The Messiah Secret

‘I’m not coming back here,’ he said, ‘and nor are my men, so we need to find out what the hell is inside this, and then leave. And, Donovan, if it’s what you believe it is, then we’ll be taking charge of it until you make the final payment. And the price has just gone up. If this really is a billion-dollar resource, like you just said, then I’m charging you five million for delivery, plus expenses.’

‘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.

67

‘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.