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Question: What was the genesis for the story of Resurrection? Answer: The inspiration for Resurrection began when I read the astonishing story of the Nag Hammadi gospels. These ancient texts, written in Coptic on ancient papyrus pages, were discovered in 1945 by a Bedouin peasant digging for soil in Upper Egypt. The books, found in an earthenware jar near the ruins of the St. Pachomius monastery, proved to be part of a collection of sixty or so gospels that were widely circulated and read in the 4th century—ancient best sellers, if you will. In that same century, when the new church outlawed all gospels save for the four selected for the New Testament, it seems probable that some of these holy men from the monastery buried these texts, perhaps with a prayer that someday they would be dug up, that their wisdom would not be lost. Q: How is it that these gospels are still relatively unknown? A: That in itself is a mystery. When I started doing research on them, I asked friends, peers, elders, people with education and learning if they knew anything about these texts. Had they even heard of Nag Hammadi? There was a resounding silence. The fact is, the gospels did not become available to the public until the 1970’s. Q: What did you think of the gospels when you read them? A: When I started to investigate the content of these (in some cases only recently translated) gospels, my blood began to boil. What began to emerge was a picture of a Christianity that I never knew existed one of wisdom and beauty and openness. As I learned more, I started to feel something like betrayal. I didn’t know if it was a rational response, this sense that something precious had been stolen—a belief system more varied, generous, and mystical than the one Christians have today. It was as if the story of Christianity had once been a great and complex work of art, full of characters and color—a masterpiece. What history brought forward was a faded sketch, the merest outline in black and white. I guess it felt like a deprivation. The flip side was the incredible gift of this material resurfacing, of the masterpiece coming back to life. Q: How is the belief system you’re describing different from the one we know today? A: In this alternate Christianity, one found God through self-knowledge, through gnosis. There was no need for an intermediary, for a church. All sacred texts were considered valid. The female was not only valued but thought to be divine. In fact, Sophia, the personification of wisdom for the Gnostics, was thought to be female. These beliefs were, for obvious reasons, threatening to the forming church. Q: How does Jesus himself come across in the gospels? A: Reading the words of the man whom some believe to be his closest disciple, Thomas, Jesus emerges as a different kind of man than the one portrayed in the New Testament; more of a sage, a gentle and tolerant teacher. He clearly respected and loved women, Mary Magdalene in particular. There was no question that they were lovers, or that Peter, the founder of the Roman Catholic Church, was envious of the relationship and harbored feelings of hostility toward Mary. The Gospel of Philip reported Peter saying to Jesus, “Can not Mary leave us now? Women are not worthy of life.” It seems no accident that Mary Magdalene, referred to by the early church as the “first apostle,” was in The New Testament reduced to a “nameless sinner.” Q: In what ways do these gospels differ from the gospels we are familiar with? A: In significant ways. In the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, the events that came to define Christianity did not exist. There were no miracles, no prophecy, no ending of the world, no dying for one’s sins, no Resurrection. There were simply Jesus’ words, his teachings, which is some cases are almost Buddhist in feel. For instance, in one gospel, Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear. He who has a mind to understand, let him understand,” and “One who knows all but lacks within, is utterly lacking.” The discovery of this gospel was momentous because so many fragments of Thomas had been found—three in Oxyrhynchus alone. With the appearance of the first complete text, scholars were able to match up their fragments, filling in missing letters and words and ultimately confirming the speculation that the Gospel of Thomas was once possibly the most widely read and popular in the land. Q: So what, if anything, is the reader made to think? A: That the story of Jesus’ life was shaped hundreds of years after his death by men who were attempting to solidify a Christian political movement. For their bible, they chose stories that agreed with each other, that told more or less the same story: the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Mark. The Nag Hammadi texts call into question that these men were the closest to Jesus and that they fully understood his teachings. When religion becomes institutionalized, and the chief aim of the institution is to create and maintain order and control, the spiritual content can be subject to interpretation, depending on who’s overseeing it. You can see how relative the dictates become by looking at the recent history of the papacy. How different, for instance, was the open-minded Second Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII from the present, more conservative reign of Pope Benedict XVI. Popes aren’t unlike presidents in this way. In any case, it becomes clear that Christianity was once a movement with many branches with conflicting beliefs. The branch that won was not necessarily the truest to the original Christian movement, but it was the best organized, with the Roman Emperor and his mighty army behind it. Q: What came before the Catholic Church? What did people believe? A: There were a number of pagan (pre-Christian) religions at the time, many of which shared remarkable traits with the emerging Christian faith. In the Rome of early Christianity, for instance, the most popular religion was Mithraism, which worshipped the god Mithra who was the son of the sun sent to earth to save mankind. He was born of a virgin on December 25th, visited by shepherds and magi, had sacraments of bread and wine as well as twelve disciples, could heal the sick, make the blind see . . . the list of similarities goes on. The fact is, the basic elements of Christianity were widespread in pagan religions at the time. December 25th was the date of an important winter festival and a logical date for the birth of a God.The story, so unique to Christianity now, was familiar to many before the life of Christ. The Church Fathers simply absorbed it. Q: How does this religious content unfold in the book? A: Resurrection is loosely based on real events, which are put together by characters Gemma Bastian and Anthony Lazar, who are moved by the discoveries they make in their race to recover the gospels, the books that have been killed for and that could disappear again forever. Isolated and, in Gemma’s case, broken by war and loss, these characters find themselves both challenged and healed by this new faith that reaches out to them in their loneliness and despair. They begin to fight for it as they fight for themselves. The story is truly about Resurrection; of a dead father, of a world ravaged by war, of a faith that might have been, of a love between a man and a woman. Q: Does the book make an argument for a particular kind of belief? A: If it makes an argument, it’s for learning. This is one of the novel’s themes. Above the relative values of right or wrong is understanding. When we push ourselves to grasp complexity, we raise our consciousness to another level, one where the answers aren’t as easy. The benefit being that with such exercise, our minds become stronger and more capable of problem solving. For what it’s worth, this seems to be a value of Gnosticism. Beyond that, I didn’t want to preach. I want to present the information I had found in the most direct way possible. Setting the book in the 1940s allowed me to side-step much of the academic complexity and dispute that has arisen in response to these gospels. What you see in Resurrection is the text of these lost gospels, pure and simple. Q: How do you think readers will respond to the religious content of your novel? A: I hope with interest. It seems this country is ready to have a real dialogue about faith. People seem to be challenging the Catholic Church’s instruction not to question, to simply have faith. What the Church has not anticipated was that people would become hungry for what they did not know, for what has been held back. They would become hungry for the truth, for facts, for the whole story. This has become evident with the wild success of The Da Vinci Code—the best-selling book, as it happens, since the Bible. Resurrection offers another conspiracy theory. There is new information here, put together towards a different conclusion, both subtler and more controversial, because it does not stray from fact. It is a book that I hope re-opens the religious dialogue on a deeper level, bringing into question a religion that has been reduced to slogans that wage war overseas, that has come to define a large segment of this country’s people. It’s a dialogue the American public is clearly ready for. |