Epilogue

Although the decisions of the Jerusalem Council were not binding on individual church bodies, 96 percent of world Christianity did adopt them in fact. Holdouts were the extremely conservative sects, rigorist splinter groups, and the Appalachian churches that practiced snake-handling as a centerpiece of their worship. The assurance that not one syllable of the newly discovered material contradicted any part of Scripture fell on deaf ears. As one of their elders put it, “If the King James Bible was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for us.”

Publication of the sixty-seven-book Bible became the greatest statistical phenomenon since Gutenberg invented movable type printing. When Jon and the ICO had first permitted the fresh addenda to be published separately as part of the public domain, publishers privately deemed them “crazy,” in view of the incredibly valuable property they were giving away. Now they called them “crazy like a fox,” since publishing any new Bible with the addenda would have certain strings attached, spelled “royalties.” The newly discovered Greek texts in the codex and any translations thereof were fully protected if they became part of any new edition of the New Testament or the Bible.

Jon explained that the reason for the copyright was far more than royalties. A restriction clause in all publishing contracts gave the ICO the right to approve any translation. A “dirty little secret” in Bible publishing had been the intrusion of denominational interests in slight shadings in translating some verses of Holy Writ.

To be sure, new Bible editions had been flooding the market of late. A whole cavalcade of specialty Bibles were crowding the bookstores, such as women’s Bibles, men’s Bibles, Scriptures for the young, for the aged, and every niche market imaginable. Jon once cracked to Shannon, “Next there will be A Bible for Left-handed Mothers-to-be in the Second Trimester of Their Pregnancy.” But all these were only adaptations of the traditional text. The new sixty-seven-book Bible rewrote the sales records in Bible publishing.

The ICO had authorized the Boston law firm of Allen, Stover, Gemrich, Haenicke, and Hume to handle the crush of publishers lining up at their doors. Known for their expertise in international rights and permissions, they monitored worldwide sales of the new edition so well that a record 93 percent of global sales were legitimate. There were exceptions, of course. Customs officials in Long Beach, California, had to seize a whole boatload of the new Bibles because they were pirated editions printed in China with a fake Zondervan imprint.

Although Jon and Shannon disliked the name “The New Bible” because it could suggest that the traditional version was now supplanted, this was the name bestowed on it by the vast public. And because global sales of the New Bible quickly reached truly biblical proportions, the phrase “an embarrassment of riches” had fresh meaning for Jon and the ICO. Their royalties were not large; they were simply prodigious.

Meetings of the ICO were now devoted to the happy task of deciding how to share the wealth. The repository was the Institute of Christian Origins Foundation, and interviews with Warren Buffett and officers of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were helpful. While theirs were secular in nature, the ICO Foundation would serve primarily Christian and biblical interests. Accordingly, the primary beneficiaries were:

• The Institute of Christian Origins, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Charity began at home. A large endowment fund was established to underwrite an expanded research program for the ICO in all its endeavors, present and future.

• The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

The enclave in Istanbul was landlocked and needed to expand. Now it could buy up surrounding properties in overcrowded Istanbul and enjoy something that actually resembled a campus. This was but a debt repaid.

• The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

Its program of photographing and/or purchasing biblical manuscripts across the world could now be fully funded and, in fact, prioritized because of the race against time to secure the texts before inevitable deterioration.

• Endowment for Interfaith Dialogue

In greater efforts toward Christian unity, far more interchange between Eastern and Western Christendom was necessary, as well as between Protestants and the rest of Christendom.

Soon other beneficiaries included an Endowment for Christian-Jewish Dialogue and an Endowment for Christian-Muslim Dialogue. The list eventually ran to seven pages.

Abbas al-Rashid and Jon remained in close touch. Abbas’s commencement address at al-Azhar University, “Freedom for Truth,” was widely published in tract form throughout the Islamic world, provoking the ire of the orthodox but kindling a powerful response among moderate Muslims everywhere. Some were calling Abbas the long-awaited Muslim Martin Luther for championing the cause of reform in Islam. Too long the moderate Muslim majority had failed to speak out. Whether their long silence had been prompted by fear of the jihadists or general passivity, they now became far more vocal through such moderate organizations as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. An American version of Abbas al-Rashid, Jasser and his colleagues vigorously opposed extremism in Islam in all its forms.

A European counterpart surfaced to oppose the fiery rhetoric of the radical mullahs who were trying to hijack Islam. In March 2010, Tahir ul-Qadri, a Pakistani sheikh in London, had issued a public declaration declaring that terrorists were the very enemies of Islam and that suicide bombers were destined not for heaven but for hell. Abbas included his statement in tracts that were published in the hundreds of thousands and dropped over Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan and elsewhere. Some of the tracts were released from helium balloons floating over their targets, and they had a surprising impact. Double agents told of heated discussions now taking place in jihadist camps, recruits no longer satisfied with their instructors’ calls for violence.

The tracts quoted the Qur’an as prohibiting attacks against the innocent (Sura 5:32) and against suicide in both the Qur’an (Sura 4:29) and the hadith (Bukhari 23:446). They concluded with the warning:

Remember, you are being deluded by false teachers into committing

murder against the innocent and against your own selves.

This violates the very heart of Islam.

Thinking for themselves, many Muslim youth started abandoning terrorist cells. As an overlooked communication device, the lowly tract was accomplishing big results.

Having escaped American justice, Osman al-Ghazali had pleaded with his wife and daughter to join him in Cairo. But they were genuine converts to Christianity and were perfectly horrified to learn of his role as Judas Iscariot. Osman promised that they could remain Christian and attend the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo, where Christian Pope Shenouda III was in charge.

They countered with what they thought a far better plan: Osman must, instead, return to the States, sincerely repent of his crime, and suffer whatever civil or criminal consequences were necessary. In view of the horror stories regarding American women moving to the Middle East only to learn that the husbands they had trusted were now misogynist tyrants operating under sharia law, their response was inevitable.

When Osman refused their terms, Fatima al-Ghazali was granted a civil divorce by the Massachusetts courts on the basis of desertion. She later wrote a bestselling exposé, titled Women Victims of Islam. Needless to say, it was banned in Baghdad and throughout the Middle East.

Some months after Osman arrived in Egypt, he had business in Istanbul and used the occasion to visit the radical cadre that had engineered the theft of the Constantine Codex. He called the cell members “greedy, stupid swine” for trying to get a ransom for the codex instead of destroying it, as he had specified. He even suggested that they rename their group “Idiots for Islam” for having blown his master plan out of the water. It seems they didn’t like to be called such nasty names, so they pounded Osman bloody. He emerged with a broken nose that never healed properly, and he spent his days in a low-paying job as translator at Cairo University Library, a lonely man bitter at the world, bitter even at Allah.

For Jon, Shannon, and the ICO, as the months rolled on, the royalties rolled in. The charity list lengthened. A generous sector of their largesse, however, would always be devoted to the purposes for which the ICO was founded: to expand knowledge of the biblical world in general, the origins of Christianity in particular. Spending their massive sums turned out to be a true chore for the ICO, but a welcome one. In time, however, at Jon and Shannon’s urging, the ICO surrendered its copyright of the new material in the Constantine Codex and threw it open to the world for scholarship and publication. The codex itself was finally committed to the Library of Congress for the ultimate in security, with ownership retained by the Ecumenical Patriarch.

At last, Jon and Shannon could spend more time at Cape Cod. In previous exploits, they had defended Christianity against diabolical fraud as well as a false Christ. Now they had even enhanced the credibility of its Holy Book—all in all, a rather respectable record. They could only wonder what intriguing adventures might await them in the future.