Tag Archives: Bible

Ancient History Made Contemporary and Compelling

Colleen Kwong is a pastor and an artist (potter). We began bumping into each other and exchanging our work a few years ago at church conventions. My fingers trace her clay labyrinth that sits on my desk. I sent her a proof copy of Wormwood and Gall, and she soon replied that she “devoured” it and sent the following review.

Who would think that a book that begins with “On a late summer’s day in the reign of Emperor Vespasian…” would be a page-turner?! And yet, RW Holmen has taken a page from ancient history and made it feel utterly contemporary and compelling.

He describes the sensory atmosphere of first century Jerusalem and environs with such ferocity that one feels, smells, sees, hears, and tastes the desperation and the occasional delight of those present in that place.

As with other writings that engage historical settings, we know the ending before we begin, but Holmen is able to take us on the journey with the protagonist Markos (the reconstructed imagined writer of the gospel of Mark) with such clarity that we feel the urgency of the time.

For the knowledgeable historian, this book offers insights into the very human aspects and possible scenario for the writing of Mark’s gospel. For those with less historical knowledge, it provides enough factual information to make the story understandable in its historical context.

Holmen hints at the power of the person Jesus through his contacts with Jesus’ relatives and friends, but does not overpower us with the usual saccharine media portrayal of “knowing Jesus as Christ.” He manages to give glimpses into the hope and possibilities of following the Christ as shown in those who knew Jesus and attempt to follow the teachings and example of Godly living. All this in a time that was brutal, where loss is great, and hope is almost unimaginable. Personal decision making and community responsibility is lived out by the book’s characters in varying ways, each having to live with their decisions, and some questioning the meaning of it all.

It is in this world of destruction, tragedy, chaos and confusion that Markos and his circle struggle for a sense of humanity and meaning. And, lucky for us, Markos is able to record it for us, as he is a scribe.

Thanks to RW Holmen for also being a scribe, doing the hard work of researching, recording, imagining, and reconstructing a possible scenario of the writing of the Gospel of Mark. This book would be a wonderful addition to a Bible study, to give life to the characters that often seem distant, and to invite us into a world that, though distant in time and place, feels contemporary through Holmen’s writing.

Wormwood and Gall–first review

A few years ago, I participated in a Saturday morning men’s group over coffee and Panera pastries. Mike Allen was another participant. Recently, he responded to my request for an early review and quickly downloaded a digital copy, and he has now sent me his review.

First, he contrasts light Christian fiction with heavy theological books, and he says,

The first is hardly worth reading. The second can be difficult, filled with arcane vocabulary and requiring mastery of languages not used for over 1,500 years. Obie Holmen’s book is neither of those two types, thankfully. Wormwood and Gall: the Destruction of Jerusalem and the First Gospel, focuses on the search for meaning in a time of destruction. Although the history, clothing, food, economy and the politics are accurately captured by Holmen, his focus is on existential meaning, the question whether creation is good or evil, the meaning of one’s death, and overarching all questions, does my existence simply end with my life?
What carries Holmen’s book is the power of his character development along with his sure grasp of history. Holmen has written a novel based on very real events at a critical point in human history, incorporating human questions. Its Christian context is clear but Holmen skillfully avoids overwhelming the reader with false religiosity. He places us in the midst of theology’s core: all theology starts from human experience, each individual must start with his or her own story. Holmen’s Wormwood and Gall manages to suggest answers in a subtle ways. This is a book that is both readable as well as worth the reading.

In Mike’s cover emails to me, he adds,

Your novel deserves a review of depth and consideration. The poetry of your text demands a solid review. It’s obvious I liked the book. I liked it for its character development and plot.
Once I moved into your book I had no doubts about it. Initially I wondered if this was going to be another of those “religious books” plaguing all of us. But it turned out to be nothing of the kind and that was the reason for my pleasure in reading it. It asks questions that I ask myself. It incorporates some of my experiences, and it captures some of my questions and answers.

Thank you for the honor of writing a review. Your book is just simply that good.

Thank you, Mike. You honor me with your kind and generous comments.

Wormwood and Gall: an odd book title

The Hollywood screenwriter who hopes to bring A Wretched Man to a movie screen near you, once complimented me on my imaginative, and sometimes provocative, book titles: A Wretched Man, Gonna Stick my Sword in the Golden Sand, Queer Clergy. I could add my current work in progress, Lady Liberty is a Bitch. So, where does Wormwood and Gall come from? For starters, Wormwood is a medicinal herb, and gall is bitter bile.

Of course, Paul’s own self-designation provides the title for A Wretched Man. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Romans 7:24. Similarly, Wormwood and Gall derives from a Biblical reference: in this case, a lament for Jerusalem:

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, and his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 1:1 & 3:19-22

This lament aptly suggests the novel’s theme. In the midst of despair as Roman legions besiege Jerusalem, and all seems lost, a narrator scribes ink strokes on a papyrus scroll to bolster courage and inspire hope in the beleaguered remnant of Jesus followers, four decades after his crucifixion. The novel characterizes Markos (Greek for “Mark”) as someone who wrestles with existential questions as to the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life.

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Is literary fiction a dinosaur?

First, a working definition of “literary fiction” from Wikipedia:

A concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition.
A focus on “introspective, in-depth character studies” of “interesting, complex and developed” characters, whose “inner stories” drive the plot, with detailed motivations to elicit “emotional involvement” in the reader.
A slower pace than popular fiction, “literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way”.
A concern with the style and complexity of the writing: “elegantly written, lyrical, and … layered”.
Unlike genre fiction, plot is not the central concern. The tone of literary fiction can be darker than genre fiction.

Literary fiction is often contrasted with genre fiction, commercial fiction, popular fiction, etc. Among other trends in the publishing industry, literary fiction is increasingly becoming a lost art, driven by cultural changes and market influences. Sadly, good books don’t sell. An overstatement, of course, and there are exceptions. Here in Minnesota, we have authors Louise Erdrich and Marlon James, winners of prestigious writing awards who also manage to sell a good number of books.

Publishing industry veteran Brooke Warner sums up the dilemma this way:

This week I had lunch with an agent friend who expressed her frustration that the best manuscripts she’s representing simply aren’t selling to traditional publishers … It used to be that traditional publishers were curators of what we read, and therefore, in a trickle-down way, of our cultural values. Literary books—which usually refers to books of substance, that are more intellectual, typically better written, and stylistically more sophisticated—were valued by mainstream culture. People actually strove to be well-read. There’s no question that our cultural values have shifted in the wake of twenty-four-hour news cycles, digital content, and the constancy of social media … While literary works win awards, and are the books that transcend time, they’re also becoming the least desirable projects for agents and editors.

Wormwood and Gall imagines the person, the community, and the circumstances behind “the Gospel according to Mark.” Although there are battle scenes, escapes, desert storms, love lost and regained, Wormwood aspires to be literary fiction. Whether it qualifies remains to be seen, but I hope it wrestles with big questions in a meaningful way.

I penned Wormwood a couple of years ago, and then I brought it to a Christian writer’s conference in Nashville where I met other writers who were churning out three and four Christian romance novels a year, and the publishers were lapping them up, so long as they followed a pat formula: a chaste woman meets a fallen man; she brings him to Christ; and they live happily ever after. But, I found no takers for Wormwood.

Now, I’m going to take Warner’s concluding advice, “Set measures of success that include but are not limited to sales, and seize your own publishing future by the reins.” Wormwood will soon be self-published as an eBook through Amazon and a paperback through Amazon’s Createspace, “print on demand” platform.

Support is appreciated. Buy it. Tell your friends about it and encourage them to buy their own copy. I always smile but wince inwardly when I hear, “I love your book. We’re passing it around at church.”

Wormwood and Gall to be released

Wormwood and Gall: The Destruction of Jerusalem and the First Gospel will soon be released. This sequel to A Wretched Man has been in the works for some time. The novel fictionalizes the scribe who penned a narrative to uplift the discouraged remnant of the Christian community as Jewish civil war raged and the Roman Legions destroyed the Jerusalem temple around 70 CE. Of course, the narrative comes down to us as “The Gospel According to Mark.”

A lament for Jerusalem inspires our title:

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, and his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 1:1 & 3:19-22

On a late summer’s day during the reign of Emperor Vespasian, the world seemingly ended for the Hebrew people of Palestine; tens of thousands died as Roman legions torched Jerusalem and demolished the Holy Temple, the very dwelling place of the Lord God Almighty of Israel. As blood-swollen gutters ran red and the smoke of hellfire blackened the sky, where was God? Was there meaning to life? To death?

The cataclysmic destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE followed nearly a century of restless churning as the long-suffering Hebrews of Judea and Galilee agitated against Roman Imperial oppression. A Galilean, Jesus of Nazareth, was one of many executed as a perceived threat to Roman authority and the Romanizing sympathizers within Jewish society, including aristocratic priests appointed by authority of the Romans.

As the family and friends of Jesus struggled to keep his movement alive after his crucifixion around 30 CE, a Greek-speaking outsider appeared and dared to promote Jesus as a Hebrew messiah to a Gentile (non-Jewish) world. Paul the apostle spread Jesus’ good news across the provinces of the Roman Empire but not without encountering imperial hostility while simultaneously offending the sensibilities and traditions of the elders back in Jerusalem. Along with establishing a network of Gentile churches, Paul also wrote letters that became the first documents of Christendom, dating to the period 50-58 CE, and recognized as authoritative for the church by the mid-second century.

Three decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul was executed in Rome by order of Emperor Nero, and so was Peter, foremost among the disciples of Jesus. Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, Jesus’ own brother James (Ya’akov in Hebrew/Aramaic), who led the Jerusalem remnant of Jesus’ followers, was executed by order of the High Priest. Their violent deaths marked the passing of the first generation of the church.

This early church history provided the setting for the author’s earlier work entitled, A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle. The present work, Wormwood and Gall, is the sequel. A Wretched Man concluded in the early 60s CE, and Wormwood and Gall begins in 66 CE.

By then, the bubbling cauldron of sectarian strife and anti-Roman sentiment was ready to boil over. Zealot revolutionaries took up arms against the vaunted Roman legions; initial successes chased the Romans from Palestine but unleashed internal power struggles and bloodletting of the priestly aristocracy that was believed to be sympathetic to Rome. When the vengeful Roman legions returned, they swept through the Galilee, leaving cities and villages ablaze and the countryside littered with rotting corpses on crosses. Refugees swelled Jerusalem like goats herded to the slaughter pens.

In the spring of 70 CE, the legions set upon Jerusalem and raised their siege engines and ramparts and launched their catapults. As the summer sun spiked hot, the city’s defenses weakened, and before autumn arrived, the temple fell on the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. Months after the killing and dying finally ceased, winter rains doused the smoldering ruins and washed the blood and ash from the single wall that remained standing from God’s magnificent marble temple.

The Great Roman-Jewish War was a watershed moment–no, more than that, an apocalypse in which the end of the world seemed near–not only for the Hebrew people, but also for emerging Christianity, and Wormwood and Gall remembers this oft-forgotten setting for an early, important chapter in the history of the church. Amid death and destruction, the dispirited remnant of the followers of Jesus, who had been awaiting the return of their crucified messiah for four decades, needed encouragement and words of hope. In response, an unknown person compiled the good news narrative that has come to be known as “the Gospel according to Mark,” the next document of Christendom following Paul’s letters. What is more, this first gospel served as template and principal source document used by the later compilers of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. John, the fourth canonical gospel, came later still from a different stream of tradition. Although a scholarly consensus agrees with this context and chronology for the development of the gospel tradition, not much more is known about the individuals behind the gospels.

Wormwood and Gall is a fictionalized account of the birth pangs of the early church against the background of revolution, civil war, and apocalyptic devastation. This novel’s characterization of the gospel’s compiler is entirely fictional as history remembers virtually nothing about the actual person behind the gospel compilation–not even his real name. The gospel document does not identify its author. The terminology “the Gospel according to Mark” dates to a 2nd century identification of an associate of Peter, but current scholarship doubts that association. However, for the sake of consistency and familiarity, the novel’s principal character shall be named Markos, the Greek form of “Mark”.

Scholars have long looked to the “setting in life” as the starting point in analyzing ancient Biblical manuscripts. Although Wormwood and Gall fictionalizes the characters behind the compilation of this gospel, the novel attempts to accurately recreate the events, chronology, and apocalyptic milieu of the Great Roman-Jewish War as the setting that influenced the formation of the first canonical gospel, which in turn influenced the later gospels.