White Spaces: Where History Falls Silent

I have always been fascinated by the places where history falls silent. The surviving evidence can tell us a great deal about the people and events of the past, but there are moments when the evidence stops - leaving questions that cannot be answered with certainty. I first encountered the phrase “white spaces” in a sermon many years ago. It was used to describe the gaps between the verses of Scripture - the things that happened between the lines, but which the Bible does not tell us. Those spaces are where historical fiction can begin. Not by pretending to know what happened, but by asking what might have happened.

In 1990, workers widening a road in Jerusalem’s Peace Forest uncovered a burial chamber dating to the first century. Among the twelve ossuaries - limestone boxes used to store human remains - was one of exceptional workmanship. It bore the inscription Yehosef bar Qayafa: ‘Joseph, son of Caiaphas.’

The ossuary contained the partial remains of six individuals: two infants, two teenage boys, an adult woman and a man estimated to have been about sixty years old. The inscription, together with the age of the man whose remains it contained, led archaeologists to suggest that he may have been Joseph Caiaphas, the high priest who served in Jerusalem from AD 18 to 36. The identification was compelling, but could not be certain.

Elsewhere in the tomb, two iron nails were discovered. One was found inside another ossuary; the other lay on the floor of the burial niche containing the Caiaphas ossuary. Their presence was unusual, and their purpose uncertain. Even the precise circumstances of their discovery have been the subject of conflicting reports.

No one could say for certain what the nails had been used for, or whether they had any connection with the man whose name was inscribed on the ornate ossuary.

The story ended, as so many do, in silence.

My journey as an author begins with that silence.

I imagined that the nails were not lost or discarded, but kept - not as relics, but as witness. That someone preserved them. That someone tried, before the forgetting began, to reckon with what they had seen.

I also imagined a manuscript: a final letter, written by the scribe known to us only as Tertius - the same name that appears briefly at the close of Paul’s letter to the Romans. No such letter exists. But if it did, it might not have survived in Jerusalem. It might have travelled west. Been copied. Buried. Found again.

Perhaps in Ephesus. Perhaps nowhere.

I did not set out to reveal a hidden gospel, nor to make a theological argument. It is a story - about memory, regret, and the weight of knowing too much too soon.

Cross & Covenant is one imagined account of what the nails may have meant, to those who held them last.