Murder at Golgotha Page 13

  On the other hand, the Matthew testimony has probably the best verbatim assemblage of Jesus' teachings and parables of any of the four. It is also the most Jewish, with many references to contemporary Jewish customs. All of which neatly equates with a very early tradition, dating no later than A.D. 130, that Matthew the tax collector had "compiled the sayings of Jesus in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as they could." In other words, some unknown, later editor, "Matthew," took the true tax collector Matthew's original document, translated it into Greek, then embellished it throughout with narrative material following much the same semihistorical formula that Mark had adopted.

  Though very likely it was this same later editor, "Matthew," who waxed a little too fanciful on matters such as the earthquakes, even he had his own important contribution to make. For in his telling the story of the Temple guards posted to watch over Jesus' tomb, and how they had fled at the time of Jesus' resurrection, he went on with a point given in no other testimony:

  Some of the guards went off into the city to tell the chief priests all that had happened. These . . . handed a considerable sum of money to the soldiers with these instructions: "This is what you must say, 'His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.' And should the governor [i.e., Pilate] come to hear of this, we undertake to put things right with him ourselves and to see that you do not get into trouble." So they took the money, and to this day that is the story among the Jews. (Matthew 28:11-15)

  The interesting aspect of this passage is that for the Temple priesthood to have wanted it put out, even as a lie, that Jesus' disciples had stolen his body from the tomb, in itself constitutes an admission that Jesus' body did vanish in some rather mysterious way. And there is a further intriguing inference. This is that, if we can believe that Temple guards were indeed posted outside Jesus' tomb during that crucial thirty-six hours after the crucifixion, then they might actually have been the first and the nearest witnesses of whatever had occurred when Jesus' body underwent its resurrection inside.

  For what was it that these guards told their employers, the Temple chief priests, of what had really happened, that the latter preferred to pay a "considerable sum of money," rather than allow this to be circulated? Had the guards, in the early hours of the Sunday morning, seen some unearthly light or heard some strange noise inside the tomb, and pushed aside the entrance boulder (as they had the manpower to do), only to find the body inside inexplicably vanished? This would actually explain what has never otherwise been explained—that is, how and why the large tomb entrance boulder should have been found already moved when the women arrived. This, even though Jesus himself, who repeatedly demonstrated his resurrected body's ability to pass through closed doors, clearly had no need to move this.

  In the case of the Mark testimony, the general thinking is that the writing of this version preceded those of Matthew and Luke. Both of these latter show some dependence on it. And it tells its stories in simpler, less elaborate, and thereby arguably more original forms than they do. Some scholars have hypothesized that Mark may have been the young man who fled naked when his sindon was grabbed by the Temple guards at the time of Jesus' arrest. This is because Mark's is the only testimony to mention this incident. If this were the case, then he may actually have been a close observer of some of the key events in his own right.

  The more widely accepted view of Mark, deriving from the same pre—A.D. 130 authority responsible for the information about Matthew, is that he was some kind of secretary or interpreter to Simon Peter. As "John Mark," he would later be described as setting out with St. Paul on the first of the latter's missionary journeys (Acts 12:25; 13:13; 15:37). Mark's testimony thereby carries some potentially first-hand information, but otherwise a lot of very high-grade, secondhand recording of events.

  Still, with regard to Mark, his testimony provides an interesting instance of what could happen to the actual documents of these testimonies during their earliest and most vulnerable years. Two of the world's oldest full Bibles, both dating from the late fourth century, are the Codex Vaticanus in Rome, and the Codex Sinaiticus in London's British Museum, the latter housed for many centuries in the remote St. Catherine's monastery in Egypt's Sinai desert. Both of these Bibles, written in Greek, incorporate Mark's gospel, along with the other three. However, they have missing from their texts the last eleven verses of the last chapter in Mark, as found in the Bibles that we use today. In a preprinting age in which everything was hand copied, it would appear that a back page of a very early original Mark manuscript became detached, or abraded away, leaving the book's ending missing. A vital ending, because it may have borne some lost information about Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, perhaps concerning that mysterious "first" one to Simon Peter. Though someone supplied as an ending the final eleven verses that appear in our present Bibles, there is a strong likelihood that these were not the Mark author's own original words.

  Probably the closest and the most reliable eyewitness descriptions of the events surrounding the Gethsemane crime scene are those in the John testimony, a source that ironically was once supposed to be the latest and the least reliable of the four. By any standards, John's is a strange piece of work compared with the other three. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke include a lot of narrative along with teachings and parables in the early part of their testimonies, John fills the equivalent part mostly with long, highly theological discourses by Jesus. But when it comes to the actual events surrounding our Golgotha crime scene, no one is more graphic or more insistently an eyewitness than John. It is John who describes the lance producing blood and water from Jesus' side, pointing out that "this is the evidence of one who saw it—true evidence, and he knows that what he says is true—and he gives it so that you may believe as well" (John 19:35). It is John who describes the linens left lying in the tomb as the cause for his and Peter's own immediate, on-the-spot belief that Jesus really had come back from the dead (John 20:9).

  It is natural to suppose that everything that could ever be deduced concerning what the four testimonies have to say about the Golgotha crime scene must have already been written many times over. It may be a surprise, therefore, that our present, evermore high-tech age is promising to shed its own unique new light on these ancient documents—quite literally. As earlier noted, over a hundred years ago archaeologists working in ancient Egypt began finding fragments of papyri they identified as being from very early copies of the testimonies. Some of these are in the University of Michigan and Princeton University libraries in the United States. Others are in the Chester Beatty collection, Dublin, Ireland. Yet others are at Oxford and Manchester in England. Because these fragments have almost invariably been recovered from ancient trash heaps, for every item which it has been possible to read, there have remained others that up until now scholars have had to set to one side as too stained or otherwise too darkened by time to be legible.

  But now, thanks to the latest techniques in digital imaging, a few clicks of a computer mouse can enable a suitably scanned papyrus scrap to be studied in any number of different light variations. This can make ink lettering that has been invisible to the naked eye for perhaps seventeen or eighteen centuries become magically legible once more. Such developments already promise that it may be possible to read some 20 percent more papyrus fragments than have been legible hitherto. So, as these hitherto too dark scraps from the ancient trash heaps begin to be systematically reexamined and deciphered, who knows what future discoveries pertinent to our crime scene may come to light?

  Nor are the possibilities of exciting future findings confined just to the written testimonies. One of the most neglected fields of investigation surrounding the Golgotha crime scene concerns what can have happened to the contents of Jesus' tomb immediately following the discovery that his body was missing, and before Emperor Hadrian had topped the spot with a temple of Venus a hundred years later. For it was from the very instant that Peter and "John," gazing upo
n the discarded linen wrappings, "saw and believed" that the religion called Christianity was born. That very same moment, that dark rock tomb, where a man who had seemed to be mortal demonstrated his defeat of death, logically became the newborn Christianity's central and most sacred shrine.

  So, what happened to the tomb, to the wrappings, and to any other of the tomb's contents in the immediate aftermath of the discoveries made, and the sightings seen, that first Easter Sunday day? We know that Joseph of Arimathea had originally intended the tomb as a brand-new construction for his own personal usage. So now that it was once again without any occupant, did he simply continue with his original plan to have himself buried within it? Did he perhaps have himself laid on the very same ledge on which Jesus' body had been laid, with his bones later gathered up into an ossuary and stored in a niche off the main chamber? Did the tomb become the family vault for other members of his kith and kin?

  Although the history of the tomb between the first Easter Sunday and A.D. 135 is a complete blank, all these possibilities seem rather unlikely. Christian tradition carries not the slightest suggestion that Joseph took the tomb back for his own usage. It also attributes other locations nearby as being tombs of both Joseph and of Nicodemus.

  So, was Jesus' empty tomb almost immediately accorded the status of the new-born Christianity's foremost shrine? In support of this, there can be no doubt that Jerusalem's earliest known Judeo-Christian synagogue, constructed after A.D. 70 from blocks of the destroyed Temple, was oriented towards it—immediately raising the question, in what manner might Jerusalem's first Christians have maintained it? Did they carry out some structural alterations, as Emperor Constantine would do three hundred years later? Or did they opt to leave it and everything left inside much as Peter and John found it on that first Easter Sunday morning?

  While there is no known evidence to suggest that any construction work was carried out, some thought certainly seems to have been given to what to leave inside. Unlike the ancient Egyptians and other pagan peoples, the Jews had no tradition of furnishing their tombs with everyday items as homes for the dead. Nonetheless, given that Jesus' blood would have been splashed on a number of items associated with his last hours of suffering, there could well have been a concern to collect those items together if at all possible, with the otherwise empty tomb their most logical housing.

  The linen wrappings that had been around Jesus' body we know to have been in the tomb already. Besides these, the crown of thorns, the nails that had pierced his hands and feet, the crossbeam to which he was nailed, and the "King of the Jews" placard could all have been considered worthy items. In the case of the nails, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus would have automatically acquired these upon their unfastening Jesus' body from the cross. The crown of thorns may well have been immediately at hand for them after they removed it from Jesus' head before en-Shrouding him. In the case of the crossbeam, although theoretically this would have been Roman property, intended to be used again for the next crucifixion victim, a few coins quietly slipped to a Roman centurion may well have secured it for the tomb collection.

  And for such items to have been assembled in the manner of a shrine would actually make a lot of sense from what we know—albeit all too little—of the tomb's rediscovery by Empress Helena in A.D. 326. Unsatisfactory as are the fourth-century historical descriptions of this event, they at least sufficiently convey that the tomb chamber contained crucifixion nails, some lengths of wood, as if from a cross or crosses, and, quite specifically, "the board ... on which Pilate had placed an inscription written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew." Though no full-length Shroud is mentioned among these items, this latter could well have been removed as unsuitable for storage in the tomb sometime before the tomb had to be hurriedly abandoned upon the expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 135. If the present-day Turin Shroud is indeed that same cloth, and if my own reconstruction of its history has any validity, then there is some good documentary evidence that it was not left in the tomb with the other objects, but transported to what is today Turkey at a very early stage. There it spent nearly a thousand years in the town known today as Urfa before being transferred to Constantinople, then via French crusaders, to Western Europe.

  So, today we have in Turin a Shroud that, despite the adverse findings of the carbon-dating test carried out in 1988, carries some compelling though still inconclusive signs that it was the true, original cloth that lay on that Jerusalem tomb ledge on the first Easter Sunday. We have in Rome a placard bearing the words "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" that bears compelling, though still inconclusive signs that it was the true, original notice on Jesus' cross, as found by Empress Helena when she rediscovered the Jerusalem tomb in A.D. 326.

  And we have in Jerusalem, within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, what appears to be that true tomb site, albeit that the original rock is all but inaccessible because of the successive ornamental shrines that have been built over it.

  All raising the question, might Turin's Shroud and Rome's placard still bear traces on their surfaces of their once intimate association with that tomb in Jerusalem? In which case, might the latest modern-day crime scene investigation methods actually be able to show this onetime close association in much the same manner that certain varieties of dust on a suspect's clothing can connect him to a particular crime scene?

  Readily suggesting that this might be possible is the fact that the original rock of the Jerusalem tomb, though so difficult to access because of all the overlying shrines, can almost certainly be determined as limestone. Limestone is the main rock on which all of Jerusalem is built. And limestone has an interesting property. Every different bed of it exhibits slight differences in its crystalline structure from the next bed, just as human beings have different fingerprints from each other. Ion microprobes can analyze tiny specks of limestone dust and show clearly which may have come from the same bed and which are from perhaps thousands of miles away.

  Equally suggesting the possibility of some such association is the fact that as recently as 2003 the Shroud's underside—the side that would have lain in direct contact with the tomb's limestone ledge—was temporarily exposed for the first time in four and a half centuries. This occurred when Swiss conservator Dr. Mechthild Flury-Lemberg removed the Shroud's sixteenth-century backing cloth as part of a major conservation program. Large quantities of microscopic debris were retrieved from the cloth's underside in the course of this conservation work, much of which has yet to be analyzed properly. However, the likelihood of it containing limestone dust is undoubtedly high, as evident from preliminary studies by an earlier investigator, Turin's Professor Giovanni Riggi. In 1978 Riggi found some significant quantities of limestone dust when just a small section of the Shroud's underside was unstitched.

  Currently, therefore, there exists the tantalizing prospect that whenever the shrines covering Jesus' tomb become dismantled for repair work, thereby exposing its original limestone bedrock, scientific comparison between this limestone and that found adhering to the Turin Shroud's underside will become possible. And while no one has hitherto considered extending such a study also to include the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme's "King of the Jews" placard, it would be fascinating if this too were found to bear some similarly matching limestone dust.

  Of course there is no guarantee that any such sampling work will produce evidence of a match. Nor, in the event of there being no match, should either the tomb site, the Shroud, or the placard necessarily be dismissed as inauthentic solely for such a reason. The Shroud may be authentic, the tomb site not. Or vice versa. Or the original ledge of the tomb may have been of a different stone from the bedrock, a stone removed long ago when Moslems made determined attempts to destroy the entire site.

  Ultimately what can only be concluded, with complete confidence, is that the file on our Golgotha crime scene is very far from closed, and it is unlikely ever to be. At the heart of whatever happened on Golgotha there lies not only the world's greate
st murder mystery, but also its greatest religious mystery. That is, that a man who was most brutally and most publicly killed at that spot two thousand years ago could, and arguably did, come back from death within thirty-six hours, just as he predicted he would.

  It is highly unlikely that there will ever be some forensic test or tests by which any crime scene investigator will be able to fathom entirely what happened, given the very nature of those events. As one Jewish-born Shroud investigator, the late Dr. Alan Adler, often remarked, "There is no test for Christness."

  However, in their seeking answers to the mysteries of Golgotha, science and religion rightly converge as one. These are mysteries on which their files, along with our minds, can and should remain forever open.