Read The Testimonium for Free Online

understand the choices that were thrust upon me during the Jewish festival of Passover this year, Caesar, I must acquaint you with the events over the last three years that led up to it. As I am sure you are aware, the Jews’ rather odd religion has for centuries prophesied about the coming of a savior they call the Messiah—Christos in Greek—who would redeem them from their slavery and restore the great kingdom that was theirs at one time. This belief makes them particularly vulnerable to the machinations of various charlatans and lunatics who pop up from time to time claiming to be this Messiah. Such men invariably spell trouble for whoever is currently holding the Jews on a leash—be it the Assyrians, the Greeks, or we Romans.
    However, most of these men in the past were quickly exposed as the frauds that they were. For all their protestations of holiness and religious fervor, the House of Zadok which controls the high priesthood is quite comfortable with the mutual arrangement they enjoy with Rome. Indeed, since Pompey the Great added this troublesome province to the Empire nearly a hundred years ago, the Priests have been Rome’s staunchest allies, and an invaluable aid in keeping the peace. So when rumors began to circulate of a new would-be Messiah rising up in Galilee, I figured they would take care of him soon enough.

CHAPTER THREE
    Bernardo Guioccini had hardly slept that night, after he made the travel arrangements and ordered the necessary supplies for the excavation on the mountaintop. The potential significance of this discovery was enormous, and he did not want to make any mistakes. He would be flying out on an Italian army helicopter early the next morning, but even as he lay in bed, he was reviewing the choices he had made the evening before.
    The mobile lab was actually quite easy to arrange—the Israelis had created the perfect example during their lengthy excavations at Qumran, where the Essenes had copied thousands of scrolls and stored them in the caves near the Dead Sea. Ancient parchment and papyrus manuscripts required careful handling and treatment in order to keep them from simply crumbling away once unearthed. The large trailer he had requisitioned had a small stockroom full of chemicals for treating and preserving ancient parchment, papyrus, wood, and fabric. It also had several stainless steel tables and benches, flat, sealed cabinet drawers for storing whatever was found, plexiglass rehydration tanks, state of the art computer systems, and several microscopes of varying degrees of power and illumination. There was even a small cookstove and a cappuccino machine. No need to live like complete barbarians while on-site!
    As for the crew—he had put long thought into it before deciding who to call in. Father Duncan MacDonald was a no-brainer—any excavation from the early Christian era needed at least one representative from the Vatican present, or at least, that had been Guioccini’s policy from the moment he became director. He did not believe that archeology should pander to faith, but when the two worlds of faith and history intersected, as they frequently did in Italy, it was foolish to needlessly antagonize the world’s—and Italy’s—largest Christian denomination. And MacDonald made that kind of liaison much easier for the scientists involved, because he was a first-rate Biblical archeologist who never let religious bias get in the way of his quest for truth. Of course, as a Catholic clergyman, he also firmly believed that the historical record, when accurately interpreted and analyzed, would back up the claims of the Church—which, more often than not, it did. MacDonald was a master at treating and preserving ancient documents. After years of experimentation with various polymers, he had developed a preservative formula that could easily be sprayed onto any ancient document. With it, he could take a papyrus manuscript that was completely falling apart and stabilize it in a