It didn’t take all that long, despite the amount of trial and error involved, and within fifteen minutes Angela wrote two words down on a fresh piece of paper and handed it to Bronson. He looked at it blankly.
YOHANAN MAMDANA
‘Now I think we really are getting somewhere,’ Angela said, a smile of anticipation on her face.
‘You may be getting somewhere, Angela,’ Bronson said, ‘but you’ve left me behind choking in the dust. This means nothing to me at all.’
She stood up and stretched, turning her back to the window, the sun pouring through it turning her hair into a halo of gold.
‘Then it’s just as well that it does to me,’ she said.
47
Mahmoud was taking a break, sipping a coffee at a café a few yards down the street from one of the hotels he had put on to his ‘possibles’ list, and wondering if he should risk walking through the public rooms in the building again. He had already done it twice before that morning, once during breakfast service and the second time in the middle of the morning when he’d expected coffee to be served. On both occasions he’d seen nobody who resembled his quarry, but the receptionist had stared at him rather longer than made him feel comfortable as he left the second time.
The good news was that he probably didn’t need to go in again, because it looked as if many, perhaps even most, of the guests, were heading out, presumably to explore the Old City. But although he never took his eyes off the hotel entrance, he saw nobody who resembled either Bronson or Lewis in the chattering throng.
He was about to try his luck somewhere else when a sudden movement caught his eye. A female figure moved across one of the windows on the upper floor, stood for a few seconds with her back to the glass, and then turned. And in that instant Mahmoud realized that he had found them. He was too far away for her to be aware of his surveillance, and he continued watching her through the glass for a few more seconds, until she moved out of view.
He exhaled deeply, unaware that he’d been holding his breath, then reached inside his jacket pocket and took out his mobile phone.
48
‘So what is “Yohanan Mamdana”?’ Bronson asked. ‘Some lost city out here in the Holy Land?’ he suggested. ‘If it is, I’ve never heard of it.’
Angela shook her head. ‘No, it’s not a place. It’s a person.’
‘Well, I’ve never heard of him. Or her.’
‘Actually,’ Angela said, ‘I can guarantee that you not only have heard of him — because Yohanan Mamdana was a man — but you also know a little bit about his life, and exactly how he died. The manner of his death, in fact, is perhaps better known than much about his life. Any ideas?’ she asked.
‘Not a glimmer so far.’
‘Right. Of course, like all the names from this period that have survived in stories and legends, the spellings have changed, often quite significantly. In this case, “Yohanan” has come down to us as “John”, and he was beheaded by—’
‘The Baptist,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘You mean John the Baptist. Herod and Salome and the silver platter.’
‘Spot on. Yohanan Mamdana was the original name, or at least the Syriac name, of the man we know as John the Baptist.’
‘Syriac? You mean from the Syrian language?’
‘No. It was an Aramaic dialect spoken across much of the Middle East.’
‘Fine. But what I have no clue about,’ Bronson said, ‘is why his name should form part of an Atbash cipher used to encrypt an inscription in a temple buried in the deserts of southern Iraq. And, come to that, I’ve no idea why any of that should have anything to do with the Temple Mount and the Knights Templar.’
‘Yes,’ Angela replied, ‘that bit is pretty obscure, I’ll grant you that. But as for the buried temple and the inscription, that does make a kind of sense. You remember when we were talking about it on the way from Kuwait City to the dig, and then when you saw it for yourself. My view was that it was almost certainly a Mandaean temple, because of where it was, that shallow indentation in the floor that could have been intended for baptisms, and even the image of the bearded man. The point that we probably didn’t make all that clear to you at the time was that both the ancient Mandaeans and the followers of that religion today all worshipped exactly the same person. And that person wasn’t — and isn’t — Jesus Christ, but John the Baptist.’
Bronson looked puzzled.
‘So was John the Baptist supposed to be another son of God, or someone equally important and unlikely?’ he asked.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Angela replied. ‘I think it’s generally accepted that he was a prophet of a sort, but in the Christian Bible and the Catholic Church he was seen as very much a bit-part player, somebody who was important for what he did, rather than for who he was. And that, for the Mandaeans, was the problem and the conundrum, because of the obvious logical inconsistency of the biblical tale. If Jesus Christ genuinely was the son of God, then obviously He had to be the most significant and important figure in religious history. But in the view of the Mandaeans, that simply could not be the case, because He was baptized by John the Baptist. No mere mortal could possibly be allowed to anoint the son of God, so very obviously the man who baptized Jesus had to be even more important than Him to be able to carry out that act.
‘And the implication, at least as far as the Mandaeans were concerned, was that the Bible and the Church and Christianity as a whole had got everything backwards. Jesus Christ had only been a prophet, one of a long line of such men in those days, and John the Baptist was the individual who deserved to be worshipped. Christ, in fact, was seen as a liar and usurper, a man who had donned the mantle of the son of God without being in any way deserving of the title. As far as the early Church was concerned, of course, this was the wildest and most unforgivable heresy of the lot, because the Mandaeans weren’t just guilty of worshipping in the wrong way, like a lot of heretics, but they were worshipping the wrong person and refusing to accept the divinity of Jesus.’
‘It’s no wonder that temple was buried,’ Bronson pointed out. ‘The Church had long arms in that period, and could probably have reached out all the way to Iraq — or mediaeval Babylon at that time — to try to stamp out that heresy. Worshipping in secret in a temple that could be completely hidden from view might have been the safest option they had.’
‘We thought it might just have been a case of excavating it from the rock underground because it would be permanent and, more importantly, relatively cool, but you could well be right. Anyway, the important thing is that I think we now know how to decipher the rest of the inscription.’
‘We do?’ Bronson sounded surprised. ‘Show me.’
Angela took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down the two sequences of letters that had been carved into one of the stones in the Western Wall Tunnel.
F E I Y B Y B Y
‘If this is meant to be a decode for a kind of extended Atbash,’ she said, ‘then logically one word group should be written out before the alphabet and the second word group after it.’
‘But we still don’t know what those word groups are,’ Bronson objected.
‘Oh, I think we do, now that we’ve made the connection with John the Baptist. As I said to you before, the names of the characters involved in these events at the start of the first millennium have changed over the centuries, been altered with different spellings and in some cases been changed beyond all recognition. And that applies in particular to the person that we now refer to as Jesus Christ. He was never known as Jesus. In fact, that name is essentially a British invention. His original Hebrew name was believed to be “Yehoshua”, which later became “Yeshua” or “Joshua”. Later, the name “Yehoshua” was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as “Iesvs” or “Iesous”, and that variant was then changed to “Jesus” in English.