Gerald N. Lund - The Kingdom and the Crown: The Complete Series

Fishers of Men:
Kingdom and the Crown, Volume 1

Lund, Gerald N.
Fishers of men / Gerald N. Lund.
p. cm. (The kingdom and the crown; v. 1)
ISBN 1-57345-820-1
ISBN-10 1-59038-667-1 (paperbound)
ISBN-13 978-1-59038-667-5 (paperbound) 1. Bible. N. T.History of Biblical eventsFiction. 2. Jesus ChristFiction. I. Title.
PS3562.U485 F57 2000
813'.54dc21 00-056281

Printed in the United States of America Banta, Menasha, WI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface

Jesus of Nazareth.

Messiah. Redeemer. Savior. The Lamb of God. The Son of God.

No other single life has so profoundly changed the course of history and influenced humanity.

Thousands upon thousands of books have been written and are still being written about his life and teachings.

Some of the greatest artistic masterpieces in art, literature, and music have been inspired by him.

Even our basic division of time into two great eras is marked by his birth.

Numerous wars have been fought in his name.

Christianity today, with its hundreds of different churches, is the largest of all world religions. More than half of the worlds population is at least nominally Christian.

The book that contains the story of his life and the most complete summary of his teachings is the bestselling book of all times. For instance, the American Bible Society alone has distributed more than five billion Bibles since its founding in 1816; and it has translated at least portions of the Bible into more than five hundred languages.

With all of this, it isnt hard to understand why my decision to write a historical novel set in New Testament times was not made lightly. In addition, it would be folly to assume one could write a novel that would embrace all interpretations of the faith and please all Christians, or even a small portion of them. And yet it is fascinating to think about those first days....

To wonder what it must have been like when there were no Christians.

To try to imagine how it must have felt when the word first began to leap from mouth to mouth about a carpenter from the obscure village of Nazareth.

To sit at his feet and hear his new and astonishing doctrines for the first time.

To stand just feet away from him and personally witness as he healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, restored the crippled and maimed, raised the dead.

And perhaps most important, to ask oneself the question, How would I have responded if I had been there?

The following brief observations may be helpful to readers as they begin The Kingdom and the Crown. Writing a novel based on the life of Jesus Christ as told in the New Testament created some interesting challenges and dilemmas. My commitment in writing historical fiction has always been to represent both the history and the time period as accurately as possible. In this case, that became a particularly challenging task. In the first place, we are two thousand years removed from that time. Second, the only dependable historical record we have of the life of Christ and those he influenced is found in the New Testament. And the four accounts written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were never meant to be histories or biographies. They are eyewitness testimonies of his life and ministry. This leaves many of the details required by a novelist woefully lacking. A third challenge comes in interpreting what those events and teachings mean for us todaya question that has been answered in a thousand different ways.

Without trying to suggest that my answer to that very difficult question is the right one, and without trying to convert the reader to my way of thinking, here in brief summary are some issues I wrestled with and how I resolved them. This, I hope, will help the reader better understand the story contained in this book.

There are now dozens of versions or translations of the Bible in English alone. Which text to use when presenting the teachings of Jesus posed a dilemma. The King James Version (often called the Authorized Version) is still the queen of all translations, not only in the numbers sold but in its influence on other translations and the art and culture of our civilization. Therefore, I chose to use the King James Version as the text I would follow.

Whole books have been written on the exact date of Christs birth, with the greatest consensus placing it between 7 b.c. and 4 b.c. However, our calendar assumes he was born in 1 b.c. Since this is a novel and not a scholarly examination of this question, I have chosen to use 1 b.c. as the base for dating in the novel. I did this simply because most readers will find it easier to think of Jesus as thirty years old in a.d. 30, rather than having to mentally add or subtract dates.

By the same token, though the Hebrews had their own calendar with different names for each of the months, and even though the primary characters in the novel are Jews, I chose to use the Julian calendar, which gave us the names of the months we still use today. Again, this allows the reader to know what time of the year it is when a date is given.

The cultural setting of Israel in New Testament times was very diverse. The common people in the Holy Land spoke Aramaic, but their scriptures were in classical Hebrew. Latin was the language of the Romans, but Greek was the lingua franca, or the language that was spoken everywhere in business and commerce. To accurately portray this diversity in the dialogue between characters could be very tedious. So while I remind the reader from time to time of this fact, I have deliberately avoided trying to be perfectly consistent because such an approach would soon become confusing.

In a similar vein, the problem of names becomes a challenge as well. Jesus is the English form of the Greek, Hee-ay-sous. In Hebrew the name was Yeshua, which is the same as the English form of the Old Testament Joshua. Moses is actually Moshe (MOH-sheh) in Hebrew. John is Yohanan. After some internal debate, I determined that I would use what felt authentic for fictional characters but stay with the more recognized forms of the names of actual people. So in the novel it is John the Baptist, not Yohanan the Baptist. It is Jesus of Nazareth, not Yeshua of Nazareth. One fictional character is named Moshe, but I never refer to the Law as The Law of Moshe, even though in actuality that was Moses name in Hebrew. This does create a few places where we have Jewish people explaining Hebrew names, which of course they would not have done. While it may not be entirely logical, I hope it lessens the confusion for the reader.

The name of God in the Old Testament is written with four consonantsYHVH. No vowels are given in the original. The King James translators and other versions have rendered this as Jehovah (the Y often becomes J in English). In recent times it has become more common to translate this as Yahweh or Jahveh. I chose to follow the more traditional form given in the King James Version.