The Fifth Gospel (42 page)

“So where are those allusions?”

“Before I answer, tell me this: after the disciples found the Shroud, who do you suppose was allowed to keep it?”

“I don't know. It would've become communal property, I guess.”

“But the disciples fanned out across the world to spread the Gospel. Which of them got to keep the Shroud?”

“I would be speculating. The gospels don't say.”

“Don't they? I would suggest to you that John gives us a hint.”

He waited, as if I might guess.

“How well do you remember the story,” he said, “of Doubting Thomas?”

I recited, “Thomas, called Didymus, was not with the other disciples when Jesus came. So they said, ‘We have seen the Lord,' but he replied, ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe.' A week later Jesus came and stood in their midst, saying, ‘Peace be with you.' Then he said to Thomas, ‘See my hands. Put your hand into my side. Do not be unbelieving, but
believe.' Thomas answered, ‘My Lord and my God!' Jesus replied, ‘Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.' ”

“Excellent,” Ugo said. “Now, I ask you: does any other gospel give us the story of Doubting Thomas?”

“No. There's a similar story in Luke, but the details are different.”

“Correct. Luke says Jesus appeared after his death and the disciples were all afraid. But he never mentions Thomas. Nor does he focus on this peculiar thing Jesus does, proving his identity by showing the nail marks and the spear wound. So why would John add those details? It's almost as if he took Luke's story and then specifically added Thomas and the wounds.”

Here was the monster I had created. A man who now could dissect the gospels like a priest and test them like a scientist. These were exactly the right questions: How are the gospel accounts different? What do the differences mean? If a story isn't factual, then why is it there? But rather than encourage Ugo, I said, “I don't know.”

Ugo leaned in. “Remember the question I asked you before? About which disciple received the Shroud? I think this story is our answer.”

“You think Thomas got the Shroud?”

He rose and pointed to a map of ancient Edessa on the wall. “This building,” he said, tapping a dot beneath the glass, “was the most famous church in Edessa. Built to house the bones of Saint Thomas after he died. Thomas was
there
, Father Alex. Later records suggest he sent the image to the king. All I'm suggesting is that the gospel of John agrees. Its author knew the story and added it to the gospel.”

I squinted. “Ugo, there are other reasons John could've put Thomas in that story.”

“True. But recite the beginning of the Doubting Thomas story one more time.”

“Thomas, called Didymus, was not—”

“Stop!” Ugo said. “That's it, right there.
Thomas, called Didymus.
Let's remind ourselves what that means.”

“
Didymus
is Greek for ‘twin.' ”

“Yes. And why?”

“They called him the Twin. It was his nickname.”

“Whose twin was he?”

“The gospels don't say.”

“Yet the gospel of John always identifies this man as ‘Thomas, called Didymus.' Isn't it odd to keep calling someone ‘Twin' without ever explaining whose twin he is?”

I shrugged. Jesus gave many nicknames. Simon became Peter, “the Rock.” John and James became Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder.”

“But the story gets stranger,” Ugo continued. “As I'm sure you know, the nickname
Didymus
isn't the only odd thing about Thomas. The name
Thomas
itself is just as strange.”

“It means ‘twin,' too,” I said.

Ugo lit up. “Yes!
T'oma
is Aramaic for ‘twin,' just as
Didymus
is Greek for ‘twin.' So ‘Thomas called Didymus' actually means ‘Twin called Twin'! Don't you find that bizarre? Why would John call him that?”

I smiled to myself. If Ugo hadn't been a museum curator, he would've made a very popular pre-seminary teacher. “Sometimes John gives us the Aramaic and then its Greek gloss. It doesn't necessarily mean—”

“Father, the other times John repeats himself like this, he's referring to Jesus. ‘The Messiah, the Anointed.' ‘Rabbi, Teacher.' So why is he doing it this time for Thomas?”

“Why don't you tell me?”

“Do you know,” Ugo said, “who this man's twin was
alleged
to be?”

“I do. The legend says it was Jesus.”

Ugo smiled.

“But that's
just
a legend,” I added.

The gospel of Mark says Jesus had brothers and sisters. Inevitably, some readers imagined that the mysterious “twin” nicknamed Thomas might've been one of these siblings.

Ugo ignored me. “
A twin of Jesus
. A facsimile. A spitting image.” He lowered his voice. “What does that remind you of ?”

Finally I understood. “You think people associated Thomas with the Shroud. You think that's how he got his nickname.”

“No. Even more than that: I think ‘Thomas' and ‘Didymus'
are
the Shroud. I think the disciples had never seen anything like it before, so they called the image what it seemed to be: reflection, duplicate, twin. Only later did the name attach to the man who brought the Shroud out of Jerusalem. By the time the first gospel was written, most Christians
spoke Greek or Latin, so they had no idea what
Thomas
meant in Aramaic. They might've thought it was the man's actual name. That's why the gospel of John reminds them by adding the
Greek
word for twin:
Didymus
.”

I sat back, not knowing what to say. In the hundreds of books I had read on the life of Jesus, I had never encountered anything like this idea. There are other reasons John might've created the Thomas story—and yet, there was something magnetic about Ugo's idea. Something simple and elegant and grounded. For a moment, the author of John stopped being an unapproachable philosopher. He became an ordinary Christian trying to keep our greatest relic from slipping out of the memory of our religion.

“I suppose it's possible,” I said. “Stranger things have been true.”

“Then we agree!”

“But Ugo, it's not strong enough to make a convincing case unless we find corroborating evidence in the Diatessaron.”

He opened his research diary to a page where his pen lay tucked like a bookmark. “Which brings me to our plan of attack. There are three passages in John that mention Thomas: 11:16, 14:5, and the Doubting Thomas story at 20:24. I've told the conservators to restore those verses next before they do anything else.”

I took the pen from him and uncapped it. “There's a fourth reference in the other gospels. Thomas appears in their lists of the twelve disciples.”

“Where?”

“Mark 3:14. Which Matthew copies at 10:2 and Luke copies at 6:13. All three versions mention Thomas, so the Diatessaron should have Thomas, too. If we find anything more than his name there—an adjective, another nickname, anything at all—it could be the corroboration you want.”

“Excellent.” Ugo clapped his hands together. “Now, one more thing. While we wait for the restorers, what's the best book on Doubting Thomas?”

I wrote a title in his diary.
Symbolism in John's Passion Narrative
.

“Do you own a copy yourself ?” he asked sheepishly. “I'd rather not look in the library.”

“Why not?”

“They've put those new scanners in the ordinary stacks. They can probably track what we take off the shelves.”

“My library is at your disposal,” I said. “I'll bring the book over tomorrow.”

He smiled. “Father Alex, we're getting close. Very close. I hope you can feel it, too.”

I went home that afternoon feeling as giddy as Ugo must've been. In my prayers that night I asked God for wisdom, for insight. The next morning I pulled out
Symbolism in John
, slipped a note inside for Ugo, and left it in his office mailbox before I went off to teach. That day I dreamed of Thomas. Of the Twin. Never did I suspect that Ugo and I had spoken to each other for the last time as friends.

OVERNIGHT, HE CHANGED. ONE
morning he was invited to an important meeting—he never said with whom—and after that meeting, he was never the same.

In retrospect, I know what happened. Two weeks earlier, Simon had surfaced in Rome for the last time that summer. He stayed just one night. In the afternoon, he went into the city for a haircut and shave. Before bed, he rolled the lint off his best cassock. Next morning he vanished before dawn and reappeared a few hours later with a white rosary of plastic pearls for Peter. Those rosaries are given as gifts by offices throughout the Holy See. Not just by the Holy Father. But no Vatican office hands out invitations to seven thirty AM meetings—and no Secretariat man would fly across a continent to accept one. Simon had Mass with the pope. He never bragged about it, never even mentioned it. But there was no other explanation. And if John Paul reached out to Simon, then he must've done the same for Ugo.

The day after Ugo's meeting, he suspended work at the conservation lab until further notice. He put a lock on the door, as if he suddenly knew that he could get away with it. That he was supported from on high. Then he called me.

“Father, we need to talk. Face-to-face. Meet me for breakfast at Bar Jona.”

Bar Jona. The nickname of the café Lucio had just opened on the rooftop of Saint Peter's. A public place. Looking back, it had all the trappings of a breakup.

When I arrived, Ugo was waiting with a cup in one hand and a briefcase in the other. A good way to prevent any handshakes or friendly embraces.

“What happened at your meeting?” I asked.

Nobody could've overheard me—there was a coffee grinder whirring, an air-conditioning unit moaning on the wall—but he led me away from the coffee bar as if we were trading secrets now.

Bar Jona
is a play on words: Saint Peter's last name in Hebrew. But the place, like all of Lucio's creations, was humorless. Posters taped to walls, trash cans half-filled with soda cups. The all-important Vatican mailbox standing by the door like an alms box beckoned tourists to write postcards and cover them with lucrative Vatican stamps.

“I know,” Ugo said, lowering his head toward me and bringing his voice down to a whisper, “what you've been doing. And I can't tell you how betrayed I feel.”

I blinked in confusion.

“How could you do this?” he added. “How could you abuse my trust?”

“Ugo, what on earth are you talking about?”

He glared. “You
knew
your brother had been to visit the Holy Father. You
knew
it was because of my work.”

I nodded. “So?”

“I won't have my work stolen away. This is
my
exhibit, Father Alex. Not your brother's. Not yours. How dare you transform it into some cheap negotiating chip behind my back? You know I don't give a damn about your Eastern politics. This is over. You and I are finished.”

I was cold in my own skin. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Go to hell.”

“What did the Holy Father say to you?”

Ugo rose from the table. “The Holy Father? Ha! Thank God
he
isn't the only one who cares about my work.”

I never made enough of those words. In retrospect, they told me everything I needed to know about who he'd really met with. Instead, the words that lingered in my memory were the ones that hurt most:

“Alex, don't say another word. I don't want to hear your lies. Respect my wishes and stay away from my exhibit. Good-bye.”

I CALLED HIM A
dozen times that afternoon. A dozen more in the week that followed. He never answered my messages. I stopped by the restoration lab, but the guards kept me out. So I waited outside the museum one night and confronted Ugo when he emerged from the door. No matter where I followed him, though, he refused to speak. I never understood, and he never explained. We never spoke again.

The morning after our meeting at Bar Jona, I phoned Simon at the nunciature in Turkey. He was away on business and took three nights to get back to me. When I told him the news, he was as upset as I had been. Now, though, my own feelings had turned to anger.

“He didn't tell you anything more?” Simon asked. “He didn't say what they'd told him?”

“Nothing.”

“Is he still in Rome? Can you try to talk to him about it?”

“I did try, Simon.”

“Alex, please. It matters a lot. He's . . . a very important person to me.”

“I'm sorry. It's done.”

I don't know why Ugo's silence hurt me so deeply. Maybe because his final accusation rang true. I had claimed ownership of work that wasn't mine. I had flattered myself that his exhibit was
our
exhibit, and he had seen through me.

But there was another reason. The work I did with Ugo made me feel, briefly, that I was a partner in something meaningful. The most thrilling thing about it wasn't that I found our work so urgent and heartfelt, but that
we
found it so urgent and heartfelt. I never envied Simon his travels and negotiations. To be a father and a teacher always suited me fine. But to have a partner in life who sits in a booster seat and only recently graduated from a bib is to crave a daily chance for adult companionship, to feel a pathetic gratitude for a short conversation with a bank teller or the man at the butcher counter. Walking into that restoration lab with Ugo each morning and wondering what the manuscript held in store—or sharing phone calls at the end of the day, with no purpose except to vent the day's frustrations and marvel at the little book that owned us—was the closest experience I'd had in years to walking into Peter's bedroom with Mona and wondering what the baby was about to teach us about being parents. Without realizing it, I'd let Ugo enter my life through the open door she left behind. And when he abandoned me,
with no explanation, all of it returned. The old dreams. The weird pangs of solitude in the middle of walking to work, or dialing a phone number, or reading alone after Peter's bedtime. The sensation of having an anchor hung around my neck, dangling into an emptiness that seemed to have no bottom.