The Exodus Quest by Will Adams

In his new book, The Exodus Quest, Will Adams delivers another exciting ride through ancient history, filled with details and concepts that are actually based in reality (unlike another author whose name I'll let slide - we all know who I'm talking about). Controversial reality, but there's still a connection to known history, known people, known events.

Daniel Knox is the thinking person's Indiana Jones - an Egyptologist with a willingness to hurl himself head first down a dark shaft closed for centuries, and a mind full of actual knowledge about the past, where people were a lot like they are now. Knox shows us a past filled with people who loved, were both powerful and fragile, who had success and failure, and who eventually, no matter how great they were, died, just like the rest of us.

The book gets the details right, from Akhenaten's probable disease, the controversy over the possible existence of a Secret Gospel of Mark and its putative explosive content, to the potential for connection between the Theratuptiae of Ancient Egypt and the Essenes of Ancient Israel. One error is to lump in the Carpocratians with these two groups known for their asceticism, whereas the Carpocratians were known as being antinomian in their inclinations, at least according to their opponents. But then, history is written by the winners,, in this case, not the Carpocratians.

Which leads me to wonder if the comments of those opponents as to the Carpocratians complaining that the group help both goods and women in common should be read as that they held their goods in common and "their" women as equals . That would have been shockingly radical at the time, and could easy have been misconstrued by others as a different kind of communal living.

Also shockingly radical is Adams putting in print an ancient allegation from the Secret Gospel of Mark, which may or may not have ever existed as anything but an ill-intentioned hoax. What slips past most modern readers is that there's plenty of material in the canonical gospels to allow for a similar interpretation, and we miss it because we don't, for the most part, bother to learn to read Greek. (The Greek language has many words for love, just as the Eskimo language has multiple words for snow. There is philos which is how you'd talk about a friend or your favorite flavor of ice cream. A step forward in closeness was agape the word both Jesus and Paul use, and the word the earliest followers of Jesus used to describe their gatherings. This left them open to the accusation of immoral behavior, because agape was considered to be the precursor to the kind of love called eros. First you felt Philos, then perhps sometimes your feelings progressed into agape, and after that, eros happened. Just like now. This is crucial to understanding, for example, John 21:15-19, in which what grieves Peter is not that Jesus asks a third time but in the third question he uses a different verb than in the first two.)

The revival of the alleged allegation alone will guarantee sales and controversy, which in turn will generate sales. Also picketing, and fulminations by conservative (or, indeed, merely orthodox) Christians. Mr. Adams is fortunate that Christianity does not issue fatwas.

In one scene, the characters are listening to story of the destruction of Sodom, while working at a dig that bears on the Exodus story, in a book that will be published around the time of Passover. Passover annually commemorates the Exodus and it's associated events, and oral tradition has held that Lot and his daughters were rescued from Sodom at the same time of year as the much-later Exodus from Egypt. I love meta refs, intentional or otherwise.

It would have been interesting to have had some tie-in with the Armana letters, and the theory proposed by those who work in sociological models that perhaps the Exodus was more political split than geographic migration. This theory does explain the utter absence of archaeological indicators of the movement of roughly half a million people (maybe - I know at least one Old Testament scholar who reads the text differently) in the Sinai Peninsula.

In contrast to his first book, The Alexander Cipher, The Exodus Quest provides less in the way of information about the ancient artifacts and events being discovered, and more sheer non-stop action. We get little to no exposition about the characters who survived the previous adventure, possibly presuming that readers will have already become familiar int The Alexander Cipher, and I still don't know if Gaille's name is meant to be pronounced in an English manner or a French one. Is she "Gay-el" or is she Gai-yuh"?

Personally, I thought the balance between action and information in the first book was better. The Exodus Quest also in distinction to The Alexander Cipher felt rushed at the end and less like it concluded than like it stopped, if you get my meaning. I would have liked a page or two more to give the feeling that things had reached something more of a conclusion, a greater sense that the ends of this adventure were now tied. But it won't stand in the way of enjoying this book, if you can stand being open to varying interpretations of history and Jewish/Christian scripture, so go out and get it. Then, start this book when you'll have time read it straight through, because you won't want to put it down, you won't want to lose the express-train like momentum, a thrill ride that's a huge part of the fun of reading this book.

But there will be more adventure for Daniel Knox and his friends, I hope and expect.