Today's mini review is of Ninth Witness, the latest AD Chronicles book by Brock and Bodie Thoene.
This book interrupts our march to the Crucifixion and Resurection to flash back to the episode from Jesus' childhood. While Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are heading to Jerusalem for His first Passover celebration, nine year old orphan Jude is trying to take his sister there so that will be taken in by family.
The plot will be fairly predictable to anyone familiar with the New Testament. But that's hardly a new thing in this series. As always, what really brings it to life are the characters. I especially liked the interaction between Jesus, John the Baptist, and a young Simon Peter.
What I didn't like was the theological implications of several things over the course of the book. They went for the perpetual virgin myth with Mary for starters. Then they changed the meaning behind some lines of scripture in the climax. It's not exactly earth shattering stuff, and I can see where they got that meaning, but it's still wrong.
So, as a result, I am going to give this a mediocre reaction. But I know fans of the series will definitely want to read it.
4 comments:
Mark, how many books would you say you read a week? I am so jealous. I have three books off the top of my head that I am saving for Christmas break. Not much time for any non-school reading during the semester. Do you enjoy and fantasy or faire tale types of books. George MacDonald is one of my favorite authors. See you next week maybe.
I usually read one book a week. Right now it looks like more than that since I'm talking about books I read on the plane to and from Dallas.
I'm much more of a mystery guy then a fantasy author. Of course, I did just finish the fairy tale book to go with the Harry Potter series, so it's not a hard and fast rule.
One of the things that I've been learning by being a member of a Christian writing group is to NOT mix in theology that could be considered controversial - or that could offend some readers.
I know that the Thoene's have enough of a following that they can throw out pretty much any of the rules that they'd want to, but I'm sorta surprised on the ones you mentioned.
They've had somethings I wasn't a fan of in previous books, but this is the first time I found something I really disagreed with.
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