Intervention by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

flying to Rome early tomorrow morning.”
    “Do you need my help literally or figuratively?” Sana questioned. To her it made a difference.
    “Literally!”
    Sana took a breath and eyed her husband. He seemed sincere, which changed things in her mind. He’d never actually asked for her help before. “All right,” she said. She sat down. “I’m not yet agreeing, but let’s hear your explanation.”
    With rekindled enthusiasm, Shawn grabbed the desk chair and planted it in front of Sana. Sitting down, he leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “Have you ever heard of the Gnostic Gospels found here in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945?”
    Sana shook her head.
    “How about the book The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels?”
    Sana shook her head again with a touch of irritation. Shawn was always asking her if she read this treatise or that one, and invariably she’d have to say no. As a molecular biologist, she’d not had a lot of time to take many liberal-arts courses, and often felt inferior as a result.
    “I’m surprised,” Shawn said. “Elaine Pagels was a bestseller, a real commercial hit that put Gnosticism on the map.”
    “When was it published?”
    “I don’t know, around 1979, I guess.”
    “Shawn, I was born in 1980. Give me a break!”
    “Right! Sorry! I keep forgetting. Anyhow, her book was about the significance of the Nag Hammadi find, which were thirteen codices, including this one I’ve come across today. This book was originally part of that find that in one fell swoop doubled the extant books about early Gnostic thought. In many ways the find was in the same league as the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Palestine two years later.”
    “I’ve heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
    “Well there are people who believe the Nag Hammadi texts are equivalently important for understanding religious thought around the time of Christ.”
    “So, this book you found today is one of those codices found in 1945.”
    “Correct. It’s known, appropriately enough, as the Thirteenth Codex.”
    “Where are the others?”
    “They’re here in Cairo at the Coptic Museum. Most had been confiscated by the Egyptian government after a few had been sold. Those that had been sold eventually made their way back here where they belong.”
    “How did number thirteen get separated from the others?”
    “Before I answer that, let me give you a thumbnail sketch of the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. It’s fascinating. Two young fellahin boys named Khalifah and Muhammed Ali were out at the edge of the desert near modern-day Nag Hammadi, supposedly looking for a kind of fertilizing soil known as sabakh. Where they were looking was at the base of a cliff called Jabal al-Tarif, which, by the way, is honeycombed with caves, both natural and ancient man-made. Their method was to blindly poke deep into the sand with their mattocks. I don’t know how that helps, but to their surprise on the day of the discovery, instead of coming across the sabakh they were looking for, one of them heard a suspicious hollow clunk when he pounded his mattock into the sand. He cleared away the sand and came across a sealed earthenware jar about three to four feet in height. Hoping to find some ancient Egyptian antiquities, they found the codices instead.”
    “Did they have any idea of the value of what they’d found?”
    “Not a clue. They carried the cache home but dumped it next to the family’s cooking oven, where the mother used some of the papyri pages to start the family’s cooking fires.”
    “What a tragedy.”
    “As I said, there are academics who still wince at the thought today. Anyway, friends and neighbors of the boys, including a Muslim imam who was also a history teacher, suspected they were valuable and quickly intervened. The codex that I came across today worked its way down the Nile to reach Cairo via various antiquities dealers. There the five of its missing texts, which also turned out to be the most