The debate was one week away. All eight thousand portable seats on the main floor inside Hagia Sophia had been spoken for. Additional folding chairs would surround the basilica on all sides, with closed-circuit television screens and loudspeakers conveying the program inside. Representatives of Christian church bodies would have VIP seating—meaning they could sit inside the basilica—as would an equal number of Islamic leaders, 84 percent of whom would be Sunni and 16 percent Shia, in accord with their relative numbers in the Islamic world.
Already the lofty galleries of Hagia Sophia were getting cluttered with television cameras, cables, and broadcast paraphernalia, next to which a special section was reserved for the world press corps. The rest of the surrounding galleries were given over to additional seating. Adjacent to the three main entrances to the basilica were security checkpoints with turnstiles, first-aid facilities, and of course, additional porta-potties.
Nothing was left to chance. Click and Clack, who suddenly had additional security help from the CIA, were putting in twelve-hour days. Each evening, they briefed Jon, Shannon, Dick, and Osman. Ferris seemed to be in constant phone or e-mail contact with Marylou Kaiser and the ICO in Cambridge. Jon himself was keeping his wits sharp through verbal duels with Osman.
Yet Jon was acutely aware that there was such a thing as too much preparation. Two days before the debate, he and Shannon decided to take a break. Perhaps an excursion on the Bosporus? A museum tour of the Topkapi Palace? Never! Like iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet, they were back again at the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate to explore the archives. This time their host was not the patriarch himself but Brother Gregorios, the librarian-archivist.
A diminutive older figure with a pointed gray beard and sallow skin, Gregorios seemed to have spent his entire life in row after row of book stacks. At first he was somewhat cool toward Jon and Shannon, as if his assigned task of showing them around his domain would cut into his beloved affair with words—printed, written, painted, pictured. But their obvious interest and apt queries seemed to melt the old man’s heart as he recognized them as genuine bibliophiles.
They had seen much larger libraries, of course—here there were only six hundred thousand books—but they had not come for the printed word. Instead, manuscripts were their target, early codices and documents from times of yore, the older the better. They had to be looking at the right place. It was in Istanbul that the Greek scholar-churchman Philotheos Bryennios had discovered the famous Didache, lost to the world since the third century, when Eusebius, the father of church history, almost included it in the New Testament canon. The Teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles through the Twelve Apostles was the real name of the work, lost for fifteen centuries until 1873 and Bryennios’s discovery.
In the reading room there were ten computers, at three of which young, black-suited students were peering into screens. Jon looked at one of the keyboards and winced, not because the lettering was Greek but because several letters were interchanged from the regular QWERTY keyboard. Then again, he hadn’t really planned to use those computers for overseas e-mail but in place of a card catalog.
Gregorios showed them row after row of book stacks and explained what sorts of titles were shelved on each. This was important, since they were hardly using the Library of Congress cataloging system. Yet all these were printed materials and thus of only secondary importance to Jon and Shannon. Still they registered appropriate interest until Jon finally asked, “And the archives, Brother Gregorios? Where are the archives?”
“Oh yes. Please to follow me.”
He led them to the far northern end of the library’s ground floor and down a metal stairway into a broad hall. All four walls were completely lined with bookshelves laden with ledgers organized by year. Jon looked around and asked, “I wonder if my wife and I could examine some of these volumes for . . . perhaps the next hour? When we’ve finished, we’ll come to your office.”
“As you wish.” He bowed slightly and left the archives.
“All right, my darling; let’s peruse all this with a passion!” Jon said, exulting in their solitude.
“Oh, of course, Jon; I’m sure we can read all of this in an hour.” She grinned.
Jon chuckled and pulled a book off the shelf. It began with events at the patriarchate in January 1848. Much of it was in a flowing Greek script that was at first difficult to read, but soon Jon had made out several pages. He put the book back where he had found it and said, “Now let’s find the earliest year here.”
Chasing down row after row, he found a really tattered tome with fading leather covers. “It’s from 1503, Shannon, just fifty years after the Muslim conquest.” Then he found another section of the hall devoted to the oldest printed books as well as manuscripts that predated them. He was overjoyed. “We have incunabula here,” he called out. “Incunabula!”
“Great!” She hurried over and looked at the title page. “Fabulous, Jon. Look at the date. It’s 1483!”
“The year Martin Luther was born. He could have read this book.” It was Hartmann Schedel’s Nūrnberger Chronica, the great picture book of the Middle Ages. Jon carefully paged through it. Then he laughed. “Never mind that this elaborate woodcut of Padua is exactly the same as that for Verona—here fifty pages earlier.”
“They must have counted on medieval readers having short memories,” Shannon said, smiling.
The manuscripts, however, were Jon’s Holy Grail, the potential treasure that had lured them from Cambridge to Istanbul. They were indexed on a large placard posted over the wider stacks where they were stored. The dates ran back from the 1400s and 1300s to the 600s and 500s. A rippling thrill tingled through Jon, although he realized it would take a much longer visit to know what they contained. Today’s was only a quick survey.
They retraced their steps to Gregorios’s office to extend their thanks and take their leave. “I think we have a general impression of the layout here, good brother,” Jon said. “We have seen it all, haven’t we?”
He nodded. “All but the geniza, of course.”
Jon chuckled at the man’s use of a Hebrew term. “The geniza? I didn’t know you were Jewish! A sacred dump for old Scriptures?”
Brother Gregorios joined in the laughter. “Well, that’s what we call our room for . . . bad manuscripts—I want to say—for leaves missing from books or . . . or codices with bindings cracked and pages that are not readable or are too torn to save. We do try to save some of them when we can. And maybe even try to rebuild them—no, what is the word?”
“Rebind them?” Shannon offered.
“Yes, rebind them.”
“And where is your geniza?” Jon asked.
“In the basement.”
“The basement? I hope you have humidity control.”
“Oh yes, the whole library and archives—and basement—are at 48 percent humidity and twenty degrees temperature.”
“Twenty degrees, you say?”
“That’s centigrade, Jon,” Shannon said. “In Fahrenheit it would be about . . . sixty-eight degrees.”
Jon made a mental note: Think first; speak later.
As they were walking out of the library, Jon did an about-face. The opportunity was simply too good to pass up. He walked back to Gregorios’s office and asked, somewhat sheepishly, “I wonder, good brother—just to complete our tour—if we might briefly visit also the geniza?”
“Well, there’s not much to see there, but . . . as you wish.”
He led them into the basement. The room was poorly lit. Next to the light switch was a clear plastic cube with temperature and humidity barrel graphs, showing that at least the proper environment was being maintained. As Gregorios had assured them, the temperature was a slightly cool but comfortable twenty degrees Celsius and the humidity was carefully controlled. Otherwise, mold would have blanketed everything in this literary catchall and ruined it.
It was hardly a picture of disciplined order. On the east side of the room were torn books, orphaned printed pages, and empty bindings. In the center was an apparently uncataloged miscellany of dusty manuscripts in partial state of preservation, and at the extreme western edge of the room were stacks of ponderous old tomes bowing the wooden shelves with their weight.
“Ugly as all this appears, Jon,” Shannon said, “I suppose our teams will have to photograph every bit of it?”
“Most of it, I think. There may be some golden nuggets in this junk heap.”
Jon tried to discern the arrangement of materials in the room, but there seemed to be little or none. Shannon walked over to the fat tomes, pulled one off the shelf, and blew dust off it. She opened to the title page, and her eyes widened. “Listen to this, Jon: Omile Hrisostomou, 491–496. That would be Sermons of Chrysostom, AD 491–496, written in Constantinople in 847.”
“Interesting,” Jon said. “Even though we have those sermons elsewhere, a ninth-century codex is nothing to sneeze at.”
“Ye—yes it is!” Shannon snorted in nasal tone, as she inhaled suddenly and let loose with a colossal sneeze. “Sorry. It’s the dust.”
The other ancient tomes offered more sermons by Greek church fathers. Shannon turned to another codex that was almost on the floor, since its weight had bulged the too-thin wooden shelf supporting it. Holding her nose, she blew the dust off the faded calfskin stretched across a thin wooden board cover. “This one looks like it’s fairly complete, although the back cover is missing.” Opening to the title page, she read aloud: “Biblia Beta. Kaine Diatheke tou Kuriou Iesou Christou. . . .”
She read on silently, then asked, “What do you think? This one could be interesting.”
Jon made no response. He was busy in the miscellaneous manuscript section.
“Jon, did you hear me?”
“What’s that, Shannon?”
“We have an interesting title page here, in very elegant lettering.” She repeated the Greek for what, in English, would be “Book Two: The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, one of fifty copies.”
Jon hurried over to Shannon’s side and examined the page. His eyes narrowed. He glanced further down the title page and read aloud the rest of the Greek, followed by his translation, as he would write it out later that day in the same relative positioning as the Greek:
One of fifty copies commissioned by
Caesar Victor Constantinus Maximus Augustus
and servant of God
who authorized Eusebius Pamphili to have these
prepared by his scribes in the church at Caesarea
Palaestina and distributed throughout
Constantinople in the year 1088 AUC
Jon realized he was breathing heavily. His face grew flushed. His pulse accelerated, and his hand actually trembled as he paged quickly through random sections of the codex. Finally he halted his frenetic paging and stared at her. “My darling,” he began, in what sounded more like gargle than elocution. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Do you have any idea what you’ve found here?”
“Well, Constantine’s name is on it, so it must be significant. But what about that date? Constantine died in 337, but this is from 1088, and we have many materials from the eleventh century.”
“That’s 1088 AUC, Shannon. Ab urbe condita—from the founding of the city.”
“Rome, of course—founded 753 BC!” Shannon recalled. “Okay, so our date is 1088 minus 753 or . . . AD 335?”
“Right. And that’s exactly when Eusebius says Constantine commissioned him to do this.”
“So this could be the real thing, Jon?”
He slowly shook his head. “I’d hate to be premature, but yes, it could well be.” He broke into a great smile. “It’s well known that Constantine had commissioned Eusebius to prepare fifty elegant copies of Scripture, but none of them has ever been found. And just look at the layout: four handsome columns of beautiful Greek lettering on each page of vellum, just like the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates only a bit later.”
Jon paged further in growing excitement. “Aside from the Sinaiticus, we have only two other codices from that time: the Vaticanus and the Alexandrinus. This is . . . this could be . . . well, I’m not given to superlatives. Let’s just say that this might be a . . . a simply stupendous find. Depending on what the text says, this could . . . well, it could be a discovery far more important than even the Dead Sea Scrolls! How in the world, Shannon, do you have such off-the-wall great luck, such over-the-top serendipity, that—?”
“Oh, Professor Weber,” said Brother Gregorios, who had just appeared in the doorway, “have you seen enough of our tattered collection?”
“Yes, thank you, good brother.” Then he whispered to Shannon, “Just put this back exactly where you found it.”
On the way back to the hotel, Jon unpacked his strategy. “We had no time to get into the text, Shannon, so telling anyone there what we found would have been totally premature. And foolish! If the thing is authentic—and how in the world could it not be?—it will stun the entire scholarly world. Report it too early, and it would become a cause célèbre and complicate any evaluation. We could even be denied further access to it.” If Jon had one questionable habit, it was his proclivity to overexplain things to people, born of many years’ teaching university undergrads, who, in fact, needed his careful reiteration of what might have seemed obvious.
The moment they returned to the Hilton, Jon headed for his laptop, found the folder on the early church fathers, and opened a work by Eusebius called Vita Constantini—The Life of Constantine. He paged through the document until he came to chapters 36 and 37, where he read aloud, for Shannon’s benefit, the dated though colorful translation from The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. It began with Eusebius’s transcription of Constantine’s own letter, written from Constantinople to Eusebius in Caesarea.
VICTOR CONSTANTINUS, MAXIMUS AUGUSTUS
to Eusebius,
It happens, through the favoring providence of God, our Savior, that great numbers have united themselves to the most holy church in the city which is called by my name. It seems, therefore, highly requisite, since that city is rapidly advancing in prosperity in all other respects, that the number of churches should also be increased. Do you, therefore, receive with all readiness my determination on this behalf. I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the Church, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practiced in their art.
The procurator of the diocese has also received instructions by letter from our Clemency to be careful to furnish all things necessary for the preparation of such copies; and it will be for you to take special care that they be completed with as little delay as possible. You have authority also, in virtue of this letter, to use two of the public carriages for their conveyance, by which arrangement the copies when fairly written will most easily be forwarded for my personal inspection; and one of the deacons of your church may be entrusted with this service, who, on his arrival here, shall experience my liberality. God preserve you, beloved brother.
Jon looked up from the screen in jubilation. “What you found was written on parchment, Shannon. You found one of the fifty. Scholars have been looking for that edition since the early centuries of the church!”
“Yes, but don’t the ‘Scriptures’ ordered by Constantine include the Old Testament? I just found the New.”
“Well, they were supposed to be portable, so they were most likely in two volumes, exactly as the title ‘Book Two’ implies. Anyhow, in the next lines, Eusebius tells how he responded to the emperor’s letter.”
Such were the emperor’s commands, which were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborately bound volumes of a threefold and fourfold form. This fact is attested by another letter, which the emperor wrote in acknowledgment. . . .
“‘Threefold and fourfold form’? Whatever can that mean?” Jon wondered.
“Maybe three or four columns of writing per page?” Shannon suggested.
“Why not? Excellent, Shannon! What we saw were four columns per page, and remember how carefully the calfskin cover had originally been tooled? That’s it! That’s one of them!”
Shannon smiled, but her reserve showed that she wasn’t quite ready to celebrate. She shook her head and asked, “But why would they put something so incredibly valuable as that in their junk room?”
“Well, who knows when it landed there? We’ll try to find out. But probably they did it for some stupidly simple reason, such as a missing back cover. That room was full of mangled books.”
“Okay, Jon, let your mind roam. What, finally, is the ‘world-shaking’ importance here? Might it not be simply an early edition of the New Testament that we all know? And if so, what’s the big deal?”
“You know the rule, Shannon: the earlier, the more authoritative. The Bible has come down to us with thousands of tiny variations. None of them amount to a hill of beans, despite sensationalizing claims to the contrary. But now textual scholars will have a tremendous new source to work with in getting us the best possible reading of what the biblical writers actually wrote. And who knows what else we might find in the text? For openers, even issues regarding the Canon come into play here: what books are included in that early New Testament, and which are left out?”
Shannon quickly found Jon’s enthusiasm contagious and said, in a beaming smile, “I bet you’ll have trouble sleeping tonight!”
“You bet, and for the next two nights, my darling, since the debate is tomorrow. But after that, I’m loading up our cameras with freshly charged batteries to photograph every last inch of that incredible document.”
In a great bound, Jon now leaped to the mini fridge in their suite, hauled out a bottle of Dom Pérignon, popped the cork, and filled two glasses with bubbly. “I know this is too traditional, sweetheart, but . . . a toast to Shannon Jennings Weber, amazing archaeologist, scintillating scholar, dauntless discoverer of precious codices, and magnificent mate! By the way, we’ll both have trouble sleeping tonight!”