“I guess that means we’re tossing out the Glorious Mystery of the Assumption.”

“Don’t be flip, Dan.”

“Sorry.”

And he meant it.  He knew of Carrie’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin and didn’t want to tread on any of her vital beliefs.  But even though he was a priest, Dan had never been able to buy the Assumption.  The thought of Mary’s soul re-entering her body after her funeral, then reviving and being carried aloft to heaven by a host of angels was pretty hokey.

That sort of fairy tale stuff was all through the Bible, Old Testament and New, and had nothing to do with Dan’s idea of what the Church was all about.  Nifty little stories to wow the kids and get their attention, but sometimes fairy tales only served to distract from the real message in the Gospels: the brotherhood of man.

“But you’ve got to admit,” he said cautiously, “that the Assumption is a bit hard to buy.”  Carrie didn’t react; she simply stared down at the papers in her hands.  So he pressed on.  “I mean, we can agree, can’t we, that Heaven isn’t a place.  It’s a state of being.  So how could Mary be ‘assumed’ into Heaven body and soul when Heaven is a spiritual state?  Her body was a physical object.  It couldn’t go to Heaven.  It had to go somewhere else.  And I doubt it’s in orbit.”

A vision of the space shuttle passing the floating body of the Virgin Mary popped into his head.  He shook it off.

Carrie looked up at him, her eyes bright again.

“Exactly!  And that’s what this is all about.  This tells us where she really is!”

Uh-oh.  He’d backed himself into that one.  “Now wait just a minute, Carrie.  Don’t get—”

“Listen to me, Dan!  Whoever wrote this was assigned the task of guarding the body of a woman, a very important woman.  ‘Twenty years and five after his death they found me.’  Tradition holds that Mary died twenty-two years after her son’s crucifixion.  The timing is almost perfect.”

“But Carrie, the guy never says whose death.  In all the Gospels and letters and other texts, Jesus was called by name or referred to as the Master, the Lord, the Son of Man, or the like, and the Dead Sea scrolls referred to the Messiah as the ‘Branch of David’ or a ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’ or as the ‘Prince of the Congregation.’  I’d expect the writer to use one of those terms at least once if he was referring to Jesus.”

“Maybe he wrote the scrolls for himself.  Maybe he feared mentioning Jesus by name—there were all sorts of persecutions back then.”

“That’s possible, of course, but—”

“But I get the feeling from this that he didn’t feel worthy to speak Jesus’s name.”

A rather melodramatic interpretation, Dan thought, but he said nothing.  Carrie’s intensity impressed him.  The translation had really got to her.  She was inspired, afire with curiosity and...something else...something he couldn’t put his finger on.

“And here,” she said, tapping one of the pages, “this part where he refers to ‘his brother.’  Who else can that be but Saint James the Apostle, the brother of Jesus.”

“His brother or his cousin, depending on which authority you believe.”

But he sat up straighter in the bed and took the page from her.  As he scanned the passage it occurred to him that she had a point.  The recent publication of some obscure Dead Sea scroll fragments suggested a link between the Essenes of Qumran and the Jerusalem wing of the early Christian church, or “Nazarean movement,” as it was called.  The Jerusalem Church had been led by St. James.  King Herod Agrippa martyred his share of early Christians, and even the High Priest Ananus was after them.  So they were periodically fleeing into the desert.

“You know,” he said softly, “I never saw it before.  I mean, the writing was so disjointed and cryptic, but the timing fits.  If we assume that ‘his death’ refers to the crucifixion, and that ‘his brother’ arrived ‘two decades and a half’ later, that would date the Glass scroll somewhere around 58 AD”  Dan felt a tingle of excitement in his gut.  “James was still alive in 58.  Ananus didn’t have him killed until 62.”

Carrie clutched his arm.  “And tradition says Mary died 22 years after Jesus’ death, which is pretty darn close to two decades and a half.”

Dan could tell Carrie was getting pumped again.  It seemed to be contagious.  His own heart had picked up its tempo.

“But who wrote this?  If we can trust the little he says about himself, I would guess he was a scribe or a Pharisee, or both.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Well, he’s educated.  Hal told me the scroll was written in the Aramaic of the time with Greek and Latin words and expressions thrown in.  The striped blue sleeve he mentions, and his former free access to the Temple—he’s got to be a Pharisee.”

“He talks about the inheritance he left behind.”

“Right.  A rich Pharisee.”

“But weren’t the Pharisees proud?  This guy’s wearing rags and he says even the lice won’t bite him.  And he tried to drown himself.”

“In the Dead Sea, apparently—it was called the Sea of Lot back in those days.  Okay.  So he’s a severely depressed Pharisee who’s fallen on hard times and suffers from a heavy-duty lack of self-esteem.”

Carrie smiled.  God, he loved that smile.  “Sounds like he’d fit right in at Loaves and Fishes.  But what’s this about Hellenists?”

Dan reread the passage.  The pieces began falling into place.  “You know...he could be referring to Saint Paul’s wing of the early church.  The two groups had a falling out.”

“I knew there were disagreements, but—”

“More than disagreements.  A complete split.  James and his followers remained in Jerusalem as observant Jews, sticking to all the dietary laws and customs while they awaited the Second Coming of the Messiah, which they assumed would happen any day. Paul, on the other hand, was out in the hinterlands, working the crowds, converting Jews and Gentiles alike to his own brand of Christianity.  His father was a Roman and so Paul had a different slant on Jesus’s teachings, one that sacked the dietary laws and most Jewish traditions.  It mentions here ‘the brother’s’ fear of the ‘Hellenists using the mother’s remains for their own purposes’—the scroll has got to be referring to James’s rivalry with Paul’s movement.”

Dan stared at Carrie, his heart pounding, his spirits soaring.  Good God, it all fit!  The scroll described an encounter with James and the remnant of the Jerusalem church shortly before James was martyred.

“Carrie, this is incredible!  Why hasn’t anybody else—?”  Then he slammed on the brakes as he remembered.  “Wait.  Just wait.”  He shook his head to clear away the adrenaline buzz.  “What am I doing?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong.  The scroll is a fake, Carrie.  The ink is modern.  We’ve got to remember that.  A damn skillful job, but a proven forgery.  Almost had me going there, wondering why nobody else had put these pieces together.  Then I realized why: Nobody bothered to try.  Why waste time interpreting a fake?”

“No,” Carrie said, shaking her head defiantly.  “This is true.”

“Carrie,” he said, stroking her arm, “somebody tried to pull a fast one on the world.”

“Why?  Why would someone want to do such a thing?”

“Maliciousness.  Like calling in a bomb scare to a concert and watching everybody scramble out.  Malicious mischief on an international scale.  If the scroll had been released to the world as authentic, someone would have come to the same conclusion as we.  The liberal and fundamentalist sects of the Christian world would be up in arms, the Vatican would be releasing encyclicals, the Judean Desert would be filled with expeditions in search of the remains of the Mother of God.  There’d be years of chaos.  And all the while, our forger would be sitting back, giggling, knowing he caused it all.”

“But to what end?  I don’t get it.”