The Last Gospel

10

T he man in the black cassock swept past the baldacchino and towards the pier of St Andrew, making the sign of the cross towards the high altar as he passed. He was tall, late middle aged, with fine, aquiline features and scholarly glasses, but with the sinewy toughness of a Jesuit who had spent years in the field. He nodded curtly at the Swiss Guard who stood at the low entranceway into the pier, then glanced back at the baldacchino. The great black pillars had been cast by Bernini from bronze taken from the Pantheon, the pagan temple to all the gods, here transformed into baroque splendour and captured beneath the dome of the greatest church in Christendom. To the man this place always made the ancient Roman sense of mastery over nature seem puny, insignificant, just as it made the people appear puny who stood beneath it today. It was a place where all could know the ascendancy of the Holy See, over a congregation far larger than ever could have been imagined by the Roman emperors at the time of Christ.

He sniffed, then wrinkled his nose slightly. The air seemed heavy with the exhalation of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who had passed through that day, as they did every day. They were the power of the Church, yet the man found the base reality of the common people distasteful and always relished passing beyond, into the sanctuaries of the ordained. He reminded himself why he was here, this evening. He recovered his stride and made his way purposefully down the steps into the grotto under the nave, to the level of the Roman hillside where there had once been a hippodrome of Caligula and Nero and a city of the dead, a necropolis, dug into the rock. Now it was the burial ground of popes, and the revered resting place of St Peter. The man made the sign again as he passed that holy spot, then weaved his way through the surviving foundation stones of Constantine the Great’s basilica to another door and another flight of steps, leading down into the depths of the ancient necropolis. The door had been opened for him, but as he passed through he took out a key from under his cassock, and with his other hand flicked on a small torch. At the bottom of the stairs the beam danced over rough stone walls lined with niches and shadowy recesses. He bent to pass down a low passageway to the right, descended a flight of rock-cut steps into an empty tomb and felt along the wall, quickly finding what he was looking for. He slid the key into the hole and a concealed door gave way, opening inwards. He ducked through, then turned and locked the door again. He was inside.

He still remembered the thrill when he had first crouched at this spot. It was during the excavation of the necropolis, when all attention was focused on the tomb of St Peter. He and another young initiate had discovered this passageway, an early Christian catacomb sealed off since antiquity. It was better preserved than the rest of the necropolis, with the niches still plastered over and the burials intact. They had gone inside, just the two of them. Then they had made their extraordinary discovery. Only a few had ever been told of it: the pontiff, the head of the college of cardinals, the man who held the position he now held, the other members of the concilium. It was one of the greatest secrets of the Holy See, ammunition for the day when the forces of darkness might reach the holy gates, when the Church might need to rally all its reserves to fight for its very existence.

He made his way towards a flickering pool of light at the end of the passageway. Along the way he passed the images they had seen that first day, simple, crude expressions of early faith that still moved him powerfully, more visceral than any of the embellishments in the church above. Christ in a boat, casting a net, a woman seated beside him. Christ on fire, rising with his two crucified companions above the flames, a burning mountain in the background. And names everywhere, on the tomb niches, names made from simple mosaics pressed into the plaster. Priscilla in Pace. Zakariah in Pace. Chi-rho symbols, incised images of baskets of bread, a dove holding an olive branch. Images that became more frequent as he drew closer to the source of light, as if people had been yearning to be interred near that spot, crowding in on it. And then he was there. The passageway widened slightly, and he could see that the light ahead came from candles on each corner of a plinth set in the floor, a tomb. It was a simple structure, raised a few inches on plaster, and was covered with large Roman roof tiles. He could see the name scratched on the surface. He made the sign again, and whispered the words that had long been suspected, but that only he and a few others knew to be true. The Basilica of St Peter and St Paul.

Two others were already there, cassocked figures seated in low rock-cut niches on either side of the tomb, their faces obscured in shadow. The man made the sign again. ‘ In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti,’ he said. He bowed slightly to each in turn. ‘Eminences.’

‘Monsignor. Please be seated.’ The words were in Italian. ‘The concilium is complete.’

The catacomb was damp, keeping the dust down, but the wreathing smoke from the candles made his eyes smart, and he blinked hard. ‘I came as soon as I received your summons, Eminence.’

‘You know why we are here?’

‘The concilium only meets when the sanctity of the Holy See is threatened.’

‘For almost two thousand years it has been so,’ the other said. ‘From the time of the coming of St Paul to the brethren, when the concilium first met in the Phlegraean Fields. We are soldiers of our Lord, and we do his bidding. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.’

‘Amen.’

‘We accept only the true word of the Messiah, no other.’

‘Amen.’

‘We have met once already this year. We have thwarted the search for the lost Jewish treasures of the Temple. But now a greater darkness threatens us, a heresy that would seek to destroy the true Church itself. The heresy of those who would deny the sanctity of the ordained, who would seek to poison the ministry of St Paul, who believe that the word of our Lord lies elsewhere, outside the Gospels. For almost two thousand years we have fought it, with all our power and all our guile. Now the heresy has arisen again. That which we had hoped destroyed, lost for ever, has been found. A blasphemy, a lie, ammunition of the Devil.’

‘What would the concilium have us do?’

The voice when it replied was steely, icy cold, a voice that brooked no debate, that sought no reply.

‘ Seek it.’

The sky was streaked with gold as Jack brought the Lynx helicopter down towards the landing lights on Seaquest II ’s stern. Maria was in the co-pilot’s seat and Costas was stretched out in the rear, snoring heavily. They had waved Hiebermeyer off at the helipad near Herculaneum, just as it began to rain, a heavy, pelting downpour that took Jack’s full attention as they lifted off. He had been quiet for the rest of the flight, preoccupied with his own thoughts after his encounter with Elizabeth and then focused on an e-mail exchange on the helicopter’s computer. It had taken less than an hour to fly south from the Bay of Naples, skirting the dark mass of the Calabrian mountains and then veering offshore to the ship’s position some ten nautical miles north of the Strait of Messina. The evening had become startlingly clear, almost pellucid, the air cleansed and the sea ruffled by the dying breeze from the west, but as the rotor churned up propwash on either side of the ship it was as if they were descending through a vortex of water, the landing lights illuminating the spray like a twister swirling off the stern.

The Lynx thumped to a halt and Jack waited for the rotors to stop before unbuckling himself and opening the door, giving a thumbs-up to the crew chief who was lashing the pontoons to the deck. He took off his helmet, waited as Costas and Maria did the same and then got out and led them straight into a hatchway at the forward end of the helipad. Moments later they were in the ship’s main conservation lab, the door shut behind them. Jack chose a workstation with a computer console on one side and a light table on the other, then activated a fluorescent bulb on a retractable metal arm above the table and sat down. He pulled out a two-way radio from his flight overalls and pressed the key for the secure IMU channel. There was a crackle and he spoke into the receiver. ‘Maurice, this is Jack. We’re on Seaquest, safe and sound. I’ll update you on any progress. Over.’ He waited for an affirmative, then placed the radio beside the monitor and slipped the strap of his old khaki bag over his head, placing the bag on his lap and pulling on a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser under the table.

‘Do you think he can hold the fort?’ Costas said.

‘Maurice? He’s a professional. He knows how to play the authorities. He knows exactly how to shut down an excavation. All he has to do is say that the tunnel’s unsafe, in danger of collapse, and they’ll board it up. The superintendency didn’t want any new excavation in the villa anyway. And they’ve got the ancient statue of Anubis to feed the press, more than enough to satisfy the public that the archaeology’s being done. We’re sticking with my revised plan. Reuters will get told, but not about the library, not yet. As soon as we’ve seen through wherever this is leading us, I’ll make a call which will expose the whole thing. Maria took hundreds of digital pictures, and they’re all here. They look like those first views of King Tut’s tomb. Absolutely sensational, front-page stuff. The authorities will have no choice but to open up the site properly, for the world to see what we’ve seen.’

‘I’ll be back there with Maurice as soon as we’ve finished here,’ Maria said.

‘That’s crucial, Maria. You can keep his blood pressure down. You obviously make a great team.’ He grinned at her, then opened his bag. ‘Now let’s see what we’ve got.’

Seconds later the extraordinary find Jack had taken from the villa chamber at Herculaneum lay in front of them on the light table. It looked much as Costas and Jack had first seen it, with each side of the scroll wound round a wooden stick, an umbilicus, and lines of ancient writing visible where the scroll was open in between. Jack attached small foam pads with retractor wires to the ends of each umbilicus and carefully drew the scroll wider apart, each wire attached to the edge of the light table and secured with ratchets. Now they could see the entire column of text, similar to the page of a modern book. ‘This is how the Greeks and Romans read them, from side to side, unrolling the scroll to reveal each page, like this,’ Maria said. ‘People often think scrolls were awkward, because they assume they were written as continuous text from one end to the other, unrolled a bit at a time. In fact, they were almost as convenient as a codex, a modern book.’

‘We’re incredibly lucky we can see any of this at all,’ Jack murmured. ‘The carbonized scrolls found in the villa in the eighteenth century took years to unravel, millimetre by millimetre. But everything we saw in that room was incredibly well preserved, having missed the firestorm in AD 79. There seems to be some kind of resin or wax in the papyrus which means it’s still supple.’ ‘This looks like two paragraphs in one hand, with a section in the middle in a completely different hand,’ Costas said.

Maria nodded. ‘The main text is like the printed page, the practised hand of a copyist, a scribe. The other writing is a little sprawling, more like personal handwriting, legible but certainly not a copyist’s hand.’

‘What are those blotches?’

‘At first I thought they might be blood, but then I sniffed them,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what I saw all over that table in the chamber. They’re wine stains.’

‘Let’s hope it was a good vintage on that final night,’ Maria murmured.

Costas pointed at a slip of papyrus attached to the top of the scroll, like a label. ‘So that’s the title?’

‘The sillybos,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘ Plinius, Naturalis Historia . This scroll must have been taken out from the batch in the basket by the door, undoubtedly one of the volumes of completed text. I can still hardly believe it. Nothing like this has survived anywhere else from antiquity, a first edition by one of the most famous writers of the classical period.’

‘I can see that,’ Costas murmured. ‘But why are we being so secretive about this?’

‘Okay.’ Jack pointed to the upper line in the scroll. ‘The first clue for me was that word, Iudaea. Pliny the Elder mentions Judaea in several places in the Natural History. He tells us about the origin and cultivation of the balsam tree, and about a river that dries up every Sabbath. Typical Pliny, a mix of authoritative natural history and fable. But the main discussion of Judaea is in his geographical chapter, where he tells us everything else he thinks worth knowing about the place. That’s what we’ve got here.’ Jack opened his modern copy of Pliny’s Natural History at a bookmarked page, and pressed it down. They could see the Latin on the left-hand side, the English translation on the right. He read out the first line on the page: ‘ “ Supra Idumaeam et Samariam Iudaea longe lateque funditur. Pars eius Syriae iuncta Galilaea vocatur.” ’

He peered back at the scroll, then at the printed text, reading it again under his breath. ‘It’s identical. Those medieval monks who transcribed this got it right after all.’ He read out the translation. ‘“Beyond Idumaea and Samaria stretches the wide expanse of Judaea. The part of Judaea adjoining Syria is called Galilee.”’ He then began to work his way down the text, his eyes darting from the translation to the scroll and back again, pausing occasionally where the lack of punctuation in the scroll made it difficult to follow. ‘Pliny was fascinated by the Dead Sea,’ he murmured. ‘Here, he tells us how nothing at all can sink in it, how even the bodies of bulls and camels float along. He loved this kind of stuff. That’s the trouble. He was right about the high salinity of the Dead Sea, but there were other wonders he wrote about that were completely fabulous, and he wasn’t great at distinguishing fact from fiction. If he had any kind of guiding principle, it was to include everything he heard. He was almost entirely reliant on second-hand sources.’

‘At least with Claudius he would have had a reliable informant, ’ Maria said. ‘A pretty sound scholar, by all accounts.’

‘Here we go,’ Jack said. ‘This is just before the gap in the scroll text, before the writing style changes. ‘ “ Iordanes amnis oritur e fonte Paniade. The source of the river Jordan is the spring of Panias.” Then there’s a longer description: “ In lacum se fundit quem plures Genesaram vocant, xvi p. longitudinis, vi latitudinis, amoenis circumsaeptum oppidis, ab oriente Iuliade et Hippo, a meridie Tarichea, quo nomine aliqui et lacum appellant, ab occidente Tiberiade aquis calidis salubri. It widens out into a lake usually called the Sea of Gennesareth, 16 miles long and 6 broad, skirted by the agreeable towns of Iulias and Hippo on the east, Tarichae on the south, the name of which place some people also give to the lake, and Tiberias with its salubrious hot springs on the west.” ’

Jack pointed at a map he had laid on the other side of the light table. ‘This time he’s not writing about the Dead Sea but the Sea of Galilee, some eighty miles north at the head of the Jordan Valley. Gennesareth was the Roman name for it, the same as the modern Hebrew name Kinnereth. Tiberias is the main town today on the Sea of Galilee, a popular resort. Tarichae he got wrong, it’s not south but west, a few miles north of Tiberias. Tarichae was the Roman name for Migdal, home of Mary Magdalene.’

‘The place where the Gospels say Jesus began his ministry,’ Maria said.

Jack nodded. ‘Along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.’ He paused, and sat back. ‘Now we come to the gap in the scroll text. This is where it gets really intriguing. There’s no gap at all in the modern printed text, based on the medieval transcription, which goes straight on to a discussion of bitumen and the Dead Sea.’

‘So our scroll must be a later version, the basis for a new edition that was never published,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it was one he was working on when he died, with updates and changes.’

‘He may have asked his scribe to do him a working copy, leaving gaps where he thought he was likely to make additions,’ Maria said. ‘And that could be the copy he brought with him to Claudius.’

‘Writing the Natural History must have been an organic process, and it’s hard to believe a magpie mind like Pliny’s would ever have been able to leave it alone,’ Jack said. ‘And remember, more places were being conquered and explored by the Romans every year, so there was always plenty to add. Claudius would have been able to tell him much that was new about Britain, especially as we now know that Britain was foremost in Claudius’ mind at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, with his own history of Britannia in progress. And if Pliny had survived Vesuvius, my guess is we’d have had a whole new chapter on vulcanology.’

‘Can you read what’s in the gap?’ Costas said.

‘I can, just,’ Jack said. ‘It’s in a completely different hand to the main text in the scroll – spidery, precise. I’ve no doubt this is the actual hand of Pliny the Elder.’ As he said the words Jack suddenly felt himself transported back to that hidden room in the villa almost two thousand years ago, beneath the lowering volcano, the ink still freshly blotted and the wine stains still reeking of grapes and alcohol, as if the figures on either side of him were not Maria and Costas but Pliny the Elder and Claudius, urging him to join them in exploring the revelations of their world.

‘Well, fire away,’ Costas said, peering at him quizzically.

Jack snapped back and leaned over the text. ‘Okay. Here goes. This is where those words appear, the ones I saw when we found this scroll in the villa. The reason for all this secrecy.’ He glanced at Costas, then paused, scanning the text to pinpoint the beginning and end of the sentences and to put the Latin into coherent English word order. ‘Here’s the first sentence: “Claudius Caesar visited this place with Herod Agrippa, where they met the fisherman Joshua of Nazareth, he whom the Greeks called Jesus, who my sailors in Misenum now call the Christos.” ’

Jack felt as if he had delivered a thunderbolt. There was a stunned silence, broken by Costas. ‘Claudius Caesar? Claudius the emperor? You mean our Claudius? He met Jesus Christ?’

‘With Herod Agrippa,’ Maria whispered. ‘Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews?’

‘So it would appear,’ Jack replied hoarsely, trying to keep his voice under control. ‘Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. And there’s more.’ He read slowly: ‘ “The Nazarene gave Claudius his written word.” ’

‘His written word,’ Costas repeated slowly. ‘A pledge, some kind of promise?’

‘I’ve translated it literally,’ Jack said. ‘It’s more than that. I’m sure it means he gave him something written.’

‘His word,’ Maria murmured. ‘His gospel.’

‘The gospel of Jesus? The written word of Christ?’ Costas suddenly sat back, his jaw dropping in amazement. ‘Holy Mother of God. I see what you mean. The secrecy at Herculaneum. The Church. This is exactly what they have most feared.’

‘And yet it is something that many have hoped against hope would one day be found,’ Maria said, almost whispering. ‘The written word of Jesus of Nazareth, in his own hand.’

‘Does Pliny say what happened to it?’ Costas asked.

Jack finished sorting out the next sentences in his mind, and read out his translation: ‘ “Gennesareth, that is Kinnereth in the local language, is said to derive from the word for the stringed instrument or lyre, kinnor, or from the kinnara, the sweet and edible fruit produced by a thorn tree that grows in the vicinity. And at Tiberias, there are springs that are remarkably health-restoring. Claudius Caesar says that to drink the waters is to clear and calm the mind, which sounds to me like ingesting the morpheum.” ’

‘Ha!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Morpheum. I want Hiebermeyer to see that.’

Jack paused, and muttered under his breath, ‘Come on, Pliny. Get on with it.’ He read what came next to himself, grunted impatiently and then repeated it out loud. ‘ “And the Sea of Gennesareth, really a lake, lies far below the level of the Middle Sea, the Mediterranean. And whereas the Sea of Gennesareth is fresh water, my friend Claudius reminds me that the Dead Sea is remarkably briny, and part of it is not water but bitumen.” ’

‘My friend Claudius,’ Costas repeated, weighing the words. ‘That’s a bit of a slip, isn’t it? I mean, I thought Claudius’ survival was meant to be a secret.’

‘That proves it,’ Jack said. ‘I think this particular scroll was Pliny’s own annotated version, one that he eventually intended to take away with him. It got left in Claudius’ study, probably deliberately. And I think some of this addition was for Claudius’ benefit, too. You have to imagine Claudius sitting beside Pliny as he’s writing this, sipping and spilling his wine, keenly reading over the other man’s shoulder. Of course, as we know from the published text, Pliny was already perfectly well aware that the Dead Sea was briny and produced bitumen.’

‘He was flattering Claudius,’ Maria said.

‘Classic interrogation technique,’ Costas said. ‘Never let on what you already know, then people will tell you more.’

‘Is there anything else?’ Maria said. ‘I mean, about Jesus? Pliny seems to have lost himself in a digression.’

‘There may be,’ Jack said. ‘But there’s a problem.’

‘What?’

‘Look at this.’ Jack pointed at the bottom of the gap in the scroll text, then at the right-hand margin. ‘I’ve read everything I can make out in the gap. But you can see at the bottom that a few lines have been smudged, wiped out. Then he’s written something in the margin beside it, much smaller. He hasn’t replenished his ink, maybe even deliberately, so it’s barely legible. It’s almost as if he wrote at the bottom of the gap something he wanted in the published edition, then thought better of it and erased it, then thought again and put a note in the margin, perhaps a note to himself that he didn’t want anyone else to read.’

‘But you can read it,’ Costas said.

‘Not exactly.’ Jack swivelled the light table until the scroll was at ninety degrees, then pulled a magnifying glass on a retractable arm over the miniature lines of writing just visible in the margin. He pushed his chair back so Maria and Costas could take a look. ‘Tell me what you think.’

They both craned over, and Costas spoke immediately. ‘It’s not Latin, is it? Is that what you mean? But some of those letters look familiar to me. There’s a lambda, a delta. It’s ancient Greek?’

‘Greek letters, but not Greek language,’ Maria murmured. ‘It looks like the precursor Greek alphabet, the one they adopted from the near east.’ She glanced back at Jack. ‘Do you remember Professor Dillen’s course at Cambridge on the early history of Greek language? It’s a while ago now, but I’m sure I recognize some of those letters. Is this Semitic?’

‘You were the star linguist, Maria, not me,’ Jack said. ‘He’d have been proud of you for remembering. In fact, he already sends his congratulations for the discovery, as we e-mailed from the Lynx when we flew in. When I took this scroll from the shelf in Herculaneum I caught a glimpse of this writing, and I had a sudden hunch. I asked Professor Dillen to provide his latest version of the Hanno Project for us to download. It should be online now.’

‘Jack!’ Costas said. ‘Computers? All by yourself?’

Jack gestured at the keyboard beside them. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all yours.’

‘The Hanno Project?’ Maria said.

‘Two years ago, we excavated an ancient shipwreck off Cornwall, not far from the IMU campus. Costas, you remember Mount’s Bay?’

‘Huh? Yeah. Cold. But great fish and chips in Newlyn.’ Costas had sat down at the computer, and was busily tapping. He turned and glanced at Jack. ‘I take it you want a scan?’

Jack nodded, and Costas pushed away the magnifier and positioned a movable scanner arm over the margin of the scroll. Jack turned to Maria. ‘It was a Phoenician shipwreck, the first ever found in British waters, dating almost a thousand years before the Romans arrived. We found British tin ingots stamped with Phoenician letters, and a mysterious metal plaque covered in Phoenician writing. Dillen’s been working on it ever since. We called the translation project Hanno after a famous Carthaginian explorer. We don’t know it was him. Just a name pulled out of a hat.’

‘So you think our scroll writing is Phoenician.’

‘I know it is.’

‘So Pliny read Phoenician?’

‘Phoenician was similar to the Aramaic spoken around the Sea of Galilee at the time of Jesus, but that may just be a coincidence. No, I think this has to do with Claudius. You remember those scrolls on the bottom shelf of the room in Herculaneum? Claudius’ History of Carthage? It was his biggest historical work, one thought completely lost but now miraculously discovered. Well, Claudius would have learned the language in order to read the original sources, the language spoken by the Phoenician traders who founded Carthage. It was virtually a dead language by the time of imperial Rome, and it’s just the kind of thing I can imagine Claudius teaching Pliny in their off-time together after finishing their writing, over wine and dice. So when Pliny comes to make this note, he chooses a language that was virtually a code between them. Claudius is watching, and he would have been pleased and flattered by that too.’

‘They must have been the only people around who could read this.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘It’s ready,’ Costas said, hunched over the screen. ‘There are four words the concordance has identified as transliterations, that is proper nouns, and it’s rendered them first into Latin and then into English. One word is Claudius. The other’s Rome. All the other words are in Dillen’s Phoenician lexicon. There’s one I even know. Bos, bull or cow. I remember that from the Bosporus.’

Jack’s heart was pounding with excitement. This could be it.

‘It’s appearing on screen now.’

Maria and Jack came up behind Costas. At the top of the scan they could see that the script had been enhanced, with the Greek-style letters more clearly visible. Below it was the translation: Haec implacivit Claudius Caesar in urbem sub duo sacra bos iacet. That which Claudius Caesar has entrusted to me lies in Rome beneath the two sacred cows.

Jack stared again. His mind was racing. Only one day after finding the shipwreck of St Paul, they had stumbled on something extraordinary, perhaps the biggest prize of them all. And now he knew he had been right to take the scroll away, to keep it hidden until they had followed the trail to the end.

The word of Jesus. The final word, the word that would eclipse all others. The last gospel.

‘Well?’ Maria said, looking up at him. ‘Sacred cows?’

‘I think I know where that is.’

‘Game on,’ Costas said.