The Last Scion

by Richard Reed

  Her heart pounding with excitement, she exerted every ounce of strength to pull herself quickly back up the main shaft on the rope belay. She undid her harness and wandered outside into the sunlight, her mind racing with possibilities. She was brought abruptly out of her reverie by a shout from close by.

  “Rachel – are you OK?”

  “I’m fine – I’ve found it!” she yelled.

  “Rachel!” David’s voice echoed across the hillside once more, edged with anxiety.

  Exasperated at having to leave her discovery, she scrambled back up towards him.

  “There you are!” exclaimed David, as she appeared through a tangle of branches. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you – where the hell have you been? I was worried sick about you.”

  Her eyes sparkling mischievously. “Nice to know you still care,” she said, coquettishly. “Wait till you see what I’ve found.”

  Chapter 55

  The Templars’ German engineers had done their work well. The mineshaft had been cut straight and true, with only the occasional deviation to avoid fault-lines in the rock; the walls were now square-cut and chiselled, rather than simply rough-hewn, as at the start of the passage.

  The rock-fall had proved less of a deterrent than they first feared, and half an hour’s hard work created a large enough opening to squeeze through. Leaving Hélène on the outside of the fall as a precaution, and with Alain up above guarding the entrance, Rachel and David followed the shaft as it led onwards like an arrow.

  Down and down it went, deep into the heart of the mountain that some believed held the secret to the origins of mankind. For both of them, having visited the tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, it bore all the hallmarks of an entry passage to a royal mausoleum.

  Rachel’s heart pounded with anticipation as she sensed the imminent denouement of their quest. Finally, as the corridor turned uphill slightly, their head-torches picked out something dark blocking the way ahead. As they drew closer they could see a massive studded oak door ahead of them.

  “This is it, I guess!” she said, barely able to contain her excitement.

  “Hopefully. But how on earth are we supposed to open this thing?”

  Rachel walked up to the door and gave it a shove. “Hmm – good question. There’s no keyhole that I can see,” she said, running her hands over the aged surface of the wood, searching for an opening. “Wait a minute – what’s this?” Her fingers closed on something smooth and roughly circular, that moved under her touch. “What on earth?” she exclaimed, shining her head-lamp on the area. “David, take a look at this!”

  He stepped forward, and in the combined light of their lamps a row of three metal tumblers could be seen on the right-hand side of the door. “I don’t believe it!” said Rachel. “It looks like some kind of combination lock – surely they didn’t have this kind of technology back then?”

  “Actually, they did,” corrected David. “The earliest known combination lock dates back to the Roman period. Then in 1206, during the Islamic Golden Age, which saw huge advances in science and mathematics, the Muslim engineer Al-Jazari outlined how to build a combination lock in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Right about the time the Templars had this place built.”

  “So the Templars could have brought this knowledge back with them from Palestine?”

  “It certainly looks that way. As an organisation they were renowned for their scholarly, if somewhat esoteric, beliefs, and at that time they would have been in the Middle East for more than a century. They would certainly have been exposed to Islamic culture, and all it had to offer at that time. It begs the question, however, as to what the combination actually is.”

  “I think I know that,” said Rachel, her eyes dancing.

  “You do?”

  “Remember the dice in the Stations of the Cross? The three and the four on adjacent sides of the same dice? And a five on the other?”

  “Rachel – you’re a genius! Go on then, what are you waiting for?”

  With a trembling hand she slowly turned the tumblers, on which faded Roman numerals could still be seen. Then she gave the door a hard push, and it slowly swung open with a resounding groan.

  A small, man-made chamber stood before them, roughly twenty feet by ten, hollowed out of solid rock. Facing them, in a commanding position at the far end of the room, was a magnificent golden throne encrusted with jewels, seated on which was a life-size statue of Christ. His face bore a striking resemblance to the image on the Turin Shroud, etched on Rachel’s brain since the day she had first seen it.

  On either side were the statues of two women: one, younger, holding a baby, was extending her free arm to anoint Jesus’s head with oil; the other a more mature woman, knelt at his feet. Above his head, inlaid into the panel behind the throne, was a white dove, and above that, the familiar Latin inscription from the Crucifixion: INRI.

  In front of this tableau, forming a T, stood a huge stone sarcophagus, its lid bearing an effigy of Christ, this time in traditional mortuary repose, his arms across his chest, a crown of thorns around his head.

  To the left and right of the sarcophagus, completing an arc to the throne, stood the statues of six saints.

  Rachel and David stood in silence, overwhelmed with awe at what lay before them.

  “So we’ve uncovered the final resting place of Jesus Christ,” said Rachel finally, her voice faltering. “This is just too much…” Tears welled in her eyes as she knelt before the holiest shrine in Christendom – tears for the loss of her father; tears for the pain of her divorce; tears for the absence of her daughter, who she missed so much; tears for the horrors she had so recently endured. And finally, as the sorrow drained out of her, her tears turned to an inexplicable and indefinable joy; an uplifting of the spirit and a deep feeling of Oneness that she had never before felt in her life.

  David reached out to squeeze her hand. “Don’t worry,” he said in a choked voice. “I feel the same way.”

  Several minutes passed before Rachel rose gingerly to her feet, wincing as she put her weight on her injured leg. “I don’t know what to say. I never thought that one day I would see… this,” she said, gesticulating, unable to find the words to describe what lay before them. “Or react like that to it.”

  “Nor me,” said David. He paused, lost in the moment. So this was the secret the Templars had been guarding. “Have you seen the other tomb?” he asked, finally.

  “Other tomb?” queried Rachel.

  “To your right.”

  Rachel looked to her side. Just inside the door was a small, simple stone sarcophagus that had gone unnoticed amongst all the grandeur of the mausoleum. It had obviously been carved in haste, and was rudely finished, but bore the effigy of a woman.

  They moved into the chamber and knelt at the side of the coffin, trying to decipher the crude inscription chiselled into the side. David read slowly: “Hic iacet corpus Maria, vocatur Magdalene, sponsa Christi, apostola apostolorum. Hic sepultus anno domini nostri MCCIX. That means…”

  “Here lies the body of Mary, called the Magdalene, bride of Christ, apostle to the apostles. Buried here in the year of Our Lord 1209,” translated Rachel. “I can manage that much in Latin – a little less flowery than the inscription on the tomb at Rennes, but then I guess they were in a hurry. The year 1209 rings a bell, for some reason.”

  “The start of Pope Innocent’s crusade against the Cathars. They obviously moved her body here for safekeeping as soon as the massacres started. So if the body was moved in haste at the start of the crusade, that means there are no guarantees the original version of the gospel is buried here with her.”

  “I think the Madeleine at the time had a hand in all this. It’s impossible she didn’t know of plans to move the body. As for the tomb of Jesus – that’s a complete revelation. Marianne hinted there was something she was holding back, something that was clearly very important.”

  “I remember,” said David
grimly. “It might have saved us some time if she had shared that.”

  “I agree, though I can understand her reasons for not mentioning it. I don’t think she knew the location – I’m sure she would have told us if she had – but she didn’t want to over-complicate an already difficult situation.”

  “You’re not kidding! This thing is suddenly a whole order of magnitude bigger. Do you realise the theological implications? It’s one thing to suggest Jesus was married – even that his bloodline has continued; it’s quite another to say he didn’t rise again from the dead. It means there was no Resurrection – it puts an end to Christianity as we know it.”

  “I totally disagree,” said Rachel stubbornly. “Historically, there have been several branches of Christianity that didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection, but rather a spiritual one – the Cathars among them. In fact, the idea that has persisted over the centuries of a bodily resurrection for all those who ‘believe’ is way past its sell-by date. The reason why none of the early Christians – in fact, right through to the Middle Ages and beyond – did not believe in cremation was because they thought they would physically rise from the grave, just as Jesus had done; or so they thought. Yet few modern Christians buy into that idea, and the vast majority are cremated when they die. So why do they still hang on to the belief that Jesus himself physically rose from the dead?”

  “Perhaps they don’t understand the inconsistency.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But in an age when more and more people of all faiths believe in some kind of spiritual afterlife, with no bodily existence, does it really matter if Jesus didn’t physically rise from the dead? If his spirit transcended death, that’s all that matters, surely? I mean, didn’t Jesus say in the gospel of Luke, to the criminal crucified alongside him, ‘Today thou shalt be with me in paradise’? That suggests Jesus believed he would ascend to heaven that very day, the day of the Crucifixion, not three days later, in some form of bodily resurrection – though he might have appeared to Mary in spirit form. Anyway, I don’t see how it alters his message – or even, from an evangelical perspective, that he died for our sins, if that’s what you believe. Though personally I think that’s a rather superficial way of looking at things. Maybe, just maybe, this is just the kick up the backside Christianity needs to drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”

  “I’m certainly with you on that one,” said David. “The whole evangelical concept of heaven and hell, with only ‘true believers’ in Christ being ‘saved’ from eternal hellfire and damnation, is positively Stone Age. It’s interesting that of the six known theological schools of early Christianity, four actually believed in universal salvation; that all souls would eventually be reunited with God, regardless of their beliefs. Only one church believed in perpetual torment in hell for unbelievers – and you can guess which one that was.”

  “Rome?”

  “Too right. It kept the Church leaders firmly in control of their flock. By excommunicating someone, they could condemn them to eternal damnation. A powerful weapon, to put it mildly.”

  There was a long silence as they both digested the enormity of what they were discussing.

  “Still, that’s a debate that will no doubt rage across the world for decades to come, but it doesn’t help us now. So far we haven’t seen any evidence of the Lost Gospel. The obvious place to look would be her tomb, but I’m reluctant – and I hesitate to use the word – to ‘violate’ it.”

  “You didn’t show such scruples at Rennes.”

  “That was before… all this,” muttered David.

  Rachel raised her eyebrows in surprise. “A conversion on the road to Damascus?”

  “Not exactly – let’s just say a reappraisal.”

  Rachel smiled. How like David to hedge his bets – but coming from him, quite an admission. “You know what I think?” she said after a while.

  “What?”

  “I think that even if a gospel wasn’t interred here with the body, back in those dark days of the crusade, when she saw how things were turning out, the Madeleine would have made every effort to hide that precious relic, the gospel written by Mary Magdalene. And where better than here? Perhaps the medieval copy in the undercroft was just a decoy, to put the Inquisition off the scent. Or maybe it was left there by one of the faithful, and found later by the Blancheforts, or Abbé Bigou. Who knows? But remember the treasure that was smuggled out of Montségur, just before the surrender? I think it was the gospel. I always thought it was the Madeleine herself, and in part it was. But in some ways this is even more precious: the words of Christ, from the person who knew him best: his wife. And as for opening the tomb, if Marianne thinks it’s OK, it’s fine with me too. She told us to find the gospel, remember?”

  She sat back on her haunches and smiled at the strange reversal of roles – her pushing for the tomb to be opened, David holding back, not from some arcane archaeological perspective, but out of respect for the remains of one of the central characters of the Christian faith.

  Then, slowly and reverently, she reached forward and grasped the lid of the sarcophagus. Silently, David joined her, and together they heaved the stone to one side. There, lying on top of a figure wrapped in a white funerary shroud, was a small, round case of ancient leather that looked as if it had once served as a quiver. Gingerly, David picked it up and peered inside the open end. Tightly bound inside were a series of scrolls.

  He turned to Rachel, his eyes burning with excitement. “The Lost Gospel,” he breathed.

  Chapter 56

  “So here we are, on Christmas Eve, with a ground-breaking programme that could change forever the way we view Christianity.”

  Suzanne Schneider looked around her slightly nervously. America was a God-fearing nation. As far as her career was concerned, what was about to go down could make her – or break her. Not to mention the death threats she was certain to receive.

  “Naturally, before airing a show like this on live TV, we go to great lengths to make sure there is a solid foundation in fact. This isn’t Oprah!” She paused for effect, forcing herself to smile.

  “I have to confess, when the people I am about to introduce first came to me a few weeks ago, I found their story hard to believe. But the evidence they have put forward – hard evidence – has been verified by experts as authentic. That evidence is none other than a complete, intact version of a gospel written by Mary Magdalene, which not only throws new light on her relationship with Jesus, but more importantly, suggests our interpretation of Jesus’s teachings is completely wrong.” She paused again as a murmur went up from the studio audience. That had them going – for better or worse.

  “Of course, we’ve had some pretty ground-breaking news recently, with the publication by Harvard professor Karen King of the so-called ’wife’ fragment, that appears to offer evidence that Jesus was married.

  “But this is a complete gospel that has been dated to the middle of the 1st century, making it probably the first book ever written about Christ – by the person who knew him best; Mary Magdalene. And the contents are earth-shattering…” She paused, and wetted her lips. “Among other things, it appears to be the source material for the Gospel of John…” A murmur broke out in the audience, and she held up her hand once more. “And we also have evidence, from both this gospel and a stunning archaeological find, that Jesus may not have risen from the dead – at least, not in bodily form.”

  They had deliberately tried to downplay that one, tacking the big headline on the end of the build-up, fearing a backlash – but now there was real anger out there, with people standing up, shouting, while studio staff desperately tried to shepherd them back to their seats.

  Suzanne swallowed hard and tried to steel herself. “One of the people I am about to introduce also claims…” she hesitated. “But I’ll let her explain that one! Ladies and gentleman, please welcome National Geographic researcher Rachel Spencer, archaeologist David Tranter, and the woman at the heart of this controvers
y, Marianne de Blanchefort!”

  The cameras panned to the wings as Rachel, David and Marianne walked onto the set. They smiled and raised their hands to acknowledge the applause. Then as Rachel stepped in front of Marianne to take her seat a gunshot punched through the air, and Rachel slumped to the floor, a vivid red stain spreading rapidly across her blouse.

  For a split second there was silence as the audience tried to grasp what had happened, then silence turned to screams. Pandemonium ensued as people stampeded for the gangways, while security guards desperately tried to pinpoint the source of the gunshot. But all that remained was a small cloud of blue smoke drifting upwards in the hot studio air, and the sharp smell of cordite.

  Suzanne slowly emerged from behind a studio camera where she had been cowering, rearranging the earpiece that had come adrift in the mayhem. She glanced across at the floor manager, raising her shoulders in question. He cycled his forefingers around each other to indicate the cameras were still rolling – this was headline-making news. The raked bank of studio seating was now empty, and the security chief was signalling the all-clear.

  David was kneeling beside Rachel, cradling her limp body in his arms, his face wet with tears. Suzanne crouched down beside him as paramedics rushed onto the set. “I’m so sorry,” she started to say, but they were both bundled out of the way as the medics took charge and started the CPR routine, pumping Rachel’s chest, pausing periodically to give artificial respiration.

  David and Marianne stood clutching each other, unable to tear their gaze from the scene. The CPR went on for what seemed like minutes. As sirens wailed in the distance, one of the medics working on Rachel paused to look up at Suzanne, shaking her head. Marianne saw the signal, and a spasm of nausea seized her. She pushed past a guard and ran to where Rachel was lying.