I love historical conspiracy books, especially when the Templars are involved. "The Last Templar" opens with a scene of four men, mounted on horseback, dressed as Templars, riding into the Met to raid a special Vatican exhibit. In the exhibit is a Templar encoding device, which allows ancient documents to be deciphered that could lead to a treasure that would turn Christianity upside down.
Who could ask for anything more?
There are enough gaps in our Templar knowledge, mysteries unanswered, oddities strewn about to fill in with a grand imagination. Raymond Khoury does that wonderfully.
I didn't read this one by eye, but by ear. Richard Ferrone brings the narrative to life.
What interests me the most about thrillers of this sort is their take on the Christian faith and what could be so huge as to undercut the entire Church-although for some reason it is usually the Roman Catholic Church that fills the role for the entire body of Christendom. I guess they are more fun to pick on than Presbyterians.
"The Da Vinci Code" is the measure against which such historical conspiracies are measured.
As a book, there is much to strain credulity, some details that didn't exactly line up, some harsh treatments of the Christian church, but on the whole, I enjoyed it.
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you are at all planning to read or listen to this book, stop right now! I am not a reviewer, I want to measure popular culture's take on my faith. So I am going to do that starting now.
The Templers were supposed to have, in their possession, a journal, a gospel, written in the hand of Jesus himself that outlines his life, not as the Son of God or the Miracle Worker, but simply as a man, a reformer, and a radical at the time of Caesar Augustus. All the rest of it, Christmas, Easter, the healings, the raisings from the dead, the casting out of demons, walking on water, the piling on of divine status, all of that is the result of the next generations of leadership deciding to create the religion we have now as the grand fiction piled on top of this historic figure.
And it was so convincing that it allowed the Templars to blackmail the Church for two centuries. And the hidden references to it in the Vatican library are so compelling that the Vatican will conspire with the world to keep it hidden. There is a Monseigneur hit man playing a villainous role throughout.
This idea of Jesus as simply a teacher is nothing new. People from Thomas Jefferson to Albert Schweitzer have sought to strip away the miraculous, the eschatological (end-times stuff), and the divinity from Jesus. The ethics of Jesus, forgiveness, love, and justice, seem to make up the core of what is left to the teacher-human.
My response is that if you do away with all the miraculous stuff in the gospel accounts and base your interpretation solely on the words of Jesus, you get a madman! Jesus claimed all kinds of crazy things about "I and the Father are one", the temple of his body being destroyed and rebuilt in three days, right on down the line to presuming to be an expert at fishing, telling the disciples it is better to fish at midday. Or, if one side of the boat has been bad for casting, try the other side!
Now I am being deliberately provocative. People who want to draw lines around Jesus to tuck him into a certain cubby hole have the best reasoning about what parts of the bible should be left behind and what parts might be true.
The premise of the novel is that there is another gospel, authored by Jesus, which debunks all the rest of the New Testament (or is there?). The author does not stray into giving us any quotes or examples from this gospel manuscript on what is different, and I think that is wise. It would never be a good idea to try and outwrite the bible.
There have been other gospels that have been recovered in the historical record that have caused a stir. The Nag Hammadi library is referenced in the novel and is the largest cache of these 'other' holy books. There hasn't been enough in them yet to upset the balance of Holy Scripture. Bible believer would point to God's preservation of His holy Word. Nay-sayers would point to book-burning, power hungry religious types.
Could such a gospel really exist? Could it force the opening of the Canon of Scripture? Could it force us to re-examine the basics of our faith? Could it be at once so dissimilar to the presentation of Jesus in the current gospel accounts and yet be faithful enough to the time and place to convince people to believe it? Could it have survived down to the present age without seeing the light of day?
To me, that presses me to consider what would I have to see or read to be convinced that the New Testament as we have it is a falsehood.
I don't know what that would look like. Because here is what I believe. I believe the Bible as a whole shows a division of two things. There is the perfection of God and the brokenness of the world. When these two are put side by side, it is always to point to the perfection of God, brokered to us by Jesus in his sacrifice for us, and instilled in us by the Holy Spirit.
What humans have done with the Bible since that time, the wars, the pogroms, the inquisitions, the slaughters, that is a whole other issue, at least for me. My religion has much evil to answer for in its history. My faith seeks to overcome those evils with good for the next generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment