2. Kate #2
“Wait a second.” She drew back. “Who stole my positive, rock-solid Eli and replaced him with a doubting imposter?”
He laughed. “Not sure what I like best about that. Your Eli or rock-solid. Am I?”
“You are both,” she assured him, leaning closer.
“Your Eli, though?” He looked confused. “A week and a half ago, you said you were leaving after the wedding and we were…done.”
“And last night I said I’d stay through the storm and while I’m here, I’d do some…research to…to bridge the gap of faith that has separated us,” she said. “Yes, I said I was leaving but now there’s a storm that’s keeping me here.”
A smile twitched. “And you don’t think there’s a God?”
That made her laugh. “I don’t,” she said, tempering that truth by tapping his chest. “But I do think that I love you. I know I do. And we’re not…done.”
He grasped her hand and closed his much bigger one around it. “I love you, too, Kate. I really do. I don’t want you to leave. And I don’t want our…gap of faith, as you call it…to break us up. But…”
“But it’s real,” she conceded. “I’m still an atheist and you’re still a Christian. Nothing will change that.”
“Nothing?” he pressed. “Then you won’t do the research?”
“Yes, I will. In fact, I’ve already started planning my strategy.”
He looked interested. “Which is…”
“I’m going to do it the way I do everything,” she said.
“I’m going to read the scholarship. The historians, the philosophers, the people who’ve actually argued the question rather than people who’ve sung about it.
I want primary sources. I want peer-reviewed work.
Of course, there’s archeology, so I’ll want—”
“Read the Bible, Kate.”
“Well, that won’t—”
“Yes, it will. Read the Bible.” He said it without irony, the way he said anything he believed completely. “That’s the only place to start, then you can get to…peer reviews. If you have to.”
Did he really imagine she’d just read it and believe? Seriously, how could he know her and think that? She was a multi-degreed scientist with a mountain of published papers to her credit.
“Eli, with respect, the Bible is…” Kate searched for a word that wouldn’t insult him. “It’s a primary source for the people who already agree with the conclusion. It’s like asking me to evaluate a battery by reading the brochure written by the manufacturer.”
“Written by the witnesses. Firsthand, in person, reliable witnesses.”
She sighed, sensing this was going to be a disaster and might break them up faster than her first trip to church.
“Read what the witnesses wrote and decide if it lines up,” he continued. “You’d read it skeptically. I’m not asking you to read it any other way.”
She might as well read Cinderella and take the word of the stepsisters as, well, gospel truth.
“Eli, that’s not how I’m going to get to the information I need.
It’s…folklore.” Which only sounded slightly better than “fairy tales” and still made him wince.
“It’s walking on water and multiplying bread and fish and talking snakes.
I am a chemist. I’m not built to give credence to that.
I need to do proper research. I need to examine the quantity and quality of early manuscripts and how accurately they’ve been translated.
Then I need to investigate the archeological evidence, evaluate internal coherence and contradictions, and compare historical sources. I’d need to assess—”
He pushed up, surprising her with the intensity of the move and the sudden separation.
Dragging his hair back with one hand, he walked toward the railing and looked at the beach, then he waved.
“Hey, girls. Emma’s on her way down.”
She heard a female voice reply—either Amanda or Riley. Friends of her daughter who she didn’t even know, but he did.
“Are they here?” Emma darted out in her favorite workout shorts and a tank top, bathing suit straps visible underneath. She popped over to the railing and waved. “Hey, guys! On my way.”
Without waiting for an answer, she spun around. “I’ll be on the beach. We might come up for water or a bite, but…” Her voice faded as she looked from one to the other. “You two good?”
“Of course,” Kate said quickly. “Go, have fun.”
“Bye!” She hesitated, looking at Eli, who was less than a foot away. Squeezing her eyes shut, she gave him an impulsive hug. “See ya, Eli!”
With that, she disappeared down the spiral steps to the deck and the boardwalk, leaving Kate in stunned silence. She didn’t get a hug from her own daughter, but he did.
After a minute, he turned from the railing and looked at her.
“You can do all that extensive research, Kate. It will take a year. Or, you can read four books in the Bible, which will take an afternoon, do a sprinkling of research, then come back, look me in the eye and tell me the resurrection didn’t happen. ”
“What? The res…” She bit back the rest of the word. “Of course it didn’t happen, Eli! Nothing supernatural is possible. I was just going to tell you if Jesus existed or not.”
“Then save yourself the trouble, because He did,” Eli replied. “It doesn’t matter if He did or didn’t, unless he rose from the dead. The entire belief system is contingent on that one thing.”
“I do not and will not and cannot ever believe in miracles.” She stood to punctuate the statement. “Never, ever. But I’m happy to research the validity of the Bible.”
“There’s no validity without the resurrection,” he said, undaunted by her determination. “Disprove that and you’ve disproved every word in the book. Don’t read sixty-six books, Kate. Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Throw in Acts because you won’t be able to stop.”
Did he really think she’d find it…riveting? “That’s all?”
He nodded. “Test one claim—the resurrection. If you can disprove that one, the whole thing falls apart, and I will marry your atheism on the spot.”
That stopped her. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Eli.”
“Hear me out. The whole religion stands or falls on it. Paul says so himself—if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and faith is futile. He hands you the disproof himself. So disprove it. Show me the body. Show me a hallucination that survives historical scrutiny. Show me a conspiracy that holds for fifty years among a dozen people who got tortured to death and never recanted. You crack the resurrection and you crack Christianity. Everything else is downstream.”
She stared at him.
“That is,” she said slowly, “almost suspiciously elegant.”
“It’s an old argument, Kate. I didn’t make it up.”
“It’s clean.”
“It’s clean because it’s right.”
“Or it’s clean because somebody constructed it that way.”
“Maybe.” He picked his coffee up again. “Figure out which.”
The scientist in her wanted to push back on the framing.
She couldn’t tie a question that big to a single event two thousand years ago.
She couldn’t evaluate a religion the way you evaluated a hypothesis.
There were a hundred good reasons people believed things that weren’t true.
But she didn’t want to fight about this anymore.
“I’ll consider that approach,” she said stiffly. “But, Eli, where does that leave us when I…” She closed her eyes and corrected herself. “If I prove you wrong?”
He just smiled. “You won’t.”
“What if I do?” Because she would.
He lifted a shoulder. “We’re no worse off than we were twenty-four hours ago when you were ready to leave for good.”
She stared at him, taking in every single thing she loved about the man. There were too many to name, enough to make her dizzy.
She longed to step into his arms and put her face against his shirt, hold him and kiss him and throw away this problem so they could just spend the rest of their lives together.
Was this the biggest mistake she’d ever made? Should she just shut up, let her daughter go to church, and appreciate that he was a good guy who…believed in miracles?
“I’ll be very busy the next week or so,” he said softly, apparently not suffering from the same longing she felt. “You do your research and I’ll…fight the storm.”
And then what?
She had no idea, but she hoped she wasn’t sorry she’d ever agreed to this challenge.