The Lost Testament

Author’s note

This book is of course a novel, which means that it’s fiction. But as with all the books in this series, I always try to build my fiction on the solid ground of established fact.

The daring robbery that took place at the end of November 1965 happened exactly as I described it in this book, and my account is based upon contemporary police reports and newspaper stories about the event. Obviously, I invented the profession of the two thieves, but because of the route they used to enter the Vatican it is almost certain that they were either acrobats or at the very least had extensive climbing experience.

They took only the four items that I claim they stole, a somewhat peculiar selection of treasures in view of the priceless relics that surrounded them when they effected their entrance to the building, and it is also a proven fact that in less than twenty-four hours three of these treasures — the replica crown and the two collections of literary manuscripts — had been returned in precisely the manner I described.

I have no idea whether or not the manuscripts that were returned to the Vatican were the originals, but in my opinion the only sensible explanation for this event is that it was a robbery to order, to allow a wealthy collector to get his hands on the genuine manuscripts. At the time, the Italian police were convinced that this was the most likely motive for the theft, and made statements to the press to this effect.

And I think it is at the very least a strong possibility that the two manuscript collections that were recovered were actually very good forgeries. Common sense suggests that nobody would plot or plan such a daring robbery, which was undetected until long after the thieves had left the Vatican City, only to hand back the three most valuable objects stolen that very same day. I have not been able to find out if the two manuscript collections are currently on display anywhere in the Vatican, or if they are locked away somewhere, out of the sight of anyone who might be able to raise doubts about their authenticity, but my money’s on the latter.

The background information that I supplied about ancient parchment and ink, and modern methods and techniques for making such ancient texts readable is accurate, if somewhat simplified for the purposes of the narrative.

Again, the historical information in the book about the P2 lodge is accurate, including the details of the death of the banker Roberto Calvi, whose body was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London.

One aspect of his death that has never really been explored is the possible significance of this location, the ‘Black Friars’ being a direct reference to members of the Dominican order, who were specifically charged by the Vatican with investigating heresy. In short, with conducting the Inquisitions: the Dominicans were essentially the Pope’s personal torturers.

It could be argued that Calvi had betrayed the Vatican through his machinations at the Banco Ambrosiano, and possibly hanging his body underneath a bridge named after the Dominican order was a not very subtle way of suggesting that he had died as a heretic, killed on the orders of the Pope like so many thousands of other heretics over the centuries.

The death of Pope John Paul I was entirely unexpected and in all sorts of ways highly suspicious, not least because it occurred within twenty-four hours of his announcing his decision to remove Archbishop Marcinkus and the other members of P2 from the Vatican Bank. Whilst there is no proof that he was murdered, it is fairly clear that he was unable to trust at least some of the people around him, and they may have felt that they owed a higher allegiance to the P2 lodge than they did to the Pope himself.

If this were the case, and of course now it is mere conjecture, then his supposed death from natural causes begins to look even less likely to be based in fact, and the idea of a deliberate act of murder increasingly plausible. But because the Vatican will never permit the autopsy of a Pope’s body, there is almost no chance that we will ever find out for sure precisely what happened on the night of 28 September 1978.

The monitoring system employed by the Vatican to monitor Internet searching, and which I named Codex S, is a figment of my imagination. But that doesn’t mean that the Vatican doesn’t actually have some system that works in a similar fashion.

In the prologue I make oblique references to the rape of Mary, and this idea forms the core of the story. It is indeed possible, as I suggested, that the Roman Emperor Constantine — as the first emperor ever to embrace the new religion — might well have been troubled by the influence of a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus. He wrote a comprehensive attack on Christianity called The True Word, which contained a detailed account of this alleged rape. His work has not survived, but it was later criticized in detail by Origen, who first stated each of the arguments advanced by Celsus, and then attempted to refute them, thus providing a largely complete copy of the earlier work.

Later writers have criticized the claim made by Celsus that the father of the man later known as Jesus Christ was a Roman archer, citing the lack of any historical evidence for this assertion. Interestingly, no writers have ever attempted to rebuke the idea of a virgin birth for the same reason — the complete lack of evidence — despite the manifest biological impossibility of such an event ever occurring. Whilst it is an extremely unpleasant idea to suggest that the founder of Christianity was the product of a violent rape, this actually makes far more sense than the alternative explanation which is claimed by the Church.

In fact, the story about Mary being impregnated in a rape by a Roman archer has been around for longer than most of the Gospels. The tale of course suffers from precisely the same problem as the Gospels, in that there is not a single shred of proof that the rape ever took place, or indeed that the Gospels themselves are anything more than works of fiction.

This is one of the most fundamental problems about Christianity: there are simply no independent sources which support any of the statements and claims made by the Catholic Church through the ages.

Ultimately, belief in God or belief in Jesus — or belief in anything else that cannot be proven — is simply a matter of faith, not a matter of fact.