The Lost Testament

109

‘This parchment provides the first, and as far as I know the only, written account of one crucial event. If its authenticity can be established, then the most important single event that the Church has claimed as absolutely true over the centuries — and which is the cornerstone of its faith — will be proven to be wholly and completely untrue. A blatant lie, in fact.’

Bronson looked somewhat sceptical.

‘We’ve been here before, Angela. Remember the tomb of the liars?’

‘I know, and I do remember. But this, this is different. You can argue about the actual status of St Peter and St Paul all day, but at the end of it you have to acknowledge that both of them were only bit-part players, people — if either of them ever actually existed, of course — who came along after the event. This is much more fundamental than that. This goes straight to the very heart of Christianity, and to the Catholic branch, in particular.’

There was a brief double tap on the door, and then it swung open.

‘You’re back then? Have a good time?’

Angela looked up at her visitor and nodded.

‘Hello, Charles,’ she said. ‘Yes, we’re back and no, it wasn’t particularly enjoyable. Have you heard from George Stebbins? Oh, sorry,’ she added, gesturing towards the easy chair as the man stepped fully into the room, ‘this is my husband — or former husband, I suppose I should say, Christopher Bronson. Chris, this is Charles Westman. He’s a specialist in ancient weapons.’

Westman nodded to Bronson and took another couple of steps forward.

‘I think the museum received a somewhat garbled message from a hospital in Madrid,’ he replied. ‘I hear Stebbins had some kind of an accident over there.’

Bronson laughed shortly.

‘I suppose the word “accident” does more or less cover it,’ he said.

‘So what did happen?’ Westman asked.

Bronson shook his head.

‘I didn’t get to know Mr Stebbins very well, but I got the feeling that he would probably far rather tell you himself, in glorious high-definition colour with all the lurid details, when he finally gets back.’

Westman smiled briefly at Bronson and then turned his attention back to Angela.

‘You left in an awful hurry,’ he said, ‘and I gather from the rumours running around this building that you were after some kind of an important ancient relic. Is it true? Did you get it?’

‘We did get it,’ Angela said, ‘against all the odds. And this time, we really were up against it. We’ve been chased and shot at across most of Europe, and we were very lucky to get back here in one piece, with the relic.’

‘And is that it, that sheet of old parchment?’

Angela nodded.

‘Yes, and as far as I can tell it’s probably the real thing, though I was a bit bothered by the language that was used on it. I was expecting vulgar Latin and I got classical Latin, but with hindsight I think I can more or less understand why that was the case. And we’ve even got a radiocarbon date that ties up pretty well with what we found out about it.’

‘But what is it?’ Westman asked, a faint hint of exasperation in his voice. ‘All you’ve told me is that you’ve got some Latin text written on a bit of parchment.’

‘For God’s sake, Angela,’ Bronson interjected, ‘tell the man what it is before he explodes.’

‘Just winding you up a little, Charles — just like you do to me when you’re in the mood.’ Angela pointed down at the piece of parchment on the desk in front of her, the photograph next to it that she’d used for the translation still illuminated by the two bright lights.

‘What we’re looking at here is a legal document, written by — or at the very least signed by — a centurion of the Roman Regiment Cohors I Sagittariorum. It’s an account of the trial, a sort of impromptu field court martial, of an archer named Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera, who was accused of the alleged rape and impregnation of a woman, shortly after the destruction of a town named Tzippori.

‘I know that period isn’t really your field, Charles, but in those days Roman soldiers accused of crimes were normally tried by their peers, and that appears to have been what happened in this case. According to the text on the parchment, the archer Pantera was accused by a man named Jerod of Cana, though he wasn’t the plaintiff. The account doesn’t identify exactly who or what Jerod was, but from the context I think it’s fairly clear that he was either a lawyer of some sort or possibly just an educated man who spoke multiple languages, which he would have needed to represent an Aramaic-or Greek-speaking Jew in a tribunal conducted entirely in Latin.’

‘“Greek-speaking”?’ Westman asked, a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Why would a first-century resident of Judaea have spoken Greek?’

Bronson glanced at him, but didn’t speak.

‘That’s easy,’ Angela replied. ‘That area had been Hellenized for some time. Anyway, Jerod of Cana presented his case on behalf of the plaintiff, a man named Yusef bar Heli, claiming rape against the woman to whom he was betrothed. I assume that Yusef didn’t speak Latin, which was why he was being represented by Jerod. Yusef bar Heli is listed on the parchment as being a naggar, a loaned Aramaic word meaning a craftsman, but which I think was used here to indicate that he was actually a scholar or a learned man, which was an alternative translation of the word.’

Angela glanced at her handwritten translation of the Latin, then continued.

‘Anyway, Jerod presented his case against the archer, surrounded by a group of soldiers from the legion who would act as the jury in the case and, if necessary, as the executioners. Even in those days rape was a very serious offence under both Roman and Jewish law, and anyone convicted of it was quite likely to be sentenced to death.

‘On the other side of the coin, in the heat of battle, rape and sexual assault were frequently used by members of the legions as tools for subduing a conquered population, and in that context it was not only accepted but often actually encouraged. The reason why this particular case was brought at all was that it hadn’t occurred during the Roman attack on Tzippori, in 4 BC, but a few days later. And there were two other factors as well. First, the victim wasn’t really a woman. She was a girl just barely in her teens, a virtual child who had been betrothed to Yusef bar Heli. The second factor was that she was now pregnant.

‘The other point about this, I suppose,’ Angela continued, ‘is that it was never going to be a fair trial. Pantera was almost certainly guilty of the rape charge and at any other time and in any other place it is likely that he would have been convicted. But he was acquitted, because every Roman soldier watching those proceedings knew perfectly well that next time it might be him standing in the circle awaiting his fate, and for that reason alone hardly any of these trials-by-peers ever opted for a guilty verdict.

‘Pantera claimed in his defence that he had indeed had carnal relations with the girl in question, but stated that she had lain with him willingly, and not once but on many occasions. According to the record, he even produced witnesses, soldiers from the legion, who supported his claim, so the result was never in any real doubt.

‘At the end of the trial, the soldiers overwhelmingly voted “not guilty”, and Pantera walked free. The centurion signed the report of the trial and I imagine it was sent off to Rome along with all the other bits of routine correspondence that were generated by the army of occupation in Judaea.’

Again Angela paused in her recital and glanced down once more at the old and discoloured parchment in front of her.

‘I have no idea what happened to the parchment after that. The most likely scenario is that it was filed away somewhere in Rome, and eventually, along with thousands of other ancient relics of various sorts, it came into the possession of the Vatican. At some point, somebody in the Holy See must have looked at it and realized its significance, and no doubt they hid it away in a place that they considered to be safe. But at some time within the last century, and most likely, Chris and I think, in nineteen sixty-five, a pair of thieves broke into the Vatican and carried out a burglary to order. They grabbed the items they had been told to steal, and we believe that the parchment was hidden in or under one of these two objects.’

‘So you mean it was stolen from the Vatican, but by accident?’ Westman asked.

‘Yes, that seems most likely. The parchment then vanished from sight, probably because the thieves didn’t know what they had. It didn’t surface until a few days ago in Cairo, when a local antique dealer got hold of it. We’re not sure exactly what happened after that, but somehow the Vatican, or perhaps some other group of people within the Roman Catholic Church, learned that the relic had been found again and began taking immediate steps both to recover it and to eliminate anyone with any significant knowledge of it.’

‘That’s all very interesting, Angela, but all you’ve done is describe the trial of a Roman archer who was accused of rape. Why would anybody, two thousand years after the event, care in the slightest about this?’

‘You didn’t pick up the reference, then?’ she replied, looking at Westman. ‘The name Yusef bar Heli doesn’t mean anything to you?’

He shook his head.

‘According to some other accounts,’ Angela said, ‘he was also known as Yusef ben Yacob or Yusef bar Yacob. I also didn’t mention the name of the victim, the young girl who was raped by Pantera. According to the parchment, her name was Maryam, but it’s come down to us through history just as “Mary”, just as we now know Yusef bar Heli simply as “Joseph”. And their first-born son, fathered not by Joseph but by Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera in an act of sheer unremitting evil and violence and lust, they named Yeshuah.

‘Normally, that would be translated as “Joshua”, but today almost everybody in the world knows that man not as “Yeshuah bar Yusef”, or even as “Joshua”, but as Jesus Christ.’