A Deceit to Die For (66 page)

“Bingo,” said Zeki. “There it is. They needed an ancient witness and they found it in the Gelasian Decree. They chose the only work for which there were no copies, so they were not in any danger of being found out.”

“Hmmm,” said Matt thoughtfully. “That’s a nice angle. It also means an incredible amount of research and preparation must have gone into this work. What was the other thing, Gary?”

“In 478 AD, the Bishop of Cyprus claimed to have received a vision of Barnabas in which the saint said, ‘You will find a coffin in a cave where my whole body has been preserved, and there is a Gospel written in my own hand, which I received from the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew.’ Many Muslims claim that the G.O.B. is the gospel referred to in this legend.”

“But the vision said that it was the Gospel of Matthew, copied down by Barnabas,” Matt protested.

“You’re not putting stock in visions now, are you?” Gary asked wryly.

“No, just pointing out an inconsistency, that’s all.”

“You’re right, of course. But, there was a connection,” said Gary, “Hang on. In the list of disciples given in the G.O.B., it said something similar. Listen:

. . . Barnabas, who wrote this with Matthew the publican .

“Nice,” said Matt with a low whistle. The forger had clearly begun to gain his respect. “Clearly, the forger needed to make Barnabas appear to be one of the twelve, so the forger adds Barnabas to the list. He also connects him with Matthew, which is especially clever in light of the vision received by the Bishop of Cyprus.”

“And can you tell us why the good bishop invented the story?” Zeki asked Gary with a twinkle in his eyes.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” replied Gary.

Zeki turned to Matt.

“How about you, Matt?” he asked, clearly enjoying himself. “I’m sorry. We already know you don’t believe it, but tell us why.”

Matt caught the quick look from Gwyn, warning him to be tactful.

“Well, first of all I don’t believe the spirits of people who have been dead more than four hundred years can visit us in our dreams. Secondly, I would guess that once again this is a case of religious shenanigans, a church looking for relics that would increase their standing in the Christendom and give them revenues from pilgrims visiting a holy site. Bury an old man in a cave, let him get good and dry, claim that you received a vision and
voilà
, your church suddenly has a direct line to the first Christians, bones to prove it and a Gospel to boot.”

“Exactly,” said Zeki. “See, we do agree on some things, maybe more than you realize.” He turned back to Gary and asked, “Is there more?”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Gwyn, scanning her own notes. “Remember, the Morisco forgeries in Spain referred to Cyprus as well. It said, ‘the King of the Arabs, who is not himself an Arab, will hold a Great Council in Cyprus revealing the True Gospel.’ Why Cyprus?” she asked. “What’s the connection?”

“The patron saint of Cyprus is Barnabas,” said Zeki matter-of-factly.

Matt looked at him dubiously.

“I was stationed in Cyprus as a new field agent,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“There is no end to the surprises with you, sir,” said Matt, shaking his head. “But let’s bring this closer to home. Is it possible that the Gospel of Barnabas was a Morisco-Ottoman plot? Maybe the relics in Granada and the Lead Books of Sacromonte were the opening performance, and the True Gospel, I mean the politically correct version in the Muslim world, the Gospel of Barnabas, was the final act. Was the plan to introduce it with some fanfare at a Council in Cyprus? The religious leaders of Cyprus might be easily convinced to go along as the Gospel would have been written by Barnabas, their patron saint, and the Ottoman Turks would obviously prefer a Gospel that helped the Christian population accept Islam.”

Matt slapped his leg and stood up, whirling to face Gary.

“Damn, that
would
be good! Too good!”

“Cyprus wasn’t an important religious or cultural center. It was the backwaters of the Mediterranean, which, at the time, was practically a Muslim lake. There is no reason for the Lead Books of Sacromonte to say that the Ottoman Sultan would hold a Council in Cyprus.”

“Unless,” said Zeki, “the Gospel of Barnabas project was covertly supported by elements within the Ottoman government. Then the so-called prophecy in the Lead Books of Sacromonte makes perfect sense.”

“And the document found by my father is proof positive that the Ottoman Empire was involved,” added Gary.

“I knew this was going to be big, but I never imagined it could be this big,” said Zeki. “The Turks took Cyprus in 1571, not long before the Morisco writings. If a pseudo-gospel were being prepared in the name of Barnabas for the purpose of slanting the New Testament towards Islam, then it would be ingenious to have the Virgin Mary ‘prophecy’ a council on Cyprus, hosted by a non-Arab king of the Arabs. The fulfillment of this prophecy and the unveiling of the Gospel of Barnabas on the island that recognizes him as their patron saint would be powerful, especially since church tradition says that the body of Barnabas was found in a cave on the island clasping a copy of the Gospel.”

Matt let out a low whistle. “Talk about the public relations project of the millennium. Just think of it, a brand new religion melding Islam and Christianity and ending the conflict between them.”

Gwyn began flipping through the pages in her notebook. Everybody waited.

“This dovetails perfectly with something else in the Lead Books of Sacromonte. The Virgin Mary claims to have received a copy of the Gospel from the ‘hand of power’ and commands St. James to bury it in Sacromonte, where it will be discovered when ‘the earth is rent by heresy and dissent about Jesus and the Gospel’. She says the discovery of this book will lead to a revival of faith led by the Arabs.”

“Impressive,” said Matt, folding his arms. “They were definitely taking the long view on social change here, carefully setting it up and laying a foundation for introducing the G.O.B. that would give it the authority of prophecy. Was there anything else, Gary?”

Gary went back to his notes.

“The Italian manuscript was clearly being prepared for printing, but the headings for the different chapters are only provided up until page twenty-two. After that, they’re all blank, so it was obviously never finished. There are, however, notes in the margins on almost every page that suggest different headings or a better text, usually so that it will conform better to Muslim theology. For example, Mohammed is called the ‘messenger of God’ but the notes over and over again suggest that this be changed to ‘Apostle of God’.

“Of course,” said Zeki. “Apostle has a much higher status than messenger.”

“One change suggested by the editor,” continued Gary, “is even a quote from the Qur’an, which obviously dates the work after Mohammed. The notes are all written in Arabic, and . . .”

“Wait a minute, I thought our conclusion was that the Ottoman Turks not the Arabs were behind this,” said Matt grimacing. “This is starting to give me a headache.”

“Well, it’s not quite that simple,” cautioned Gary. “Language experts say that the Arabic is quite poor. We don’t know who wrote the notes.”

Zeki raised his hand, as if asking for quiet, while he paced across the room. After several trips back and forth he stopped.

“First of all,” he said, “there are many dialects of spoken Arabic, some mutually unintelligible to the others, and the written language is a difficult one to master. Second, a Morisco could easily have been less than proficient in Arabic if he had been brought up in Catholic Spain where Arabic was prohibited, so that might explain why the Arabic is bad. What else do we have to consider, Gary?”

He began to pace the room again while Gary scrolled down through his notes. Gwyn stood up and headed to the kitchen, shaking her head as if the whole thing were just too astonishing. Matt walked over and sat down beside Gilbert, who hadn’t said a word in the last half hour. He picked up his notes. Gary continued.

“There are a lot of tiny details, nothing really important. For example, the first three occurrences of God, which is, of course,
Dio
in Italian, are crossed out and the word Allah is written over it in Arabic.”

“So,” said Matt, look down at his own notes. “Is it fair to say that that this pseudo-Gospel was probably prepared with some Morisco involvement and Ottoman support, that the purpose was to present a version of the Gospel that confirmed the truth of Islam to Christians by resurrecting a respected early church figure like Barnabas and still retain enough Christianity to encourage some sort of common ground between the two?”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“But, we still haven’t answered the crucial question,” continued Matt. “Who would go to this much trouble, create a work this involved, and then just drop it? It makes no sense. In Muslim literature before 1906, we have no trace of it until 1634 and then only a single reference in a Morisco document that does not even quote a single passage from the book. Then, we have a few references by Western scholars in the early 1700s and nothing else until it is translated into English in 1907.”

Zeki smiled again. “We may never know the answer to that. What we do know is that whoever was behind the project decided to cancel it. It’s as simple as that. The first line of the order Prof. O’Brien found is clear: ‘The council’s decision to cancel son of prophet and erase every trace remains among our most solemn duties.’ They almost succeeded, too. The Spanish copy or copies, which were all either in Holland or England, are gone except for one half-finished version that turned up in Australia forty years ago. The single Italian version in Vienna is the only other copy. Gwyn, can you read the translation of the order again?”

She turned to the front of the notebook.

The council’s decision to cancel son of prophet and erase every trace remains among our most solemn duties. It will be a red English sunset on Suri-Strend with a golden sunrise in Tunis when the bird which has flown is brought back to Südde-i Saadet. Walk in the snow but leave no footprints. Assistance for the sendoff may be obtained from our ever faithful D. Hasten delivery.

13 Jumaada al-awal 1149

 “Now, you were saying the English connection was Sale, right?” asked Matt.

“That’s right.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Sale,” said Gwyn, “Was the editor of the Arabic New Testament, probably not a popular project in the Muslim world. More importantly, he translated the Qur’an into English. I read the introduction this morning where he mentions the Gospel of Barnabas. He died at his home on Surrey-Strand in England, allegedly of a fever . . .”

“So, ‘the bird which has flown’ is the G.O.B.,” said Zeki confidently and to no one in particular. “Sale had it and they wanted it back. Maybe he did come down with an illness and die prematurely, maybe he was killed. Whatever the case, we know that they were after the Spanish version of the G.O.B.”

“And yet,” continued Gary, “The Italian version somehow escaped.”

“Let me ask a question,” ventured Zeki. “If you had the Italian version and knew how it was meant to be used by the enemy, who would you give it to for safe-keeping?”

No one spoke. Gwyn simply shrugged. Gary crossed his arms and tilted his head back in a thinking posture. It was Matt who spoke first.

“The General?” he asked.

“Precisely!” said Zeki. The pieces were coming together in his mind. “A man who had fought the enemy, a soldier whose honor would prevent him from ever being tempted to sell it, a place where it would be safe from Morisco assassins like the one who carried this letter.”

“How do we know the assassin was Morisco?” asked Gwyn.

“The
Aljamiado
translation at the bottom only makes sense if they were Moriscos,” replied Zeki. “And, they were to be paid handsomely with a ‘golden sunset’ back in the city of Tunis.”