Talking with Tim

The Galilean Secret

I am grateful to my parents for many gifts, but I rank my Catholic education/upbringing and intellectual curiosity as among some of the best. While Evan Howard, the author of The Galilean Secret (released last month), are not of the exact same religion (he is the pastor of the Community Church of Providence [Rhode Island), given that we are both Christians and that he is even more intellectually curious than myself (as well as the owner of a doctorate in theology from Boston University)–well it made for a great interview. In this email interview we discuss his novel–which is described as follows:

“When Karim Musalaha, a Palestinian on the run, seeks refuge in a forgotten cave near Qumran, he discovers a half-buried clay jar that contains a fragile scroll. His quest to discover its origins takes him on a high-speed chase through hostile Jerusalem and West Bank neighborhoods. Caught between his brother’s relentless ambition for martyrdom and the forbidden love of a Jewish woman with ties to the highest levels of the Israeli army, he must choose between honoring his father and betraying him to serve a higher purpose.

The scroll’s message also resonates with Judith of Jerusalem, a first century Jewish woman who, under the cover of darkness, gallops into the desert with the brother of the man she was betrothed to marry. When her allegiance to the burgeoning Zealot revolution pits her against the Roman occupiers and their priestly collaborators, Judith sees the cruelty of war and realizes her mistake. But is it too late for her to escape and find forgiveness? A letter written by a mysterious Galilean rabbi holds the answers, but the Romans have placed a price on his head. Should she risk her life for a rabbi she hardly knows, or risk her soul for a cause and a man whose beliefs she now rejects?

Bound by a letter that spans two millennia, both Karim and Judith will either succumb to hatred, violence and hopelessness, or reveal a wisdom that could save us all.”

I’m grateful to Howard for his valuable time and thoughts, as well as Kelly Hughes for facilitating the interview. Go here to read the first chapter.

Tim O’Shea: Tackling two plots with historical complexities in one book is fairly ambitious. How much revision/aggressive editing was involved in the pursuit of balancing the respective narratives and their unique pacing for both stories?

Evan Howard: The decision to include plots in two different time periods came about unexpectedly.  As a first-time novelist I didn’t plan to use this method because of the difficulties involved, but readers of an earlier version of the book (which I had self-published) expressed frustration that I hadn’t resolved what happened to Karim, the Palestinian student who appears in the first chapter, the action of which takes place in the present.  Since the rest of the novel happens in the time of Jesus, at first I resisted developing Karim’s story because I thought it would be a very complicated undertaking, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw that having two time periods and multiple plots could make the novel more multi-dimensional and increase its suspense.  This process required that I write fifteen new chapters and blend them with the historical material.  It took me about seven months to do this and involved a great deal of revising and editing along the way.  Once I entered into this process, I found it highly challenging but also a lot of fun—like working on a giant literary jigsaw puzzle.  Since there is a lot of action in both stories, the issue of pacing wasn’t a major problem.

O’Shea: Given the passion and strong opinions that go hand and hand with topics like Israel & Palestine, was there any hesitation on your part to delve into such complex and volatile matters in your novel?

Howard: The divisions and conflicts in the Holy Land today and throughout history were part of what drew me to this setting.  It’s a land with so much promise but also so much tragedy, and that’s part of what makes it a fascinating setting for a novel.  It feels as if there has been a narrative of anguish superimposed on this land.  The conflicts have been with us for so long that they seem impossible to solve.  Writing The Galilean Secret was a way of offering an alternative narrative—one that dramatizes the possibility of hope, healing, and reconciliation.  It’s true that there are potentially many pitfalls that await an author who chooses to write about Israel and Palestine, but the potential rewards made the risk worth it.  I kept thinking of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which is set in South Africa under apartheid.  Paton took readers into the emotions of that troubled land in a way that motivated them to work for change.  Art can sometimes have a cathartic effect that helps to inspire a new narrative of transformation, but creating it requires accepting controversy as part of this important work.

O’Shea: Which of Jesus’ disciples did you most enjoy writing in the book?

Howard: Oddly enough, it was probably Judas Iscariot, although I was also drawn to the stories of Nicodemus and Mary Magdalene, but neither of them was among the Twelve.  Judas fascinates me because he’s such a complex character in the Gospels.  His light drew him to follow Jesus, but his darkness eventually extinguished the light.  Originally, like all of the disciples, he came to Jesus with great idealism, believing that the Messianic age had finally come, but then he became disillusioned, his greed took over, and his life ended tragically—an all too human story.  I was also captivated by the question of why he betrayed Jesus and wondered if it was just because of disillusionment or greed.  Could there have been an element of jealousy involved, arising out of his experience of unrequited love?  To me, seeing the story in this way made it all the more real and relevant to the thorniest dilemmas of life.

O’Shea: What about the dynamics between Jesus and Mary Magdalene do you feel you most effectively tapped into and communicated in your story?

Howard: The Galilean Secret encourages the healing of our intimate relationships through its fresh perspective on these dynamics. Neither the canonical nor the noncanonical sources provide detailed information about Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. Most of us are familiar with the two extreme positions on this matter—the church’s traditional claim that the relationship was only platonic, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the view of revisionist scholars, novelists, and filmmakers that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife and had a child.

I see problems with both of these views.  The traditional position puts forth a celibate Christ who never wrestles with his sexuality. Since most of us do wrestle with this essential component of being human, we can’t relate well to a Christ who doesn’t fully enter the struggle with us. On the other side of the spectrum, it’s hard to believe that Jesus was married because the nearly unanimous verdict of biblical scholars is that there’s no credible evidence to support such a notion.  The Galilean Secret explores the middle ground.  It presents a Christ who, as the Epistle to the Hebrews states, “was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

In The Galilean Secret, Jesus and Mary Magdalene struggle mightily with their attraction to one another, and the struggle forces them to ponder what it means to be created male and female “in the image of God,” as stated in the Torah.  The way toward healing and wholeness emerges from Jesus’ spiritual wisdom and his insights into how we can find God’s love and light in all areas of our lives, even the most perplexing ones.  My novel invites readers to ponder how Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene challenges us to integrate the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in the image of God.

O’Shea: How hard is it to write about love, when one’s addressing spiritual love versus romantic love as you are in this story?

Howard: Love has many different manifestations, a fact that the Greek language highlights by using several different terms for our one English word “love.”  There are different nuances of love, two of them being spiritual versus romantic, but because these two sometimes feel the same, it can be extremely difficult to distinguish between them.  In Greek, the word for spiritual love—the love of God–is agape, and the word for romantic/sexual love is eros.  A major theme of The Galilean Secret is the trouble and tragedy that result when we get spiritual and romantic love confused.  These expressions of love both originate in God and they are present in the best dating and marriage relationships. But it is also quite possible to develop romantic feelings for the wrong person at the wrong time, and when these feelings are mistaken for spiritual love, they can cause terrible heartbreak.  It’s a very emotional experience to write about such situations; in that sense, doing so is difficult, but the insights gained from the undertaking can also be quite therapeutic and helpful.

O’Shea: When delving into religion-based fiction, in some ways do you hope it serves to bolster someone’s religion when they read your writing?

Howard: I wrote The Galilean Secret out of my personal search for spiritual truth and for healing and wholeness.  I hope that the book will challenge and inspire others in their searches. I also hope that it presents an interpretation of Jesus that makes him more relevant and accessible to searching people.  I heard the well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens interviewed on C-Span recently and he painted all religions with a broad brush, declaring them equally harmful.  I hope that The Galilean Secret will help people who hold such views to give Christianity another chance.  The Jesus presented in the novel is very human but at the same time a messenger sent from God.  The people who encounter him find their lives transformed, and through his revolutionary spiritual movement, the hope of peace comes to the world. How could anyone, even an atheist, not be drawn to such a fascinating individual?  It has been said that Jesus must have been a historical figure because no one could have invented such a unique and multi-faceted person. The Galilean Secret is particularly provocative in suggesting that part of Jesus’ spiritual genius came from his integration of the masculine and feminine in both his person and his religious teachings.

O’Shea: On the flipside, do you think an agnostic or an atheist has the opportunity to be just as engaged in the novel as a religious reader may be?

Howard: An agnostic or atheist reader could definitely become engaged with this novel, provided that they bring an open mind to the process.  An online video features the prominent atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. In viewing the video, I noticed that although these atheists don’t believe in God, they believe that spiritual experiences are real. I would think that any inquisitive person would want to ask where these experiences come from.  Do they derive entirely from a person’s particular psychological type or history?  Are some people more prone to having spiritual experiences than others?  If we are honest in our quest for truth, how can we rule out that these experiences might come from the creative spiritual being that Christians and other theists call God?  The Galilean Secret explores the nature of these spiritual experiences as they relate to the human quest for love.  The life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are critically important to this quest because he brought humanity a fresh interpretation of love and died dramatizing its meaning.  Agnostics and atheists, like everyone else, need to love and be loved in order to find meaning in life.  The Galilean Secret explores the question, Where does love come from and how we can we better understand its many dimensions?  Only by asking and attempting to answer such questions can we find the love that we all crave.

O’Shea: Were there ways that in writing the book you found aspects that allowed you insight into things you were trying to teach at the church you pastor?

Howard: The short answer is yes, but writing a novel allowed me to go into much greater depth than I could in a sermon or Bible study.  Although there are some similarities, sermons and novels are different forms of communication.  Listeners to sermons would quickly get impatient and bored if the preacher used the time to ask deep questions and not give clear answers.  A story, on the other hand, is much more open-ended.  The best novels don’t offer black-and-white solutions to human problems.  They tell stories that must be interpreted by the reader, and often multiple interpretations are possible.  Hopefully readers of The Galilean Secret will receive a much richer, more nuanced, and ultimately more challenging and inspiring interpretation of love than I could ever communicate in a sermon.

O’Shea: In a modern age, do you think folks are more or less likely to believe that religion has the power to change the world (in a positive way)?

Howard: In his book When Religion Becomes Evil, the Christian theologian and ethicist Charles Kimball makes the point that religion is arguably the most powerful force in the world.  He says this because religion brings out both the very best and the very worst in people.  Out of love for God, people feed the hungry, care for the sick, establish orphanages, work for peace and justice, and engage in all manner of humanitarian and altruistic activities.  On the other hand, people enslave other people, oppress women, start wars, and become suicide bombers in the name of their God and their religion (to name just a few abuses).  Unfortunately, in our media-saturated world, the images of evil being done in the name of religion gets seared into viewers’ minds and they forget all the good that is done in its name.  This leads to a great deal of cynicism about religion in general.  The only way to change this is for people who practice their faith in an ethical and humane way to keep doing good works until evil religion becomes a thing of the past.  It will be a long journey toward God’s new world of love, peace, freedom, justice, and provision for all, but we must keep working toward that new world, and I hope that The Galilean Secret will help in some small way.