His book Jesus of Nazareth had been translated into nearly thirty languages at last count. Clearly Father Athanasius was numbered among Jon’s worldwide fans.
“And you are his wife?”
When she nodded modestly, Athanasius broke into a great smile. “Yes, Mrs. Weber, you may certainly borrow those leaves of manuscript. Your husband’s life of Christ is the best I’ve ever read!” He stopped, a twinkle in his eye, and seemed to reverse himself. “But no, you cannot take them… unless you sign my copy of O Iisous.”
Shannon was about to object that she could hardly inscribe a book she had not written, but why quibble at the moment of success? Instead, she nodded happily.
Carefully, Athanasius removed the almost tobacco-colored leaves and hurried into his office, where the Greek edition of Jon’s book was on the shelf behind his desk. “I’ve read it three times,” the priest said proudly.
Shannon signed the book, then looked up and said, “A final favor, Father Athanasius. If you have time, please try to find and save any other ancient manuscript pages here, whether bound or unbound, because of their possible importance.”
He nodded instantly. “Oh, indeed, Mrs. Weber.”
Shannon gratefully accepted the five brown pages of manuscript, hoping they might shed a bit of new light on earliest church history. She could not know that they would, in fact, ignite a change in church history.
Jonathan Weber had experienced much more than the fifteen minutes of fame often allotted to mortals. The recognition brought about by his bestseller and his archaeological sleuthing in Israel that had “saved Christianity” (according to his fans) had given him entree at the Vatican, the White House, and even Buckingham Palace. Yet despite a string of extraordinary adventures, Jon would always count the return of his wife from her dig at Pella as one of the summit events in his life. It was not only the joy of seeing Shannon again-that lithe, sapphire-eyed, pert-nosed, Irish pixie who had taken him captive-but what she had brought back with her from Jordan as a little memento of her tour.
A day after she had unpacked, Jon and Shannon took the manuscript leaves to his office at Harvard. In an adjoining room he had a small but efficient manuscript laboratory with an ultraviolet apparatus as the centerpiece. It had served him well in exploring palimpsests, vellum manuscripts on which the writing had been erased and the vellum reused. The penetrating, purplish rays of the instrument usually showed the original script quite clearly.
Shannon adjusted the window blinds to darken the room, while Jon turned on the UV apparatus. The hum of its fan covered the throb of his almost-audible pulse. “We’re not looking for erasures here, Shannon,” he said, “just the original script underneath those brownish accretions.”
“Obviously. We could hardly make out anything at home last night, even with intense illumination.”
“Okay. We’re ready. Bring the first page over.”
Shannon put on white gloves, opened a large portfolio, and-with care that bordered on a caress-lifted a protective muslin pad and extracted the first of the leaves. With both hands she laid it on the examining field below the instrument.
Jon peered closely at the document, studied it for some time, and then shook his head. “Here, have a look, sweetheart.”
Shannon scrutinized the leaf for several moments. “Oh… how disappointing. I can make out a little more of the lettering, but…”
“I’ll raise the intensity.” Jon turned the gain knob thirty degrees clockwise, but the brighter light, while revealing more of the Greek lettering, failed to liberate enough script for them even to try to reconstruct the text without much guesswork and the insertion of long blanks.
Crestfallen, Shannon sighed. “I… I’m sorry, Jon. I certainly had hoped for more than this. What an utter waste of effort!”
“Not necessarily, darling.” Jon kissed her cheek. Was it actually moistened with a tear? “We’ll do it just like they do at Palomar Mountain.”
“By which you mean…?”
“Our eyes can’t store up light versus dark contrast. Film can. That’s why stars that couldn’t possibly be seen otherwise show up on their photo plates.”
“Got it!” She chuckled.
Jon opened his photo cabinet, pulled down a 35mm Nikon, and loaded it with panchromatic film. He mounted it in a camera bracket adjacent to the ultraviolet instrument and focused on the document. The shutter snapped repeatedly as he photographed at various speeds and diaphragm settings.
They achieved no results that day, since from that point on, it was trial and error-overexposure, underexposure, too much contrast, not enough contrast. Finally they hit upon a formula that worked: inside a totally opaque chamber with a very low-intensity UV illumination of the leaves, the Nikon set at f/16, time exposure, and precision film development yielded beautifully readable Greek script on almost every line of the five pages of manuscript, when printed out on photo paper.
It took Jon another week to prize out a translation of the leaves. When he had finished, he gave Shannon copies of both the Greek text and his English translation. “You know Greek, honey,” he said. “Please see if I got it right.”
Shannon started reading the translated version immediately.
His own pulse in something of a gallop, Jon watched as her eyes widened and the jaw of his lovely wife sagged open.
She looked up and said, “Jon, there are details here about the martyrdom of Jesus’ brother James-beyond what we have from Eusebius!”
“Exactly.”
“Then do you suppose this is from… from Hegesippus?”
“Who else? Some old librarian at that church must have tried to keep the secondary and primary sources together. As a bookmark, no less.”
“Well, this is just fabulous, Jon!”
“No, it isn’t. You haven’t come to the good part yet.” The twinkle in Jon’s eye had broadened into a huge expansive smile. “Read on,” he said, “but it’ll take a while since it’s at the other end of the material.”
Shannon flashed him a quizzical look and returned to Jon’s typescript. Some minutes later, she looked up again. “Well, here Hegesippus seems to be talking about what he calls ‘the sacred books.’ Do you suppose he means the Canon?”
“Could be,” he said, again assuming his mischievous grin. Soon Shannon would find the passage, he knew.
And she did, of course. She now dropped the typescript and said, very slowly, “Oh… my. This… this is just… beyond belief.”
“It looks like you discovered more at Pella than you ever thought, my dear. But now, we have to keep mum on this until the authentication is complete. We’ll have to go to Pella, of course, to see if there are any more leaves-loose or bound-floating around Father Athanasius’s library. And we’ll definitely have to include Greece on the itinerary, since I want to try to date this thing if possible, and I’ll need help from some of their best text experts. We fly over at the end of the spring semester, right?”
Shannon nodded slowly, in wonderment. It seemed as if great discoveries were not limited to excavating the good earth. Good libraries, evidently, were also fertile ground.
Must good fortune be balanced off by bad? Jon and Shannon never made the trip.
How could things go wrong so instantly, so emphatically? And why did it have to happen on one of the loveliest days in May? One moment, Jon and Shannon were looking forward to their trip to Jordan and Greece. But the next, Jon heard his own name being shouted by an angry jumble of voices from Harvard Yard below. He hurried over to the open windows of his office to see at least seventy or eighty students gathered in the shape of a crescent below Sever Hall. Many stood with raised fists waving at him in unison.
“Weber? Never! Islam is forever!”
As he listened, the chant grew louder and became a full-throated chorus: “Weber? Never! Islam is forever!”
