Ed

Lawyer and historian Cameron Thorne found an ancient Templar scroll that referred to Jesus as “The Thief on the Cross.” He and his fiancée, Amanda Spencer, try to uncover several secrets of early Christianity before a splinter group of Mormon zealots finds them and destroys them.

In David S. Brody’s novel, Cabal of the Westford Knight (2009), a Canadian Catholic priest explains to lawyer/historian Cameron Thorne and Amanda Spencer, a British researcher, several unorthodox beliefs.

The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury (2005) opens in Acre, Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, in 1291. As the city burns, a Templar knight, Martin of Carmaux, and his mentor, Aimard of Villiers, board a galley with a mysterious Templar chest. The ship vanishes without a trace.

In Kathleen McGowan’s The Book of Love (2008), Maureen Pascal, a journalist, needs assistance from the man she loves, Berenger Sinclair, and her cousin, a Jesuit scholar at the Vatican, to unravel Matilda of Tuscany’s biography and to find The Book of Love, a gospel written by Jesus, before a secret faction within the Catholic Church destroys it. The Church is afraid the revelations in these documents will inflict irreparable damage on the Church and its doctrines, so they will do whatever is necessary to make certain Maureen and her friends fail in their mission.

In The Alexandria Link (2007) by Steve Berry, Cotton Malone, a retired elite operative for the U.S. Justice Department, has become a Copenhagen rare-book dealer. He intends to lead a more stress-free life, but his son is kidnapped. The kidnappers force him to try to find the lost Library of Alexandria, which vanished approximately fifteen hundred years ago.

Do Christians – the more fundamental or conservative ones, at least – read anything other than the Bible? If they’re reading contemporary fiction or seeing movies like The Da Vinci Code, they are not screaming heresy as loudly as would one might expect. Eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code were sold worldwide and millions more saw the film version even though author Dan Brown makes many claims that are unorthodox.

It’s amazing to me how theologically progressive modern novelists are and yet they are being read by millions, who don’t appear to be disturbed by unorthodox ideas about Christianity that are in these novels.