While novels and cinema have repeatedly sought after the
historical Jesus, until now none have explored what may be a more tantalizing
mystery—the Christian story’s anonymous creator. Logos is a literary bildungsroman about the
man who will become the anonymous author of the original Gospel, set amid the
kaleidoscopic mingling of ancient cultures.
Logos is a gripping tale of adventure, a moving love story, and a novel
of ideas. None of this should be
regarded as out of place or incompatible in a novel about Christianity’s
origin. Dissent, anarchism, and
revolution—and incipient Christianity was no less these things than the
Bolshevik, the French or the American revolutions—inevitably have involved
ideas, adventure, and romance.
In A.D. 66, Jacob is an educated and privileged
Greco-Roman Jew, a Temple priest in Jerusalem, and a leader of Israel’s
rebellion against Rome. When Roman soldiers murder his parents and his beloved
sister disappears in a pogrom led by the Roman procurator, personal tragedy
impels Jacob to seek blood and vengeance. The rebellion he helps to foment
leads to more tragedy, personal and ultimately cosmic: his wife and son perish
in the Romans’ siege of Jerusalem, and the Roman army destroys Jerusalem and
the Temple, and finally extinguishes Israel at Masada. Jacob is expelled from
his homeland, and he wanders by land and sea, bereft of all, until he arrives
in Rome. He is still rebellious, and in Rome he joins other dissidents, but now
plotting ironic vengeance, not by arms, but by the power of an idea.
Paul of Tarsus, Josephus, the keepers of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, and even Yeshua, the historical Jesus himself, play a role in Jacob’s
tumultuous and mysterious fortunes. But it is the women who have loved him who
help him to appreciate that violence is a dire cycle.
A mystery that must fascinate and haunt all former
believers and progressive believers, regardless of faith, is at the heart of
Logos—what kind of person would set out to create sacred scripture, to be the
source of enduring myth? Who was
Homer? Who was Harold Bloom’s Redactor
(the editor and assembler of the Pentateuch)? Who was Joseph Smith (he said,
“No man knows my history”)? Who was the
anonymous author of the original Gospel? Why did they do it? What is the “back story”? Certainly each such
person is different, though each understood the awesome power of story, and
whoever became possessed of such strange and overwhelming creative impulse must
defy facile judgment.
So my debut novel Logos is about the anonymous author of
the original gospel. Part of the
foundation of mainstream modern gospel scholarship is that there was an
original gospel, now lost, that was a common source for the canonized Mark,
Matthew and Luke gospels (which preceded John).
The seed of Logos was Nietzsche’s speculations in The Antichrist about the creators of the Christian story. He
suggested that the gospels were produced by refugees of the Romans’ destruction
of Jerusalem in the year 70, and their aim was a kind of vengeance, not by
arms, but by the power of an idea. In the beginning, all Christians were Jews.
And from the historical record it is evident that the trauma and dislocation
proceeding from the obliteration of the Jewish kingdom and the extinction of
the Judaic temple cult, including destruction of the Temple, and the associated
holocaust, led to the diaspora of Jews and reevaluation among Jews of Jewish
history and the Jewish experience that was essential to the spectacular success
of both Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism.
More recent scholarship including Harold Bloom’s writings
about the first schism among the followers of Yeshua provided additional
dramatic context for Logos. Logos in part dramatizes the split between
Greco-Roman Pauline Christianity and James’ more ascetic, rural centered faith
derived from Yeshua’s teachings that was more closely associated with ancient
Judaism or the Essene movement and that may have been the seed for the rise of
Islam.
The first time I read War and Peace I told myself that I
wanted to try to write a novel that dealt with religion and portrayed an entire
society transformed by war like that masterwork did. Indeed, from the historical record it’s
evident that like the Russian nobility at the beginning of War and Peace, who
were Russian to the marrow, but steeped in French culture, speaking French,
going to the ballet and the opera, reading French novels, eating French food
(yet despising Catholicism), adoring Napoleon and quoting him (until he turned
on them), the Jews—including Paul—who created the Christian canon regularly
spoke and wrote in Greek, which at that time and place was the language of the
intelligentsia, and were originally nobles closely associated with their Roman
overlords.
Fittingly, then, Logos explores Christ as the power of
story through the medium of a powerful story. Nietzsche’s speculation seems
plausible to me, and it inspired Logos’ premise. But this scenario as well follows the
archetypical course of the heroic epic.
Logos is loosely and ironically based on the plot of the Aeneid,
Virgil’s epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled
burning Troy following its destruction by the Greeks, experienced a period of
wandering that involved a star crossed love affair with Dido, a queen of
Carthage, and ultimately made a sea journey to Italy, where he founded the
Roman civilization. Not only does Logos
follow heroic norms, it can claim status as a sequel to the Aeneid, just as the
Aeneid is a sequel to the Iliad.
Paradoxically, the term “Logos” captures both
Christianity’s and the modern empirical account’s source of Christ’s
power. As I tell my children, even if
you don’t regard the Bible as a history book, the Bible proves the awesome
power of story. To traditional
Christianity, “Logos” is a manifestation of God, as mediator between imperfect
matter and perfect idea. It is a concept
innovated by the Jewish philosopher Philo, adapting it from Greek
philosophy. Philo was a contemporary of
Paul of Tarsus and the historical Jesus, a Hellenized Jew like Paul, now
designated by Catholicism as a “Father of the Church” though apparently he was
never a Christian. (He is a character in
Logos.) Christ is therefore an
enfleshed Logos. But the modern
empirical account of the historical Jesus and his lasting influence reprises
the original Greek definition of “logos” —literally, the word, an account, a
story. Implicitly according to even the
modern empirical account, Logos is indeed “God,” i.e., God is the power of
story.
Obviously I owe an enormous debt to that notoriously
unreliable narrator Josephus. I have repaid him by making him a major character
in Logos, although I suspect he’d regard this as a poor showing of gratitude.
I am fascinated by the paradox that a religious movement
appears always to begin as a reaction to authority and oppression, and if it
succeeds, it will itself become autocratic and oppressive, a part of the very
problem that impelled its founder to rebel.
Because my protagonist, Jacob ben Aaron, finds Christianity and expands
on and refines its founding myth at about the time Christianity started to make
this transformation, Jacob is in a sense an anti-hero. I am convinced that Yeshua, the historical
Jesus, was a rebel, a radical, and an apostate from the religion of his
fathers. He is just the kind of
historical figure that I adore, and most emphatically not an anti-hero in
Logos.
The wonderful thing is that, in writing this novel, I
think I discovered the abiding element of Christianity that—for all of men’s
deployment of Christianity as a means of oppression, and regardless of my
personal skepticism—has been a recurring source of humanism and enlightenment
since Christianity’s advent in the first century.
