A violet-robed warden of diminutive stature extended them a warm greeting, and Shannon tried to arrange her features into a more neutral state. The warden showed them to their quarters for the night, and Shannon was pleased to see that the room was nicely appointed-not the monastic cell she had expected-with twin beds and a window looking out over the valley below. Shannon quickly chose the bed away from that window.
By now it was late afternoon, a golden yolk of sun starting to drop onto the western horizon. The vesper had rung, and the brother monks gathered in the monastery chapel to chant their evening prayers. Jon and Shannon, however, were escorted to the refectory, where they were treated to a simple, though tasty, dinner of seafood broth, green beans, white fish, dark bread, and-of course-black olives. A pungent retsina wine, served in wooden goblets, assured them that they were in the very heart of Greece.
Early to bed, Jon finally admitted to her why their “ascension to heaven” was momentarily delayed. On the cell phone, he had asked the brother in charge of the windlass to halt the hoisting for a minute or two when they were near the top “so that they could gather in a final view.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” His voice was contrite. “I shouldn’t have taken your acrophobia so lightly. I really thought…” He paused.
“I’m listening.”
“I really thought the magnificent view would take your mind off the circumstances. I didn’t mean to scare you out of your wits. Truly I didn’t.”
Shannon took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time Jon’s enthusiasm had overridden his better judgment, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last. Despite his sometimes-childish pranks, she did love him. And she somehow always found it in her heart to forgive him.
“Okay, Jon. I… I’ll try to forgive you. But if you want a good-night kiss, you’ll have to come over here. I’m not getting any closer to that window than I have to.”
Almost before she’d finished speaking, Jon appeared at her side. She squeezed over against the wall to make room for him on the narrow bed. He snuggled in and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you, darling. I love you.”
Surrendering to his embrace, she once again thanked God for bringing this wonderful, unpredictable, albeit exasperating, man into her life.
The meeting with Abbot Simonides the next morning went well enough, although it was complicated by the fact that the rotund, white-bearded archimandrite insisted on using his broken English instead of Greek-this in deference to Shannon. In responding to Jon’s manuscript project, Simonides promised to secure the cooperation of the other monasteries at Meteora, but admitted that they were better known for their museums, icons, and relics than their libraries. “Here at Varlaam,” he said proudly, “please to believe it: our museum has a finger of St. John the apostle, and also a shoulder blade of the apostle Andrew, brother of St. Peter!”
Shannon exchanged a glance with her husband that told it alclass="underline" privately they would share a chuckle over the dear brother’s sincerity, but a simple smile and a nod were far more appropriate here.
“For your purposes, I would go to Holy Mountain,” the patriarch continued.
“That is indeed our plan, Your Grace,” Jon replied. “Mount Athos, in fact, is our next destination. But for the very reasons you mention, the collections at Meteora have been overlooked, I think. If you and your colleagues at the other monasteries here took a complete inventory of your manuscript collections, something priceless might yet be discovered and the world would be in your debt.”
The abbot’s eyebrows arched. Slowly he nodded and said, “Yes, we will do this. We will do this. And yes, let the photo people come too and make pictures of our treasures.”
“We could not ask for more, Your Grace,” Jon said.
Shannon knew that he was probably restraining himself from doing cartwheels in his delight. “We also deeply appreciate your hospitality at Varlaam,” Shannon added. “Ef charisto!”
“Parakalo!” Abbot Simonides replied. “It is nothing. It is nothing.”
“ Ouxi! In fact, it is everything,” Jon commented.
Shannon’s favorite memory of their visit to Varlaam was when the abbot announced, in parting, that the crack at the base of the pedestrian bridge from the monastery to the adjoining plateau had been repaired, and that Varlaam’s service vehicle would drive them down to their car. She would not have to risk her life again on that netted raft, since the trip down the cliffside would have been even more terrifying, she assumed, a virtual descent into hell.
God was good! Her husband, on the other hand? Well, the jury was still out in his case.
On the drive northward to Saloniki-as Greeks referred to their second-largest city, Thessalonica-Jon gave Shannon the gist of the phone call he had put in to Marylou Kaiser. To his surprise, sales of the Arabic translation of his Jesus book were booming in moderate Muslim nations like Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan, with brisk success even in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and Indonesia-and not just as fuel for book burning.
“Then again, chalk it up to controversy, Marylou,” he had said. “Controversy is always the mother’s milk of sales.”
“But it may be more than that, Dr. Weber,” his secretary had replied. “Because of your other comments on Islam in that chapter, all sorts of debates are springing up between Muslims and Christians in various cities here, including Boston.”
“Nothing wrong with that-so long as it remains dialogue and no one gets steamed. By the way, anything from the Iranians?”
“Do you mean, has your fatwa been lifted?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”
“No. Which reminds me, Mr. Dillingham-the CIA, you’ll recall-has phoned several times to complain that you aren’t checking in with their operatives in Greece, as you should have.”
“Darn. I plumb forgot. But hey, I haven’t been assassinated yet, have I?”
“That’s so comforting, Dr. Weber. Now please do the right thing?”
“I promise. Oh, and please ask Osman al-Ghazali to try and monitor some of those Christian-Muslim debates and get back to me, okay?”
Shannon had not worried about the fatwa for several days, but Jon’s mention of it restored a furrow or two to her brow. He saw it and immediately switched the subject to their favorite topic of late: the five leaves of brown parchment that had such explosive implications-provided they were authentic and could be dated.
“Those just have to be pages from Hegesippus’s lost memoirs, honey. And no, you don’t have to ask if I packed them. The attache case went into the trunk first.”
“Let me play devil’s advocate, Jon, and ask why you seem to be so sure that this is material from Hegesippus. After all, those pages are anonymous-no author’s name anywhere.”
“True enough. But they provide new detail on the death of James the Just that doesn’t appear anywhere else. So when Eusebius states that he got his information from Hegesippus, and the expanded version of this material shows up inside Eusebius just at that passage where Eusebius tells of the death of James, I think any scholar would support our conclusion that yes, this obviously older text must come from Hegesippus.”
She nodded. “I only hope the experts agree, especially because of what Hegesippus wrote about the Canon.”
“Yessss!” Jon dragged out the sibilants in his enthusiasm. He would never forget the tidal wave of excitement that had splashed over them both in Cambridge when they read the passage: After blessed Luke wrote his first treatise to Theophilus, which we call Luke’s Gospel, and his second treatise to Theophilus, which we call the Acts of the Apostles, he wrote yet a third treatise to the same person, which we call the Second Acts of the Apostles.
“Second Acts, Shannon, Second Acts!”
She beamed as if it were fresh news. “No less than a missing book of the New Testament!”
“What do you think Luke wrote in the second book of Acts?”