The Messiah Secret

70

‘We’re out of here,’ Masters said, as they stepped outside the mouth of the cave. ‘The Indian Army or Air Force are going to be swarming all over this valley lookin’ for whoever blew their shiny Hind gunship out of the sky, so we need to be history before they get here. You gonna be OK?’

‘Thanks,’ Bronson said, shaking the American’s hand. ‘Our truck’s parked down at the bottom of the valley, but I suppose you knew that already.’

Masters nodded and grinned, then turned, his mind already on his exit strategy as he selected a number on his sat-phone.

In the open space outside the cave, Bronson took Angela in his arms and for a few seconds just held her tight.

‘I thought that was it,’ Angela murmured, her cheeks damp from tears of relief. ‘I really thought you’d be crushed by that stone door closing. What do you think happened?’ She turned back to look through the dark mouth of the cave.

‘A clever booby-trap is how I see it,’ Bronson said. ‘When we pushed the slab all the way over to the right, the top of it was resting against another lump of stone. Somehow that must have tripped a trigger of some kind, because that second slab then started moving down, pushing against the first one. That was the noise we heard – the second slab starting to move.’

Before he’d left the cave he’d looked over the right-hand side of the slab. On the far side of the stone door was another rough-cut lump of stone which had clearly forced the slab closed as it pivoted downwards.

‘That’s just like some of the pyramids,’ Angela said. ‘An anti-theft mechanism. Open the first door and something triggers the mechanism. Then gravity does the rest.’

‘I wonder why Yus Asaph’s followers didn’t trigger it themselves, and seal the door using the second slab when they hid the body here?’ Bronson asked.

‘Maybe it would have made it too obvious that something was hidden in the inner chamber. If you knew that there was a secret room in there, you could hack your way through the stone door.’ Angela shuddered against Bronson’s body. ‘Let’s get out of here, Chris. Let’s go home.’

Bronson took her hand, and together they started picking their way over the rutted boulder-strewn surface of the valley down to where they’d left their jeep. Night had fallen, and above them the sky was a black velvet blanket pierced by the light of countless millions of stars. It felt good to be alive.

Several minutes later, Killian recovered consciousness inside the inner chamber. At first, he could see nothing at all, then pulled a small torch from his pocket, switched it on and glanced around him. The others had all gone, which suited him perfectly. Now he had the time to complete the task he’d been set by God himself.

He walked across to the stone structure and ran his hand slowly over the top of the lead coffin and looked down, a contented smile on his face. Inside, the body he believed to have been Jesus the Nazarite had simply ceased to exist, turned to dust by the inexorable process of decay. That was something he’d completely failed to anticipate, but ultimately that was exactly what he’d intended. He had expected to have to destroy the tomb and its contents with explosives, but a force of nature had saved him the job. And it simply didn’t matter what Donovan or any of the others said or claimed now – there was not the slightest shred of proof that the coffin had ever contained a human body, far less the body of the Messiah Himself.

Killian’s smile deepened. He truly had been blessed. For the first time in two millennia, a small group of people had been granted the most sublime and utterly divine gift possible. For a few moments they had been permitted to stare at the face of the Saviour of mankind, at the man revered by countless millions of worshippers as the Son of God.

He made the sign of the cross and turned away from the coffin, swinging the torch beam in front of him. For the first time he registered the fact that the stone door was closed. Then he saw the spreading pool of blood on the floor of the chamber, and Donovan’s body obscenely crushed into the gap.

Killian looked around desperately, seeking another way out, some tunnel or passageway they’d all missed, but in seconds he confirmed that the walls of the chamber were solid.

He ran to the stone door and tore at the edge of it with his fingers, ripping the skin and flesh and tearing off two of his nails. But the stone didn’t budge by even a millimetre.

Then he started to scream.

Author’s Note

This book is, of course, a novel, but I’ve tried to base it as far as possible on fact.

The accepted story of the life of Jesus Christ is fraught with inconsistencies, none of which are entirely surprising in view of the passage of time and the perceived need of the Catholic Church, in particular, to produce a seamless and acceptable account of the life of the man who was responsible for founding the Christian religion. Let me list just three of the more common of these misconceptions:

•   Jesus was born on 25 December. If there really were shepherds tending their flocks in the fields when Jesus was born, as the Gospel of Luke claims, then the month was most likely to have been June. That was the first month of the year when sheep were allowed into the fields to graze on the remains of the wheat harvest. In fact, the date of 25 December was almost certainly chosen by the early Church as the major Christian festival because it was important to subdue all other religions, including paganism, and one of the most important pagan celebrations was the festival of the Unvanquished Sun, held every year on 25 December. It is known that the ‘new’ festival was established by the fourth century AD, because in AD 334 the 25 December first appeared in a Roman calendar as Christ’s date of birth.

•   His name was Jesus Christ. The name ‘Jesus’ is actually a British invention. His original Hebrew name was ‘Yehoshua’, which later became ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Joshua’. The name ‘Yehoshua’ was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as ‘Iesvs’ or ‘Iesous’, which was then changed to ‘Jesus’ in English. In those early days, people didn’t actually have a second or family name. Instead, Jesus would have been known as ‘Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub’, or ‘Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob’. He would certainly never have been known as ‘Jesus Christ’ while He was alive. Jesus was believed by some people to have been the Messiah, which in Hebrew means ‘the anointed one’. The oil used for such an anointing is called ‘khrisma’ in Greek, and so an anointed person is called ‘Khristos’, which was translated into ‘Christus’ in Latin and then became ‘Christ’ in English. And being anointed was not a special privilege reserved for the Messiah – all sorts of people were anointed, including kings, high priests, prophets and even people suffering from some forms of sickness.

•   Jesus lived in Nazareth. In fact, it’s almost certain that Nazareth didn’t exist as a settlement when Jesus was alive, and ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is actually a mistranslation of an Old Testament passage by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew. The name ‘Iesous Nazarene’ or ‘Nazareneus’ means that Jesus was a Nazarene, not that he came from a place called Nazareth. If the writer had meant that he did come from Nazareth, the correct word would have been either ‘Nazarethenos’ or ‘Nazarethaios’. A ‘Nazarene’ was an ascetic, a holy person who spent a lot of time praying, and who lived simply with no or few possessions. They were an important sect in northern Palestine, and may also have been known as ‘Mandaeans’.

There’s also a large gap in the story of the life of Jesus Christ that the Christian Church never mentions. His birth is talked about, then His appearance at the Temple at the age of twelve or thirteen, His ministry and of course His death and apparent Resurrection, but where was Jesus between the ages of about thirteen and thirty?

There’s evidence that Christ spent quite a lot of His early life outside Judea, and it appears quite possible that He actually lived in India for at least a part of this time. Such travels were not unknown in the first century AD. What later became known as the Silk Road or Silk Route was already well established, and there was frequent two-way traffic between the countries around the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as China.

In the winter of 1887, a man named Nicolai Notovitch was travelling through India as a correspondent for the Russian journal Novaya Vremiya. In November he was in the Kashmir region, near Ladakh, when he fell from his horse and suffered a broken leg. His bearers carried him to the Hemis Gompa