‘I’ll second that,’ Morgan said from the back.
‘We still have to find out what’s in that cylinder,’ Costas said. ‘If Jack will let us.’
‘Have patience,’ Jack said.
‘We’re heading in this direction because of Pliny’s note in the Natural History, right? The scroll we found in Herculaneum? That Claudius and his friend Herod visited Jesus on the Sea of Galilee?’
‘Right.’
‘No holes in the ground?’
‘Well, I promised Massimo in Rome that you’d be back. There’s a huge job opening up the entrance to the Vestals’ chamber. Absolutely tons of sludge to clear out.’
‘Jack.’
‘Okay, no holes in the ground. This time.’
They passed signposts with names redolent of the rich history of the Holy Land: Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth. At the sign for the Sea of Galilee they veered left, past the resorts and thermal springs of modern Tiberias, then to the edge of the lake. They carried on a few miles further beneath the imposing flanks of Mount Arbel until they came to the entrance to Kibbutz Ginosar. The land around them was scorched, desiccated, and the shoreline of the lake had receded some distance over the mudflats to the east. Helena pulled into the kibbutz and they all got out, tired and hungry after the four-hour journey. Jack was wearing khaki shorts with a grey T-shirt and desert boots, and he had his trusty khaki bag slung over his side. Costas had on his usual garish selection of Hawaiian gear and the designer sunglasses Jeremy had given him, now seemingly a permanent fixture. Jeremy, Maria and Morgan were all dressed like Jack. The only one who seemed oblivious to the heat was Helena, who had on the Ethiopian white cassock she had been wearing when they first met her on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre the day before.
‘This is the site of ancient Migdal, also called Magdala,’ Jack said. ‘Home of Mary Magdalene. This shore is where Jesus of Nazareth lived as a young man, where he worked as a carpenter and fisherman and went among the people of Galilee, spreading his word.’
After a quick lunch in the kibbutz canteen, they trooped into the Yigal Allon Museum and stood around its centrepiece exhibit, silently absorbing one of the most remarkable finds ever made in the Holy Land. It was an ancient boat, its timbers blackened with age but beautifully preserved, a little over eight metres long and two metres wide. Costas tipped up his sunglasses and leaned over the metal cradle that held it, inspecting one of the timbers. ‘Polyethylene glycol?’
Jack nodded. ‘It didn’t take long to impregnate the timbers with PEG, as the boat was found in fresh water and there was no salt to leach out. It was the summer of 1986, a drought year like this one, and the level of the Sea of Galilee had dropped. Two local guys searching for ancient coins found these timbers sticking out of the mud, the prow facing towards the lake. It was clearly an ancient boat, and caused an immediate sensation. It was also a flashpoint. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism revelled in the possible Jesus connection, seeing a new magnet for tourism at a time when the intifada was putting people off visiting Israel. But some ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrated against the excavation, seeing it as a green light for Christian missionary activity in the area. There were even people praying for rain so the site would be inundated and the excavation thwarted.’
‘That sounds familiar,’ Costas murmured.
‘That’s one reason I wanted you to see this, before we go out to our final destination,’ Jack said. ‘All of that nonsense is forgotten now. This boat’s one of the star archaeological attractions of Israel, for Christians, for Jews, for all the people of Galilee, whatever their faith. It’s their shared heritage.’
‘The planks are edge-joined in the ancient fashion, with mortice-and-tenon,’ Costas said.
‘It’s a unique find, the only Sea of Galilee boat to survive from antiquity,’ Jack said, pointing out the features. ‘It probably had a mast with a single brailed sail, with space for two oarsmen on either side and an oar that served as a quarter-rudder. It had a recurving stem and a pointed bow, with a cutwater. The wood’s mainly oak for the frames and cedar for the strakes, cedar of Lebanon.’
‘I’ve just realized why it looks familiar,’ Maria murmured. ‘Maurice showed me pictures of a boat about this size from the foreshore at Herculaneum, found in 1980 when they discovered all those skeletons huddled in the chambers below the sea wall. The gas and ash from the eruption flipped the boat over and carbonized it, but the interior face of the timbers was well preserved. It was immaculately built, maybe a pleasure boat for one of the rich villa-owners.’
‘Maybe old Claudius snuck out on it, for a bit of fishing,’ Costas said.
‘There’s a lot of recycled timber here, scraps cleverly reused,’ Jack said. ‘The Kinneret Boat may not have the finesse of the Herculaneum boat, but it has a lot of style. Whoever built and maintained it had an intimate feel for the Galilee area, for its resources and how to use them.’
‘Any radiocarbon dates?’ Costas asked.
‘Forty BC, plus or minus eighty years.’
Costas whistled. ‘Wide latitude, but pretty good odds. Jesus died around AD 30, right? Close to the end of that spectrum. But boats like this could have lasted for generations on the lake, repaired and refitted. Even a boat made at the beginning of that timeframe could still have been in use during his lifetime.’
‘The only artefacts found associated with it were a simple cooking pot and an oil lamp, both probably from the same period.’
‘So what about Claudius and Herod Agrippa?’ Costas said. ‘What date are we looking at for their visit?’
‘I believe they came here in AD 23,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Jesus of Nazareth would have been in his mid twenties, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Claudius was thirty-two or thirty-three and Herod Agrippa was the same age, both born in 10 BC. A few years later Jesus went into the wilderness and renounced his worldly occupation, and the rest is history. Claudius must have returned to Rome soon after his visit here, and never came again. We know what happened to him. And Herod Agrippa went on to become King of the Jews.’
‘How do you get the date?’
‘Something I remembered in Jerusalem. Something that had been niggling me ever since we first saw those words in the lab on board Seaquest II, on Pliny’s page from the Natural History. There’s no reference anywhere else to Claudius travelling to the east. I’d guessed it must have happened when he was living in obscurity as a scholar in Rome, before he was dragged to the imperial throne in AD 41. It was obviously before Jesus was crucified, about AD 30, in the reign of Tiberius. It was also probably before Jesus was surrounded with disciples who would surely have remembered a visit from Rome, left some record of it in the Gospels.’
Helena cleared her throat. ‘We have our tradition, in Ethiopia. That an emperor sought the Messiah.’
‘If Herod Agrippa was king of Judaea, he might have visited Galilee then,’ Costas said.
Jack shook his head. ‘That was much later. It was Claudius who gave him Judaea in AD 41, as a reward for loyalty. Until then Herod Agrippa had lived mainly in Rome. No, I’m thinking of another time, years earlier. Herod Agrippa was grandson of Herod the Great, king of Judaea, but was brought up in Rome in the imperial palace, adopted by Claudius’ mother Antonia. He and Claudius became the most unlikely of friends, the hard-living playboy and the crippled scholar. One of Herod Agrippa’s drinking buddies was the emperor Tiberius’ son Drusus, who used to get drunk and pick fights with the Praetorian Guard. There was some murky incident one night, and Drusus died. Herod Agrippa was immediately packed off to Judaea. That’s what I remembered. It happened in AD 23.’
‘Bingo,’ Costas said.
‘It gets better. Herod Agrippa’s uncle, Herod Antipas, was governor of Galilee at the time. He got his wayward nephew a token job as a market overseer, an agoranomos. Guess where? In Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee a few miles south of here. We passed the site on the way.’