Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part OnePrologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part TwoChapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
About the Author
THE STOLEN GOSPELS
Book 1 of the Stolen Gospels Series
Brian Herbert
Copyright 2011 DreamStar, Inc
eISBN: 9781614750314
Digital Edition 2011
WordFire Press
www.wordfire.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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 Gosp
els, 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
Prologue
July 9, 2033
At her office in Salonika, Greece, Dr. Katherine Pangalos read an e-mail concerning two mysterious babies in the care of her non-profit international medical organization. Within hours of birth, the children—both girls—were babbling, making peculiar, complex sounds that seemed very similar.
Over her computer’s speaker system Pangalos listened carefully to the recorded sounds: rhythmic and fluid for short stretches, but halting and clicking much of the time, like a language in the process of formation. Definitely not normal baby talk, her doctors were saying, and she couldn’t help but agree.
Utilizing a high security encrypted Internet line—which Pangalos normally employed for other purposes—she contacted a renowned linguistics expert who could be trusted, and the startling truth began to unfold. . . .
Chapter 1
We must await the proper moment to reveal our incredible secret, when all is in readiness. If we come out too early, an eruption of fear and suppression will destroy our movement.
—Report of the Commission on the She-Apostles
February 7, 2034 . . .
An orderly queue of seventeen robed women moved across the cobblestone plaza toward a weathered stone church. Second in the procession, a stocky black woman, Dixie Lou Jackson, heard the ancient tower bell ringing, a melancholy throb carried on a cool afternoon breeze. She shivered. It was winter, in the Macedonian mountains of northern Greece.
Around them rose the other structures of Monte Konos, a secluded mountaintop monastery that had been abandoned during Turkish raids in 1827. For centuries before that, it had been a sanctuary for a form of chauvinist monasticism in which only men were permitted to participate. In all that time, no women had been allowed to set foot on Monte Konos, not even female animals.
Of course, all that was changed now.
At the church entrance Dixie Lou and her superior, Amy Angkor-Billings, stepped into shadows on one side while their companions filed past them through arched double doors. Each door featured a large, carved Byzantine cross. Nervously, Dixie Lou looked up at the cerulean sky, wondering if an enemy might detect them here with an orbital surveillance satellite. If that happened, the consequences would be disastrous.
She hurried inside with the others.
* * *
The tall, broad-shouldered man moved through the underground corridor with athletic grace and power, a deportment that stemmed as much from his intense attitude as from physical prowess. Vice Minister Styx Tertullian wore wire-rimmed glasses and carried two jet-ball pens in his shirt pocket. His straight blond hair was overly long, so that it fell around his eyes.
He passed the door to the bustling, all-male secretarial pool, then continued on through the plex-bubble of the communications pod and into the honeycomb-walled concrete and steel office core, the most heavily protected section of the bombproof office complex. The air filtration system in the facility had been designed to keep the interior atmosphere clean in case of military attack, but dust still got through from a sandstorm that was raging outside. The equipment had never functioned properly, just one of numerous construction problems and cost overruns in this four-year old network of concealed subterranean structures, in eastern Washington state.
As Styx approached, a guard in a silver-and-black Bureau of Ideology uniform nodded to him. Styx stopped at the guard station and pressed his face against the cool surface of an identity plate. Lavender light washed across him, reading his epidermal cell patterns and retinas, while imparting a slight tingle to the skin. He felt a pin prick as a DNA sample was taken from his cheek, and seconds later the clearance bell rang, permitting him to continue on his way. No person, not even the Minister himself, was exempt from such procedures.
This morning the Vice Minister had important news for his boss’s ears only, and was hurrying to make his report. Styx’s ear-implanted phone went off, making his skin tingle. A subconscious link told him it was Minister Nelson Culpepper himself, exactly the person he wa
s going to see anyway. Seconds after the call, Styx walked into the Minister’s opulent reception area, where an electronic secretary registered his presence and transmitted the information to the inner office.
“Come in, come in,” a voice boomed across the intercom system.
Styx hurried into the office, and blurted out in his high-pitched, whining voice, “I have exciting news, Minister!”
But as he entered he saw a holo-projection of the broad-faced President of the United States, Lowell Markwether, dancing in the air in front of Culpepper’s desk. With a crafty smile, Culpepper motioned for Styx to take a seat, which he did, in one of the deep armchairs off to one side.
At the press of a button, Styx caused a cup of steaming hot coffee to pop out of a slot in the table next to him. It was the best coffee he had ever tasted, a blend of the finest beans in the world, brewed through enhanced methods that produced a cup of java that tasted just as good as it smelled. He waited for it to cool down.
A fat man with a youthful face, the Minister looked like an oversized child. He wore an impeccable silver-and-black uniform with gold buttons, each of them a Christian cross. The flag of the Bureau of Ideology hung on a pole behind him, a silver banner with a black cross in the center.
“I need more funding,” Culpepper said to the President. “Another four billion dollars.”
“Four billion more?” the holo-form responded. “How many favors do you think I owe you?”
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