Under the title, “An incredible story, an incredible resource.”
“Holmen takes on a topic much discussed but seldom told in story with such care and attention.”
“This book is nothing less than magisterial.”
“Holmen does the church an incredible service by offering this book.”
These words come from reviewer, Rev. Clint Schnekloth, on the book’s Amazon page and also on his highly popular Facebook page entitled, “ELCA Clergy” (closed group).
About six weeks ago, I was contacted by a Hollywood screenwriter who expressed interest in adapting A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle into a screenplay. Following discussions and negotiations, we have today reached agreement. The screenwriter, who has been in the movie industry for nearly a decade, shares my vision and passion. In his first email to me, the screenwriter commented:
I am fascinated by the story and believe that it could make a really intriguing film—something independent, honest, touching … a film that takes these Biblical giants and makes them accessible, human, and endearing. What I like about your take on the story is that when Paul is wounded—it actually seemed to hurt. I think a movie like that would speak to many.
Whether A Wretched Man reaches the silver screen or not remains a long shot. After a screenplay is completed, the screenwriter must then persuade a producer or other monied interests to invest in a film, but I am convinced that the screenwriter has the appropriate experience, expertise, and contacts to give it a good shot.
Indulge me in a bit of fantasy. For those of you who have read the book, what actor should play the role of Paulos? Shall I, a la Hitchcock, play a cameo role? Perhaps the character of Eli the sage? Or Jubilees, the phantom seer?
Former Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan is a co-founder and highly visible spokesman for the Jesus Seminar, a progressive group of New Testament scholars active in the last twenty years seeking to identify “the historical Jesus”.
Recently, he has turned his attention to Paul the apostle. A few years ago, he co-authored, with Marcus Borg, an excellent book entitled The First Paul (2009), which I reviewed in three separate posts. Here’s a link to the three posts in reverse order. The central thesis of the book is that the thirteen New Testament books traditionally ascribed to the pen of Paul the apostle may be broken into three groupings: a) the radical and authentic Paul who was a social visionary vis a vis the existing culture—an opponent of slavery and proponent of a strong role for women, b) the conservative Paul, three books that may have been written by Paul but probably weren’t and which evinced a retreat from his radical social views, and c) the reactionary Paul, the so-called pastoral epistles consisting of 1st & 2nd Timothy and Titus, which were definitely not written by Paul and indeed were written to correct Paul’s radicalism, to re-establish the Roman social order of slavery and patriarchy.
Crossan is again writing about these themes in a highly public forum, the Huffington Post. His article is not only on the religious section of the Huffpost, but appears on the main page under the banner The Search for the Historical Paul: Which Letters Did He Really Write? As I write this, there are over 200 comments to Crossan’s Huffpost article, and like many public cyberspace forums, the “trolls” dominate. Many are anti-Christian, and a few are conservative Christians who insist, even if the human authorship is not Paul, that the subsequent letters were “spirit-breathed” and thus all letters are consistent and true (the holy trinity of inerrant, infallible, and inspired).
Crossan’s article is brief and seems not to plough new ground but merely restates the conclusions voiced earlier in the collaboration with Borg. Here is the central thesis of the Huffpost article:
The problem is that those post-Pauline or Pseudo-Pauline letters are primarily counter-Pauline and anti-Pauline. What happens across those three sets of letters is that the radical Paul of the authentic seven letters (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) is slowly but steadily morphed into the conservative Paul of the probably inauthentic threesome (Ephesians Colossians, 2 Thessalonians) and finally into the reactionary Paul of those certainly inauthentic ones (1-2 Timothy, Titus).
Crossan’s article includes this recently rediscovered and cleaned up fresco of Paul dating to the 13th century. 
Note that Paul holds not one scroll and not thirteen scrolls but ten, signifying that the dubious authenticity of the pastoral epistles is not merely a recent understanding. Indeed, in 2nd century lists of authoritative books that served as precursors to the formalized New Testament canon, the pastoral epistles are generally not included.
By the time The First Paul was published in 2009, my own manuscript for A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle was already completed and in the hands of the publisher. Thus, my research did not include The First Paul, but my conclusions were similar–but I had a special authorial problem. In a novel about the life of Paul, how could I suggest that six books traditionally attributed to him were not actually his? Written after his death, such books were not part of his story in a strict sense. Additionally, how could I make the point that he held radical views regarding slavery and women to rebut the traditional stereotype of Paul derived from the NT letters to Timothy and Titus?
My solution was two-fold. First, the novel included the circumstances and the writing and the delivery of the seven “authentic” letters. The six “inauthentic” letters were not mentioned at all, an implicit but indirect statement that they were not part of Paul’s story. Second, Timothy and Titus were important characters in the novel, protégés of Paul. In a purely fictional device, I placed offensive words about women quoted from the NT book of Timothy in the mouth of Timothy the character and offensive words about slavery from the NT book of Titus in the mouth of Titus the character. In both instances, the novel offers a strong rebuke from the lips of Paul.
Feedback to A Wretched Man has come in many forms: critical reviews, online bookstore comments (Amazon & Barnes/Noble), private emails, and book blogs. Recently, a new medium has chimed in—the Lutheran blogosphere. Those who are familiar with my other blog, Spirit of a Liberal, a blog of progressive, religious themes, may also follow the ELCA news blog of Susan Hogan called Pretty Good Lutherans and ELCA Pastor Brant Clement’s blog called Both Saint and Cynic since we all link to each other regularly. Each of these Lutheran blogs offered articles about the novel within the last week.
Pastor Brant offered a book review.
Holmen gives flesh to his characters. They eat, drink (sometimes too much) and void waste. They feel love, anger, jealousy, joy and sorrow. They fight and make up. Or not. These Apostles are not Sunday School flannel-graph cut-outs, but complex, three-dimensional human beings.
It is clear that Holmen has done his homework. Everyday life in the first century Mediterranean world is evoked with detail and description. The author has also digested a great deal of current New Testament scholarship and woven it seamlessly into his narrative.
Most importantly, Holmen spins a good yarn.
Susan Hogan provided insight through a question and answer session with me. Here’s a sampling:
Q. What challenges do you face in marketing Christian fiction?
A. For a lot of people, the word “Christian” means evangelical or conservative Christian. That’s the popular conception. My book is written for a more progressive readership, and it is best characterized as historical fiction with religious themes because it doesn’t fit the popular perception of the genre of Christian fiction. It is edgier than most Christian fiction.”
Thanks to both Susan and Brant for your interest in my novel and for helping to publicize it.
UPDATE: A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle is now available as an eBook for $8.99. It is in Kindle version at Amazon.com and also through the publisher’s website. It is also available in iPad, Sony Reader, Nook/.epub version through the publisher’s website.
The Amazon Kindle has long been the leader in the eBook revolution, but Apple’s rollout of the iPad in the past few months has heightened awareness of the eBook phenomenon. For the uninitiated who haven’t been paying attention, eBook reading devices (such as Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc.) allow users to read books in electronic format. Poppycock, you say? A passing fad? For better or worse, the answer is a resounding no, and the major publishing houses are scared to death, and recent news items will only stoke their fears.
I’ll get to that in a moment, but let us pause first and enjoy the musty fragrance of old books.
Louise Erdrich is an accomplished Minnesota author, and her memoir of a trip to the border waters of Minnesota and Canada, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
Erdrich writes,
I want to stay among what I imagine must have been his favorite books. The foundation has tried to keep the feeling of Ober’s world intact, and so the books that line the walls of his loft bedroom were pretty much the ones he chose to keep there, just hundreds out of the more than 11,000 on the island. Heavy on Keats, I notice right off, as we enter. Volumes of both the poems and the letters. Lots of Shakespeare … then with kind of a bingeing greed I start, taking one book off the shelf, sucking what I can of it, replacing it … [I imagine a year with these books in which] I am forced to do nothing but absorb Oberholzer’s books. Every day, I pluck down stacks of books from the shelves upon shelves tacked up on every wall and level of each of the seven cabins on Ober’s island. Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word.
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth four decades ago, I spent much of my study time in Baker Library, and I preferred climbing into the stacks of many storeys and storys. Huddling in a corner carrel, surrounded by thousands of hoary volumes, I sensed that I learned by osmosis, that even if I napped, knowledge would seep in through my pores.
For such as Oberholtzer, Erdrich, and me, something will be lost in the phenomenon of the eBook. But now to the recent news stories that bode an ominous future for traditional publishing.
Amazon.com is an ecommerce phenomenon. Founded in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon soon cut deeply into the market share of traditional brick and mortar bookstores. Today, it is the giant of booksellers and sells far more books than any other entity. Just a few years ago, it introduced Kindle, a hand held, electronic device that could read digital versions of books. Here is the first recent news story:
The Amazon.com Kindle e-reader and bookstore have reached a “tipping point,” the company said Monday, with Kindle titles outselling hardcover books on the massive online marketplace for the first time … “even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing, when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months.”
This report suggests that the much ballyhooed introduction of the Apple iPad into the marketplace has not negatively affected Amazon and Kindle—to the contrary, the increased public awareness of the eBook phenomenon engendered by the iPad publicity seems to have benefited all eBook vendors.
The second news item is that the price for a Kindle continues to drop even as the technology improves.
Amazon has launched a $139 Wi-Fi-only Kindle, hoping to stay ahead of competitors by luring customers with low-priced e-readers that the online retailer is betting will drive digital book sales.
Amazon on Thursday also introduced the third generation of the original Kindle, which has Wi-Fi and 3G wireless technologies. The latter makes it possible to buy digital books from Amazon and download them in less than a minute. Amazon kept the price for the device at $189.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble announced its own marketing effort to push its version of an eBook reader, the Nook:
In September, the chain will begin an aggressive promotion of its Nook e-readers by building 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all of its stores, with sample Nooks, demonstration tables, video screens and employees who will give customers advice and operating instructions.
What’s an author to do? Much as I might prefer to live in a world of Baker Library stacks and Oberholtzer island retreats, I recognize that I must sell books in order to write them. My publisher has been working diligently to convert A Wretched Man novel to the various digital formats, and it will soon be available as an eBook through Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and others as well as downloadable from our own website.
Numerous purchasers of A Wretched Man novel have asked about a study guide suitable for group discussions. In response, I have prepared a five page pdf document that offers numerous questions, section by section. Some questions are simple (discuss the Aramaic or Greek names of the characters) and others are designed to be open-ended and thought-provoking (think of the times in your life when you felt the presence of God. Do you think your experience was similar to or different from Paul’s experience on the Damascus road?) Many of the questions require looking up a Bible passage so the study guide will get your group into the Bible.
Yesterday, April 16th, I was privileged to be Paula Granquist’s guest on her Art Zany radio program broadcast in the Northfield-Cannon River Valley area on KYMN radio. An audio feed is available for replay here. The whole show takes about thrity-six minutes, and I appear three or four minutes after the preliminaries.