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.
