The Templar Heresy

48

‘So what is “Yohanan Mamdana”?’ Bronson asked. ‘Some lost city out here in the Holy Land?’ he suggested. ‘If it is, I’ve never heard of it.’

Angela shook her head. ‘No, it’s not a place. It’s a person.’

‘Well, I’ve never heard of him. Or her.’

‘Actually,’ Angela said, ‘I can guarantee that you not only have heard of him — because Yohanan Mamdana was a man — but you also know a little bit about his life, and exactly how he died. The manner of his death, in fact, is perhaps better known than much about his life. Any ideas?’ she asked.

‘Not a glimmer so far.’

‘Right. Of course, like all the names from this period that have survived in stories and legends, the spellings have changed, often quite significantly. In this case, “Yohanan” has come down to us as “John”, and he was beheaded by—’

‘The Baptist,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘You mean John the Baptist. Herod and Salome and the silver platter.’

‘Spot on. Yohanan Mamdana was the original name, or at least the Syriac name, of the man we know as John the Baptist.’

‘Syriac? You mean from the Syrian language?’

‘No. It was an Aramaic dialect spoken across much of the Middle East.’

‘Fine. But what I have no clue about,’ Bronson said, ‘is why his name should form part of an Atbash cipher used to encrypt an inscription in a temple buried in the deserts of southern Iraq. And, come to that, I’ve no idea why any of that should have anything to do with the Temple Mount and the Knights Templar.’

‘Yes,’ Angela replied, ‘that bit is pretty obscure, I’ll grant you that. But as for the buried temple and the inscription, that does make a kind of sense. You remember when we were talking about it on the way from Kuwait City to the dig, and then when you saw it for yourself. My view was that it was almost certainly a Mandaean temple, because of where it was, that shallow indentation in the floor that could have been intended for baptisms, and even the image of the bearded man. The point that we probably didn’t make all that clear to you at the time was that both the ancient Mandaeans and the followers of that religion today all worshipped exactly the same person. And that person wasn’t — and isn’t — Jesus Christ, but John the Baptist.’

Bronson looked puzzled.

‘So was John the Baptist supposed to be another son of God, or someone equally important and unlikely?’ he asked.

‘Not as far as I know,’ Angela replied. ‘I think it’s generally accepted that he was a prophet of a sort, but in the Christian Bible and the Catholic Church he was seen as very much a bit-part player, somebody who was important for what he did, rather than for who he was. And that, for the Mandaeans, was the problem and the conundrum, because of the obvious logical inconsistency of the biblical tale. If Jesus Christ genuinely was the son of God, then obviously He had to be the most significant and important figure in religious history. But in the view of the Mandaeans, that simply could not be the case, because He was baptized by John the Baptist. No mere mortal could possibly be allowed to anoint the son of God, so very obviously the man who baptized Jesus had to be even more important than Him to be able to carry out that act.

‘And the implication, at least as far as the Mandaeans were concerned, was that the Bible and the Church and Christianity as a whole had got everything backwards. Jesus Christ had only been a prophet, one of a long line of such men in those days, and John the Baptist was the individual who deserved to be worshipped. Christ, in fact, was seen as a liar and usurper, a man who had donned the mantle of the son of God without being in any way deserving of the title. As far as the early Church was concerned, of course, this was the wildest and most unforgivable heresy of the lot, because the Mandaeans weren’t just guilty of worshipping in the wrong way, like a lot of heretics, but they were worshipping the wrong person and refusing to accept the divinity of Jesus.’

‘It’s no wonder that temple was buried,’ Bronson pointed out. ‘The Church had long arms in that period, and could probably have reached out all the way to Iraq — or mediaeval Babylon at that time — to try to stamp out that heresy. Worshipping in secret in a temple that could be completely hidden from view might have been the safest option they had.’

‘We thought it might just have been a case of excavating it from the rock underground because it would be permanent and, more importantly, relatively cool, but you could well be right. Anyway, the important thing is that I think we now know how to decipher the rest of the inscription.’

‘We do?’ Bronson sounded surprised. ‘Show me.’

Angela took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down the two sequences of letters that had been carved into one of the stones in the Western Wall Tunnel.

‘If this is meant to be a decode for a kind of extended Atbash,’ she said, ‘then logically one word group should be written out before the alphabet and the second word group after it.’

‘But we still don’t know what those word groups are,’ Bronson objected.

‘Oh, I think we do, now that we’ve made the connection with John the Baptist. As I said to you before, the names of the characters involved in these events at the start of the first millennium have changed over the centuries, been altered with different spellings and in some cases been changed beyond all recognition. And that applies in particular to the person that we now refer to as Jesus Christ. He was never known as Jesus. In fact, that name is essentially a British invention. His original Hebrew name was believed to be “Yehoshua”, which later became “Yeshua” or “Joshua”. Later, the name “Yehoshua” was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as “Iesvs” or “Iesous”, and that variant was then changed to “Jesus” in English.

‘And the “Christ” is another later addition. According to the Bible, Jesus was believed by some of the people he encountered to have been the Messiah, and that word in Hebrew means “the anointed one”. That fact was recognized by the early translators who were rendering the Bible in Greek, and the oil used for that kind of anointing was called khrisma in Greek and a person who had been anointed was known as a khristos. When the text was then translated from Greek into Latin, the khristos was changed into christus and, predictably enough, during the translation into English that became “Christ”, but it was never a part of Jesus’s name when he was alive.’

‘Assuming that such a person lived at all,’ Bronson interjected.

Angela shook her head.

‘Another time, another story,’ she said shortly. ‘In those very early days, people didn’t actually have a second or family name. Instead, Jesus would have been known as “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, or “Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob”.’ She paused for a moment and pointed at the paper, and at the second group of letters. ‘“Y B Y B Y”,’ she said. ‘There doesn’t seem to me to be any doubt that that refers to “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, the man the Mandaeans saw as the usurper, and if we were in any doubt at all, then the letters “F E I” would seem to confirm it.’

‘Furis et interceptoris,’ Bronson said, remembering their earlier conversation and nodding. ‘“Thief and usurper”. Let’s hope that really is it.’

He took another piece of paper, wrote out the three Latin words, then the reversed alphabet, and then Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, all without spaces. Then he wrote out the plaintext alphabet below it, repeating it until he had matched each ciphertext letter with its plaintext equivalent. The entire ciphertext string amounted almost to three complete alphabets.

‘I’ve reversed the alphabet this time,’ he said, ‘but we can always try it the other way round, and I suppose reverse the added bits as well. Ring the changes, as it were. Let’s see how it goes.’

As Angela read out the encrypted letters from the temple inscription, Bronson carefully checked the possible plaintext equivalents and wrote each of them down, bracketing each group as he did so.

And slowly, with much trial and frequent error, a kind of message began to emerge from the jumble of letters.