Read Skeleton 03 - The Constantine Codex for Free Online Page A

place. It rather conveniently hides our manpower at the western edge of your property. Not to worry!”
    “Thanks, Mr. Behnke,” Shannon said. “We were concerned that our neighborhood would be disrupted.”
    “Your neighbors won’t even know we’re here, Mrs. Weber.”

    Maybe life could return to something resembling normalcy after all, they dared to hope. But one nagging concern remained: were their summer plans ruined? Both were determined to have the finest scholars in Greece examine what Shannon had discovered at Pella.
    They decided to postpone their visit to Pella because Father Athanasius had written that, after an exhaustive search of their library, no other vellum sheets matching Shannon’s had been discovered. In place of Pella, they decided to visit Turkey along with Greece. Both were gorgeous peninsulas thrusting themselves into the sapphire Mediterranean. Both were scattered with scenic mountains and lakes, rimmed with golden beaches, and surrounded by Aegean islands boasting homes of gleaming white with roofs of royal blue. That’s what the tourist brochures promised, and yet there was so much more there.
    Greece and Asia Minor were the cradles of classical civilization in the ancient world, both lands still studded with ruins of temples, colonnades, theaters, baths, aqueducts, and even latrines from antiquity. “People living in Greece and Asia Minor two and three millennia ago gave us more of our present culture than any other civilization,” Professor Weber reminded his classes again and again.
    Yet there was still more. The Aegean world was also the second cradle of Christianity. It was here that St. Paul did most of his missions work, where many of the earliest church fathers held forth, where the first churches were built and the first creeds formulated. And perhaps most importantly, it was here that the earliest New Testament Scriptures were written. This was what most intrigued Jonathan Weber and the ICO that he had founded.
    The Institute of Christian Origins, based in Cambridge, was a think tank for discovery rather than—as was so much of recent theology—a scholarly rehashing of evidence raked over many times in the past. Their symposia dealt with cutting-edge findings from the ancient world that impinged on Jesus of Nazareth and the church that he founded. Membership in the ICO—by invitation only—was an honor roll of many of the most prestigious scholars in the world, men and women not only with expertise in their specialties but with the flexibility and courage to draw unpopular conclusions, if necessary. They regularly had to blow a shrill whistle on the increasing fakery and fraud pseudoarchaeologists were foisting on the public, such as claims that wheels from the ancient Egyptian chariots in the Exodus account had been found at the bottom of the Red Sea. Similar targets were mistranslations of the vaunted Judas Gospel or wild claims regarding the so-called Jesus Family Tomb at Talpiot in south Jerusalem. And as for Noah’s ark, the ICO reminded the public that Noah must certainly have built a fleet rather than just one ship, since it had now been “discovered” twenty-one times in the last century!
    At the most recent symposium of the ICO in April, Jon had told his colleagues, “So often we assume that any fresh information on Jesus and early Christianity will come from archaeological discoveries. And while that’s true enough, it’s not the whole truth. Perhaps we’ve overlooked another major source of potential evidence, and I’m sure you all know where I’m heading: manuscripts ! Ancient manuscripts, wherever they might be found—whether via archaeological digs, hiding in medieval and even modern libraries, or lurking in neglected monastery archives.
    “But here’s an important difference between these two sources: things not yet unearthed will hardly change over the millennia, but manuscripts will change. They’ll deteriorate. Papyrus and parchment will age,