New Book Review: The Cyrene Conspiracy

Title: The Cyrene Conspiracy 

Author: Ali Kaden

Date: 2026

Publisher: Third Culture Soul Publishing

ISBN: 979-8-9976635-0-6 

Quote: "She claimed to have something connected to Jesus and ancient Christianity that she wanted me to investigate."

Amir Zane, a young Egyptian-American writer, is asked to investigate an old parchment on which is written, among other things, "not him but another." 

If you remember Holy Blood Holy Grail or The Da Vinci Code you may now have some idea what to expect Amir is about to learn. There were, in the ancient world, a lot of ideas about who Jesus was and what had become of him. 

What became the orthodox Roman Catholic view, derived from the epistles of Paul in our New Testament, was that the Holy One is a unity of (probably an infinite number of Persons actually, but Three that we think we know about for sure) Three Persons, and Jesus was the one of those Persons who chose to exist in human form for thirty-some years. He didn't exactly look forward to crucifixion, but chose to take human form at a period when publicly doing and saying even the nice things our Gospels record would offend enough "higher-up" people to result in crucifixion. In some cosmic way this willing self-sacrifice of a perfect man atoned for the sinfulness of humankind and allowed those who followed Him to be saved from the eternal destruction our sinfulness deserved. 

Many people find this hard to believe. How could the Holy One have created a universe where some part of God's self would need to be killed by torture to show love for humankind? Couldn't the real story have been something simpler? Maybe Jesus came to show people how to lead a virtuous life, was murdered in the ordinary way, and came back to tell us that the resurrection will set all of our inherently immortal souls free from really ceasing to exist, which some people seem to fear more than they fear the pain of death. Maybe he wasn't even murdered. A theory that the apostle Thomas, whose name means "twin," was Jesus' twin is hard to reconcile with the Gospels. Some people theorized that Jesus had a secret twin who either was the one who walked around Jerusalem after Jesus died, or died in Jesus' place. Maybe even the apostles didn't know about this twin...

Relatively few churches try to reenact the full "Passion" drama. "Passion" does not merely mean the emotional outburst Victorian writers meant by saying someone "flew into a passion" and presumably yelled or cried, nor does it merely mean the physical feelings modern writers usually have in mind. It means "suffering." Before being crucified the Gospels make it clear that Jesus chose to endure some additional torture. The crucificarii, an ancient Roman term of abuse meaning "men about to be crucified" and used as a general term of contempt, were forced to drag their crosses through the streets before they were hanged on them. All of them were thus displayed to the public as sweating, bleeding, miserable messes. Jesus, we are told, had been beaten thoroughly and lost a fair bit of blood before the crucifixion, and the people who came out to taunt and throw things at the crucificarii felt sorry for him. Along the way he collapsed on the ground. Some say the Roman soldiers dragooned someone else into carrying his cross, so that the mob could watch Jesus' final agony on the cross; some say a kind man  volunteered to do it, to spare Jesus some small part of the suffering he had chosen. Some have imagined that Jesus was given an extra-large cross that was meant for Barabbas and had been built by a relative of someone Barabbas had murdered. In any case, all the Gospel writers say about the man who actually carried the cross for the last part of the way was that he was called Simon of Cyrene. 

About the given name, what we know is that "Simon" was one of those names that become popular in multiethnic societies because they seem traditional in more than one language. Two of the apostles were called Simon, at least until Jesus gave one of them the nickname Peter. Many other men used the same name. It does not tell us whether this man was Greek or Jewish.

About the place he came from, history tells us a little more. Cyrene was in Libya but it was built into a city by Greeks; they might have moved away from one of the islands because of renewed volcanic activity. The official leader of the Greeks who settled there was their princess, the daughter of the king they had lost, and the place was named after her. It was dedicated to the sun god Apollo, who was said to be the father of a child to whom the princess gave birth. Several Jews settled there. Later many people in the city became Christians; it had a church, and bishops who are still on the list of obscure saints. Mark, the Gospel writer, was said to have been a Jew from Cyrene who became the city's first bishop. 

Photo of what's left of part of ancient Cyrene from Wikipedia. 

Photo posted on Facebook by Grigol Pheradze. At least the rich people who had their portraits painted or sculpted in ancient Cyrene look more like modern southern Europeans than like modern Africans. Then again, northern Africans don't look all that different from southern Europeans. Nevertheless, when Passion dramas are enacted, any Black man who attends the church is likely to be cast as Simon of Cyrene. Simon of Cyrene may have been Black but, even if he was, he would have been in Jerusalem to trade or to visit relatives, as a well-off gentleman from a wealthy city. He was not a fugitive slave, or if he was one he hadn't been enslaved in Cyrene; ex-slaves didn't claim the places they'd fled from as home. He might have been Jewish. He might have looked remarkably similar to Jesus. He might have been crucified in Jesus' place, while Jesus faded out of mortal view and, as some old texts say, laughed at the idea of mere men thinking they could crucify the Prophet who had become so virtuous as to be allowed to embody God. 

For all Muslims, Jesus is remembered as a prophet, sometimes called the greatest of prophets, a sinless teacher of peace and mercy. "We don't say 'Son of God,'" a Muslim once explained to me, "but 'Soul of God'. Anyone could choose to embody the Soul of God, but only Jesus did." Was he crucified because his enemies said he had claimed to be a Son of God, which Jews and Muslims agreed would have been blasphemy...or did it only appear that he was? Did he travel on to other places and teach peace and mercy to, e.g., the Persians, who had their own monotheistic religion in which he might have been seen as a fulfilment of prophecy? Could Mary Magdalene have received more ink in the Gospels than even Mother Mary, not because she was much older than the other women disciples, but because she was Jesus' wife; could they have had a child? 

If Christians seriously study the history of the Church, these ideas are familiar to them; they are some of the major heresies. In the Christian tradition the idea that Jesus was a natural man who earned the title "Son of God" by abstaining from all sin and fully embodying the Will of God is known as the Arian Heresy, which, as preached by Bishop Arius, annoyed Bishop Nicholas to the point of "slapping" Arius--whether literally, or with a book or sermon so scathing that it got Nicholas banned from the council of bishops voting whether or not to excommunicate Arius, as unable to hear the debate and vote with an unbiased mind. But most Christians don't bother studying these things, and to them The Cyrene Conspiracy, which is about Amir's discovery of the theory that Simon of Cyrene not only carried Jesus' cross but was crucified on it, may be new and shocking.

It is fiction but, as Kaden explains, it's written in aid of the people of Gaza. In order to investigate the parchment Amir doesn't go to a church or university library and study its history; he takes the parchment right back to the Middle East, where he meets some kind Christian priests and rescue workers, and a liberated modern Arab young lady whose fiance left her because he couldn't distract her from relief work in Gaza. He meets a woman who's been trying to nurse a baby, but her milk has failed due to starvation, and people with arms and legs blown off, and the familiar gallery of casualties of Modern War. He feels left out of conversations among Palestinians because they all introduce themselves to new acquaintances with tallies of the relatives they've lost, many of whom were women and children.

And he finds a ruined church where an heretical Christian sect seem to have met, centuries ago. He recognizes artistic motifs that lead him to begin to research the Manichaean Christian sect, of which the most thorough surviving descriptions were written by Augustine of Hippo after he left the group, and may have been written with prejudice. Exactly who the prophet Mani was, when and where he lived or died, and what he taught, may never be known but the woman Amir starts to fall in love with seems to see him as an intermediary link between Christian and Muslim thinking. In the ruined church his name appears under those of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Could he have been their son--or "spiritual son," a student--or in either sense their descendant? 

Muslims, like Christians, belong to different denominations. From the news media most Americans have heard that Sunnis were seen as more liberal than Shiites in some ways, but Sunnis persecuted Shiites, which doesn't sound so liberal. (That was only in Iran. The Sunni Muslims from India whom I've known were not inclined to persecute anybody, though they did accept that their leaders had a right to punish heretics against their religion: "Oh yes, if Salman Rushdie really did blaspheme and defame the Prophet, then of course he will have to die.") More recently we've heard of hard-line Wahhabis who take various phrases from the Koran more literally than most Muslims do. 

Relatively few Americans have heard of the Sufis, a liberal Muslim group who seemed to me, when I met them in Washington, to be trying to bridge the gaps between Islam and other religions toward the goal of converting everyone to a liberal, freethinking, New Agey form of Islam. In The Cyrene Conspiracy the heroine doesn't identify as a Sufi in so many words, but she seems close to being one. Sufis are, in my experience, profoundly likable people; they hate nobody, they invite Jews as well as Christians and Buddhists to chant and pray with them, they do not noticeably even disparage women even to the extent the Koran does. Some now say that their niceness is deployed by the evil, power-seeking Muslim political machine as a form of taqiyya, legitimized lying to gain social acceptability as a step toward political power. Those people probably also think the kind old priest in your neighborhood, the nice ladies at the Catholic school fundraising events, and President Kennedy were mere tools being used to restore the Papacy in the United States. Nice people and the nice things they do are sometimes exploited, but they are nice. 

The kind Christians Amir meets in Gaza are, of course, liberal and humanitarian people too. The Jews, on the other hand...There have been, in historical fact, Jews who volunteered to serve as bodyguards, blockades, and even hostages for their Palestinian neighbors in some past conflicts between Gaza and Israel. They said that human beings are human beings, however misguided, even hateful, some of them may be. That was before October 2022.

I did not write the Bible and have wondered, myself, why even before Moses' time people in the Old Testament treated rape as worse than murder. I can see why people emotionally feel that killing a baby is worse than killing a man, and I completely agree that a rapist has no reason to live, but if killing the murderer himself was enough of a deterrent to murder, why was it felt necessary to kill all the men in a rapist's tribe or town? Of course, Susan Brownmiller theorized that the perversion of sexuality that makes rape possible has to be a societal evil. That argument was credible and well argued, though not everyone is convinced that it's true. It does not sound like an argument Semitic tribesmen before Moses' time would have made. They seem to have seen rape as a peculiarly evil sin, not even so much against the victim as against the God of Life itself, that needed to be "put away from among you." Moses limited victims' families to demanding the execution of the rapist himself, Deborah celebrated that a woman was willing to stop with killing a war chief who was known to allow his army to rape other tribes' women, and David certainly had cause to encourage Absalom to stop with killing Ammon, but in the only other instance recorded in the Bible, where a gang of Benjamite youths raped a nameless and status-less woman, the other tribes joined in the slaughter of all the then able-bodied male adults in the tribe of Benjamin. Why? Because, as a crime, rape was seen as going beyond murder and needing to be punished accordingly. Murder can be, in the ancient world it probably often was, a crime of carelessness or emotionality. Rape has a blasphemous quality that some murders share, but most do not.

In October 2022 the men in the ruling party Gaza chose for itself raped Jewish women and murdered Jewish babies, and a great number of people, worldwide, said: "Let Gaza suffer whatever anyone in Israel cares to do to them," at least "...until the men who committed this crime are dead, buried under layers of dung and carrion, disowned by as many of their families as want to live." The result was Modern War. Even supporters of Israel asked, as did this web site: Really, Mr. Netanyahu, primary schools? And were told: Gazans have built their primary schools above tunnels where the evildoers are known to hide; therefore. That's Modern War. The only way to win a war against things that long ago ceased to be human is not to treat them like human beings again, even if they have taken human beings as hostages.

I believe there are alternatives, difficult and costly as they may be. Afghanistan had already been reduced to a desert before the US went in, but we could have gone as policemen and killed only known terrorists. (Actually I think, mostly, our army tried to do that.) The whole Middle East is already pretty much a desert, but Israel could have limited its violence to the Hamas goons. Maybe they tried. I am not the judge. I am a Christian reflecting on recent events from a religious and philosophical point of view.

Legitimate police work, finding and punishing violent criminals, can sometimes do a certain amount of collateral damage. In the US our big news story for this whole year has been how we had an unsustainable number of illegal immigrants who were contributing nothing good to society, from fraudulent recipients of business grants (who made a good snarky news story) to the usual drug dealers and violent fugitives from justice, and we as a nation said to all these people: Go home! And despite all the publicity given to armed federal agents arresting and deporting these immigrants, masses of them just peaceably recognized that their time was up, and left the US. And others chose to force our government to send armed men after them, and certain people who hardly deserved to be US citizens got in the way, and we had cases like that wretched woman screaming to her driver to run the car over a federal agent who, feeling threatened, shot the woman; and nobody who walks on US streets can blame him. In the same way, if Gazans support Hamas and interfere with the legitimate effort to punish the violence of October 2022, even most Arabs seem to think that missing legs and hungry babies are inevitable.

In The Cyrene Conspiracy, Amir realizes that he's going to have a very hard time staying near the woman he obviously wants to be near. He sympathizes too much with Palestinians. As an American he can't resist yelling "Leave them alone!" and otherwise interfering with Israeli military police who swagger around putting Palestinians in their place. He tries to tell himself that these Israelis--all the Israelis he meets seem hostile--are dealing with their own war zone emotional issues, but then he hears one with an American accent, determines that this particular Israeli soldier comes from Brooklyn, and tells the man off as if they were back in New York City. He realizes that the Israeli police are likely to leave an American visitor alone and then punish his local friends. He can't help it. Amir is a rich young man who grew up in the US. Self-control has not been a major subject in his education, as it has for his friends in the Middle East.

So, back in the US (readers will find out for themselves how the characters' relationships go), Amir writes a novel in which the characters conclude that Simon of Cyrene died in Jesus' place, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene became not the teachers or even the great-great-grandparents but the parents of Mani. It sells well. It seems to remind some American Christians that good relations with the children of Abraham involves good relations with the children of Ishmael too. Then a quiet, fanatical scholar he's met a few times in the course of his research breaks into his apartment and his computer, babbling about sacrificing red heifers to bring about the ultimate conflict with the Muslim world...There will be a sequel. Probably a series.

The Old Testament itself tells us that it's a mistake to take prophetic texts too literally. In Hebrew more than in other languages, most words may suggest visual images, which may or may not literally have anything to do with the fulfilment of the prophecy. Jesus is the Lion of Judah, the greatest and strongest of all the leaders foretold to come out of that tribe; he is not a wild animal with claws and a tail and a foul odor. Abraham's "children" are like the sands of the sea in number; not in size or color or consistency. A red heifer without white spots, like the virgin bride who was to conceive (people would have imagined) in the moment of losing her virginity, is rare but natural; whether God promised to do anything special when a red heifer was literally sacrificed, or when people's dedication reached a level that is rare but natural, remains to be learned. 

The Bible does not promise that Christians will never be forced into war, or forced to choose between warfare and abuse. It does teach us that we are not to choose war with any child of Abraham. For all practical purposes we might as well read "with any one." The children of Abraham include Jews who trace their physical descent to Isaac, Christians who are adoptive heirs of Isaac, Arabs who trace their physical descent to Ishmael, non-Arab Muslims who are adoptive heirs of Ishmael, and the descendants of Keturah, which seems to include most of Africa and India. Cases have been made for the claim that "Red" Russians, who rejected Christianity, were also physical descendants of Isaac through "Red" Esau/Edom and that at least some northern European and indigenous American groups were physical descendants of the scattered tribes of Israel. The Bible does say that God will bless those who bless a child of Abraham, and curse those who curse one. This is probably best interpreted as telling us that we should bless rather than curse all nations.  Egyptians were not Ishmaelites in Bible days but now, having become Muslims, they too should be blessed and not cursed.

What may come as surprising news to some American Christians is that Christianity did not originate in Rome or Ireland. Christianity came from the Middle East. The first Christians were Jews; the Christian message reached other Semitic tribes before it reached European tribes. There were and there still are Christian groups that never had much contact with Rome, that understand the teachings of Moses and Jesus differently due to not having had them filtered through the teachings of Augustine or Aquinas or, in some cases, even Paul. There are Christians who understand resurrection in terms of reincarnation, and accept some of those Lost Books of the  Bible as sacred scriptures, and imagine Jesus laughing at the idea that people thought they were crucifying him rather than weeping for the suffering of someone else who was crucified in his place, and all kinds of things that mainstream churches teach us not to  believe. There are schools of Christian thought that are close to Muslim thought on some points. 

Are these minority Christian groups right? Well...most of the major heresies and Lost Books of the Bible were pushed out of the mainstream, not by war, but by a consensus of people who had studied the Law and the Prophets and the Gospels, discussed these books and ideas, and found them incompatible with the canonical scriptures. Do they have a right to their beliefs? Of course they have.

Islam has been called, by Christian scholars and thinkers no less than C.S. Lewis, the greatest of all the Christian heresies. In the Quran and Hadith the difficult and mysterious parts of Christian doctrine are replaced with ideas easier to understand, and the complexities of ideas like "In Christ is neither male nor female" are replaced with ideas more popular at the time like "Since you [mortals] agree that some of you are of more value than others..." And also some teachings that Christians might want to forget have been preserved, even spelled out in detail: To prevent employers from delaying payment, taking risks with the money, and perhaps not paying employees at all, Muslim employers are specifically told to pay employees "while the sweat is on their faces." To prevent quibbling about a certain level of interest on debt, like the two-figure interest on credit card debt, being defined as usury, Muslims are told not to charge interest on debts at all; there can be flat fees on loans, but creditors are not allowed to make more money by making it harder for debtors to pay off debts. Every American has undoubtedly heard false friends warble that "A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you"; Muslims are told to defend their friends in battle and support their businesses in times of peace. We in the US have the right and duty to identify ourselves as a majority-Christian nation, enshrine Christian practices in our law, and deport anyone who wants to replace our constitutional system with sharia law. Nevertheless there are things we could benefit from learning from Muslims. 

We should not tolerate either the efforts some Muslims have made to impose sharia law over and above our own law, or the efforts some of their (weak and temporary) political allies have made to cover up those efforts. We should recognize that, if the Israelis deserve support and protection as children of Abraham, so do the Arabs, and most other nations; for the prophecy has been fulfilled that Abraham's heirs would be like the sands of the seas in numbers. Muslims who seek reconciliation with Christians should also seek reconciliation  with Jews...and I say the sooner the better. 

Not everyone has experienced the peace and good will of a Sufi prayer meeting. I have; The Cyrene Conspiracy recalled it to my mind, and I hope the book can bring something similar to all of your minds. May that peace and good will be with all of you, Gentle Readers.