The Last Gospel (49 page)

‘I’ve checked, and these two words
domine iumius
don’t actually appear together in the Latin of the Vulgate, the Roman Bible of the early medieval period,’ Helena said. ‘If they are a translation of Psalm 122, they could be very early, before the Latin translation that appears in the Vulgate was formalized. They could be a translation done by a very early Christian pilgrim, maybe from Rome.’

‘Ships come and go, don’t they?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be a pilgrim arriving here. It could be someone going, leaving Jerusalem. Your first translation, “Lord we shall go”. Maybe it was one of the apostles, practising a bit of Latin before heading out into the big wide world, telling his Lord he was heading off to spread the word.’

Helena remained silent, but her expression was brimming with anticipation. Jack peered at her. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’ he asked.

She reached into her robe, and took out a small plastic coin case. She handed it to Jack. ‘Yereva and I found this bronze coin a few days ago. We did a bit of unofficial excavation. There was some loose plaster under the graffito. The coin was embedded in the base of that stone, in a cavity made for it. It’s like those coins I remember you telling me about that the Romans put in the mast steps of ships, to ward off misfortune. A good luck token.’

Jack was peering at the case. ‘Unusual to put an apotropaic coin like that in a building,’ he murmured. ‘Do you mind?’ He clicked open the case and took out the coin. He held it up by the rim, and the candelight reflected off the bronze. He saw an image of a man’s head, crude, thick necked, with a single word underneath. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed.

‘See what I mean?’ Helena replied.

‘Herod Agrippa,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement.

‘Herod Agrippa,’ Costas murmured. ‘Buddy of Claudius?’

‘King of Judaea, AD 41 to 44,’ Helena said, nodding.

Jack touched the wall beside the graffito. ‘So this masonry could be centuries older than the fourth-century church above us.’

‘When that wall was revealed during the 1970s excavations, there was nothing to pin the date down. But it was clearly earlier than the basement wall of the fourth-century Constantinian church, which you can see over there,’ Helena said, pointing off to the side wall of the chapel to her left. ‘The only ancient record of any building at this site before the fourth century comes from Eusebius’
Life of Constantine
. Eusebius was a contemporary of the emperor Constantine, so he’s probably pretty reliable on what went on here in the early fourth century. That was when Bishop Macrobius of Jerusalem identified the rock-cut chamber under the Aedicule as the tomb of Christ, and Constantine’s mother Helena had the first church built here. But Eusebius also says that the site had been built on two hundred years before his time, when the emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as Colonia Aelia Capitolina.’

‘Hadrian built a temple of Aphrodite, apparently,’ Costas said, peering in the candlelight at a battered guidebook Jack had given him.

‘That’s what Eusebius claims,’ Helena replied. ‘But we can’t be sure. He was part of that revisionist take on early Christian history under Constantine. Eusebius wanted his readers to think Hadrian had deliberately built on the site of the tomb of Christ to destroy it, to revile it. And Aphrodite, Roman Venus, the goddess of love, was regarded as a particular abomination by the Church fathers in his day, so the identification of the building as a temple of Aphrodite could just have been something Eusebius or his informants dreamed up for their Christian readership.’

‘Bunch of killjoys,’ Costas muttered. ‘What was their problem? I thought Jesus was all about love.’

Helena gave a wry shrug. ‘Eusebius was probably right about the date of the building, though. There are other sections of wall here that are clearly Hadrianic, judging by construction technique. If there was a structure here before that, all memory of it had clearly gone by Eusebius’ day.’

Jack was staring at the wall, his mind in a tumult. ‘That coin,’ he exclaimed. ‘Herod Agrippa. This begins to make sense.’

‘What does?’ Costas said.

‘It’s one of the biggest unanswered questions about the Holy Sepulchre site. I’ve never understood why nobody has properly addressed it. Maybe it’s the resurrection, fear of treading too close to an event so sacrosanct.’

‘This is beginning to sound familiar,’ Costas murmured. ‘Go on.’

‘There is one event soon after the crucifixion that gives us an archaeological possibility. King Herod Agrippa had grandiose schemes for Judaea, for his capital Jerusalem. He fancied himself as Emperor of the East, a kind of co-regent with his friend Claudius. It was Agrippa’s undoing. Before he died in AD 44, probably poisoned, one scheme he did complete was to increase the size of Jerusalem, building an entirely new wall circuit to the north-west. It encompassed the hill of Golgotha and the ancient quarry site, where we’re standing now.’

‘Bringing the old burial ground, the necropolis, within the city limits,’ Helena said.

Jack nodded. ‘When city walls were extended like that, old tombs were often emptied, sometimes even reused as dwellings. In Roman tradition, no burials could exist within the sacred line of the
pomerium
, the city wall. Herod Agrippa had been brought up in Rome, and may have fancied himself enough of a Roman to observe that.’

‘What date are we talking about?’ Costas said.

‘The wall was built about AD 41 to 43, probably just before Claudius became emperor.’

‘And Jesus died in AD 30, or a few years after,’ Helena said.

‘So about a decade after the crucifixion, the tombs here would probably have been cleared out,’ Costas murmured. ‘Would Herod Agrippa have known about Jesus, about the crucifixion?’

Jack took a deep breath, and reached out to touch the wall. ‘Helena’s probably one step ahead of me on this, but yes, I do believe Herod Agrippa would have known about Jesus. There was a time earlier in Herod’s life when contact between the two men was possible. And from the crucifixion onwards, I have no doubt that this place would have been venerated by Jesus’ family and followers, become a place of pilgrimage. When Herod built his walls, he himself in the Roman guise of
pontifex maximus
, chief priest, would have ordered all the tombs within the walls to be emptied. But at the same time, this coin and the wall here suggest that he ordered a masonry structure built above or very close to the tomb. Why? Was he reviling Christ, trying to eradicate the memory?’

‘Or trying to protect it,’ Helena murmured.

‘I don’t understand,’ Costas said. ‘Herod Agrippa?’

‘It’s not necessarily what you might think,’ Jack replied. ‘He could have been genuinely sympathetic to the Christians, or there could have been some other factor at play. An augury that led him to believe he had to protect the site, a chance encounter with a Christian that swayed him, some early experience. Or politics. He could have been at loggerheads with the Jewish authorities, and done it to spite them. We may never know. The fact remains, we seem to have a structure built at the likely site of Christ’s tomb only a few years after the crucifixion, at a time when this hill was probably already sacred ground to early Christians.’

‘Then there’s another thing I don’t get,’ Costas said. ‘The tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre, is behind us in the rotunda, at least eighty metres west of here by my reckoning. Let’s imagine this wall in front of us was built by Herod Agrippa as some kind of shrine over the tomb. If that’s the case, then the ship graffito must be on the inside, painted by someone who was actually within the structure. That just doesn’t make sense to me. You’d expect the interior of the tomb to be sealed up, hallowed ground, and any graffito to be on the outside wall. And looking at the lie and wear of the masonry around that graffito, I’d say we’re actually more likely on the outside of a structure. Something’s not quite right.’

Jack nodded, and squatted back. ‘We need some hard archaeology. The ball’s in your court now, Helena,’ he said, passing her back the coin of Herod Agrippa. ‘Have you got anything more, anything at all?’

‘Keep hold of the coin,’ she murmured. ‘There are others here who may suspect I have something, and it’s safest with you until this is over.’ She pointed to his khaki bag, and Jack replaced the coin in its case and slid it deep into the bag. She turned to face the ancient wall again, then reached out to either side of the glass pane over the graffito, lifting it up and out. She placed the pane carefully on the floor, then knelt down and began to work her fingers into a section of mortar beneath the stone block with the graffito. ‘There is something I haven’t shown you yet,’ she said, flinching as she scraped her hand. ‘I want an objective assessment.’

‘About the graffito?’ Jack said.

Helena winced again, and then gripped two points under the mortar. She pulled, and there was a slight movement. ‘Done,’ she said. She jiggled a broken section of mortar out, and laid it carefully beside the glass pane. The base of the block was now revealed, with a dark crack beneath where the mortar had been. She knelt down and blew at the lower face of the block, pulling back quickly to avoid a small cloud of dust. ‘There it is,’ she said, moving back further.

Jack and Costas knelt down where she had been. Jack could see more markings, inscriptions. There was a chi-rho symbol, crudely incised into the rock. Beside it was another inscription, a painted word, clearly by the same hand as the ship graffito and the
Domine Iumius
inscription, the same-shaped letters and stroke of the brush. Costas was closest, and peered down further to get a better angle. He sat back, and looked at Jack. They both stared back at the rock, speechless for a moment.

‘Jack, I’m getting that strange sense of déjà vu again.’

Jack felt faint. He suddenly realized where he had seen that style of letter before. The serifs on the V, the square-sided S.

The ancient shipwreck off Sicily.

The shipwreck of St Paul
.

‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘
Paulus
.’ He swallowed hard, and slumped back. St Paul the Apostle. St Paul, whose name they had seen only a week before, a hundred metres beneath the sea, scratched on an amphora in an ancient shipwreck.
Impossible
. Jack closed his eyes for a moment, then stared again. No. Not impossible. It made perfect sense. He sat back, and stared at Helena.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said quietly.

‘You asked for an objective assessment,’ Jack replied. ‘And here it is. That graffito was carved by St Paul. That’s his ship.
Domine Iumius
. Lord we go. Costas, you were right. The man who drew this was going, not coming. He came here to tell his Lord that he was about to set out on his great mission, to spread the word beyond Judaea. Paul was here, sitting on the hillside at the very spot where we are now, beside the wall built by Herod Agrippa only a few years before.’

‘At the place of pilgrimage,’ Helena murmured. ‘At the tomb of Christ.’

‘At the tomb of Christ,’ Jack repeated.

Helena pointed at the space under the block. ‘Jack, take a look in there. Is hasn’t been mortared. You remember I told you I knew of some areas of masonry down here with spaces behind them? Most of the mortar you can see around the block is modern, dating from after the 1970s excavations when the graffito was revealed. But there’s another sealing layer beneath that that’s also relatively recent, dating within the last hundred years or so.’

‘Let me guess,’ Jack murmured. ‘Nineteen eighteen?’

‘I’m convinced of it.’

‘You’re talking about Everett,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘You’re saying he found this, and removed the block. Can we do it too?’

‘That’s why I needed both of you here,’ Helena said. ‘When Yereva and I first found the Paul inscription, we realized there was a space beyond. You can see it through the crack. It could just be a dead space beyond the wall, or another water cistern. There are at least eleven cisterns under the Holy Sepulchre for collecting rainwater, most of them disused and sealed over. Or it could be something else. There was no way we could move this block, and if we’d been caught trying there would have been a couple more crucifixions at this spot.’

‘Have you told anyone else about the Paul inscription?’ Jack asked.

‘You’re the first. But we’re certain others know, and have kept it secret. The mortar over the inscription was recent, from the 1970s excavation. They found it, then concealed it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Costas said. ‘Surely a discovery like that would give the Armenians huge extra clout, really put them on the map?’

‘It’s all about keeping the status quo in this place,’ Helena murmured. ‘Whoever made the decision might have feared jealousy from the other denominations in the Holy Sepulchre. It could have pulled the rug out from all the checks and balances, threatened rights and privileges they’d worked so hard to maintain over the centuries. Better to keep a discovery like this as their own secret, to bolster their own private sense of superiority, to save as ammunition should it be needed in the future.’

‘And there could have been other factors at play,’ Jack added.

‘The
concilium
?’ Costas said.

‘A fear of bringing dark forces down upon themselves, forces that would do anything to suppress them simply for what they knew, just as so nearly happened to the Ethiopians.’

‘Come on,’ Helena said, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘Let’s get going.’ She began to prise away more sections of ancient mortar around the block with her fingers. It came away surprisingly easily, in chunks which had clearly been removed before and then sealed back into place. After a few minutes the entire block was clear, leaving a crack around the edge a few centimetres wide, enough to slot in a hand to palm depth. Jack rummaged in his bag and took out a climber’s headlamp, flicking it on and pushing it through the crack at the widest point on the right-hand side. ‘I see what you mean,’ he murmured, his face close to the crack. ‘With the block removed we’d be looking at a space about a metre by half a metre wide, just big enough for a crawlway.’