Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees
Bible translators, of all people, are dying—at their meetings no less. Why?
In this, the third novel in the Jon Mote Mystery series, Jon and his special needs sister Judy find more bodies showing up in their lives. This time it’s Bible translators. Jon’s wife Zillah has returned. Determined to leave behind forever both the voices that once haunted him and his life-long confusion about the meaning of his life that plagues him still, Jon has taken a job as a book editor. That lands him in last place in heaven or on earth that he expected to find himself: as a member of a Bible translation committee.
The New York subsidiary of a gigantic international enterprise wants in on the Bible-selling business. Knowing nothing about the Bible, it assembles a team of translators based primarily on the principles of diversity and name recognition. Things do not go well.
Wildly different understandings of nearly everything—theology, the meaning of texts, the direction of history, the nature of reality and of church, among others—leads to take-no-prisoner clashes on issues large (Did Jesus consider himself divine?), medium (Is the woman in Song of Songs “dark, but beautiful” or “dark and beautiful”?), and small (Did Jesus go into the “wilderness” or into the “desert”?).
But these are merely surface issues in what is more profoundly a collision of understandings of the cosmos and the human condition. For some reason, this collision is proving deadly.