The Lost Testament

30

Angela Lewis often found that her subconscious mind was rather good at solving problems that her conscious mind for some reason had failed to cope with.

When she’d read Ali Mohammed’s email the previous day, she knew she’d seen or read the partial name ef bar he somewhere else but, like a library with no filing cards or index system, she simply couldn’t retrieve it from her memory. Her searches on the Internet hadn’t helped either. But almost as soon as she got up that morning, she had remembered exactly where to look.

While Bronson was still in the shower, tunelessly singing some awful pop song from the seventies, she opened up her laptop and carried out a couple of swift searches, both of which yielded somewhat sparse results. But at least she now had something to send out to Ali in Cairo, which might help him in his work. Her best guess at the significance of ef bar he was that it was the middle section of the Hebrew name Yusef bar Heli, and that alone made the parchment quite an important find. But it was the inclusion of the name of the Judaean town of Tzippori — assuming Ali Mohammed had read the word correctly — which suggested the relic could potentially be a discovery of great importance.

The only names that had been associated with that particular individual were purely apocryphal, with virtually nothing in the historical record to support any of them. However, it was widely believed that the individual had spent at least some time in Tzippori. Depending upon which source was consulted, the man had either been called Yusef bar Heli — or Yusef ben Heli, both bar and ben translating as ‘the son of’ — or Yusef bar Yacob or Yusef ben Yacob. The man’s father had most probably been named either Heli or Yacob — the historical record was unclear on that point — though his own name, Yusef, was fairly well established. If the parchment was contemporary with this man’s life, and if the fragment of the name did in fact refer to this specific individual, historians might for the first time be able to establish something of the man’s family tree. And if that proved to be possible, the ramifications could be simply astonishing.

If Angela was right, that single piece of parchment sitting in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo could be one of the most significant finds since the Nag Hammadi Codices or the Dead Sea Scrolls.