The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  Jack took out a photograph from his bag, and handed it to Costas. ‘Where it gets us,’ he said excitedly, ‘is back to the time of Boudica.’

  ‘Ah,’ Costas murmured. ‘Got you. Not drainage pipes. Roman amphoras.’

  ‘More than just amphoras,’ Jack said excitedly. ‘Much more. Intact amphoras by themselves would be a fantastic find, but it’s the context that counts. Think of where we are.’

  ‘The Roman amphitheatre?’ Costas said. ‘A bar, an ancient tavern like the one we saw at Herculaneum?’

  ‘Good guess,’ Jack said. ‘But that picture’s from a place called Sheepen. It shows the amphoras exactly as archaeologists found them. Intact wine amphoras, five of them in a row, along with drinking cups and other goods. They were in a grave.’

  ‘A Roman grave?’ Costas said.

  Jack shook his head. ‘Not Roman. Remember what I said about the Celtic taste for wine? Imported wine had prestige value, a sign of wealth and status. No, the Sheepen amphoras were in the grave of a Celtic nobleman, a warrior.’ Jack suddenly felt exuberant. ‘All those years ago, when I was a boy, I knew I was on to something really big when I came to the Guildhall site. I just had a hunch. I thought it was the amphitheatre, when they found it years later. But now this, something else, maybe even more extraordinary. I wish my grandmother were here now. Wherever else this trail leads us, this could be another dream of mine realised.’

  Costas looked at the photo, then at the bricked-up wall in front of them. He started to speak, but suddenly stopped, transfixed. He looked at the photo again, then at Jack. ‘Holy cow,’ he said weakly.

  Jack looked at him, and nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That goddess. Andraste,’ Costas whispered.

  Jack nodded, wordlessly.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jeremy said.

  Jack looked at his watch. ‘If everything goes according to schedule, the van with the equipment should be outside in an hour. By then the concert upstairs will be over and we’ll be able to get all the gear in discreetly, if the church people agree.’

  ‘I’ve just got one more guy to talk to, but we’ll be good to go,’ Jeremy said, eyeing Costas, who gave a thumbs-up.

  ‘We’re not taking any chances,’ Jack said. ‘Full kit. We might be going below the water table, and who knows what else is down there. I’m not even going to tackle that wall until we’re ready. Meanwhile, I might just go up and listen to the music.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Costas said. ‘I still need to get a few things straight. A few big things. Like how Christianity fits into all this warrior queen stuff.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jeremy said, pushing up his spectacles and peering at Costas. ‘If it’s early Christianity in Britain, it’s one of my areas of interest. Fire away.’

  ‘Before meeting you this morning we went to the British Library,’ Costas said. ‘Jack needed to check some source material on this church, and while he was busy I visited the display of ancient manuscripts. Incredible stuff. I saw one of the Bibles brought by St Augustine to Britain, in AD 597. That’s almost two hundred years after the Romans left Britain. That’s where I’m confused. I thought Augustine was the one who brought Christianity to Britain. I thought, hold on, how can there be Christians in Roman Britain?’

  Jeremy leaned forward from where he was sitting against the wall. ‘That’s a common misconception. And it’s what the Anglo-Saxon Church historians would have liked you to believe, even the big names like Bede.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘The Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana, was really the Church of the Anglo-Saxons. It traced its origins to the mission of Augustine, who supposedly brought Christianity to the pagan population of Britain well after the Romans had left. It was a political tool, intimately bound up with Anglo-Saxon kingship and with the power of Rome. But even the Anglo-Saxon historians knew there had been Christianity in Britain before that, when the Romans had ruled.’

  ‘The Ecclesia Britannorum,’ Jack murmured. ‘The Church of the Britons. The Celtic Church.’

  ‘To get a handle on it, you have to go to Gildas,’ Jeremy said. ‘A British monk who lived in the early sixth century, about a hundred years after the Romans left, a couple of generations before Augustine arrived. Gildas is just about the only Briton we know about who may have been alive at the time of King Arthur, probably a British warlord fighting the Anglo-Saxon invaders at that time.’

  ‘Sounds like the original Friar Tuck,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘His book’s called De Excidio Britonum, The Ruin of Britain. It was written in Latin, but I’ve got a translation.’ Jack delved into his bag, and brought out a scuffed blue and grey book with a chi-rho symbol on the front. ‘It’s a rant about how the kings who ruled Britain after the Romans had failed in their Christian duty. I’ve got it because Gildas mentions Boudica. It was a present from my grandmother when I was a boy.’

  ‘Gildas called Boudica a deceitful lioness,’ Jeremy said, grinning.

  ‘That’s all he says, but it suggests that the memory of her rebellion lingered on, even in a churchman who knew virtually nothing of Roman history, and little of Christian history for that matter.’

  ‘But he gives us the first ever account of the founding of the British Church, the Celtic Church in the time of the Romans,’ Jeremy said.

  Jack nodded, and turned the page. ‘Here it is.’ He read it aloud: ‘ “Meanwhile, to an island numb with chill ice and far removed, as in a remote nook of the world, from the visible sun, Christ made a present of his rays, that is, his precepts, Christ the true sun, which shows its dazzling brilliance to the entire earth, not from the temporal firmament merely, but from the highest citadel of heaven, that goes beyond all time. This happened first, as we know, in the last years of the emperor Tiberius, at a time when Christ’s religion was being propagated without hindrance; for, against the wishes of the Senate, the emperor threatened the death penalty for informers against soldiers of God.” ’

  ‘At least he got the weather right,’ Costas grumbled. ‘So what’s he on about? The emperor Tiberius?’

  ‘The Roman emperor at the time of the crucifixion,’ Jeremy said.

  Jack closed the book. ‘Tiberius was Claudius’ uncle, ruled Rome from AD 14 to 37. Gildas seems to think that Tiberius was himself a Christian, at odds with a pagan Senate. It’s all pretty garbled and probably an anachronism, referring to the problems the Christian emperors had with the pagan Senate in the fourth century AD, after Constantine the Great had made Christianity the state religion. There’s no other indication anywhere that Tiberius was a Christian. But what we’ve found in the last few days, in Herculaneum, in Rome, has set me thinking.’

  ‘About others in Rome who knew of Jesus of Nazareth,’ Jeremy murmured.

  ‘The British Church, the Celtic Church of the Roman period, has left no written records,’ Jack replied. ‘If there ever were any, they would almost certainly have been destroyed by the Anglo-Saxons. But was Gildas recounting a distant truth, a folk memory perhaps, a secret passed on by word of mouth among followers of the British Church for more than five centuries? Was he telling us that there had indeed been a Christian emperor very early on, or an emperor well disposed towards Christians? Not Tiberius, but another emperor who had been alive at the time of Christ?’

  ‘Claudius!’ Costas exclaimed.

  ‘It’s just possible.’ Jack was animated, and gesticulated as he spoke. ‘By the time of Gildas, centuries later, the true identity of the emperor could have been confused. Claudius would have been remembered as the invader of Britain, as the deified emperor worshipped in the temple at Colchester. A pretty unlikely Christian. But Gildas would have known of Tiberius from the Gospels, as the emperor who had presided over the death of Jesus. To Gildas, it might have seemed the ultimate triumph of Christianity to suggest that Tiberius himself was a convert. A pretty extravagant fiction, but Gildas lived at a time when many fanciful additions were being made to the story of events surrounding the life
of Christ.’

  ‘And he’s talking about Britain,’ Costas said.

  ‘Gildas was implying that Christianity came to Britain very early on, in the first century AD,’ Jeremy said. ‘He’s even implying that the emperor himself brought it, in person. That’s what’s really fascinating. It’s only through being here ourselves, on the trail of an emperor, that those lines of Gildas suddenly take on a new significance, a real authority. His De Excidio Britonum was exclusively a book on Britain, not some wider history.’

  ‘What’s the other evidence for early Christianity here?’ Costas said. ‘From archaeology, I mean?’

  ‘Just like in the Mediterranean region,’ Jack replied. ‘Incredibly elusive until the second century, and it’s not until the fourth century that you start to see churches, burials, overt symbols of Christianity, after it becomes the state religion. But early Christianity was a religion of the word, not of idols and temples. It was secretive, and often persecuted. If it wasn’t for the Gospels and a few Roman sources, we’d know nothing at all about Christianity in the first century AD. Remember our shipwreck off Sicily? That scratched chi-rho symbol was the only overt evidence we saw there of Christianity, yet we’re talking about the ship of St Paul, one of the key episodes in early Christian history.’

  ‘And remember who we’re looking at in early Roman Britain,’ Jeremy added pensively. ‘There were the immigrants, traders and soldiers who may well have brought the idea of Christianity with them, and may have come to worship Christ as others did Mithras or Isis. But the majority of the population were natives, Romanized to some degree but retaining much of their Celtic way of life and customs. Their religion has left almost no archaeological trace. These were not people who were inclined to build temples and altars or to make statues of their gods. Archaeology was never going to tell us much.’

  ‘Okay.’ Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘But if there was Christianity in early Roman Britain, why would the Anglo-Saxon Church want to deny it? I mean, wouldn’t it have been something to celebrate, that their religion had been in place hundreds of years before?’

  ‘But it wasn’t their religion,’ Jeremy said quietly.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The time of Gildas, the time of King Arthur, wasn’t just a formative period in the political genesis of Britain,’ Jeremy said. ‘It was also a time when a conflict within the Christian communities of Britain first began to play out in a big way. Everyone knows about King Henry the Eighth, his break with the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. But the roots of the English Reformation under Henry go way back to this period, to the time when the British Church stood up against Rome and proclaimed their direct connection to the Holy Land, to Jesus the man.’

  ‘The Pelagian heresy,’ Jack murmured.

  Jeremy nodded. ‘A lot of the Church schisms are obscure, but this one was straightforward, a really profound one. It went right to the heart of Christian belief. It also went right to the heart of the Church as an institution. It frightened a lot of those in power in Rome. It still does.’

  ‘Pelagian?’ Costas said.

  ‘Pelagius was another monk in Britain, earlier than Gildas, possibly Irish by birth, born about AD 360, when the Romans were still in control of Britain. By Pelagius’ time the Roman Empire had been officially Christian for several decades, since the conversion of Constantine the Great, and efforts were being made to establish the Roman Church in Britain. Pelagius himself went to study in Rome, but was very disturbed by what he saw there. He came into direct conflict with one of the powerhouses of the Roman Church.’

  ‘St Augustine of Hippo,’ Jack said.

  ‘Author of the Confessions and the City of God. The earlier Augustine, not the one who brought the Roman Church to Britain, the one whose bible you saw in the British Library, Costas. Augustine of Hippo came to believe in the concept of predestination, that Christians were utterly dependent on divine grace, on the favour of God. In his view, the kingdom of heaven could only be sought through the Church, not by free volition. It was a theological doctrine, but one with huge practical benefits for the Roman Church, for the newly Christian state.’

  ‘Domination, control,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘It made believers subservient to the Church, as the conduit of divine grace. It made the state stronger, more able to control the masses. Church and state were fused together as an unassailable powerhouse, and the stage was set for the medieval European world.’

  ‘But Pelagius was having none of that,’ Jack said.

  ‘Pelagius probably thought of himself as a member of the original Christian community which existed in Britain before the official Roman Church arrived, the community who traced themselves back to the earliest followers of Jesus in the first century AD,’ Jeremy said. ‘What we’ve just been talking about, the Ecclesia Britannorum, the Celtic Church, many of them probably Romanized Britons of Celtic ancestry. Pelagius is virtually the only evidence we have for their beliefs. It seems possible that they took the concept of heaven on earth at face value, the idea that heaven could be found around them, in their earthly lives. To them, the message of Jesus may have been about finding and extolling beauty in nature, about love and compassion for its own sake. It would have been a morally empowering concept, completely at odds with what Pelagius saw in Rome. When Pelagius was there he stood up against Augustine of Hippo, denied the doctrine of predestination and original sin, defended innate human goodness and free will. It was a hopeless battle, but he was a beacon for resistance and his name resounded through the centuries, in hidden places and secret meetings when any hint of it could have meant arrest, torture, even worse.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Costas said.

  ‘Pelagianism was condemned as heretical by the Synod of Carthage in AD 418,’ Jack said. ‘Pelagius himself was excommunicated and banished from Rome. It’s not clear whether he ever got back to Britain. Some believe he went to Judaea, to Jerusalem, to the site of Christ’s tomb, and was murdered there.’

  ‘There were uncompromising forces already within the Roman Church, ready to stop at nothing to carry out what they saw as divine justice,’ Jeremy said. ‘But they couldn’t control what went on in Britain. After the Roman withdrawal in AD 410, after the Roman towns of Britain had crumbled and decayed, the Church which had been brought by Constantine’s bishops seems to have virtually died out. That’s what Gildas was lamenting. He himself was probably one of the last monks in Britain of the Roman Church of the fourth century, though a pretty confused one. With the edifice of the state removed, the Roman church no longer held sway over a people who were not attracted by Augustinian doctrine. Then the Anglo-Saxons invaded. They were pagan. That’s where we come to the second Augustine, St Augustine of Canterbury. He was sent by Pope Gregory in AD 597 with forty monks to convert King Aethelbert of Kent, and after that the Roman Church was here to stay.’

  ‘But Celtic Christianity somehow survived,’ Costas said.

  ‘It survived the first Augustine, and it survived the second,’ Jeremy said. ‘There was something in its philosophy that spoke to the Celtic ancestry of the Britons, something they also believed was true to the original teachings of Jesus. Something that told a universal truth, about freedom and individual aspiration. Something which had been taught to them by the first followers of Jesus to reach these shores, perhaps even by the emperor dimly remembered by Gildas. A wisdom they had kept and cherished, a sacred memory.’

  ‘People having control and responsibility for their own actions, their own destiny,’ Jack said.

  ‘That’s the nub of Pelagianism,’ Jeremy agreed. ‘When Pelagius came to Rome, he saw moral laxity, decadence, and he blamed it on the idea of divine grace. If everything is predestined and the whim of God, why bother with good deeds, or with trying to make the world a better place? Pelagianism was all about the individual, about free will, about moral strength. In his view, Jesus’ example was primarily one of instruction. Jesus showed how to avoid sin and live a holy life, and Chris
tians can choose to follow him. And what’s really fascinating is how these ideas may also represent a continuity from Celtic paganism, which seems to have championed a person’s ability to triumph as an individual, even over the supernatural.’

  ‘What I don’t get is how this early Celtic Christianity survived the Dark Age after the Romans,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, you’ve got the Anglo-Saxons invading, then the Vikings, then the Normans. This Celtic ancestry stuff must have been pretty fringe by then.’

  ‘It’s something to do with the kind of people who chose to come to Britain,’ Jeremy responded. ‘Not just those famous invasions, but later migrations too, the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, the Huguenot Protestant refugees from France and Holland. Some common thread, character traits needed to succeed here. Independence, wilfulness, stubbornness, endurance in the face of authority, strength through hardship. Everything about this place where we are now, the history. The Blitz spirit. All of it makes those ideas espoused by Pelagius seem particularly British.’

  ‘I think it’s something to do with the weather, myself,’ Costas grumbled. ‘You’ve got to have something extra to survive this place.’ He paused. ‘So you think this church, St Lawrence Jewry, has all this history in it?’

  ‘There’s no proof there was a church here before the eleventh century, when the Normans arrived,’ Jack said. ‘But nobody knows where the churches of late Roman London were located. Before then, Christian meetings were secretive, and even after Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century AD, congregational worship never really took hold in Roman Britain. But I believe St Lawrence Jewry is a very likely spot. Right next to the amphitheatre, a place that would have been associated with the martyrdom of Christians. And churches were often built on sites of pagan ritual. There may have been more going on here, something very old, sacred long before Roman London. And this place may have concealed an extraordinary secret.’

  ‘The heart of darkness,’ Costas murmured, looking at the bricked-up wall at the end of the chamber.