It could be argued that Calvi had betrayed the Vatican through his machinations at the Banco Ambrosiano, and possibly hanging his body underneath a bridge named after the Dominican order was a not very subtle way of suggesting that he had died as a heretic, killed on the orders of the Pope like so many thousands of other heretics over the centuries.
The death of Pope John Paul I was entirely unexpected and in all sorts of ways highly suspicious, not least because it occurred within twenty-four hours of his announcing his decision to remove Archbishop Marcinkus and the other members of P2 from the Vatican Bank. Whilst there is no proof that he was murdered, it is fairly clear that he was unable to trust at least some of the people around him, and they may have felt that they owed a higher allegiance to the P2 lodge than they did to the Pope himself.
If this were the case, and of course now it is mere conjecture, then his supposed death from natural causes begins to look even less likely to be based in fact, and the idea of a deliberate act of murder increasingly plausible. But because the Vatican will never permit the autopsy of a Pope’s body, there is almost no chance that we will ever find out for sure precisely what happened on the night of 28 September 1978.
The monitoring system employed by the Vatican to monitor Internet searching, and which I named Codex S, is a figment of my imagination. But that doesn’t mean that the Vatican doesn’t actually have some system that works in a similar fashion.
In the prologue I make oblique references to the rape of Mary, and this idea forms the core of the story. It is indeed possible, as I suggested, that the Roman Emperor Constantine — as the first emperor ever to embrace the new religion — might well have been troubled by the influence of a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus. He wrote a comprehensive attack on Christianity called The True Word, which contained a detailed account of this alleged rape. His work has not survived, but it was later criticized in detail by Origen, who first stated each of the arguments advanced by Celsus, and then attempted to refute them, thus providing a largely complete copy of the earlier work.
Later writers have criticized the claim made by Celsus that the father of the man later known as Jesus Christ was a Roman archer, citing the lack of any historical evidence for this assertion. Interestingly, no writers have ever attempted to rebuke the idea of a virgin birth for the same reason — the complete lack of evidence — despite the manifest biological impossibility of such an event ever occurring. Whilst it is an extremely unpleasant idea to suggest that the founder of Christianity was the product of a violent rape, this actually makes far more sense than the alternative explanation which is claimed by the Church.
In fact, the story about Mary being impregnated in a rape by a Roman archer has been around for longer than most of the Gospels. The tale of course suffers from precisely the same problem as the Gospels, in that there is not a single shred of proof that the rape ever took place, or indeed that the Gospels themselves are anything more than works of fiction.
This is one of the most fundamental problems about Christianity: there are simply no independent sources which support any of the statements and claims made by the Catholic Church through the ages.
Ultimately, belief in God or belief in Jesus — or belief in anything else that cannot be proven — is simply a matter of faith, not a matter of fact.
Acknowledgements
Any novel is a collaborative effort, and I’ve been very fortunate to have, in Katy Loftus, a keen and enthusiastic — but above all very competent and personable — young editor who has done so much to shape this book. For her, and for the rest of the highly motivated team at Transworld out in darkest Ealing, I’m very grateful. Let’s have lunch again, and soon. And I obviously can’t forget my wonderful agent and good friend, Luigi Bonomi, who has always done his best to consistently and brilliantly shape my career as an author. To him, and Ajda and Alison and everyone else at LBA, my heartfelt thanks. Onwards and upwards!
About the Author