Paul Maier - The Constantine Codex

That was plausible, even probable, and a welcome blanket of relief seemed to descend on everyone, especially when Yilmaz called again to say that both brothers would be in prison for weeks before they were even arraigned in Turkish courts.

Dick Ferris, however, wondered why Jon and Shannon were not more enthusiastic about the debate triumph or more relieved that the would-be assassin and his brother had been caught and that theirs seemed to be a solo operation. “Do you have something else on your minds?” he asked.

Jon just smiled at him. Of course, the men knew what Jon and Shannon had been up to, but he was not going to divulge any more information than was absolutely necessary at this point.

When everyone had left that night, Jon and Shannon transferred the photos they had taken of the codex onto Jon’s laptop. When they appeared on screen, he had no trouble enhancing the images using only the contrast control of his favorite photo program.

“Great!” he commented. “These will print out with razor-sharp clarity.”

“But what about the pages that are stuck together?”

“Yeah, I’ve been worried about that. Tomorrow let’s use something as simple as steam. If that doesn’t work, then we simply have to declare our find to the patriarch, and he’ll have to bring in a team of his own museum restoration people. But I’d hate to have to do that before we know what’s actually in the text of the codex. Still, we dare not destroy a single line-a single word-so if steam doesn’t work, we’ll photograph the rest of the codex and then let Bartholomew in on the greatest manuscript find of the twenty-first century.” He grinned at her. “Or am I exaggerating?”

“Probably not, provided it’s authentic.”

“I know, Shannon. We’ve been duped before. But not this time. No one on earth could ever have managed to forge all that.”

She nodded. “That, and its totally accidental discovery. No wonder you had your mind on this rather than the debate, my darling.”

Her use of such a tender term in the context of cold scholarly research added sudden, renewed warmth to their relationship. That, combined with their natural elation over the codex was all they needed to call it a night. There simply was nothing like love to banish all concern and restore the soul.

En route to the patriarchate the next morning, Jon and Shannon’s security escorts maintained the same dispassionate silence they had observed from the start, never bothering to ask why they were making this daily trip as Jon surely thought they would. Real professionalism, he thought. They raised no questions even when Jon asked the driver to stop at a hardware store, where he purchased a hot plate, a teakettle, some flexible tubing, a hose clamp, a screwdriver, a roll of paper towels, and a long extension cord. Somehow, he managed to pack it all into Shannon’s tote bag so that when they arrived at the patriarchate, no curiosity was aroused. Again, Brother Gregorios admitted them into the geniza without asking any questions. But how long would that last?

When he had left them, Jon searched for an electrical outlet. It was maddening; he could find none. And why would you need one in a manuscript morgue in the first place? He felt the same ugly frustration he had encountered at so many airports when the battery in his laptop was draining, but could he find an outlet at any of the gates? Evidently, the miserly masters of the aerodrome were afraid of losing three cents’ worth of electricity.

Alternate options boiled up in his brain. Go to the kitchen or refectory of the patriarchate and beg a steaming teakettle? But then their secret would be out, quite apart from the fact that the teakettle would lose its steam before reaching the geniza. Well, there had to be an outlet in the room somewhere. Surely the place had served some other purpose before being converted into a manuscript dump.

“Jon, look overhead at the light fixture,” Shannon advised.

And there it was: salvation hanging just above the lightbulb. It was a compound socket that included not only a screw-in cavity for the lightbulb but two regular outlets as well.

Jon smiled broadly. “Shannon, you’re a dream-also in the daytime!”

But where to get the water? Not a problem, since Gregorios had helpfully pointed out a little WC near the geniza.

The extension cord proved just long enough to reach from the light fixture to the table beneath it, so he plugged in the hot plate, set the teakettle upon it, and waited for the water to boil.

The light had dimmed visibly when he plugged the hot plate in. “Please, Lord, don’t let the fuse blow.” While the water was warming, Jon put a hose clamp over the flex tubing and screwed it tight over the circular nose of the teakettle.

Soon came the wondrous simmer of heating water and finally the welcome gurgle of boiling. When a clear jet of steam emerged, Jon and Shannon lugged the codex over to the table.

“There aren’t all that many stuck pages, honey, and here’s the first.”?Jon paged through to the end of Mark’s Gospel that adhered to the first page of Luke’s Gospel. Now he directed the jet of steam around the three available edges of the two stuck pages. Moment after moment passed. Jon tried to distribute the steam as gently and evenly as possible, but it seemed to have no effect whatever, raising the level of his frustration. “Rats!” he said. “I guess we’ll not be able to do it ourselves after all.”

“Look at the upper right corner, Jon.”

“Hey, it’s starting to part!” He aimed the steam jet to this vulnerable spot, opening it further. “Yessss…,” he crooned.

Slowly, and with admirable cooperation, the two pages started parting from one another, providing additional avenues for the steam to penetrate.

“Fabulous! It’s working.”

Soon the pages separated entirely. Jon quickly scanned the material for any damage, but while the uncial lettering was damp and even wet at places, the ink had not run. Evidently, a deposit of ink that had clung to its parchment for seventeen centuries was not going to be deterred by a little steam.

“Thank God!” Jon whispered. Triumphantly he put a paper towel under both parted pages and then small weights at the edges of the pages to keep them open. “Let’s go get some coffee, sweetheart,” he said. “We can’t do a thing until these pages dry.”

And they did remember to unplug the hot plate.

When they returned, the pages had dried, but just to make certain, they inserted paper towels between the now-parted pages to absorb any remaining moisture. Matthew and Mark were now ready for photographing. Starting at the beginning, they photographed each page digitally, then with film, and finally with ultraviolet and infrared light to detect whether any of the vellum had been used previously and erased-a palimpsest. While this was unlikely in view of Constantine’s commission, they would overlook nothing.

This consumed the rest of the day and might even have been deemed tedious were it not for the critical importance of the codex for future New Testament manuscript research. When they had finished, around 4 p.m., Matthew and Mark had surrendered their texts. Tomorrow, Luke, John, and perhaps Acts would hopefully do the same.

Under any other circumstances, Jon and Shannon would have spent the evening at one of the more prominent night spots in Istanbul-or perhaps on a dinner cruise along the Bosporus. In view of their enthralling project, however, they hardly felt deprived at the lack of time for such comparatively frivolous pursuits. They excused Ferris and al-Ghazali for that purpose. Instead, it was time to “view the rushes” of the day’s shooting-to borrow a phrase from Hollywood. Jon had brought along his Eberhard Nestle Greek New Testament-the latest edition of which contained the optimal readings of the ancient Greek manuscripts in attempting to provide the most exact version of what Matthew and the others had originally written down.