‘Okay,’ Jeremy said, pushing up his spectacles and peering at Costas. ‘If it’s early Christianity in Britain, it’s one of my areas of interest. Fire away.’
‘Before meeting you this morning we went to the British Library,’ Costas said. ‘Jack needed to check some source material on this church, and while he was busy I visited the display of ancient manuscripts. Incredible stuff. I saw one of the Bibles brought by St Augustine to Britain, in AD 597. That’s almost two hundred years after the Romans left Britain. That’s where I’m confused. I thought Augustine was the one who brought Christianity to Britain. I thought, hold on, how can there be Christians in Roman Britain?’
Jeremy leaned forward from where he was sitting against the wall. ‘That’s a common misconception. And it’s what the Anglo-Saxon Church historians would have liked you to believe, even the big names like Bede.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana, was really the Church of the Anglo-Saxons. It traced its origins to the mission of Augustine, who supposedly brought Christianity to the pagan population of Britain well after the Romans had left. It was a political tool, intimately bound up with Anglo-Saxon kingship and with the power of Rome. But even the Anglo-Saxon historians knew there had been Christianity in Britain before that, when the Romans had ruled.’
‘The Ecclesia Britannorum,’ Jack murmured. ‘The Church of the Britons. The Celtic Church.’
‘To get a handle on it, you have to go to Gildas,’ Jeremy said. ‘A British monk who lived in the early sixth century, about a hundred years after the Romans left, a couple of generations before Augustine arrived. Gildas is just about the only Briton we know about who may have been alive at the time of King Arthur, probably a British warlord fighting the Anglo-Saxon invaders at that time.’
‘Sounds like the original Friar Tuck,’ Costas murmured.
‘His book’s called De Excidio Britonum, The Ruin of Britain. It was written in Latin, but I’ve got a translation.’ Jack delved into his bag, and brought out a scuffed blue and grey book with a chi-rho symbol on the front. ‘It’s a rant about how the kings who ruled Britain after the Romans had failed in their Christian duty. I’ve got it because Gildas mentions Boudica. It was a present from my grandmother when I was a boy.’
‘Gildas called Boudica a deceitful lioness,’ Jeremy said, grinning.
‘That’s all he says, but it suggests that the memory of her rebellion lingered on, even in a churchman who knew virtually nothing of Roman history, and little of Christian history for that matter.’
‘But he gives us the first ever account of the founding of the British Church, the Celtic Church in the time of the Romans,’ Jeremy said.
Jack nodded, and turned the page. ‘Here it is.’ He read it aloud: ‘ “Meanwhile, to an island numb with chill ice and far removed, as in a remote nook of the world, from the visible sun, Christ made a present of his rays, that is, his precepts, Christ the true sun, which shows its dazzling brilliance to the entire earth, not from the temporal firmament merely, but from the highest citadel of heaven, that goes beyond all time. This happened first, as we know, in the last years of the emperor Tiberius, at a time when Christ’s religion was being propagated without hindrance; for, against the wishes of the Senate, the emperor threatened the death penalty for informers against soldiers of God.” ’
‘At least he got the weather right,’ Costas grumbled. ‘So what’s he on about? The emperor Tiberius?’
‘The Roman emperor at the time of the crucifixion,’ Jeremy said.
Jack closed the book. ‘Tiberius was Claudius’ uncle, ruled Rome from AD 14 to 37. Gildas seems to think that Tiberius was himself a Christian, at odds with a pagan Senate. It’s all pretty garbled and probably an anachronism, referring to the problems the Christian emperors had with the pagan Senate in the fourth century AD, after Constantine the Great had made Christianity the state religion. There’s no other indication anywhere that Tiberius was a Christian. But what we’ve found in the last few days, in Herculaneum, in Rome, has set me thinking.’
‘About others in Rome who knew of Jesus of Nazareth,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘The British Church, the Celtic Church of the Roman period, has left no written records,’ Jack replied. ‘If there ever were any, they would almost certainly have been destroyed by the Anglo-Saxons. But was Gildas recounting a distant truth, a folk memory perhaps, a secret passed on by word of mouth among followers of the British Church for more than five centuries? Was he telling us that there had indeed been a Christian emperor very early on, or an emperor well disposed towards Christians? Not Tiberius, but another emperor who had been alive at the time of Christ?’
‘Claudius!’ Costas exclaimed.
‘It’s just possible.’ Jack was animated, and gesticulated as he spoke. ‘By the time of Gildas, centuries later, the true identity of the emperor could have been confused. Claudius would have been remembered as the invader of Britain, as the deified emperor worshipped in the temple at Colchester. A pretty unlikely Christian. But Gildas would have known of Tiberius from the Gospels, as the emperor who had presided over the death of Jesus. To Gildas, it might have seemed the ultimate triumph of Christianity to suggest that Tiberius himself was a convert. A pretty extravagant fiction, but Gildas lived at a time when many fanciful additions were being made to the story of events surrounding the life of Christ.’
‘And he’s talking about Britain,’ Costas said.
‘Gildas was implying that Christianity came to Britain very early on, in the first century AD,’ Jeremy said. ‘He’s even implying that the emperor himself brought it, in person. That’s what’s really fascinating. It’s only through being here ourselves, on the trail of an emperor, that those lines of Gildas suddenly take on a new significance, a real authority. His De Excidio Britonum was exclusively a book on Britain, not some wider history.’
‘What’s the other evidence for early Christianity here?’ Costas said. ‘From archaeology, I mean?’
‘Just like in the Mediterranean region,’ Jack replied. ‘Incredibly elusive until the second century, and it’s not until the fourth century that you start to see churches, burials, overt symbols of Christianity, after it becomes the state religion. But early Christianity was a religion of the word, not of idols and temples. It was secretive, and often persecuted. If it wasn’t for the Gospels and a few Roman sources, we’d know nothing at all about Christianity in the first century AD. Remember our shipwreck off Sicily? That scratched chi-rho symbol was the only overt evidence we saw there of Christianity, yet we’re talking about the ship of St Paul, one of the key episodes in early Christian history.’
‘And remember who we’re looking at in early Roman Britain,’ Jeremy added pensively. ‘There were the immigrants, traders and soldiers who may well have brought the idea of Christianity with them, and may have come to worship Christ as others did Mithras or Isis. But the majority of the population were natives, Romanized to some degree but retaining much of their Celtic way of life and customs. Their religion has left almost no archaeological trace. These were not people who were inclined to build temples and altars or to make statues of their gods. Archaeology was never going to tell us much.’
‘Okay.’ Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘But if there was Christianity in early Roman Britain, why would the Anglo-Saxon Church want to deny it? I mean, wouldn’t it have been something to celebrate, that their religion had been in place hundreds of years before?’
‘But it wasn’t their religion,’ Jeremy said quietly.
‘Huh?’
‘The time of Gildas, the time of King Arthur, wasn’t just a formative period in the political genesis of Britain,’ Jeremy said. ‘It was also a time when a conflict within the Christian communities of Britain first began to play out in a big way. Everyone knows about King Henry the Eighth, his break with the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. But the roots of the English Reformation under Henry go way back to this period, to the time when the British Church stood up against Rome and proclaimed their direct connection to the Holy Land, to Jesus the man.’