Customer Reviews

The Secret Scroll

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

Since the overwheming response to Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, the real mystery is why there has not been more authors duplicating Brown's commercial success with their own "Jesus du jour" efforts. It seems we should by now be inundated with best sellers that create their own Brand X Christ by inventing a "history" to suit their needs, declaring it as fact in the preface, setting it in a halfway decent page turner, and then watching the cash roll into the coffers. Thankfully, the lucrative payoff for Brown has not been that easy to duplicate.

Yet since the potential payoff is so high, the unique success of Brown's venture does still draw authors to try their hand at catching lightning in a bottle. A new contender is Ronald Cutler's The Secret Scroll - a novel with all the usual ingredients: secret societies, architectural referneces, cloak-and-dagger priests, any Jesus but the orthodox one, corrupted scriptures, a coming restoration of the truth, and a few plot twists thrown in to try to keep it interesting.

Unfortunately, Cutler has little of the talent for keeping the reader's attention that Brown possesses and the story contains so many inconsistencies and asbsurdities that the reader is often forced to stop and stare blankfaced in wonderment. This "huh?" factor turns up again and again as ad hoc plot developments are introduced for no other reason than because the author could not find a creative bridge to the desired end - a result that makes the book's twists and turns little more than pulling rabbits out of hats.

Yet it is not only at the literary level that this book fails. While he makes none of the obvious historical gaffes that made Brown's book so frustrating, the Jesus who emerges from The Secret Scroll could hardly have drawn followers in such troubled circumstances as faced first century Judea - much less have them continue their allegiance after his execution. Cutler's Jesus is one custom made for a shallow consumer culture - a post-modern messiah for Oprah viewers who makes no demands but on his followers apart from an occasional hug. Such a bland vanilla Jesus would hardly have troubled religious leaders much less given the world's then superpower reason to execute him.

A serious problem Cutler faces is that he really is trying to "be fair" to those with whom he disagrees without actually understanding what they really believe. It is admirable that he does not wish to repeat Brown's caricatures of orthodox belief but he simply doesn't grasp it well enough to make his efforts believable. For example, when an orthodox Catholic priest is confronted by "The Master" - the leader of the secretive Guardians - he rebuts the latter's anti-Semetic views by stating that Jesus' mother and father were Jewish. Apparently, Mr. Cutler has not grasped the "Son of God" ideal well enough to fully comprehend that orthodox Christians do not consider Joseph to be the father of Jesus. In another noticable error, an orthodox Protestant clergyman defiantly states to the Master that God will judge him by his deeds - a point that would seemingly make sola fide and the Reformation a moot point.

Overall, The Secret Scroll had some potential as an idea but quickly lost its flavor in execution. A combination of poor writing and editing, deficient understanding of the subject matter underlying the topic, and an apologia for the worst form of cafeteria religion makes this book a mess best left unread despite its initial potential.

THE SECRET SCROLL seems to have taken "inspiration" (or maybe just taken) from THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the ever popular DAVINCI CODE & ANGELS AND DEMONS, thrown in a dash of MISTS OF AVALON mysticism and a pinch or two of generic action/thrillers. The basic premise is that our hero, Josh Cohan, a talented, young archaeologist, has a gone to Israel to lick his wounds after being on the losing side of an intradepartmental fight. He is also drawn by visions that he has heard his 'whole life'. When he follows one of these visions he happens to find a secret scroll, one that turns out to be written by none other than Jesus himself (I don't usually give out spoilers but honestly most readers will have seen that one coming within the first couple of pages). From there on things start to get more complicated, messy (with dead bodies) and more fantastic. Our hero has mystical powers, a photographic memory, astounding code breaking abilities and, of course is fluent in whatever ancient languages happen to be needed.

Like the plot, the characters are also far fetched and unbelievable. None of the characters ever really come to life, they enter the scene, do their business and move on or die or something. It seems that even the author has some trouble keeping them all straight. For example, Josh's (adoptive) parents died in a plane crash, Josh got the news of their deaths after he came back from jogging but later it is stated that they died when he was four - I don't know of many four year olds who jog much less check their phone messages when they return. Also there are an amazing amount of adopted children in this book and of course the expected surprise reunions.

This could have been an entertaining read, on a par with other DAVINCI CODE inspired secret society thrillers with religious overtones but the author just left so many loose ends and relied too much on the fantastic. It is also just much too apparent that although the author claims to have read 75 books researching this one none of them were about archaeology. If the hero of the novel is supposed to be an expert in a specialized field then at least have some idea how that field operates.

It seems that each and every book that makes even a passing reference to Jesus Christ, secret codes, the Catholic Church, secret societies, cults, lost/hidden/or stolen artifacts, etc. is immediately compared to The DaVinci Code. Granted both the book and its author, Dan Brown, have enjoyed phenomenal success, but truth be told, Mr. Brown is no Shakespeare (he's not even a poor mans Richard Russo) and the DaVinci Code isn't the greatest story ever told. That said; let me get on to reviewing the positive and negative factors of THE SECRET SCROLL by Ron Cutler.

On the plus side, this book is a work of fiction and interesting historical speculation. It does not pretend to anything more. It is clear that Mr. Cutler has put a lot of time into researching and developing his theories for this venture. In addition, some of the organizations such as the IAA as well as several sites depicted as our protagonist (Josh Cohen) travels the streets of Jerusalem do exist and lend a certain touch of reality to the story. Those bits of reality are all the reader gets.

Josh, his girlfriend Danielle, and the evil "Master" are another matter. They could be characters straight out of a graphic novel. Cutler would have you believe that Danielle is the combined physical incarnation of Mary Leakey, Lara Croft, Salome and Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. She's a smart, tough, independent woman who is willing to use her sexuality to achieve the outcome she desires and who, it seems, is so adept at seduction that she is irresistible to any man unfortunate enough to cross her path .

Josh, man of visions, discoverer of the scroll, and healer of the injured, seems to spend a third of his time bedding Danielle, another third creating situations that prove deadly to those around him, and the final third in some sort of fugue state.

As for the "Master", he too is an amalgamation of characters we've met before. Take one part Commodus (from the movie Gladiator), one part SHE (who must be obeyed....from the book of the same name by H. Rider Haggard), and one part Alice in Wonderland's Queen of Hearts (off with her head!) and there you have the "Master". He and his nefarious band of twelve "Guardians" provide most of the action and bloodletting in the book.

Mr. Cutler gets 3 stars for enthusiasm and research on his first attempt into the novelists world, but only one star for composition. Perhaps he should try for the YA audience.

This novel is possibly one of the most unintentionally comic fictions that I have ever read.

The narrative is driven almost entirely by the plot line, which revolves around the discovery of an ancient manuscript from a cave near Masada, Israel. The narrator a visiting archaeologist, Josh Cohan (Cohen?), is drawn mysteriously to its location - then quickly unrolls, photographs and hides it before contacting the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Immediately bad things begin to happen. People are killed, beautiful women are kidnapped (and titillatingly touched!), and eventually... something mysterious happens.

"The Secret Scroll" popped up as a suggestion from Amazon. Since previous recommendations had been to my liking - it went onto a list. Several months later, I ordered it without looking some of the other reviews on this web site.

Bad idea.

Within the first page I was quizzical; within three pages, laughing out loud, and after the first chapter or two (which came quickly because they are VERY short), I had resolved to finish this novel simply in order to review it.

Unless completely oblivious, the first thing you will notice is the phrasing: "...suffusing the clouds..." "...his head spinning and the blood thumping..." "...slowly with mounting trepidation...", but these trivial gems come "so thick and fast" that you soon start waiting for the Master's next pronouncement "in sonorous tone".

The author, Ronald Cutler, describes the protagonist's feelings or experiences rather than creating a narrative that informs the reader. This is only mildly irritating since the text moves along quickly, but any attempt to make sense of it is thwarted by divine intervention.

Cutler consistently uses "deus ex machina" to resolve even the least likely turns and twists. Josh just "knows" exactly what to do at every critical juncture.

Don't despair. Sufficient sex (or the intimation of sex), violence (or an account of violence), and torture (or suggestions of torture) periodically pop up in various various combinations to reawaken the reader.

As the chapters roll by, the author's writing skills gradually improve, but the reader is left wondering why the earlier sections were not revised to weed out the incongruous schemes, fill in characters motives, or offer plausible explanations for Josh's intuition and healing powers.

The author conveniently leaves the door open for a sequel - or perhaps he simply could not figure out how to explain and resolve the paradoxes created along the way.

In reading "The Secret Scroll", I was reminded of the aphorism, "No experiment is a total loss because it can always be used as a bad example". If nothing else, this novel might inspire another author who would figure, "Well, if he can publish this..."

This book deserves some credit for the interesting locale - the ancient holy places of Israel, especially Jeruselem. It also tackles some big issues, like good and evil, and the life and death of Jesus. The author leads us to a definite conclusion about Jesus and the meaning of his ministry (hint: it's a very Jewish conclusion).

But the characters never came to life for me, and I found myself unable to keep track of who was who, since they were all so forgettable. The hero, Josh Cohan, has strange powers that he has apparently never much wondered about, until the events in the book. He (predictably) meets a beautiful woman who turns out to be involved in the very intrigue that embroils him once he finds the scroll.

The opening chapters of the book already introduce scenes that are not credible. Josh just happens to be driving near the Dead Sea and gets an urge to go into a cave where he finds an ancient jar with a scroll. Meanwhile, a secret society somehow knows that Josh Cohan, American Archeologist, has discovered a scroll (even though Josh has not told anyone about it) and they also somehow know that this scroll has content related to their beliefs (even though no one has translated the scroll). Once Josh talks to the Israel Antiquities Authority, they somehow know that the contents are explosive (even though it has not been translated). They refer to "the jar" and never talk about the scroll inside (which they don't even bother to look at right away!) except for a few plot slip-ups where someone mentions the scroll as if they already know what's in it. Since Josh had in fact secretly translated a portion of it, why hadn't he told them he thought it was the words of Jesus of Nazareth? I guess they, like so many of the characters, just knew.

I was already thinking the rest of the book couldn't be much better.

It wasn't. We get more cliches with an evil "Master" who wears a snake mask, a dim-witted, physically deformed devotee (shades of the DaVinci Code, with its albino monk!!), and a whole slew of acheologists and Israeli security people who all seem willing to give up a lifetime of work and beliefs to become traitors. We even get another DaVinci Code rip-off in a planned "holy sexual union" between a usually celebate evil society heir apparent and a chosen female (guess who she is...). Throw in bizarre and horrifying murders and a totally unsatisfying ending.

My guess is that the author conceived this plot because he wanted to put forth his ideas about Jesus and how he fit into the Jewish world. The nut group in this book, the Guardians, reveres Paul, who did not know Jesus and who did bring his own dogma to Christianity. (For a good book on how this happened, see The Mythmaker: Paul And the Invention Of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby) The actual idiology of this group is never fully explained, and its relationship to the scroll seems tenuous.

We get (in the scroll translation) the actual words the author attributes to Jesus, and they are words of warning and prophecy. The author does not subscribe to any overly wierd ideas, but he does seem to endorse (through the words of Jesus) a scenario of continuing violence over religion and the holy places. But, given the lack of clarity of the story, the author's ideas about Jesus seem undeveloped and unworthy of serious consideration.

This book is hugely bad, really bad, and also very very bad.

This is the sort of book where bad guys are referred to as goons. Hardly noir, not even a poor man's Ludlum, the action in this action adventure is pulsing, but the pulse is thready and weak.

The story is insulting. A scroll is found; it is written by Jesus. In the end, when translated, it turns out to be written in 20th century venacular. It reveals that an apocalypse is coming, revealed by Jesus, who by the way was not God, although a messiah may come.

I guess that makes Josh, the lead character, into a John the Baptist figure, or maybe he is the Messiah, in a later book.

The theology is suspect; the gnostics wear hoods and carry swords and are not really of any religion, except perhaps the Church of Goons. The Master is a cartoon character. The love story is written in a style that belies any experience in love or sex on the part of the author.

As Josh sweats about whether his transcendence is beginning, and his shoddy magical mysticism kicks in, the reader begins to understand that this book has been written by an adolescent, and is a panoply of lackwittedness. This is not written well enough to be a dangerous blasphemy or a huge heresy, even though the author depicts Paul as a secret gnostic, and Jesus as a sort of cipher with lots of foresight about the coming apocalypse.

The publisher spent money on production values and a web site, but I could write a better conspiracy book in my sleep. So could you. Certainly you may read this in your sleep. It will induce sonambulence.

The book is sure to be compared to the Da Vinci Code, but this book lacks even a semblance of the wit, plotting, and style of that far better work... and I am not even that big of a fan of the Da Vinci Code!

This is the sort of book where, as an afterthought, the lead charachter wanders down into tunnels below Jerusalem and stumbles across the True Cross. Here is the passage, so bad it bears quoting: "Josh moved his light around the chamber, searching around the sacred burial block for any kind of sign. Incredibly, that was just what he found." Then he sees the True Cross... complete with bloody nails. What? That is the climax? He just sorta accidentally kicks the True Cross, not as a culmination, but as an after-thought?

Skip this, it is so damn bad it is not even laughable.

When J.K. Rowling hit it big with her Harry Potter series, she started to get lots of imitators hoping to make a few bucks off her fame. Similarly, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has inspired a whole bunch of other authors to exploit Brown's success by telling their own stories of ancient conspiracies and mysterious documents. Some are decent in their own way; others, like Ronald Cutler's The Secret Scroll, should be skipped.

The Secret Scroll follows Josh Cohan, an archaeologist in Israel who is inspired by a vision to find a scroll that appears to be the written word of Jesus. After a bit of wheeling and dealing, he turns in the scroll to Moshe Ben Daniel at the Israeli Antiquities Authority, where the translation of the Aramaic document begins.

Meanwhile, there is a secret organization of extremist Christians known as the Guardians who want the scroll for their own purposes, and are willing to kill to get it. When it is seeming out of their reach, they resort to kidnapping and other activities to get their way. In their hands, the scroll can be a powerful instrument which they hope will bring about a new world order.

According to the "About the Author" section, Cutler has a long career in the entertainment industry (particularly radio) but this is his first novel. It shows: while the writing is competent on the most basic level - he is technically proficient - the story itself rarely is better than just so-so, and often it is almost awful. Nowhere is this more evident than with the head of the Guardians, the Master, a villain who seems to be made less of flesh-and-blood than pure cliches. He sits around wearing a mask (with an electronic voice disguiser) spouting off lines that are straight out of Villainy 101; the only thing that he seems to be missing is a mustache to twirl.

Although technically a suspense novel, there is a lot that you can see coming a hundred pages early. It takes all of a paragraph after the introduction of Moshe's daughter Danielle to know she will be the love interest for Josh (actually, since she is really the only woman in the book, there aren't any real alternatives); they fall in love quickly, which is good, because her real purpose is to just be in constant danger (I kept waiting for her to be tied to train tracks, but I guess even Cutler has his limits). Oh, and Josh has strange (Christ-like?) supernatural powers.

I suppose if your sole exposure to the thriller genre was The Da Vinci Code, you might think this book was okay, but anyone with any real reading experience in the genre will see The Secret Scroll as what it is: a hopefully forgettable experience.

This is a quick read. The book has a reasonable plot and it moves at a good pace, with short chapters that end with a hook to keep you reading. It also seems to be well researched. Even though I didn't really enjoy The Secret Scroll, I was interested enough to keep going.

However I felt that the characters were all far too simplistic and the writing was pretty wooden. Also, as another reviewer has commented, there isn't a lot of suspense as problems tend to get resolved too easily. This had the makings of a good book, but it needed a better writer.

Overall not a bad choice to while away a plane flight, but it's all pretty forgettable at the end of the day.

I really hate to just bash a book. I realize this author poured four years of his life into this effort. He read a lot of books, did a number of interviews, tried his very best to breathe energy into the story. I respect that attempt. Unfortunately, it simply was not successful.

I cannot tell you how many times during this story I burst out laughing and had to read a passage to my boyfriend of a ludicrous situation. The "hero" begins by being psychic and then whining about wanting more attention. He steals an ancient artifact, realizes it is Jesus' diary and his ONLY worry is that he'll get credit for the discovery. He demands to be on the research team.

Along the way, he instant-true-love is kidnapped at least twice and both times he and her father both go "oh well" and don't bother to do anything about it.

He has a PERFECT memory for memorizing pages of ancient Aramaic. His claims his computer system is super-hack-proof while typing in the short passwords on a public access computer. Meanwhile, the super secret enemy uses a PUBLIC website message board for exchanging their secret notes.

Everyone seems to be adopted - although somehow the hero's parents died both when he was four and also when he was an adult out jogging.

Also, on a larger scale, I have read many books about religious history, about the way in which the Bible was compiled and how early religions formed. Many of the "debates" the supposedly well educated scholars in this story have make little sense and have inconsistencies.

I can't even mention some of the larger issues as they are key plot points.

With all of the tens of thousands of books out there to read, there are more than enough great books to occupy your every reading hour. I would leave this one off your reading list.

I read a lot of so-called "thrillers" and I enjoy them as a change of pace from the heavier non-fiction reading I must do as part of my avocation. "The Secret Scroll" is not a real thriller in my opinion; it is not actually very well written and does not compare at all with similar novels within the thriller genre.

The plot is really not that unique (similar plots in other novels have been done much better), the characters are thinly presented, and the pacing is generally disjointed. There are jumps from one scene to another without adequate connections between the scenes; for instance, the development of the relationship between the hero Josh Cohan and the heroine Danielle is too rapid to be really believable, as they meet early in the story and, it seems, are ready to bed one another within minutes of their introduction to one another.

There are many things I could criticize about the story, but I don't think it's necessary to list all the negatives about this work. All in all, I think I am being generous in giving it two stars.