Робин Кук: Intervention

“Why aren’t you at the pool?” Sana repeated. The door slammed on its own behind her. “It’s our last day, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Shawn said, a gleam coming into his eye. “I’ve been busy.”

“So I see,” Sana said, eyeing the gloves and the magnifying glass. She went back to unbuttoning her blouse and headed into the bathroom. Shawn came to the threshold.

“I just made what I thought was my biggest archaeological find in that antiquities shop I told you about. The one where I got the prehistoric Egyptian pot.”

“Excuse me,” Sana said, easing Shawn back from the threshold so she could push the door almost closed. She didn’t like to change in front of anyone, even Shawn, especially since their level of intimacy had faded of late. “I remember,” she called out. “Does it have something to do with your white gloves and the magnifying glass?”

“It certainly does,” Shawn said to the door. “The concierge helped me out with the gloves and the magnifying glass. Talk about your full-service hotel!”

“Are you going to tell me about your find, or do I have to guess?” Sana asked, now interested. When it came to his profession, Shawn didn’t exaggerate. For sure, he’d made a number of important finds digging in multiple locations throughout the Near East earlier in his career. That was before becoming a high-ranking curator whose responsibilities had devolved to be more supervisory and fund-raising than fieldwork.

“Come out, and I’ll show you.”

“Is it not as good as you hoped? I noticed you used the past tense.”

“At first I was disappointed, but now I think it is even a hundred times better than my initial impression.”

“Really?” Sana questioned. With her bathing-suit bottoms halfway up her thighs, she stopped. Now her curiosity had truly been piqued. What could Shawn possibly have found to warrant such a description?

“Are you coming out? I’m dying to show you this.”

Sana wiggled her bottom into the suit and adjusted the crotch, then checked herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She was reasonably happy with what she saw. A devoted runner, she had a slim, athletic figure and short, dirty-blond but healthy hair. Gathering up her clothes, she opened the door. Depositing the clothes carefully on the bed, she walked to the desk.

“Here. Put these on,” he said, handing her a second pair of freshly laundered white gloves. “I got them especially for you.”

“What is it, a book?” Sana asked, once she got her hands into the gloves. She could see an ancient-looking leather-bound volume sitting on the corner of the desk.

“It’s called a codex,” Shawn said. “It’s an example of the first books that superseded the scroll, since you can get more in it and access various portions of the text far easier. What makes it different from a real book, like the Gutenberg Bible, is that it was done completely by hand. Handle it carefully! It’s more than fifteen hundred years old. It had been preserved for more than a millen nium and a half by being sealed in a jar buried in the sand.”

“My word,” Sana said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hold something quite so old for fear it might disintegrate in her hands.

“Open it!” he urged.

Gingerly, Sana folded back the cover. It was stiff, and the binding audibly complained. “What’s the cover made of?”

“It’s kind of a leather sandwich stiffened with layers of papyrus.”

“What are the pages made out of?”

“The pages are all papyrus.”

“And the language?”

“It’s called Coptic, which is kind of a written version of ancient Egyptian using a Greek alphabet.”

“Truly amazing!” Sana said. She was impressed but wondered why Shawn had said it was such an important find for him. Some of the statuary he’d found in Asia Minor seemed far more substantial.

“Can you see that a large section of the book has been torn out?”

“I can. Is that significant?”

“Very much so! Five of the original, individual texts of this particular codex had been roughly removed in the 1940s to sell them in America. Other pages had been rumored to have been removed to start kitchen fires in a fellahin mud hut.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Indeed. Many an academic has cringed at the thought.”

“I also notice that the inside of the front cover has been opened up along its edge.”

“I did that myself very carefully with a steak knife about an hour ago.”

“Was that wise? I mean, considering the age of this thing. I imagine there are more appropriate tools than a steak knife.”

“No, it probably wasn’t wise, but I did it because I couldn’t help myself. At that point I was horribly disappointed with what’s in the codex. I had expected a virtual gold mine, and instead I’ve rescued the equivalent of the output of one of the world’s first copy machines.”

“I don’t think I’m following you,” Sana admitted. She handed the ancient book back to Shawn to absolve herself from responsibility. She pulled off the gloves. His excitement was palpable. She was more than intrigued.

“I’m not surprised.” He took the codex and replaced it to its former position on the corner of the desk. In the middle of the desk, under the glare of both a desk lamp and a floor lamp, were three individual pages held flat by various objects, including a pair of Shawn’s ancient-coin cuff links. The pages were heavily creased from being folded up for thousands of years. It too was papyrus, like the pages in the codex, but it seemed to be older. The edges had blackened to the point of appearing burnt.

“What’s this?” Sana asked, pointing at the papyri sheets. “A letter?” She could see the first page had a possible addressee, the last a signature.

“Ah, the scientific mind immediately homes in on the crux of the matter,” Shawn said with glee. Palms down, fingers spread, he reverently passed his hands over the pages as if worshipping them. “It is indeed a letter, a very special letter written in AD 121, by a septuagenarian bishop of the city of Antioch by the name of Saturninus. It was a reply to a previous letter written to him by a bishop of Alexandria named Basilides.”

“My gosh!” Sana exclaimed. “That’s the beginning of the second century.”

“Quite,” Shawn remarked, “and within a century of Jesus of Nazareth. It was a fractious time for the early Church.”

“Is either man well known?”

“A good question! Basilides is well known among biblical scholars, Saturninus much less so, although I’ve come across references to him on a couple of occasions. As this letter substantiates, Saturninus was a student or an assistant of Simon the Magician.”

“That’s a name I’ve heard in my childhood.”

“No doubt. He was and is the quintessential Sunday-school bad guy, as well as the father of all heresies, at least according to a number of the early Christian Church fathers. In point of fact his attempt to buy the ability to heal from Saint Peter is the origin of the word simony .”

“What about Basilides?”

“He was a very busy man here in Egypt — in Alexandria, to be precise — and a prodigious writer. He’s also given credit as one of the first Gnostic thinkers, particularly for putting a distinctive Christian stamp on Gnosticism by centering his Gnostic theology on Jesus of Nazareth.”

“Help me,” Sana said. “I’ve heard the term Gnosticism, but I wouldn’t be able to define it.”

“Simply speaking, it was a movement that predated Christianity, ultimately merging aspects of pagan religions, Judaism, and then Christianity into a single sect. The name Gnosticism came from the Greek word gnosis, meaning intuitive knowledge. To the Gnostics, knowledge of the divine being was the end-all, and those who had the knowledge believed they had the spark of the divine to the point that people like Simon the Magician actually thought he was, at least partially, divine.”