a couple of plots. He wasn’t keen on it, of course,” Donovan said with
a smile. “The man celebrated life, didn’t want to speak a word about
death. Though I remember he’d toast the old-timers at the pub by
saying, ‘May you be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you’re
dead.’ ”
Charlotte laughed.
“Right over here,” he said, pointing to a humble cross-shaped gravestone. “You would have gotten on marvelously with my parents, Charlotte.
Good people with big hearts. Now see here.” He pointed to the symbol
etched in his father’s gravestone:
Ch
“Do you know what this symbol stands for?”
Growing up Catholic, she had seen the overlapping P and X many times before—mainly on priests’ chasubles and on altar linens. But its meaning escaped her. She shook her head.
“Chi and rho are the first two letters of the Greek word for ‘Christ’—X and P. But as they’re pronounced, they correspond to C and H in our alphabet. Christ,” he repeated. “ ‘The anointed one,’ or ‘the chosen one.’ ” Now he looked at her and smiled.
Stunned, Charlotte looked down at the new grass that had sprung up from the plot. “Jesus’s bones are
Donovan smiled and nodded. He explained how his father’s oversize casket included a smaller coffin inside it—an ossuary. “The safest place I could think of. So now you know. Just you, me, and Him.”
She was speechless.
“There’s something else you’ll need now.”
Charlotte watched him dip into his pocket and pull out some very oldlooking paper sealed in clear plastic.
“Remember our discussion about how the Gospel of Mark originally ended with the empty tomb, how the ending had been amended?”
She nodded.
“Here’s the real ending,” he said. “The world’s only copy. Taken from the first Gospel, written by Joseph of Arimathea—the man who interred Jesus’s body in that ossuary you studied.” He’d cut the shocking epilogue from the journal of secrets just before shipping it back to Jerusalem.
She accepted it. “Why are you giving this to me?”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your initials are C-H.” He tipped his head back toward the gravestone. “I believe you were meant to have it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
******
Special thanks to my wife, Caroline, my fountain of inspiration. To D. Michael Driscoll’s keen eye. Once again, my hat goes off to Doug Grad for his incomparable editorial skills. To my friend and agent, Charlie Viney, for his unwavering encouragement and market savvy. Thanks, Julie Wright, Ian Chapman, and everyone at S&S UK. And cheers to the fabulous team at ILA—Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West—for enabling me to share my stories in so many languages.
Multiple manuscripts of the oldest known gospel, Mark (circa 60–70 c.e.), did indeed close with the empty tomb. The confusion and disappointment this presented for Christianity’s early pagan converts is believed to have spawned Mark’s multiple addendums. Most scholars contend that Mark is the common source—aka the
I’ve stretched the current parameters of genetic research, though only time will tell if a more refined genome might be discovered or engineered. The ethical issues surrounding these breakthroughs should prove challenging for religion and humanity. Though I strongly believe that faith itself will remain strong, as it always has.
The religious squabbling and bloodletting over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is scarily real, as it has been since King Solomon supposedly laid its first cornerstone over three millennia ago. In its modern incarnation, this bitter turf war exemplifies Israeli and Palestinian discord over land rights and national sovereignty. Though the Mount resides wholly within Israel’s borders, it is tacitly controlled by a Muslim trust, or
Josephus and Philo provide the most definitive accounts of the highly secretive Jewish community, the Essenes, who inhabited Qumran. The Essenes’ obsession with the purity of body and soul present many tantalizing parallels to Christ’s ministry and the emergence of Christianity. Most intriguing are their elaborate and ambitious plans for reshaping Jerusalem into a grand temple city that would herald the earthly Messianic Age. Many scholars credit the Essenes for transcribing and preserving the world’s oldest copies of the Old Testament and Jewish apocryphal texts, collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The hunt for more scrolls is still under way.
Theories abound as to the fate of the Ark of the Covenant, most maintaining that a foreign empire invaded Jerusalem and claimed it as booty. In antiquity, however, sieges against heavily fortified cities like Jerusalem took months—not hours or days. So suffice it to say that the temple priests would have hidden the Ark—the centerpiece of Jewish faith, the relic that symbolized the Israelite nation—well before any combatant could have pillaged the temple. Once in hiding, the vulnerable Ark would likely have been clandestinely moved around. Inevitably, the safest hiding place would have been within a fortress’s keep, behind walls, and protected by an army. Enter Josephus’s chronicling of Onias’s Jewish temple city in ancient Egypt’s Heliopolis, complete with a homegrown army ...and imagine the possibilities.
Finally, on navigating the minefield of the three Judaic religions . . . I recently met a very wise and pious Muslim who attributed his impressive optimism in the fate of all things to “The Higher Power.” I sensed that he avoided a more decisive label so as not to create a barrier between us. I must confess that I liked his approach. Because though most religions seek to build community based on rigid—many times, exclusionary—doctrine,
