Scan barcode
nghia's review against another edition
2.0
It is a premise that is intriguing on the surface but quickly shows itself to not really have enough depth to support a book. Or at least not this book. It all started when the author, a lawyer, was rereading the Biblical Gospels:
What struck me at once was the attack on the moneychangers in the Jerusalem Temple. All four Gospels record it, and their combined accounts do not reflect well on the perpetrator’s character.
Jesus went in armed (with a whip) and trashed the place, stampeding animals, destroying property and assaulting people. He also did it during or just before Passover, when the Temple precinct would have been packed to capacity with tourists, pilgrims, and religious officials. I live in Edinburgh, a city that has many large festivals—religious and secular. The thought of what would happen if someone behaved similarly in Princes Street during Hogmanay filled my mind’s eye. This was not a small incident.
It seemed obvious to me that Jesus was executed because he started a riot. Everything else—the Messianic claims, giving Pilate attitude at trial, verbal jousting with Jewish religious leaders—was by the by. Our system would send someone down for a decent stretch if they did something similar; the Romans were not alone in developing concepts of ‘breach of the peace’, ‘assault’ or ‘malicious mischief’. Those things exist at common law, too.
The problem is, yes, obviously Jesus was a domestic terrorist, or at least something very close to it. That's not exactly material for a riveting legal thriller. And Dale doesn't try to give us a legal thriller exactly. Instead we get a legal procedural.
To compound matters, when envisioning the book Dale tells us that her first attempt at writing it was to simply place Jesus and his attack on the money-lenders in the modern world but that didn't really work out. So she went back to the drawing board and came up with an alternate history where the Roman empire undergoes a kind of Industrial Revolution -- to the point where in many ways it is fairly identical to the current, modern world.
The problem: for much of the book Dale seems far more interested in exploring how Roman culture and sensitivities are both similar to our own but also quite different. And...it just isn't that exciting, I guess? It doesn't help that, at least in the early book, chapters are told from perhaps a dozen different point of view characters. We never spend enough time with any of them to particularly care about them and the goal, instead, seems to be able to showcase a wide variety of "weird" Roman practices.
I admit, I didn't finish this. I didn't even make it half way in before deciding I wasn't really having fun reading this. The legal procedural part wasn't exactly enticing: they have Jesus and his apostles on CCTV with dozens of witnesses committing assault.
I think it doesn't help that a lot of the book comes across as kind of didactic and unsubtle. The Roman Empire is, for the most part, coded as a positive liberal force for good in the world. There's even an exchange where one of the colonised, a Carthaginian woman, thanks for Roman boyfriend for freeing her from the backwards shackles of Carthaginian culture.
Dale even recycles an anecdote from the British occupation of India and places it in the occupied Carthage instead:
‘The Romans forbade this tradition [of child sacrifice], and the City Fathers complained that the new law was destroying their culture and customs. The response of the Roman Governor at the time was to say that Romans, too, had customs and traditions. Their custom in this case was that every time the city fathers sacrificed a girl to Tanit, the Romans would build a gallows beside the Temple and hang the city father responsible by the neck until he died. Soon, no more little girls were sacrificed to Tanit, and so I am before you today.’
Through much of the book (at least the part I read), the Judean anger is less about Roman occupation and loss of self-determination per se than about Roman sexual mores (Judean girls who sleep with Romans are and Roman acceptance of abortion and Roman usage of graven images and idols). It is hard not to read this as somewhat heavy handed parallels between Western (and especially American) interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Basically the Judeans are religious fundamentalists and Jesus and his apostles are even more extreme zealots than the rest. And the Romans are just a civilizing force trying to bring girls education and modern health care. One Roman even says all they want to do is bring "school vouchers and public–private health insurance arrangements" to Judea. Stuff like that makes the whole thing feel less like an alternate-history Rome than a somewhat lazy copy & paste of modern America.
[Judean] women seen to be spending too much time in the wrong company were often attacked. In Jerusalem, this tended to mean a shaven head and a thrashing. In more remote areas, there were stonings and honour killings.
I'm not offended by all this or anything. On the contrary, this actually strikes me as a fairly plausible take on the whole thing. But, again, it just felt pretty heavy-handed and there just wasn't enough exciting plot or characterisation to make me care to keep reading after a certain point.
More...