The Constantine Codex

by Paul L Maier

  Bartholomew had visibly changed. Gone was the genial patriarch. In his place was a scowling prophet with flushed countenance who had again wrapped his hand, or rather fist, around the knob of his staff as if to cudgel Venetians off the pages of history. “You know of the Emperor Heraclius?” he asked.

  “Byzantine emperor soon after Justinian?” Shannon suggested. “Lived in Muhammad’s time?”

  “Yes, exactly, Madame Weber. The Venetians broke open his tomb and stole the golden crown right off his head-with some of his hairs still attached to it! You can see it yet today at St. Mark’s basilica in Venice.”

  The disaster at the beginning of the thirteenth century seemed to impinge even into Jon’s twenty-first. His hopes of finding any written materials from the time of Constantine seemed to vanish with the Venetians. Almost timidly, he asked, “What about the other treasures at the Church of the Apostles-the library, the codices, the manuscripts? The Venetians carted those off also?”

  Bartholomew thought for several moments, each of which seemed an endless span of time to Jon. Finally the patriarch shook his head. “No, those barbarians, those putrid pirates, couldn’t even read. They wanted gold, not books.”

  Jon tried not to look too elated. Swimming in relief-at least preliminary relief-he asked, “What… whatever happened to the written materials? Did the Turks destroy them?”

  “Some were lost in the fires that burned at various parts of Constantinople after the conquest, but the church saved a goodly number of important documents.”

  “And… where are they now?”

  “Some are at church and seminary libraries of the Orthodox churches across the world-St. Vladimir’s in New York, St. Catherine’s at Mount Sinai, Mount Athos-but many are here in the patriarchate.”

  Glorious news! Now was the time for Jon to bare his heart. How abrupt should he be? A bald, frontal assault with an unvarnished confession of what he and Shannon ultimately desired? A series of gradual insinuations and hints? No, plain honesty would be best, he decided.

  “Your All Holiness,” Jon began, “I wonder if you’d be generous enough to let us see some of the written materials-the documents, the older manuscripts?”

  The patriarch seemed somewhat puzzled, hesitant.

  “Well, certainly not today,” Jon quickly added, almost in panic. “But perhaps before we leave Istanbul?”

  Bartholomew finally nodded. “I only wonder why we have not talked more about the matter that concerns me most, concerns the church most, which is-”

  “The debate, of course?” Jon broke in.

  “Yes, the debate, Professor Weber. I am to be joint moderator with Mustafa Selim. Don’t you think we should talk more about the debate?”

  “Yes, certainly. This must indeed be our central concern. How well do you know Mustafa Selim?”

  “Well, we are not the closest of friends, obviously, but we do respect one another. Each time Christians are attacked somewhere in Turkey, he publicly deplores it and tries to build tolerance among the more fanatic elements in Islam. Several times when our patriarchate was bombed, he even sent workers over to help in the repair. A good man. But now, Professor and Mrs. Weber, please to join me for lunch so that we can plan together at table.”

  Both the patriarch and Jon had checklists for items related to the debate. Jon was most concerned for the safety of the Christians inside Hagia Sophia and whether there were really enough in Istanbul to constitute half the audience. To his surprise, the patriarch said they could have filled the entire structure with Christians, since many were coming to Istanbul for the event from Asiatic Turkey. He also reported that he and Mustafa Selim were in charge of ticket distribution, and the latter passed them out only to known, moderate Muslims. And yes, the police would be able to assure the safety of those inside.

  For his part, Bartholomew wanted to know the main thrust of Jon’s opening remarks and the strategy that he planned to pursue. In response, Jon unpacked his arsenal of Christian arguments as well as the principal points in Islam that he felt were open to challenge. The patriarch’s repeated noddings in affirmation were a welcome sight for Jon, but his concluding caution was quite sobering. “You must walk a very careful line, Professor Weber. If you triumph in the debate-or, I should say, when you triumph-please do so gently. Were you to mortify your opponent, there could be ‘blood in the streets,’ as you Americans put it. On the other hand, our faith must be defended with vigor, for it is God’s own truth. The way will be narrow-and difficult.”

  “That’s very sage advice, Your All Holiness, and I thank you for it.”

  As they stood up from the table, their host said something in Greek to an aide. This translated itself when an aged, scholarly monk appeared and greeted them in the courtyard below the patriarch’s quarters.

  “This is Brother Gregorios,” Bartholomew said. “He is our archivist and librarian. I have instructed him to let you examine our entire collection of ancient records and documents anytime you wish.”

  Jon felt like wrapping his arms around the patriarch for a big hug, but he checked himself. Offering most genuine gratitude, they left the patriarchate.

  On the drive back to the Hilton, Jon was pensive, even crestfallen. Shannon asked what the problem might be.

  “What a study in contrasts,” he commented, shaking his head. “We’ve just conversed with the spiritual head of the second-largest church in Christendom-the eastern pope, so to speak. But the patriarchate is so much smaller than the Vatican, so very modest by comparison. It just… doesn’t seem fair.”

  Shannon sighed. “Well, you can thank the Ottomans for that. Just imagine what might have happened had the Turks not conquered the Byzantine Empire.”

  “Or what if they had converted to Christianity rather than Islam? We’d have a very different world today.”

  “We’d have a better world!”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss, thankful that their driver was so engrossed in fighting his way through Istanbul traffic that he took no notice.

  The debate was one week away. All eight thousand portable seats on the main floor inside Hagia Sophia had been spoken for. Additional folding chairs would surround the basilica on all sides, with closed-circuit television screens and loudspeakers conveying the program inside. Representatives of Christian church bodies would have VIP seating-meaning they could sit inside the basilica-as would an equal number of Islamic leaders, 84 percent of whom would be Sunni and 16 percent Shia, in accord with their relative numbers in the Islamic world.

  Already the lofty galleries of Hagia Sophia were getting cluttered with television cameras, cables, and broadcast paraphernalia, next to which a special section was reserved for the world press corps. The rest of the surrounding galleries were given over to additional seating. Adjacent to the three main entrances to the basilica were security checkpoints with turnstiles, first-aid facilities, and of course, additional porta-potties.

  Nothing was left to chance. Click and Clack, who suddenly had additional security help from the CIA, were putting in twelve-hour days. Each evening, they briefed Jon, Shannon, Dick, and Osman. Ferris seemed to be in constant phone or e-mail contact with Marylou Kaiser and the ICO in Cambridge. Jon himself was keeping his wits sharp through verbal duels with Osman.

  Yet Jon was acutely aware that there was such a thing as too much preparation. Two days before the debate, he and Shannon decided to take a break. Perhaps an excursion on the Bosporus? A museum tour of the Topkapi Palace? Never! Like iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet, they were back again at the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate to explore the archives. This time their host was not the patriarch himself but Brother Gregorios, the librarian-archivist.

  A diminutive older figure with a pointed gray beard and sallow skin, Gregorios seemed to have spent his entire life in row after row of book stacks. At first he was somewhat cool toward Jon and Shannon, as if his assigned task of showing them around his domain would cut into his beloved affa
ir with words-printed, written, painted, pictured. But their obvious interest and apt queries seemed to melt the old man’s heart as he recognized them as genuine bibliophiles.

  They had seen much larger libraries, of course-here there were only six hundred thousand books-but they had not come for the printed word. Instead, manuscripts were their target, early codices and documents from times of yore, the older the better. They had to be looking at the right place. It was in Istanbul that the Greek scholar-churchman Philotheos Bryennios had discovered the famous Didache, lost to the world since the third century, when Eusebius, the father of church history, almost included it in the New Testament canon. The Teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles through the Twelve Apostles was the real name of the work, lost for fifteen centuries until 1873 and Bryennios’s discovery.

  In the reading room there were ten computers, at three of which young, black-suited students were peering into screens. Jon looked at one of the keyboards and winced, not because the lettering was Greek but because several letters were interchanged from the regular QWERTY keyboard. Then again, he hadn’t really planned to use those computers for overseas e-mail but in place of a card catalog.

  Gregorios showed them row after row of book stacks and explained what sorts of titles were shelved on each. This was important, since they were hardly using the Library of Congress cataloging system. Yet all these were printed materials and thus of only secondary importance to Jon and Shannon. Still they registered appropriate interest until Jon finally asked, “And the archives, Brother Gregorios? Where are the archives?”

  “Oh yes. Please to follow me.”

  He led them to the far northern end of the library’s ground floor and down a metal stairway into a broad hall. All four walls were completely lined with bookshelves laden with ledgers organized by year. Jon looked around and asked, “I wonder if my wife and I could examine some of these volumes for… perhaps the next hour? When we’ve finished, we’ll come to your office.”

  “As you wish.” He bowed slightly and left the archives.

  “All right, my darling; let’s peruse all this with a passion!” Jon said, exulting in their solitude.

  “Oh, of course, Jon; I’m sure we can read all of this in an hour.” She grinned.

  Jon chuckled and pulled a book off the shelf. It began with events at the patriarchate in January 1848. Much of it was in a flowing Greek script that was at first difficult to read, but soon Jon had made out several pages. He put the book back where he had found it and said, “Now let’s find the earliest year here.”

  Chasing down row after row, he found a really tattered tome with fading leather covers. “It’s from 1503, Shannon, just fifty years after the Muslim conquest.” Then he found another section of the hall devoted to the oldest printed books as well as manuscripts that predated them. He was overjoyed. “We have incunabula here,” he called out. “Incunabula!”

  “Great!” She hurried over and looked at the title page. “Fabulous, Jon. Look at the date. It’s 1483!”

  “The year Martin Luther was born. He could have read this book.” It was Hartmann Schedel’s Nurnberger Chronica, the great picture book of the Middle Ages. Jon carefully paged through it. Then he laughed. “Never mind that this elaborate woodcut of Padua is exactly the same as that for Verona-here fifty pages earlier.”

  “They must have counted on medieval readers having short memories,” Shannon said, smiling.

  The manuscripts, however, were Jon’s Holy Grail, the potential treasure that had lured them from Cambridge to Istanbul. They were indexed on a large placard posted over the wider stacks where they were stored. The dates ran back from the 1400s and 1300s to the 600s and 500s. A rippling thrill tingled through Jon, although he realized it would take a much longer visit to know what they contained. Today’s was only a quick survey.

  They retraced their steps to Gregorios’s office to extend their thanks and take their leave. “I think we have a general impression of the layout here, good brother,” Jon said. “We have seen it all, haven’t we?”

  He nodded. “All but the geniza, of course.”

  Jon chuckled at the man’s use of a Hebrew term. “The geniza? I didn’t know you were Jewish! A sacred dump for old Scriptures?”

  Brother Gregorios joined in the laughter. “Well, that’s what we call our room for… bad manuscripts-I want to say-for leaves missing from books or… or codices with bindings cracked and pages that are not readable or are too torn to save. We do try to save some of them when we can. And maybe even try to rebuild them-no, what is the word?”

  “Rebind them?” Shannon offered.

  “Yes, rebind them.”

  “And where is your geniza?” Jon asked.

  “In the basement.”

  “The basement? I hope you have humidity control.”

  “Oh yes, the whole library and archives-and basement-are at 48 percent humidity and twenty degrees temperature.”

  “Twenty degrees, you say?”

  “That’s centigrade, Jon,” Shannon said. “In Fahrenheit it would be about… sixty-eight degrees.”

  Jon made a mental note: Think first; speak later.

  As they were walking out of the library, Jon did an about-face. The opportunity was simply too good to pass up. He walked back to Gregorios’s office and asked, somewhat sheepishly, “I wonder, good brother-just to complete our tour-if we might briefly visit also the geniza?”

  “Well, there’s not much to see there, but… as you wish.”

  He led them into the basement. The room was poorly lit. Next to the light switch was a clear plastic cube with temperature and humidity barrel graphs, showing that at least the proper environment was being maintained. As Gregorios had assured them, the temperature was a slightly cool but comfortable twenty degrees Celsius and the humidity was carefully controlled. Otherwise, mold would have blanketed everything in this literary catchall and ruined it.

  It was hardly a picture of disciplined order. On the east side of the room were torn books, orphaned printed pages, and empty bindings. In the center was an apparently uncataloged miscellany of dusty manuscripts in partial state of preservation, and at the extreme western edge of the room were stacks of ponderous old tomes bowing the wooden shelves with their weight.

  “Ugly as all this appears, Jon,” Shannon said, “I suppose our teams will have to photograph every bit of it?”

  “Most of it, I think. There may be some golden nuggets in this junk heap.”

  Jon tried to discern the arrangement of materials in the room, but there seemed to be little or none. Shannon walked over to the fat tomes, pulled one off the shelf, and blew dust off it. She opened to the title page, and her eyes widened. “Listen to this, Jon: Omile Hrisostomou, 491-496. That would be Sermons of Chrysostom, AD 491-496, written in Constantinople in 847.”

  “Interesting,” Jon said. “Even though we have those sermons elsewhere, a ninth-century codex is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “Ye-yes it is!” Shannon snorted in nasal tone, as she inhaled suddenly and let loose with a colossal sneeze. “Sorry. It’s the dust.”

  The other ancient tomes offered more sermons by Greek church fathers. Shannon turned to another codex that was almost on the floor, since its weight had bulged the too-thin wooden shelf supporting it. Holding her nose, she blew the dust off the faded calfskin stretched across a thin wooden board cover. “This one looks like it’s fairly complete, although the back cover is missing.” Opening to the title page, she read aloud: “Biblia Beta. Kaine Diatheke tou Kuriou Iesou Christou…”

  She read on silently, then asked, “What do you think? This one could be interesting.”

  Jon made no response. He was busy in the miscellaneous manuscript section.

  “Jon, did you hear me?”

  “What’s that, Shannon?”

  “We have an interesting title page here, in very elegant lettering.” She repeated the Greek for what, in English, would be “Book Two: The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Je
sus Christ, one of fifty copies.”

  Jon hurried over to Shannon’s side and examined the page. His eyes narrowed. He glanced further down the title page and read aloud the rest of the Greek, followed by his translation, as he would write it out later that day in the same relative positioning as the Greek: One of fifty copies commissioned by Caesar Victor Constantinus Maximus Augustus and servant of God who authorized Eusebius Pamphili to have these prepared by his scribes in the church at Caesarea Palaestina and distributed throughout Constantinople in the year 1088 AUC

  Jon realized he was breathing heavily. His face grew flushed. His pulse accelerated, and his hand actually trembled as he paged quickly through random sections of the codex. Finally he halted his frenetic paging and stared at her. “My darling,” he began, in what sounded more like gargle than elocution. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Do you have any idea what you’ve found here?”

  “Well, Constantine’s name is on it, so it must be significant. But what about that date? Constantine died in 337, but this is from 1088, and we have many materials from the eleventh century.”

  “That’s 1088 AUC, Shannon. Ab urbe condita -from the founding of the city.”

  “Rome, of course-founded 753 BC!” Shannon recalled. “Okay, so our date is 1088 minus 753 or… AD 335?”

  “Right. And that’s exactly when Eusebius says Constantine commissioned him to do this.”

  “So this could be the real thing, Jon?”

  He slowly shook his head. “I’d hate to be premature, but yes, it could well be.” He broke into a great smile. “It’s well known that Constantine had commissioned Eusebius to prepare fifty elegant copies of Scripture, but none of them has ever been found. And just look at the layout: four handsome columns of beautiful Greek lettering on each page of vellum, just like the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates only a bit later.”

  Jon paged further in growing excitement. “Aside from the Sinaiticus, we have only two other codices from that time: the Vaticanus and the Alexandrinus. This is… this could be… well, I’m not given to superlatives. Let’s just say that this might be a… a simply stupendous find. Depending on what the text says, this could… well, it could be a discovery far more important than even the Dead Sea Scrolls! How in the world, Shannon, do you have such off-the-wall great luck, such over-the-top serendipity, that-?”