The Fifth Gospel (26 page)

“Where?”

“I saw his face! I saw it!”

The sound is coming from beyond the door. From the outer room.

“Shhh,” I whisper, drawing Peter to my shoulder.

The shutters are still locked. The door is still closed.

“Father!” comes the voice. “What's happening in there?”

“It's okay,” I whisper. “Nightmare, Peter. Nightmare. Nobody's here.”

But he shakes. The fear is so strong, his body is stiff.

“I'll show you,” I say, turning on the bedside lamp.

The room is untouched. Agent Fontana beats on the main door again.

“Father! Open up!”

I stagger out to the door, Peter clinging to me. When I open it, Fontana makes a fluid movement: his hand, moving away from the holster at his hip.

“Nightmare,” I say. “Just a nightmare.”

But Fontana isn't looking at me. He's looking over my shoulder. He goes first to the bedroom, then checks his way back out. Only when the examination is done does he say something for Peter's benefit.

“Everything looks safe, Father. Very safe.”

I kiss Peter on the forehead. When we close the door again, though, I hear Fontana say into the radio, “Send someone to double-check the courtyard.”

It's half an hour before Peter gets back to sleep. He leans against me while I stroke his head. We keep the lights on. At home, there's a book we read to ward off nightmares. It's about a turtle who survives a thunderstorm. But the turtle isn't here, so I gently knead the bridge of his nose and sing him a song. As I do, I wonder if Michael Black was right.

“Maybe,” I think out loud, “we should take a vacation.”

He nods. “America,” he says dreamily.

“How about Anzio?”

A beach town thirty miles south of Rome. I've saved enough money that two or three days won't break us. I've been considering a special trip anyway. My boy will be leaving for primary school soon.

“I want to go home,” Peter says.

A flashlight down in the courtyard sends a beam strafing across the shutters. There's the faintest hiss of a gendarme radio.

“I know, Pete,” I whisper. “I know.”

C
HAPTER
12

M
Y OWN DREAMS
are uneasy. They're all of Ugo.

For a time, after the night he and I spent down in the Vatican Library, we worked together so closely that I mistook our acquaintance for friendship. The morning after our adventure in the library vault, we went together to explain his discovery to Uncle Lucio. The Cardinal Librarian was the man we should've told, but His Eminence would never have let Ugo keep his job, let alone keep his hands on the manuscript. All lay workers have to sign ninety-five moral conditions of employment, and librarians tend to be sticklers for the ones about papal property. Lucio, though, had a moneymaking exhibit on the line and could be counted on to protect the golden goose. What I hadn't predicted was what
else
he would do.

No public announcement was ever made about the Diatessaron, because Ugo lobbied hard against one. But forty-eight hours after our meeting with my uncle, an article appeared in a Rome paper:
FIFTH G
OSPEL DISCOVERED IN VATICAN LIBRARY
. The following Friday, three dailies picked up the story. That weekend, our discovery ran above the fold in
La Repubblica
. That was when the TV networks started calling.

Priests underestimate the appetite of laymen for cheap thrills about Jesus. Most of us roll our eyes at the prospect of new gospels. Every cave in Israel seems to contain one, and most turn out to have been written centuries after Christ by little sects of Christian heretics, or else forged for the publicity. But the Diatessaron was different. Here was a headline
the Church could get behind. A legitimate and famous text, discovered in an extremely ancient manuscript, preserved thanks to the popes' centuries-long devotion to books. Lucio had foreseen that it was a story everyone inside the walls would want to tell. So he made sure no one but Ugo could tell it.

Someone in John Paul's apartments must've rubber-stamped Lucio's decision to give custody of the Diatessaron to Ugo, because the whole arrangement made the Cardinal Librarian furious. Ugo hid the manuscript under lock and key in the restoration laboratory, where a team of conservationists under his command started removing the mysterious smudges. Thus the one book everyone wanted to know about, no one was allowed to see. Library staff went off the record with reporters to complain that the book might not even exist; the whole thing might be a stunt. Ugo, in retaliation, released a photo of the manuscript. Experts quickly studied the style of penmanship and declared it authentic. The major European dailies reprinted the photo, and now the questions intensified.

The attention scared Ugo. He knew the Diatessaron might be the keystone of his Shroud authentication, one of the pillars of his exhibit. But now it was threatening to
become
the exhibit. The Shroud had waited sixteen years for redemption and was now being overshadowed by its supporting cast. Wishing he had kept as mum about the Diatessaron as he had about the rest of his exhibit, Ugo decided to correct that mistake. From now on, he would stonewall. He would choke the flame. It must have seemed reasonable at the time, but he had forgotten that nothing fans a religious delirium quite like Vatican silence.

Peter and I, walking the streets of Rome over the summer, heard laymen discussing the Diatessaron. Was it right for the Vatican to withhold information? Didn't the patrimony of Christianity belong to all of us? What needed hiding, anyway? Headlines in leftist tabloids seized on the opportunity. They wheeled out the usual conspiracy theories in the guise of proposing what the Diatessaron's secret might be. Jesus was a married man. A gay man. A woman. One professor at a secular university was quoted as saying that the Diatessaron failed to report that Jesus was ever seen again after his death. Later the professor clarified that he was talking about the gospel of Mark, not the Diatessaron, since early manuscripts of Mark do indeed fail to report this.

Day by day the hubbub grew. Finally a panel of forty Bible scholars
wrote an open letter to John Paul, calling for the manuscript to be studied. And so it came to pass that Uncle Lucio, having dealt the cards, now played his ace. In response to public pressure, he announced, the Diatessaron would be publicly displayed for the first time—at Ugo's exhibit. Overnight, advance ticket sales quadrupled.

Ugo was beside himself. I told him there was no shame in letting a new gospel share the pedestal with the Shroud—after all, they were ancient brothers, both leading us back to first-century Jerusalem. But I'd let my enthusiasm for the Diatessaron carry me away. Ugo was irate. He growled that the Diatessaron was not a new gospel and that I obviously didn't understand his exhibit's duty not just to redeem the Shroud but to show the world where it belonged in the pecking order of ancient Christian testimony. “The gospels weren't written by Jesus,” he snapped. “They aren't Christ's testimony about Himself. Only the Shroud holds that honor. So if every church on earth has a copy of the gospels, then every church on earth should have an image of the Shroud, and that image should be revered
above
the gospels. I'm surprised at you, Father Alex. It's an insult to God to let a second-class gospel—a man-made thing—be celebrated on par with our Lord's gift.”

I realized he was paralyzed by this idea. Horrified with himself for having allowed the Shroud to be betrayed. Not until then did I understand the fatherly protectiveness he felt toward it. And though I didn't feel the same way, I could identify with the strength of that emotion. Unfortunately, it squeezed something to the surface in Ugo that I'd never encountered before. In his eyes, my enthusiasm for the Diatessaron had revealed me as a traitor. So he approached me one day in the mess hall and grabbed me by the cassock.

“If you hadn't twisted my arm to tell your uncle about the manuscript,” he growled, “none of this would be happening.”

“We made the right choice,” I told him.

But he turned his back to me and said, “I don't think we can work together anymore. I'll be finding someone else to teach me the gospels.”

I RAN INTO
THEM
only by accident, teacher and pupil, huddled over a Bible in a private study room beside the manuscript workshop. Ugo's
new instructor was an ancient priest named Popa who spoke with an accent and wore an Eastern cassock. I didn't recognize him;
Popa
is a Romanian name, and there are fifty thousand Romanians in Rome. I just assumed he was Eastern Catholic. But I was wrong. He was Orthodox. And in gospel scholarship that made all the difference in the world.

“Father, please,” I overheard Ugo saying, “we need to get to the
burial
. The cloth. I know these early parts are important, but what interests me is the Shroud.”

“Don't you see?” Popa answered. “The two are connected. The birth of Jesus anticipates his rebirth, his Resurrection. The liturgy and the Church Fathers agree th—”

“Respectfully, Father,” Ugo said, “I don't need the liturgy or the Church Fathers. Just the hard facts of what happened in 33 AD.”

Popa had a mystical, lovable way about him. His soft white beard looked jovial when he smiled. But neither he nor Ugo seemed to understand what was separating them.

“Remember, my son,” Popa said, “the Bible didn't create the Church; the Church created the Bible. The liturgy is
older
than the gospels. Now, please, let's begin at the beginning. To understand the tomb, we need to understand the manger.”

I couldn't help myself. “Ugo,” I said, “Jesus wasn't born in a manger. Factually speaking.”

Suddenly Popa looked a bit less jovial.

“We don't even know the city where Jesus was born,” I continued. “Factually speaking.”

“Father, that's not true,” Popa protested. “The gospels agree it was Bethlehem.”

“Show me two gospels that say so, and I'll show you two that don't.”

Popa frowned. He said nothing more; he just waited for me to finish my business and leave.

But I had caught Ugo's attention. “Father Alex,” he said, “please explain.”

I lowered my stack of books onto his table. “Jesus grew up in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. All four gospels agree about that.”

“The question is where he was born,” Popa objected, “not where he grew up.”

I held up a hand to quiet him. “Two gospels never say anything about
where he was born. The other two tell different birth stories. Draw your own conclusions.”

Ugo looked as surprised as most seminary students on their first day of scripture class. “You're saying those stories are fiction?”

“I'm saying read them carefully.”

“I have.”

“Then which one says Jesus was born in a manger?”

“Luke.”

“And which one says Jesus was visited by three wise men?”

“Matthew.”

“So why does Luke
not
mention the wise men, and Matthew
not
mention the manger?”

Ugo shrugged.

“Because they're both trying to explain how Jesus could've been born in Bethlehem even though he grew up in Nazareth. And they come up with completely different explanations. Matthew tells us about an evil king named Herod who wants to kill baby Jesus, but when the wise men won't tell him where Jesus is, Herod kills all the babies in that whole region. So Mary and Joseph flee, and that's how they end up in Nazareth. Luke, on the other hand, says Jesus' family
started
in Nazareth. But the Roman emperor declared a huge census, and for some reason everyone had to go back to their ancestral hometown to be counted. Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, because that's where Joseph's family came from, and
that's
why Jesus was born in a manger: because there was no room at the inn. The stories are completely different. And since there's no evidence Herod really killed those babies
or
Caesar Augustus really declared that census, it's likely that neither story actually happened.”

Popa stared at me with a crawling sadness in his eyes. He said, as if Ugo weren't even in the room, “Is this really what you believe, Father? That the gospels don't agree? That they lie to us?”

“The gospels
don't
agree. And that doesn't mean they're lying.” I picked up the stack of books again. “Ugo, I'll come back later sometime when—”

But all three of us knew, even before Ugo interrupted me, that it was done. Most Orthodox hew to the traditional way of reading the gospels: there are few new answers, mainly just faith in the old ones. Catholics used to share that belief, until we recognized the power of biblical science.

“Father Alex, wait,” Ugo said. “Stay a moment. Please.”

He didn't need to say another word. Popa and I knew which path he had chosen.

IT WAS AS IF
Ugo's accusations in the mess hall had never been spoken. Our lessons were broad at first. Like most laymen, he had only a basic understanding of how the gospels should be read, and not enough confidence to apply it. So we began at the beginning.

But for me, unlike for Father Popa, that meant the hard evidence. The oldest unchanged facts. The books.

Before the Diatessaron, and before the Alogi, there were our four gospels, named after the men who were believed to be their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John were disciples, Jesus' closest followers. Tradition says Mark took dictation from the chief disciple, Peter. And Luke tells us that he gathered his information from people who saw Jesus firsthand. This means our gospels, if they were really written by these four men, give us a portrait of Jesus' life based almost entirely on eyewitness testimony.

But it isn't so simple. Three of the four gospels are so similar that they seem less like independent accounts than like replicas of each other. Mark, Matthew, and Luke not only record Jesus' words almost identically, they
translate
those words almost identically from Jesus' Aramaic into gospel Greek. Their thumbnail sketches of many minor characters are verbatim duplicates, and at times all three gospels stop midstream, at the same point in the same sentence, to offer the same stage directions and asides: