A Review by Dwight A. Moody
“All roads lead to Rome,” the old adage observes. This was the description of the famous system of stone roads built and maintained by the Roman Empire. It is quoted somewhere in this new novel by my long-time friend, Larry Gregg. Which is appropriate because that same phrase describes the narrative structure of his book.
The book opens with stories in four parts of the ancient world: Britian, with the defeat of the regional kings by the Roman legions; Lystra, in a typical slave market and Tarsus, along the street set aside for tentmakers; and Antioch, in Syria, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. These four stories and the people they introduce wind their way to Rome where, decades later, the city burns, the emperor fiddles, and the people die.
What makes this work of historical fiction so impressive is, in fact, the history. Dr. Gregg’s command of the history is apparent on every page, often in every sentence. As best I can tell and with very few exceptions, every character in this novel is taken straight from the history books. Many were new to me, and more than once, I stopped my reading to research a name or a place; and time and again, what turned up was a summary of some obscure event that had never found its way into my education. Like the Roman invasion of Britian, or the intricacies of Greek philosophy, or the shenanigans of the imperial families of Rome. In and around these historical events are wound the more familiar narratives of the New Testament: Paul and Barnabas, Mark and Silas, Peter and Aquilla, and especially Timothy.
Throughout the book, Latin versions of these names are used, so Timothy becomes Timotheus and Barnabas is known as Joseph bar Nabas. These names, like so much in the book, are plausible. As are the events Gregg creates for the life and times of the main character, Timotheus: his tutoring by an educated slave, his marriage to the daughter of a king, and his accumulation and distribution of vast wealth. It is this latter series of imagined events that comprise the bulk of this narrative and the majority of the fiction in this work of “historical fiction.” All of which conspired to flesh out a character of great significance in first-century Christianity, yet one largely unknown to us. Timothy appears in the New Testament records but little else is revealed, except the names of his mother and grandmother and his connection to Paul the great apostle.
Years ago, in the early days of my work as a gospel minister, I read the famous historical novel, Great Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell, which allows me to confess how powerful can be the impact of such writing. “I never got over it,” is the best way to describe it. That book transformed biblical characters into real people; that book solidified my life-long fascination with the great apostle to the Gentiles, Saul of Tarsus/Paul the Apostle.
This book by Dr. Gregg has the same potential.
It is a book of historical fiction, but Dr. Gregg’s great erudition makes the accent fall heavily on that “historical” adjective and lightly on the “fiction” noun. Maybe too much so. His effort to get all the history into the book makes many sentences read too much like a history book; and the created dialogue is laboriously stylized, void of authenticity. I muttered to myself more than once, “This is not the way people really talk, then or now.”
But Gregg is the novelist, not me; this is his third novel with a sequel to this one out later this year. “I am about 400 pages into another novel,” he wrote me from a vacation spot in Florida. He was a Sunday-sermon pastor when we worked together in Pittsburgh, he on the south side and I on the north side. Now, 40 years later, we end up almost neighbors in North Carolina. He is writing the books, and I am reading them. It is a good thing.
