The Thirteenth Apostle (2006)

Apparently based on the author's lifetime research. He's also written a memoir about his time as an unordained monk for 22 years. I have a feeling he has modelled the character Nil on himself. I read it in 2 sittings. Fast paced and absorbing. Also a great overview of the origns of the 3 monotheistic religions and how their beliefs intertwine. Recommended.

Another 'thriller' with the history of the catholic church at its center. Murders, secret societies and Vatican politics... Forgetable. ( )

I actually read the whole book, though I never had a book where I was wondering if there was no editor who actually read the book and corrected it. The style is irritating and sometimes simply horrible to read. The idea of the story was not bad, but unfortunately not very good written. It was a waste of money and time. ( )

If you come to this book looking for theological scholarship or literary depth, you will be disappointed; if on the other hand you are looking for a gripping, if someone two dimensional, thriller, taking in the Vatican, Mossad, the Palestinians, the Knights Templar and the Dead Sea Scrolls, you are in luck. Benoit has put far more effort into the plot than characterisation - many of the main players are less than rounded.

That aside, the book fairly rips along, and explores in some depth the danger in criticising the orthodoxy of opinion within the Catholic church. The central premise, that Jesus was a very nice guy but no Messiah is pretty uncontroversial from the point of view of someone outside the church, but the "proof" uncovered by the main protagonist, and its potential impact on the church is nicely explored.

It's a cut above Dan Brown and similarly at least one below The Name of the Rose, but worth reading nonetheless. ( )

Thanks to another Library Thing user, I went and double checked a quote on the publisher's website, to make sure I had read it correctly. I had.

From an interview with the author - a former Benedictine monk with a PhD in Pharmacology (yikes!) identified by the publisher on the book's cover as a "religious scholar":

"In 1975, having returned safe and sound from Rome, where I had spent four and a half years in a pontifical university close to the Vatican, I began to study the sources of Christianity, only to uncover a scoop: Jesus was a Jew! I had never heard this before."

www.almabooks.co.uk/ThirteenApostle/BenoitInterview/BenoitInterview.html

We'll now respectfully pause while everyone picks their dropped jaws up off the floor.

Jesus having been a Jew throughout his life is hardly the shocking news it apparently was to the author, and if this was his idea of a "scoop" - and he freely admits he'd never heard it before - it immediately raises some questions about how much credence the reader wants to place in the author or in the pontifical university which he claims had him for four and a half years and yet never managed to convey the news to him that Jesus was Jewish. It's not as though this was suppressed information - had he never read the New Testament? Ever? What exactly was he doing for those four and a half years? In fact, if I were the author, I would have immediately demanded a tuition refund on the grounds of grievous malpractice - if true, it appears that pontifical universities have developed a policy of churning out ill-educated idiots.

However, I hadn't yet read that disturbing interview until after reading the novel - which has as its premise a monk from a French abbey investigating the death of one of his closest friends and in the process discovering that there was a "thirteenth apostle" whose name and written works have been rigorously suppressed by the Catholic Church.

Along the way, we meet some very honorable and some extremely dishonorable members of the clergy. A Benedictine monk stationed in the Vatican would have had plenty of time to analyze his experience there and not surprisingly, Benoit's Vatican is far from a universal bastion of holiness - depicted here as a cross between "The Firm" -- the designation used by the late Princess Diana to describe the Buckingham Palace overlords - and a candidate for "The Scariest Places on Earth", with its well-financed subterfuge, violence, unholy lust, greed and murderous suppression of modern day "heretics" within its ranks by descendants of the Inquisition - now known by its "Propagation of the Faith" designation.

As to the research: it would help to have a Bible nearby to check his references, as well as translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls/Dag Hammadi gnostic texts. I had neither, so can't address those references - he may be right about the periodic appearances of an unnamed "Thirteenth Apostle". A genuine scholar might have cited his reference sources (such as the translation of the Inquisitorial "interviews" with the members of the Knights Templar under torture) at the conclusion of the book, but Benoit did not.

Lastly, also not surprising for a former Benedictine monk who writes tearfully of a suppressed and completely platonic (right...) "love" between two monks who have been separated as punishment by the Church: the only woman of note who appears in these pages is a whore. Also not surprising: Mary Magdelen has disappeared from the story entirely. ( )