitting the inscription survey. The “titulus” parchment: pollen analysis, texture analysis via electron microscopy, pigment/ink analysis of a small portion of one of the letters.’ And thanks for allowing us that, Jon!”
“I had a choice?” he chuckled. “I regret it, but it has to be done. Otherwise, critics would point to it as the big chink in our testing procedure.”