Intervention by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online

of ancient Egyptian using a Greek alphabet.”
    “Truly amazing!” Sana said. She was impressed but wondered why Shawn had said it was such an important find for him. Some of the statuary he’d found in Asia Minor seemed far more substantial.
    “Can you see that a large section of the book has been torn out?”
    “I can. Is that significant?”
    “Very much so! Five of the original, individual texts of this particular codex had been roughly removed in the 1940s to sell them in America. Other pages had been rumored to have been removed to start kitchen fires in a fellahin mud hut.”
    “That’s terrible.”
    “Indeed. Many an academic has cringed at the thought.”
    “I also notice that the inside of the front cover has been opened up along its edge.”
    “I did that myself very carefully with a steak knife about an hour ago.”
    “Was that wise? I mean, considering the age of this thing. I imagine there are more appropriate tools than a steak knife.”
    “No, it probably wasn’t wise, but I did it because I couldn’t help myself. At that point I was horribly disappointed with what’s in the codex. I had expected a virtual gold mine, and instead I’ve rescued the equivalent of the output of one of the world’s first copy machines.”
    “I don’t think I’m following you,” Sana admitted. She handed the ancient book back to Shawn to absolve herself from responsibility. She pulled off the gloves. His excitement was palpable. She was more than intrigued.
    “I’m not surprised.” He took the codex and replaced it to its former position on the corner of the desk. In the middle of the desk, under the glare of both a desk lamp and a floor lamp, were three individual pages held flat by various objects, including a pair of Shawn’s ancient-coin cuff links. The pages were heavily creased from being folded up for thousands of years. It too was papyrus, like the pages in the codex, but it seemed to be older. The edges had blackened to the point of appearing burnt.
    “What’s this?” Sana asked, pointing at the papyri sheets. “A letter?” She could see the first page had a possible addressee, the last a signature.
    “Ah, the scientific mind immediately homes in on the crux of the matter,” Shawn said with glee. Palms down, fingers spread, he reverently passed his hands over the pages as if worshipping them. “It is indeed a letter, a very special letter written in AD 121, by a septuagenarian bishop of the city of Antioch by the name of Saturninus. It was a reply to a previous letter written to him by a bishop of Alexandria named Basilides.”
    “My gosh!” Sana exclaimed. “That’s the beginning of the second century.”
    “Quite,” Shawn remarked, “and within a century of Jesus of Nazareth. It was a fractious time for the early Church.”
    “Is either man well known?”
    “A good question! Basilides is well known among biblical scholars, Saturninus much less so, although I’ve come across references to him on a couple of occasions. As this letter substantiates, Saturninus was a student or an assistant of Simon the Magician.”
    “That’s a name I’ve heard in my childhood.”
    “No doubt. He was and is the quintessential Sunday-school bad guy, as well as the father of all heresies, at least according to a number of the early Christian Church fathers. In point of fact his attempt to buy the ability to heal from Saint Peter is the origin of the word simony .”
    “What about Basilides?”
    “He was a very busy man here in Egypt—in Alexandria, to be precise—and a prodigious writer. He’s also given credit as one of the first Gnostic thinkers, particularly for putting a distinctive Christian stamp on Gnosticism by centering his Gnostic theology on Jesus of Nazareth.”
    “Help me,” Sana said. “I’ve heard the term Gnosticism, but I wouldn’t be able to define it.”
    “Simply speaking, it was a movement that predated Christianity, ultimately merging aspects of pagan religions,