Book Reviews

I have been invited to join the team which writes book reviews for New Times, the South Australia Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia's monthly magazine to congregations. Below are two reviews I wrote for the one book, as a type of practice before beginning work. I am currently awaiting my first batch of books to review to be sent from Adelaide.

‘The Betrayal’
Author: Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
Published by Tim Doherty Associates

Considering the title, and the picture on the front of the hardback edition of this book I was expecting a fictional account of the last days of Judas Iscariot. Having now read the book I wonder in fact what “the betrayal” actually is: who or what has been betrayed by this story? There is nothing new or potentially shocking here; a fiction based around scholarship which disproves the resurrection, denies the virgin birth to consider Jesus to be the illegitimate son of Pantera, and links Jesus emotionally with Mary Magdalene goes past the words of Dan Brown at least as far as the film Jesus of Montreal in my Generation-X memory.

As a story I found the book readable without being gripping. It has intrigue and action; a traditional chase narrative set inside a not uncommon story of the pagan woman and the Christian monk slowly falling in love during a time of hiding out from the baddies. And these are Church baddies too: Constantinian rather than Vatican, but even in the fourth century no one expected the Spanish Inquisition with their chief weapon of fear and surprise. I enjoyed the retelling of the last days of Jesus from the point of view of Joseph of Arimathea and once I became used to the use of Jewish spelling rather than the more traditional forms the story moved quickly; but the occasional passages set in second person (“you turn and enter the room”) left me puzzled as I’m still not certain who I was supposed to be at that point. (Judas Iscariot? But why?)

Perhaps this book is little more than has-been scholarship dressed up in has-been sensationalism: but if you know who you are in Christ, and He in you, there’s nothing too scary here for you, and you may well enjoy the story.


‘The Betrayal’
Author: Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
Published by Tim Doherty Associates

Jesus, possibly romantically linked to Mary Magdalene (who is the same person as Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus), the bastard son of a roman soldier, does not rise from the dead but his body is stolen from the tomb and hidden away by the Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea. High Priest Caiaphas had done all he could to save Jesus, but Annas subverted the plan out of a sense of personal vendetta, (his family are the temple traders in doves who Jesus kicked apart a few days earlier), and Jesus was sent to a sadistic Pilate who delighted in having him flogged prior to crucifixion just to see the look on Joseph of Arimathea’s face. Centuries later a small band of rebel monks (and their pagan but stunningly redheaded washerwoman) discover the truth and must outrun the Church police sent by Constantine to stop them at all costs.

It’s all here, murder, torture, intrigue, forbidden love, and a Church desperate to hide The Truth to protect the integrity of The Way. It worked for Dan Brown, and the players of Jesus of Montreal, so why not for two “Biblical Archaeologists” from the mid-west.

I found the use of Hebraic spellings needlessly complicated; the fiction of scholars showing how dreadfully clever they are, but once I was able to work out who each word actually referred to I was able to read around it. This book is an entertaining if not an engaging read, but in terms of shock value I was left undaunted and rather “been-there-done-that” by its claims.