A Deceit to Die For (63 page)

Then, turning to Dr. Brown, “I don’t suppose you have any idea why the secretary’s email never reached you?”

“I don’t,” he replied. “I was quite keen to see it and stopped by again on Tuesday. Mrs. Davenport was out, but Prof. O’Brien was here. He said that he would remind her. I figured it had just been overlooked in all of the hustle and bustle surrounding the conference.”

“That’s right,” said Cathy. “Dr. O’Brien left me a note, asking me to resend it to Dr. Brown.”

“I see,” said McIntosh. “I guess those are my only questions for now. Thank you, Dr. Brown, for your time.”

“I was looking forward to working with Dr. O’Brien. He had quite a reputation in his field.”

He stood up and headed for the door. When it closed, McIntosh turned to Jack.

“Make a note to subpoena the university’s server records going back at least three weeks.”

“If you’re wondering if a copy of the document is on the server, it won’t be under Dr. Brown’s university account,” she volunteered. “It hadn’t been issued yet. He gave me his personal account.”

“Can we have that please?”

“It’s not in my sent mail anymore, but it was too simple to forget. dbrown19 @gmail.com”

“I don’t suppose you keep curricula vitae for professors in the department?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Would you mind sharing a copy of those with me?” asked McIntosh.

“Sir, I cannot provide those without the express written permission of the professors.”

“Or a court order,” said McIntosh, as if finishing her sentence. “I’ll make sure you have one in the morning. I shall not have the least amount of trouble in obtaining it. This is a murder case, Mrs. Davenport, and it is quite clear to me that Monday was the first day that Dr. O’Brien showed the document to anyone with expertise. Dr. O’Brien apparently didn’t even know what he had. In fact, he thought it was an Arabic document, which explains why he contacted Dr. Brown. But now one of the Turkish professors attending your conference is dead, another is missing and a respected Byzantine scholar from your university has been killed. Crucial evidence is no longer on your computer, and Dr. Brown says he never received the email. Mrs. Davenport, this all started right here last Monday, and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

CHAPTER
49

I
STANBUL
 
 
Gwyn pulled a small notebook from her bag and started flipping through the pages.

“Bear with me. I’ve got these notes all over the place.”

Matt pulled out a legal pad and pen.

“Gilbert said you split the research, so none of you have seen both sides, and I haven’t seen any of it. We all need to concentrate here and look for connections.”

Zeki walked into the room holding the traditional double teapot used by the Turks. “If two minds are better than one, imagine what we might do with five. Does anyone want their tea particularly weak?”

“Yes, please,” said Gwyn.

The rest of them shook their heads. Zeki poured dark, strong tea from the top and then diluted it with boiling water from the bottom. Gwyn looked at Matt. She could see that he was trying to refocus and put the rebuke from Zeki behind him.

“Alright,” said Gwyn, “I found it interesting that several of the references on the Moriscos mentioned something called the Lead Books of Sacromonte. On the flight over, I read almost two hundred pages of research, and oddly enough, it turns out that most modern scholars believe there is at least an ideological link, if not a physical one, with the Gospel of Barnabas. Remember the situation in Spain at the time. Arabic was completely and totally banned in 1567. The Inquisition was being used to squelch all religious dissent. People who had lived in Spain for seven hundred years as Muslims were being forced to abandon their entire culture.

“Then, in 1588, when the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Granada was being torn down, a lead box was discovered. It contained a parchment written in Latin, Arabic and Spanish, and claimed to date back to the Emperor Nero. It included a prophecy from St. John predicting the rise of Islam and the coming of Martin Luther. There was also a piece of cloth that the Virgin Mary supposedly used to dry her tears at the crucifixion, and a bone that was said to belong to the martyr St. Stephen.”

Matt jumped in. “Even if you did believe in prophecy, Spanish did not exist as a language until several hundred years after the fall of Rome, and Arabic wouldn’t have arrived in Iberia until the conquest of Spain in the seventh century. It’s obviously a forgery.”

“It’s obvious to you because you live in the information age,” said Zeki slowly, weighing his words. “But this was the late 1500s. Most people were illiterate. Many never travelled more than fifty miles from their place of birth. Besides, people tend to believe what they hope to be true. From what I understand of Catholicism, the status of a church was greatly enhanced by its possession of relics. In their eyes, these artifacts authenticated their connection to the apostles. They would have wanted it to be true.”

“Right,” said Gwyn. “Actually there were a few people who voiced their doubts, but the mania that surrounded the discovery prevailed for years. Christians in Granada greeted the finds euphorically because they confirmed the city as a bishopric. It gets much better though. Seven years later, starting in 1595 and continuing until 1599, a series of books called the Lead Books of Sacromonte were discovered in caves on a mountain outside the city of Granada. These lead books claimed that the relics found in the tower belonged to Arab Christians who had come to Granada with St. James, who, it just so happens, is the Patron Saint of Spain. These Arab Christians were supposedly martyred there. In the caves, they discovered bones thought to be human remains.”

Gwyn noted how intently Matt was listening and taking notes. His intellect and inquisitiveness had always been one of the things she liked most about him.

“Clever,” said Gary. “Faking a fifteen-hundred-year-old parchment would be a serious challenge. Iron, copper, and silver would have corroded excessively over fifteen centuries. Gold is too expensive, so lead is the perfect choice. It would have been difficult to prove its age.”

Gwyn nodded her head in agreement and continued.

“They were written in an angular Arabic script without diacritics . . .”

“Diacritics?” asked Matt.

“The vowel points in Arabic,” responded Zeki. “Hebrew and Arabic were not originally written with vowels because the words could generally be understood from the structure of the sentence.”

“In other words,” said Gwyn, “the forgers had done their homework. The angular script and lack of vowel points were meant to make it look ancient. Anyway . . . There were tons of these booklets, but probably the most important one was where the Virgin Mary speaks to Saint Peter. I wrote the quote somewhere. Here it is. ‘I testify to you that the Arabs are one of the good nations and their tongue one of the good tongues. It was chosen by God to exalt his holy law and his sacred gospel and his holy church at the end of Time . . .’”

Zeki crossed his legs and took a deep breath.

“The Virgin Mary is held in high esteem by Muslims but venerated by Catholics. The fact that she is calling the Arabs a good nation and Arabic a good language would have carried much weight with the Spanish, especially her claim that they had been in Spain since the days of Christ.”

“Here we go again, manipulating religions for political ends. Whoever wrote this was looking for a way to save Arab language and culture, so they pulled out all the stops and resurrected Mary to have her deliver their message.”

“That’s probably right,” continued Gwyn. “The text also mentions the Virgin Mary commissioning St. James to go and evangelize the Arabs of Spain.”

“Wait a minute,” objected Gary, “There were no Arabs in Spain during the first century.”

“We know that,” replied Matt, smiling at Zeki, “But, back then, only serious historians would have known it. The Arabs had been in Granada for seven hundred years. No one could remember a time when they didn’t live there. It seems to me that the Moriscos were trying to convince the Spanish that Arabs had been inhabitants of Spain since the time of Christ. They also wanted to show that they could be genuine Christians in order to alleviate the pressure put on them by the Inquisition.”

“Exactly,” replied Gwyn, “As I said before, there were a few people who immediately called the discoveries a forgery, but the local church was so enamored with its newfound status that it swept all these objections under the rug. In fact, they refused to send the lead books to Rome for several decades, probably because they knew the truth would come out. In the end, Rome condemned the books as heresy, but strangely enough, did not indicate that the relics were not genuine, so they are still venerated to this day.”

“I still don’t see a connection with the Gospel of Barnabas though,” said Matt.

“The connection is primarily theological,” replied Gwyn. “The Lead Books of Sacromonte present a theology that Zeki says is manifestly Islamic. For example, they contain the phrase, ‘There is no god but God and Jesus is the Spirit of God’, which is very similar to the affirmation of Islam, ‘There is no god but God and Mohammed is His prophet.’ Plus, the title of Jesus as the ‘Spirit of God’ is one found in the Qur’an. Strangely enough, the books also contain a thinly-veiled reference to the post-Reformation doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.”

“Another anachronous appeal to the intended Catholic audience,” groaned Matt.

“Right. The Virgin Mary says, ‘. . . in the end times the ‘King of the Arabs, who is not himself an Arab, will hold a Great Council in Cyprus revealing the True Gospel.’”

“That is almost certainly a reference to the Ottoman Sultan, a Turk ruling over the Arabs,” said Zeki. “The conquest of Cyprus happened just a few years before these books were discovered.”

“Talk about faking prophecy . . . These guys had it down to an art form. Write about the past as if it were the future, back-date your text and presto! You’ve got yourself a bonafide prophet. They were even clever enough to avoid the words ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Turk’ since those were unknown in the first century. ”

Gwyn flipped through several more pages. “Somewhere I wrote down a prayer that Mary commands everyone to pray in preparation for the Council that will be held in Cyprus. Listen to this, ‘O Allah, my Lord, watch protectively over the humblest of Thy creatures, over him who interprets the Truth of the Blessed Gospel in the Great Council. Smooth the way for him and make me believe in the Truth contained in it that he will expound . . .’”

“Wow,” said Matt. “The Ottoman Sultan will call a Council to expound the Truth of the Gospel on the island of Cyprus. That is a pretty specific prophecy. I don’t remember anything like that ever happening though.”

“It never did,” said Zeki quietly. “But, we can list a number of Islamic elements in the texts. They emphasize the unity of God, as opposed to the Trinity, while prohibiting the cult of images, which Muslims consider sacrilegious, and downplaying the role of wine in the Eucharist because alcohol is proscribed by Islam.”

“Classic politics,” said Matt, “Using religion, no, even worse, blatantly making it up.”

“It does sound horrible, but they were just trying to encourage a more tolerant attitude towards their language and culture,” rejoined Gwyn.

“Seems to have failed,” remarked Gary, “Didn’t you say they were kicked out in 1609?”

“That’s right,” replied Zeki.

“What’s the point of inventing a religion?” snorted Matt in disbelief. “It’s like bowing down to a creation of your own hands.”

Zeki took a deep breath. “You can be sure that no one ever invented a religion for themselves; it is always for someone else. The forgers may have been attempting to make the Moriscos more comfortable with their conversion to Christianity by removing certain thorny theological issues, or they may have been encouraging the Spanish to respect Morisco culture and language. We should not judge them too harshly. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Their children were being taken away and brought up in a foreign religion. They faced the horrors of the Inquisition . . .”