Logos: A Novel of Christianity's Origin, by John Neeleman
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Logos: A Novel of Christianity's Origin, by John Neeleman
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Gold Medal winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards ("IPPY") From Kirkus Reviews:A fictional account of the birth of Christianity.First-time author Neeleman has pulled off a staggeringly impressive feat: a rigorously researched historical novel that carries its scholarliness lightly and grips the reader with personal drama. Jacob was raised to be an intellectual, reading both Greek and Latin, as well as Hebrew and Aramaic, but also to love his native Jerusalem. He chafes under the oppressive, sometimes-capricious rule of the Roman Empire, however, despite the security such tyranny brings to the Jewish people. Still, he clings to his family, reluctant to endanger them and the quiet life he enjoys. After a ferocious massacre leaves his parents and sister murdered, Jacob's desire for revolution and the autonomy of Jerusalem grows, plunging him into a war for liberty. Neeleman depicts the ensuing drama with a powerful prose that evokes the spirit of the time without devolving into historically archaic vernacular: "Beyond the gates were ranks of torch carrying soldiers marching two abreast, man after man in gleaming helmet; they formed a bristling, seething, shining, gigantic serpent. He heard the tramp of a hundred thousand armor-clad feet and the serpent's awful roaring, joyful in its bloody work: victorious, violent, unbridled." Despite its theological content, the story brims with sensual imagery. Overcoming his original antipathy to Christianity, Jacob eventually becomes the unnamed author of the original Gospel, bearing witness to the extraordinary transformation wrought by Jesus. Sometimes, the Job-like suffering of Jacob can be challenging to weather, and the tale could have been enlivened by a few more lighthearted moments, but this book remains a stirring account of a historically significant time and a deep comment on the nature of Scripture itself.Especially for those interested in theological history, an extraordinary amalgam of fiction and fact.
Logos: A Novel of Christianity's Origin, by John Neeleman - Amazon Sales Rank: #611834 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Logos: A Novel of Christianity's Origin, by John Neeleman Review "A staggeringly impressive feat: a rigorously researched historical novel that carries its scholarliness lightly and grips the reader with personal drama. . . . Neeleman depicts the ensuing drama with a powerful prose that evokes the spirit of the time . . . The story brims with sensual imagery. . . A stirring account of a historically significant time and a deep comment on the nature of Scripture itself.. An extraordinary amalgam of fiction and fact." --Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Featured Review)"Through rebellious uprising, wilderness wandering and a final sea journey, Jacob is eventually involved with every single Jewish or Roman person of historical importance.... Yet this novel's core is a set of ideas more than a chain of events.... Those interested in how facts and myth synthesize to form a religion will be pleased by plausible extrapolation from reasonable assumptions." --Publishers Weekly "The best historical novel tackles historical events from different perspectives, injects an intimate feel of bygone years, and deftly implants these facets into characters taken from historical fact and personalized so that they are real living, breathing people. Logos is such a beast, a serious historical approach set in an ancient world that captures not only the advent of Christianity and the rise of a religion, but the heart and soul of its times." --Midwest Book Review "Logos is a brilliant evocation of the tumultuous first century and the birth of Christianity. Neeleman's vivid reconstruction of the period of the Jewish Wars and ultimately the promulgation of the first Gospel is a feat of both art and scholarship." --Beverly Swerling, author of Bristol House and City of Dreams
From the Author THE CONSPIRACY THAT MADE THE MAN JESUS A MYTH THAT WOULD SWALLOW THE ROMAN EMPIRE My novel, Logos, dramatizes the advent of Christianity. The primary action ultimately involves the composition of the original Gospel - by the novel's protagonist, Jacob. The novel's premise is predicated on the consensus among biblical scholars that the canonical Gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, and that all of their authors are anonymous. They likely were not written by persons bearing the names that are attached to them: Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Moreover, mainstream Gospel scholarship has concluded that there must have been at least one additional Gospel, now lost, that preceded and was a source for these canonical Gospels. The mystery source is most often identified as Q, a proto-Gospel. But there are dozens hypotheses for the provenance of the canonical Gospels, and much disagreement exists among biblical scholars. Other hypothetical sources or proto-Gospels that may have been sources for the canonical Gospels have been identified as well, e.g., L, M and K. None of these have been found. But my aim is most emphatically not to take a position among these two dozen varying hypotheses. My personal view is that the authors of the Gospels likely intended to keep their origins mysterious. And any amount of after the fact reasoning to support the various hypotheses is essentially fiction. People are complicated; often, truth is stranger than fiction. I am a novelist, not a biblical scholar. The great historical novelist Hilary Mantel says, "I try to stick with the facts until the facts run out." I began with these facts: To quote Harold Bloom, "there was an historical Jesus." Apparently, like Tank Man or Ethel Rosenberg, and like legions of other Jews in the first century, he was murdered by the powers that be because he was rebelling against an unjust society. We know almost nothing about the historical Jesus, but we know quite a lot about Palestine at the time: There was a dominant imperial power-Rome-which ruled by means of local client autocrats, including a Jewish King (the Herods) and a theocracy focused on the Jerusalem Temple. And there were many poor, and revolutionaries. Among the dissidents there were also Jewish pacifists, who lived monastically, and preached against the worldliness and the acquisitiveness of the priests, and against animal sacrifices, eating meat, and slavery, and practiced celibacy. They also prophesied that an apocalypse, the end of the world, was at hand. The most prominent among these were the Essenes. Apparently, the historical John the Baptist and the historical Jesus emerged as charismatic leaders among the radicals. At the same time, a Jewish scholar and philosopher named Philo lived in Alexandria, Egypt, from 20 BC to 50 AD. Philo was a product of a momentous event in the history of the world that had happened four hundred years before: the encounter between ancient Greek civilization and influence, and ancient Judaism, the Jewish people. This was precipitated by Alexander the Great's conquests which drove the Persians out of Egypt and the Middle East including Palestine. Alexander died young, but his generals who succeeded him established important cities, schools, and cultural centers throughout the Middle East: most important, the City of Alexandria and its great, now almost mythical library. The modern word to describe the resulting phenomenon is Hellenization, which means the spread of Greek language, culture, and population into the former Persian Empire after Alexander's conquest. So, in the first century, Philo lived with one foot in the secular world and one in the religious tradition of his fathers - Judaism - and he set out to synthesize or reconcile those two traditions that were equally dear to him. His focal point was Greek philosophy's "Logos" concept. The writings of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived in about 500 B.C., are the earliest evidence we have of the word Logos receiving special attention. If there were such a thing as a Greek-English dictionary at that time, you might find the word Logos defined to mean: an argument, reasoned discourse, an opinion, word, speech, account, to reason. Later, the Greeks refined the concept to include the rational and intelligent principle of the universe by which it is energized and operates: the orbit of the planets, the seasons, life itself, the thing that caused it to come into being, that gave birth to it, and that still gives it life. Philo reworked Logos to mean a mediating element that joins the Torah's God with our material world - for example, angels, the burning bush, and whatever it is that makes us human: reasoning, words, compassion. Philo wrote that intermediary beings are necessary to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world. The Logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo "the first-born of God," and the eldest and chief of the angels. That all sounds very Christian. But so far as we know, the original narrative attributing divine qualities to Jesus is in Paul of Tarsus' (a/k/a St. Paul's) letters - which were originally written in Greek. Nietzsche speculated that Paul had experienced hallucinations associated with his epilepsy, and this seems plausible to me. Still, within just 50 years of the death of the historical Jesus - a time span well within living memories even then - something unique and momentous in the history of the world occurred: the deliberate and systematic creation of a myth that would ultimately swallow the Roman Empire. The participants in this premeditated myth-making are anonymous, but we can surmise a few facts: They were likely Hellenized Jews, and therefore among the intelligentsia. Likely they created the original gospel in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and were profoundly affected by that event. How did Philo's Logos - which to him was always an abstraction: Philo was a lifelong Jew - become a human being and God incarnate? That is what my novel is about.
From the Back Cover Logos is a bildungsroman about the anonymous author of the original Gospel, set amid the kaleidoscopic mingling of ancient cultures. In A.D. 66, Jacob is one of Jerusalem's privileged Greco-Roman Jews. When Roman soldiers murder his parents and his beloved sister disappears in a pogrom led by the Roman procurator, he joins Israel's rebellion against Rome. The rebellion he helps to foment leads to more tragedy--personal and, ultimately, cosmic: Jacob's wife and son perish in Rome's siege of Jerusalem, and the Romans destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, and finally extinguish Israel at Masada. Jacob wanders, and in Rome, he joins other dissidents--plotting vengeance not by arms, but by the power of an idea. Paul of Tarsus, Josephus, the keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the historical Jesus himself each play a role in Jacob's tumultuous fortunes, but the women who have loved him compel the transforming and subversive climax.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A Superb Debut Novel on the Birth of Christianity By John Kwok Debut novelist John Neeleman's "Logos" should be viewed as one of the most notable works of fiction published this year - and one of this year's notable debut novels - and one that should have been published by a major New York City publishing house. This is a compelling, quite fascinating, account of the life of Jacob Ben Aaron, whom Neeleman establishes as the author of the unknown "proto-Gospel" that apparently inspired several of the Gospels found in the New Testament. While Jacob is entirely fictional, the novel introduces us to such key historical figures as Roman general Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Romanized Jew who was the deputy commander the Roman legion which lay siege to Jerusalem in AD 70, the enigmatic historian Flavius Josephus, and Roman emperor TItus. It is through Jacob's eyes that we see a most spellbinding account of Jewish religious and political strife in the streets of Jerusalem leading up to and during the first Roman-Jewish war (AD 66 to AD 73), and the gradual rise of Christianity, seen initially as a heretical Essene sect. Neeleman has done for 1st Century AD Palestine and Rome, what Hilary Mantel has done in covering the life and times of King Henry VIII in her novels "Wolf Hall" and "Bringing up the Bodies", demonstrating his own fine gifts for historical research, storytelling and prose. For those seeking a credible, historical fictional account of the birth of Christianity, then "Logos" should rank high on their lists.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Ambitious historical fiction that proves accessible and interesting By Mike W. Logos: A Novel of Christianity’s Origin seems an ambitious undertaking, especially when you consider that it is a debut novel. Neeleman has chosen a period of history, the first century destruction of Jerusalem, about which I'd wager few in the mainstream know much, if anything. While this setting is certainly unique, it also proves efficacious for the advancing of a tale that turns on its ear the foundational story of Christianity.Perhaps the most important question a mainstream reader should be asking here is “does Neeleman succeed in making this history accessible to the non-historian?” As it turns out the novel’s two biggest strengths are the author’s clear grasp of the history and his facility with the various philosophies which play a vital role in both plot development and resolution. Not only has the history been made accessible, it has been made interesting. One of the byproducts of quality historical fiction is that a reader is sent consistently in search of further knowledge of the characters and events in which he or she has newly become interested. Logos frequently inspired me to further research, much of this inspiration coming from the fantastically detailed descriptions of first century life. From clothing to technology, from landscape to the quality and make up of Roman roads, from warfare to family life, it becomes abundantly clear that this book is well researched and that the reader stands to learn a great deal as a result.To summarize without spoilers, the novel follows the protagonist Jacob, a member of the noble class among Palestinian Jews, as he moves through three main phases of his life leading up to the book’s ultimate and surprising resolution. From the pride, agitation and arrogance leading up to the Jewish rebellion, to the pain, suffering, humility and anger of having been laid low by the Romans at great personal cost. From the hope and joy of spiritual rebirth to the depression and despair of seemingly senseless tragedy. And finally from spiritual and physical emptiness to the discovery of new purpose and a somewhat shocking resolution to the tale.The final third of the book was for me its most powerful section, and there the author’s facility with philosophy was on full display. Complicated ideas are well expressed, even to the non philosopher, and the result is a summation that skillfully ties Jacob’s many experiences together, and provokes a great deal of thought.I’m guessing that one of the most difficult aspects of writing a novel like this one is finding the right voice for dialog. One minor criticism of Logos is that for me it was difficult to hear more than one voice among the many characters. Perhaps this was due to the fact that often the speakers were of the same educated, privileged set. Perhaps it was because the more formal speech did not leave much room for individuality or distinction between characters. This formal voice was perfect when it was time to talk philosophy however, and made for at times quite powerful dialog, especially in the book’s final chapters.Overall, Logos was an enriching and thought provoking reading experience. I emerged with an interest in a time period about which I previously knew very little, and a desire to expand this new knowledge. I also came away impressed with what became a very creative plot and its resolution. Again, Neeleman has taken a fairly esoteric topic and made it both accessible and interesting and for these reasons, I’m happy to recommend it to any lover of reading, and especially to readers interested in history, religion and/or philosophy.I was provided an advanced copy of Logos for the purpose of review.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. The word made flesh By The Kindle Book Review NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.Like many of those who wandered away from Christianity, I am fascinated by any close examination of the life and times of Yeshua bar Miriam. This well-researched, sprawling historical novel (and yes, it is required to describe historical novels over a certain length as “sprawling”) aims to put the reader deeply in first-century Palestine and Rome, when people first came to debate among themselves what Yeshua was.The hero, Jacob, begins as the weakest point in the novel. He is too much of an Everyman, too eager to fight for the right at every turning point in the dark history of Jerusalem's revolt against Rome, and too easily taken to the bosom of major historical figures.Nonetheless, the pace picks up considerably when Jacob stumbles across the story of Jesus as the Christ. Then the novel offers a fascinating rendering of life with the Essenes and with pre-Islamic Bedouins, and becomes a much more compelling read. The novel's theory of the “invention” of Christianity as a syncretic, Hellenized religion is thoroughly plausible. I recommend this read as a primer or a companion primer for those with an interest in the birth of Christianity.-- L.T. Patridge, The Kindle Book Review
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Logos: A Novel of Christianity's Origin, by John Neeleman
