The Sacred Blood (38 page)

Special thanks to my wife, Caroline, my fountain of inspiration. To D. Michael Driscoll’s keen eye. Once again, my hat goes off to Doug Grad for his incomparable editorial skills. To my friend and agent, Charlie Viney, for his unwavering encouragement and market savvy. Thanks, Julie Wright, Ian Chapman, and everyone at S&S UK. And cheers to the fabulous team at ILA—Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West—for enabling me to share my stories in so many languages.

The Sacred Bones
and
The Sacred Blood
feature hardy infusions of theology, science, and history. Since I’m a control freak when it comes to research, I take full responsibility for any unintended errors.

Multiple manuscripts of the oldest known gospel, Mark (circa 60–70 c.e.), did indeed close with the empty tomb. The confusion and disappointment this presented for Christianity’s early pagan converts is believed to have spawned Mark’s multiple addendums. Most scholars contend that Mark is the common source—aka the
Quelle
or Q—for the synoptic gospels of Matthew and Luke. Some also suggest that Q is comprised of both Mark and an even earlier undiscovered gospel—the “lost gospel.” I’ve fictionalized this lost gospel’s discovery, what the text might tell us, and its authorship by Joseph of Arimathea—in my estimation, the only likely broker for procuring Jesus’s body from the cross.

I’ve stretched the current parameters of genetic research, though only time will tell if a more refined genome might be discovered or engineered. The ethical issues surrounding these breakthroughs should prove challenging for religion and humanity. Though I strongly believe that faith itself will remain strong, as it always has.

The religious squabbling and bloodletting over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is scarily real, as it has been since King Solomon supposedly laid its first cornerstone over three millennia ago. In its modern incarnation, this bitter turf war exemplifies Israeli and Palestinian discord over land rights and national sovereignty. Though the Mount resides wholly within Israel’s borders, it is tacitly controlled by a Muslim trust, or
waqf
. Therefore, an act of terrorism committed there could easily ignite a third world war.

Josephus and Philo provide the most definitive accounts of the highly secretive Jewish community, the Essenes, who inhabited Qumran. The Essenes’ obsession with the purity of body and soul present many tantalizing parallels to Christ’s ministry and the emergence of Christianity. Most intriguing are their elaborate and ambitious plans for reshaping Jerusalem into a grand temple city that would herald the earthly Messianic Age. Many scholars credit the Essenes for transcribing and preserving the world’s oldest copies of the Old Testament and Jewish apocryphal texts, collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The hunt for more scrolls is still under way.

Theories abound as to the fate of the Ark of the Covenant, most maintaining that a foreign empire invaded Jerusalem and claimed it as booty. In antiquity, however, sieges against heavily fortified cities like Jerusalem took months—not hours or days. So suffice it to say that the temple priests would have hidden the Ark—the centerpiece of Jewish faith, the relic that symbolized the Israelite nation—well before any combatant could have pillaged the temple. Once in hiding, the vulnerable Ark would likely have been clandestinely moved around. Inevitably, the safest hiding place would have been within a fortress’s keep, behind walls, and protected by an army. Enter Josephus’s chronicling of Onias’s Jewish temple city in ancient Egypt’s Heliopolis, complete with a homegrown army ...and imagine the possibilities.

Finally, on navigating the minefield of the three Judaic religions . . . I recently met a very wise and pious Muslim who attributed his impressive optimism in the fate of all things to “The Higher Power.” I sensed that he avoided a more decisive label so as not to create a barrier between us. I must confess that I liked his approach. Because though most religions seek to build community based on rigid—many times, exclusionary—doctrine,
faith
is a very personal journey that reflects a universal need in each one of us to connect with the mysterious, indefinable power(s) responsible for our world and our mortality—in other words, something bigger, or “higher,” than ourselves. In my stories, I explore the various paths along which this most remarkable quest might take us.

M
ICHAEL
B
YRNES
attended Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, and earned his graduate degree in business administration at Rutgers. Byrnes lives in Florida with his wife, Caroline, and daughters, Vivian and Camille.

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Jacket design by Ervin Serrano

Jacket photograph of woman running by Gallo Images/Alamy;

Jesus from the Haghia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey/Bildarchive Steffens/Bridgeman Art Library; heiroglyphs by Age Fotostock/Superstock; tunnel by Romain Bayle/Trevillion Images

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE SACRED BLOOD. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Byrnes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader February 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-178195-7

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