Book Review: The Last Disciple

This one's late because I wanted to find and review another Christian book from the Book Funnel, but I didn't find one in time. So here is a rerun taken from the early posts that have been removed, now link-free.

Title: The Last Disciple

Author: Hank Hanegraaff

Date: 2004

Publisher: Tyndale

ISBN: 0-8423-8437-5

Length: 395 pages

Quote: “Helius—along with Tigellinus—had been a companion since Nero was a teenage emperor, when the three of them roamed the streets of Rome at night to bully and rob strangers.”

2004. Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’ speculative thriller, the Left Behind series, ruled the bestseller book lists. Somewhere a minister called Hanegraaff read the latest volume of Left Behind. “But this is not how the Book of Revelation ought to be read!” he cried. “Mehercure! I must write a novel about the Book of Revelation as I read it!” And, amassing volumes of Roman history, he set about the writing of a novel set in the reign of the Emperor Nero, when John the Revelator was the last living disciple, and the Gospels and Epistles were still circulating as “letters” but not compiled into a sacred document, and fathers could sell their teenage children into slavery as easily as adoption or apprenticeship or marriage, and anyone who annoyed Nero was likely to receive a letter formally advising suicide, and the complete absence of firearms did nothing to stop people stabbing and strangling each other—on an everyday basis, Rome being crowded enough to have a “gay” subculture, which worshipped “gay” deities with Nero’s blessing as long as they recognized Nero’s ancestors as supreme gods...

If you enjoy mentally visiting that primitive urban culture, you’ll enjoy The Last Disciple. Hanegraaff doesn’t lure us in with precious prose but gets straight down to gory action, Roman honor, Jewish law, Christian faith, and the baddies who betray all of them. His characters read the Book of Revelation as a code message but, because this novel was meant to launch a series, they don’t explain all of its mysteries, except to note that NERO CAESAR can, like many other names and phrases, be converted into numbers that add up to 666.

For the same reason, although there’s a lot of graphic violence, most of the people whose enemies leave them for dead will pop up with only minor injuries further along  in the story. We watch fake suicides, a man beaten about the face so he can be executed by proxy, riots that leave blood and broken bodies clogging the gutters. We see people behaving with awe-inspiring courage and with stomach-turning treachery. An old rabbi behaves just like the Good Samaritan, only to be denounced as the one who attacked the victim; we’re not told whether there’s any possibility that the victim believes this claim. A servant of Nero’s falsely claims to be a Christian in order to identify and denounce Christians, knowing Nero to be perfectly capable of denying having employed him as a spy. At least three handsome heroes and three beautiful heroines act out love for one another in classic “Jesus movie” ways...

What you might not like is that there was only one first-century Rome and its history will bear only so much embroidery. If you’ve already read Ben Hur and Quo Vadis and The Silver Chalice and The Robe and I Claudius and a few dozen similar works, there’s a distinct possibility that you’ll be unable to enjoy The Last Disciple for what it is, because unfavorable comparisons will come to mind. My perception is that Hanegraaff is more shamelessly theatrical, less plausible, than other fictionizers of this period. Also, the ethnic, political, and cultural conflicts of first century Rome went far beyond “Jews and Romans” or even “Jews and Romans against Christians,” and while it’s conceivable that a small intimate group of people might have been focussed on only the “Christian problem” at this period, or that an individual character might be a fervent evangelist or fanatical Christian-hater, it’s hard to swallow a large diverse crowd like the cast of The Last Disciple being so obsessed with what was, after all, a tiny minority, not the sole or even primary target of Roman tyranny or Nero’s viciousness.

Nero was one of history’s more baffling characters. Start with his name. It meant “black.” Many Romans had black hair and eyes, as many still do. Nero was not one of those; he was described as having blond, red-blond, or sandy hair and nicknamed Ahenobarbus, “bronze beard.” He wasn’t known for gloomy, mournful “black moods” either. He was apparently intelligent, cheerful, outgoing, and creative, though sadistic and suspicious. His “black” was the cover of darkness for nefarious activities and shameful secrets. How and why humans become as bad as he may have been his darkest secret. Romans experimented with several drugs other than, or often added to, the wine they drank continually. What drugs Nero took will never be known. His was not a normal mind, but whether his pathology was more like Hitler’s or Charles Manson’s or Idi Amin’s will probably never be known either. It’s hard to portray Nero as anything but an embodiment of Human Evil, which was how many of his contemporaries saw him, and Hanegraaff doesn’t even try. If you are going to write about Nero’s era you probably do need to try to imagine how the lousy creep of his era saw himself. One Devil is enough.

Anyway, if not a great novel, The Last Disciple is at least the script for what might be made a great movie.