A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  Archaeology panelists studied every inch of stone on the sarcophagus, and then did a survey of all known first-century sarcophagi in Israel. Joseph’s was similar in proportions though larger than the mean and yet smaller than the largest. “Clearly inside the ballpark,” Jon noted, shaking his head.

  Paleography panelists took wax impressions of the sarcophagus inscription, and then studied plaster-cast reproductions of it for hours on end. Next they launched a broad survey of all first-century tomb inscriptions in Israel to determine lettering size and style, length of line, and the average cutting angle and depth of the cut. Computerization of the results showed a bewildering variety. “Obviously, each local stonecutter did his own thing,” commented Dick Cromwell, who had photographed so many tombs recently that he was starting to feel like a ghoul.

  Clive and Jon now scoured the open cavern tomb higher up the escarpment. “This, probably, is where Joseph finally had himself buried ‘in another tomb,’” said Brampton, “probably along with his family—if that blinking papyrus is genuine. And I, for one, think it is. I tell you true, Jon. All this looks nothing like any put-up job to me. How about you?”

  “I’ve got to agree, Clive, though that’s not for publication. The evidence is simply overwhelming. But I doubt we’ll find much in this cavern. Grave robbers must have cleaned it out centuries ago.”

  But he was wrong. They did uncover shards from several cooking pots in one of the loculi and fragments from a funerary lamp. Naomi placed both in mid-first century, and thermoluminescence would shortly bear her out. Most of the time, in fact, her ceramic typology proved even more accurate than thermoluminescence in pinpointing dates.

  “She’s a magnificent woman, Clive,” Jon told him one day as they watched her washing pottery, faded denim cutoffs and a rather skimpy halter barely concealing her beautiful contours. “She’s not only a gorgeous woman, but one of the finest ceramicists in Israel. You’re a lucky fellow, you know.”

  “I know! Thanks, Jon. I’m really mad about the woman. And I intend to marry her.”

  “As you should! What an archaeological team you’ll make!”

  Noel Nottingham was a changed man. The breezy, tweedy, witty Cambridge anthropologist had felt embarrassed by his miscalculation of the age-at-death of the bones discovered, and fully agreed with Dr. Itzhak Shomar that they were at least a decade younger. “Those joint spurs looked so large to me,” he later confessed, “but of course I was looking at them through a huge magnifying glass!” He had laughed at his own “stupidity” at the time, blissfully unaware of the possible alternate identity of the remains he had so carefully examined.

  The day he finally learned, along with the rest of the world, he suffered a severe psychological trauma. White and sweaty, he poured himself too many gins, and then spent the rest of the night washing his hands, drying them, and then washing them again, drying, mumbling, washing again until dawn. Over the next few days, Nottingham came to better terms with reality, but still had taken several Valiums to make it through the first press conference in Jerusalem.

  The compulsive handwashing remained a problem for weeks, however. He found it hard to pass a wash basin without indulging, and took to wearing gloves to hide the angry red wrinkles on his hands. Jennings had to issue Nottingham an ultimatum: get professional help or leave the dig.

  Noel was minded to do the latter, but finally consulted a psychiatrist in Jerusalem who quickly exposed the problem. Noel had been a good Anglican in his youth, but later lost his faith, though not with-out a ponderous guilt for having done so. Now, he assumed, Jesus had come back into his life in a bizarre way, and his hands had in some way violated Him. Those hands had to be purged, scrubbed, purified. But recognition and catharsis eventually cured what Jon called Noel’s “Pontius Pilate Syndrome.”

  While every aspect of Phase III was being conducted under the most scrupulous ethical standards, one major deception was intentional. Ever since the Jerusalem press conference, the ultraorthodox Hasidim had been staging periodic demonstrations at Rama, demanding that the human remains be reinterred. They shouted, chanted, engaged in token stonings, and tried to block traffic in and out of the site. While foreign television crews rejoiced at some “action”—any action—to spice up their arid vigil, the Hasidim nettled the Rama staff.

  Naomi Sharon returned from one of their confrontations with very bad news. “They’re trying to establish your mother’s name, Austin,” she said. “But don’t ever tell them!”

  “Why not?”

  “As a last resort, they’re now planning the old medieval ‘Rod of Light’ ceremony to curse you.”

  “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never—”

  “No, listen. First they read from an eight-hundred-year- old text based on the Cabala. Then they burn black candles while someone sounds a ram’s horn, and they invoke your mother’s name to curse you. After that you face a horrible fate, or so their rabbis claim. I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘There are many ways of dying, some less pleasant than others.’”

  “I tremble, Naomi,” said Jennings, playfully. “But let’s have done with all this and give them their ruddy funeral!”

  One night, they secretly exhumed one of the skeletons discovered and reinterred at the Rama cemetery back in the Kensington days, brought it back to the artifact shed, and placed it into a wooden coffin. The next morning, Jennings beckoned the chief Hasid inside the dig, showed him the remains, and agreed with him that it was time to rebury the dead if the Hasidim would keep the ceremony confidential. The next day, the Hasidim gathered again in their best clothes to hold a formal reburial rite along with the dig staff. Their rabbi had at first demanded that the remains go back into the cavern tomb, but finally compromised on one that Jennings had specially dug for the occasion. And so it was that the bones did, in fact, return to their original grave. End of demonstrations.

  Editorials in the London press had complained about the “Americanization” of Rama, which, after all, had a British director and associate director, to say nothing of financing. While this was no problem for Jennings, the staff agreed that much of the analysis and testing be sent to British laboratories henceforth—Oxford University for radiocarbon and Cambridge for thermoluminescence. English scholars were also included on the various panels because of their international renown, quite apart from any Fleet Street pressures. But Shannon’s idea was a masterstroke. With her insatiable appetite for English spy novels, she asked, “Why, for pity’s sake, don’t we simply turn the whole Investigative Panel over to them?”

  Jennings pondered, smiled, and said, “Brilliant, child. Positively brilliant. Is that all right with you, Jon?”

  “Superb! A U.N. roundtable is not what we need for that particular panel!”

  The British had responded with Reginald Glastonbury of Scotland Yard to chair the Investigative Panel, and Tom Paddington of MI-5—the British CIA—as vicechairman. Glastonbury had a Robert Morley sort of corpulence and hairlined pate to match. He was particularly delighted to be called up, since, because of his name, he was a “Glastonbury Legend” buff, according to which Joseph of Arimathea eventually sailed to England with the Holy Grail and built a chapel at Glastonbury before he died and was buried in a crypt there. Jennings twitted Glastonbury that he would likely prefer that the remains be Jesus’ rather than Joseph’s so that his precious legend could remain intact!

  Tom Paddington, on the other hand, looked enough like a younger Sean Connery that the students referred to him as James Bond, while Glastonbury became “Sherlock the Fat.” Both men and their aides were given free run of the dig, as well as all the facili-ties at the Ramallah hotel.

  The Investigative Panel had been charged with probing the personalities involved at Rama, locating any blind spots, detecting any flaws, and sniffing out any hoaxes. Panelists had just done a grand tour of the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Prado in Madrid, where they had interviewed the
respective officials on celebrated art frauds and techniques of forgery. Armed with this information, Henri Berthoud skill-fully worked up various scenarios as to how every-thing might have been concocted. Berthoud, a youthful expert on loan from the Deuxième Bureau in Paris, had a meticulously combed thatch of dark hair with well-trimmed beard, and eyes by Roentgen that seemed to look through rather than at anything. Every scenario that Berthoud played before the group showed a rather warped genius.

  “You’d make a superb faker yourself, Henri,” said Paddington. “Are you sure you didn’t concoct all this?” But panel members always brought up some flaw in Berthoud’s elaborate schemes which doomed that particular scenario. Several months passed, and they had found nothing that even hinted at fraud.

  Glastonbury called the group together for its final meeting in spring. Making a triangle of his fingers and thumbs, he said, “Enough of this search of the effects. We have to go back to the cause—if such exists—and discover motives—if such exist. The hypothetical perpetrator must know archaeology and Aramaic absolutely, and he must truly hate Christianity for some reason. I think we can all agree on that, not?”

  They nodded.

  “That really would be the only explanation,” said Paddington. “You see, forgery is almost always done for money, like the Hitler diaries. This would have to have been done for ideology alone . . . again, if this is a hoax.”

  “Well,” said Glastonbury, “it’s time for us to go our separate ways for now. Tom and I have agreed that he should stay here in Israel and do a title search on who owned the Rama property years back, while I go to Britain and the U.S. to do a run-down on everyone connected with the archaeology staff here. We’ll meet again in late July. Agreed?”

  Before leaving Israel, Glastonbury reported their plans to Jennings and Jon, who readily endorsed them. “I’ve nothing to hide in my record,” said Jennings, a twinkle in his eye. “Do you, Jon?”

  “Be my guest, Reginald,” Jon smiled. “Off the record, it looks less and less likely that we’re dealing with fraud here. But if we are, I hope you find the perpetrator and hang him by the gonads. Situations like this turn the brains of experts into jelly and demolish reputations overnight. Back in the twenties, Carl Sandburg thought the Lincoln letters in the Atlantic Monthly were genuine, and they weren’t. Mussolini’s son Vittorio declared that diaries supposedly written by his father were authentic, and they weren’t!”

  Glastonbury nodded and said, “Our own Hugh Trevor-Roper at first thought the Hitler diaries were authentic, and, of course, they were not! ”

  “But the opposite is even worse,” said Jennings. “The renowned Solomon Zeitlin declared that the Dead Sea Scrolls were medieval forgeries! So did my colleague G. R. Driver of Oxford! And they—God knows—were not! ”

  “We’ll do our best to bag the blighter if he’s out there, gentlemen,” said Glastonbury. “Cheerio!”

  Month after month saw an ever steeper decline in church attendance across the world, though an actual gain in some of the rigorist groups. Jon had predicted that phenomenon. “At times of crisis,” he told the staff, “people gravitate toward authoritarian leaders in state or church.”

  “But what rattles me are the lunatics out there,” said Jennings. “They’re outdoing one another in trying to prove to the world that you and I are apostles from hell, Jon—spawns of Satan, walking antichrists who bear the sign of the beast! They’re even trying to find number values of 666 in R-A-M-A.”

  Jon nodded. “Unfortunately, many of that crowd are coming to Jerusalem this Easter.”

  “Why?” Shannon wondered. “Other than the usual Holy Week pilgrimage?”

  “Because Easter Sunday is now being trumpeted as the very day of Christ’s return!”

  Although Melvin Merton was not the first to suggest this, he quickly agreed with the logic. Since God had created the world around 4000 BC to his reckoning, and the great date of AD 2000 had just passed, that would make six millennia for the age of the earth. The seventh would doubtless be the great Sabbath millennium, the thousand years predicted in the book of Revelation when Jesus would return. Now that Antichrist had appeared, could Jesus be far behind? And what better day for His return than Easter! And what better place than Jerusalem! Merton called a press conference and issued this statement: “It would not surprise me a bit if Jesus descended to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem just about dawn this coming Easter Sunday.”

  The response astonished even Merton. A horde of his followers and those of other prophecy fanatics booked every available seat on the standard overseas airlines, and then chartered 747s when these were filled. As Holy Week approached, the pilgrims started arriving in groups of tens, hundreds, thousands. Once again, hundreds of troops from the Israel Defense Force had to supplement the over-whelmed Jerusalem police.

  On Palm Sunday, Jon and Shannon stopped by St. Stephen’s Gate in the eastern wall of Jerusalem to look in on the pilgrims processing into the Old City. The narrow street was forested with waving palm branches. Some of the groups bore signs, like “HE IS COMING NEXT SUNDAY!” or “THAT’S NOT JESUS AT RAMA!”

  “Good Lord, Jon, what a circus!” Shannon commented.

  “That was some Pandora’s box we opened at Rama.”

  “You mean you opened! Don’t blame the rest of us.”

  “Aha! Comes the crisis, and we all blame some-one else?”

  She beamed and gave him a warm kiss.

  “That’s better!” he murmured.

  “Hah! Look at that dropout and his sign!”

  Marching directly behind a nicely groomed college student who was carrying a sign: “OUR JESUS LIVES! SORRY ABOUT YOURS,” was perhaps the earth’s last representative of the beat generation. Heavily bearded in soiled T-shirt and jeans, he carried a sign that had only a large question mark painted on it. He had barely crossed inside the gate when he was attacked by enraged pilgrims who tore into his sign and pummeled him until he slumped down onto the street. Police quickly intervened and dragged the hap-less fellow—dazed and bleeding—to the sidewalk.

  Not a minute later, who should come strutting by at the head of his massive following but Dr. Melvin Morris Merton himself, singing hymns at the top of his Texan lungs. He looked for a moment at Jon, looked away, and then looked back, this time noticing Shannon at his side—two faces he knew well enough from news photos across the world. Jon now paid for his dislike of sunglasses.

  Merton stopped, held up his hands for quiet, and said, “Professor Weber, I presume? And Miss Shannon Jennings?”

  “Let’s get out of here, Jon!” Shannon whispered. But it was too late.

  “There, my friends,” Merton pointed, “are the authors of the world’s agony, the deceivers who claim to have discovered Jesus! He is the Antichrist named Weber, and she is the daughter of the other devil named Jennings!”

  An angry growl bloomed up from his followers, and several rushed toward Jon and Shannon.

  “No, no, no!” Merton remonstrated. “Don’t hurt them. They’re only fulfilling prophecy—Antichrist shall be revealed at the Temple of God!”

  But it was no use. All the months of despair among some of Merton’s followers had only thinly been compensated for by his exuberant prophecies, while others, who never doubted, now wanted to do battle for their Lord by attacking the enemy. A score of them broke ranks, stormed into the crowd, and made a lunge for Jon and Shannon, dragging her, shrieking, into the street, while others grabbed Jon’s arms and legs and hoisted him after her. Now they had some-thing better than signs for their procession, and they carried their two struggling trophies triumphantly through St. Stephen’s Gate. A soprano in the front ranks started singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, and hundreds of voices joined her.

  “Jon! Do something!” Shannon screamed.

  Jon kicked and thrashed violently. “Let go of me, you fanatic fools!” he shouted. “I’m no Antichrist! You seem to be!”

  Suddenly they were surrounded by a
company of khaki-clad Israeli troops, each clutching a snub-nosed Uzi machine gun.

  “Put them down, I tell you!” Merton cried, red-faced at losing control of his followers, who grudgingly released their captives.

  Surrounding Jon and Shannon in a cordon, the troops marched them away to a waiting van and loaded them inside. There they found the battered dropout. He squinted at them, massaged his aching scalp, and said, “Like wow, man! That was pretty heavy out there, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, man,” Jon replied. “It was strictly a bad scene.”

  “Where do you wish to go, Professor Weber?” asked the driver.

  “Our car’s over at the Rockefeller. Thanks!”

  On Good Friday, so many pilgrims tried to crowd into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that people fainted. Claustrophobes grew hysterical. Rescue teams had difficulty threading through the jammed lanes and alleyways of the living labyrinth that was the Holy City. But the Arab souvenir shops were making a killing, hence the joke: “What is the favorite Muslim hymn? Answer: ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’!”

  Easter, though, would be more manageable, since the pilgrim masses planned to celebrate it at dawn on the slopes outside the eastern wall of Jerusalem. This would give them a perfect vantage point from which to see the returning Lord when He descended onto the Mount of Olives to the east, the very summit from which He had ascended after His resurrection. Probably half the multitude had some doubts that Jesus would put in an appearance, but the rest had donned white robes to greet the returning Lord. Their eyes blazed with joy as they sang their hymns in a candlelight procession out to the eastern slopes of the Old City, each looking expectantly toward the dawn.

  Jon and Shannon saw it all from their own vantage point. As a brief holiday, they had returned to Jerusalem for the Easter weekend, and, through the courtesy of the manager, had gotten a suite atop the Seven Arches on the Mount of Olives. Just before dawn on Easter Sunday, Jon had awakened her with the words, “Let’s get outside as soon as possible, darling. We may never see anything like this again!”