The Constantine Codex

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Shannon Jennings Weber was enjoying her lunch under the shade of a juniper tree-much as the prophet Elijah had done. She was digging at Pella on the east bank of the Jordan River, about twenty miles south of the Sea of Galilee. This was new territory for the archaeologist, who had had a string of successes with her spade in Israel. She had organized this dig in hopes of finding something-anything-to help fill one of the most crucial gaps in church history: the later first century, when Christians managed to escape the horrifying Roman conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70 by fleeing to Pella before the war started. Here, she thought, in the very capital of the earliest church, there must be clues under the soil, artifacts that would illumine the decades during which Christianity first took hold in the Mediterranean world.

Her husband, Jon, could not have been more pleased, since he too thought Pella an excavation site with huge potential. While teaching at Harvard, he regularly sent Shannon such e-mail queries as “Have you found the personal memoirs of Jesus yet?” or “How about Paul’s missing letter to Corinth?” Even the messages that told of his love and loneliness usually had a playful tagline, such as “Surely you’ve found one of Luke’s paintings of the apostles?” or “If you unearth the bishop’s chair of James, do excavate carefully.”

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