The Messiah Secret - James Becker [133]
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’