Reddit Reddit reviews Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs

We found 2 Reddit comments about Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Historical Fiction
Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs
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2 Reddit comments about Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs:

u/solo-ran · 5 pointsr/AncientCivilizations

(Note: comment written poorly on a phone.) The Nag Hamadi library is a collection of mostly gnostic writings. The diversity of opinions and views in that collection, which seemed to be curated by a single monk, may only be a small sample of the wide diveristy in what we could call gnostic. It may be that there were Christian gnostics, Jewish gnostics and Pagan gnostics, or combinations of all of them. The main trust of much of the Nag Hamadi work is that the god of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is an evil god. Jesus may be a man with a spark of the divine from the other realm in some conceptions. That's all: he was a man. A spark of the divine came into him when he was baptized by John the Baptist. The spark from the other world was inside of him for one year, and then the spark deserted him on the cross and he died as a man. This reading is consistent with the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament: it's possible that the Gospel of Mark is gnostic. While he had the spark, he revealed secret knowlege of the other realm. That is the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, in Coptic in the Nag Hamadi library, a work that may have been written before the Gospel of John, although it's hard to know. The wilder parts of gnosticism are fun but the core or simpler readings are almost familiar. I like the way the gnostics make heroes of all the bad guys in the Old Testament, like Eve. The gnostic reading of Genesis make complete sense: God in the story of the Garden of Eden is clearly evil. He forbids Adam and Eve from obtaining knowlege. Why? Pure evil. Eve is a bold seeker of truth. In truth, the God of the Hebrew Bible is pretty damn evil. Noah's Ark: why did he murder everyone? There is no clear charge except some vague "immorality"... If the one God of the Bible is evil, then there must be a creation that is good but not here. In a way, it's way more logicially consistent than the Trinity, cooked up by the proto-orthodox. The Gospel of Truth is beautiful. The gnostics were okay. The first monks, the first monestaries were likely all gnostic, all in Egypt, which seems to be a center of this branch of the followers of Jesus. I wrote a whole book set at this time: Juba (Will Pflaum) (https://www.amazon.com/Juba-Search-Martyrs-Will-Pflaum/dp/1467917540) in which I imagine a gnostic ritual and a gnostic monk locked in a tower and all kinds of fun stuff.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

I just wrote a novel. I was just saying to my wife, who hasn't read it, that the first part is set among people who know each other well, in Carthage under Rome in the year 207AD. The slaves, the masters, the Christians, pagans, women, men, young, old: they are all connected over many years. It kind of seems like a more "female" novel in that many of the characters are women and the relationships are fundamental. Then the main character, Juba, a former slave, goes on the road (or on the ship). At that point, there are few female characters, as women in 207AD did not travel much. The second half of the book is more of a "male" book about a character finding a way to deal with adversity. Almost no one has read this book, which is not to say it isn't good, since I just uploaded it the other day and got the proof in the mail yesterday. http://www.amazon.com/Juba-Search-Sons-Martyrs-1/dp/1467917540/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345061385&sr=1-2