The Sacred Blood

b.c.e.; and human heads from Jericho dating to 6000 b.c.e.

Nothing, however, could compare to the gallery’s most recent acquisition.

He stopped in front of a modern display case with ultrathick security glass. The podium that was its base was solid; it hid an elaborate security system. The relic housed in the case was gently lit from top and bottom.

“Take a look at this,” he said to Jules. “You know about this ossuary, right?”

She studied the compact stone box covered in etched designs: rosettes and hatch patterns. Its arched lid was beautiful, though she noticed restoration work had corrected a jagged widthwise crack along its middle. Nothing came to mind. “Should I?”

He gave her a surprised look. “The theft at the Temple Mount? Back in June? It was all over the news. A firefight, explosions . . .”

To Jules, this was all vague at best. “I was excavating outside Tanis in June,” she said defensively. “It’s not like I brought a TV with me into the desert. You know how digs can be . . . the isolation?”

“Yes. Of course,” replied Amit.

“So stop being a bully.”

He shook his head before proceeding to give her the Reader’s Digest version of the crime that had taken place, explained how the situation had gotten so dire that a synagogue had been hit by a Muslim female suicide bomber (or as Amit preferred to call them, “homicide bomber”) and that in desperate response to the act, the Israeli police had almost wrongfully pegged a colleague of his named Graham Barton as an accomplice. Barton had been released only after Israeli authorities tracked the stolen ossuary to the home of a Muslim cleric who’d orchestrated the theft. The ossuary was then studied and brought here for safekeeping.

“This is what the thieves stole?” She regarded the relic more levelly now. “An ossuary?” It didn’t compute. “Why?”

“Lots of conspiracy theories about that, but no one knows for sure. Probably had a lot to do with what had been inside it.”

“Which was . . . ?”

He shrugged. “It came back empty,” he said, keeping his voice low in the echoing hall. “So that’s where the rumors get really interesting.” Thinking he heard the wheelchair’s squeaky tires, he paused and glanced over his shoulder. Nothing. “Take a look at this.” He pointed to the side of the box.

Jules sidestepped and bent to see what he was so interested in. That’s when she noticed the carved relief that matched the strange pagan images they’d seen on the wall painting hidden beneath the hills of Qumran. “That’s weird.”

“Certainly is.” Her troubled expression showed him that she’d made the connection.

“So what do you think it means?”

“Tough to say, really. But some have interpreted it to be an early Christian symbol.”

“How so?”

“Well, when Jesus died in thirty-four c.e. or thereabouts, those who tried to continue his ministry were sought out by the Romans. So they concealed their identity by using pagan symbols.”

“A c ode ? ”

“A seal, to be more precise. It’s meant to represent Jesus’s crucifixion. Greeks and Romans revered dolphins as magical creatures that brought spirits to the afterlife.”

“Like angels,” Jules said.

“Like saviors,” he corrected her. “And the trident is said to represent a lance that killed the dolphin.”

“The cross.”

“The cross,” Amit confirmed. “Not to mention the trident’s three tines—”

“The Trinity.”

“Good thing you weren’t a Roman back then,” he said. “Again, this is the type of stuff some are suggesting, and—”

“So they think this ossuary contained the body of an early Christian?”

He grinned. “Oh, something like that. But not just any Christian.”

“Peter? Paul?”

“Think bigger.”

She looked at the ossuary and fished for the impossible. “No way. Not Jesus.”

Amit nodded.

This made Jules snicker. “Amit, you’re talking to an Egyptologist,” she reminded him. “You know how I feel about the whole Jesus thing.”

“And?” But he already knew where this was going.

“There’s no evidence that Jesus was a living historical figure.”

He already knew her stance. “So he’s a literary creation?”

“Jesus reads like an Egyptian folk hero. Let me remind you—Osiris was brutally mutilated, his body parts collected by the female goddess Isis and put in a stone tomb, only to be resurrected three days later so that he ascended up into the sky. Crucifixion, burial, resurrection on day three, and ascension into heaven?” She spread her hands. “Osiris, mind you, who judged souls in the hereafter, weighed the heart against