Free Skeleton 03 - The Constantine Codex by Paul L Maier Page B

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 attaché 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?”
    “I think it’s obvious, Jon. He must have finished off St. Paul’s story, since he really leaves us hanging in the last verse