Galen Watson

An interesting read. The author obviously put in a significant amount of research to ensure characters and events were at least nominally historical (or appear in historical folk tales). I spent a fair amount of time on google discovering a lot of new information about the early Catholic Church. All that said, the author shows a remarkable level of ignorance on how the actual canon was formed, frequently ascribing nefarious motivations and rationale to the process that are not supportable with what we currently know. This is perhaps a necessary simplification of a very long and involved process in order to make one of the main story plots work (the preservation of potentially heretical scriptures), but I found it more distracting/irritating. The principal heresy appears to be anything that implies Jesus was just a man ... but the author never really does anything other than hint that it would radically change the church forever (this despite that fact that such ideas have been floating around for centuries in niche communities). The only method the author uses to give these ideas more legitimacy is the association of these heretical gospels to the first century based upon paleography ... which really doesn't seem very likely. At any right, the primary reason the story does not perform is that it reads more like a textbook than a novel. The characters are flat (nearly one dimensional) with little to no development (as if written by an academic).… (mais)

I started off thinking "Everybody wants to be Robert Langdon," but the book never gets that good. The factual errors are just too much. For example, our priest has apparently never studied the gnostic heresy or even heard of the gnostic gospels. Despite all evidence that it was Pope Paul V (d. 1572), a Dominican friar, who started the tradition of the popes wearing only white (as is the Dominican habit), the pope in this novel wears white in the 800s. The apparently notion that only priests work in the current-day Vatican. They go on and on, and just get too distracting.… (mais)

Hey, this is a fun one!

Let’s start with the basics. A psalter doesn’t psing psongs door-to-door, nor does it dispense psalt and pepper. A psalter is a devotional book of psalms.

This particular psalter is over 1,000 years old. Nay, nearly 2,000 years old, for in in the ninth century, it was written over the words of a first-century heretical gospel … a copy of the Book of Thomas the Contender from the Ebionites … as a means of secretly preserving the words of an original apostle. The story takes place half in the ninth century and half in the twenty-first century, when the original gospel is finally restored. It’s a thriller that escalates in both story lines to an unexpected finish.

This is a Da Vinci Code twin, complete with a Vatican setting and a few jabs at the Church, but without the sensationalism. The conversation is well-written; it draws you into the era. It’s fiction, but well-researched and plausible beneath the story-telling surface.

Definitely recommended.… (mais)