The Resurrection File (31 page)

Will saw that all four of the stories also said that the visit to the tomb occurred very early in the morning—just at the break of dawn, on the “first day of the week.” All four accounts prominently mentioned a disciple by the name of Mary being among those visiting. All of the stories mentioned that the women had witnessed the fact that the large stone that had been rolled in front of the tomb to seal it had been moved before they got there, and that the tomb was open, and that the tomb no longer contained the corpse of Jesus. And all four accounts included a reference to a subsequent face-to-face meeting between a resurrected Jesus and his disciples.

There were some other significant consistencies that Will noted. Three out of the four Gospels mentioned an encounter at the tomb between Mary and at least one being described as an “angel,” who announced that Jesus had risen. And those three were all consistent in describing the emotional response of Mary to that encounter.

The flip-side facet of “individuality” was also present in these accounts. Will knew that the hallmark of accurate multiple-witness testimony was not only that all must agree as to the central facts, but that each observation should differ slightly in the details—details that one witness may have observed but another may not have noticed. When four witnesses recite exactly the same facts in the same way, that immediately points to the possibility that the witnesses consorted together to fashion a unified story, or even worse, to manufacture a lie.

Will observed that each story bore the hallmark of setting forth individual and unique facts—but not in a way that would logically contradict the other Gospels. In particular, Matthew and Mark mentioned one angelic meeting with Mary and the other women. Luke mentioned two. Dr. Reichstad, in some of the writings Will had reviewed, had ridiculed the Gospel accounts for such “discrepancies.”

But to Will it was much like the situation at an armed robbery. One witness on the street corner sees, and later testifies that he saw,
“one”
police officer draw his gun on a robber he was chasing. Another witness, closer and at a better angle, might see that same officer and also a
second
officer, obscured from the first witness's view by a parked car, also pursuing the bank robber with his gun drawn. Are the two witnesses to be disbelieved because
they both accurately observed the same incident from two different positions? To Will, the point seemed so elementary, it surprised him that someone with Reichstad's qualifications would have missed it.

Will looked out of the window as the train reduced its speed and the cadence of click-clacks of the rails beneath him slowed down. The train eased into the station at Philadelphia for a short stop.

An influx of passengers was arriving, and Will moved his books and papers off the seat next to him so an elderly man with a cane and a gray fedora could sit down in the neighboring seat. Will had already moved onto the second characteristic he had noted in the Gospels—the “credibility” of the witnesses.

Will was impressed at the believable way in which the main characters were portrayed. Three out of the four accounts specifically described the kind of awe-struck emotion one would expect in a person who confronts a supernatural event. Matthew described the “fear” and “joy” of the women; Mark mentioned their “trembling” and “astonishment” as they ran, pell-mell, from the scene. Luke detailed how the women were “terrified” and fell with their faces to the ground during the angelic encounter at the tomb.

Will remembered hearing ghost stories as a child when he was at camp, and how the hair would rise on the back of his neck. There was something authentic about the way these stories recounted the very human reaction of these followers of Jesus.

Yet something struck Will even more strongly: the credible way that the disciples of Jesus were portrayed. Genuine doubt and initial disbelief was a constant theme in the Gospels. If these accounts were fabrications and lies, why hadn't these disciples portrayed themselves in a positive light? Why hadn't they written themselves into the stories as paragons of unswerving faith and fidelity to Jesus, their hero?

In one of his journal articles, Riechstad had written that the writers of the Gospels, and the disciples, and the believers in the early Christian church were infected by the naivete of nonscientific first-century ignorance and superstition—thus, they were able to talk themselves into believing the miracle stories that they themselves were actually inventing.

But Will found something quite different in his study of the accounts. When Mary first encountered the empty tomb—when it was “still dark,” and presumably before she met any “angel”—she ran and told Peter and the other disciples. Her first reaction was
not
to believe that Jesus had miraculously risen. Rather, she had the kind of common sense, empirical skepticism that Will appreciated. According to the Gospel of John, she had
initially concluded simply that “they have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him.”

According to Luke's account, when Mary reported the empty tomb and her encounter with an angel to the disciples, their initial reaction was exactly what Will would have expected from the most skeptical twenty-first century witness: “These words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.”

And in Matthew, even when the risen Jesus bodily presented himself to the disciples, not all of them instantly believed: “But some were doubtful.” Will found that, in John's Gospel, one follower by the name of Thomas had refused to believe until he had had the chance to personally inspect the nail holes in Jesus' hands, and the scar in his side where the Roman soldier had thrust in a spear.

To Will, these New Testament witnesses and followers were simply not gullible or naive in the way that Reichstad and his compatriots had assumed.

As the train slowed down and entered Newark, New Jersey, for a short stop, Will had begun examining his third conclusion. This one he had labeled “factual irrelevancies.”

He knew that one of the marks of factual accuracy is the presence of the seemingly
irrelevant
detail that a witness initially gives. When Will would meet with a new client for the first time—someone who had experienced some great trauma or injustice, or had some important story to tell—often the client would just spill out needless and seemingly irrelevant factual information. The reason for this is that the client knows only that he or she has a story to tell. A person with a story wants to tell it all, and let the lawyer figure out what the facts mean in the eyes of the law.

As Will viewed the accounts of the resurrection, this was the one aspect of the story that impacted him more than any other. In the Gospel of John, there was an abundance of factual detail about the inspection of the empty tomb—much of it secondary and seemingly irrelevant to the main point that Jesus had been resurrected and was no longer there. Yet all of it bore the marks of eyewitness observation and therefore corroborated the story.

One of the disciples ran faster than Peter and got to the tomb first. Then in order to look into the empty tomb Peter ended up “stooping and looking in,” implying a small opening with a low doorway.

And when they looked into the empty tomb they didn't just see that Jesus' body was absent. Peter also saw something else—something having powerful testimonial value to Will as a trial lawyer. He “saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the face-cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself.”

If the body had been stolen, or simply moved from the tomb, there would have been no reason, Will concluded, to have taken the time to painstakingly remove the linen wrappings from the body—and certainly no reason to take the time to carefully “roll up” the face covering

But secondly, the reference to “the face-cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself” told Will that there had been deliberate and intentional action—by someone or something. That action had taken place within the tomb between the time Jesus had been buried and the time, Sunday morning, that the witnesses had arrived and found the tomb was empty. The linen wrappings had been intentionally removed and discarded. The face-cloth had been carefully rolled up and placed down in the tomb at a slightly different spot.

All this could not have been the result of grave-robbing followers who grabbed the body and dragged it out so as to bury it elsewhere—in the hopes of perpetrating a fraud on the world. And the enemies of Jesus would certainly not have had any reason to disturb the body. In fact, they had every reason to try to ensure that it remained exactly where it lay.

The more that Will thought on it, the more he felt that what he was reading in the Gospel accounts was an authentic description of a corpse that was simply not acting like a corpse. There were evidences of an event that was convincingly factual and observable—yet unexplainable by human reason or scientific theory. Dare he admit it to himself? Here were the powerful, tangible traces of what should happen when the mundane, physical world is intersected by the supernatural. When the ordinary facts of life encounter the divine.

Will had lost track of the time. Raising his head, suddenly he was aware that the train was pulling into Penn Station in New York City. The elderly man next to him glanced over at the Bible in Will's lap.

“You a preacher?”

“No,” Will replied, “I'm a lawyer.”

The old man gave him a strange look. As if the idea of a lawyer reading a Bible didn't make much sense to him. After a moment the train came to a slow, rocking stop.

After getting to his feet stiffly and with difficulty, the old man turned to Will and said, “Don't care much for
that
stuff,” nodding his head toward the Bible that Will was holding. Then he added, “I've got more important things to worry about.”

The old man cautiously inched his way to the steps, leaning heavily on his cane as he walked, with Will impatiently walking behind him.

34

W
ILL MADE HIS WAY OUT OF THE DINGY
, cavernous confines of Penn Station and into sunlight, where he was greeted with the roar of New York City street noise. He hailed a cab over to the New York Public Library.

As he climbed out of the cab on the west side of Fifth Avenue, Will realized that he had not asked for a physical description of the lawyer he was supposed to meet. So as he walked across the wide plaza in front of the library he quickly scanned the crowds of pedestrians, some walking, others mingling in front of the huge stone columns and high arched entrances of the library.

Then he noticed a short man in his thirties with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a corduroy jacket and a tie loosened at the neck, with a newspaper tucked under his arm. The man was walking toward him. When he was right in front of Will he extended his hand but kept it close to him and looked around as he did. His expression was worried-looking and his face was locked in a kind of a grimace.

“You haven't changed much,” the man said. “I'm the guy from the public defender's office. Let's start walking.” The public defender then gave a little nod of his head.

With that the two lawyers started strolling down toward Fortieth Street, wading through the tide of pedestrians that was cramming the sidewalks during the noon hour.

Will didn't waste any time.

“How did my name come up in this MIRV missile incident?” he asked as they walked along.

“There was this long line of federal agencies that were interrogating my client, one after another. The last agency in line brought it up,” the public defender answered, still glancing around him.

“Which one?”

“The State Department—their lawyers.”

“Why?”

“You got me,” the man answered. “We had two days of interviews. I had worked out a really sweet deal for my client, but it required him to spill his guts about everything he knew about the truck, the guys who hired him to do this, and so on. Most of the people interrogating my client were either prosecutor types or experienced investigators. Except at the end. These two pencil-pusher types from the State Department came in at the end, basically with a shopping list of names, and wanted to know if my client ever talked to—or had any contact with—this long catalogue of people.”

“What kind of people?” Will asked.

“I didn't recognize any of the names except for the last name they asked about—yours. They mentioned it and I couldn't believe what I had just heard. They wanted to know if Mr. Ajadi, the driver of that rented truck, had ever talked to you after his arrest. Now, I don't think they realized that I knew you.”

“What did Ajadi say?”

“Of course he had no idea who you were.”

The other lawyer stopped in front of a hot dog wagon. “You want one?” he asked Will.

“Are you kidding?” Will responded. “I don't eat anything that's served on the streets of New York City.”

“I was the same way when I moved here,” the other man said, squeezing mustard on his hot dog. “But I figure after living here for the last five years without getting dysentery I must have developed the NYC superimmunity to all of the bugs that swim around here.”