James Becker - The Messiah Secret

‘Agreed,’ Donovan muttered. ‘Just get on with it, will you?’

‘I still think we should wait,’ Angela said.

‘You’re out-voted, I’m afraid,’ Masters said. He turned to Cross. ‘Get the lid off that wooden box.’

Cross took the crowbar and jammed it into the wooden crate, where the lid met the side. But as he did so, the two-thousand-year-old wood disintegrated to reveal the dull gleam of metal within. He pulled out the remaining bits of wood and tossed them away.

With the wood removed, a heavy but entirely plain and unmarked metal coffin became visible, resting on the floor of the stone oblong. Cross pulled out a knife and slid the point along its lid.

‘I think it’s made of lead,’ he said, looking at the silvery gleam of the cut surface in the light from his torch.

‘That settles it,’ Donovan said. ‘Even if we wanted to lift it intact and take it somewhere, it’s too heavy. We’d never get it out of this room, let alone down to one of the jeeps. We’re going to have to open it right here, right now.’

Angela shook her head, and took a half-step backwards. She looked pale and shocked.

Bronson felt a lurch of concern.

‘The lid’s sealed,’ Cross said. ‘There are half a dozen separate seals between the lid and the base, and there’s a kind of reddish stuff in the joint as well. Looks to me like they did their best to keep the whole thing air-tight.’

‘So in that case you might get a decent sample, Donovan,’ Masters remarked.

‘I should bloody well hope so, after all this,’ Donovan said, while in the background Killian snorted his disgust.

Using his knife, Cross sliced through the seals that linked the lid and the base of the coffin, then ran the tip of the blade all the way around the joint, to try to break the seal between the two sections.

‘You’ll need to give me a hand,’ Cross said, motioning to Masters to help him lift the lid. The two men stood side by side as Cross drove the tip of the crowbar into the gap below the coffin lid and levered it upwards. There was a sudden hiss of escaping air as the seal was finally breached. They seized the lid and levered it up and to one side, where it thudded heavily back against the stone wall that surrounded the coffin. Then they both stepped back.

For the first time in two thousand years the contents of the coffin were revealed in the yellow light from a handful of electric torches. For a few seconds nobody spoke.

‘So Josephus was right,’ Killian muttered.

There was a sudden clang as Angela dropped her torch. She gave a sharp intake of breath that was almost a sob. ‘Oh. My. God,’ she whispered, and almost fell into Bronson’s arms.

‘It can’t be,’ Donovan muttered. ‘That’s wrong. That’s so wrong. That can’t be Him. That’s not Jesus Christ.’

Behind him, Masters crossed himself.

‘He wasn’t called Jesus Christ,’ Killian said, his voice echoing around the tomb. ‘Now that we’re finally in this sacred place, at the very least you should use His correct name. He was called Yehoshua or Yeshua, and that name in Hebrew means “God is saviour”. The appellation “Christ” is just a translation of the Greek Khristos or Latin Christus , meaning “the anointed one”. He was never called that when He was alive.’

Nobody in the cave took the slightest notice of what he was saying. Everyone was looking into the coffin, with varying expressions of disbelief.

‘That’s not what I expected,’ Bronson muttered. ‘Not what I expected at all.’

‘You’re simply showing your ignorance, all of you,’ Killian snapped. ‘What did you expect? The skeleton of a man six feet tall, maybe still showing the remains of long hair and a beard? The image that almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, has of Jesus Christ? The image that has not the slightest shred of historical evidence to support it? The image that only became accepted as a true representation over eight hundred years after He died? That image?’

Still nobody responded.

What the coffin contained wasn’t a skeleton. It was a body. The body of a man which looked so fresh and so vibrant that it was almost possible to believe he was still alive. It was wrapped in a discoloured but probably once-white cloth, the arms lying by its side, bare feet exposed at the end of the coffin.

But the body wasn’t six feet in height, nothing like it. Bronson, who was used to estimating heights and distances as part of his job as a police officer, guessed the man had stood little more than five feet tall. He was heavily tanned and almost clean-shaven, just a few wisps of coarse hair dotted on his cheeks and chin. And his patchy fair hair was almost reddish in colour, and parted in the centre.

But it was the face that shocked them the most. Every person standing in that cave — even Bronson, who was a committed atheist — had a mental image of Jesus as a man of noble, even patrician, bearing, but the body in the lead coffin had a face that was almost startlingly unattractive. It was pinched and narrow, dominated by a long and thin nose under thick eyebrows that almost met in the middle, giving the face a mean and unpleasant, almost equine, appearance. The corpse was about as far removed from the traditional picture of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined.

‘This must be a mistake,’ Donovan muttered, shaking his head.

‘If it is, you made it,’ Killian retorted. Of all the people in the cave, he was the only one who seemed unaffected by the sight of the corpse. In fact, from the moment the coffin lid had been removed, he’d acted as if the body inside it had been exactly what he’d expected.

‘What did you mean when you said “Josephus was right”?’ Angela asked him, staring wide-eyed at the corpse. She seemed to have recovered her composure somewhat, and was leaning forward, right over the base of the open coffin.

‘There are no extant first-hand contemporary accounts of what Jesus looked like,’ Killian said. ‘But in a very early Slavonic copy of the Capture of Jerusalem , Josephus — you do know who he was, I hope? — describes Jesus as being small in stature with a “long face, long nose and meeting eyebrows”. He also said He had dark skin, scanty hair parted in the middle like a Nazarite and with an undeveloped beard. And I think that’s a pretty good description of this man, wouldn’t you agree?’

There was another long silence. ‘Could this really be the founder of Christianity?’ Donovan said at last. ‘Just look at him. Short — he’s almost a dwarf — and ugly with it.’

‘It’s not what He looked like that’s important,’ Killian said, his voice rising in anger. ‘It’s what He did, what He said and the lessons He gave us. Those are the building blocks, the very foundations, of the greatest religion the world has ever known.’

‘Look at the hands,’ Donovan said suddenly, and everybody’s focus shifted. ‘Do you see any nail marks? Stigmata?’

But the corpse’s hands and wrists were unmarked.

‘That proves nothing,’ Killian said. ‘Nails were expensive. The Romans often tied their victims to the cross with ropes. It just meant they lasted a bit longer, made them suffer even more.’

‘What about the feet?’ Bronson asked. He couldn’t quite see into the base of the coffin. ‘Or did the Romans lash their legs to the cross as well?’

Masters bent down to have a closer look. When he straightened up, his face was pale in the gloom of the cave, and he crossed himself again before he spoke.

‘Two old wounds,’ he said. ‘Looks like something was driven through both heels. He’d have found walking real painful.’

Everyone looked at Killian who nodded. ‘Common practice,’ he said. ‘They usually turned the victim sideways, jammed his feet into a wooden box attached to the cross and drove one nail straight through both ankles.’