The Last Gospel Read Online Free PDF

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.