The Fifth Gospel(222)

            This registers as just another fact. Nowak doesn’t pursue it. Instead he asks, “How would you characterize your brother’s working relationship with Nogara?”

            “They were good friends. My brother saved his life.”

            “Yet I have heard the voice message from Doctor Nogara. It indicates they were not on friendly terms.”

            I choose my words carefully.

            “When my brother began to travel on his missions to the Orthodox, he couldn’t spend as much time tending to Nogara. It upset them both.”

            I watch Nowak’s expression. I need to make sure he remembers the demands on Simon’s time. The source of Simon’s obligations. Just a few feet from here is the private chapel where the Holy Father would’ve performed the rite of consecration to make Simon a bishop.

            “But the voice message suggests,” Archbishop Nowak says, “that Nogara made a discovery which complicated their working relationship. Were you aware of this?”

            I brace myself. “Yes. I was.”

            “What was the discovery?”

            “He found a manuscript of an ancient gospel called the Diatessaron.”

            Nowak nods. “The one that is now missing.”

            “I helped him to read the Diatessaron,” I continue. “Until that time, Doctor Nogara hadn’t realized that the gospels have different testimony about the Holy Shroud. This was the origin of his problem.”

            “Go on.”

            Now I begin my own job of weaving verses. I must do it perfectly.

            “The most detailed description of Jesus’ burial,” I say, “is in the gospel of John. The other gospels say Jesus was buried in a σινδόνι, ‘shroud,’ but John says όθονίοις, ‘cloths.’ John also gives us the most specific description of the empty tomb, and it corroborates his first one: the disciples didn’t just find the όθονίοις, ‘burial cloths’; they also found the σουδάριον, the kerchief or napkin, that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. This would obviously be problematic for any image on the Shroud.”

            Archbishop Nowak frowns. He seems about to ask another question, but I push forward, heaping up evidence, burying him in Greek. At all cost, I must keep him away from the lance wound. I must keep him looking in the other direction, at all the minor details where John’s discrepancies don’t match the Shroud, because Nowak will know Ugo should’ve brushed them aside, since no one turns to John for hard facts.

            “These problems are deepened by John’s testimony about the άρωμάτων, ‘burial spices.’ The other gospels suggest Jesus wasn’t buried with spices, since the Jewish Sabbath had come and the burial took place in a hurry. But John says a huge weight of spices—μίγμα σμύρνης καί άλόης ώς λίτρας έκατόν, ‘a mixture of myrrh and aloes about a hundred pounds’ weight’—was used. And this is a problem, because the scientific tests on the Shroud haven’t found any trace of burial spices. Without belaboring the point, Your Holiness, Nogara felt that our most detailed testimony about Jesus’ burial was John’s, and that John’s account did not support the existence of the Shroud. Nogara went to Castel Gandolfo to say as much to the Orthodox.”

            Archbishop Nowak’s soft features sag with concern. His brow is heavy. His hand is folded pensively over his jowls. “But Father, did you not explain to him about the gospel of John?”

            “I did. I explained to him that it’s the most theological. The least historical. That it was written decades after the others. But he knew the Orthodox would be less likely to apply a scientific reading to the gospel. He knew the Orthodox were more likely to feel that John needed to be taken at face value.”