The Omega Scroll (13 page)

‘My uncle sent us,’ edh-Dhib answered hesitantly. ‘We have some leather scrolls he thought you might be interested in.’

Beckoning the boys inside the shop that smelled of spices and olive wood, he checked the street and quickly closed the door behind them. Ali cleared a space on a bench at the rear of the shop and with the aid of an old silver magnifying glass he peered at the strange looking characters on one of the scrolls. Finally he put the glass to one side and picked his large nose thoughtfully, not immediately able to decipher the ancient script.

‘Where did you get these?’ he demanded.

‘In a cave near Yam Hamelah,’ Abu Dabu answered quickly, not wanting edh-Dhib to be any more specific than the Dead Sea.

‘They might be of interest but you will have to leave them with me while I make some inquiries. I will send you word in a few weeks. In the meantime, don’t tell anyone that you have found them, or of our meeting.’ With that he ushered them back out to the street.

Ali Ercan spent the next two nights examining the boys’ find. He still could not decipher the script but three scrolls appeared to be more carefully protected than the others, although one of them was in pieces. He separated them from the rest, put them in olive wood boxes and hid them in a cavity under the floorboards. The Ministry of Antiquities had visited the previous week and inspected his safe, but they were not likely to rip up the floor. Covering the floorboards with a rug, Ali resolved to get some advice from the Syrian Metropolitan at the Monastery of Saint Mark in the Old City of Jerusalem.

‘So what might be in these scrolls that seems to so worry the Vatican?’ Professor Rosselli concluded, abruptly bringing Allegra away from the Old City of Jerusalem and back to the lecture room at Ca’ Granda.

‘There seems little doubt that in the past the Vatican has vigorously opposed their publication,’ he said, his eyes twinkling again. As Allegra would come to know well, Professor Rosselli loved a good mystery. ‘Ever since their discovery the Vatican has prevented any access to the scrolls, other than by a team of a few privileged and, for the most part, Catholic academics from Europe and the United States. A group that has become known as the International Team. Curiously, the Vatican has gone to great lengths to assert that Christ had nothing to do with the Essene Community at Qumran, a stone’s throw from where John the Baptist baptised him in the Jordan.’

The
accettazione
side of Allegra was becoming more and more troubled as the discussion went on, but when she glanced at Giovanni he seemed very relaxed, encouraging Allegra’s
testarda
, her rebellious side, to inquire more deeply into the inflexible dogma of her faith.

‘Which has prompted some to suggest there is something in the scrolls, and the Omega Scroll in particular, that the Vatican will not allow into the public domain,’ Rosselli continued. ‘The American scholar Margaret Starbird has pointed out that the authors of the New Testament used gematria. This is a literary device where numbers are assigned to the letters in the words. Certain phrases add up to equal significant sacred numbers which in turn convey hidden meanings. I suspect that part of the answer lies in what has become known as the Magdalene Numbers.’

Professor Rosselli took a piece of chalk and turned to the blackboard.

‘Neither Hebrew nor Greek have separate symbols for numbers, instead individual letters stand for different numbers. If we take Greek,’ he said, writing on the board:

Alpha   α   = 1

Beta     β   = 2

Gamma γ  = 3

‘And so on,’ Professor Rosselli explained, exposing the entire alphabet, down to omega, Ω

‘Which means that each word in Greek or Hebrew has a numerical value that is obtained by adding up the sum of the letters. Margaret Starbird draws our attention to Christ comparing the Kingdom of God to a grain of mustard seed. The Greek for mustard seed, κοκκος σιναττεως, totals 1746. At first glance, Christ’s description of the Kingdom of God as a grain of mustard seed seems very peculiar, but it is deceptively simple.’ Professor Rosselli’s eyes danced as he warmed to the mystery.

‘The number 1746 is made up of the union or sum of 666 and 1080, and as a Jewish rabbi, Christ would have been well aware of the significance of the numbers 666 and 1080. For the Essenes, 666 represented the solar energy of the male. Many interpretations of the parable of the mustard seed are bizarre,’ he continued, ‘but when we understand that the other part of the union – the number 1080 – represents the lunar creativity of the feminine, the meaning becomes very clear. Not only does this parable link Christ with the Essenes, but the numerical code of the mustard seed is a simple and clear statement from Christ that the Kingdom of God, the Spirit, is not exclusively male but a combination of male and female, a balance of yin and yang. Christ’s 1746 of the mustard seed contains the lost feminine of Christianity.’ Professor Rosselli paused, a slightly sad look on his face. ‘The early Church Fathers brutally suppressed this message. Can anyone give me an example?’

Again it was Giovanni who answered.

‘All copies of the Gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, the Gnostic Gospels, were destroyed on the orders of Iraneaeus, the Bishop of Lyons in 180
AD
because they threatened the power of the male priesthood.’

Rosselli looked at his pupil with a growing respect. It was unusual, he reflected, to strike such a visible, intelligent candour in a Catholic priest.

‘Or so the early Church Fathers thought,’ Giovanni continued, ‘but someone took the trouble to spirit copies of the Gnostic Gospels down the Nile and bury them in an earthenware jar at Nag Hammadi, where they remained for nearly two thousand years. The Gnostic Gospels were carefully wrapped,’ he said, ‘and a Bedouin Arab discovered them digging for
sabakh
, the under soil that
fellaheen
use to fertilise their crops on the banks of the Nile. Many scholars are now of the view they should be included in the Bible to provide the feminine balance that was suppressed by the early Church Fathers.’

‘Not unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls and found just two years apart,’ Professor Rosselli added. ‘It’s almost as if the cosmos has coordinated the time of their respective discoveries, linking them together, and Father Donelli raises a critical point. The religions of the ancients had a balance of gods and goddesses and it is only in relatively recent times that religion has been hijacked by the male of the species. I am one of those who think that male-dominated religions are dangerously out of balance and as a result, they have done untold damage in the world. With the advent of weapons of mass destruction, male-dominated religions are a threat to humanity.’

It was a chilling prophecy and Giovanni wondered once again how much Rosselli knew about the contents of the Omega Scroll. It was as if Rosselli had read his thoughts.

‘It would be interesting to see if Starbird’s theories on the hidden numbers of the New Testament are borne out by the Omega Scroll.’ Rosselli’s eyes darkened momentarily. ‘Although I suspect the Omega Scroll contains a great deal more than the Magdalene Numbers. After the mid-semester break we will examine the significance of the number I think the Vatican fears most: 153. I have always been an optimist and some of you may wish to do some research on that over the break. It may have something to do with fish and cities falling out of the sky,’ he added mischievously. ‘And when we come back it would be useful to hear from someone other than Father Donelli.’

La Pizzeria Milano was crowded with students but even ‘out of uniform’ Allegra spotted Giovanni at one of the small corner booths.

‘
Buonasera
, Allegra!’ Giovanni got to his feet to allow Allegra to squeeze into the small booth. He poured her chianti from the carafe he had ordered. ‘Pasta is coming,’ he said. ‘
Salute!
’

‘
Salute
,’ she responded and immediately relaxed in his company, as usual.

‘So what did you think of old Rosselli today?’ Giovanni asked, leaning forward to make himself heard over the normal student excesses of a Friday night.

‘He’s provocative, isn’t he! I enjoy that, although I’m still on a pretty steep learning curve. Until I got to Milano I hadn’t even heard of the Essenes and their Dead Sea Scrolls, much less that the Vatican might be blocking access to them, but what really got me thinking was the Omega Scroll. Do you think it exists?’

Giovanni was saved from answering immediately by the arrival of the pasta, two steaming plates of
puttanesca
, spaghetti with olives, tomatoes, anchovies, chillies, garlic and basil. He knew he had to tell someone about his concerns over the connection of the death of Pope John Paul I and the Omega Scroll, as a way of trying to guarantee that a search for the truth would continue. Everybody connected with research on the Scroll had disappeared without a trace, academic papers had gone missing and prominent scientists had been ruthlessly discredited. Giovanni was wary of dragging anyone else into the dangerous maelstrom that clearly surrounded the Scroll, but he needed a confidante. Allegra was the only person he could implicitly trust. She had one of the finest minds he had encountered in a long time.

‘You think he was murdered,’ Allegra said solemnly after Giovanni had recounted the events at the Vatican.

Giovanni nodded. ‘Albino Luciani posed a threat to too many people, not least to our Cardinal Petroni here in Milano. The Vatican Bank’s criminal activities bothered him greatly, but that was not the only thing threatening the Curia. Petroni and the Curial Cardinals vigorously deny it but I know from the papers that Luciani wrote when he was in Venice, papers that have now mysteriously disappeared, that Luciani was strongly in favour of artificial birth control.’

A few short months earlier Allegra might have been taken aback. It had been a steep intellectual climb from the little backwater of Tricarico but the
testarda
in Allegra was rapidly taking hold.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t meet him,’ she said. ‘I used to accept the teaching against contraceptives but I’m coming round to his point of view. If I remember it correctly, the basis for prohibiting birth control in the twentieth century is a three-thousand-year-old text in Genesis where God puts Onan to death because he spills his semen on the ground, rather than perform a duty for his dead brother’s wife, right?’

Giovanni nodded, smiling. He had come to enjoy their Friday night intellectual joustings.

‘A text that was passed on by word of mouth for thousands of years before it was even written down,’ Allegra added. ‘That sounds more like an excuse for the male hierarchy to use sex as a means of control, and a pretty powerful one.’

‘It has always had far more to do with maintaining the power of the priesthood than any logical theological basis and Luciani would have agreed with you,’ Giovanni responded, a touch of sadness in his voice. ‘He was a great loss, not only to the Church but to the world. We were talking about birth control in Venice one day and he told me he had just read a report that over a thousand children die every hour from malnutrition. He saw effective birth control as part of the solution and after he was elected he told me that at last he was in a position to do something about it. In the end I think his views on contraception, his decision to investigate the Vatican Bank and his discovery that the Vatican had bought the Omega Scroll all combined to sign his death warrant.’

‘You didn’t get more than a glance at the brief?’

Giovanni shook his head. ‘Knowing what I know now I should have gathered up the entire file. Petroni arrived very quickly.’

‘Very odd that he was fully dressed at that hour,’ Allegra agreed. ‘Why didn’t you try to recover the Omega Scroll? Why not go to the Press?’

‘As soon as I could I searched the Secret Archives but someone had clearly been there before me. I seriously thought about going public, but I think there is more chance of finding the Omega Scroll if I stay low for the moment. Without the Scroll the Vatican would simply deny it as a figment of my imagination and put it about that poor old Donelli’s become unhinged as a result of Luciani’s unfortunate heart attack.’

‘From what you’ve told me that’s the least they would do. What about Professor Fiorini, can’t you go to him?’

‘This is where it gets very murky. I went to see Rosselli after the lecture today. I only gave him the bare bones of what I’ve told you, that I thought the Omega Scroll existed, and he seemed quite upset. He wouldn’t say much, but he told me Professor Fiorini disappeared the day after he returned from Rome.’

‘Murdered?’

‘It’s the classic “Italian Solution” and if these people in the Vatican are as closely linked to the Mafia as I think they are, it’s quite possible. It won’t stop Rosselli speculating in his lectures, but I’m guessing he’s been warned not to take his investigation too far and deep down he’s more than a little frightened. He told me to be very careful.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘For the moment, nothing. Play our cards close to our chests. Eventually something will give, the truth always outs.’

Giovanni reached over and refilled Allegra’s glass.

As they walked back towards the university Giovanni linked his arm through Allegra’s. A little voice told Giovanni that this was wrong, but the chianti seemed to blur the insistent voice and he rationalised that he had met his soulmate. Had he been more honest he might have admitted that the feelings he had for this intelligent and beautiful nun had thrown him into turmoil.

‘What are you doing over the semester break? Will you go home?’

Allegra shook her head. ‘I can’t afford it. I guess I’ll stay here and wrestle with Mary Magdalene, 153 and what was it? Fish and cities falling out of the sky,’ she said, laughing.

It was Giovanni’s turn to shake his head. ‘
Quello non va!
That won’t do at all. I am going home to see my folks – I’ve even been invited to say Mass. You must come too. My family said they would love to meet you.’