by Roger Herst
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The day she vacated her apartment, Gabby moved into Itamar's home in Katamon and was greeted by a Circassian housekeeper who cleaned twice a week. Originally constructed in the late 1800s when Turks ruled Palestine, this large, single-family home—nowadays rather rare in crowded Jerusalem—was surrounded by a garden of flowering sunflowers and azaleas. The housekeeper had opened the windows in the guestroom to greet Gabby with dazzling sunlight.
It took five more days before she got around to opening seven cartons sent from the Ussishkin Street apartment. When she finally overcame a reluctance to face memorabilia from her life with Tim and unpack, she first tackled her clothing, arranging them in an armoire that still reeked from the presence of Itamar's daughter, then transferred books that had occupied the lower shelf in Tim's study to an empty bookcase. It had been weeks since she had done more than worry about her graduate thesis, or her pledge to communicate with Dr. Cross. Now, settling into a new venue inspired her to get back to work. Discovery of the school at Ein Arugot, followed by a roster of students and a curriculum for the instruction there, substantiated what she had long been struggling to prove. The unpublished material reviewed by Itamar's colleagues at the Antiquities Authority confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that becoming a prophetic spokesperson for God in the ancient world was more about study, discipline, and spiritual preparation than the common view that God somehow selected individuals in an unknown process, then co-opted them as His spokesmen. She liked to describe this theory in a simple sentence: God didn't choose His prophets; they chose Him.
While shelving her books in the alphabetical order she had used in Tim's apartment, she took hold of her prized Kittel Bible. What she had learned from the Qumran fragments moved her to review textual confirmation in the Book of Isaiah. The Kittel was large and, due to its thick paper, quite heavy, encouraging her to sit with the volume on her knees. She shuffled through the Five Books of Moses at the front, eventually working her way into the midsection reserved for the books of prophecy. Once in the Isaiah narrative, the pages appeared to open by themselves to the forty-second chapter, exactly where she was headed! How, she asked herself, could this book have known her intention? She wasn't prone to thinking in terms of miracles, and immediately concluded that someone, perhaps herself, must have turned previously to Chapter 42. That proved true because whoever it was had tucked a plastic envelope between the thick pages.
It was not one of Tim's Ziploc sandwich bags, like what he had left in his Hyundai, but similar—a transparent, airtight plastic food storage container with a re-sealable sliding mechanism along the top lip. She brought the envelope to the sunlight streaming through the bedroom window to observe what looked to be a fragment of parchment, much like the digital words she had assembled with Rabbi Schreiber. But unlike those scanned photocopies, this scrap of decayed animal skin appeared to be an original. The scribe's handwriting seemed similar, but not identical, to the script found on Tim's DVD disks. This new text consisted of no more than three words.
The first letter of the first word was a "yod", followed by a "shin," then a "vav," which at the end of a word might be either a vowel or a consonant. She read the word aloud. YESHU, the Hebrew name for Jesus, the same that appeared so frequently in the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelations, but never in the Old Testament. And, more importantly from the perspective of early Christian history, never reported by anyone who lived during Jesus' lifetime. What had always seemed important to her was that records of Jesus' life and his extraordinary religious ministry were circulated by people who never actually knew him in his own time, but by disciples who lived at least a full generation later. That Mark, the earliest and perhaps most influential of the gospels, was a member of a succeeding generation, a half-century after the Preacher's death, led scholars to conclude that everything known about the Christ came into the modern world secondhand. Even the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who mentioned a messianic figure thought by many to be Jesus, both lived and wrote some thirty years after the Preacher's death.
To be certain it was not a figment of her imagination, Gabby reread the name. Out loud, she repeatedly pronounced YESHU to confirm in sound what her eyes witnessed. It suddenly dawned on her that in her fingers was the earliest historic confirmation of this most holy man. But what differentiated it from the multiple stories of Jesus found in the New Testament, this small document was contemporaneous with other fragments found in Cave XII, a direct link to Jesus of Nazareth in his own time! She wondered if Jesus belonged on the roster of students at the yeshiva of Ein Arugot. And if, somehow, he was linked to the Prince of Light mentioned in messianic liturgy in this desert yeshiva.
Questions multiplied in her mind faster than answers. But if only some of her suspicions were correct, then the small document in her hand was arguably the most valuable artifact in Christian history!
While she questioned how this revelatory fragment had found its way into her Kittel Bible, blood flushed her cheeks with a hot pulsating heat. Numbness seized her limbs while the dreaded tremor she routinely experienced in times of stress returned to her hands. It took all her powers of concentration to avoid panic. "Get a grip, get a grip," she repeated to herself. How? When? She kept mulling over the same questions. Then, suddenly, a glimmer of lost memory edged into her consciousness. Hadn't Tim visited the apartment to get his anti-cholesterol medication? And his favorite razor? No doubt it was then that he stored the fragment into the chapter of Isaiah's messianic vision. Knowing how he enjoyed sporting with her, she didn't rule out a practical joke.
But upon reflection, that didn't seem plausible, for why would he allow himself to become a fugitive for a scrap of counterfeit text? Or lose his life for a bogus reproduction? And why would Father Benoit, no amateur when it came to ancient texts, send goons to ransack her apartment and kidnap her for a mere forgery? In the end, she was compelled to believe that Tim had discovered this priceless fragment in Cave XII, put it in one of his Ziploc bags, then, at some subsequent time, transferred it from the Ziploc to the airtight envelope, probably at the Monastery of St. George. More than a quarter hour passed before she realized there were still two additional words to translate.
The middle one presented no difficulty. An Aramaic "bet" followed by a "raish." The Aramaic bar, the common designation at the time for "son of," identifying paternal lineage.
The last word was composed of another yud, "y," followed by a vowel for "O," then a sin, "S," after which the parchment appeared to have decomposed. But the three letters were sufficient to form the proper name YOSE, missing only a final pey, "F," to complete the name YOSE[F]!
No surprise there, for the final two words complemented the first. YESHU BAR YOSEF. Jesus the son of Joseph. If genuine, this fragment was recorded by a scribe living contemporaneously with the man Christendom later came to believe was infused with the Divine spirit.
Holding in her hand a treasure of unimaginable value, she considered becoming wealthy for life. Hiding a small fragment that only a handful of people knew about presented few obstacles. Packed into a pocket, it wouldn't even show up on a metal detector at the airport. In Chicago, she could lock it in a safe deposit to wait and see if anyone noticed it was gone, and during that time, give careful thought to its final disposition. The Church of Rome or a worthy museum would pay a king's ransom for it.
That concerned the future, but she faced a more immediate decision, what to do with this treasure in the next few hours. And to make this decision she needed a quiet place to calm her nerves and, even more importantly, seek inspiration. Her favorite spot in the Hebrew Union College library would work for quiet and privacy, but not for inspiration. For the latter, she felt drawn not to a Jewish location, but somewhere closer to the roots of Christianity, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian sector of Jerusalem's Old City, the traditional site of Jesus' crucifixion, his burial, and resurrection, as close to the Preacher's presence on earth as it was possible to get.
Before leaving the house, she found a vinyl folder used for notes at academic conferences and tucked Tim's airtight envelope with the Jesus fragment between its hard covers, then stripped off her blouse and ran a roll of Dermaskin tape around her torso to secure the folder to the small of her back. A thought that Tim might have employed a similar stratagem when fleeing the Monastery of St. George coursed through her mind and then, in the rush of emotion, was lost. Her bra strap snapped into place above the Derma tape.
She avoided a city bus running from the Katamon District to the Old City in favor of walking. The plan was sound, but ghosts from her abduction in Independence Park immediately returned with images of suspicious men following her. She didn't like the looks of a man and woman in European leather jackets on the sidewalk, moving behind her, the woman with her hair pulled back tightly behind her head, the man with a slight limp. In her judgment, they didn't walk close enough to be a couple or friends in conversation. The female pressed a cell phone to her ear, her hands animating her speech. Gabby's feet almost skipped over the pavement, far too fast, she felt, to imitate a normal pedestrian. Her lips repeated a mantra her emotions didn't believe: that at the moment, nobody could possibly know what she carried taped to her flesh. Still, she was aware that by taking possession of this invaluable fragment, she had entered a dangerous realm in which Tim had already surrendered his life. A tiny patch of parchment from the distant past, wholly unknown until this moment, had cast her into a world governed by dark, perhaps mystic powers, a world populated by passionate defenders of religious doctrine.
She approached the Old City walls, originally constructed by the Hasmonean kings a century and a half before Jesus' birth. Her path led through the southernmost Zion Gate where wide boulevards narrowed into a warren of alleys bordered by small souvenir shops bristling with silver and brass menorahs and crosses. Small meat, bakery, and produce stalls packed the crowded pathway of what was once a Roman cardoinis, the ancient axis point now dividing this modern Oriental bazaar into sectors. Above the confusion of buyers and vendors maneuvering for commercial advantage, the 140-meter-tall spire of the Redeemer's Church provided Gabby a recognizable landmark to locate the subdued, but far more historically important, Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
From the inauspicious courtyard fronting the Sepulcher Church, her passage led through a small portal to the eastern atrium and the adjacent martyrion, now filled with clusters of pilgrims and tourists consulting their guidebooks and framing flash photographs. Feeling a measure of security in their numbers, she marched among them to the anastasis directly above the holy spot where Christian tradition sites the sepulcher of Jesus. Three olive-skinned, bewhiskered Orthodox priests in full-length black robes stood guard at the Angel's Chapel, aggressively monitoring foot traffic as visitors formed a single line to pass the holiest of holy sites in Christendom. When it was her turn to approach the Sepulture in air laced with incense, she squeezed into the burial chamber beside a granite tombstone, purported to be the Savior's last presence on earth before resurrection. A combination of pilgrims and tourists pressed, but did not shove, from behind, forcing her to shorten her petition seeking spiritual guidance to the god of the Christians. By the time she might have expected a flash of inspiration, she was already through the exit portal to the Angel's Chapel and looking up into an elaborately decorated dome above. The viewing, which she had thought might be long enough for a meaningful conversation with God, lasted no more than a few minutes.
Once outside the burial chamber, she mollified her frustration by moving through the historic Crusader basilica in pursuit of a quiet place to confront her thoughts. Nothing worked until, by chance, she discovered an empty grotto where an informational plank in English, French, and Hebrew told how, in this place, Jewish ossuaries from the first century of the Common Era had been found embedded in niches cleaved from the sandstone walls. The nearly dark space, free of pilgrims and tourists, presented to Gabby a proper place to complete what she had left undone at the Sepulture itself.
She randomly selected one of the vacant burial niches and, recalling how Jesus lived and died a Jew, summarily designated it as Jesus' final sepulture, not the traditional site recognized by the Orthodox and Latin churches. After dropping to her knees on the granite floor and reaching behind her back to touch the vinyl folder taped to her flesh, she addressed a prayer first to the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who she knew, then to the Father of Jesus, who she didn't. When words stopped flowing, she contracted into herself and listened to the silence.
In that moment, she understood how the excitement of discovery had temporarily eclipsed her judgment as, she surmised, it had twisted Tim's. Such rapture had led her to overlook how the Jesus fragment, now taped to the small of her back, had the same standing as the other Dead Sea fragments Itamar believed illegally held by the Vatican. She knew then, without hesitation, that this treasure from the past didn't belong to her just because Tim had placed it in her Kittel Bible. Why he had not immediately relinquished this priceless document to the Israeli authorities she did not know, but she had absolutely no doubt it was never intended for her enrichment. Equally significant, she also understood that to keep this Jesus fragment was guaranteed to end her friendship with Itamar, a friendship she had come to regard as far more valuable than a scrap of parchment, no matter how it linked Christianity with its past and no matter what riches it might command on the antiquities market.
By now, her initial shock of discovery morphed into terror. Billions of believers throughout the world anchored their faiths upon God revealing His will to mankind. They structured their lives, planned their futures, and trained their children in the certain knowledge of what the Lord wanted them to do. Until this moment, their faiths were rooted in the gospels of Jesus' disciples who knew of the Preacher only from testimony provided by a subsequent generation of observers. But the Jesus fragment changed all that. Solid documentary proof of his earthly existence suddenly removed him from the realm of hearsay testimony and placed him in the realm of historic fact. The Gospels taught their practitioners of their Savior's birth, but failed to tell them of his youth or his education. They then continued chronicling his biography during a brief ministry, some three decades later, just prior to his death. Now suddenly, something definitive was known about his life during the intervening years.
She heard someone say from the shadows behind her, "You never came to lunch with me. A shame because we might have become better friends." There was a slight echo in the chamber, but she knew she had heard the voice before. Pivoting on her knees, she rotated about to observe the silhouette of an Orthodox monk towering above her, his black habit blending into the darkness beyond. The form was that of an Orthodox priest but the voice was unquestionably that of Father Benoit Matteau.
"What the hell are you doing here?" she snapped, struggling to rise to her feet. "I thought you were in Rome."
He stepped closer as she found footing to face him directly. "I was, but I now have urgent business here in Jerusalem."
"How did you get into the country? There's a warrant for your arrest."
"Of course there is, but Israel is bordered by desert. I have friends for whom smuggling is a sacred occupation. For them, borders are mere lines some cartographer drew on a map many years ago."
"You'll be arrested."
"Possibly. The prospect of imprisonment now isn't as threatening as it was when I was younger."
"You followed me here," she said, exposing her uneasiness. "No, not me. My friends
Irena and Alexander. They're nasty refugees from Russia, but when you need them and are prepared to pay, they can be quite useful. They took you on a ride to Hebron but, of course, you're not expected to recognize them."
"Why did you have them follow me here?" she said, looking for pockets to hide an expected tremor in her hands.
"Until this moment, I wasn't certain Tim had transferred the Jesus fragment to you. But once I learned you were headed to this holy sanctuary, all doubt disappeared."
"Ridiculous."
"Whoever sees the fragment becomes touched by the sacred history of our Savior. You're no exception."
"You forget, Father, I'm a rabbi, not a Christian believer."
"That's just the point, my dear. Why would a rabbi come to this Christian holy place unless she were smitten by the fragment? You must have been, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I've come to Israel under considerable danger to offer a very large sum of money for what does not belong to you."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
He wheezed an artificial sigh of exasperation. "That sounds like a cliché in a bad detective movie. You know very well what I'm talking about. My sponsors have put a large sum into a Swiss bank account. All you need is the code to retrieve it. This need not be a complicated exchange. I can give you the code the minute I've verified the fragment. No legal documents. No abominable middlemen sucking off their commissions. No government oversight. Just a quick verification and you'll be a very rich woman."
Several long seconds elapsed before she eventually asked, "How much?" "Twelve million US."
"And if I don't accept?"
"My friend Irena has an EpiPen, you know what that is, don't you? It's an injector for penetrating clothing. Irena's EpiPen is filled with a nasty concoction of viruses from the KGB in Moscow. If she sticks you, you'll probably make it to Hadassah Hospital, but the doctors there will be helpless to stop the degeneration of your immune system. I'm told it's a terribly painful way to end a life."