The Last Gospel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 identified 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