S
o Hosius decides these writings shouldn’t be destroyed and stashes them away somewhere safe. How did they end up in the Templars’ hands?”
“I don’t know,” Tess replied, her mind hurtling down many avenues at the same time. “But somehow, the first Templars to show up at the monastery, the ones led by Everard—”
“The ones the monks poisoned,” Reilly interjected.
“Yes, somehow, they got hold of them.” A beacon lit up somewhere in the maze and drew her toward it. “That was in 1203. Just before the sack of Constantinople,” she told Reilly, her eyes flaring with the thrill of a newly established connection. “What if that’s where they’d been kept all along, in Constantinople? What if whoever Hosius had entrusted to look after them figured they had to get them out of there and moved to somewhere safe before the city was overrun by the crusaders?”
“The crusaders—in other words, the pope’s army.”
Tess felt her skin light up. “The pope’s army had the city under siege. They’d just pillaged Zara, a Catholic city. The people of Constantinople could expect even worse, given that it was the capital of Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox patriarchs and the popes had spent the last couple of hundred years trading insults and excommunicating each other. It didn’t take a soothsayer to know what the crusaders would do to them once they got inside the city walls. Whether the pope knew the documents were there or not, they were still at risk.”
“So they ask the Templars to take them somewhere safe? Why the Templars?”
Tess processed the timeline. Another beacon flared up, dazzlingly bright and irresistible. “What if the Templars were in on it from the beginning?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three years ago, at the Vatican, the first time you met Brugnone, he told you the Templars had found Jesus’s journal in Jerusalem. He confirmed what Vance had suspected—that they’d used it to blackmail the pope and that that was how they got so rich and powerful so quickly. Well … where did that journal really come from?”
“Didn’t they find it buried somewhere in the remains of the old Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem? I thought the story was that they spent their first few years out there digging around, and then when they found it, it allowed them to blackmail the Vatican into backing them and that’s when all the donations of money and land started pouring in.”
“That’s what we’ve always assumed. But what if we were wrong?” She thought back to the origin of the Templars that was common lore—nine knights from across Europe who all showed up in Jerusalem one day back in 1118, out of the blue, and told the king they wanted to protect the Christian pilgrims who were streaming in to see the newly conquered holy city. The king gave them huge premises to use as their base, the site of the old Temple of Solomon—hence, Knights of the Temple, or Templars—premises they didn’t apparently leave for nine years, years that they supposedly spent digging around, looking for something that, when they found it, gave them great wealth and power. Something that Tess believed she and Reilly had uncovered three years earlier.
“Did the first Templars really find it after digging around those ruins?” she asked. “Or was that just their cover story? What if it had been part of the trove of Nicaea from day one?”
“So they lied to the pope to sex it up? To make it sound more mysterious, more mythical?”
“Partly,” Tess speculated. “It would also keep the rest of the trove safe. There was no reason for them to alert the pope and his cronies to the fact that there were all these other gospels and writings out there. Why put it all at risk?”
“But that would mean the founding Templars knew about the trove from day one,” Reilly observed.
“Which begs the question,” Tess jumped in, “who were they really, and why did they choose to make their move and blackmail the pope when they did?” She was having trouble keeping up with the implications of every new realization. Everything she’d thought she knew about the origins of the Templars—who they really were, where they came from, why they appeared when they did, what they were really trying to achieve—it was all suddenly thrown into question.
“When did they first show up on the map?”
“In 1118. A pretty revolutionary time,” she thought aloud, her mind on fire now. “It was the first time that any pope, the leader of the Catholic Church and Jesus’s representative on earth, wasn’t spreading His message of love and peace. Instead, he was telling his flock to go out and kill in the name of Christ, telling them all their sins would be forgiven and Heaven would be theirs if they went out and butchered the heathen in the name of the Cross. And at that point, his holy army was winning. They had taken over Jerusalem, the Muslims were on the ropes. The pope was the leader of the only superpower around, and the world was his for the taking.”
Reilly processed her words. “Maybe someone, somewhere decided to create a counterpoint?” he put in. “A force that could check Rome’s supremacy and maybe put the brakes on before it all got out of hand?”
Tess nodded, her eyes distant. “Maybe everything we thought we knew about the Templars is wrong.”
A silence fell over them, allowing their ideas to find some purchase. Then Tess’s expression lost its inspired lightness and sank, heavy with trepidation. “I can see why our Iranian friend wanted to get his hands on Hosius’s stash. We’ve got to find it, Sean. If it’s out there, we’ve got to find it first. We can’t let some bastards in Tehran dump it on an unprepared world.”
“You really think it can still cause trouble?” he questioned. “Even in today’s world? People out there are pretty cynical.”
“Not about this. Not about the Bible. There are two billion Christians out there, Sean, and a lot of them think of the Bible as God’s words.
His actual words
. They think the twenty-seven texts that make up the New Testament were handed down to us by God himself, to help us lead better lives and achieve eternal salvation. They don’t realize that nothing could be farther from the truth and that what we call the Bible was actually put together a few hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. But we know different. We know for a fact that early Christianity was very diverse in its beliefs and in its writings. It was made up of scattered communities of people who had competing interpretations of what Jesus was and what he preached and what he did, communities that based their faiths on very different ideas. And before too long, they started squabbling about whose version was right. Ultimately, one of these groups won by gaining more converts than the others. And the winners decided which of these early writings were the ones their converts should follow, they changed them to fit the story they settled on, and they branded all the others blasphemous and heretical and suppressed them. They buried the competition, along with their beliefs and practices, and then they rewrote the history of the whole struggle. My point is, they decided what would be considered genuine, sacred scripture, and what wouldn’t. And they did a great job. There’s hardly anything left of the texts they didn’t like. The only reason we know they even existed is that they’re occasionally mentioned by early church writers, and the handful of copies we have of any of these competing versions are down to the occasional fluke, like the discovery of that stash of gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi back in the 1940s.”
“Until now,” Reilly put in.
“Absolutely. And imagine for a second what would have happened if one of the other groups of Christians had won that struggle. We could have ended up with a very different religion, one that doesn’t have much in common with what we call Christianity today. And that’s
if
it would have made it this far in the first place. ‘Cause it’s possible, even likely, that if Christianity hadn’t taken on the form it did take, the all-welcoming, supernatural story of death and resurrection and eternal salvation that cobbled together elements from all the empire’s existing religions into a new, one-size-fits-all package—Mithraism, Sol Invictus, a virgin birth, a resurrection three days later, the day of the sun and ‘Sunday,’ the twenty-fifth of December—and allowed it to grow in an organized way and become the official religion of the Roman Empire … Constantine might not have embraced it. He might not have been able to convince his pagan populace to accept it, and our world would be very different today. Without Christianity as its bedrock, Western civilization would’ve developed in ways you and I can’t even begin to imagine.
And it’s all down to the sacred texts the founders chose to build their church on
. Cause that’s what any religion boils down to, isn’t it? Scripture. Sacred texts. A story, a fable, a mythical tale that someone wrote down a hell of long time ago.
“But those early, competing Christianities were very, very different. And their gospels, their scripture, described a very different set of events and a very different set of beliefs from those in the New Testament. Some described Jesus as a Buddha-like preacher whose secrets would only be revealed to a few lucky initiates. Others talk about him as a revolutionary leader who would liberate the poor from their Roman oppressors by force. Some of them describe Jesus as a divinely inspired guide to spiritual enlightenment who went around saying very New Agey things like ‘
You saw the Spirit, you became Spirit. You saw the Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become Father
.’ They have radically different takes on the whole human-divine debate about Jesus and on how we can achieve salvation—though it usually boils down to understanding the true meaning of Jesus’s words and discovering the truth about our own divine selves without the need for priests or churches or weird cannibalistic rituals like eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. And fans of these non-canonical gospels will tell you they predate the four that are in the Bible. They’ll claim—and there’s a lot of evidence to support this—that the four gospels in the canon were heavily edited and massaged to support the setting up of an organized church in His name and to justify having a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons and give them power over their followers as the legitimate heirs of the apostles and—and this is the key part—the exclusive providers of eternal salvation. Which is what they achieved. Exclusivity. Remember, before Christianity, people in the Roman Empire worshipped all kinds of gods. No one had a problem with that. There was huge tolerance and respect, and the concept of heresy and of believing in ‘the right god’—orthodoxy—didn’t exist. There was no sin we needed to be saved from, either. It was only with Christianity that the idea of what a person believed in started to matter, and matter a lot, because his or her eternal life suddenly depended on it.
“Purists and staunch Bible defenders, on the other hand, will tell you anything that doesn’t conform to the four gospels in the canon is of dubious origin. They’ll say they had to be written
after
the four gospels that are in the Bible, and they’ll tell you their authors were ‘corrupted’ by gnostic influences. They label them ‘heretic.’ You know what the word means?
Choice
. Literally. That’s the root of the word. It just means someone who chooses to believe something else. That’s all. But the winners chose what we should believe in. They chose which writings were sacred and which ones were ‘heretical.’
“The thing is, right now, we don’t know for a fact which one of the two sides is right. We don’t know which writings are the ‘corrupted’ ones. It’s all theory and conjecture—because there’s so little that survives from back then. We don’t know for a fact when Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written, or in what order. We don’t. We don’t really know who wrote them, but we know it wasn’t any of them—they’re not written in the first person, for starters, and we know they were written long after they were dead. But we’re told they’re the real deal, we’re told they’re the ones that tell the true story of Jesus and his preaching and that anything that deviates from them is bogus. But there’s no proof of that. And there’s a hell of a lot of material to support questioning it. The world’s top biblical scholars have documented references to many other writings, other gospels that have never been found but that could predate the ones in the Bible—close to fifty of them, at last count. That’s fifty other gospels that we’ve never had a chance to read, and those are just the ones we know about. And yet we still take the book we’ve been handed down for granted as being the real thing, and that’s the book that rules almost every aspect of our lives. It’s the book they quote in the Senate when they’re deciding whether or not to go to war, or if a woman can have an abortion or not. It’s the book that people believe contains the words of God. Literally. Without having the first clue about where it came from or how it was really put together.”
“And this trove could change all that,” Reilly noted.
Tess nodded. “Are you kidding me? We’re not talking about postage stamp fragments like the Dead Sea Scrolls or even a few random codices like the ones from Nag Hammadi. We’re talking about an entire library of gospels and early Christian writings here, Sean. Dated, documented, complete, and original, not translations of translations of translations—a full, authentic, unadulterated picture of all the different takes on Jesus’s life and words. It could revolutionize our understanding of the man and the myth—in fact, I’m sure it would. ‘Cause I don’t doubt for a second that Jesus’s words were very different from what we’ve been sold since Nicaea. I mean, how else could His message of possession-free selflessness, a message that was aimed at lifting up the poor and the oppressed, have ended up as a religion of the rich and powerful in Rome without being corrupted to fit its new agenda?”
“The religion of the emperor,” Reilly said, recalling Hosius’s letter.
“Exactly. Think about what really happened at the Council of Nicaea. An emperor—not a pope—brought together the most influential priests and bishops from all over his empire, sat them in a room, and told them to work out their differences and come up with one doctrine that would become the official, accepted version of Christianity. An emperor, not a pope. A warrior-king, a ruler,
a messiah
, really, if you want to use the real meaning of that word—a man who had just defeated his opponents and taken control of a divided land and who needed something incredibly powerful to unify all the different parts of his empire. We have a chance to discover the texts that didn’t make the cut, the other versions of what Jesus said and did—the ones Constantine and the founders of the Church decided we shouldn’t know about.”