The Fifth Gospel (10 page)

The thrill of those words was more intense than I had expected. “Before I do,” I asked, “could I touch it? Just for a second. I'll be very careful.”

He didn't answer. Instead, with a practiced movement he notched the volume off the shelf, opened the gilded leather cover—and out slid something gnarled and awful looking. It was no bigger than a necklace case, with rust-colored scratches that webbed the black, pitted surface of its cover. The librarians had never removed the original binding to slip it inside the papal covers.

“There's something you need to know,” Ugo said, “before you touch
this. Something I was able to track down only after I discovered it. Three hundred years ago, the pope sent a family of priests to search for the oldest manuscripts in the world. One of them stumbled upon a library in the deserts of Nitrian Egypt, in the Monastery of the Syrians, where an abbot had assembled a collection of texts in the nine hundreds AD. Even in the abbot's day, these texts were extremely old. Today they're the most ancient books known to exist. The abbot printed a warning inside them:
He who removes these books from the monastery will be accursed of God
. The priest, Assemani, ignored this warning, and on his way back to Rome his boat capsized in the Nile. One of the monks was drowned. Assemani paid men to dredge up his manuscripts, but the books needed repair for water damage, which is one reason this book ended up on a forgotten shelf.

“The other reason is that when Assemani's cousin tried to make a catalog of these manuscripts, he died in the attempt. A third Assemani took over, only to have a fire break out in his apartment beside the library. The whole catalog was destroyed, and no one has ever completed it. That's why no record of these manuscripts exists, and nobody seems to know they're here.”

“Ugo,” I said, “why are you telling me this?”

“Because while I consider myself to be above superstition, and lucky to have found this book, you're entitled to decide for yourself.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” I was a teacher of modern gospel methods. The scientific, rational reading of the Bible. I didn't even hesitate.

He shifted the ancient text between his own gloves so that it sat in the palm of one hand while he raised the other for me to see. Where the manuscript had made contact with the glove, the latex was ruddy brown.

“The cover,” he said, “leaves an almost indelible stain. It took me days to scrub it off my skin. Please, wear the gloves.”

He waited until I had done it; then, tenderly, like the doctor who placed Peter in my arms, he handed the text over.

Never had I seen a book made that way. Like a prehistoric creature found living at the bottom of the sea, it bore only the faintest resemblance to its modern cousins. The manuscript's cover was made with a sheet of skin hanging off like a satchel flap, designed to wrap around the pages again and again, to protect them. A leather tail dangled from it, beltlike, looping around the book to cinch it closed.

I undid the straps as carefully as if I were arranging hairs on a baby's head. Inside, the pages were gray and soft. Flowing letters were penned in long, smooth strokes with no rounded edges: Syriac. Beside them, inked right there on the page, was a Latin index written by some long-dead Vatican librarian.

Formerly Book VIII among the Nitrian Syriac collection.

And then, very clearly:

Gospel Harmony of Tatian (Diatessaron).

A shudder went through me. Here in my hands was the creature invented by one of the giants of early Christianity. The canonical life of Jesus of Nazareth in a single book. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John fused together to form the super-gospel of the ancient Syrian church.

There were no sounds down here except from the titanic earthworms of ductwork on the ceiling, ventilated by a faraway mechanical lung. But in my ears was the watery drumming of my blood.

“Dyed goatskin,” Ugo said nervously under his breath, “over papyrus boards. Pages made of parchment.”

With a type of tool I didn't recognize, he turned the first page.

I gasped. Everything inside was too water-stained to read. But on the next page, the stains became smaller. And on the third, handwriting became visible.

“You're right,” I whispered. “It's a diglot.”

There were two columns on the page: the left one in Syriac, the right one in Greek. And this time, when Ugo turned the leaf, it was as if the fog of damage had begun to roll off. There, in all capital letters, with no spaces in between, was a line of Greek I could transform into something familiar.

ΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΡΗΜΑΘΕΟΥΕΠΙΙΩΑΝΝΗΝΤΟΝΤΟΥΖΑΧΑΡΙΟΥ
.

“
The word of God came to John the son of Zechariah
,” I said. “That's from Luke.”

Ugo glanced at me, then back at the page. In his eyes there was now fire, too.

“But look at the next line!” I said. “
He confessed, ‘I am not the Christ
.
'
That verse is only in the gospel of John.”

Ugo searched his pockets for something but didn't seem to find it. He dashed back to the duffel bag and returned, panting, with a notebook.

“Father Alex,” he said, “this is the list. These are the Shroud references we need to check. The first one is Matthew 27:59. The parallel verses are Mark—”

Before I could scan the page, though, he frowned and stopped short. For a moment he turned and stared at the scanner.

“What's wrong?”

He cocked an ear. Distantly there was the faintest sound.

But he shook his head and said, “Air current. Carry on.”

I wondered how he could be so focused on his small list of verses—or even on the Shroud—when an entire gospel lay before us. I would've stayed here a month, a year, until I had taught myself enough Syriac to read both columns together, every word.

Yet the muscles of Ugo's face were strained. All trace of jovial good humor had left. “Read, Father,” he said. “Please.”

There were eight verses on the list. I knew them by heart. Each of the four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—says that Jesus' dead body was wrapped in linen after the crucifixion. Two of the gospels—Luke and John—also say that disciples returned after the Resurrection and saw the linen lying by itself in the empty tomb. But the Diatessaron, by merging the gospels into a single story, distilled all these references to only two moments: the burial and the reopening of the tomb.

“Ugo, there's a problem,” I said, finding the first of the quotations. “There's too much rot here. I can't make out some of the words.”

Hazy black stains spotted the page, rendering words illegible. I had read about manuscripts destroyed by fungus but had never seen one firsthand.

Ugo collected himself. Then as calmly as he could, he said, “Very well, scrape it off.”

I blinked at him. “I can't. That would damage the page.”

Ugo reached over. “Then show me the word, and
I'll
do it.”

I moved the book away from him.

His temper flashed. “Father, you know how important that one word is.”

“What word?”

He shut his eyes and collected himself. “Three of the gospels say Jesus was buried in a linen
cloth
. Singular. But John says
cloths
. Plural.”

“I don't understand.”

He looked incredulous. “Singular means we have a burial shroud. Plural means we have something else. If John was right, then all of this has been a grand mistake, hasn't it? The man who wrote the Diatessaron had to choose. And if he really saw the Shroud in Edessa, then he would've chosen
cloth
, singular.”

This newfound intensity repelled me. “You told me we were here to prove the Shroud was in Edessa when the Diatessaron was written.”

He shook his list of Bible verses in the air. “
Eight
Shroud references. Eight. Four from Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Four from John.” He pointed to the manuscript. “The fellow who wrote this book—”

“Tatian.”

“—had to break the tie. He couldn't use
both
words, so which did he choose? The battle begins here, Father. So let's have it.”

Yet no matter how I squinted, the rot was impenetrable. “I'll check the other reference,” I suggested. “The empty tomb.”

But there, too, the word was hidden by black splotches.

Ugo removed a plastic kit from his breast pocket. “I brought swabs and solvent. We'll begin with saliva. The enzymes may be enough.”

I placed a hand on his arm. “Stop. No.”

“
Father, I didn't bring you
—”

“Please, tell the Cardinal Librarian what you've found. The restorers will do this the right way. We don't have to risk damaging it.”

He became incensed. “The
C
ardinal Librarian
? You said I could trust you! You gave me your word!”

“Ugo, damage these pages and you'll have nothing. Neither will anyone else. Forever.”

“I didn't come here to be lectured. Father Simon told me you had experience with—”

I lifted the manuscript up in the air.

“Stop!” he cried. “You'll set off the alarm!”

When the book was level with my eyes, I said, “Move the flashlight at an angle. Maybe I can see the indentations of the pen strokes.”

He stared at me, then patted his pockets and produced a small magnifying glass. “Yes. Okay, good. Use this.”

One hundred years ago, a lost book of Archimedes had turned up in a Greek Orthodox convent, hidden in plain sight. A medieval monk had
erased the treatise by scraping the ink off the parchment and had written a liturgical text on the blank pages instead. But under the right light, from the right angle, it was still possible to see the old indentations, the tracks of that ancient pen.

“Stop,” I said. “Keep the beam just like that.”

“What do you see?”

I blinked and looked again.

“What is it?” he repeated.

“Ugo . . .”

“Speak! Please!”

“This isn't rot.”

“Then what is it?”

I squinted. “These are brushstrokes.”

“What?”

“These stains are
paint
. Someone already found this book. It's been censored.”

THE BLOTS WERE everywhere.
Swallowing up words, phrases, entire verses. The text beneath was impossible to read.

In shock, Ugo murmured, “You're saying someone got to this book before we did?”

“Not anytime recently. This paint looks very old.”

I scanned the text, trying to understand what I was seeing.

And Joseph took down Jesus' body.