The Testimonium (10 page)

“That seems the most logical assumption,” said Parker. “And if that is indeed the case, we may well have a treasure trove of Imperial Roman correspondence from the first century AD. Dr. Apriceno, you are the only one who has ventured to the back of the chamber. Any observations on the objects you observed?”

“All I have done is removed a small core sample of dust from every wall, every part of the floor, and every object,” she said. “The big square in the back of the chamber is very heavily coated—there are about six or eight centimeters of dust on top of it, and it was partially buried in a dirt slide long ago, so its dimensions are hard to determine with certainty. But I can confirm that it is made of wood, since I went all the way down to the original surface in collecting my sample. It will take several days to clean it off so we can actually see what it is.”

At this point they all retired to their tents. Josh broke out his old journal—he still kept it the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink—and recorded his thoughts on the day’s events. But despite the excitement of the discovery, his mind kept going back to what Rossini had said about Dr. Sforza. She was looking at him! With Isabella’s face floating in his mind, it was a long time before he went to sleep.

This I was reluctant to do. First and foremost, I believed and still believe that the man was innocent of any offense against Roman law. The second reason is more personal, but you of all people should understand it. For each of the three previous nights, my wife had woken me with her screams. She was not entirely coherent, but one thing she said on each occasion was, ‘Do not kill the Galilean! He is innocent! You will be damned forever if you do!’ These statements troubled me deeply. Every Roman knows the story of how the noble Calpurnia sought to dissuade the Divus Julius from going to the forum on the Ides of March. Dreams are powerful things, and sometimes the gods use them to speak to us. Even as I stood before this angry mob, trying to make sense of their accusations, she sent me a note that read “Have nothing to do with the death of this innocent man.” At this moment, I realized that Jesus was actually a subject of King Herod Antipas, since he was from Galilee rather than Judea, so I sent him to stand trial before Herod. Unfortunately, Herod was unwilling to pronounce judgment on him, and two hours later Jesus was brought before me once more. The only positive development from this incident was that Herod, who had been quite hostile to me for some time, has become friendlier ever since—although given his mercurial nature, I have no confidence the improvement in our relations will be permanent.

Josh rose early the next morning, his body still unsure exactly what time it was or when it was supposed to wake up. He had always been unable to sleep once the sun was up, so after rolling over several times in a vain attempt to recapture his slumber, he slowly stirred and stretched. He pulled on his shoes and got a clean khaki shirt out of his duffel bag, then stepped outside. The snores from the tent next to his told him that Dr. Rossini was still asleep, so he walked over to the mobile lab. Dr. Apriceno and Isabella were already there, and the rich smell of coffee brewing filled the trailer.

“Our American friend is an early riser,” the older woman commented. “The other two men could learn a lesson from him!”

“Well, Simone,” said Isabella, “I don’t know MacDonald that well, but Giuseppe has been hard at work on this site ever since the earthquake! He’s earned the right to sleep in a little, and it’s not even seven AM yet.”

“I’m only awake because my body is convinced it is mid-afternoon, or whatever time it is in Oklahoma,” said Josh. “Well, that, and I have never been able to sleep once the sun comes over the horizon. It will take me a couple of days to catch up from my jet lag. Is that coffee ready?”

“Here you are,” said Dr. Sforza, pouring him a cup. “We like it dark and sweet here in Italy, but I could probably find you some cream if you like.”

“Honestly, I hate coffee on principle,” said Josh. “Never even been inside a Starbucks. But I figured a cold Dr Pepper was too much to hope for in Italy. A Coke would be all right, too, I suppose. But for the moment, this nasty stuff will wake me up and get me going.” He sipped the coffee and made a wry face.

Apriceno wrinkled her nose. “Dr Pepper? I had that stuff in the States one time. Tastes like prune juice!”

Josh raised an eyebrow and waggled his finger at her. “Dear lady,” he said, “you may question my character, belittle my faith, deride my appearance, and record over my favorite DVDs—but
don’t ever
insult the Elixir of Life!”

The two women laughed at this jibe, and Isabella said, “I must confess that I love your soft drink choice. It’s hard to get Dr Pepper here in Italy, but perhaps we can order some from Naples before the week is out. In the meantime, I know the store down in Capri village has Coca-Cola and several other American drink brands. We’ll try to have a coffee substitute up here tomorrow for you.”

Dr. Apriceno walked back to the storage closet in one corner of the lab and pulled out a small metal vacuum cleaner. “I have taken all the dust and pollen samples I need from the chamber,” she said. “Now I will begin clearing out the remainder of the dust, so that you all may begin your work inside. It will take a few hours, but I hope to have the chamber ready for excavation by the end of the day. So if you will excuse me, I will be off to work.” They bid her a good day as she took the vacuum and several spare bags out the door.

“I’ve had to excavate all manner of ancient overburden, from Roman era privies to volcanic ash to rich Italian farm soil,” said Isabella, “but I have never encountered a site that was coated with so much plain old dust!”

“I imagine she will save every one of those vacuum bags, too,” Josh said. “That way there will be samples available for study to any archeological lab that wants to verify her findings.”

Dr. Sforza sat down across from Josh at the small dining table, looking at him with a clear gaze that was piercing and a bit unsettling at the same time. It didn’t help matters that she had the most beautiful green eyes he had ever seen. “So, Dr. Joshua Parker,” she finally said. “Tell me a bit about yourself. How did you become an archeologist?”

Josh thought about it a moment. “I guess my dad gave me a big push in that direction,” he said. “My father is a pastor, but he has a deep love of history, science, and nature. As a boy he took me all over North Texas collecting arrowheads and fossils, but he always made sure that I understood that they were more than just pretty rocks. He taught me to catalog each and every piece I found, so that their significance would be recorded and preserved. Then when we moved to Spiro, Oklahoma, I heard about and saw what had happened to the famous Indian mounds there. Have you ever heard of the Spiro mounds?”

“Isn’t that the big ceremonial site that was largely destroyed by looters during the Depression?” she said. “I think I read an article about it once.”

“That’s the place,” he replied. “When I was a kid I heard a famous Oklahoma archeologist talk about what happened there. It’s hard to blame the looters—there were no antiquity laws in place then, and they were just poor men trying to feed their families in a desperate time. But as Dr. Bell described all the marvelous things that were found there, especially inside the largest mound, I made up my mind that I was going to be an archeologist myself. I dreamed of finding a site like Spiro, completely undisturbed, and being the first to excavate and study it. But as I got older and learned more about American archeology, I realized that science had been completely sold down the river in the name of political correctness. In my country, the Native American populations have the power of life and death over every archeological excavation. In Texas about ten years ago, they found a seventy-five-hundred-year-old cemetery site, the oldest mass burial ever found in the United States. There were artifacts there that had never been found in Texas before, bannerstones and ceremonial artifacts that are normally only found in the Ohio River valley. So what did they do? They excavated, photographed, and then turned everything back over to the Karankawa Indians—a tribe that lived in that region in historic times. And the Indians performed their religious rites and buried everything all over again. Artifacts, remains, the whole shebang, back in the ground! No one will ever be able to study them, or learn from them, or simply look at them and appreciate the artisanship that went into making them. And, worst of all, we have no way of knowing if the tribe we turned them over to are the descendants of those ancient skeletons or not. No DNA test required, no historical or archeological links, nothing. All a tribe has to do is claim an artifact as ‘an object of cultural patrimony,’ and the archeologist’s hands are tied. It is sickening! That’s one thing that led me away from American archeology.”

Dr. Sforza was astonished—both at the ridiculous restrictions placed on science in the name of respecting aboriginal religious beliefs, and also at Josh’s obvious anger at the policies he described. She nodded in agreement at his assessment, and then said: “You said that was one thing that led you away from American archeology. What is the other?”

He paused for a while. “It’s a bit more personal,” he said. “It’s a matter of faith and science combined. My father is a Baptist minister, but he is also a serious student of history, as I said. He always told me that good science and solid archeology would never undermine Scripture. His idea is that, if the Scriptures seem to be telling us one thing, and the earth, or the historical record, seems to be telling us another, then we are not reading one or both of them correctly. And I must say, as far as the New Testament era goes, I have yet to find or read anything that proves him wrong. Time and again, skeptical scholars have tried to say that this discovery or that would debunk some aspect of the Biblical narrative—and yet, they haven’t managed to disprove anything yet! And many of the discoveries made over the last century have confirmed the New Testament stories rather than disproved them. So I decided to come over here and do my work, my scholarship, in the land where my faith was born—the ancient Roman Empire. I’ve worked at Qumran, Ephesus, and Capernaum, excavating and studying. It has been an incredible experience, and so far everything I have found has strengthened my convictions that Christianity rests on a foundation of real, historical events. Thomas Huxley said ‘Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is an unworthy tenant in the mind of an honest man.’ I guess I have devoted my life thus far to investigating the doctrines I believe in.”

Sforza was amazed. Genuine men of faith were almost unheard of in the sciences in general, especially in archeology. Like many of her colleagues, she had heard stories of the “brain-dead fundamentalists” who wielded so much power in American politics, but this young man seemed anything but the kind of zealot she had heard about. “A true believer,” she said. “I have encountered a few in the Catholic Church—Father MacDonald, I know, is a man of real faith, and a solid scientist. But I will be honest; you don’t look or sound anything like the fundamentalist American Christians I have heard of.”

“That’s because very little of what you hear is true,” Josh replied. “Don’t get me wrong—I have known some very unimaginative, ignorant, and prejudiced people in the churches my dad pastored over the years. I had one tell me once that he refused to believe dinosaurs existed because they were never mentioned in the Bible. This was right after Dad and I had discovered and excavated a mosasaur skull in the Sulphur River bed too, so what could I say?”

“So what did you tell him?” she asked.

“I told him to go read Job 41,” replied Josh. “It’s an ancient description of a huge sea beast called a Leviathan. I have no idea what God was describing to Job, honestly, but the description sure sounds like some sort of giant aquatic reptile. But here is the point I was going to make. Most of the images that people have of American Christianity come from one of three sources. It’s either from Hollywood, which is largely populated by atheists, Buddhists, or lapsed Jews and Catholics who have a pretty hostile view of Protestants in general and evangelicals in particular. Then there is the American and international media, which is also made up largely of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists who have a rather harsh view of all religions. So every time they want to portray the state of religion in America, they go find some ignorant extremist like Fred Phelps or David Duke to interview, and thus affirm the worst stereotypes about people of faith. They never portray the good that is done by the American church because they are almost entirely unaware of it. Finally, sadly, there are the American televangelists. There are some good, doctrinally solid Christians among them, of course, but the ones that get the press are the con men and nut jobs. As a result, most of the world never really gets a good look at the real face of American evangelicalism—men like my dad, who has pastored over a dozen churches, has two master’s degrees, and reads a book or two a week. Guys like him never get any publicity beyond the local newspapers, and so the world thinks that the face of American Christianity is some guy with a pompadour and a thousand-dollar suit who pronounces ‘God’ with about six syllables while bilking little old ladies out of their Social Security checks, or some radical lunatic waving a sign about how ‘God Hates You’!”

He spoke with strong emotion, and Isabella found herself more and more intrigued by this young man. “So, do you think that these ‘atheists and agnostics’ are bad people?” she asked.

“Not at all.” said Josh. “I’ve met quite a few of them in person, and dozens more in various online forums and chat groups. The vast majority of them are perfectly nice people. The problem is that many of them have never met an evangelical Christian, and have no clue how we think or what we believe. They just accept the stereotypes that have been created about us without question. It’s very frustrating, because most of them I have met are genuinely surprised to find that I can actually read and that my knuckles don’t drag the ground when I walk. No, they’re not bad people—they’re just, as my dad would say, ‘lost as jaybirds.’ I’m sorry, Dr. Sforza, you’ve got me going on one of my pet peeves.” He paused a moment to calm himself down. Here he had a rare opportunity to have a private conversation with the most fascinating woman he had ever met, and he was ranting like a talk radio host. “Tell you what—I’ve told you about myself now. How about if we talk about you for a while?”