by James Becker
Bronson made a final effort and pulled himself through the gap, rolling across the floor of the cave to clear the opening as quickly as possible.
On the other side of the moving door, Donovan thrust himself forward, diving headlong into the narrow space.
‘Nick, help me!’ he shouted as he started to force his way through the gap.
Masters stepped forward and reached down to grab Donovan’s out-stretched arm.
Then the stone door gave a sudden lurch and Masters looked up. The crowbar was starting to bend under the enormous pressure of the moving slab of stone. He grabbed Donovan’s hand and started to pull, but even as he did so he knew it was too late.
Donovan felt an enormous, intolerable pressure on his chest as the stone door started moving again, started closing the gap. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.
He felt a snap as the first of his ribs broke, then his chest caved in, a sudden excruciating shaft of agony that seared through his very being. And then he felt nothing at all as the crowbar snapped and the stone slab finally slammed into place, the ancient stone rollers crumbling to dust with the impact, jamming the door closed for another eternity.
70
‘We’re out of here,’ Masters said, as they stepped outside the mouth of the cave. ‘The Indian Army or Air Force are going to be swarming all over this valley lookin’ for whoever blew their shiny Hind gunship out of the sky, so we need to be history before they get here. You gonna be OK?’
‘Thanks,’ Bronson said, shaking the American’s hand. ‘Our truck’s parked down at the bottom of the valley, but I suppose you knew that already.’
Masters nodded and grinned, then turned, his mind already on his exit strategy as he selected a number on his sat-phone.
In the open space outside the cave, Bronson took Angela in his arms and for a few seconds just held her tight.
‘I thought that was it,’ Angela murmured, her cheeks damp from tears of relief. ‘I really thought you’d be crushed by that stone door closing. What do you think happened?’ She turned back to look through the dark mouth of the cave.
‘A clever booby-trap is how I see it,’ Bronson said. ‘When we pushed the slab all the way over to the right, the top of it was resting against another lump of stone. Somehow that must have tripped a trigger of some kind, because that second slab then started moving down, pushing against the first one. That was the noise we heard – the second slab starting to move.’
Before he’d left the cave he’d looked over the right-hand side of the slab. On the far side of the stone door was another rough-cut lump of stone which had clearly forced the slab closed as it pivoted downwards.
‘That’s just like some of the pyramids,’ Angela said. ‘An anti-theft mechanism. Open the first door and something triggers the mechanism. Then gravity does the rest.’
‘I wonder why Yus Asaph’s followers didn’t trigger it themselves, and seal the door using the second slab when they hid the body here?’ Bronson asked.
‘Maybe it would have made it too obvious that something was hidden in the inner chamber. If you knew that there was a secret room in there, you could hack your way through the stone door.’ Angela shuddered against Bronson’s body. ‘Let’s get out of here, Chris. Let’s go home.’
Bronson took her hand, and together they started picking their way over the rutted boulder-strewn surface of the valley down to where they’d left their jeep. Night had fallen, and above them the sky was a black velvet blanket pierced by the light of countless millions of stars. It felt good to be alive.
Several minutes later, Killian recovered consciousness inside the inner chamber. At first, he could see nothing at all, then pulled a small torch from his pocket, switched it on and glanced around him. The others had all gone, which suited him perfectly. Now he had the time to complete the task he’d been set by God himself.
He walked across to the stone structure and ran his hand slowly over the top of the lead coffin and looked down, a contented smile on his face. Inside, the body he believed to have been Jesus the Nazarite had simply ceased to exist, turned to dust by the inexorable process of decay. That was something he’d completely failed to anticipate, but ultimately that was exactly what he’d intended. He had expected to have to destroy the tomb and its contents with explosives, but a force of nature had saved him the job. And it simply didn’t matter what Donovan or any of the others said or claimed now – there was not the slightest shred of proof that the coffin had ever contained a human body, far less the body of the Messiah Himself.
Killian’s smile deepened. He truly had been blessed. For the first time in two millennia, a small group of people had been granted the most sublime and utterly divine gift possible. For a few moments they had been permitted to stare at the face of the Saviour of mankind, at the man revered by countless millions of worshippers as the Son of God.
He made the sign of the cross and turned away from the coffin, swinging the torch beam in front of him. For the first time he registered the fact that the stone door was closed. Then he saw the spreading pool of blood on the floor of the chamber, and Donovan’s body obscenely crushed into the gap.
Killian looked around desperately, seeking another way out, some tunnel or passageway they’d all missed, but in seconds he confirmed that the walls of the chamber were solid.
He ran to the stone door and tore at the edge of it with his fingers, ripping the skin and flesh and tearing off two of his nails. But the stone didn’t budge by even a millimetre.
Then he started to scream.
Author’s Note
This book is, of course, a novel, but I’ve tried to base it as far as possible on fact.
The accepted story of the life of Jesus Christ is fraught with inconsistencies, none of which are entirely surprising in view of the passage of time and the perceived need of the Catholic Church, in particular, to produce a seamless and acceptable account of the life of the man who was responsible for founding the Christian religion. Let me list just three of the more common of these misconceptions:
• Jesus was born on 25 December. If there really were shepherds tending their flocks in the fields when Jesus was born, as the Gospel of Luke claims, then the month was most likely to have been June. That was the first month of the year when sheep were allowed into the fields to graze on the remains of the wheat harvest. In fact, the date of 25 December was almost certainly chosen by the early Church as the major Christian festival because it was important to subdue all other religions, including paganism, and one of the most important pagan celebrations was the festival of the Unvanquished Sun, held every year on 25 December. It is known that the ‘new’ festival was established by the fourth century AD, because in AD 334 the 25 December first appeared in a Roman calendar as Christ’s date of birth.
• His name was Jesus Christ. The name ‘Jesus’ is actually a British invention. His original Hebrew name was ‘Yehoshua’, which later became ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Joshua’. The name ‘Yehoshua’ was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as ‘Iesvs’ or ‘Iesous’, which was then changed to ‘Jesus’ in English. In those 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’. He would certainly never have been known as ‘Jesus Christ’ while He was alive. Jesus was believed by some people to have been the Messiah, which in Hebrew means ‘the anointed one’. The oil used for such an anointing is called ‘khrisma’ in Greek, and so an anointed person is called ‘Khristos’, which was translated into ‘Christus’ in Latin and then became ‘Christ’ in English. And being anointed was not a special privilege reserved for the Messiah – all sorts of people were anointed, including kings, high priests, prophets and even people suffering from some forms of sickness.
• Jesus lived in Nazareth. In fact, it’s almost certain that Nazareth didn’t exist as a settlement when Jesus was alive, and ‘Jesus
of Nazareth’ is actually a mistranslation of an Old Testament passage by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew. The name ‘Iesous Nazarene’ or ‘Nazareneus’ means that Jesus was a Nazarene, not that he came from a place called Nazareth. If the writer had meant that he did come from Nazareth, the correct word would have been either ‘Nazarethenos’ or ‘Nazarethaios’. A ‘Nazarene’ was an ascetic, a holy person who spent a lot of time praying, and who lived simply with no or few possessions. They were an important sect in northern Palestine, and may also have been known as ‘Mandaeans’.
There’s also a large gap in the story of the life of Jesus Christ that the Christian Church never mentions. His birth is talked about, then His appearance at the Temple at the age of twelve or thirteen, His ministry and of course His death and apparent Resurrection, but where was Jesus between the ages of about thirteen and thirty?
There’s evidence that Christ spent quite a lot of His early life outside Judea, and it appears quite possible that He actually lived in India for at least a part of this time. Such travels were not unknown in the first century AD. What later became known as the Silk Road or Silk Route was already well established, and there was frequent two-way traffic between the countries around the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as China.
In the winter of 1887, a man named Nicolai Notovitch was travelling through India as a correspondent for the Russian journal Novaya Vremiya. In November he was in the Kashmir region, near Ladakh, when he fell from his horse and suffered a broken leg. His bearers carried him to the Hemis Gompa monastery for medical treatment. While he was there, Notovitch was told a story that astonished him.
He was slightly puzzled that he’d been given such excellent treatment by the residents of the monastery, and was told by one of the lamas that, as a European, they considered him to essentially share their faith, to almost be a Buddhist. Notovitch objected that he was a Christian, not a Buddhist, but the lama told him that the greatest of all the Buddhist prophets, a man named Issa, was also the founder of the Christian religion. The head lama produced two bound volumes of loose leaves, from which he read the story of Issa to Notovitch, who took notes and recorded as much as he could.
According to these ancient records, Issa was born in Israel, and arrived in India when he was about fourteen years old in company with a group of merchants. For the next fifteen years or so, he travelled throughout the sub-continent, including a six-year stint in Nepal, learning the tenets of Buddhism and acquiring a reputation as a preacher and a prophet. He then returned home to Israel to try to combat the oppression of the Jewish people. These texts, Notovitch was told, were part of a collection of ancient Tibetan writings compiled in Pali, an old Indian language, during the first two centuries AD.
The parallels between the lives of Issa and Jesus were obvious, and on his return to Europe Notovitch attempted to publicize his discovery, but every Church official, including one at the Vatican, warned him in the strongest possible terms not to try to publish anything about this strange story. And the power of the Church at the end of the nineteenth century was sufficient to ensure that when Notovitch did finally manage to publish La Vie Inconnue de Jésus Christ in 1895, not only was the work essentially ignored, but Notovitch himself was arrested in St Petersburg and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and accused of ‘literary activity dangerous to the state and to society’. He was exiled without trial to Siberia, but was allowed to return in 1897. His ultimate fate remains unknown, though he probably lived until about 1916.
Various attempts have been made to debunk Notovitch’s claims since then, but without success. An impartial look at the evidence suggests that he really did visit Ladakh and the Hemis Gompa monastery – the basis of at least one of the debunking attempts was that he was simply never there – and other, later, travellers to the area have been told similar stories of books held at Hemis Gompa that contained accounts of the life of Jesus in India.
It’s an interesting story, but without sight of the original documents held at the monastery it’s unproven. But there is other evidence that suggests Jesus and Issa might have been one and the same person.
First, when Jesus reappears in Judea as an adult, He’s clearly already an accomplished prophet, which suggests He had to have learned His trade somewhere.
Second, there are a lot of similarities between what Jesus is supposed to have preached and the Buddhist religion, so if India is where He went for His formative years, it’s at least possible that when He returned to Judea He was essentially a Buddhist. For example, both religions cite exactly the same story of the poor widow giving two coins – all she has – at a religious gathering, and this tiny gift being fêted by the presiding priest as being more valuable than all the other contributions. As Buddhism was founded about 460 BC, it’s almost possible to argue that Christianity is essentially simply a Buddhist sect, the religious message being carried to Judea by Jesus, which then became enshrined in the Christian religion.
The third piece of circumstantial evidence is that when the first Christian missionaries arrived in Ladakh, they discovered that the local people were already very familiar with the story of Jesus/Issa, and they were carrying and using rosaries.
And what happened after Jesus’s crucifixion? The accepted story of the death of Jesus is perhaps the most contentious part of His life, because it simply doesn’t make sense for a whole list of reasons, far too many to fully discuss here. But one of the most obvious anomalies was that Jesus apparently died within about three or four hours of being crucified, and his body was then taken down from the cross.
The whole point about crucifixion was that it was intended to be a slow, lingering and very public form of execution. That was why the Romans used it – to frighten and intimidate their subject peoples. Victims could survive for as long as four or five days on the cross if their legs weren’t broken to hasten their deaths. And the bodies of victims were never removed from the cross after death. Again, for the purposes of intimidation, they were left there to rot, and guards were routinely posted at sites of crucifixions to ensure that relatives didn’t manage to steal the bodies for secret burial after death.
If the whole episode wasn’t purely apocryphal – a crucifiction, in fact – and the execution did take place as described in the Bible, there had to have been collusion between the Roman authorities and the Jewish people, because nothing else makes sense. The strong implication is that Jesus was alive when he was taken down from the cross, and that, of course, provides the easiest and most logical explanation for the Resurrection – there simply wasn’t one.
Taking that as a given, it would also be obvious that Jesus couldn’t stay in Israel – having a condemned and crucified man walking around would have been unacceptable to the Romans – so He would have had to leave the country. And if He had spent almost half of his life in India, that would have been the obvious place for Him to return to. Which brings us to the ‘Rozabal’.
As Angela states in this novel, in Srinigar there’s a building known as the ‘Rozabal’ – it’s an abbreviation of Rauza Bal, and the word rauza means ‘the tomb of the prophet’ – which contains two tombs. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, and points north-south, in accordance with Muslim custom. The other tomb is aligned east-west, a Jewish custom, and bears the name ‘Yuz Asaf’.
This tomb is also unique in that it bears a carving of a pair of footprints – actually a common custom at the graves of saints – but this carving shows what appear to be the marks of crucifixion, a punishment unknown in India, on the feet. Records show that this tomb dates from at least as early as 112 AD.
According to the Farhang-i-Asafia, an ancient text that describes the history of Persia, the prophet Jesus – who was then known as ‘Hazrat Issa’ – healed a group of lepers, who thereafter were referred to as Asaf, meaning ‘the purified’, because they’d been cured of their disease. Jesus or Issa then acquired the additional name ‘Yus Asaf�
��, meaning the ‘leader of the healed’.
It’s reasonably certain that this tomb contains the body of Yus Asaf, a man who was also known as Issa, and also probably known as Jesus, and I based this novel upon that supposition. I should emphasize that there’s no evidence the body was removed from this tomb and carried into the high valleys of Ladakh – that is purely a fiction I devised for this book. As far as I know, the body of Yus Asaf – whoever he was – still lies in the grave in Srinigar.
Readers interested in learning more about this aspect of Jesus’s life should refer to Jesus lived in India by Holger Kersten (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-302829-1).
What did Jesus look like? Again as stated in the novel, the current depictions of Him as a tall man of noble bearing with long hair and a beard have no historical basis whatsoever. In the first century AD, the average height of an adult male in Judea was about five feet.
The full description of ‘the King of the Jews’ from the Slavonic copy of Josephus’s Capture of Jerusalem states that He was ‘a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows . . . with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard’. That description is very similar to one found in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which stated he was ‘a man small in size, bald-headed . . . with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed’.
And Jesus was, according to several different accounts, physically quite unattractive. In the Acts of Peter a prophet described Jesus as having ‘no beauty nor comeliness’, and in the Acts of John as ‘a small man and uncomely’. Celsus described Jesus as ‘small and ugly and undistinguished’. Tertullian said that ‘he would not have been spat upon by the Roman soldiers if his face had not been so ugly as to inspire spitting’.
