The Lost Testament

93

‘So who was this Jerod of Cana?’

They were sitting in the hotel room discussing a few of the words that Angela had managed to translate.

‘He might have been a lawyer of some sort,’ she replied, ‘if this is a record of a trial or legal proceeding, or maybe just a minor official. He probably spoke Greek because Judaea had been Hellenized for some time and that language was spoken there almost as commonly as Hebrew. And he also spoke at least some Aramaic as well, because according to this sentence on the parchment he describes Yusef — Joseph — as a naggar.’

‘And that means what?’

‘It’s a loanword from Aramaic that has two different but related meanings. The literal translation would be a “craftsman”, but it also had a metaphorical interpretation as a scholar or a learned man, which I suppose is another way of looking at a craftsman — somebody who works with words rather than wood, say. And that’s interesting, because I had expected to find the word teknon being used instead. That’s not Aramaic. It’s a Greek word that also means a craftsman or a technician, a man who worked in metal or wood, and it was almost certainly the root of the modern English word “technician”. But the point is that it has no other meaning.’

‘I don’t see the significance.’

‘It’s very simple. Forget the parchment for a minute and think back to what you were told when you were at school, during your religious instruction classes, or whatever they were called. What job was Jesus Christ supposed to have followed?’

‘He was a carpenter, of course. Everybody knows that.’

Angela nodded. ‘Of course everybody knows that,’ she replied. ‘And actually everybody’s got it wrong. When you go back to the oldest known sources, to the original Aramaic, it’s quite clear that whoever translated the word naggar assumed that the correct meaning was the literal one, that Jesus was a craftsman of some kind, a carpenter or metal worker, and more importantly so was his father.

‘But actually it’s almost certain that that was a mistranslation, and the word they should have used was the metaphorical meaning, a “scholar”. Quite apart from anything else, at one point Jesus was supposed to have begun teaching in the synagogue, and there is no possible way that any carpenter would have been permitted to do that. But a scholar would actually have been expected to carry out this kind of duty, and nobody would have thought it unusual in any way.’

Bronson shook his head.

‘I still don’t see why that’s important.’

‘It’s important,’ Angela said, ‘because it possibly shows that the parchment is contemporary with whatever event it’s describing, and not something written much later. In particular, because the carpenter story became established quite quickly, it would be far more likely for a later writer to describe him as a teknon, using the Greek word, rather than the Aramaic naggar. It’s not proof positive, of course, but it does suggest — at least to me — that the parchment is most probably an authentic and contemporary record of something. We just don’t know what.’