THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER ONE
AN
EXCITING
DISCOVERY
Near sundown
on November 18,1962, the one-hundred-ten ton schooner Santa Maria emerged as a
speck on the vast sea and splashed her anchor down in twenty feet of water
off a tiny island in the West Indies. The old ship seemed to sense the thrill
of her last great adventure as she rolled in the offshore swell. We had come
to find sunken treasure. We did. Or at least we found the bones of the Spanish
galleon which had broken up on this reef before the United States was born. As
in one of those strange stories of pirate maps, we had learned of it somewhat
by accident But we were not alone. In the first full daylight we gasped at the
sight of the shoreline. Vast craters were scattered over the tiny island.
Areas of glaring white coral gaped from the palmetto-covered earth. We were
even more amazed to find that one lone man had dug all these craters. He had
heard of the galleon apparently many months before we did and had left his
family to find it. Now half-mad with treasure lust, long since out of
dynamite, he continued to dig frantically with his bare hands. He had become
convinced that the survivors of the galleon had removed the bulk of the
treasure from the wreck, buried it and died without survivors. We began to
dive on the wreck itself. Down on the ocean floor, breathing through hoses
from the surface we found cannon balls and trinkets and coins of centuries
ago. We almost forgot our fear of sharks and barracudas under the art of
America's past.
2 Just
before sundown we used to move the schooner to cove at the end of the island.
The hours between sitting chatting and bedtime were filled with conversations
which often had little to do with the treasure. Deeply affected by the sense
of solitude, of "other worldliness" experennced together in the
silent depths, our thoughts ran to greater things. The four aboard included a
writer who once studied to be a priest; an atheist graduated from Oxford; a
pro-, sectional photographer; and a sailor whose hobbies in conclude weight
lifting and skin diving. The discussions never became angry, but they were
often spirited. "Trouble is," said the Englishman, "you fellows
have had too many churchy publications which have prejudiced your judgment.
Your church puts the books you ought to read on its Index of Prohibited
Books.* You probably feel you'd be contaminating yourselves if ~you read Frank
Harris* or Henry Miller.* You ride ~through life in a closed carriage of
religious views and never get to know what man really is. "The next day a
big barracuda met us over the wreck while we were turning over
barnacle-encrusted ballast stones. One of us had felt a "presence"
in the water, turned around, and there the great lethal fish hung, staring. We
could not know when the lightning speed would be unleashed behind those
murderous jaws. One of us signaled that he would watch while the others
worked. Finally the sailor motioned that he was going to shoot it and the
Englishman took up a side Position armed only with a short spear.
3 "That
was a brave thing you did," the sailor said to the Englishman as we
climbed back on the deck. But the Englishman was always doing brave things. He
was one of the finest athletes and most personable companions any of us had
known. And he did not mean to be rude when he challenged the narrowness of our
views, as we also did not mean to be rude when we defended the existence of
God. Perhaps without expecting to convince each other, we hoped that some
thoughts would sink in like seeds disappearing into swallowing soil, finally
conquering it in silence. "Speaking of Frank Harris," the writer
said, "didn't he become an atheist just before he was about to be
confirmed because a Hindu asked him who had made God? And doesn't his
autobiography indicate that he rejected God so easily because he didn't like
the Commandments?" Immediately the Englishman defended Harris: "But
Frank Harris was a modern Christian. He acknowledged the historic reality of
Christ and of the Gospels. Harris was not like the ignoramuses who say Christ
never even existed. Himself a great Latin and Greek scholar, he knew of Christ
in the writings of Tacitus and of Josephus, contemporary historians. He has a
whole chapter in one of his five autobiographical volumes in which he extols
Christ, and yet at the same time proves that He was not divine."
4 Finally we
had to leave the wreck for a time because the writer had to return to New York
on business for a couple of weeks. He had not known how to answer the
challenge that Harris had "proved" Christ was not divine. So he
studied the position of Harris, and then was almost as interested in going
back to the schooner to continue those discussions as in continuing hunt. Near
shipwreck and a host of adventures filled the rest of the voyage, but the
discussion at meals and in the nights of quiet watch still went on. They led
to a new and different treasure hunt, and to the writing of this book. Harris'
own words revealed that he first affirmed Christ's reality because of an
archeological* discovery which he made in Greece and which, in his own words,
" had lent an enormous, a disproportionate influence on my whole outlook
and way of reading the past. " He claims that while traveling on foot
through Attica he began to wonder about the great ruin of a marble lion which
was destroyed by the Turks who thought it contained treasure.
5 The Turks
had found the lion solid. It contained no treasure, and no one had solved the
mystery as to why it was standing there. Harris, who possessed an encyclopedic
memory recalled a great battle which took place on this plain in which three
hundred young men of Thebes went out to Oppose the invading armies of Philip
of Macedonia and Alexander. The three hundred young men had taken a S01emn
oath to stop the invaders or die in the attempt. They were all killed.
Plutarch, who described the event, mentioned a river on the plain. Harris says
that he studied the area and while there was now no river, a shallow brook
flowed not far from the fragments of the [ion and a long, grass-grown
depression. He reasoned that the lion had been a memorial over the tomb. He
persuaded archeologists* to excavate in that particular spot. They found four
stone walls a foot or so broad and six feet or so in height, built in the form
of an elongated square, resting on the shingle of an old river bed. Inside
there were 297 skeletons. In a corner was a little pile of ashes which they
took to be the remains of the other three who had survived longest and were
finally -remitted.
6 Evidence
of the terrible conflict was still Discernible in the conditions of the
skeletons, one of which had three ribs smashed on one side, while the head A
spear was found jammed between another rib and a Backbone; another backbone
had been broken by a Vigorous spear thrust and one side of the head beaten in
is well. Had it not been for the account in Plutarch, which harries
remembered, the ruin of a lion might still be a Mystery. Previously this
description of the battle by Plutarch ad been taken by many to be poetic
legend. "I began to read other books," Harris writes, "and
stably the New Testament in a different spirit. German :holars had taught me
that Jesus was a mythical figure: his teachings a mishmash of various
traditions and ligions and myths. He was not an historical personage any way,
they declared; the three synoptic Gospels ere all compiled from fifty to
eighty years after the cents, and John was certainly later still."
Harris, although an atheist, now became convinced of a historical reality of
Christ because he now knew from rsonal experience that records of history do
not Finish in accuracy because of age. A record of 2,000 years ago could be
just as accurate as a description written yesterday.
7 Not only
have the facts of Christ's life been told by four different disciples
(Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), who even offered their lives in testimony of
what they recorded, but the same reality of Christ was confirmed by other
contemporary historians such as Josephus and Tacitus. Now convinced of the
fact of Christ, how did Harris, the atheist, react? How did he
"prove" Christ was not divine? Admitting that Christ appeared to
hundreds of, persons after allegedly dying on the cross, Harris says that
Christ had merely fainted, and that afterward because of the care of those who
were waiting He was able to be brought back to health and to show Himself to
His disciples. Halris says: "If He were dead, He must have been dead for
some time, the time at least necessary for someone to go to Jerusalem and see
Pilate and return again to Calvary with the order to test the apparent death.
" It is remarkable that Harris felt himself to be one of the world's
greatest scholars, perhaps because he could memorize whole passages so easily
and could speak six languages. Yet he did not know how far Calvary was from
the Fortress Antonia where Pilate presided that day! The distance from Calvary
to Fortress Antonia is only a ten-minute walk. On horseback around the wall,
as it was then, it could have been no more than a few minutes! Anchored off
the island of San Salvador, where Columbus' extraordinary landfall exploded
the world into a new age, the writer quietly summed up to the Atheist:
"You accuse believers Of Prejudice and ignorance, but it is usually the
other way about." The writer had traveled around the Mediterranean just
before the treasure hunt and he knew of some exciting discoveries, especially
in Rome.
8 "If
Harris could be convinced about the facts of Christ because he found a grave
in a field in Greece, even as we came alive to early American history when we
found pieces-of eight among the bones of a Spanish galleon, I think we should
be able to find something better than a Grecian grave to help good men realize
that there is something more glorious than Henry Miller's 'pus and open
sewers', something better to which to look forward to than your new prophets
like de Maupassant slitting his own throat in his early forties." So we
began to wonder: What is the buried secret of a Spanish galleon when compared
to the secrets now being uncovered by scientific, well-equipped treasure
hunters of history: the modern archeologists?* When we see the vastness of
their excavations spreading around the Mediterranean and get some inkling of
the scientific precision with which they work to uncover the secrets of the
past, does not the common sea-going treasure hunter seem like a haphazard
amateur looking for baubles? For five years prior to finding the wrecked
galleon, our imagination had been captivated by the reported archeological
findings around the Mediterranean area, particularly in Rome. Now, with the
success of discovering the bones of a Spanish ship, we began to wonder: Why
not go to Italy to verify those archeological finds? The Spanish galleon had
seemed like a myth until those pieces-of-eight were actually in our hands. And
if we could verify a rumor by merely lifting real coin from the bottom of the
sea, then why shouldn't we hope to verify that far more precious coin of the
world's greatest secret which modern archeologists claimed to have discovered?
9 So the
Santa Maria was returned to Miami and her skipper boarded an ocean liner to
spend most of the next two years in Europe writing this book. Those
Mediterranean treasure hunters with pick and shovel knew where to look. Their
knowledge of history has leaped ahead during recent years. Documents have been
founded, catalogued, duplicated on microfilm and made available to them at
stations around the world. They found Pompeii. They found Herculaneum and
Capernaum and dozens of other ancient cities long since drowned beneath the
waves of the changing earth. Back in that schooner in the West Indies we began
to understand the modern archeologists because from old Spanish documents we
knew in advance about the galleon whose bones we picked. Most of the greatest
archeological finds of our time have been similarly made because of old
documents. It was long known, for example, that probably an important first
century cemetery was still uncovered in Rome. And cemeteries, to treasure
hunters of civilization, are more exciting than the smell of gold to treasure
hunters of the sea. Cemeteries contain tombs, and ancient tombs with their
pottery, coins and inscriptions are time of the past. Unfortunately, most of
the cemeteries of Rome had been emptied before the archeologists reached them.
After the Roman Empire crumbled, wave upon wave of invaders pillaged
mausoleums and catacombs. But the catacombs of Vatican Hill, still buried
beneath St. Peter's Basilica, were yet to be unearthed. They might still be
preserved! In 1900, by unanimous vote, the International Archeologists'
Congress petitioned Pope Leo X111 to excavate beneath the church.
10 But the
Pope refused. The church in question was Saint Peter's Basilica, the largest
church in the world! In 1939, an accident led to discovery. Pope Pius XII, the
reigning ( pontiff at that time, had ordered a portion of the floor of Saint
Peter's crypt be lowered to receive the tomb of Pius XI, and a workman made
the amazing discovery. It must have been figuratively a little like Alice's
failing through the rabbit hole. He landed in a different world: in a first
century cemetery. With that, the excavation was on. The expense resembled a
U.S. Government appropriation. Several superstructures, though
"modern" in comparison to the substructures, had been built long
before Columbus discovered America. They had to be shored up. The dome rose
above that very spot almost as high as a forty story skyscraper! This vast
structure, almost as tall as the Time-Life Building in New York, with a
"wing" so big it could be used for a football stadium, presented
problems to the scientists who wanted to dig beneath it. It had taken one
hundred twenty years to build. Nobody wanted it to come crashing down in as
many seconds, even to probe the secrets of the past! Painstakingly, the work
proceeded. Excitement and suspense mounted. Excavators hit a rich religious
lode and began to discover things hidden since Constantine built the first
basilica on the same spot back in 315. They were still tallying the finds when
Pius XII died in 1958, twenty years after the first archeological spade sank
guessingly between the great foundations. The cemetery they found dated from
the time of Christ. Some tombs were found so perfectly preserved that
the mosaic and fresco decorations seemed new.
11
Excavations from the central floor of the basilica slowly worked toward the
spot where tradition said Peter had been buried. Almost at once two surprising
facts came to light: First, some of the pagan tombs of the first century ha
been filled in during the fourth century by the there pagan Emperor,
Constantine,' to serve as foundation of a Christian church. This was
particularly amazing because the pagan Romans had an almost superstition
respect for tombs. In all history only twice did Roma emperors violate the
catacombs, even during ruthless thorough persecutions. Obviously the pagan
emperor must have had a very pressing reason for allowing sorn tombs to be
filled in for building foundations! Second, as the excavators approached that
area where Peter was said to be interred, they found Christian tombs squeezed
among the pagan tombs in increasing numbers. They even found some Christians
buried in this older pagan mausoleums which were there before Peter', death.
Most amazing was the discovery of Peter's grave. It was a very poor tomb,
lowered in the ground, sealed with a slab of stone. Ordinarily it would never
have attracted any attention, squeezed as it was between magnificent pagan
mausoleums. Because of their immense respect for the dead, the Roman
'Constantine, though he declared himself in favor of Christianity earlier was
not himself baptized until shortly before his death, and was therefore a pagan
when he built the first "St. Peter's Basilica" on Rome's Vatican
Hill. 'For an account of the excavations and later positive determination of
Peter's remains see John Evangelist Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter.
12 Mans had
never desecrated Peter's tomb, despite the bitter persecutions of Christians.
They had done the next thing: They had tried to camouflage ( hide it. They had
built a staircase from one level of if cemetery to an upper level right over
this tomb. The day of this stircase was ascertained from a marked tile in if
foundation. The staircase was built less than a century after Peter's death,
when Christianity was beginning t spread like a consuming fire through the
pagan world The red staircase wall, which had been built within the life span
of a single man after Peter's death, was covered with a maze of inscriptions.
The first archeologist to see this wall found most of the markings as
undecipherable as hieroglyphics had been before the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone.* Pius XII, who had undertaken the excavations, did not live to see
their major translations. Experts began to identify these inscriptions with
similar ones which had begun to turn up in excavations all over the
Mediterranean area in Christian tombs of the first and second centuries. These
markings partially lifted the curtain on early Christian belie before the
meaning of the red wall markings was deciphered, workmen made other finds.
They found three altars directly below the sixteenth century altar which
visitors see today beneath the dome of St. Peter's. Each altar is on a
different level, one above the other, having been built at about 500-year
intervals. The most recent had been built by Calixtus, the next by Gregory the
Great, and the last and earliest by Constantine who was the first of the Roman
emperors to recognize Christianity. The altar of Constantine crowded out still
a fourth altar, a "trophy," with two columns and a sort of trap door
underneath it.
13 This
predated the altar of Constantine by at least 150 years. The
"trophy" was built into the staircase wall which bore many
inscriptions. One of the inscriptions, older than the enclosure of
Constantine, reads: "Peter Lies Within. 1~ 2 The name and symbol of Peter
were found everywhere about. One line scribbled about A.D. 150 reads:
"Paccius Eulychus remembered Glykon here. " In the eighteen
centuries since then how many pilgrims to Peter's tomb have written home:
"I remembered you here." Why had Pius XII reversed the decision of
his predecessors and agreed, at such tremendous risk and expense, to unearth
Peter's tomb? Was he trying to produce a creditable witness for Christ? Or did
he guess we might find some evidence of Christ's doctrinal legacy for which
Peter had been willing to die? If might help us to understand if we translate
what happened to Peter into modern context. Rome in its prime, was like
Washington or Moscow today. If our world were pagan and Christ came now, what
would happen if a creditable, intelligent witness traveled to Washington to
testify about Him before a joint session of Congress? Since Christ performed
great miracles, converting thousands and thereby upsetting the traditions
underlying all contemporary fife, Congress might listen, and might even be
more tolerant than were Caligula, Claudius or Nero. But suppose the witness
had been forced to go to Margherita Guarducci, The Tomb of St. Peter, 1960,
pp. 133-35.
14 Moscow or
Peking? Could he have expected any better treatment than Peter and Paul
expected in Rome? So this digging under the great Roman basilica to the tomb
of Christ's "witness" was a dramatic, scientific step into
Christianity's infancy. It was a direct contact with an important witness of
Christian faith. After all, the writings and the spoken words of Christ's
later followers have often been confusing. Over two hundred Christian sects
have grown out of different interpretations of the Gospels. So which teachings
of Christ most impressed Peter, a man who walked with Christ, learned directly
from His lips, and died at last for his belief in what he had heard Christ
teaching? Because they partially answer this question, the inscriptions on the
wall over Peter's tomb were truly the great discovery made in our own time - a
dis- i :overy vastly more exciting than a pile of cannon balls And some pieces
-of -eight or the remains of three hundred rhebans in an Attican grave.
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