Death in the Wilderness

Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness of Judah, so the Bible says, and James Pike was determined to go there too--"to meditate," as his wife wistfully recalled later, "and get a firsthand feeling of it." For the onetime Episcopal Bishop of California, it was just one more unusual adventure in a remarkably strange career (see following story). As always, he was anxious to get on with it. No matter that it was 1 o'clock on a hot Monday afternoon, hardly the time to set out into the blistering, arid desert. James Pike, 56, and his wife Diane, 31, hopped into their rented white Ford Cortina, armed only with two bottles of Coca-Cola, sunglasses, a small camera and a map, and drove out of East Jerusalem into the wilderness.

The Pikes had been in the Holy Land since the previous Friday, and, as usual, the trip was part pleasure, part business and part quest. For four years, Pike had been working on a new book on the historical Jesus, and he had recently agreed to make a movie on the subject with TV Star David Frost. Pike had wanted to forage in Jerusalem bookstalls, search for new meanings in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and walk, said his wife, "where Jesus walked."

After taking a dirt road across the desert toward Qumran, where the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the Pikes missed a turn and wound up instead driving down a gray sandstone wadi (dry creek bed). When large rocks kept them from going farther, they tried in vain to turn the car around. Then, ignoring an old desert rule, they abandoned their vehicle to search for help. Two hours later, James Pike could walk no farther. "If we are going to die in the desert," Diane recalled telling him, "I will stay by you." The two napped; then Mrs. Pike decided after all to try to reach help. "I really thought we'd both die," she remembers, "so Jim and I said goodbye to each other." She walked all night, guided only by moonlight. Once, hemmed in by sheer canyon walls, she had to scale an almost vertical cliff while "simply hanging from the rocks." Later, on a steep downhill grade, she was so exhausted she simply lay down and rolled until she stopped. Finally, near dawn, some Gaza Arabs working on a new road heard her weak cries of "Shalom!" and found her. Taken to Bethlehem and treated, she led a 30-man police platoon that afternoon in search of her husband.

Countless Caves. Spiraling out from the abandoned Cortina, the searchers poked through canyons and wadis leading down toward the Dead Sea. They found a piece of the map Pike had been carrying, but no sign of Pike himself. Eventually, a total of 100 Israeli border policemen, a helicopter and a Piper Cub joined in the search. Assuming that Pike would have sought refuge from the sun, the searchers peered into countless caves along the canyon walls. Philadelphia Seer Arthur Ford, the medium through whom Pike once claimed he had contacted his dead son, called Diane Pike in Jerusalem to tell her he had a vision of her husband, "alive but sick," in a cave not far from where she had left him. But the police insisted that they had already searched all the caves in the vicinity.

At the end of the third day, the Israelis abandoned the official search, declaring that there was no longer any real hope that James Albert Pike would be found alive. But volunteers kept searching, spurred on by Diane, who steadfastly refused to give up hope. She was encouraged by messages from other mediums, who reported visions of Pike still alive in a cave. The visions proved to be false. Sunday morning, on a rock two miles from where Diane had last seen her husband seven days earlier, an Israeli border policeman found the body of James Pike.

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