The Stolen Gospels

Book Description

Lori Vale, a rebellious teenager, is thrust into the middle of a violent religious conflict when her mother is murdered, and the girl is taken to a heavily guarded fortress in an ancient Greek monastery. There, a group of radical women is creating an earthshaking religious text, the
Holy Women’s Bible.
The new sacred book will include the
Old Testament
and the
New Testament,
edited to alter gospels that are detrimental to the interests of women, such as passages asserting that they should obey their husbands, remain silent in churches, and suffer the burden of Eve’s sins.

A third section of the
Holy Women’s Bible
is the biggest bombshell, the
Testament of the She-Apostles
. It asserts that Jesus Christ had 24 apostles, not 12, and half were women called “she-apostles.” Eleven she-apostles have been reincarnated in modern times as female children, and are revealing new female-oriented gospels about the life of Jesus, stories they say were omitted from the
Bible
by male church authorities who decided what to include in the
Bible
and what to leave out of it, in order to assert the power and dominance of men over women.

The radical women have dangerous enemies, and Lori’s life is in grave peril, along with the lives of the remarkable female apostles of Jesus. . . .

Dedication

For Jan, with all of my love and admiration, and my great appreciation for your special contributions to this novel and its sequel. You are the most powerful and interesting woman I have ever met.

Acknowledgements

Over the years there have been numerous advisers and editors on this project, and the suggestions of Kevin J. Anderson, Robert Gottlieb, Matt Bialer, Martin H. Greenberg, John Silbersack, Mary Alice Kier, and Anna Cottle have all been greatly appreciated. I am also grateful to Rebecca Moesta-Anderson, for her work on the e-book edition of this novel.

Introduction

The Stolen Gospels

The Stolen Gospels
has a long history as a writing project, going back to the mid 1990s. By then I had read a number of books about the early centuries after Jesus Christ, when the gospels of His remarkable life were being assembled and religious leaders debated over what was to be included in the
Bible
, and what was to be omitted from it.

By 1995, I had read a number of feminist religious books that had been referred to me by my cousin Marie Landis, a fellow author (with whom I collaborated on occasion) and an admirer of Mary Magdalene. Marie said to me that she might be related to Mary Magdalene, and she was quite knowledgeable about the legendary woman’s history. She argued against the characterization of Mary as a prostitute, and when I researched this I discovered that she was right, because I found proof that the facts of her life had been distorted for centuries, and it was only through the flimsiest of evidence that she had been characterized as a fallen woman.

At the time, I had also read about the discovery of buried papyrus codices at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945—bound volumes that included ancient Christian religious texts that were not included in the
Bible
. These comparatively recent discoveries contained gospels suggesting that Mary Magdalene was much closer to Jesus Christ than most people had previously imagined. Many of the passages extolled the virtues

of women much more than did the
Bible
, which in contrast contained verses calling for wives to be ruled over by their husbands (Genesis 3:16), for women to remain silent in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34–35), and for women not to teach or to usurp authority over men (1 Timothy 2:12).

The Gnostic Christians were considered heretics by other Christians of the time, and in the midst of this conflict, and the concern of all Christians about being persecuted and tortured by the Romans, someone hid the Nag Hammadi codices, so that they would not be destroyed.

The Nag Hammadi discovery included religious works (the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary) that described tension between Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Peter, and his displeasure over how Jesus favored her. This led me to wonder if Mary Magdalene had actually been a full-fledged apostle of Jesus, a concept that had been suggested by a number of other researchers, but which had not been widely accepted.

I also began to wonder if the gospels of women had been suppressed by influential men in the early Christian church, purposefully excluding feminine writings in favor of those written by men. It seemed probable, and this troubled me, because I believed in the feminist cause, and in the advancement of women. I was married to a strong woman, Jan, and my mother (Beverly Herbert) had been the role model for the strong and elegant Lady Jessica of my father’s classic novel
Dune
, arguably the most famous and most admired female character in all of science fiction. In fact, by the fifth and sixth books in the Dune series, Frank Herbert had women running everything, ruling numerous planets. The heroines were the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, and they competed with their own dark side, women who had gone rogue from the organization to become the deadly Honored Matres.

The strong and interesting women in my father’s writings—as well as my own experiences and observations—had been instrumental in my feeling that the world needed more female energy, because men had wreaked such havoc throughout history with their endless violence and mistreatment of the planet. Male-incited wars had killed millions of people and caused extreme environmental damage, so it seemed to me that the males of the human species had proven their inability to govern peacefully, and our planet could not stand any more of it.

With all of this in my mind, in late 1995 I started brainstorming a new novel with my brilliant and creative wife, Jan. We envisioned a sci-fi religious thriller that we entitled
The Stolen Gospels
, an immense story that would ultimately be divided into two novels, to include
The Lost Apostles
.

In science fiction, it is common to ask the question “what if?” and to extrapolate kernels of information to the extreme. Jan and I began with the assumption that Mary Magdalene had actually been an apostle of Jesus Christ, and because of the many women who were known to be in the company of Jesus, we wondered if He might have had other female apostles as well. What if, in fact, He had twelve female apostles in addition to the twelve known male apostles? From this assumption, we postulated that there had been a series of events that buried information about those female apostles in the dust bins of history, and only came to light many centuries later when the female apostles of Jesus were reincarnated, and began dictating their authentic gospels—gospels that were being formed into a new
Holy Women’s Bible
. Our title for the novel,
The Stolen Gospels
, was a natural outgrowth of the postulation that the sacred religious texts of women were stolen from them by men many centuries ago—and the corollary that this was a huge loss to all of humankind.

Soon the new novel began to take shape, as I wrote chapters and scenes and discussed them with Jan. By late 1996, I sent a copyrighted draft of the novel to my literary agent, Mary Alice Kier. She made suggestions for improvement, and after I completed two rewrites, she submitted the book to a number of publishers. All of them turned it down.

In 1997, I began talking with Kevin J. Anderson about collaborating on new Dune-series novels, and we made arrangements with the William Morris Agency to represent us on new book proposals. I provided Kevin with a copy of the manuscript of
The Stolen Gospels
, and he gave me additional suggestions for improvement, as did my new literary agents at the William Morris Agency, Robert Gottlieb and Matt Bialer. With that input, I hurried to write yet another draft in an attempt to publish the novel by the year 2000, which had been declared a Holy Year by Pope John Paul II to commemorate two thousand years since the birth of Jesus Christ.

But even more publishers declined to publish the next draft of the story, making me wonder if it was too long or too radical and controversial in its feminist viewpoint and theological presentation, complicated by the fact that it did not fit neatly into any one literary genre—it was a sci-fi religious thriller with elements of fantasy, and was not like any fictional work that had been published before. My agents referred the novel to the well-known editor and publisher, Martin H. Greenberg. After a careful reading, Mr. Greenberg and his staff provided additional suggestions for improvement, which I began incorporating into the manuscript—when I had time between new Dune-series novels with Kevin, and a number of my own other solo novels and non-fiction books.

Through it all, the Gospels novel project slowed down, and by 2004 I had yet another agent, John Silbersack, who worked at Robert Gottlieb’s new agency, Trident Media Group. After I divided the story into two parts, John found an interested publisher, who sent me a contract, but that contract was never signed and we did not move forward with them.

Now, sixteen years after beginning this ambitious project, I am pleased to finally present both novels—
The Stolen Gospels
and
The Lost Apostles
—in e-book form. I hope you will find the story interesting and thought provoking, especially in the context of the strong female characters I like to include in much of my fiction, and the religious elements contained in a number of my other solo novels, including
The Race For God
(1990), and the three-volume
Timeweb
series (2006–2008).

This is the epic, heroic story of the brave women who might have been apostles of Jesus, and of the men and women who protected them from harm. . . .

Brian Herbert

September 10, 2011

Part One

Voices

But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

—1 Timothy 2:12–14,
The New Testament