"Do you really know the story?" Phyllis asked.

"I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota," John replied shortly. "I went to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me."

Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions like this. He had a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.

John said, "You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he's a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don't know anything about the man himself."

Phyllis shook her head. "That's not true."

"But it is," John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady looked up from the next table. "Look, there's a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It's an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There's a kind of archeology, an anthropology-a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear-how it came about, what needs it fulfilled."

Phyllis regarded him with a small smile. "I don't know what to say to that, John. It's not a matter of history, after all. It's a matter of faith."

"Do you believe in Christ's miracles?"

"The miracles aren't what matter. It's not the church or its dogma that matters. It's Jesus himself that matters."

"But he's just a literary construct," John repeated doggedly. "Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn't answer my question about the miracles."

Phyllis shrugged. "I consider the presence of the universe to be a miracle. The universe and everything in it. Can you deny it?"

"Sure," John said. "The universe just is. I define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law."

"Like traveling to other planets?"

"No. Like raising the dead."

"Doctors do that every day."

"Doctors have never done that."

Phyllis loked non-plussed. "I don't know what to say to you, John. I'm kind of surprised. We don't know everything, to pretend we do is arrogance. The creation is mysterious. To give something a name like 'the big bang,' and then think you have an explanation-it's bad logic, bad thinking. Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don't." She stood. "I hope it comes to you." She left the room.

After a silence, John sighed. "Sorry, folks. Sometimes it still gets to me."