The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘Rich volcanic soil, perfect for vineyards.’

  ‘And a lot of Greek influence,’ Jack said. ‘Even after the Romans took over in the fourth and third centuries BC, making this place a kind of Costa del Sol for the wealthy, Greek culture stayed strong. People think of Pompeii and Herculaneum as the quintessential Roman towns, but actually they existed for centuries before the Romans arrived. They were still highly cosmopolitan in AD 79, with people speaking Greek and local dialects as well as Latin. And the Bay of Naples continued to be the first port of call for all things from the east, not just Greece but also the Near East and Egypt and beyond, exotic trade goods, new art styles, foreign emissaries, new ideas in philosophy and religion.’

  ‘Now fill me in on the volcano,’ Costas said.

  Jack tapped the computer keyboard and the Goethe watercolour was replaced by a black-and-white photograph showing a distant view of a volcano erupting, a great plume of rolling black cloud hanging like a malign genie over the city. ‘March 1944, during the Second World War,’ Jack said. ‘Fastforward nine months from the Allied landings in Sicily, where we’ve just been diving. A few months after the liberation of Naples, while the Allies were still slogging towards Rome. The most recent major eruption of Vesuvius.’

  Costas whistled. ‘Looks like the gods of war unleashed hell.’

  ‘That’s what people thought at the time, but fortunately it was just an immense venting of gas and ash and then the fissure closed up. Since then there’s been nothing as dramatic, though there was a bad earthquake in 1980 that killed several thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. There’s a lot of concern about the recent seismic disturbances.’

  ‘Three weeks ago.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘And in ancient times?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, the eruption of AD 79?’

  Jack tapped again, and another painting appeared. ‘This is the only known Roman image of Vesuvius, found on a wall painting in Pompeii. It’s fanciful, with the god of wine laden with grapes to the left, but you can see the mountain’s rich with vegetation and vineyards growing up the slopes. Vesuvius had been completely dormant since the Bronze Age, and the Romans only knew of it as an incredibly bountiful place, with rich soils that produced some of the best wines anywhere. The eruption in AD 79 was a massive shock, psychological as well as physical. Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, the villas around the volcano, were all gone for ever, though eventually life reasserted itself in Campania. The psychological effects were probably more damaging, reverberating down the centuries. It’s hard to make a modern analogy, but imagine if the San Andreas fault split open destroying Hollywood and devastating Los Angeles. Many would see it as the coming apocalypse.’

  ‘So they really had no clue about what was going to happen?’

  ‘The clues were there, where we’re headed now, but they had no reason to link them with the mountain.’

  Jack pulled the helicopter in a wide arc to the north, and Costas peered down at a barren landscape. ‘What’s that place?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted you to see. We’re over the north-west shore of the Bay of Naples, about twenty-five kilometres west of Vesuvius. This was the one area of extensive volcanic activity in the Roman period, though even Pliny never made the connection with Vesuvius. The Phlegraean Fields, the fields of fire. Listen to this. It’s from the Aeneid by Virgil, Rome’s national poet. I’ve got the text on screen. “There was a deep rugged cave, stupendous and yawning wide, protected by a lake of black water and the glooming forest. Over this lake no birds could wing a straight course without harm, so poisonous the breath which streamed up from those black jaws and rose to the vault of sky.” Now look outside. That’s Lake Avernus, which means birdless. Over there you can see the most active crater today, Sulfaterra. That’s what Virgil was on about. And by the coast you can just make out the overgrown acropolis of ancient Cumae, one of the first places the Greeks settled.’

  ‘Where the Sibyl hung out.’

  ‘Literally. According to some accounts, she was suspended in a cage in the back of her cave, never fully visible and always wreathed in smoke.’

  ‘High in more ways than one.’

  Jack grinned. ‘In the Roman period, the Phlegraean Fields was a big tourist attraction, much more so than it is now. The entrance to the underworld, a place that reeked of fire and brimstone. People came here to see the tomb of Virgil, buried beside the road from Naples. And the Sibyl was still here too, at least before the eruption. Augustus consulted her, and other emperors too. Claudius went to the Sibyl,’ he added.

  ‘So the Greek colonists brought the first Sibyl with them?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  Costas groaned. ‘Facts, Jack. Facts.’

  ‘Supposedly there were thirteen Sibyls across the Greek world, though the earliest references suggest they derived from the idea of a single all-seeing prophetess. The site of Cumae is one of the few places where archaeology adds to the picture. In the 1930s, an extraordinary underground grotto came to light, exactly as the Romans described the cave of the Sibyl. It’s a trapezoidal corridor almost fifty metres long, lit by side galleries and ending in a rectangular chamber, all hewn out of the rock. In Virgil’s Aeneid, this was where the Trojan hero Aeneas consulted the Sibyl, to ask whether his colony in Italy would one day become the Roman Empire. And this was where she took him down into the underworld, to see his father Anchises.’

  Costas pointed to the steaming crater below them. ‘You mean the fields of fire, the Phlegraean Fields?’

  ‘There were probably open volcanic vents here in antiquity. It must have been a vision of Dante’s inferno if there ever was one,’ Jack said. ‘People are always drawn to these places, creation and destruction together in one terrifying cauldron. It was the perfect location for the Sibyl, who must have seemed like an apparition from the underworld itself. Supplicants were probably led through the fumaroles and boiling mud, so would have been shaking with fear even before they stood in front of her cave.’

  ‘If my memory serves me, Aeneas was a Trojan prince escaping from the Trojan War, at the end of the Bronze Age,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘That means Virgil thought the Sibyl was here already, way before the Greeks or the Romans arrived.’

  ‘All of the mythology we know today associated with the Cumaean Sibyl was Greek, especially her relationship with the god Apollo. But this may have been what the Greeks brought with them, and layered on to a goddess or prophetess who already existed in prehistoric Italy. The Greeks and the Romans often fused their gods with similar native gods, even as far away as Britain.’

  ‘So there may have been a much older female deity here.’

  ‘Our friend Katya has a theory about that. Her team at the Palaeographic Institute in Moscow are almost ready to publish the Atlantis symbols. You remember the Neolithic mother goddess of Atlantis?’

  ‘Could hardly forget her. I’ve still got the bruises.’

  ‘Well, we already knew that corpulent female figurines were being worshipped across Europe at the end of the Ice Age, at least to the time of the first farmers. For years archaeologists have speculated about a prehistoric cult of the mother goddess, a cult that crossed boundaries between tribes and peoples. Well, Katya thinks the survival of that cult owes everything to a powerful priesthood, the men and women who led the first farmers west, whose descendants preserved the cult through the Bronze Age and to the classical period. She even thinks the druids of north-west Europe were connected.’

  ‘I remember,’ Costas murmured. ‘From Atlantis. The wizards with conical hats. Lords of the Rings.’

  ‘The idea of Tolkien’s Gandalf, like Merlin in the King Arthur stories, may ultimately derive from the same tradition,’ Jack said. ‘Men with supposedly supernatural powers who could pass from one kingdom to the next, who knew no borders. Healers, mediators, prophets.’

  Costas peered down again at the Phlegraean Fields. ‘Seems that every culture needs them,’ he m
urmured.

  ‘And the mother goddess also survived in different guises. The Roman goddess Ceres, the Greek Demeter. Magna Mater, the Great Mother.’

  ‘Every new culture adds its own layer of paint, but it’s the same old statue underneath.’

  ‘And the same allure, the same mystery. I’ve just been giving you the facts as we know them. Part of me can’t help thinking that there was something about the Sibyls that defies rational explanation, something so powerful that it allowed them to maintain the mystique over centuries, so alluring that it even drew in the Romans, the most rational and practical of peoples. Something the Sibyls themselves believed in.’

  ‘Don’t go all supernatural on me, Jack.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting it. But if the Sibyls believed in themselves, and if others with the power to shape the world, emperors, believed in them, then it becomes something we have to take seriously.’

  Costas grunted, then peered down through his visor at the indented shoreline that was now directly beneath them. ‘What’s that place now?’

  ‘Pozzuoli. Roman Puteoli.’

  ‘So that was where St Paul was heading? After Sicily, after surviving the wreck?’

  ‘According to the Acts of the Apostles, he and his companions sailed up from Syracuse on a ship of Alexandria, then stopped at Puteoli. That’s the ancient Roman grain port you can see now. It complements the naval port beside it at Misenum.’ Jack tapped the screen. ‘The words are: “We found brethren there, and were intreated to tarry with them seven days.’

  ‘Brethren? Fellow Christians? What about persecution?’

  Jack jerked his head to the north. ‘The Phlegraean Fields. Perfect hideaway. Probably always a place for outcasts, beggars, misfits.’

  ‘And then Paul goes to Rome. Where Nero had him beheaded.’

  ‘The New Testament doesn’t actually say so, but that’s the tradition.’

  ‘Might have been better for him if he’d gone down in that shipwreck after all.’

  ‘If that had happened, then western history might have been utterly different.’ Jack banked the helicopter to starboard, then nosed it towards the smudge on the eastern shore of the bay. ‘We might have ended up worshipping Isis, Mithras, or even the great mother goddess.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Jack adjusted the throttle, glanced at the air traffic screen and flicked on the autopilot. ‘That shipwreck really was one of the pivotal events of history, not because of what was lost but because of who survived. Remember, Jesus’ ministry in his lifetime was confined to Judaea, mainly his home province of Galilee. The idea that his word should spread to Jewish communities abroad, and then to non-Jews, only seems to have taken hold after his death. Paul was one of the first generation of missionaries, of proselytizers. Without him, many of those who proved receptive to Christianity might have been seduced by one of the other cults on offer. At the time we’re talking about, the spread of the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana meant that the Mediterranean world was awash with new cults, new religious ideas, some brought back by soldiers from newly conquered lands, others brought by sailors to ports such as Misenum and Puteoli. The Egyptian goddess Isis, the Persian god Mithras, the ancient mother goddess, any one of these could have provided the kernel of a monotheistic religion, giving the common people something they craved in the face of all the gods and rituals of Greece and Rome. If one of those religions had truly taken hold, it might have been enough to repel Christianity.’

  ‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘And I thought with the crucifixion it was all a done deal.’

  ‘That was really just the beginning,’ Jack said. ‘And the amazing thing is, there’s no indication that Paul ever met Jesus in life. Paul was a Jew from Asia Minor who had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, but only after the crucifixion. And yet he may have been responsible more than any other for the foundation of the Church as we know it. The spread of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as the Messiah, the meaning of the Greek word Christos, all seem to owe a huge amount to his teaching. The word Christian probably first appears about the time of his travels, and the emphasis on the cross. It’s as if, a generation after Jesus’ death, after people’s personal experience of him, the focus had shifted from Jesus the man to the risen Jesus, almost as if he’d come to be seen as a god, been put on a pedestal.’

  ‘That’s what people would have understood,’ Costas said. ‘No one worships a man.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jack said. ‘It was a world where emperors were deified after their death, where the imperial cult was a huge unifying factor in the Roman Empire. And like all good missionaries, Paul was a shrewd operator who knew what he had to do to get the word across, the compromises and incorporation of age-old ways of thinking and seeing the world he would have thought necessary to get the light to shine through.’

  ‘So you’re saying this is the place where it all took hold, the Bay of Naples?’

  ‘The Acts of the Apostles suggest that there were followers of Jesus already here when Paul arrived in the late fifties AD, only twenty-odd years after the crucifixion. But Paul may have been responsible for making them truly Christian, for turning their thoughts from the message of Jesus, the imminent kingdom of heaven, to Christ himself, the Messiah. This is the place where Paul may have created the first western Church, the first organized worship, maybe somewhere hidden out there among the craters and the sulphur of the Phlegraean Fields. Taught them what they should believe, how they should live. Given them the Gospel.’

  ‘I wonder how much of it was the original one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Paul didn’t know Jesus in life, had never met him. And Jesus never wrote anything down, right? It makes you wonder.’

  ‘Paul claimed to have had a vision, to have seen the risen Christ.’

  ‘I grew up with all this stuff, remember? Greek Orthodox. I loved the beauty of it, the rituals. But I’m just a nuts-and-bolts man, Jack. If we can follow a trail of hard facts, then I’m good with it. This early Christianity stuff is like looking through one of those kids’ kaleidoscope tubes, endlessly shifting lenses and prisms. I want facts, hard data, stuff written by those who were there at the time, texts that have never been tampered with. As far as I can tell, the only hard facts we have are those names scratched on that amphora we found yesterday at the bottom of the Mediterranean.’

  ‘I hear you.’ Jack grinned, and flipped off the autopilot. ‘Speculation out, facts in.’

  ‘I wonder what the old Sibyl would have thought of it all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Christianity. Followers of a new religion, gathering here under her very nose.’

  ‘Okay. Final bit of speculation,’ Jack said. ‘Hard facts first. By the late Roman period, Cumae had become a focus for Christian worship. The temples were converted to churches, the cave of the Sibyl was reused for burials. The place is riddled with Christian tombs, almost like a catacomb.’

  ‘And the speculation? I’ll allow you.’

  ‘There’s a long-standing Christian tradition that the Sibyl foretold the coming of Christ. In Virgil’s Eclogues, poems written about a hundred years before Vesuvius erupted, we’re told of being at the end of the last age predicted by Cumae’s Sibyl, and of a boy’s birth preceding a golden age. Later Christians read this as a Messianic prophecy. And then there’s the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, a medieval hymn used in the Catholic requiem mass until 1970. I’ve just been looking at it again, while you were asleep. The first lines are “Dies irae! Dies illa Solvet saeclum in favilla teste David cum Sibylla! Day of wrath and terror looming! Heaven and earth to ash consuming, David’s word and Sibyl’s truth foredooming!” It’s usually thought to be medieval, thirteenth century, but there may be an ancient source behind it, one that’s now lost to us.’

  ‘The Sibyl would certainly have had her ear to the ground, in that cave,’ Costas said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, that verse all sounds pre
tty apocalyptic,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, heaven and earth to ash consuming. That sounds like a volcanic eruption to me.’

  ‘Pure speculation.’ Jack smiled at Costas, then put his hands on the helicopter controls. He stared out of the window, thinking hard. It was possible, just possible, that the Sibyl knew something big was about to happen. There had been a catastrophic earthquake a few years before, in AD 62, bad enough to topple much of Pompeii. Maybe creating the Sibylline prophecies involved keeping a close eye on the Phlegraean Fields, divination and augury based on all the changing moods of the underworld. It suddenly seemed plausible. That mystique, that power, based on knowledge that few others had, on hard science. Jack turned back to Costas. ‘The Sibyl may have known her days were numbered. Already she was becoming a curio, a tourist attraction. Only a few supplicants were now coming seeking utterances, with few of the gifts and payments that had sustained the oracle in the past. And she had a pretty good idea where Vesuvius was heading.’

  ‘And what better way to go than with a bang,’ Costas added.

  ‘Precisely. Maybe the Sibyl fed this idea to the Christians who lived here, hung out in the Phlegraean Fields. There’s no clear indication that Jesus’ teaching had the kingdom of heaven preceded by an apocalypse, even though this idea has gripped Christians over the centuries. Maybe it has its origins here, in the Christians who may have perished in the inferno of AD 79. I hate to think what was running through their minds in those final moments. When Paul had brought the Gospel to them twenty years before, I doubt whether they envisaged the end being a pyroclastic flow followed by incineration.’

  ‘Speculation built on speculation, Jack.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Jack grinned, and brought the Lynx out of its circling pattern and on to a course due east, along the coast towards the rising sun. ‘Time to find some hard facts. We’re coming inbound.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Costas flipped down his designer sunglasses and stared to the east. ‘And speaking of fire and brimstone, I’m seeing a volcano dead ahead.’