The room had grown cold, and for the first time since Braun had begun his extraordinary soliloquy, the American noticed that the room had also grown dim. In the west, the sun appeared low on the horizon. The American shivered.

“But all these records. How could they be preserved for more than sixteen hundred years?”

“There is a building on the grounds of the Vatican whose basement contains forty miles of shelves filled with books, parchments, stone tablets, dossiers, and manuscripts of the most remarkable significance. Here, for example, the church has stored court records of sorcery trials, the letters of Joan of Arc, the original handwritten records of the trial of Galileo, a petition from seventy-five lords of England pleading for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage, documents concerning the Crusades, details of the scandalous lives led by the nuns of Monza, reports of prophecy fulfilled and prophecy yet to come. Millions of items of the most secret nature are guarded here in L’Archivo Segreto Vaticano—the Secret Archives of the Vatican,” Braun said. “The records that irrefutably confirm the resurrection of Sophia are stored here.” He paused as if his thoughts pained him too much to translate into words. “And until Emperor Heinrich IV sacked Rome in 1084, Sophia’s shroud, her passion tale, and other records of impeccable credibility also rested in L’Archivo. We think that Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius, secretly gathered all these items and had them sealed into a jewel-encrusted gold box.”

“But why him? He was Constantine’s main bishop.”

“Revenge, most certainly.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s well documented now that Eusebius was a secret follower of Arius, the bishop who wound up on the losing end of the Nicean Conference. Eusebius was a spiritual guerrilla in Constantine’s court. That box that Eusebius put together—an item we refer to as the Sophia Passion—contains very credible evidence that the Nicean Conference had more to do with covering up Sophia’s divinity than it did hammering out a creed to guide the faithful on a single path.”

He looked silently at the veins on the backs of his hands for a long moment, as if seeing there a reenactment of the battle that had set the truth loose on the world.

“When the reports of Sophia’s miracles and teachings reached Rome,” Braun continued, “they were regarded as extremely serious by both Pope Sylvester I and Emperor Constantine. To the history books, the Reformation period was the most unsettled in our history. But there have been greater ones, ones more threatening to the survival of the church. Think of what Constantine and Sylvester I must have thought when they learned of Sophia. There they were: Constantine, the first Roman emperor to grant Christianity the official protection of the empire; Sylvester, the first Pope to rule legitimately in the eyes of civil authority after nearly three hundred years of persecution.

“By all rights, this should have been a glorious era for the church,” Braun said, “but it was anything but that. As part of an official, protected religion, members of the church started to lose the bonds of mutual dependence they had needed for survival. It had been easy to stifle heresy and maintain spiritual unity when the faithful had to depend on other church members for survival from roving bands of Roman legionnaires bent on eradicating diem. Unity was survival. But the church, once officially sanctioned by Constantine, quickly lost that coherence. Encouraged by its connections to official Rome, the church quickly developed the bureaucracy that the Vatican is now so famous for. And as the bureaucracy gained a life of its own, it found itself frequently in conflicts.