The Gospel Of Judas Read Online Free PDF Page A

lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, the language that anyone with an education would have spoken in those days, the language of commerce and exchange, the language of administrationand law. Jesus would have spoken
Koine
. He would have talked to Pilate in
Koine
.
    Leo had turned the photograph over just to see, to delay the moment of reading, just as one might savour a childhood treat by deliberately putting it off. On the back was a circular stamp, a stylised globe with the title WORLD BIBLE CENTER, JERUSALEM wrapped around the edge like an atmosphere; and a catalogue number.
    Then he had turned back and started to read.
    It was like solving a crossword clue. One word had stood out. One word had given the whole piece away, a single word that occurs a mere four times in the whole of the New Testament:
gennemata
. Offspring. He checked in his concordance, his hands shaking with excitement as he lifted the volume down from the shelf. Then there were a mere three letters of the following word, but there could be little doubt about them either: epsilon-chi-iota. E-Ch-I.
    Echinos
, a hedgehog.
    He had laughed aloud at the thought, laughed to himself in the silence of his room. Offspring of hedgehogs. He had wanted someone with whom he could share the joke, someone who would have laughed with excitement at the whole thing. But there was no one there. Just the institutional sounds outside: the slamming of a door, the labouring of the lift as it moved down to the ground floor, music playing in a nearby room. He almost got up from his desk and ran to the door to call someone, anyone to share his emotion, but he didn’t.
    It wasn’t
echinos
of course; it was
echidnon
. Vipers. Offspring of vipers.
    The rest had been easy.
    ‘I suppose it was what I’d been hoping for all my life,’ he told Madeleine. ‘Concrete evidence that the gospels, at leastthe source of the gospels pre-dates the Jewish War, and that therefore they contain genuine eyewitness accounts.’
    ‘But surely that’s obvious.’
    ‘But surely nothing at all. You know what the name Jesus actually
means
?’
    ‘Isn’t it just a name?’
    He shook his head. ‘In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings. Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, Yehoshua and it means
God is salvation
. So you can see it’s easy enough to explain Jesus away as just the personification of faith in God, not a historical figure at all. If the earliest manuscripts only come from the first century, if the gospels themselves were written that late – after Paul’s ministry, let’s say – then it’s easy to make the kind of claim that you hear often enough, that Christ was a construct of the early Church, a mythic figure given some kind of historical identity in order to help simple people believe.’
    ‘And you’ve disproved it all.’
    He shrugged. ‘It was clear from the start that these pieces were early. Second century for sure. You see those characters?’ She watched and listened with that focus that she had, the moment when the bright and ironical became focused as though by a lens. ‘What we call
zierstil
, decorated style. See the gamma? Second century at least. And then there’s the use of the iota adscript which died out in the second century, and suddenly I thought, my God, this might be older than the Rylands fragment.’ He looked round from the picture. ‘And I realised that this find was sensational. The earliest New Testament text from the Holy Land, probably the earliest in existence.’
    *     *     *
    The images came over the telephone lines. Every few days he logged on to the Bible Center’s server and found the pictures waiting for him, two images for each fragment along with a catalogue number, nothing more. One image would be high resolution and time-consuming to download. The other would be a smaller version to give the general idea of things. The ragged scraps would unfurl themselves on to the screen of his