Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Mar Saba Codex
Has anyone seen this yet to be released work of fiction? The description at Amazon describes it as follows - "While attending a Catholic conference in the US to boost the faith in difficult times, Australian political journalist and ex seminarian Jack Duggan is made aware of a controversial codex written by a 4th century Syrian bishop. Only photographs of the codex are available, the original having gone missing soon after its discovery at the Palestinian monastery of Mar Saba. Within a few pages we are engaged in Duggan’s struggle with his religious past, a past that furnished him with the expertise to translate the codex, but left him antagonistic to all things religious. From there we are carried into the thick of a story that reveals, step by step, what this ancient codex contains, and it contains not a few historical surprises. At once a kind of thriller, a romance and a slice of life, The Mar Saba Codex is a big story with many an unexpected twist that traverses the globe from Sydney to San Francisco, and from New York to Rome, reaching its grand climax in the old walled city of Jerusalem where equally belligerent forces strive for dominance." Among the early praise for the work is Jeff Malpas, Professor of Philosophy and ARC Professorial Fellow, University of Tasmania who writes "An extremely well-written and well-crafted book, The Mar-Saba Codex takes up a set of philosophical issues that mirror those explored in Going Beyond the Jesus Story, and yet the intellectual weight of those issues is not such as to overload the narrative, but actually provides the interplay that drives it forward." We'll have to see how this one turns out!
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