Jack felt as if he had delivered a thunderbolt. There was a stunned silence, broken by Costas. ‘Claudius Caesar? Claudius the emperor? You mean our Claudius? He met Jesus Christ?’
‘With Herod Agrippa,’ Maria whispered. ‘Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews?’
‘So it would appear,’ Jack replied hoarsely, trying to keep his voice under control. ‘Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. And there’s more.’ He read slowly: ‘ “The Nazarene gave Claudius his written word.” ’
‘His written word,’ Costas repeated slowly. ‘A pledge, some kind of promise?’
‘I’ve translated it literally,’ Jack said. ‘It’s more than that. I’m sure it means he gave him something written.’
‘His word,’ Maria murmured. ‘His gospel.’
‘The gospel of Jesus? The written word of Christ?’ Costas suddenly sat back, his jaw dropping in amazement. ‘Holy Mother of God. I see what you mean. The secrecy at Herculaneum. The Church. This is exactly what they have most feared.’
‘And yet it is something that many have hoped against hope would one day be found,’ Maria said, almost whispering. ‘The written word of Jesus of Nazareth, in his own hand.’
‘Does Pliny say what happened to it?’ Costas asked.
Jack finished sorting out the next sentences in his mind, and read out his translation: ‘ “Gennesareth, that is Kinnereth in the local language, is said to derive from the word for the stringed instrument or lyre, kinnor, or from the kinnara, the sweet and edible fruit produced by a thorn tree that grows in the vicinity. And at Tiberias, there are springs that are remarkably health-restoring. Claudius Caesar says that to drink the waters is to clear and calm the mind, which sounds to me like ingesting the morpheum.” ’
‘Ha!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Morpheum. I want Hiebermeyer to see that.’
Jack paused, and muttered under his breath, ‘Come on, Pliny. Get on with it.’ He read what came next to himself, grunted impatiently and then repeated it out loud. ‘ “And the Sea of Gennesareth, really a lake, lies far below the level of the Middle Sea, the Mediterranean. And whereas the Sea of Gennesareth is fresh water, my friend Claudius reminds me that the Dead Sea is remarkably briny, and part of it is not water but bitumen.” ’
‘My friend Claudius,’ Costas repeated, weighing the words. ‘That’s a bit of a slip, isn’t it? I mean, I thought Claudius’ survival was meant to be a secret.’
‘That proves it,’ Jack said. ‘I think this particular scroll was Pliny’s own annotated version, one that he eventually intended to take away with him. It got left in Claudius’ study, probably deliberately. And I think some of this addition was for Claudius’ benefit, too. You have to imagine Claudius sitting beside Pliny as he’s writing this, sipping and spilling his wine, keenly reading over the other man’s shoulder. Of course, as we know from the published text, Pliny was already perfectly well aware that the Dead Sea was briny and produced bitumen.’
‘He was flattering Claudius,’ Maria said.
‘Classic interrogation technique,’ Costas said. ‘Never let on what you already know, then people will tell you more.’
‘Is there anything else?’ Maria said. ‘I mean, about Jesus? Pliny seems to have lost himself in a digression.’
‘There may be,’ Jack said. ‘But there’s a problem.’
‘What?’
‘Look at this.’ Jack pointed at the bottom of the gap in the scroll text, then at the right-hand margin. ‘I’ve read everything I can make out in the gap. But you can see at the bottom that a few lines have been smudged, wiped out. Then he’s written something in the margin beside it, much smaller. He hasn’t replenished his ink, maybe even deliberately, so it’s barely legible. It’s almost as if he wrote at the bottom of the gap something he wanted in the published edition, then thought better of it and erased it, then thought again and put a note in the margin, perhaps a note to himself that he didn’t want anyone else to read.’
‘But you can read it,’ Costas said.
‘Not exactly.’ Jack swivelled the light table until the scroll was at ninety degrees, then pulled a magnifying glass on a retractable arm over the miniature lines of writing just visible in the margin. He pushed his chair back so Maria and Costas could take a look. ‘Tell me what you think.’
They both craned over, and Costas spoke immediately. ‘It’s not Latin, is it? Is that what you mean? But some of those letters look familiar to me. There’s a lambda, a delta. It’s ancient Greek?’
‘Greek letters, but not Greek language,’ Maria murmured. ‘It looks like the precursor Greek alphabet, the one they adopted from the near east.’ She glanced back at Jack. ‘Do you remember Professor Dillen’s course at Cambridge on the early history of Greek language? It’s a while ago now, but I’m sure I recognize some of those letters. Is this Semitic?’
‘You were the star linguist, Maria, not me,’ Jack said. ‘He’d have been proud of you for remembering. In fact, he already sends his congratulations for the discovery, as we e-mailed from the Lynx when we flew in. When I took this scroll from the shelf in Herculaneum I caught a glimpse of this writing, and I had a sudden hunch. I asked Professor Dillen to provide his latest version of the Hanno Project for us to download. It should be online now.’
‘Jack!’ Costas said. ‘Computers? All by yourself?’
Jack gestured at the keyboard beside them. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all yours.’
‘The Hanno Project?’ Maria said.
‘Two years ago, we excavated an ancient shipwreck off Cornwall, not far from the IMU campus. Costas, you remember Mount’s Bay?’
‘Huh? Yeah. Cold. But great fish and chips in Newlyn.’ Costas had sat down at the computer, and was busily tapping. He turned and glanced at Jack. ‘I take it you want a scan?’
Jack nodded, and Costas pushed away the magnifier and positioned a movable scanner arm over the margin of the scroll. Jack turned to Maria. ‘It was a Phoenician shipwreck, the first ever found in British waters, dating almost a thousand years before the Romans arrived. We found British tin ingots stamped with Phoenician letters, and a mysterious metal plaque covered in Phoenician writing. Dillen’s been working on it ever since. We called the translation project Hanno after a famous Carthaginian explorer. We don’t know it was him. Just a name pulled out of a hat.’
‘So you think our scroll writing is Phoenician.’
‘I know it is.’
‘So Pliny read Phoenician?’
‘Phoenician was similar to the Aramaic spoken around the Sea of Galilee at the time of Jesus, but that may just be a coincidence. No, I think this has to do with Claudius. You remember those scrolls on the bottom shelf of the room in Herculaneum? Claudius’ History of Carthage? It was his biggest historical work, one thought completely lost but now miraculously discovered. Well, Claudius would have learned the language in order to read the original sources, the language spoken by the Phoenician traders who founded Carthage. It was virtually a dead language by the time of imperial Rome, and it’s just the kind of thing I can imagine Claudius teaching Pliny in their off-time together after finishing their writing, over wine and dice. So when Pliny comes to make this note, he chooses a language that was virtually a code between them. Claudius is watching, and he would have been pleased and flattered by that too.’
‘They must have been the only people around who could read this.’
‘That’s the point.’
‘It’s ready,’ Costas said, hunched over the screen. ‘There are four words the concordance has identified as transliterations, that is proper nouns, and it’s rendered them first into Latin and then into English. One word is Claudius. The other’s Rome. All the other words are in Dillen’s Phoenician lexicon. There’s one I even know. Bos, bull or cow. I remember that from the Bosporus.’