The Order

 

Daniel Silva, “The Order,” Kindle Version, 2020, ??? pp.

From reviews I've read, most long-time readers of Silva don’t like this latest book all that much.  However, he has written a total of 22 and Linda read and liked all of them in spite of not caring about this one so much.  In any event, this is my first Silva book and I found two intriguing concepts in this book:  the biblical blaming of the Jews for deicide and the alliance of the Catholic church with Right-Wing political movements, represented in this book by The Order, beginning around the time of WWI (think Wilson) and continuing through Hitler to Rush Limbaugh and the neo-Nazis of this day.

Gospel of St. Mark written about 60 c.e. becomes the foundation for the later St. Matthew gospel, the later gospel that adds what may be the most notorious “His blood shall be on us and our children.”

Gospel of St. Matthew 27-25 written somewhere between 70 AD and 110 AD.  The author wrote for a community of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians located probably in Syria.  He mostly repeats  Mark’s gospel but adds to it during the ‘trial’ of Jesus, especially the: “ Pilate, washes his hands in front of the Jewish crowd gathered on the Great Pavement and declares himself innocent of Christ’s blood. To which the crowd replies, ‘His blood shall be on us and our children.’ It is the most consequential line of dialogue ever composed. Two thousand years of persecution and slaughter of Jews at the hands of Christians can be traced back to those nine terrible words.  (I would add one other reason that Jews have been persecuted up to 1948 when they received and defended their own land: Lack of a homeland).

Plot:

Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into Venice for a much-needed holiday with his wife and two young children. But when Pope Paul VII (a fictitious pope) dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the Holy Father’s loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati. A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect his master was murdered. The Swiss Guard who was standing watch outside the papal apartments the night of the pope’s death is missing. So, too, is the letter the Holy Father was writing during the final hours of his life. A letter that was addressed to Gabriel.

As the cardinals gather in Rome for the start of the conclave, Gabriel sets out on a desperate search for proof of the Order’s conspiracy, and for a long-lost gospel with the power to put an end to two thousand years of murderous hatred. His quest will take him from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to a monastery in Assisi, to the hidden depths of the Secret Archives, and finally to the Sistine Chapel, where he will witness an event no outsider has ever before seen—the sacred passing of the Keys of St. Peter to a newly elected pope.

My Notes:

Location 2775-2794:  Pilate is similar to Mark’s, with one critical addition. “Pilate, the ruthless Roman prefect, washes his hands in front of the Jewish crowd gathered on the Great Pavement and declares himself innocent of Christ’s blood. To which the crowd replies, ‘His blood shall be on us and our children.’ It is the most consequential line of dialogue ever composed. Two thousand years of persecution and slaughter of Jews at the hands of Christians can be traced back to those nine terrible words.” “Why were they written?”  “Because within a few short years of the Crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. If there was a future, it lay with the gentiles living under Roman rule. The evangelists and the Church Fathers had to make the new faith acceptable to the Empire. to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had forced Pilate’s hand . . .” “Problem solved.”

Location 2809:  Early Christian theologians wrestled with the question of whether the Jews should even be allowed to exist. St. John Chrysostom of Antioch preached that synagogues were whorehouses and dens of thieves, that Jews were no better than pigs and goats, that they had grown fat from having too much to eat, that they should be marked for slaughter. Not surprisingly, there were numerous attacks on the Jews of Antioch, and their synagogue was destroyed. In 414 the Jews of Alexandria were wiped out. Regrettably, it was only the beginning.”

Location 5069:  “For centuries,” said Donati, “this Church of ours has seen enemies and threats everywhere it looked. Science, secularism, humanism, pluralism, relativism, socialism, Americanism.” Donati paused, then added quietly, “The Jews.

Location 5855:  “One central element of the Passion narratives is undeniable. A Jew from the village of Nazareth named Jesus was put to death by the Roman prefect on or about the holiday of Passover, in perhaps the year 33 c.e. Much else of what was written in the four Gospels must be taken with a cartload of salt. The accounts are literary invention or, worse, a deliberate effort on the part of the evangelists and early Church to implicate the Jews in the death of Jesus while simultaneously exculpating the real culprits.” “Pontius Pilate and the Romans.”

Location 5870:  “What was the charge against Jesus?” “The only crime punishable by crucifixion.” “Insurrection.” “Of course.”

Location 5923:  Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, DC, reportedly funneled more than $600,000 from a little known archdiocese account to friends and benefactors at the Vatican, including popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The Washington Post found that several of the Vatican bureaucrats who received money were directly involved in assessing allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against McCarrick,

Location 5948:  “The terrible truth,” wrote historian Susan Zuccotti in her remarkable study of the Holocaust in Italy, Under His Very Windows, “was that they wanted the Jews put in their place.”

Location 5958:  Pius’s XII critics and apologists have engaged in a decades-long quarrel over his failure to explicitly condemn the Holocaust and warn Europe’s Jews about the death camps. But his indefensible support of wanted Nazi mass murderers is perhaps the clearest evidence of his innate hostility toward Jews. Pius opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, and opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with the faith from which it had sprung. He excommunicated every Communist on earth in 1949 but never took a similar step against members of the Nazi Party

Location 5963-5968:  Pope John XXIII, took extraordinary steps to protect Jews during World War II while serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul,  The culmination of John XXIII’s bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust was the milestone declaration of the Second Vatican Council known as Nostra Aetate.

Location 5985 -6000:  is widely accepted by scholars that none of the Gospels, with the possible exception of Luke, were written by the men for whom they are named.  Numerous critical biblical scholars and contemporary historians have concluded that the evangelists and their editors in the early Church consciously shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews in order to make Christianity more appealing to gentiles living under Roman rule and less threatening to the Romans themselves. It is perhaps most illuminative to compare Mark’s version to Matthew’s. In Mark, Pilate reluctantly sentences Jesus to death at the urging of a Jewish crowd. But in Matthew the crowd has suddenly become “the whole people.” Pilate washes his hands in front of them and declares himself innocent of Jesus’ blood. To which “the whole people” reply, “Let his blood be on us and our children!