John 19:38–40: So Joseph came and took away Jesus’ body. Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds’ weight. They took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.
I’m caught by surprise. Ugo has taken our gospel lessons and mounted them for the world to see. Everything he highlighted in John’s version shows how John is different from the other gospels. How the other three speak in unison while John is hard to square with the rest. Ugo has also made a brazen point by mounting this page from the Diatessaron: he seems to be saying that even nineteen centuries ago, in the time of the Alogi, Christians knew John was not quite writing history.
This makes me deeply uncomfortable. Ugo was supposed to be working on the history of the Shroud. I thought our gospel lessons were building toward something else, some theory of how the Shroud left Jerusalem for Edessa. What I see here is far more controversial. The Church believes that some minds aren’t ready to be exposed to some ideas. What’s good for the shepherd may not be good for the flock. Lay Catholics, lacking scriptural training, may leave this gallery with the impression that John is a second-class gospel or should be thrown out entirely for changing the facts. Everything Ugo has mounted here is technically correct, but he’s taken a huge risk by displaying it so publicly and leaving the viewer to draw his own inference.
I lead Peter quickly through the galleries we saw yesterday. We have only twenty minutes to see what else Ugo has in store.
Finally we reach an area almost at the end of the museums, where the galleries feed into the Sistine Chapel. Before us hangs a sheet of black plastic, thick as canvas, covering the next entryway. Peter hugs his soccer ball defensively. He peers into the darkness beyond the curtain as if it’s the closet where he huddled with Sister Helena.
I pull back the sheet. The air has a claylike smell. Long sets of makeshift walls have been raised in front of the windows, blocking the natural light. The floor is white with dust. Something’s wrong. The exhibit opens in three days, but the preparations seem to stop right here.
All around us are ornate display cases that seem to have been treated no better than sawhorses. The glass tops are floured with particles of drywall mud. Electrical cords are coiled on them. I swipe my hand across the surface and see a manuscript by Evagrius Scholasticus, a Christian historian who lived two hundred years before Charlemagne. The page in front of me tells how Edessa was attacked by a Persian army but was saved by its miraculous image of Jesus. Beside him is Bishop Eusebius, the father of Church history, writing in 300 AD, who says he’s been to the archives of Edessa himself and has seen the letters Jesus traded with the city’s king. Peter, noticing that the texts are in Greek, lights up. “Those words are long!” he says.
Each page looks like an endless string of letters because these manuscripts were written before the invention of spaces between words. They are mystical, mystifying documents, so old that the world reflected in them is unlike ours and reminiscent of the world of the gospels instead. Mysterious things seem commonplace. The boundaries of history, fantasy, and hearsay are muddy. But Ugo’s point is clear: by a very early date, intellectuals across the Christian East had heard of a powerful relic in Edessa that originated in Jesus himself.
I look around for some sign of what happened here. Of why nothing’s been finished. The net impression is that the exhibit underwent a sudden change. The individual parts are familiar, but the thrust is different and strange.
“Come on,” I say, waving Peter toward the next hall, hoping to find it in better shape.
But a display case has been pushed into the entryway, as if the workmen were unsure which gallery it was meant for. Inside the case is a small, unimpressive manuscript that records a sermon given a thousand years ago. The occasion for the sermon is a miraculous rescue: a Byzantine army marched to the gates of Edessa, seized the mystical image of Christ from Muslim hands, and carried it eight hundred miles across the Turkish highlands and desert before leading it triumphantly into the Orthodox capital of Constantinople.