The Lost Testament

108

The British Museum was only a short distance down Great Russell Street, and once inside the building Angela led the way straight up to her office, where she followed her usual routine and set about grinding some Blue Mountain beans for her morning coffee.

‘While this is brewing,’ she said, ‘I’ll take the parchment to one of our specialist laboratories here and see what they can do with it. The coffee machine is right in front of you, there’s a comfortable chair over by that bookcase, and I can see that there’s a novel sticking out of your jacket pocket, so you can just relax until I get back.’

‘Sounds like a deal to me,’ Bronson said, and retired to the chair as instructed.

About twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door, which then opened, and closed again almost immediately, whoever was outside presuming that Angela’s office was empty.

It was over two hours before Angela finally returned, pushing open the door and walking across to her desk, a cardboard folder in her hand.

‘I hope that’s fresh coffee,’ she said, glancing at the filter machine.

‘It certainly is,’ Bronson confirmed. ‘I made it about ten minutes ago. Any luck?’

‘Yes, definitely. I won’t bore you with the technicalities of it, unlike the man in the laboratory where I’ve just spent the last one hundred and twenty tediously endless minutes. Suffice it to say that almost all the text showed up using a thing called multi-spectral imaging, where we could irradiate the parchment using a number of different wavelengths of light. We fed the results into our state-of-the-art digital image processing program, which analysed what we’ve got and then spat it out to an ultra high-resolution laser printer.’

‘And that’s without the technicalities, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Angela replied firmly. ‘That really is the short, short version. Trust me on that.’

‘So have you got everything you need now?’

‘Just about, yes. The only thing I haven’t got is the complete translation of the text, which is what I’m going to do right now.’

‘And what then?’ Bronson asked.

‘Then, in order to go public with this, I’ll have to write a short report about how the parchment came to be in my possession, then pass that up the line here in the museum with a request that a statement should be issued describing the relic and what the text says. If that’s approved, then I’ll have to work up a fully detailed report that will need to be checked and peer-reviewed, and then published in the appropriate professional journals. After that, we’ll need to set up a display here in the museum which will house the parchment and all the information relating to it.’

‘So it won’t be a fast process, then?’

‘Nothing moves quickly in the world of academe, my friend. But what we will be able to do once I’ve written the report is ask the public relations people here to issue a press release outlining what we found and what we believe is the significance of the relic. And that, hopefully, will be enough to get us out of the firing line. Now just sit there and be quiet while I do the translation.’

Angela took a number of photographs out of the folder and stared down at them through a magnifying lens, the pictures illuminated by two powerful shadow-free lights. Then she picked up the radiocarbon dating report that Ali had arranged to be sent to her and studied that for a couple of minutes, before going back to the parchment.

‘I know you told me not to talk,’ Bronson said, ‘but you look puzzled. Is there anything wrong?’

‘Hmm, there is one thing that’s bothering me.’

‘Which is?’

‘The language. There’s a kind of signature block at the end of the parchment that identifies the author as a centurion, a fighting man. He would have been trained in the art of war, in battle tactics and swordsmanship and hand-to-hand combat, but he wouldn’t have been trained to write in classical Latin. In those days, in the first century AD, the common man would have spoken and written — if they could write at all, which is by no means certain — a language called sermo vulgaris, or vulgar Latin. But the text on the parchment is more like classical Latin, which is a bit of a surprise.’

‘You don’t mean that after all we’ve been through with that relic you think it’s a forgery?’

Angela shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. It’s possible that the centurion was far better educated than most men in his position. Or, alternatively and this is perhaps even more likely, maybe the centurion didn’t write it, but simply signed it, and had the text written by a professional scribe. In which case it’s more than likely that classical Latin would have been used.’

‘Forget the signature block. What about the text itself? Does it contain some dreadful secret about Joseph?’

‘Just a minute.’ Angela looked troubled, and was silent as she read through it again, scribbling as she went.

‘No, not about Joseph,’ she said slowly, almost sadly. ‘He actually comes out of this incredibly well. And Jesus isn’t involved either, except peripherally. No, this document is a bit of a surprise, because it’s all about Mary.’