The Last Templar - Страница 54

He was pretty sure that the big Land Cruiser had been crippled by Vance's spirited charge. On foot, whoever had attacked them would still be hours away; in a vehicle, they could at least be heard approaching. As he watched the last glints of sunlight melt away behind the mountains, Reilly hoped the descending darkness would provide them with some measure of cover. There would be no campfires tonight.

He'd left Vance by die side of the pickup, having tied his hands behind his back. The rope was secured to the truck. A quick search of the pickup had uncovered no hidden weapons, providing some basic comforts instead, in the form of a small gas cooker and some canned food. They found no clothes to change into. He and Tess would have to stay in their wetsuits for the time being.

Reilly joined Tess at the water's edge, kneeling down for a much needed drink before settling onto a large rock next to her. His mind was a jumble of concerns and fears, all jostling for attention. He had accomplished what he had set out to do; he just had to bring Vance safely back to the United States to face justice. There was little chance his prisoner could be spirited out of the country quietly. Local crimes had been committed, people had been killed. Reilly thought ahead, irked by the prospect of inevitably messy extradition proceedings with the Turkish authorities. More pressingly, he had to get them all off the mountain and back to the coast safely. Whoever had shot at them was clearly in a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later frame of mind, while they were unarmed, had no radio, and were out of cell-phone range.

As salient as those concerns were, they quickly took a backseat to the bigger issue that was hounding him. And from the uncertain look on her face, he could see that Tess was gripped by the same concerns.

"I always wondered how Howard Carter must have felt when he found King Tut's tomb," she finally said, somberly.

"I'm guessing he had a better time."

"I'm not so sure. He did have a curse to contend with, remember?" A faint smile crossed her features as she brightened up a bit, momentarily lifting his spirits. But it was still there. That pile of bricks pressing down on the pit of his stomach. It wasn't about to go away, and he couldn't ignore it anymore. He had to understand more clearly what they had gotten themselves into.

Steeling himself, he got up and walked over to Vance. Tess followed, close by. He knelt down by the tied man, checking the rope around his wrists. Vance just stared at him quietly. He seemed oddly at peace with his situation. Reilly frowned inwardly as he debated whether or not to go into it, but decided he couldn't avoid it.

"I need to know something," he ventured tersely. "When you said 'the truth about this fairy tale' . . .

what were you talking about? What do you think they hid on the Falcon Templet"

Vance lifted his head, his gray eyes piercing with clarity. "I'm not entirely sure, but whatever it is, I suspect it's something that might not be too easy for you to accept."

"Let me worry about that," Reilly shot back.

Vance seemed to consider his words carefully. "The problem is that like most true believers, you've never stopped to think of the difference between faith and fact, the difference between the Jesus Christ of faith and the factual Jesus of history, between truth . . . and fiction."

Reilly was unmoved by the mocking he thought he detected in Vance's tone. "I'm not sure I've ever needed to."

"And yet you're happy to believe everything that's in the Bible, right? I mean, you do believe in all that stuff, don't you? The miracles, the fact that He walked on water, that He cured a blind man . . .

that He came back from the dead?"

"Of course, I do."

A faint smile crossed Vance's lips. "Okay. So let me ask you this. How much do you know about the origin of what you're reading? Do you know who actually wrote the Bible—the one you're familiar with, the New Testament?"

Reilly was far from certain. "You're talking about the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?"

"Yes. How did they come about? Let's start with something basic. When they were written, for instance?"

Reilly felt an invisible weight pressing down on him. "I don't know . . . they were His disciples, so I guess shortly after His death?"

Vance glanced at Tess and let out a demeaning chortle. His discomforting gaze settled on Reilly again. "I shouldn't really be surprised, but it's amazing, isn't it? Over a billion people out there, worshipping these writings, accepting every word as God's own wisdom, slaughtering each other over them, and all of it without having die vaguest notion of where these scriptures really come from."

Reilly felt a rising anger. Vance's haughty tone wasn't helping either. "It's the Bible. It's been around long enough ..."

Vance pursed his lips and shook his head gently, quickly dismissing it. "And I suppose that makes it all true, then, does it?" He leaned back, his eyes wandering off into the distance. "I was like you, once. I didn't question things. I took them on as a matter of . . . faith. I can tell you, though . . . once you start digging for the truth ..." His gaze settled onto Reilly again, darkening visibly. "It's not a pretty picture."

Chapter 67

"What you need to realize," Vance explained, "is that the early days of Christianity are just one big scholarly black spot, when it comes to verifiable, documented facts. But if there isn't much we can definitely say did happen in the Holy Land almost two thousand years ago, there's one thing we do know: none of the four gospels that make up the New Testament was written by contemporaries of Jesus. Which," he remarked as he noted Reilly's reaction, "never fails to take followers of the faith, like you, by surprise.

"The earliest of the four," he clarified, "the Gospel of Mark—or rather, the one we refer to as the Gospel of Mark, since we don't even really know who wrote it, as it was common practice at that time to attribute written works to famous people—is thought to have been written at least forty years after Jesus's death. That's forty years without CNN, without videotaped interviews, without a Google search turning up scores of eyewitness reports from those who actually knew Him. So at best, what we're talking about here are stories that were passed on by word of mouth, over forty years, without any written record. So you tell me, Agent Reilly—if you were running an investigation, how accurate would you consider such evidence, after forty years of primitive, uneducated, superstitious people telling stories around their campfires?"

Reilly didn't have time to answer, as Vance quickly continued. "Far more troubling, if you ask me, is the story of how these particular four gospels actually came to be included in the New Testament.

You see, over the two hundred years following the writing of the Gospel of Mark, we know that many other gospels were written, with all kinds of tales about Jesus's life. As the early movement grew more popular and spread among the scattered communities, stories of Jesus's life took on local flavors that were influenced by the particular circumstances of each community. Dozens of different gospels were floating around, often at odds with one another. We know this for a fact because, in December 1945, some Arab peasants were digging for fertilizer in the Jabal al-Tarif mountains of Upper Egypt, close to the town of Nag Hammadi, and they discovered an earthenware jar almost six feet high. At first, they hesitated to break it, fearful that a djinn—an evil spirit—could be trapped inside. But they did break into it, hoping to find gold instead, and that led to one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of all time: inside the jar were thirteen papyrus books, bound in tooled gazelle leather. The peasants, unfortunately, didn't realize the value of what they found, and some of the books and the loose papyrus leaves went up in flames in the ovens of their homes.

Other pages were lost as the documents found their way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. What did survive, though, were fifty-two texts that are still the subject of great controversy among biblical scholars, as these writings—commonly referred to as the Gnostic Gospels— refer to sayings and beliefs of Jesus that are at odds with those of the New Testament."

"Gnostic?" Reilly asked. "Like the Cathars?"

Vance smiled. "Precisely," he nodded. "Among the texts found at Nag Hammadi was die Gospel of Thomas, which identifies itself as a secret gospel and opens with the line: 'These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.' His twin. And there's more. Bound in the same volume with it was the Gospel of Philip, which openly describes Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene as an intimate one. Mary has her own text—the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene is regarded as a disciple and a leader of a Christian group.

There's also the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the secret book of John. There's the Gospel of Truth, with its distinctly Buddhist undertones . . . the list goes on.

"A common thread in all these gospels," he continued, "apart from attributing acts and words to Jesus that are pretty different from those in the gospels of the New Testament, is that they considered common Christian beliefs, like the virgin birth and the Resurrection, to be naive delusions. Even worse, these writings were also uniformly gnostic, because, although they refer to Jesus and His disciples, the message they conveyed was that to know oneself, at the deepest level, was also to know God—that is, by looking within oneself to find the sources of joy, sorrow, love, and hate, one would find God."