“They’ll have to adjust,” Shawn agreed with a snide smile.
“Adjusting is not easy for an institution like the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church believes the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven like her son, bones and all, since hers was a virgin birth without original sin.” Sana had been raised a Catholic until her father’s death when she was eight. From then on she’d been raised an Anglican, her mother’s religion.
“Well, as the expression goes, the ball will be in their court to deal with that issue,” Shawn added, with his smile lingering on his lips.
“I wouldn’t make light of it,” Sana said.
“I won’t,” Shawn said categorically but then added with gathering emotion, “I’m going to enjoy it. You’re right about Mary’s bones not being here on earth, but that dogma is relatively new for the Catholic Church. For centuries the Catholic Church just avoided the issue, letting people believe what they wanted to believe. It wasn’t until 1950 that Pope Pius the Twelfth made the determination ex cathedra and invoking papal infallibility, which for me, as you know, is pure nonsense. I’ve had this argument with James a thousand times: The Catholic Church wants it both ways. They evoke a divine basis for papal infallibility regarding Church matters and their interpretation of morality based on a direct apostolic lineage to Saint Peter and ultimately to Christ. Then, in the same breath, they dismiss some of the Church’s medieval popes as being only human.”
“Calm down!” Sana ordered. Shawn’s voice had been steadily rising as he spoke. “You and I are having a discussion here, not a debate.”
“Sorry. I’ve been wound up from the moment Rahul placed the codex in my hot little hands.”
“Apology accepted,” Sana said. “Let me ask you another question about Saturninus’s letter. He used the word
“Offhand, I’d guess wax. Burial practices at that time involved putting a corpse in a cave tomb for a year or so, then collecting the bones and putting them in a limestone box, which they called an ossuary. If the decay wasn’t complete, the box could have stunk to high heaven unless sealed. To do that, they would have had to use something like wax.”
“Saturninus said that Mary’s body was put in a cave in Qumran. How dry is it there?”
“Very.”
“And how dry is it in the necropolis beneath Saint Peter’s?”
“It varies, but there are times when it’s relatively humid. What are you thinking?”
“I’m wondering what kind of condition the bones might be in if the ossuary stayed sealed. If dampness has been excluded, I might be able to harvest a bit of DNA.” Shawn chuckled with delight. “I’d never even considered that. Getting some DNA could add another dimension to this story. Maybe the Vatican could make some money by creating Bible Land, something akin to Jurassic Park, by bringing back some of the original characters, starting with Mary.”
“I’m being serious,” Sana said, mildly offended, thinking Shawn was making fun of her.
“I’m not talking about nuclear DNA, I’m only talking of my area of expertise: mitochondrial DNA.”
Shawn held up his hands, again pretending to surrender. “Now, I know you’ve told me in the past, but I don’t totally remember the difference between the two types of DNA.”
“Nuclear DNA is in the cell’s nucleus, and it contains all the information to make a cell, to allow it to differentiate into, say, a heart cell, and to cause it to function. Every cell has a full complement of nuclear DNA except red blood cells, which have no nucleus.
But every cell has only one set. Mitochondria are microscopic energy organelles that in the very distant past when life was just beginning were engulfed by primitive single-cell organisms. Once those single cells had mitochondria, they were able over millions or even billions of years to develop through evolution into multicellular organisms up to and including humans. Since the mitochondria had been freely living organisms, they have their own DNA, which exists in a circular, relatively stable form. And since individual cells have up to a hundred or so mitochondria, the cell has up to a hundred sets of mitochondrial DNA. All that leads to a higher possibility that DNA can be retrievable, even from ancient bones.”
“I’m going to pretend I understood all that. Do you really think you might be able to isolate some of this circular DNA? That would be fascinating.”
“It all depends on how dry the bones were initially and how dry they have remained. If the ossuary is still sealed, it’s a possibility, and if it is possible to retrieve some of Mary’s DNA, then it’s too bad she had only a divine son and not a divine daughter.” A crooked smile spread across Shawn’s face. “What a strange comment! Why a daughter and not a son?”
“Because mitochondrial DNA is passed on from generation to generation matrilineally.
Males are genetic dead ends, mitochondri ally speaking. Sperm don’t have much mitochondria, and what they do have dies off after conception, whereas ova are loaded with them. If Mary had a daughter who had a daughter, et cetera, until current day, there might be someone alive today with the same mitochondrial sequence. By coincidence, the mitochondrial DNA has a two-thousand-year mutational half-life, meaning that after two thousand years, statistically speaking, there’d be a fifty percent chance the DNA sequence would be unchanged.”
“Actually, there’s a very good chance Mary had a daughter—in fact, not one but three of them.”
“Truly?” Sana questioned. “I recall she had only one child, Jesus. That’s what I learned in Sunday school.”
“One son is Catholic dogma, Eastern Orthodox creed, and even the belief of some Protestant denominations, but there are many people who think otherwise. Even the New Testament in the Bible suggests she at least had other sons, although some people think the term ‘brother of Jesus’ means another close relative, like a cousin, a debate that arose during translation from Aramaic and Hebrew to Greek and Latin. But I, for one, think a brother is a brother. Besides, it makes sense to me that she had more children. She was a married woman, and having a bunch of kids the normal way certainly wouldn’t have taken away from having the first one mystically, if that’s what happened. And I’m not making this up. There’s an awful lot of early Christian apocrypha, which didn’t get chosen to be canonical by being included in the New Testament but which state she had up to eleven children, including Jesus, three of whom were daughters. So there might be someone out there with the same DNA.”
“Now, that would put my field of mitochondrial DNA on the map,” Sana said, while imagining writing the paper for
“Getting back to reality,” Shawn said, “our Egyptair flight leaves Cairo at ten a.m.
tomorrow and arrives in Rome at half past twelve. We’re staying at the Hassler. Why not celebrate this coup in style. So, what do you think? Are you coming with me? If all goes well, it’s just an extra day, and the payoff will be immense. I’m truly excited about it. As my last hurrah at fieldwork it will seriously aid my fund-raising.”
“Do you really need me or am I window dressing to prop you up and keep you company?” Sana asked for reassurance but then inwardly winced the moment the unguarded words spilled from her mouth. It was the first time she’d actually voiced the idea, which she had lately been questioning due to his general behavior plus his lagging interest in intimacy, that Shawn had married her more as a young trophy wife than a true partner. It was an issue that had been progressively bothering her over the previous year and which seemed to be worsening with her own modest professional successes.
Although she was planning on bringing the subject up at some point, the last thing she wanted to do was get into a serious row there in Egypt.
“I need you!” Shawn said definitively. If he’d actually heard what she had said, he didn’t let on. “I won’t be able to do this myself. I imagine the ossuary will weigh ten to fifteen kilograms, depending on its size and thickness, and I’m not going to want it to literally drop out of the ceiling. I suppose I could hire someone, but I’d much prefer not to. I don’t want to be beholden to someone for their silence until I publish.” Relieved that her verbal slip had gone over his head, Sana fired off another question:
“What are the chances that we could get into serious trouble by sneaking into the crypt under Saint Peter’s?”
“We won’t be sneaking in! We’ll have to get past the Swiss Guards before we even get into the Vatican, and I’ll need to show my all-hours-access permit from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. So we’ll be perfectly legal.”
