The Last Gospel (11 page)

‘I remember,’ Costas murmured. ‘From Atlantis. The wizards with conical hats. Lords of the Rings.’

‘The idea of Tolkien’s Gandalf, like Merlin in the King Arthur stories, may ultimately derive from the same tradition,’ Jack said. ‘Men with supposedly supernatural powers who could pass from one kingdom to the next, who knew no borders. Healers, mediators, prophets.’

Costas peered down again at the Phlegraean Fields. ‘Seems that every culture needs them,’ he murmured.

‘And the mother goddess also survived in different guises. The Roman goddess Ceres, the Greek Demeter. Magna Mater, the Great Mother.’

‘Every new culture adds its own layer of paint, but it’s the same old statue underneath.’

‘And the same allure, the same mystery. I’ve just been giving you the facts as we know them. Part of me can’t help thinking that there was something about the Sibyls that defies rational explanation, something so powerful that it allowed them to maintain the mystique over centuries, so alluring that it even drew in the Romans, the most rational and practical of peoples. Something the Sibyls themselves believed in.’

‘Don’t go all supernatural on me, Jack.’

‘I’m not suggesting it. But if the Sibyls believed in themselves, and if others with the power to shape the world, emperors, believed in them, then it becomes something we have to take seriously.’

Costas grunted, then peered down through his visor at the indented shoreline that was now directly beneath them. ‘What’s that place now?’

‘Pozzuoli. Roman Puteoli.’

‘So that was where St Paul was heading? After Sicily, after surviving the wreck?’

‘According to the Acts of the Apostles, he and his companions sailed up from Syracuse on a ship of Alexandria, then stopped at Puteoli. That’s the ancient Roman grain port you can see now. It complements the naval port beside it at Misenum.’ Jack tapped the screen. ‘The words are: “We found brethren there, and were intreated to tarry with them seven days.’

‘Brethren? Fellow Christians? What about persecution?’

Jack jerked his head to the north. ‘The Phlegraean Fields. Perfect hideaway. Probably always a place for outcasts, beggars, misfits.’

‘And then Paul goes to Rome. Where Nero had him beheaded.’

‘The New Testament doesn’t actually say so, but that’s the tradition.’

‘Might have been better for him if he’d gone down in that shipwreck after all.’

‘If that had happened, then western history might have been utterly different.’ Jack banked the helicopter to starboard, then nosed it towards the smudge on the eastern shore of the bay. ‘We might have ended up worshipping Isis, Mithras, or even the great mother goddess.’

‘Huh?’

Jack adjusted the throttle, glanced at the air traffic screen and flicked on the autopilot. ‘That shipwreck really was one of the pivotal events of history, not because of what was lost but because of who survived. Remember, Jesus’ ministry in his lifetime was confined to Judaea, mainly his home province of Galilee. The idea that his word should spread to Jewish communities abroad, and then to non-Jews, only seems to have taken hold after his death. Paul was one of the first generation of missionaries, of proselytizers. Without him, many of those who proved receptive to Christianity might have been seduced by one of the other cults on offer. At the time we’re talking about, the spread of the Roman Empire and the
Pax Romana
meant that the Mediterranean world was awash with new cults, new religious ideas, some brought back by soldiers from newly conquered lands, others brought by sailors to ports such as Misenum and Puteoli. The Egyptian goddess Isis, the Persian god Mithras, the ancient mother goddess, any one of these could have provided the kernel of a monotheistic religion, giving the common people something they craved in the face of all the gods and rituals of Greece and Rome. If one of those religions had truly taken hold, it might have been enough to repel Christianity.’

‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘And I thought with the crucifixion it was all a done deal.’

‘That was really just the beginning,’ Jack said. ‘And the amazing thing is, there’s no indication that Paul ever met Jesus in life. Paul was a Jew from Asia Minor who had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, but only after the crucifixion. And yet he may have been responsible more than any other for the foundation of the Church as we know it. The spread of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as the Messiah, the meaning of the Greek word
Christos
, all seem to owe a huge amount to his teaching. The word Christian probably first appears about the time of his travels, and the emphasis on the cross. It’s as if, a generation after Jesus’ death, after people’s personal experience of him, the focus had shifted from Jesus the man to the risen Jesus, almost as if he’d come to be seen as a god, been put on a pedestal.’

‘That’s what people would have understood,’ Costas said. ‘No one worships a man.’

‘Exactly,’ Jack said. ‘It was a world where emperors were deified after their death, where the imperial cult was a huge unifying factor in the Roman Empire. And like all good missionaries, Paul was a shrewd operator who knew what he had to do to get the word across, the compromises and incorporation of age-old ways of thinking and seeing the world he would have thought necessary to get the light to shine through.’

‘So you’re saying this is the place where it all took hold, the Bay of Naples?’

‘The Acts of the Apostles suggest that there were followers of Jesus already here when Paul arrived in the late fifties AD, only twenty-odd years after the crucifixion. But Paul may have been responsible for making them truly Christian, for turning their thoughts from the message of Jesus, the imminent kingdom of heaven, to Christ himself, the Messiah. This is the place where Paul may have created the first western Church, the first organized worship, maybe somewhere hidden out there among the craters and the sulphur of the Phlegraean Fields. Taught them what they should believe, how they should live. Given them the Gospel.’

‘I wonder how much of it was the original one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Paul didn’t know Jesus in life, had never met him. And Jesus never wrote anything down, right? It makes you wonder.’

‘Paul claimed to have had a vision, to have seen the risen Christ.’

‘I grew up with all this stuff, remember? Greek Orthodox. I loved the beauty of it, the rituals. But I’m just a nuts-and-bolts man, Jack. If we can follow a trail of hard facts, then I’m good with it. This early Christianity stuff is like looking through one of those kids’ kaleidoscope tubes, endlessly shifting lenses and prisms. I want facts, hard data, stuff written by those who were there at the time, texts that have never been tampered with. As far as I can tell, the only hard facts we have are those names scratched on that amphora we found yesterday at the bottom of the Mediterranean.’

‘I hear you.’ Jack grinned, and flipped off the autopilot. ‘Speculation out, facts in.’

‘I wonder what the old Sibyl would have thought of it all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Christianity. Followers of a new religion, gathering here under her very nose.’

‘Okay. Final bit of speculation,’ Jack said. ‘Hard facts first. By the late Roman period, Cumae had become a focus for Christian worship. The temples were converted to churches, the cave of the Sibyl was reused for burials. The place is riddled with Christian tombs, almost like a catacomb.’

‘And the speculation? I’ll allow you.’

‘There’s a long-standing Christian tradition that the Sibyl foretold the coming of Christ. In Virgil’s
Eclogues
, poems written about a hundred years before Vesuvius erupted, we’re told of being at the end of the last age predicted by Cumae’s Sibyl, and of a boy’s birth preceding a golden age. Later Christians read this as a Messianic prophecy. And then there’s the
Dies Irae
, the Day of Wrath, a medieval hymn used in the Catholic requiem mass until 1970. I’ve just been looking at it again, while you were asleep. The first lines are “
Dies irae! Dies illa Solvet saeclum in favilla teste David cum Sibylla
! Day of wrath and terror looming! Heaven and earth to ash consuming, David’s word and Sibyl’s truth foredooming!” It’s usually thought to be medieval, thirteenth century, but there may be an ancient source behind it, one that’s now lost to us.’

‘The Sibyl would certainly have had her ear to the ground, in that cave,’ Costas said.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that verse all sounds pretty apocalyptic,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, heaven and earth to ash consuming. That sounds like a volcanic eruption to me.’

‘Pure speculation.’ Jack smiled at Costas, then put his hands on the helicopter controls. He stared out of the window, thinking hard. It was possible, just possible, that the Sibyl knew something big was about to happen. There had been a catastrophic earthquake a few years before, in AD 62, bad enough to topple much of Pompeii. Maybe creating the Sibylline prophecies involved keeping a close eye on the Phlegraean Fields, divination and augury based on all the changing moods of the underworld. It suddenly seemed plausible. That mystique, that power, based on knowledge that few others had, on hard science. Jack turned back to Costas. ‘The Sibyl may have known her days were numbered. Already she was becoming a curio, a tourist attraction. Only a few supplicants were now coming seeking utterances, with few of the gifts and payments that had sustained the oracle in the past. And she had a pretty good idea where Vesuvius was heading.’

‘And what better way to go than with a bang,’ Costas added.

‘Precisely. Maybe the Sibyl fed this idea to the Christians who lived here, hung out in the Phlegraean Fields. There’s no clear indication that Jesus’ teaching had the kingdom of heaven preceded by an apocalypse, even though this idea has gripped Christians over the centuries. Maybe it has its origins here, in the Christians who may have perished in the inferno of AD 79. I hate to think what was running through their minds in those final moments. When Paul had brought the Gospel to them twenty years before, I doubt whether they envisaged the end being a pyroclastic flow followed by incineration.’

‘Speculation built on speculation, Jack.’

‘You’re right.’ Jack grinned, and brought the Lynx out of its circling pattern and on to a course due east, along the coast towards the rising sun. ‘Time to find some hard facts. We’re coming inbound.’

‘Roger that.’ Costas flipped down his designer sunglasses and stared to the east. ‘And speaking of fire and brimstone, I’m seeing a volcano dead ahead.’

J
ack leaned forward on the railing over the archaeological precinct, taking in the extraordinary scene in front of him as the morning sunlight began to pick out the alleyways and dark spaces of the Roman town below. He felt tired, as tired as he ever had been, with the sense of heaviness that always came after a deep dive. He knew that his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from the dive the day before, yet the feeling also came from a profound sense of contentment. In the space of twelve hours he had moved from one of the most remarkable underwater discoveries of his career to one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, a place that had left an indelible impression on him when he had first visited as a schoolboy.
Herculaneum
. It had been a scorching afternoon, and he had found the
frigidarium
of the bathhouse, a cool, dark place where he had sat in a corner for over an hour, listening to the drip of condensation from the damp walls and conjuring up the people who had last used it almost two thousand years before. Herculaneum seemed shabbier now, neglected in places, but had changed little over the years, and it still took his breath away. He could hardly believe that they were about to be the first archaeologists in over two hundred years to excavate the place, inside the tunnel Maria and Maurice had discovered the day before.

‘Text message for you, Jack.’ Costas passed up the cell phone without looking. He was squatting with his back against the railing, focusing entirely on a complex systems diagram on his laptop. ‘It’s from Maria.’

Jack read the message, and grunted. ‘Another half-hour, maybe less. Good news is, the transaction’s been done.’ He and Costas had already been waiting over an hour since landing the helicopter, time well spent showing Costas round the archaeological site, but neither of them was used to being at the beck and call of officialdom and the delay was becoming an irritation.

Costas took back the phone, and squinted up at Jack. ‘I still can’t believe we’re doing this. Paying baksheesh. It’s like something from
The French Connection
.’

‘That’s Naples for you,’ Jack said. ‘Bandit country.’

‘So the idea is our money goes towards the upkeep of the site, conservation work.’ Costas turned round and gestured at a dusty roof above a crumbling ancient wall. ‘Like all the other foreign money that’s been pumped in here in the past.’