Margherita Guarducci

For nearly two thousand years, Christians built churches on top of churches on top of that spot.

Beginning in about nineteen forty with excavations commissioned by Pope Pius the Twelfth, archeologists worked for a decade through the layers beneath the basilica, the scavi as they're called, uncovering a pagan necropolis from the second and third centuries, and at its center, that second-century shrine.

In nineteen fifty-three, a set of bones was found in a niche in a nearby graffiti wall, bones that had been removed during the earlier excavations and apparently set aside.

The archeologist, Margherita Guarducci, eventually identified them as the bones of a man between sixty and seventy years old, wrapped in purple and gold cloth with the foot bones missing from below the ankles, which she argued was consistent with being cut down from an inverted cross.

Antonio Ferrua, the archeologist who led the original excavation, said he was never fully persuaded.

The evidence is layered and contested, and any honest account has to say so.

But it is worth pausing over the fact that archeologists digging under the most important church in Christendom found, at the precise spot venerated since the second century, the bones of an elderly man wrapped in cloth of purple and gold with his feet missing.

Simon Bar-Jonah, the fisherman from Bethsaida who wanted to build tents at the Transfiguration, who jumped out of a boat twice, once to walk on water, briefly, and once to swim to a beach breakfast.