Hidden Treasure

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 2, 2008

Last week we described the elation of the excavators when they found the prince of the apostle's tomb underneath the main altar of St. Peter's basilica in 1941, a victory monument matching the written description given by a Roman priest named Gaius from the second century.

We also focused on the universal disappointment and confusion that ensued when the famous Sicilian anatomist Dr. Venerando Correnti announced that the bones found in the soil underneath the victory monument could not have been St. Peter's, since they were of two men who died under 50, a woman, and some animals. People wondered where were St. Peter's bones and why were these other bones in his tomb?

The answer to the first question seems to have come through a lot of luck and a lot of science.

When the epigraphist Margherita Guarducci was summoned in 1953 to decipher the graffiti on the buttressing wall encapsulated within Constantine's marble and porphyry box, she saw the hole where the excavators had found a secret repository within the wall and had removed its contents. She thought that the contents might provide clues to help her decode the inscriptions. When she and a Vatican employee found the box with the removed contents of the repository, they saw some pieces of red plaster — evidently from the red wall behind the victory monument — and a set of bones.

As I mentioned last week, one of the fragments of red plaster from the repository had a partial Greek inscription — Petr(os) eni — that in English means "Peter is here." That, needless to say, got Dr. Guarducci excited and she begged Pope Pius XII to ask Dr. Correnti to return from Sicily to examine the bones. It took Dr. Correnti and other specialists eventually with him six years to complete the analysis and publish their results. Here's what they discovered:

The bones found within the graffiti wall's depository were of one man who died between the ages of 65-70. This was consistent with the age that Christian tradition said St. Peter would have been if he were about Jesus' age (born about 4 BC) and died in 64 AD.

The man was 1.66 meters tall — or about 5'6 ½" tall. This might seem like useless trivia, unless you happen to be, like me, 5'6 ½" tall.

Every part of the body was represented among the skeletal remains except foot bones. Dr. Correnti said that there was no medical explanation for this, since if it were a question of decomposition rates, the hand bones should have decomposed faster, since the hand's carpals and metacarpals are smaller than the feet's tarsals and metatarsals. One possible explanation, not lost on the doctors, was the tradition of Peter's death upside down on a cross. The nails through his feet may have shattered many of the foot bones, or soldiers may have expedited his deposition my using a lance to chop him from the cross at the ankles.

The bones had been covered with gold and purple cloth in such a way that the purple dye had left a stain directly on some of the bones. Not only was the use of such royal colors an indication of precious contents, but the bone stains showed that the purple fabric must have originally covered the bones, and not skin. If they had covered skin, then the purple dye's primary residue would have disintegrated when the skin decomposed. The fact that the residue was on the bones showed that the skin must have already decomposed by the time the bones were covered in the fabric and placed in the repository.

Inside the pores of the bones was deeply embedded dirt. This was a sign, of course, that the bones had decomposed not in a repository but in soil. When other experts extracted the dirt, melted it, and compared its chemical composition to widely variant soil samples from throughout the necropolis and elsewhere, they noted that it was a perfect match for the soil underneath the victory monument.

The final piece of evidence came not from doctors but from architects. When Constantine in the fourth century covered the victory monument with a marble and porphyry box, he eliminated most of the red wall behind the tropaion. He could have easily removed the buttressing wall in which the repository was found, because, first, there was no long a wall to buttress and, second, Constantine's box would adequately support the victory monument. But the buttressing wall was retained, and in doing so, it created an enormous architectural error.

St. Peter's basilica was being built under classical principles of architecture, in which perfect proportion and symmetry were meant to symbolize God's perfection. The center of the basilica was the center of the victory monument. In keeping the buttressing wall, it was going to throw off the symmetry of the marble and porphyry box by 18 inches — the width of the buttressing wall — with respect to the entire basilica. That might not seem like a lot, but to ancient architects, it would have been a huge embarrassment. When the new and present basilica of St. Peter was erected 1300 years later, the asymmetry of the "niche of the pallia" underneath the main altar was again noted, and nobody understood how such a blunder could have occurred when everything else was done so precisely. For the symmetry or "perfection" of the basilica to have been thrown off in the central monument of the basilica — especially when there was no reason to functional reason to retain the buttressing wall — there must have been a hugely important reason. Perhaps the only sufficient reason would have been that the remains of the person within the buttressing wall's repository was the one after whom the whole basilica was being named.

So when Pope Paul VI and his experts looked at all of this data, they asked: What do you think the odds would be that the remains in the repository could be of another man than Peter, who died between the ages of 65-70, with no foot bones, whose remains decomposed in dirt matching Peter's grave, were enveloped in royal fabrics after much of the skeleton had decomposed, placed in a repository next to an inscription saying "Peter is here," and found within a buttressing wall that should never remained and that threw off the symmetrical perfection of the whole basilica?

Next week we'll see what Pope Paul VI concluded and did, as well as tie up all the loose ends of the story.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.