Year Zero Read Online Free Page B

stone, a favorite of Iron Age quarriers. This particular blob of stone had been left in place because it was flawed, with a crack through the top that predated the Christian era by eons. Was this Ochs’s memento, a chunk of Christ’s rock? But what museum would buy such a thing?
    “Look how small the summit is,” Ochs drily observed. “No room for two more crosses of the thieves, would you say? And steep. Have you seen the section drawing by Gibson and Taylor? It’s overhanging on the back side. Maybe a climber like you could get up the sides with a cross on your back. But a man who’s just been whipped half to death? They say a fully assembled cross would have weighed 200 pounds. Even if it was only the crosspiece Jesus was carrying, it still would have meant a good fifty pounds or more.”
    Ochs went on. “The Gospels said nothing about Jesus being crucified on a hill, only at a topos or place. According to Jerome, golgotha was a common term for crucifixion sites. The skull referred to the unburied remains. It’s no wonder scholars have come to dismiss the site. I did, too.”
    “We don’t have time for this,” said Nathan Lee. He looked around for something portable and precious, but it was all knickknacks to his eye. He couldn’t imagine what Ochs wanted here.
    “One thing is certain,” Ochs rambled on. “Wherever Golgotha was, it must have served for thousands of other executions over the years. Varus crucified 2000 in the year 4 B . C . E . Florus crucified almost twice that many at the start of the First Jewish Revolt. A few years later, Titus was crucifying 500 people per day. It adds up. But have you ever asked yourself, with all those dead men, where are the remains? Wouldn’t some of those skulls and bones have survived? In all our excavations around Jerusalem, we’ve found only one skeleton that had been crucified.”
    Nathan Lee knew the skeleton…by name. Yehochanan had been a male, five-foot five-inches tall, twenty-five years old. Possibly he’d been a rebel. Possibly his little daughter had been killed before his eyes as he hung on his cross. At any rate, her bones had been found mixed with his. A spike driven sideways through his heel bone had stuck, and they had buried Yehochanan with the nail at a tomb just north of the city.
    For a moment, despite himself, Nathan Lee felt pulled in. “The bones were removed when the Old City walls were expanded,” he said. “According to halakhic law, carcasses, graves and tanneries couldn’t remain within fifty cubits of the town.”
    “That’s conventional wisdom,” said Ochs. “But the Jews weren’t in charge of the city’s expansion, remember? It was the Romans calling the shots. They didn’t give a damn about Hebrew regulations.”
    “Then the bones turned to dust. I don’t know. They’re gone. What does it matter?”
    “My man,” tutted Ochs.
    The pieces fell together. “There are remains?”
    “Under our very feet.”
    “But I would have heard about it.”
    “They were only discovered a month ago,” said Ochs. “A team with the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. Vatican people. You know how secretive they are.”
    “How did you find out then?”
    Ochs rubbed his fingers and thumb. “Filthy lucre. I know you think you’re above everyone else, Nathan Lee. But even you have your price.”
    Nathan Lee flushed. Ochs led the way down a set of stone stairs through a chapel region, then further on to a barred gate with a U-shaped, titanium bike lock. “The Cave of the Invention of the Cross,” he said, beaming his flashlight into the depths.
    According to legend, the true cross had been discovered here, in 327 C.E., by the newly converted mother of Emperor Constantine. In a sense, she’d been the original archaeologist, dashing around, digging up artifacts, orchestrating bits and pieces of the Passion Narrative, the story of Jesus’ death. It was she who had decided the Rock was Golgotha, a tomb was the Tomb, and that Jesus’