The Last Gospel

25

T he next morning they crammed into a four-wheel-drive Toyota, and Helena drove them up the great rift of the Jordan Valley from Jerusalem towards the Sea of Galilee. Costas and Jack were sitting beside Helena, and Morgan, Maria and Jeremy were in the back. Maria and Jeremy had joined them straight from Tel Aviv airport. Jack had called them immediately after coming out of the Holy Sepulchre the day before. He knew that much of his anxiety about their safety could now be dispelled, but it was still a huge relief to have them alongside. Hiebermeyer was another matter entirely. The world’s press corps seemed to have converged on him in Naples, and he had refused to budge. Jack knew he would be relishing every moment, but it was also a way of deflecting press attention from their activities in Israel. They still had one final act to play out, a final folding-back of history to the event that had led them on one of the most extraordinary quests of Jack’s career.

‘Any word?’ Costas said to Jack. His voice juddered as Helena slammed the vehicle over a patch of potholes.

‘Nothing yet.’ Jack had taken Jeremy aside the instant he arrived at their hotel in Jerusalem that morning. The news was not good. Elizabeth had vanished the evening after Jack had spoken to her, walked away from the site at Herculaneum and never returned. Jeremy’s enquiries had been met with only shrugs and silence. ‘But maybe that’s Naples for you,’ Jack said. ‘And we hadn’t spoken for fifteen years, since she left me. So I can hardly expect an instant pick-up.’

‘I’ll pray for her, Jack,’ Helena said, fighting the wheel. ‘But she may just have walked away. Sounds like she’s done it before.’

‘I had a strange vision in the tomb below the Holy Sepulchre, you know,’ Jack said. ‘I seemed to see her through the water, but it was a kind of odd composite, as if there were someone actually lying on the stone slab.’

‘An Agamemnon moment?’ Costas said.

‘She’d always been on my mind, you know, over all those years,’ Jack said. ‘It was the way it ended between us. It never really did end, she just left. It all came welling up when I was holding Ritter down in the chapel yesterday. It was what he said, about bringing Elizabeth back into the fold. In that instant everything seemed to be his fault. I nearly broke his neck, you know. I could do it now.’

‘At least he’s out of the way.’

‘For the time being. But he’ll be back. He and his henchman are only being held under the rules of the curfew, for carrying an open weapon and for assaulting a police officer. Kidnap would have been more serious, but the patriarch refused to press charges. That’s why Ben’s interrogation won’t get anywhere. Ritter knows he’ll be on a plane back to Rome within days. And all the press exposure, the naming of names, what I wrote in that article, that’ll dissipate like leaves in the wind. Organizations like his have weathered this kind of thing before. He’ll be quietly absorbed back.’

‘With public awareness of the concilium, the law might be able to exert a stronger arm,’ Maria said.

‘Whose law, exactly?’ Jeremy asked.

‘And it depends how much people believe all this,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, you said it, Jack, big exposes about Church conspiracies quickly become yesterday’s news, unless you can actually pin murder and corruption on them. And we’re hardly the first to claim we’ve found some kind of lost gospel.’

‘We haven’t seen it yet,’ Maria said, nudging Jack.

‘Remember what Jack said to Ritter,’ Helena said. ‘The power of the written word. If we’ve truly got it, then people will believe.’

‘Even if it rocks the foundations of the Church?’ Maria asked.

‘Freedom for people to choose their own spiritual path, without fear, guilt, persecution, the concilium,’ Helena said. That’s why I’m here. If we’ve found something that will help people make that choice, then we’ll have done some good.’

‘I’ll second that,’ Morgan said from the back.

‘We still have to find out what’s in that cylinder,’ Costas said. ‘If Jack will let us.’

‘Have patience,’ Jack said.

‘We’re heading in this direction because of Pliny’s note in the Natural History, right? The scroll we found in Herculaneum? That Claudius and his friend Herod visited Jesus on the Sea of Galilee?’

‘Right.’

‘No holes in the ground?’

‘Well, I promised Massimo in Rome that you’d be back. There’s a huge job opening up the entrance to the Vestals’ chamber. Absolutely tons of sludge to clear out.’

‘Jack.’

‘Okay, no holes in the ground. This time.’

They passed signposts with names redolent of the rich history of the Holy Land: Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth. At the sign for the Sea of Galilee they veered left, past the resorts and thermal springs of modern Tiberias, then to the edge of the lake. They carried on a few miles further beneath the imposing flanks of Mount Arbel until they came to the entrance to Kibbutz Ginosar. The land around them was scorched, desiccated, and the shoreline of the lake had receded some distance over the mudflats to the east. Helena pulled into the kibbutz and they all got out, tired and hungry after the four-hour journey. Jack was wearing khaki shorts with a grey T-shirt and desert boots, and he had his trusty khaki bag slung over his side. Costas had on his usual garish selection of Hawaiian gear and the designer sunglasses Jeremy had given him, now seemingly a permanent fixture. Jeremy, Maria and Morgan were all dressed like Jack. The only one who seemed oblivious to the heat was Helena, who had on the Ethiopian white cassock she had been wearing when they first met her on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre the day before.

‘This is the site of ancient Migdal, also called Magdala,’ Jack said. ‘Home of Mary Magdalene. This shore is where Jesus of Nazareth lived as a young man, where he worked as a carpenter and fisherman and went among the people of Galilee, spreading his word.’

After a quick lunch in the kibbutz canteen, they trooped into the Yigal Allon Museum and stood around its centrepiece exhibit, silently absorbing one of the most remarkable finds ever made in the Holy Land. It was an ancient boat, its timbers blackened with age but beautifully preserved, a little over eight metres long and two metres wide. Costas tipped up his sunglasses and leaned over the metal cradle that held it, inspecting one of the timbers. ‘Polyethylene glycol?’

Jack nodded. ‘It didn’t take long to impregnate the timbers with PEG, as the boat was found in fresh water and there was no salt to leach out. It was the summer of 1986, a drought year like this one, and the level of the Sea of Galilee had dropped. Two local guys searching for ancient coins found these timbers sticking out of the mud, the prow facing towards the lake. It was clearly an ancient boat, and caused an immediate sensation. It was also a flashpoint. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism revelled in the possible Jesus connection, seeing a new magnet for tourism at a time when the intifada was putting people off visiting Israel. But some ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrated against the excavation, seeing it as a green light for Christian missionary activity in the area. There were even people praying for rain so the site would be inundated and the excavation thwarted.’

‘That sounds familiar,’ Costas murmured.

‘That’s one reason I wanted you to see this, before we go out to our final destination,’ Jack said. ‘All of that nonsense is forgotten now. This boat’s one of the star archaeological attractions of Israel, for Christians, for Jews, for all the people of Galilee, whatever their faith. It’s their shared heritage.’

‘The planks are edge-joined in the ancient fashion, with mortice-and-tenon,’ Costas said.

‘It’s a unique find, the only Sea of Galilee boat to survive from antiquity,’ Jack said, pointing out the features. ‘It probably had a mast with a single brailed sail, with space for two oarsmen on either side and an oar that served as a quarter-rudder. It had a recurving stem and a pointed bow, with a cutwater. The wood’s mainly oak for the frames and cedar for the strakes, cedar of Lebanon.’

‘I’ve just realized why it looks familiar,’ Maria murmured. ‘Maurice showed me pictures of a boat about this size from the foreshore at Herculaneum, found in 1980 when they discovered all those skeletons huddled in the chambers below the sea wall. The gas and ash from the eruption flipped the boat over and carbonized it, but the interior face of the timbers was well preserved. It was immaculately built, maybe a pleasure boat for one of the rich villa-owners.’

‘Maybe old Claudius snuck out on it, for a bit of fishing,’ Costas said.

‘There’s a lot of recycled timber here, scraps cleverly reused,’ Jack said. ‘The Kinneret Boat may not have the finesse of the Herculaneum boat, but it has a lot of style. Whoever built and maintained it had an intimate feel for the Galilee area, for its resources and how to use them.’

‘Any radiocarbon dates?’ Costas asked.

‘Forty BC, plus or minus eighty years.’

Costas whistled. ‘Wide latitude, but pretty good odds. Jesus died around AD 30, right? Close to the end of that spectrum. But boats like this could have lasted for generations on the lake, repaired and refitted. Even a boat made at the beginning of that timeframe could still have been in use during his lifetime.’

‘The only artefacts found associated with it were a simple cooking pot and an oil lamp, both probably from the same period.’

‘So what about Claudius and Herod Agrippa?’ Costas said. ‘What date are we looking at for their visit?’

‘I believe they came here in AD 23,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Jesus of Nazareth would have been in his mid twenties, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Claudius was thirty-two or thirty-three and Herod Agrippa was the same age, both born in 10 BC. A few years later Jesus went into the wilderness and renounced his worldly occupation, and the rest is history. Claudius must have returned to Rome soon after his visit here, and never came again. We know what happened to him. And Herod Agrippa went on to become King of the Jews.’

‘How do you get the date?’

‘Something I remembered in Jerusalem. Something that had been niggling me ever since we first saw those words in the lab on board Seaquest II, on Pliny’s page from the Natural History. There’s no reference anywhere else to Claudius travelling to the east. I’d guessed it must have happened when he was living in obscurity as a scholar in Rome, before he was dragged to the imperial throne in AD 41. It was obviously before Jesus was crucified, about AD 30, in the reign of Tiberius. It was also probably before Jesus was surrounded with disciples who would surely have remembered a visit from Rome, left some record of it in the Gospels.’

Helena cleared her throat. ‘We have our tradition, in Ethiopia. That an emperor sought the Messiah.’

‘If Herod Agrippa was king of Judaea, he might have visited Galilee then,’ Costas said.

Jack shook his head. ‘That was much later. It was Claudius who gave him Judaea in AD 41, as a reward for loyalty. Until then Herod Agrippa had lived mainly in Rome. No, I’m thinking of another time, years earlier. Herod Agrippa was grandson of Herod the Great, king of Judaea, but was brought up in Rome in the imperial palace, adopted by Claudius’ mother Antonia. He and Claudius became the most unlikely of friends, the hard-living playboy and the crippled scholar. One of Herod Agrippa’s drinking buddies was the emperor Tiberius’ son Drusus, who used to get drunk and pick fights with the Praetorian Guard. There was some murky incident one night, and Drusus died. Herod Agrippa was immediately packed off to Judaea. That’s what I remembered. It happened in AD 23.’

‘Bingo,’ Costas said.

‘It gets better. Herod Agrippa’s uncle, Herod Antipas, was governor of Galilee at the time. He got his wayward nephew a token job as a market overseer, an agoranomos. Guess where? In Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee a few miles south of here. We passed the site on the way.’

Costas whistled. ‘So Herod Agrippa really could have crossed paths with Jesus.’

‘Herod Agrippa would probably have got to know everyone worth knowing in Tiberias, pretty quickly,’ Jack replied. ‘He was a gregarious man, boisterous and charismatic, and would have spoken the local Aramaic as well as Latin and Greek. He would have felt a real affinity with the people here, his own people who he would one day rule. Perhaps he heard tavern talk of some local healer, someone who really did seem a step above the rest. Perhaps he sent word to Rome, to his crippled friend Claudius, who might still have harboured a youthful hope that a cure could be found, maybe somewhere in the east.’

‘So we’ve got Herod Agrippa and Claudius and Jesus of Nazareth here in Galilee at the same time, in AD 23,’ Costas said slowly. ‘A meeting recorded nowhere else, only in the margin of an ancient scroll we found at the end of a lost tunnel three days ago in Herculaneum.’

‘Correct.’

‘Jesus was a carpenter,’ Costas said thoughtfully, stroking the edge of the timber in front of him. ‘That could mean boatbuilder, right?’

Jack nodded. ‘In ancient Greek, as well as in the Semitic languages of the time, Aramaic, old Phoenician, the word we translate as “carpenter” could have a whole range of meanings. Architect, worker in wood, even builder in stone or metal. There would have been plenty of work like that around here. Herod Antipas founded Tiberias in AD 20, and there was a palace to build, the city walls. But you’re right. The staple woodworking trade would have been boatbuilding. Later in the first century AD the historian Josephus wrote about the Sea of Galilee and said there were 230 boats on the lake, and that probably didn’t include the smaller ones. Boats here would have lasted longer than on the Mediterranean, with no saltwater woodworms. But even so there would have been all the usual repair work as well as construction of new vessels. The twenties AD could have been a boom time for this as well, with a lot of scrap wood coming off the building sites at Tiberias. The hull in front of us has some odd-shaped timbers.’

Costas nodded, and put his hand on the edge of the timber in front of him, then looked at Jack. ‘A lifetime ago, I think it was last Tuesday, we were diving on the shipwreck of St Paul, off Sicily. You told me then that the archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive, that hardly anything is known with certainty.’ He paused. ‘Now tell me this. I am touching a boat made by Jesus?’

Jack put his hands on the boat as well, scanned the ancient timbers and then looked over at Costas. ‘In the New Testament, one problem is working out how Jesus regarded himself, whether or not he saw himself as the Christos, the Messiah. When he’s asked, when people wonder who he is, he sometimes replies with a particular turn of phrase. It’s in translation, of course, but I think this gets the gist of it. He says, “It is as you say.”’

‘What are you saying?’

‘It is as you say.’

Costas was silent for a moment, looked at Jack imploringly, then sighed and took his hand off the boat. ‘Archaeologists,’ he grumbled. ‘Can’t get a straight answer out of any of them.’

Jack gave a tired smile, then gently patted his khaki bag. ‘Come on. There’s one final place we need to go.’

Half an hour later they stood on the edge of the mudflats on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was now early evening, and the shadows had begun to steal up behind them and advance across the flats. In the distance the water still sparkled, and Jack remembered the strange pixillation he had sensed in the sky off Sicily the week before, as if his eyes were being drawn to the parts rather than the whole, the view too blinding to comprehend. Now, clutching his bag, he felt the same thrill of anticipation he had felt then, the knowledge that he was on the cusp of another extraordinary revelation, a promise that had brought them to the place where the treasure in Jack’s hands had begun its journey almost two thousand years before. He knew with utter conviction that Claudius had stood at this spot, that he too had gazed at the distant shoreline of the Golan Heights, felt the allure of the east. He wondered whether Claudius had sensed the disquiet too, the lurking danger of this age-old faultline between east and west, known the calm of the sea was an illusion like the eye of a storm.

As Jack watched, the sun set lower behind them and the scene became coherent in his mind again, more like a painting by Turner than by Seurat, the sparkles smudging together into pastel hues of blue and orange. He took a deep breath, motioned to the others, and they began to pick their way on to the mudflats, through a tangle of twigs that had been blown up over the shoreline like tumbleweed.

‘ Ziziphus spina-crista, if I’m not mistaken,’ Jeremy said. ‘Christ-thorn. It has an excellent fruit. You should try it some time.’

‘You sound just like Pliny the Elder,’ Maria said.

They walked on, Jack in the lead, the rest forming a ragged line over the flats. Jeremy splashed through the puddles and caught up to Jack, out of earshot of the others. ‘About Elizabeth, Jack. There’s one thing I didn’t mention.’

Jack kept on walking, but glanced at Jeremy. ‘Go on.’

‘Did you know she had a daughter?’

‘A daughter?’

‘She’s at school in New York, and lives with two of Elizabeth’s old friends, both university professors. Elizabeth didn’t want her brought up in Naples, with her own family. She kept her daughter secret from almost everyone. One of the other superintendency people told me, a man who seems to have been close to Elizabeth. He was very emotional.’

‘Does she know? The daughter, I mean?’

‘Elizabeth’s only been missing for two days, and she kept her daughter completely out of the loop about her life in Naples. But she tried to speak on the phone every few days. She’ll soon know something’s wrong.’

‘Can you put me in touch with this man?’ Jack said. ‘Can I get the daughter’s contact details?’

‘I’m there already, Jack,’ Jeremy said quietly. He passed over a slip of paper. ‘He’ll do it, but he said you should be the one.’

‘Why would he suggest me?’

‘He and Elizabeth had talked about you.’

They walked on in silence. Jack felt as if he were on a treadmill, the ground below his feet moving but the world around him stock-still, as if everything, the play he was in, were suddenly frozen in time, and only the path he could see in front of him had any significance. He began to speak, but caught his breath. When the words came out they sounded as if they came from another person.

‘How old is she?’

‘She’s fifteen, Jack.’

Jack swallowed hard. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he said quietly. Jeremy nodded, then stopped to join the others who were coming behind. Jack carried on walking, but his mind was fragmented, seeing images of Elizabeth over and over again, willing an anger that would not come, a rage against all the forces that had made this happen, against the man he had nearly killed the day before and all that he stood for. But instead all he could think about was the last fifteen years, and what he had done.

What he had missed.

After ten minutes skirting the shallow mudpools they came to a raised patch about a hundred yards in front of the shoreline. It was a fishermen’s hard, a temporary landing area used during the drought, and was suffused with the odour of fish and old nets. In the centre a large rock lay deeply buried where it had been used as a mooring stone, a frayed old rope emerging from the mud in front and trailing off towards the shore. Jack pulled away some decayed netting and sat down, and the others did the same on two old railway sleepers which had clearly been dragged out for this purpose. Jack laid his bag on his lap, and they all looked out to sea, caught by the utter tranquillity of the scene. They watched as a man and a woman wandered languidly along the shoreline, the sheen of water on the mud making it look as if they were walking on water, like a mirage. Far away they could make out the fishing boats on the lake, the lights on their masts dotting the scene like a carpet of candles.

‘This shoreline was where Jesus spent some of his formative years,’ Helena said quietly. ‘In the Gospels, his sayings abound with metaphors of fishing and the sea. When he spoke of the red evening sky presaging a fine day, he was not being a prophet, but a sailor and a fisherman, someone who knew that dust in the air meant a dry day to follow.’

‘And people have come here to the Sea of Galilee seeking him ever since,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Early Christians came after the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the ones who created the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then pilgrims of the medieval world, from the British Isles, from the Holy Roman Empire, from Byzantium. Harald Hardrada was here, leading the Viking mercenaries of the Byzantine emperor’s bodyguard, bathing in the river Jordan. Then the Crusaders, riding on a tide of blood, thinking they had found the kingdom of heaven, only to see it collapse before their eyes as the Arab armies rolled in from the east.’

‘I bet this place hasn’t changed much, though,’ Costas said, skipping a pebble along a shallow pool, then eyeing Jack. ‘Are you going to show us what you’ve got?’ Jack nodded absently, then looked back to where he had been staring at the man and the woman walking off in the distance by the shoreline.

‘Did you know Mark Twain was here?’ Jeremy asked.

‘Come again?’ Costas said, turning to him.

‘Mark Twain, the writer. In 1867, one of the first American tourists in the Holy Land.’

‘I memorized his words,’ Helena said. ‘I read them last time I was here, and they made a real impression on me. “Night is the time to see Galilee, when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.”’

‘There were others like him,’ Jack said, clearing his throat and taking a deep breath. He was still reeling from Jeremy’s news, and had been unable to suppress the bleakness he felt about Elizabeth’s disappearance, a feeling of culpability he knew was irrational. What had happened to her had been set in train the day she was born. He had seen it in her eyes when they were together all those years ago, only he had seen it then as something else. And yet, as he had watched the shoreline, the boats on the horizon, he had suddenly felt the weight lifted from him, a sense of peace he had never known before. Part of him seemed to accept Jeremy’s news as if he had known it all along. He wiped his hand over his eyes, then looked at Costas, who had been watching him closely. He clutched the slip of paper from Jeremy tight in his hand. In the face of despair, there was huge yearning, and an overwhelming responsibility. And he still had to hope that Elizabeth was alive after all, that they had stopped Ritter and his henchmen in time.

‘There were others who believed the stories in the Bible were not just allegory and fable,’ Jack said. ‘It was the time when archaeology came of age, when Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans proved the reality of the Trojan Wars and the Greek Bronze Age. Ten years after Mark Twain, Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener, Royal Engineers, cut his teeth in Galilee with the Survey of Palestine, before becoming Britain’s greatest war leader. And then T. E. Lawrence came here studying Crusader castles, before returning as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the Arab legion over those hills towards Damascus. Great movements of history sweep past this place, and the biggest fracture line between the eastern and western worlds runs through here along the Jordan valley. But Galilee has so often been an eddy pool of history, a place where the individual can stand out.’

‘People who came here with the future ahead of them, on the cusp of greatness,’ Maria murmured.

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small snap-lid box. He opened it and took out two coins. He held them up, one in each hand, letting the fading sunlight catch the portraits, the features accentuated by shadow as he slowly moved them from side to side.

‘It looks to me as if you’ve been borrowing again, Jack,’ Costas said quietly, still peering intently at his friend. ‘It’s a slippery slope to becoming a treasure-hunter, you know. I always wondered when you’d cross the line.’

Jack flashed him a smile, but kept silent, staring at the faces on the coins. He had needed to view them one last time, to reach out and touch them before opening up his bag and revealing what they had all come here to see. The coin on the left was a tetradrachm of Herod Agrippa, the one that Helena and Yereva had found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The portrait was worn, but it showed a thick-set, bullish face, the image of a fighter more than a thinker, but with large, sensitive eyes. It was idealized in the eastern tradition, a Hercules or an Alexander more than Herod Agrippa. He wore a laurel diadem, normally only seen on coins of Roman emperors. The man on the other coin was wearing a diadem too, but this time rightly so. It was the sestertius of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum. Jack saw Claudius as he had imagined him sitting at his table in the villa, working with Narcissus and Pliny on his history of Britain, then standing before the tomb under London. He saw the full head of hair, the high forehead, the eyes set back and thoughtful, the pursed mouth. Not Claudius the cripple, not Claudius the fool, but Claudius the emperor at the height of his powers, an emperor who built aqueducts and harbours and brought the Roman world back from the brink of catastrophe, paving the way for the Christian west in centuries to come. Both coins showed men who had reached the pinnacle of their lives, a future they could scarcely have foreseen that day in AD 23 when they came here together as young men, beside the Sea of Galilee. Herod Agrippa, prince of the East. Claudius the god.

‘I wonder if they sensed the darkness ahead,’ Helena murmured.

‘What do you mean?’ Costas said.

Jack put away the coins, slipped the box back into his pocket, and then took out a swaddled package from his bag. The others watched him intently. ‘Herod Agrippa came from one of the most volatile dynasties of the east, and had grown up in Rome,’ he said. ‘He knew all about the fickle nature of power. Claudius was intimate with that too, and was also a historian. Even as early as AD 23 he would have seen the seeds of decay in the reign of Tiberius. And the one they met here, the fisherman from Nazareth, may have lived his life in Galilee away from the momentous events of history, but he may have known what lay ahead. When Claudius made his final visit to Britain to hide his treasure, he was doing it to last beyond Rome. And when Everett came to Jerusalem in 1917, he was doing the same. His world was one of terrible darkness, closer to apocalypse than Claudius could ever have imagined. And both men knew how the fickle winds of history might snatch away their prize.’

Jack removed the bubblewrap from the object in his hands and revealed a small stone cylinder. There was a murmur of excitement from the others, and both Helena and Morgan held their hands together as if in prayer. Jack held the cylinder out for Helena. ‘Will you break the seal?’

Helena made the sign of the cross and took the cylinder from Jack’s hands. Slowly, carefully, she twisted the lid. It came away easily, breaking the blackened resinous material that had sealed the join. She handed it back to Jack, who finished removing the lid. The others crowded round, Maria and Jeremy kneeling in front and Costas and Morgan peering over Jack’s shoulder. There was another gasp as they saw what was inside. It was a scroll, brown with age but apparently intact, still wound round a wooden rod.

‘The cylinder was airtight,’ Jack breathed. ‘Thank God for that.’ He reached in and held the edge of the scroll between two fingers, gently feeling it. ‘It’s still supple. There’s some kind of preservative on it, a waxy material.’

‘Clever old Claudius,’ Maria murmured.

‘Clever old Pliny, you mean,’ Jeremy said. ‘I bet that’s who Claudius learned it from.’

They were silent, and all Jack could hear was a distant knocking sound, and a faint whisper of breeze from the west. He held his breath. He drew out the scroll, and put the cylinder on his lap. There was no writing to be seen, just the brown surface of the papyrus. He held the scroll up so it was caught in the remaining sunlight that shone over the hills behind them. Carefully, without a word, he unrolled a few centimetres, peering closely at the surface as it was revealed.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured.

‘Got something?’ Costas said.

‘Look at the cross-layering, where the strips of papyrus have been laid. You can see it where the light shines through. This is first-grade paper, exactly the same as the papyrus sheet we found on Claudius’ desk in Herculaneum. And there it is.’ His voice was hushed. ‘I can see it.’

‘What?’

‘Writing. There. Look.’ Jack slowly unrolled the papyrus. First one line was revealed, then another. He unravelled the entire scroll, and they could see about twenty lines. Jack’s heart was racing. The ink was black, almost jet-black, sealed in by the preservative wax. The writing was continuous, without word breaks or punctuation, in the ancient fashion. ‘It’s Greek,’ he whispered. ‘It’s written in Greek.’

‘There’s a cross beside the first word,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘You see that in medieval religious manuscripts too.’

‘There’s some scrubbed-out writing underneath it, older writing,’ Costas said, squinting at the paper from behind Jack. ‘Just the first few lines. You can barely make it out, but it looks like a different hand, a different script.’

‘Probably some older writing by Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘If so, it’d be in Latin. Maybe something he’d started then erased, notes he’d made on the journey out to Judaea. That’d be fascinating. We don’t have anything yet in Claudius’ own handwriting.’

‘Mass spectrometry,’ Costas said. ‘That’d sort it out. Hard science.’

Jack was not listening. He had read the first lines of the visible text, the lines that overlaid the scrubbed-out words. He felt light headed, and the scroll seemed to waver in his hands, whether from his own extraordinary emotion or from a waft of breeze he could not tell. He let his hands slowly drop, and held the scroll open over his knees. He turned to Helena. ‘ Kyriakon,’ he said. ‘Am I correct in using the literal translation, House of the Lord?’

Helena nodded. ‘It could mean congregation as a whole, Church in the broad sense.’

‘And naos? The Greek word for temple?’

‘Probably used to mean church as a physical entity, as a structure.’

‘Are you ready for this?’

‘If these are his words, Jack, then I have nothing to fear.’

‘No, you do not.’ Jack paused, and for an extraordinary moment he felt as if he were looking down from a great height, not at their gathering on the mudflat but at a pinprick of light on a vast sea, on two shadowy forms hunched across from each other in a little boat, barely discernible in the darkness. He closed his eyes, then looked at the scroll and began to translate.

‘ “Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, these are his words…” ’