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Welcome to the New Books Network
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hello
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everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Jonathan Lookedew, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Christopher Stanley about his new book, A Ram for Mars, published by NFB Publishing in 2026. Chris, welcome to the show.
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A
Thank you. It's nice to be with you.
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B
Well, can you start by telling us just a little bit about yourself and your scholarship on earliest Christianity?
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A
Sure. I guess the thing that people might know me for is my early work on Paul's use of scripture. Several books and lots of articles and been, I would say, fairly influential in that area. But even back then I was interested in the social realia of the world of early Christianity and how they engage with that world. So even then at that time I was looking at, well, how does Paul's handling of scripture compare with Greek handling of Homer or with Jewish handling of the biblical text or that kind of thing. And over the years, actually after those, at some point along the way, I began working on another totally unrelated book that is still not out yet because I've had a lot of other distractions but having to do with Jews and Greeks in antiquity. What we Call interethnic relations through the lens of social anthropology and social psychology and sociology and post colonial theory is kind of broadened over time. And in the course of that I got more and more into interest in the social world of early Christianity, the lived experience of ordinary people. And so that as I was working on the other project on that book and some other things, papers and everything, I. Well, my wife just challenged me one day to think about writing historical fiction. I'll tell you more about that in just a moment, but I will say that in the course of writing this first novel, I did a lot of work on the kind of lived experience of ancient people in the Roman world in regard to sickness and healing. And that led to a couple of papers which led to a book. So, you know, it's interesting how I've had the. In some ways the novels are an encapsulation of the academic research I've been doing for decades on kind of the lived experience of ordinary people. And yet working on the novels has fostered more of academic scholarship on my part. So it's been a very productive process.
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B
It's really wonderful to hear about. And yeah, you mentioned historical fiction. A Ram for Mars is the third book in a trilogy of novels that you have written entitled A Slave's Story. I guess it sounds like you got started perhaps at your wife's suggestion. But how else. How did you find the start of writing the trilogy?
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And yeah, one day I came home, or I was just hanging around, my wife said to me, you know, all this historical research you do, you ought to think about writing a historical novel. And I said, I don't know anything about writing historical fiction. You know, dialogue and characters and things like that. Now, we both love historical fiction. She reads a lot, I listen to a lot on Audible and other channels and I just kind of flitted the idea away. But that next day, this wonderful opening scene just popped into my head. And over the next I told my wife and she said, yeah, that sounds interesting. And then over the next two weeks, this book just kept developing and writing itself. And I would tell her, and this happens and the other thing happens. And so, yeah, she's normally my fiercest critic, and the fact that she liked it gave you some encouragement. So fast forward maybe another year, I don't remember. I was over in Ireland on a Fulbright fellowship and I was in England speaking at a number of the universities over there. And I was out hiking one day, not even thinking about this project. And this opening scene pop back into my head and I'M literally writing it as I'm walking and not even consciously. It's almost like it's being given to me, I can almost say. And so I went, I memorized it as I walked along, wrote it out when I got back to my hotel room and sent it to my wife, maybe three or four pages. And she said, this is really good. This is as good as any historical fiction that I've read. So again, that encouraged me. And so for the next several years I worked on this off and on, alongside my academic writing and my teaching and my grading and my committees and all those other things, of course, that we do. So it took years to actually bring to fruition. And by the time I finished the first novel, it was over a thousand pages of manuscript. And shopping around for agents and such, I found not a lot of success. And I decided that's just too much. And so I broke the first book into two novels, which are the first two novels in this series. And I always had envisioned a follow up novel to that first one that would take my characters to Israel. And so that's the one that I've finally written after again, a few more years of working on that. A Ram from Mars. And I would be so bold as to say I think it's the best one of the bunch.
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B
Yeah, I agree. It's a. It's a really great novel. Do you want to tell us, I don't want to give away any plot spoilers unnecessarily, but do you want to tell us a bit about the, the plots? What's the premise for A Ram?
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A
Good, thank you. Basically, the story focuses on a slave of a lower level aristocrat in the Roman colony of Pisidian Antioch in Central Asia Minor. And I should mention that the first two books there is no interaction with real historical figures, although Paul gets mentioned on occasion and so do a few other people. But this is not the kind of fiction where you've got somebody who's traveling along with Julius Caesar, you know, or, or whatever. It's an immersing people into the world of lived experience. And so at the very beginning you learn that this, his master has some illness, some kind of a stomach or intestinal problem, and it infects in, affects things that he is doing on an ongoing basis. But he's a rising guy in the city, the master is. And so he is working on dedicating a statue of Fortuna and some other things to kind of elevate his status. And Marcus is essentially somewhat like Tyro was to Cicero, a bookkeeper, a record keeper correspondent, but without the responsibility and freedom that Tiro had. And one of the things that I was trying to show in this book, drawing in part on things that I learned from Dale Martin and his Slavery as Salvation book, is, you know, the diversity of experience of slaves in the ancient world and how it wasn't certainly could be as bad as the American south, but it could also be better to be a slave of a rich guy than to be a poor free person. And we say more about, talk about that more if you'd like. So at any rate, through some unexpected circumstances, the master's plans fall apart and he's discouraged and decide Kitsi, he's pursuing healing through a variety of channels, both medical and religious and what we might call magical. And he decides to seek a vision or a dream from the healing God Asclepius, who was believed to appear to people in dreams and try to get cured or try to find instructions for this physician. And nothing happens to him when he goes to the temple, but his physician gets a dream saying that he should go to the temple of Asclepius in Pergamum on the western part of Asia Minor. And so he's encouraged, enthusiastic, and the next many chapters kind of take them him through travel across western Asia Minor. A number of things happen along the way, including discovering his wife is pregnant, who is a slave, he's elevated by the way, to Mary. And some things at Ephesus, where Marcus has an experience that becomes very important in the story. They end up staying through circumstances I won't get into here with a wealthy Jewish who wants to take them to the synagogue. And during the prayer service, Marcus, in hearing the Shema, starts hearing these echoes in his own head about that kind of thing in his own past. And I'll give away a little bit of a spoiler here that Marcus eventually discovers that his mother had not died in childbirth as he'd been told. Never knew her, but she might still be alive and she was Jewish. And so it raises all kind of issues. Well, what's he going to do about that? Because from the very beginning of the book, I've highlighted the presence of anti Judaism in the Roman world. So suddenly discovering you're one of these despised people that you also have despised is not good news. Well, they go to the Asclepian and document in great detail the treatment regimens that his master Lucius goes through there. And finally a dream he receives from Asclepius that is not what he had expected. And that takes us to the end of the first book. I'll summarize the rest more quickly. In the second book, he begins to head home, but along the way he stops at Hierapolis Healing Springs, and he decides he's going to die there and not go home. And Marcus is rather distraught. And unbeknownst to him, his master goes to the temple of Pluto and enters the cave where the noxious gases are and passes out as a means of committing suicide. Meanwhile, Marcus has met a young Jewish woman who he's getting close to and they find Lucius taking back to her house and nursing back to health. And in the weeks that find follow she and Marcus and the. I mean, she. Yeah, she and Marcus and the head of the household have a lot of conversations about Judaism and he decides he wants to marry her. But he's not that enthused yet about Judaism, but he never is really. They finally go home because his master recovers enough, finds it his ne' er do well son has totally destroyed his household in terms of abusing slaves and things like this. And so he sets all that straight and he's dying now and. But he also revisits the idea of Judaism and that's never becomes a Jew. But he had been asked early in the first book by Saxon Jews to help him with building a synagogue, to contribute, and he had rejected them out of hand. And now he decides to help them. He gets taken by a young woman in his house to a Christian worship service which he. They want to pray for him. And he runs out. He's not interested in this, what seemed like a weird crazy cult. And before he dies, he tells Marcus the truth about his own past. And I won't spoil that because there's a lot of revelations here, but they all. In the end, after he dies, he leaves Marcus a lot of money and tells him his mother might still be alive in Israel. And so in the third book, the one I've just finished, we follow Marcus to Israel on the quest to find his mother. And now with the money he's received, what is he going to do? And he ends up settling in Magdala. And the rest of the story largely centers there. He and Miriam think they've come to the land of plenty and abundance in the land of the ancestors. And in truth, they come to rather than peace and plenty, they've arrived in the years leading up to and including the Jewish revolt against the Romans. And so he becomes a merchant, tries to avoid getting entangled, but he gets more and more entangled. And he also is raising Lucius young infant son who becomes an important part of the story as things go on. And again, not to give too much away, but they end up getting involved in the Jewish war. And a lot of the latter, maybe half of the book has to do with that, but from a very distinctive perspective because it's portrayed from a standpoint of Galilee, not from Jerusalem. And it's, you know, what we know pretty much is through Josephus biased lens. But I set things up so that one of the one of Marcus's cousins he finds there, he finds some family members, is the one that we know is John of Giskala, one of the rebel leaders. And so basically, in some ways this book is a rehabilitation of John of Gischala and a kind of disparagement of Josephus. So reading Josephus against the grain and taking them on through the war and the consequences after that, including the fact that Lucius son, who thinks he's Marcus's son, has run off to Jerusalem at the end and Marcus has to go there and rescue him. And so it becomes a very difficult situation, being in Jerusalem under siege and a host of other kind of things. So one last thing I'll add is Marcus becomes a Roman citizen when he's freed, and his Roman citizenship is not a good thing to have in Israel, but he does use it on occasion in constructive ways to advance his own needs. So it's very complex and the whole series is meant to immerse people in this world. In fact, there's one word that reviewers use on Amazon more than any other to describe my books is they're immersive. They really get you in deep into the detail of lived reality and daily experience of ordinary people. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 terms@aka your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. 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B
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to Press, Princeton. Eduardo to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books that you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 at Press Princeton. Eduardo the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Having read them, I think that's quite right. They are immersive and it brings the world of the Eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the first century kind of to life, which is a wonderful thing. You mentioned Josephus Account of the Jewish War. Can I. Can I ask. So you read Josephus against the grain. Do you want to say anything else? Maybe I find Josephus interesting. How did you use Josephus in your account?
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A
Yeah, I mean, I had read Josephus before, and I was certainly aware of the critical issues around Josephus in terms of bias and inaccuracies and things like this. And from the start of the third novel, I was very attuned to wanting to present him in a. In a much diminished and somewhat more negative light than he presents himself. And. But what I found, besides that kind of big picture thing, is the more I bored into, you know, got actually into the war years, bored into Josephus Account of the War, trying to convert it into a consistent narrative, I discovered all kinds of places where his narrative just does not work. The geography doesn't work from story account to account, or the dates don't work, and a variety of things besides his own biases, I became much more aware of the seams in his construction of his narrative. And so I found myself having to make a lot of choices. And along the way I was also engaging, as I have in all three books, very intentionally with the archeology of the sites. Every site that I describe in all three of my books, you can go stand on that site where things, specific things happened, if it has been excavated and where it hasn't been. You know, I could have been to all the sites and I all the kind of geographic things I did my best to make as entirely accurate as possible, but I had to fill in gaps and supply things where he's vague or inaccurate. And the fact that also I'm telling it from a standpoint of Galilee, where Galilee is a sidelight for Josephus. So putting all the pieces together and the parties that were competing for political loyalty led me to perspectives on Josephus that I believe. I really felt like I'm doing academic historical research here that I could defend in academic publications. But one of the nice things about writing fiction is you don't have to do that. You can make choices, you can tell stories, and you don't have to lay out your reasons for them. And so I'd like to think that even when I'm diverging significantly from Josephus, I am presenting an academically defensible presentation that is coherent with and faithful to the archaeology and other sources. In fact, while I was working the third book, I had many email conversations with Stephen Mason, of course, great Josephus scholar, and Mordecai Aviam, a great Galilean archaeologist, Eric Myers and a number of other scholars. When I ran into questions about, okay, well, how does this work? You know, so where did these Roman soldiers, when they're besieging Yotapada, get their water? You know, and so Mordecai was able to, you know, kind of think about that with me. He didn't have. It was fascinating. A lot of times the scholars didn't really know the answers to questions I was asking because I was raising things that they never thought about in that detail as well. So in that sense, I guess what I've tried to do in all three books is do fiction that is academically accurate and as culturally correct as I can possibly make it. I had a reader asked me one time, did they really give each other the finger in the Roman world? And I said, yes, they did. I'll add one more point in terms of my being stickler for accuracy. So when you go today to Pergamon, I don't know if you've been there, but what you see is ruins from the second century and later. And I wanted my characters to be there in the first century buildings. And I dug and I dug and I dug and I finally ordered in my interlabriate on the 3 volume, 3 giant volume German archeological reports on the site with all their drawings in the back and the sites 100 years old or something or the other, and dug through all that. And so what you see then, when you see the descriptions of things happening at Pergamon in the first novel, are things that fit the first century buildings as far as we can know. So if you go there, somebody read my novel and looked at it carefully in relation to the buildings there today that's, oh, you got this wrong or that wrong. And it's, no, I got it right, but it's just not what you see there today.
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B
Really interesting. Yes. One of the challenges, I think, of archeology is people keep building on top and so trying to figure out what's underneath is. Yes. Well, for me, one of, one of the other wonderful things about this trilogy is the way in which you draw on all this ancient history that you've just described. Um, maybe I can ask a slightly larger question. How does fiction help us to understand the ancient world and, and more specifically the ancient Roman and especially Judean world in which early Christianity originated?
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A
Yeah. I can tell you that I certainly learned a lot in the writing of them. In fact, I really felt like I did a PhD dissertation worth of work on each book in terms of the, the research that I did because, you know, you start boring into what it was really like. And it's one thing to kind of know the big picture of, okay, I know what a Roman house is like, and I have a sense of people living there. And I spent enough time on archeological sites and particularly in Turkey to get a sense of how a city works and things like that. But when you try to put people in those places, you realize there's so many questions you never asked. And so then you got to go back and dig in your sources and also a lot of cross cultural analysis as well, so that you can make credible presentations of various specific customs and practices. For example, in my depictions of the Asclepian, there is a, is a massive volume of primary sources. On Asclepius, there was actually collect inquired by a medical doctor and his wife a few decades ago. And it's all primary sources. And so, you know, when I come to there, I'm like, okay, well, what are they going to be saying at the altar when a sacrifice is being offered? Well, at least I had primary sources there. Sometimes I reach dead ends where the answer was basically, we don't know. And then I could create, you know, but I, when I had, when I created it was because there was nothing. And I could say with confidence, I don't know, because nobody knows. But in the course of working on, you know, the Asclepian there, I was able to incorporate a lot of these primary sources and tease out kind of lived experience. I keep using that term that's behind these texts, the window that they, the light that they shed on the experience of ordinary people. So in ways that I had never thought about things in that detail. So I think what I would answer as a kind of a big picture answer is that writing the kind of novels that I did forced me to ask a lot of questions that I never would have asked in writing ordinary academic analysis, and therefore forced me to go out and actually do more research and learn the answers to those questions.
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B
It's really fascinating. Yes. Yeah. The details that we need to make novels come alive are often not the same details that get shared in academic books or we don't use them all well. So you mentioned Marcus, the kind of main character, the slave, who was introduced in the first book and runs throughout the trilogy. How does Marcus's story shed light on the experience not only of slaves, but also of freed persons during the first century or two of the Roman Empire?
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A
Yeah, that was certainly one of the things, especially in the first two books, but also the third that I was trying to make a big point of that. And one other thing, the importance, the pervasiveness of religion in the ancient world. I mean, there's a lot of religion in these books. Greek religion, Roman religion, indigenous religion, Judaism, Christianity. And maybe if you want to talk about that, we can. But as said earlier, I guess it was Dale Martin's book Slavery of Salvation that first got me into realizing that the experience of slaves in the Roman world, while it could be awful, was not necessarily what we would think of in relation to we Americans. In relation to the American south, there were abusive masters. You could be put to work in the coal in the salt mines and be beat to death. But there were also lots of opportunities to work in households where you might compare it a little bit to being the house slaves in the South. But, you know, slaves carried a lot of responsibility in the ancient world. Augustus ran the empire through his slaves. They were his bureaucrats. And so this recognition of the kind of classic trope in the Roman world of the boorish freedmen, because slaves, they could own money, they could own property, they could own other slaves if their master allowed them to do these things. And we have plenty of instances of slaves who became quite wealthy and then are freed, as, in fact, most a majority of slaves would have been freed in the Roman world. And they are wealthier than a lot of the old wine families. And so you got these old families kind of needing to borrow money from this freedman or occasional woman and looking down their nose at him and feeling awful about having to do this. And so we have these pictures of the boar who doesn't have any manners. He doesn't know how to Conduct himself at the lavish dinner party he's getting invited to because he is somebody with money and influence and a client, you know, the freedman then can become a person with clients of his own and his sons can become citizens and become officials in the city. So the taint of slavery after a couple of generations is gone. So that recognition that, as weird as it sounds to us, slavery was one of the few channels of social advancement in the Roman world just seems so bizarre to our mindset today. And you know, most people, if you were poor, you worked, stayed poor your whole life. You worked in what your parents did. If you're wealthy, you stayed at the top because we are, you know, you're superior. There is a, what we might almost say a genetic superiority to the people on the top looking down on those in the bottom. So all that to kind of show something about the lived experience of some slaves being very different than any picture we might have had. In the third book, the experience of the free person comes into play in a different way because Marcus is free when he arrives in Israel, but he leave at first. First he and Miriam have conspired to tell a version of their story that leaves out their slavery. And they're eventually told by a fellow, an elite Jew. They meet, look, it's no big deal. We admire Jew, there are lots and lots of Jewish slaves around the empire and others get liberated and come back here. And we admire those people. And the fact that you got money helps too. And so eventually they become more comfortable talking about that. But still the issue of the Roman citizenship remains delicate through the whole story. That's a closely guarded secret because at a time when supporting the Romans could get you killed or at least get you socially ostracized, that was not something that was worth doing. So he learns very early on he's not going to wear his toga, he's not going to tell people he is a Roman citizen. And so in that sense, he doesn't have the full experience that a Roman freed person would have had. But it comes up off and on through the book, but it's less prominent as the story goes on because it covers a couple of decades and he comes to be, actually becomes a city councilor and Magdalene. So he, there's still old line people there who look down on him, but he becomes an important person in his own city.
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B
It's really interesting and it does, I think, challenge at least my own way of thinking about slavery and the way in which maybe stigmas can dissipate over time. So I Think that's really a helpful thing that comes out of Marcus's story. Well, at the beginning of A Ram for Mars, you've mentioned that Marcus has recently discovered that he is, is Jewish and has even married a Jewish woman named Miriam. How do Marcus and Miriam's stories illuminate Jewish life and identity in the first century ce?
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A
Yeah, I tried to show very much the complexity of Jewish life and of ways in which people viewed Jews also. So as I mentioned earlier, I have at the beginning of the first book a fair amount of anti Judaism that gradually gets overcome in the case of Marcus and Lucius, his master. But I also have Jewish characters. I have people who are Gentiles, who I guess we would call God fearers. So I've got a variety of ways in which outsiders viewed and related to Judaism. And in the course of that you see varying ways in which Jews are engaging with. With those who are not Jews. So the first two books that are set in Asia Minor, it's very much about Jews living in a Roman and Greek cultural, geographic setting. So they're more what we would traditionally call the Hellenistic Jews. And I show varying degrees of acculturation on the part of those Jews and try to give a sense of the variety, including Jewish slaves, as in the case of Miriam, and show that while she was at one point a slave to a Jewish master, her mistress died and she got thrown out for supposedly practicing magic that killed the wife. And so she ends up with a pagan master. She's not able to practice her Judaism. And so she knows more about Judaism than Marcus does. There's a lot she doesn't know. And then Marcus is just all fresh and new and he's trying to deal with this question of, well, what is this Judaism and what is it like? And so I'm able to show him in Jewish settings where you see the best I can reconstruct of what a prayer service might have been like, you know, in the. In the Diaspora, what observing Passover might have been like in a family context in the Diaspora. And so a variety of things along those lines and a Jewish household. So I have him actually at the end the latter part of the second book, living for a significant part of the book in a Jewish household. So it gives me an opportunity to again show a lot of the experience of Jews who are both comfortable in or not comfortable in the Greek and Roman culture at the time, once it goes back to Israel to give away. To give away just a little bit. His marriage to Miriam involves him having to accept circumcision which is a very difficult decision. And so I do highlight the problems that would have caused in people. Even though he was born a Jew, he's never been circumcised, and so that becomes an issue. But he never embraces Judaism in a. What we might say, a heartfelt sense. He does this in order to please her so he can marry her. But once he gets to Israel, slowly, over a course of many years, he becomes more and more Jewish. You know, the culture there is different. And so he is living out his Jewishness in ways that he's. He's never a fervent Jew. He's never someone who is very highly observant, and Miriam isn't either, because that's not the world they grew up in. But they encounter Jews who are. And of course, they encounter Jews who are fighting for freedom and revolting against the Romans because of their devotion. And so I tried to show the varieties of Judaism in. In Israel also, including the acculturation to Greeks to Greek culture and language among the wealthy elites in many cases. And yet how far, you know, showing. Well, they would only go this far and no farther, and so ways in which they disagreed among themselves. So I guess, you know, I've been actually working in Jewish studies as long as I have been in Christian studies, and I did my PhD at Duke. I seriously thought about majoring in Jewish studies. But I came to see during the course of my time there that I probably my job prospects would not be that great being a Christian, trying to get jobs in Jewish studies. And so I, you know, shifted more and more toward my original interest, which is New Testament, early Christianity. But I've continued over the years. When I was at Duke, I did a fair amount of work in rabbinics and Dead Sea Scrolls and a variety of other things in there. And I've kept that focus up over the years. So the Jewishness was not a newfound interest for the sake of the novels, even for this other book I mentioned earlier about Jews and Greeks in the Roman world, very much about the lived experience of Jews going to be a big part of that also.
- [38:05]
B
It's very helpful to hear, and I think the degrees of acculturation comes out very well, particularly in a novel form. So that's really helpful. But you've kept using, I think rightly, the word lived experience. And so your books deal with many of just the vicissitudes of daily life in the Roman world. Can you say something about maybe how your prior research informed your depictions of either healthcare or childcare in the Novels.
- [38:38]
A
Yeah, in some sense. I've already explained how some of my earlier research on Judaism fed in here. But the work on the sickness and all that and childbirth, that really was something I learned more in the course of writing this book. In fact, I never intended for the sickness and healing to occupy the prominent place that it does. When I was doing some of my early work on the novel, both writing, but probably already written some, I went over to Turkey with Mark Wilson, who is. I don't know if you know Mark, but he is. He lives in Turkey most of the year. He trains Turkish tour guides, new test New Testament scholar. And we spent about 10 days together traveling around all these different sites that I was wanting to include in my novel. And just him educating me about the archeology and us together kind of piecing things out, teasing things out that he really had never thought about. And I became more and more aware of just the. That and the reading of just how pervasive sickness and injury were in the ancient world. And therefore there had to be a lot of ways of treating it. And it's something we really don't think about, you know, prior to modern medicine. I mean, we read in 2 Corinthians 11 where Paul talks about all the things he suffered. And I've never heard anybody talk about, well, okay, what did he do to get medical care afterwards? And that's what some of the things I dealt with in my. The last academic book called Paul and Asclepius the Greco Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission. Getting very much into the nitty gritty of things. I learned from the research on the novels about sickness and various modes of treatment in the ancient world, and how Jews and Christians in the first few centuries engaged with those different modes of healing, which I defined as medical, magical and miracle or religious. And then what might we suspect or guess about what Paul did and what he taught others regarding is it okay to go to a temple of Asclepius for healing? Is it okay to wear an amulet? You know, what kinds of treatment are we going to be inconsistent with or consistent with his faith in Christ? So the work on the novel got me into those things. And of course, his wife being pregnant got me into issues of child care. I tried to bring out some of what we would call magic because that was important in that world, particularly around the child, the trying to become pregnant side of things. I felt like at the end of the third novel, I really didn't bring that in as much as I would have liked. You get caught up in so many other things. But I guess really it's a matter something I didn't say earlier about writing the fiction. This might be a place to bring it in. I really experienced in writing these books something that I've occasionally heard some other novelists say. There were a lot of occasions where I felt I'm not creating the story, my characters are living their lives and I'm just recording what they're doing. And so the fact that the magic didn't come up as much as I might have thought and after the fact is more that it wasn't coming up in their lives in the same way that maybe it might have. Because of their background in the diaspora, they weren't as familiar with Jewish modes of magical practice. But it was just fascinating to be writing not knowing what's going to happen next. And sometimes my character surprised me, particularly the twist at the end of the second book that you probably didn't see coming. I did not see that coming either. It's, you know, get the characters in the situation and you know, essentially it was like Marcus told me, this is what he's going to do and I wrote it down. And there's culturally, I mean, of course, in reality, you know, it's my mind engaging with what I know about how people treated children and the way they were often disposed of and things like that and how they were rescued from duck trash heaps and host of other things like that. But it was just culturally. Right. And I think that's what happened all through the writing of these three novels. That the things that I had already known framed the story in a way that my characters were living it out and I was kind of framing it as I went along and I went where they went.
- [43:25]
B
It's really a wonderful experience to hear that. Yeah, just recording what your characters were already doing. That's fantastic. Well, another matter that your books deal with is travel. And I remember a scene early in A Ram for Mars in which Marcus and Miriam struggle with nausea while sailing on their journey to Galilee. And I found my mind drifting to stories in the New Testament as well as a few other Greco Roman narratives that involve travel on the sea. For readers who may not be experts on Roman era travel such as myself, what are the most important things for us to know?
- [44:07]
A
As with the other things that I was writing about, I was really concerned to get in the nitty gritty of what it would have been like to travel in the ancient world. And again, if you know something of Paul, you know, he traveled, you might have some idea about how far he might have gone in a day. But we don't think about, you know, the difficulty of finding a place to stay, finding food if you're on a wagon, how it must hurt your butt if you're. They didn't have springs on their wagons, they didn't have much padding. And how do you carry your stuff if you're going in a group? And how would aristocrats travel in ways that might be different than the way someone like Paul would. And just on and on and on and on. So I tried to show in the first two books people traveling in various modes in the primary roadways there in Asia Minor. And then when you come to Israel, it took me a lot of work to really pin down that there just basically were no paved Roman roads once you got outside of a place like Caesarea. And so I tried to illustrate the difficulties of getting around where Marcus couldn't do what he did in the first two books. Riding a mule drawn carriage or riding a supply wagon as he starts out. But he has to learn to ride a horse eventually, which he never gets comfortable with. But he also, you know, uses various other modes of transportation, from walking to carts of various types. And he encounters other people who do the same, bringing goods into the city for marketing on a market day or things like that. So again, you mentioned the sea travel. There's only one place that that is actually described. And I have him at the beginning of the third book. Yes. Suffering through that and swearing he's never going to get on a boat again. And yet what happens when he finally meets, meets his cousins who are in hippos on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They are merchant traders who ship goods across the Sea of Galilee and he ends up having to make trips across that body of water as well. And he ends up being a merchant owner of ships. So great irony there, you know, that he goes from his own unpleasantness, I don't really, really quite say, but I don't think he ever got comfortable with sea travel. But nonetheless it's something that he has to do. One other thing that I might add that's not quite related to that, but they haven't really talked about is in the war, he gets caught up in doing something that again, I had never thought about, which is he's a supplier of goods, supplier of food and weapons. And he has both sides wanting him to supply them with food and weapons. And you know, we don't think about, well, how did the Romans get their food and get this Much. How did the rebels, you know, get their weapons? And so I have Marcus getting very much caught up in all kinds of machinations between different parties who want his services and his family gets threatened when he's trying to back out and a host of other things like that. And as you know, they're all kinds of ins and outs to the plot and people in peril and people having to deal with what life throws at them and trying to make the best they can. And Marcus just had to keep his family safe. In a war. He never becomes a warrior. He doesn't get caught up in the fighting. He's not someone who wants to be traveling around, joining Josephus. He's a Roman citizen. He wants peace. He sympathizes, if anything, with the Romans. And so again, we don't see, normally we don't think about pro Roman Jews during that time and, you know, what their experience would have been like. So all that is a little bit beyond the travel side and yet not quite because he is, of course, shipping his goods, you know, by boat and by cart and how does he do that and how do you organize those kinds of things? So a lot about maybe beyond travel, just transportation in the Roman world, including the land of Israel or Palestine. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real D design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now. Get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional measure. @blinds.com rules and restrictions apply.
- [49:02]
B
It's really fascinating. Yeah. And just thinking about Roman Jews and, and the way in which. Or pro, pro Roman Jews and. And the way in which they might have been caught in the middle. The perhaps opportunities, but also the many dangers. I think your. Your book brings that out really well. So.
- [49:19]
A
Yeah.
- [49:20]
B
Well, Chris, I know we've taken up a lot of your time, but can I ask what are you working on now and what should we watch out for in the future from you?
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I enjoyed writing fiction so much that I kind of want to keep doing it and I might. As of about five years ago, we learned all kinds of fascinating things about the early history of my family in this country. And I won't get into the details. But my earliest ancestor came over in the 1600s through Jamestown and became a Quaker. And the Quakers kept good records of their members. And so we know actually a fair amount now about those early days. And he was a fairly cantankerous guy from what I can tell from the records. And I just see the makings of a novel here which would involve me having to learn an awful lot about pre colonial, about colonial history and the role of Quakers in that context leading up to the Revolutionary War. So I may shift over at some point if I can live long enough to a completely different sphere of fiction where I guess angels fear to tread. But prior to that I've got two other academic projects I want to finish. The the book I mentioned earlier that I've worked on off and on over the years is called Neither Jew nor Ethnic Conflict in the Greco World or something like that. I think I got Paul in there somewhere and in a nutshell, arguing, as I've done in many papers and people have, I think been persuaded that when Paul talks about neither Jew nor Greek, he's using Greek. There was nobody going around in the ancient world saying I'm a Gentile, but there were lots of people going around saying I'm a Greek. And I think, you know, so what does it mean when Paul uses specifically Greek language there? And I argue that he's dealing with a history of conflict between people who self identified as Jews and as Greeks and that that's permeated into it, builded into his churches and he's having to deal with it from a pastoral standpoint, not just a theological standpoint. So I'm going to work on that. It's still a massive undertaking. The part I'm working on right now is what I call an ethnic map of the Roman world. So looking at ethnic diversity, I've done Egypt and I've done Palestine. I'm working on Syria now, working my way around to Asia Minor, which I've already done some writing on, and possibly Greece too, as a background for seeing the variety of, of ethnic groups, self identified and other identified and the ways he got along and realized this was a very complicated world that Paul was navigating. And what does it mean when he kind of lumps them all together as Gentiles and things like that. So that's kind of the issues I'm grappling with. I published quite a few papers and others at conferences on that topic. I think though, I'm going to do a more popular oriented book before that that is just going to be A quick, easy write that I'm tending to be calling the Bible doesn't tell me so how misreading Scripture led Christianity astray. So it's intended to be one of those kind of provocative books that might get some media play of basically arguing that if Christians of whatever theological stripe claim to take the Bible seriously, they hold to a lot of ideas and practices that don't fit with at least my understanding of what the Bible would be saying. So I intend to be what one of my former professors called the equal opportunity offender, pointing out problems of people of both conservative and more liberal or progressive and middle of the ground and all kinds of stuff. Taking skewering some sacred cows along the way and maybe making them. I'm from Alabama, so maybe we're going to barbecue some of them, too. So I expect that that will be something I can, you know, write maybe in a few months or so. I'm very busy right now working with a nonprofit in Southern California, where I moved three years ago, doing a lot of grant writing and working on dealing with the homeless problem out here. So that takes me a lot of time away from my research and writing. But that too is part of my living out what I understand to be, I mean, for me as a Christ follower, something that is vital to. To God's intentions for me. And so if I don't get as much writing done well, so be it.
- [54:10]
B
The. Those. Those all sound like really amazing projects. And, and your. Your work, grant writing is. That's. That's extremely important. So thank you for sharing about that.
- [54:21]
A
Thank you. Yeah.
- [54:23]
B
Well, I want to thank you, Chris, very much for being on the show today to discuss your book, A Ram for Mars. I have really enjoyed it.
- [54:31]
A
I really appreciate you letting me talk here. I have appreciated the feedback you've given me about both when the first two volumes came out and you read it and were very encouraging and the agreement that you had with me that this was the best one of the bunch and like to encourage other people to go to my website, aslavestory.com where they can find links to all the books, summaries of the plots, a lot of information about the world in which the novels take place. I've got a resources tab where I've got links to web information about all the geographic sites that appear in the novel and some of the people. And I've got quite a few posts on the Roman social life on a blog tab there. So a lot of information there. Even if somebody's never going to read the novels, the links on the blog page alone would kind of distill some of the things I've been talking about here. They're also available on Amazon and any other as far as pretty much any book site you prefer to go to. They're also available. The first two are available in audible form in audio form on audible.com the third one is currently under process being worked on and I actually think it's even better listening to them than reading them. So got a good reader, does a good job with the voices. So yeah, pick up the first one, try it and see what you think.
- [56:02]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [56:03]
A
Oh, I should add, if somebody doesn't maybe is more interested in the Israel side and the Jewish world side. The third book can be read without the first two. I have a summary of the first two in the prologue in the preface to the third book. You can't read the first two without separately from one another because it's a continuous story. But if you're really interested, it's really more in the Jewish war side. You can read the third book apart from the other two, and then go back and read the first two. Of course.
- [56:36]
B
Of course. Yes. Yeah. It's a great trilogy. And we'll be sure to put a link to the, to the. To your website in the show notes.
- [56:43]
A
Thank you.
- [56:44]
B
Well, no, thank you. Thanks very much for your time and thanks everyone for. For listening. Take care, everyone.
- [56:50]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode
- [56:52]
B
of the New Books Network.
- [56:53]
A
We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.