“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, Judaism, and then Christianity into a single sect. The name Gnosticism came from the Greek word gnosis, meaning intuitive knowledge. To the Gnostics, knowledge of the divine being was the end-all, and those who had the knowledge believed they had the spark of the divine to the point that people like Simon the Magician actually thought he was, at least partially, divine.”

“And you complain that my DNA science is complicated,” Sana scoffed.

“This isn’t all that complicated, but back to Basilides. He happened to be one of the first Gnostics also to be a Christian, although the name Christian didn’t yet exist. He believed Jesus of Nazareth was the awaited Messiah. Yet he didn’t believe that Christ had come to earth to redeem mankind from sin by suffering on the cross, like most of the rest of his fellow Christians did. Instead, Basilides thought that Jesus’ mission had been for the purposes of enlightenment, or gnosis, to show humans how to break free of the physical world and achieve salvation. The Gnostics like Basilides were really high on Greek philosophy and Persian mythology, but they were all very down on the material world, which they thought entrapped humankind and was the source of all sin.”