The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘That reminds me,’ Costas said, sneezing again. ‘Thanks for the bit about the smell of death. A nice little touch. I nearly threw up into that gag.’

  ‘I thought you needed a little incentive.’

  ‘Never mention that stuff again, Jack. Never.’

  ‘Never,’ Jack said solemnly.

  Cardinal Ritter had been rooted to the spot beside the altar, a policeman guarding him. Suddenly there was a commotion as the gunman on the floor regained consciousness and grabbed the leg of the policeman guarding him, before being kicked back. The other policeman swung round instinctively, taking his eye off his charge for a second. In that moment of inattention the cardinal lunged forward and grabbed the bronze cylinder, then stumbled with it towards the entrance to the Chapel of St Vartan. ‘I have it now,’ he said. ‘I will destroy it. You will never know what it contains.’

  ‘Wrong again.’ Jack reached into his bag, and carefully pulled out another cylinder, a marble one, the cylinder he had taken from the underwater chamber only twenty minutes before, from the place where Everett had hidden it in 1918. ‘What you’ve got there is a bronze cylinder from a tomb in London. A very nice artefact, remarkable really. Probably late Iron Age. And it’s empty, by the way.’

  The cardinal snarled, and tore the lid off the cylinder, peering inside. He swayed, then seemed frozen to the spot. Jack passed the stone cylinder to Costas, caught his eye, then launched himself forward. In an instant he had the cardinal in a headlock, forcing his right arm behind his back and pushing it up until the man bellowed in pain. Jack was tempted to squeeze the headlock fractionally tighter, to jerk upwards, to hear the crack. But it was too easy, too quick, and there was an off-chance the police interrogation might work. He relented slightly, keeping the man’s arm pinned with one hand, and took the bronze cylinder off him, placing it back beside the altar. Then he pushed the cardinal’s arm up again until he whimpered in pain. Jack held him like a vice, and pressed himself close behind Ritter’s left ear. He could smell the sweat, the fear.

  ‘You see?’ Jack whispered, steering the cardinal’s head in the direction of the press release on the laptop screen, and then pushing his face close to the precious cylinder in Costas’ hands. ‘You of all people should know, Eminence. A preacher of the Holy Gospels. The power of the written word.’

  25

  The next morning they crammed into a four-wheel-drive Toyota, and Helena drove them up the great rift of the Jordan Valley from Jerusalem towards the Sea of Galilee. Costas and Jack were sitting beside Helena, and Morgan, Maria and Jeremy were in the back. Maria and Jeremy had joined them straight from Tel Aviv airport. Jack had called them immediately after coming out of the Holy Sepulchre the day before. He knew that much of his anxiety about their safety could now be dispelled, but it was still a huge relief to have them alongside. Hiebermeyer was another matter entirely. The world’s press corps seemed to have converged on him in Naples, and he had refused to budge. Jack knew he would be relishing every moment, but it was also a way of deflecting press attention from their activities in Israel. They still had one final act to play out, a final folding-back of history to the event that had led them on one of the most extraordinary quests of Jack’s career.

  ‘Any word?’ Costas said to Jack. His voice juddered as Helena slammed the vehicle over a patch of potholes.

  ‘Nothing yet.’ Jack had taken Jeremy aside the instant he arrived at their hotel in Jerusalem that morning. The news was not good. Elizabeth had vanished the evening after Jack had spoken to her, walked away from the site at Herculaneum and never returned. Jeremy’s enquiries had been met with only shrugs and silence. ‘But maybe that’s Naples for you,’ Jack said. ‘And we hadn’t spoken for fifteen years, since she left me. So I can hardly expect an instant pick-up.’

  ‘I’ll pray for her, Jack,’ Helena said, fighting the wheel. ‘But she may just have walked away. Sounds like she’s done it before.’

  ‘I had a strange vision in the tomb below the Holy Sepulchre, you know,’ Jack said. ‘I seemed to see her through the water, but it was a kind of odd composite, as if there were someone actually lying on the stone slab.’

  ‘An Agamemnon moment?’ Costas said.

  ‘She’d always been on my mind, you know, over all those years,’ Jack said. ‘It was the way it ended between us. It never really did end, she just left. It all came welling up when I was holding Ritter down in the chapel yesterday. It was what he said, about bringing Elizabeth back into the fold. In that instant everything seemed to be his fault. I nearly broke his neck, you know. I could do it now.’

  ‘At least he’s out of the way.’

  ‘For the time being. But he’ll be back. He and his henchman are only being held under the rules of the curfew, for carrying an open weapon and for assaulting a police officer. Kidnap would have been more serious, but the patriarch refused to press charges. That’s why Ben’s interrogation won’t get anywhere. Ritter knows he’ll be on a plane back to Rome within days. And all the press exposure, the naming of names, what I wrote in that article, that’ll dissipate like leaves in the wind. Organizations like his have weathered this kind of thing before. He’ll be quietly absorbed back.’

  ‘With public awareness of the concilium, the law might be able to exert a stronger arm,’ Maria said.

  ‘Whose law, exactly?’ Jeremy asked.

  ‘And it depends how much people believe all this,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, you said it, Jack, big exposés about Church conspiracies quickly become yesterday’s news, unless you can actually pin murder and corruption on them. And we’re hardly the first to claim we’ve found some kind of lost gospel.’

  ‘We haven’t seen it yet,’ Maria said, nudging Jack.

  ‘Remember what Jack said to Ritter,’ Helena said. ‘The power of the written word. If we’ve truly got it, then people will believe.’

  ‘Even if it rocks the foundations of the Church?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Freedom for people to choose their own spiritual path, without fear, guilt, persecution, the concilium,’ Helena said. That’s why I’m here. If we’ve found something that will help people make that choice, then we’ll have done some good.’

  ‘I’ll second that,’ Morgan said from the back.

  ‘We still have to find out what’s in that cylinder,’ Costas said. ‘If Jack will let us.’

  ‘Have patience,’ Jack said.

  ‘We’re heading in this direction because of Pliny’s note in the Natural History, right? The scroll we found in Herculaneum? That Claudius and his friend Herod visited Jesus on the Sea of Galilee?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘No holes in the ground?’

  ‘Well, I promised Massimo in Rome that you’d be back. There’s a huge job opening up the entrance to the Vestals’ chamber. Absolutely tons of sludge to clear out.’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘Okay, no holes in the ground. This time.’

  They passed signposts with names redolent of the rich history of the Holy Land: Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth. At the sign for the Sea of Galilee they veered left, past the resorts and thermal springs of modern Tiberias, then to the edge of the lake. They carried on a few miles further beneath the imposing flanks of Mount Arbel until they came to the entrance to Kibbutz Ginosar. The land around them was scorched, desiccated, and the shoreline of the lake had receded some distance over the mudflats to the east. Helena pulled into the kibbutz and they all got out, tired and hungry after the four-hour journey. Jack was wearing khaki shorts with a grey T-shirt and desert boots, and he had his trusty khaki bag slung over his side. Costas had on his usual garish selection of Hawaiian gear and the designer sunglasses Jeremy had given him, now seemingly a permanent fixture. Jeremy, Maria and Morgan were all dressed like Jack. The only one who seemed oblivious to the heat was Helena, who had on the Ethiopian white cassock she had been wearing when they first met her on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre the day before.

  ‘This is the site of ancient Migdal, also cal
led Magdala,’ Jack said. ‘Home of Mary Magdalene. This shore is where Jesus of Nazareth lived as a young man, where he worked as a carpenter and fisherman and went among the people of Galilee, spreading his word.’

  After a quick lunch in the kibbutz canteen, they trooped into the Yigal Allon Museum and stood around its centrepiece exhibit, silently absorbing one of the most remarkable finds ever made in the Holy Land. It was an ancient boat, its timbers blackened with age but beautifully preserved, a little over eight metres long and two metres wide. Costas tipped up his sunglasses and leaned over the metal cradle that held it, inspecting one of the timbers. ‘Polyethylene glycol?’

  Jack nodded. ‘It didn’t take long to impregnate the timbers with PEG, as the boat was found in fresh water and there was no salt to leach out. It was the summer of 1986, a drought year like this one, and the level of the Sea of Galilee had dropped. Two local guys searching for ancient coins found these timbers sticking out of the mud, the prow facing towards the lake. It was clearly an ancient boat, and caused an immediate sensation. It was also a flashpoint. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism revelled in the possible Jesus connection, seeing a new magnet for tourism at a time when the intifada was putting people off visiting Israel. But some ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrated against the excavation, seeing it as a green light for Christian missionary activity in the area. There were even people praying for rain so the site would be inundated and the excavation thwarted.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘That’s one reason I wanted you to see this, before we go out to our final destination,’ Jack said. ‘All of that nonsense is forgotten now. This boat’s one of the star archaeological attractions of Israel, for Christians, for Jews, for all the people of Galilee, whatever their faith. It’s their shared heritage.’

  ‘The planks are edge-joined in the ancient fashion, with mortice-and-tenon,’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s a unique find, the only Sea of Galilee boat to survive from antiquity,’ Jack said, pointing out the features. ‘It probably had a mast with a single brailed sail, with space for two oarsmen on either side and an oar that served as a quarter-rudder. It had a recurving stem and a pointed bow, with a cutwater. The wood’s mainly oak for the frames and cedar for the strakes, cedar of Lebanon.’

  ‘I’ve just realized why it looks familiar,’ Maria murmured. ‘Maurice showed me pictures of a boat about this size from the foreshore at Herculaneum, found in 1980 when they discovered all those skeletons huddled in the chambers below the sea wall. The gas and ash from the eruption flipped the boat over and carbonized it, but the interior face of the timbers was well preserved. It was immaculately built, maybe a pleasure boat for one of the rich villa-owners.’

  ‘Maybe old Claudius snuck out on it, for a bit of fishing,’ Costas said.

  ‘There’s a lot of recycled timber here, scraps cleverly reused,’ Jack said. ‘The Kinneret Boat may not have the finesse of the Herculaneum boat, but it has a lot of style. Whoever built and maintained it had an intimate feel for the Galilee area, for its resources and how to use them.’

  ‘Any radiocarbon dates?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Forty BC, plus or minus eighty years.’

  Costas whistled. ‘Wide latitude, but pretty good odds. Jesus died around AD 30, right? Close to the end of that spectrum. But boats like this could have lasted for generations on the lake, repaired and refitted. Even a boat made at the beginning of that timeframe could still have been in use during his lifetime.’

  ‘The only artefacts found associated with it were a simple cooking pot and an oil lamp, both probably from the same period.’

  ‘So what about Claudius and Herod Agrippa?’ Costas said. ‘What date are we looking at for their visit?’

  ‘I believe they came here in AD 23,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Jesus of Nazareth would have been in his mid twenties, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Claudius was thirty-two or thirty-three and Herod Agrippa was the same age, both born in 10 BC. A few years later Jesus went into the wilderness and renounced his worldly occupation, and the rest is history. Claudius must have returned to Rome soon after his visit here, and never came again. We know what happened to him. And Herod Agrippa went on to become King of the Jews.’

  ‘How do you get the date?’

  ‘Something I remembered in Jerusalem. Something that had been niggling me ever since we first saw those words in the lab on board Seaquest II, on Pliny’s page from the Natural History. There’s no reference anywhere else to Claudius travelling to the east. I’d guessed it must have happened when he was living in obscurity as a scholar in Rome, before he was dragged to the imperial throne in AD 41. It was obviously before Jesus was crucified, about AD 30, in the reign of Tiberius. It was also probably before Jesus was surrounded with disciples who would surely have remembered a visit from Rome, left some record of it in the Gospels.’

  Helena cleared her throat. ‘We have our tradition, in Ethiopia. That an emperor sought the Messiah.’

  ‘If Herod Agrippa was king of Judaea, he might have visited Galilee then,’ Costas said.

  Jack shook his head. ‘That was much later. It was Claudius who gave him Judaea in AD 41, as a reward for loyalty. Until then Herod Agrippa had lived mainly in Rome. No, I’m thinking of another time, years earlier. Herod Agrippa was grandson of Herod the Great, king of Judaea, but was brought up in Rome in the imperial palace, adopted by Claudius’ mother Antonia. He and Claudius became the most unlikely of friends, the hard-living playboy and the crippled scholar. One of Herod Agrippa’s drinking buddies was the emperor Tiberius’ son Drusus, who used to get drunk and pick fights with the Praetorian Guard. There was some murky incident one night, and Drusus died. Herod Agrippa was immediately packed off to Judaea. That’s what I remembered. It happened in AD 23.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Costas said.

  ‘It gets better. Herod Agrippa’s uncle, Herod Antipas, was governor of Galilee at the time. He got his wayward nephew a token job as a market overseer, an agoranomos. Guess where? In Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee a few miles south of here. We passed the site on the way.’

  Costas whistled. ‘So Herod Agrippa really could have crossed paths with Jesus.’

  ‘Herod Agrippa would probably have got to know everyone worth knowing in Tiberias, pretty quickly,’ Jack replied. ‘He was a gregarious man, boisterous and charismatic, and would have spoken the local Aramaic as well as Latin and Greek. He would have felt a real affinity with the people here, his own people who he would one day rule. Perhaps he heard tavern talk of some local healer, someone who really did seem a step above the rest. Perhaps he sent word to Rome, to his crippled friend Claudius, who might still have harboured a youthful hope that a cure could be found, maybe somewhere in the east.’

  ‘So we’ve got Herod Agrippa and Claudius and Jesus of Nazareth here in Galilee at the same time, in AD 23,’ Costas said slowly. ‘A meeting recorded nowhere else, only in the margin of an ancient scroll we found at the end of a lost tunnel three days ago in Herculaneum.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Jesus was a carpenter,’ Costas said thoughtfully, stroking the edge of the timber in front of him. ‘That could mean boatbuilder, right?’

  Jack nodded. ‘In ancient Greek, as well as in the Semitic languages of the time, Aramaic, old Phoenician, the word we translate as “carpenter” could have a whole range of meanings. Architect, worker in wood, even builder in stone or metal. There would have been plenty of work like that around here. Herod Antipas founded Tiberias in AD 20, and there was a palace to build, the city walls. But you’re right. The staple woodworking trade would have been boatbuilding. Later in the first century AD the historian Josephus wrote about the Sea of Galilee and said there were 230 boats on the lake, and that probably didn’t include the smaller ones. Boats here would have lasted longer than on the Mediterranean, with no saltwater woodworms. But even so there would have been all the usual repair work as well as construction of new vessels. The twenties
AD could have been a boom time for this as well, with a lot of scrap wood coming off the building sites at Tiberias. The hull in front of us has some odd-shaped timbers.’

  Costas nodded, and put his hand on the edge of the timber in front of him, then looked at Jack. ‘A lifetime ago, I think it was last Tuesday, we were diving on the shipwreck of St Paul, off Sicily. You told me then that the archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive, that hardly anything is known with certainty.’ He paused. ‘Now tell me this. I am touching a boat made by Jesus?’

  Jack put his hands on the boat as well, scanned the ancient timbers and then looked over at Costas. ‘In the New Testament, one problem is working out how Jesus regarded himself, whether or not he saw himself as the Christos, the Messiah. When he’s asked, when people wonder who he is, he sometimes replies with a particular turn of phrase. It’s in translation, of course, but I think this gets the gist of it. He says, “It is as you say.”’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘It is as you say.’

  Costas was silent for a moment, looked at Jack imploringly, then sighed and took his hand off the boat. ‘Archaeologists,’ he grumbled. ‘Can’t get a straight answer out of any of them.’

  Jack gave a tired smile, then gently patted his khaki bag. ‘Come on. There’s one final place we need to go.’

  Half an hour later they stood on the edge of the mudflats on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was now early evening, and the shadows had begun to steal up behind them and advance across the flats. In the distance the water still sparkled, and Jack remembered the strange pixillation he had sensed in the sky off Sicily the week before, as if his eyes were being drawn to the parts rather than the whole, the view too blinding to comprehend. Now, clutching his bag, he felt the same thrill of anticipation he had felt then, the knowledge that he was on the cusp of another extraordinary revelation, a promise that had brought them to the place where the treasure in Jack’s hands had begun its journey almost two thousand years before. He knew with utter conviction that Claudius had stood at this spot, that he too had gazed at the distant shoreline of the Golan Heights, felt the allure of the east. He wondered whether Claudius had sensed the disquiet too, the lurking danger of this age-old faultline between east and west, known the calm of the sea was an illusion like the eye of a storm.