The Fifth Gospel(136)
To buy myself respite, I gave Ugo a sheaf of Simon’s old homily paper—the same stationery on which he would later write the letter I found in Simon’s bag—and we invented an exercise for him to do: chapter by chapter, he began writing out parallel verses from the gospels, comparing them word by word, and crossing out the sections that must’ve been added or changed by the gospel writers. This thrilled Ugo, who believed that by weeding out theology he was coming closer to the historical facts of Jesus’ life. And though it saddened me to see him return each day with a new handful of pages in which whole phrases and lines from the gospels, especially John, had been crossed out, his command of scripture was becoming so strong, and his errors were becoming so rare, that I decided to let him continue until he reached the end.
Meantime, the manuscript restorers told me they thought Ugo sometimes spent the night in the lab. They resented the way he refused to let the Diatessaron out of his sight, as if he didn’t trust them. Their concerns reassured me about Ugo’s true intentions. He didn’t really believe that by whittling the gospels down to their factual core he would reveal something new about how the Shroud had left Jerusalem. Instead, all our work together was preparation for reading the Diatessaron—and his hopes for that gospel were well-founded.
The man who wrote the Diatessaron, Tatian, belonged to a Christian sect called the Encratites. Encratite is Greek for “self-disciplined,” and they earned the title: they were teetotalers and vegetarians who also outlawed marriage. Since one of Jesus’ first miracles was to turn water into wine at a wedding, it’s tempting to ask how well the Encratites knew their gospels. But Tatian knew them cold.
It’s a daring feat to weave Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into a single gospel. But Tatian made it even harder on himself. His goal was to create a definitive version of Jesus’ life, to disprove the pagans who said the Christian holy books contradicted themselves. A century earlier, the gospel of Mark had been edited to create the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Tatian set out to edit all the gospels. One God, one truth, one gospel. And for anyone trying to prove the Shroud was in Edessa, his editorial changes were gold.
In merging the gospels, he left behind a trail of clues about himself and the world he lived in. For instance, the gospel of Matthew says Jesus was baptized by a man known as John the Baptist, who lived on a diet of locusts and honey. But Tatian, being an Encratite, was a vegetarian, and he happened to classify locusts as a kind of meat. So he changed the gospel text: in the Diatessaron, John the Baptist survives on milk and honey.
In the same way, it would take only a single word to prove that Tatian had seen the Shroud, or that the Shroud was in Edessa. The clue might be obvious, or it might be almost invisible. If anywhere in the Diatessaron Tatian described Jesus’ physical appearance, it could be the lead we were hoping for. The four gospels never say what Jesus looked like, so a description in the Diatessaron would suggest Tatian had seen an image he considered authentic. Thus every page of the Diatessaron became pregnant. Ugo and I hung on what the restorers were recovering from under the smudges each day.
It was slow going. I convinced Ugo not to let the technicians remove the Diatessaron’s binding, even though it would let them work faster. The pope’s oldest Bible, Codex Vaticanus, was now just a collection of loose sheets under glass because someone had let the restorers disassemble it that way. But with the Diatessaron still bound, the conservators could restore only two pages at a time. So Ugo forced them to start on the pages that interested him most—the ones that described Jesus’ death—and one morning a technician sidled up to us and said, “Doctor, the section you asked about is ready.”
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THE WORKROOM OF THE manuscript restoration lab was filled with wonderful contraptions. There were anvil-like things with hand-wheels as big as bicycle tires. Clotheslines sagged from the ceiling, draped with what looked like giant napkins. The conservators worked with vials of chemicals and huddled around the tiny manuscript with what appeared to be doll-size tweezers and brushes. Removing the smudges was painstaking work, and the manuscript had to be set open in an apparatus to recover overnight. Now, as the technician presented his work, Ugo stared. He had begun taking Greek lessons at a pontifical university, but he was too impatient to use that knowledge now.