The Fifth Gospel(214)

            In Luke’s story, Christ shows the disciples His hands and feet. His wounds from the crucifixion. But John adds something more. Something new. He says Thomas put his finger in a lance wound in Christ’s side.

            Where did the lance wound come from? No other gospel mentions it. Only John himself does—earlier in his own narrative, at a crucial symbolic moment: the moment where the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God are finally fused together. These are the very verses shown on this Diatessaron enlargement, John 19:32–37:

            So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the men crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust a lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth so that you also may believe. For this happened so that the scripture passage might be fulfilled: “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced.”

            No other gospel says that either of these two incidents ever happened. So where did John get this?

            Not a bone of it will be broken: this is what the Old Testament says about the Passover lamb.

            They will look upon him whom they have pierced: this is what the Old Testament says about the Good Shepherd.

            John’s theology has reached its summit. At the moment of Jesus’ death, Shepherd and Lamb converge. The two snakes of Ugo’s caduceus meet. The gospel stops dead in its tracks to point out that these are symbols, that they come from the Old Testament. John is saying, emphatically, This is why Jesus died. Like the shepherd, he laid down his life for his flock. Like the lamb, he saved us with his blood. John even says these events came straight from the testimony of the Beloved Disciple. In other words, they express a symbolic truth that is essential to understanding Jesus Christ. On earth, however, in history, they didn’t really happen.

            Of all the wounds on the Turin Shroud, the bloodiest is the spear wound in Jesus’ side. Yet the earthly Jesus was never pierced in his side. This wound is no more historical than the armed mob that Jesus magically knocked off its feet by saying, “I AM.” No more historical than the sponge raised on the limp stalk of hyssop. They all belong together, to the same family of symbols, because the writer of John made all these changes for the same reason: to make his point about the Shepherd and the Lamb.

            Which means that the forger of the Shroud—whoever he may have been, whenever he may have worked—made the same mistake as the author of the Diatessaron. By merging the testimony of all four gospels together, he erased the difference between theology and history. He created a terrible, heartbreaking mishmash. Putting the spear wound on the burial cloth is no different from putting a crook in Jesus’ hand because he was the Good Shepherd or a coat of wool on his shoulders because he was the Lamb of God. When the Beloved Disciple says his testimony is “true,” he means it in the same way John does when he calls Jesus “the true light,” or when Jesus himself says—only in the gospel of John—“I am the True Vine” and “I am the true bread.” To be literal about these symbols is to miss their beauty and importance. The genius of John’s gospel is that it refuses to be bound by an earthly straitjacket. John’s spear wound gestures at the truth that lies beyond mere facts. The Shroud, then, does the same. It is a powerful symbol—but it has never been a relic.

            I’ve spent my life combing these verses for meaning. Yet when Ugo came to me, wanting to show me what he’d found, I closed my eyes. And Simon did infinitely worse. So this is why my friend died. Because I taught him how to read the gospels. And because he had the bravery to speak out about what they revealed.





CHAPTER 40





I WANT TO FALL to my knees. I have never been so blindsided by my own failure. The anguish is a cord wrapped around my chest, tightening, tightening. My body is unsteady. But my eyes are fixed on the Greek letters of the Diatessaron photograph. They accuse me of having been a hypocrite. A fool. I ask my own students to read carefully, to search for complexity and meaning in the evidence God puts before us, and here I have known my own gospels as dimly as I knew Ugo, who suffered with a secret that would have tortured and haunted any believer in the Shroud but that must have been unspeakable hell to him, salting the whole earth of his life, laying waste to him before he ever arrived at Castel Gandolfo. And Simon, who knew how he suffered, seems to have chosen to end his life with even more suffering. If that’s true, then it makes my own brother, whose heart I thought I understood as well as I understand my own, as much a stranger to me as the man on the Shroud.