“There’s always room for error, but . . .” Donovan shook his head.
“You . . . a priest . . . ,” she said, stalling. “You’re basically telling me that there was no resurrection or ascension?”
“Not in a physical sense.”
“Then what about the Gospels?” Charlotte bitterly replied. “Is it all just made up?”
“The biblical accounts of events immediately following Christ’s burial are highly suspect, dare I say . . . falsified.”
“How so?”
The proof was fairly complicated, but he started at the easiest point. He explained that the oldest Gospel—Mark—originally ended with the empty tomb and that verses 16:9 through 16:20, where Jesus makes His appearances to Mary and the disciples, then ascends into heaven, were an addendum, written by a completely different hand. The Vatican’s oldest manuscripts from the fourth century, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, didn’t include the long ending, but by the fifth century Mark had four different endings that spoke about resurrection and ascension.
Charlotte could tell that Donovan was calm about all this but also felt somewhat cheated. To her, it seemed too big a conspiracy to have been kept under wraps for so long. “And nobody figured this out?” she asked, incredulous.
“Oh, it’s no secret,” Donovan insisted. “Any good Bible will reference this omission in its footnotes. Not to mention that even if you read these added verses verbatim, Jesus’s post-burial appearances are still referenced in metaphysical terms.”
Giovanni Bersei had told her this too. But she was interested in the priest’s perspective. So she asked for examples.
Donovan went on to give a sampling from all four Gospels, noting that each read like many of the omitted apocryphal texts the Catholic Church had considered heretical. He told her that immediately following the resurrection accounts in John 20 and Mark 16, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and was unrecognizable to her; she’d actually mistaken Him for a gardener. And in Luke 24, two of the disciples not only doubted His identity when he appeared to them, but then Christ literally disappeared from their sight—vanished!
In Donovan’s opinion, however, John 20 was the most telling of a metaphysical resurrection. He said, “John stated that the disciples were hiding in a sealed chamber and Jesus suddenly appeared in the room among them . . . from out of thin air,” he pointed out. “So you see, all four Gospels contain specific language suggesting that the Jesus who appeared after the resurrection was not that same Jesus who was buried in the tomb. So I ask the scientist in you, Charlotte: does that sound like a physical body to you?”
“No.” There were too many things it sounded like, she thought. But disappearing from sight? Appearing out of thin air into a locked room? How else could that be explained? Another wave of mixed emotions crested over her as she came to terms with the notion that the DNA inside her could actually have been taken from Christ. She sighed. “I suppose I’d rather be an apparition in the next life too,” she said.
To a scientist, this actually made more sense anyway, she thought. After all, the body’s “spirit” was really an electrical charge running through the nervous system. And Einstein’s most basic principle maintained that in a closed system, energy could never be lost or gained—merely transferred. If one viewed a dead body as a battery that had lost its charge, then logically, the body’s energy would be given back to the system. What system,
however, was anyone’s guess.
“The real question is, should this knowledge impact one’s faith or discredit Christ’s teachings . . . His mission?” Donovan added. “A physical
body doesn’t negate the teachings found in the Gospels. Nor does it downplay that God’s kingdom does promise eternal peace for the righteous. But
after all these centuries, the Vatican has emphasized an archaic interpretation of Christ’s physical death. So you can imagine the threat a body would
pose.”
He tried his best to explain how the Vatican had for centuries speculated about a physical body and feared one might turn up. Occasionally,
charlatans had attempted to blackmail the Vatican with anonymous relics
lacking any provenance whatsoever. But with today’s scientific methods,
Donovan pointed out, had a genuine relic been excavated, in its context
from beneath the Temple Mount, the threat would then be very, very real.
He stayed silent for a few seconds, then said, “Now we just need to figure
out why these two men want the bones so badly.”
Charlotte shifted uneasily in her seat. One thought kept repeating itself—Evan Aldrich had used those bones to save her life. Now those same
bones had made him a casualty. And though Donovan was fishing for an
explanation in the theological realm, there was only one thing that could
logically be their true motivation.
“I think I might know what these men are after.”
17
******
The Volvo idled at a scenic overlook along Camelback Mountain. The two passengers inside had just reversed roles; now Donovan was hearing Charlotte’s confession. And what she had to say—had to release—was something far more astounding than anything weighing on his soul.
Far across the valley below, beyond the unnatural green swaths of golf courses set amidst suburban sprawl, Donovan’s empty eyes were locked on BMS’s gleaming edifice, which rose high above the buildings clustered around it—an ungodly Tower of Babel forged of glass and steel, where humans challenged God on an entirely new level.
“There’s something else you need to know about what we discovered,” she said. “I’d been very sick back in June . . .”
“I gathered that,” Donovan weakly replied. “I was told you’d left behind things in your room. The drugs were for cancer, weren’t they?”
She nodded. “Multiple myeloma.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of this aggressive disease, and he couldn’t hold back the grim expression that immediately came over him. How ironic that it attacked the bones, he thought.
Picking up on his distress, she quickly added, “But I don’t have cancer anymore.”
Amazed, he looked up at her. “Praise God,” he said, beaming. “That’s incredible! A miracle.”
“Yes . . . and no,” she said. “You see, that same gene I just told you about—” Her voice choked off.
“Go on,” he encouraged her. The same words he’d used countless times in the confessional.
Glancing over at him, she could tell he didn’t fully comprehend. “The DNA . . . Jesus’s DNA? It has special qualities.” The genetic synthesis was fairly complicated—something she still couldn’t completely decipher—so she needed to keep it simple. “It’s like a virus, but a good one. And when introduced into someone who’s sick . . .” She tried to envision 23 intelligently replicating system-wide at super speed to destroy the malicious cancer cells.