The Last Gospel Read online

  ‘The time of St Paul,’ Costas murmured. ‘Why we’re here.’

  ‘Right.’ Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa from Egypt. ‘Now it’s possible, just possible, that the opium was shipped along the African coast from Alexandria to Carthage, and then went north to Sicily in our little merchantman.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘I remember the navigational advice in the Mediterranean Pilot from my stint in the US Navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline between Egypt and Tunisia has always been a death trap for sailors, avoided at all costs.’

  ‘Precisely. Ships leaving Alexandria for Rome sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Italy. The most likely scenario for our opium cargo is one of those ships, blown south-west from the Ionian Sea towards Sicily.’

  Costas looked perplexed, then his eyes suddenly lit up. ‘I’ve got you! We’re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve dived on ships’ graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.’ Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel. He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item on to his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of towelling away.

  ‘Let me guess.’ He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. ‘A golden disc covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost city?’

  Jack grinned. ‘Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.’

  Costas raised the last fold and held the object up. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. ‘A sounding lead?’

  ‘You’ve got it. A lead weight tied to the end of a line for sounding depths. Check out the base.’

  Costas carefully held the lead upside down. In the base was a depression about an inch deep, as if the lead had been partly hollowed out like a bell, and below that was a further depression in a distinctive shape. Costas raised his eyes again. ‘A cross?’

  ‘Don’t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of sea-bed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.’

  ‘This came from the wreck below us?’

  Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. ‘My first ever major find from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow sea bed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.’

  ‘You mean like the Nile?’

  Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘What we’re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.’ He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. ‘Now listen to this.’ He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read: ‘“But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.”’

  Costas whistled. ‘The Gospels!’

  ‘The Acts of St Paul, Chapter 27.’ Jack’s eyes were ablaze. ‘And guess what? Directly offshore from where we are now, the bottom slopes off to deep water, but diagonally to the south there’s a sandy plateau extending about three hundred metres out, about forty metres deep.’

  ‘That’s a hundred and twenty feet, twenty fathoms,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘On our last day of diving twenty years ago we did a recce over it, just to see if we’d missed anything,’ Jack said. ‘The very last thing I saw was two lead anchor shanks, unmistakably early Roman types used to weigh down wooden anchors. By the time of our north African amphora wreck, anchors were made of iron, so we knew these must have been lost by an earlier ship that had tried to hold off this coast.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It gets better.’

  ‘I thought it would.’

  Jack read again: ‘ “And casting off the anchors, they left them in the sea, at the same time loosing the bands of the rudders; and hoisting up the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach. But lighting on a place where two seas met, they ran the vessel aground; and the foreship struck and remained unmoveable, but the stern began to break up by the violence of the waves.” ’

  ‘Good God,’ Costas said. ‘The drug chest, the sounding lead. Stored in the forward compartment. What about the stern?’

  ‘Wait for it.’ Jack grinned, and pulled out a folder from the bag. ‘Fast-forward two millennia. August 1953, to be exact. Captain Cousteau and Calypso.’

  ‘I was wondering when they were going to come in to it.’

  ‘It was the clue that brought us here in the first place,’ Jack said. ‘They dived all along this coast. Here’s what the chief diver wrote about this headland. “I saw broken amphoras, concreted into a fold in the cliff, then an iron anchor, concreted to the bottom and apparently in corroded state, with amphora sherds on top.” That’s exactly what we found here, the Roman amphora wreck. But there’s more. On their second dive, they saw “des amphores grecques, en bas profound”.’

  ‘Greek amphoras, in deep water,’ Costas murmured. ‘Any idea where?’

  ‘Straight out from the cleft in the rock behind us,’ Jack said. ‘We reckoned they hit seventy, maybe eighty metres depth.’

  ‘Sounds like Cousteau’s boys,’ Costas said. ‘Let me guess. Compressed air, twin hose regulators, no pressure gauge, no buoyancy system.’

  ‘Back when diving was diving,’ Jack said wistfully. ‘Before mixed gas took all the fun out of it.’

  ‘The danger’s still there, just the threshold’s deeper.’

  ‘Twenty years ago I volunteered to do a bounce dive to find those amphoras, but the team doctor vetoed it. We only had compressed air and were strictly following the US Navy tables, with a depth limit of fifty metres. We had no helicopter, no support ship, and the nearest recompression chamber was a couple of hours away in the US naval base up the coast.’

  Costas gestured pointedly at the two mixed-gas rebreathers on the floor of the boat, and then at the white speck of a ship visible on the horizon, steaming towards them. ‘State-of-the-art deep-diving equipment, and full recompression facilities on board Seaquest II. Modern technology. I rest my case.’ He waved at the battered old diary Jack was holding. ‘Anyway, Greek amphoras. Isn’t that before our period?’

  ‘That’s what we assumed at the time. But something was niggling me, something I couldn’t be sure of until I saw those amphoras with my own eyes.’ Jack picked up a clipboard from the crate and passed it over to Costas. ‘That’s the amphora typology devised by Heinrich Dressel, a German scholar who studied finds from Rome and Pompeii in the nineteenth century. Check out the drawings on the upper left, numbers two to four.’

  ‘The amphoras with the high pointed handles?’

  ‘You’ve got it. Now, in Cousteau’s day, divers id
entified any amphora with those handles as Greek, because that was the shape of wine amphoras known to have been made in classical Greece. But since then we’ve learned that amphoras of that shape were also made in the areas of the west Mediterranean colonized by the Greeks, then later under the Romans when they conquered those areas. We’re talking southern Italy, Sicily, north-east Spain, all major wine-producing regions first developed by the Greeks.’ He passed over a large black and white photograph showing high-handled amphoras leaning against a wall, and Costas peered at it thoughtfully.

  ‘A wine storeroom? A tavern? Pompeii?

  Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘Not Pompeii, but Herculaneum, the other town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. A roadside bar, preserved exactly as it was on 24 August AD 79.’

  Costas was quiet for a moment, then squinted at Jack. ‘Remind me. What was the date of St Paul’s shipwreck?’

  ‘Best guess is spring AD 58, maybe a year or two later.’

  ‘Put me in the picture.’

  ‘A few years after the death of the emperor Claudius, in the reign of Nero. About ten years before the Romans conquer Judaea and steal the Jewish menorah.’

  ‘Ah. I’m with you.’ Costas gave Jack a tired smile, then narrowed his eyes again. ‘Nero. Gross debauchery, throwing Christians to the lions, all that?’

  Jack nodded. ‘That’s one take on the history of the period. But it was also the most prosperous time in ancient history, the height of the Roman Empire. Wine from the rich vineyards of Campania around Vesuvius was being exported in those Greek-style amphoras all round the known world. They’ve even been found in the furthest Roman outposts in southern India, traded for spices and medicines like the opium in that chest. And they’re found in Britain. They’re exactly what you’d expect to find on a large Alexandrian grain ship of this period. According to the New Testament account in the Acts of the Apostles, there were more than two hundred and seventy people on board that ship with St Paul, and diluted wine would have been their staple drink.’

  ‘Last question,’ Costas said. ‘The big one. From what I remember, St Paul’s shipwreck was supposed to have been in Malta. How come Sicily?’

  ‘That’s why it never clicked twenty years ago. Then I did a bit of lateral thinking. Geographically, I mean.’

  ‘You mean you had a way-out hunch.’

  Jack grinned. ‘It’s like this. All we have to go on is the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles. There’s no other account of St Paul’s shipwreck, no way of verifying the story. Right?’

  ‘It’s all about faith.’

  ‘In a way, that’s the nub of it. The Gospels, the New Testament, were a collection of documents chosen by the early Church to represent the ministry of Jesus, or perhaps their view of the ministry of Jesus. Some of the Gospels were written soon after Jesus’ life, by eyewitnesses and contemporaries, others were written later. None of them were written as historical documents as we would understand the term, let alone geographical ones. To those who put the texts together, it was probably a matter of little consequence which island Paul was actually wrecked on.’

  ‘I had all this drummed into me by my Greek Orthodox family. Acts was written by a survivor of the wrecking, by Paul’s companion Luke.’

  Jack nodded. ‘That was what everyone was taught. Acts tells us that Paul was accompanied by two men, Luke from Asia Minor and a Macedonian from Thessaloniki.’

  ‘Aristarchos.’

  ‘I’m preaching to the converted,’ Jack grinned. ‘You should be telling this.’

  ‘I can only give you the bare bones,’ Costas said. ‘After Paul was arrested in Judaea, they joined him on the voyage north from Caesarea to Myra in southern Turkey, where they transferred to an Alexandrian ship destined for Rome.’

  ‘That’s what we’re told,’ Jack said. ‘But we need to stand back from the detail. It goes back to what I said about reading the Gospels as history. That wasn’t their primary purpose. Some scholars now think Acts was composed several decades later by someone else, maybe based on an eyewitness account. And then there are questions over textual transmission. The Gospels went through the same process as all the other classical texts, all those except the fragments we’ve actually found in ancient sites. Sieved, purified, translated, embellished with interpretations and annotations which became part of the text, censored by religious authorities, altered by the whim or negligence of the individual copyist.’

  ‘You’re saying take the details with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘Be circumspect.’

  ‘A favourite word of yours these days.’

  Jack grinned. ‘The earliest surviving fragment we have of Acts dates to about AD 200, almost 150 years after Paul, and it only contains the first part of the story. The earliest version with the wreck dates several hundred years later. It gets translated from Greek to Latin to medieval languages, to seventeenth-century English, goes through numerous scribes and copyists. It makes me very cautious, circumspect, about a detail like the word Melita, whether it even means Malta. Some ancient versions even render it as Mytilene, an island in the Aegean more familiar to Greek copyists of the Gospels.’

  ‘Treasure-hunting 101,’ Costas said solemnly. ‘Always authenticate your map.’

  ‘St Paul’s shipwreck is just about the first time in history that we can hunt a known wreck, but like so many wreck accounts it’s fraught with pitfalls. You have to stand back from it, open your mind to all the possibilities and let them fall into place, not force them towards a foregone conclusion. I think that’s what I’ve been doing over the years since I last dived here, since the idea first began to dawn on me.’

  ‘That’s why you’re an archaeologist, and I’m an engineer,’ Costas said. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘And that’s why I leave robotics and submersibles to you.’ Jack grinned at Costas, then looked towards the eastern horizon. ‘There’s nothing else in Acts to corroborate Malta as the location, and all that happens on the island is that Paul heals some local man. Sicily makes a lot more sense. It’s in the right neck of the woods, a far more likely landfall for a grain ship blown off course in the Ionian Sea by a north-east wind. Acts even mentions Syracuse, just round the headland from us, where Paul and his companions spent several days on their eventual trip to Rome after the wrecking. According to Acts, they hitched a lift on another grain ship which had overwintered in Malta, but I believe that was far more likely to be a ship in the Great Harbour at Syracuse itself.’

  ‘So two thousand years of Biblical scholarship is wrong, and Jack Howard has a hunch and is right?’

  ‘Careful reasoning based on an accumulation of evidence, pointing . . .’

  ‘Pointing unswervingly to one conclusion,’ Costas finished. ‘Yeah, yeah. A hunch.’ He grinned at Jack, then spoke with mock resignation. ‘Okay. You’ve sold me. And now that I look at it, that cleft in the cliff face beside us, your marker for the wreck site. Have you noticed how it also looks like the Greek letter chi? Like a cross?’ Costas grinned. ‘While we’re on the subject of leaps of faith, don’t tell me you’re above a little sign from on high.’

  Jack squinted at the rock, then grinned. ‘Okay. I’ll go with that. Twenty years on, you see things with different eyes.’ He leaned back on his elbows, and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to put all these pieces together.’

  ‘You’ve had a few other projects on your mind.’

  ‘Yes, but this could be the biggest of them all.’ Jack sat up and leaned towards Costas, his face ablaze with excitement. ‘Anything, anything at all, that identifies this shipwreck with St Paul would make it a treasure trove like we’ve never seen before. Nobody has ever found anything so intimately linked with the lives of the evangelists, with the reality behind the Gospels. We’re looking at a time when a few people truly believed in a kingdom of heaven on earth, a dream that pagan religion didn’t offer the common people. A time before churches, before priests, before guilt and confession and inqui
sitions and holy wars. Strip away all that and you go back to the essence of what Jesus had to say, what drew so many to him.’

  ‘I never knew you were so passionate about it.’

  ‘It’s the idea that individuals can take charge of their own destiny and seek beauty and joy on earth. That seems to be about as uplifting as you can get. If we can find something that will draw people back to that, take them back to the essence of the idea and make them reflect on it, then we’ll have done humanity a service.’

  ‘Holy cow, Jack. I thought we were just treasure-hunters.’

  Jack grinned. ‘Archaeology isn’t just about filling up museums.’

  ‘I know. It’s about the hard facts.’

  ‘A shipwreck could be a time capsule of the period like Pompeii and Herculaneum, only with a direct connection to the most potent figures in western history. It would capture the imagination of the world.’

  Costas shifted and stretched. ‘We still have to find it yet. And speaking of excitement, we’ve got company.’ He jerked his head towards the cascade of bubbles now erupting on the surface, and they watched as the two divers came into view a few metres below them. They surfaced simultaneously and both gave the okay signal. Jack noted down the time in the log and then glanced at Costas. ‘This place was a fulcrum of history,’ he continued. ‘Whatever we find, we’d be adding to a story that’s already pretty fantastic. In 415 BC the Athenians landed at this spot to attack Syracuse, a key event in the war with Sparta which almost destroyed Greek civilization. Fast-forward to another world war, July 1943, Operation Husky. My grandfather was here, chief officer of the armed merchant ship Empire Elaine, just inshore from the monitor HMS Erebus as she bombarded the enemy positions above us with fifteen-inch shells.’

  ‘This place must be in your blood,’ Costas said. ‘Seems like a Howard was present at just about every famous naval engagement in British history.’

  ‘If many English families knew their background, they’d be able to say the same.’

  ‘Anything left to see?’