An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.
The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”
The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.
All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.
It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.
The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”
While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.
This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?
The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.
If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.
This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.
Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”
The History Channel: not just for documentaries about Hitler anymore. In an effort to appeal to those millions of Americans who would rather watch contestants eat dung in a jungle with Jeff Probst egging them on than watch another documentary about something that happened before they were born, the channel has brought in reality show producer Mark Burnett to create a 12-hour scripted drama about the Bible. Previously, Burnett’s biggest shows to date have been “Survivor,” “The Apprentice” and “The Voice”… all of which sound like Sunday school stories themselves when you stop to think about it.
But just in case putting Bible stories on the History Channel makes you feel a little icky, don’t worry. The series will be entirely free of historical context, according the network’s president.
The Bible has its own layers of interpretation, of course, but Ms. Dubuc said the series would not try to impose any kind of historical context to events like the Flood. “It is just the magnitude of the book itself,” she said. “We’re not stepping back to examine anything that could be called a controversy. We are just telling the stories that are in it.”
Ms. Dubuc said researchers are already at work and theologians will be consulted.
Where else should a non-historical show go than on the History Channel? And good luck finding that non-controversial story from the Bible. I think it’s somewhere between the part where God (if he/she/it exists) says “Let there be light,” and when Jesus Christ rises from the dead (still up for debate).
Of course, the ultimate irony of Burnett’s Bible series is that it is the first scripted History program since “The Kennedys” was canceled, with the channel claiming that “the mini-series did not live up to its standards of accuracy.”
Apparently James Frey has a tiny man in his head, like some kind of internalized boss, who barks, “You haven’t enraged anyone lately!” and starts cracking the whip whenever things slow down. This week, we learned that Frey will deliver a book he discussed in an interview with the Rumpus back in 2008, “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” which will depict the return of Jesus Christ as a drunk who consorts with hookers and canoodles with other men. The book will be published in a limited edition by an art gallery and self-published by Frey “online,” which presumably means in e-book format. This event will take place on April 22, Good Friday.
I know! Shocking, right? Frey says that he expects to “get blasted” for this. The press has happily joined him in rubbing its hands together over the prospect, deploying words like “controversial” and “firestorm” in stories that Frey promptly posts to his website. “I tried to write a radical book. I’m releasing it in a radical way,” Frey told the New York Post. So it’s possible his Christ might be a skateboarder, too.
But seriously, who besides good ol’ Bill Donohue at the Catholic League can possibly be counted on to take offense at such a stunt? “I’m sure the religious right will go crazy,” Frey said. Well, at least someone is sure. But since Philip Pullman barely raised a snort from them with “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” last year — and that was a famous atheist’s revisionist account of the historical Jesus, not just a fancifully smutty imagining of his second coming — I would not advise the author to hold his breath.
In fact, there’s already a long history of revisionist literary accounts of Jesus’ life and social criticism disguised as fiction depicting his return. Among the most renowned in the first category are “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis (1951), “Quarantine” by Jim Crace (1997) and “The Gospel According to the Son” by Norman Mailer (1999), as well as the comic romp “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore (2001) and about a zillion New-Agey retellings that turn Mary Magdalene into the heroine.
The observation that the Jesus of the Scriptures would be dismayed at what his professed followers get up to today is also by no means rare. In 2008, Roland Merullo published “American Savior,” in which a pro-choice Jesus runs for president, and in 1990, James Morrow’s “Only Begotten Daughter” has the Messiah reincarnated as a woman. Science fiction writers have been particularly fond of using the trope to illuminate the hypocrisies and injustices of our time, as Frey presumably intends to do. Theodore Sturgeon’s last novel, “Godbody,” features a savior who communicates divine love by touch and who predictably winds up slaughtered by a mob. And surely the best-known crypto-Christ in all science fiction is Valentine Michael Smith of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a human instilled with the hippieish values of Mars, who meets an equally ugly end.
The most celebrated literary second coming of all, however, is the “Grand Inquisitor” section from Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” in which Christ returns to Medieval Spain and is sentenced to be burned at the stake by the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell on the eve of the execution and delivers a long explication of how the Church has moved beyond his teachings after realizing that the vast majority of human beings cannot cope with and do not really want freedom. It’s a profound meditation on courage and free will. That’s a tough act to follow, Mr. Frey, no matter how radical you’re prepared to get.
But controversial? Not really. Kazantzakis’ novel did provoke some genuine furor when it was first released 60 years ago, and the book has a history of being banned. Nowadays, however, you can’t expect mere print to get you properly blasted. You need pictures. Protesters picketed theaters screening Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, and are believed to have seriously damaged its earnings. The following year, conservatives used Andres Serrano’s photograph “Piss Christ” as an argument to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave him $15,000 for the work. A decade later, New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum for exhibiting a purportedly blasphemous painting.
So no wonder Frey has hooked up with the art world for this particular scheme. It’s like going to Blackwater for bodyguards; making the holy rollers mad is just what they do. Still, the project itself seems a miscalculation. So far, Frey’s notoriety has been founded on two pillars: producing a memoir that turned out to be partially fabricated and running a sort of book factory in which recent MFA graduates are gulled into laboring like sweatshop seamstresses for meager pay. Before that, he attracted attention by bad-mouthing more famous writers.
The genius of this strategy is that it focuses on offending that tiny class of Americans who still care about books and can be expected to notice the people who write them. Who else would wax indignant on the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction and/or the exploitation of aspiring novelists? And that’s certainly not the same crowd who rants about the War on Christmas or tries to put prayer back in schools. In fact, it’s not clear that that crowd ever reads anything — including the Bible. Even Pullman, who was piping atheist propaganda directly into our school libraries for a nearly a decade, didn’t get called on it until they made his book into a movie.
Could it be that Frey, for all this talk about getting blasted, is now courting the very people he once specialized in outraging? You can become a minor hero to the liberal intelligentsia if your work gets you persecuted by bullies like Bill O’Reilly. Of course, that would involve Frey making himself over as a victim, when the world he inhabits seems much happier to cast him as the villain. A role-change like that isn’t going to be easy. As a matter of fact, it’s going to take a miracle.
Recently I found myself explaining to a group of surprised friends from Protestant and secular backgrounds that, despite being educated in the Catholic faith up to the sacrament of confirmation at age 14, I didn’t read the Old Testament until I was assigned it in a college literature course. Traditionally, the Catholic Church did not encourage its congregation to read the Bible; we had the priests to explain it to us. In fact, the church once took such a dim view of the idea that, in 1536, the English reformer William Tyndale was tried for heresy, strangled and burned at the stake, largely for translating the Bible into English for a lay readership. Tyndale House, a major American Christian publisher, is named after him.
Though I’m no longer a believer, and in principle I support the notion of adherents to a religion familiarizing themselves with its scriptures, it sometimes seems like the old Vatican had a point. In his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book,” religion professor Timothy Beal describes all the angst and doubt that Bible reading provoked in him during his youth, as well as the frustration many American Christians experience as a result of their own encounters with the book. This doesn’t prevent them from buying truckloads of the things — Beal notes that “the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year” — but actually reading them is another matter. Beal believes that’s because today’s Christians are seeking a certainty in their holy book that simply isn’t there, and shouldn’t be.
“The Rise and Fall of the Bible” is a succinct, clear and fascinating look at two phenomena: what Beal calls “biblical consumerism” — in which buying Bibles and Bible-related publications and products substitutes for more meaningful encounters with the foundational text of Western Civilization — and the history of how the book came to be assembled. The latter story, albeit in a severely mangled form, came as a revelation to many readers of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code.” Beal, who teaches an introductory course in biblical literature at Case Western Reserve University, estimates that more than half of the students who come to his classes know more about the Bible from Brown’s conspiracy-crazed potboiler than from “actual biblical texts.”
For anyone with more than a passing familiarity with biblical history, however, the historical portions of “The Rise and Fall of the Bible” will be old news. The thing is, many Americans — especially those raised in the less reflective Christian denominations — know nothing about how the Bible was compiled. That’s why so many of them were amazed to learn from “The Da Vinci Code” that the Old and New Testaments are assemblages of texts written at different times by different authors, most of whom were not eyewitnesses to the events they describe. In Brown’s crackpot version, the Emperor Constantine gets cast as the arch-villain, ordaining that conservative texts be officially canonized, while more politically radical (and less misogynistic) works got kicked out of the scripture clubhouse. The real story is even more unstable than Brown’s inaccurate potted version, with dozens of official and semiofficial variations (including or excluding certain marginal books) produced in the centuries after the death of Jesus.
The bestselling New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who, like Beal, was raised in a conservative evangelical family, has written in greater depth on early Christian texts; that isn’t really Beal’s purpose. Ehrman became an agnostic, but Beal is still a Christian, and with “The Rise and Fall of the Bible,” he wants to argue against the common perception of the Bible as God’s infallible handbook on how to live, “totally accurate in all of its teachings” — a view, incidentally, that nearly half of all Americans (and 88 percent of “born again” Christians) claim to believe. Beal is the sort of Christian who doesn’t want to raise his son to “think that creationism is a viable alternative to evolutionary biology or that homosexuality is sinful,” but he is as skeptical of liberal attempts to simplify the Bible as he is of the more predominant right-wing reductionism. He would rather see his co-religionists embrace the fact that the Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies and come to regard it not as “the book of answers, but as a library of questions,” many of which can never be conclusively resolved.
Some of the most interesting chapters in “The Rise and Fall of the Bible” explore the world of Bibles created for specific subcultures and needs: the manly Metal Bible and Duct Tape Bible, kicky handbag/Bible combos and special editions geared toward teenagers, African-American women and so on. These can contain as much as 50 percent “supplemental” material, “explaining” the scripture according to the taste of the intended audience. Then there are Biblezines, publications in which articles about how to grill steaks or talk to girls (in the case of a Biblezine for boys) share the page with biblical quotations. Well-meaning older relatives give this material to young Christians, hoping it will make the Bible itself seem more “readable.” Beal thinks the kids just wind up reading the articles and skipping the quotations. He compares Biblezines to the “sweeter and more colorful roll-ups, punches, sauces and squirtable foams that I buy for my kids’ lunches” in lieu of the unprocessed fresh fruit they refuse to eat. At least you can tell yourself you’re giving them fruit.
Even more insidious, in Beal’s eyes, is the trend over the past couple of centuries away from word-for-word translations of the Bible and toward “functional equivalence” and “meaning driven” translations. These considerably fiddled-with versions iron out the wrinkles and perplexities in the ancient texts and nudge them closer toward the advice, directives and “values” so many people expect from their Bible. Beal argues that the Bible industry resorts to this sort of thing precisely because the Bible doesn’t offer cut-and-dried guidance — or Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, as one popular modern acronym would have it.
Much like the professor who assigned the Old Testament during my sophomore year of college, Beal would prefer that people read the Bible as if it were a work of art — that is, as a text permitting multiple interpretations and as a spur to further thought and self-examination rather than as the last word on all of life’s enigmas. Or, as he rather fetchingly puts it at one point: “This is poetry, not pool rules.” His approach is, of course, more congenial to nonbelievers than the conviction that the Bible describes historical facts and constitutes the “inerrant” word of God. Still, even an optimistic secularist may find it difficult to credit Beal’s prediction that his way of reading the Bible is just about to catch on, big time.
Beal thinks the current boom in biblical consumerism amounts to a “distress crop,” the last great efflorescence of the old authoritative ideal before people move on and learn to embrace biblical ambiguity. I’m not so sure. Craving the certainty and absolutism of fundamentalism is a fairly common response (across many religious faiths) to the often terrifying flux of modern life. If certitude is the main thing American Christians are seeking when they turn to the Bible, then they’re unlikely to tolerate, let alone embrace, Beal’s “library of questions” model. You can learn a lot about how the Bible was created in the past 2,000 years, and about the many strange forms it has taken in the present, from “The Rise and Fall of the Bible.” But where it’s headed in the future is a mystery much harder to solve.
Three men who called themselves the “3 Hebrew Boys” and were convicted of fleecing thousands of people out of more than $80 million were sentenced Tuesday to decades in federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Seymour on Tuesday sentenced Joseph Brunson and Timothy McQueen to 27 years in prison and Tony Pough to 30 years. They also were ordered to repay $82 million in restitution.
The men were convicted in 2009 on nearly 60 charges each. The men told clients they could make amazing returns in currency markets but actually invested less than $1 out of every $10,000 they were given. Prosecutors say they used the cash for cars and houses.
The three remained defiant Tuesday, telling the judge they didn’t think they did anything wrong and were only trying to help people.
The “3 Hebrew Boys” took their name from a Biblical tale about two believers in God who survived being tossed into a fiery furnace because of their faith. In their pitch, they told investors they had been through the flames of crushing debt and survived, thanks to their secret investments and the power of God.
The men traveled to churches and other gatherings across the Southeast, preaching how faith and an investment in what they said were foreign currencies wold at least double their money, wiping out credit card debt and paying off mortgages in months, prosecutors said.
But authorities said less than $1 out of every $10,000 invested went into the foreign currency markets. A very small percentage of the money did go to other investments like a limo service or small businesses, but most of it went for a fleet of expensive cars, homes, luxury boxes at pro football games and other high-end items.
Attorneys for the men asked the judge to reduce their possible sentences because the exact extent of how much money is missing is not known. A court-appointed receiver is still trying to recover assets, and has unearthed about $20 million so far from bank accounts and selling items. At least 4,000 investors have filed claims to get their money back, according to testimony Tuesday.
The sentences for the men were so harsh in part because the judge found they tried to obstruct justice at every turn, hiding cars and other assets from authorities and filing rambling, quizzical motions that called prosecutors “civilly dead.” The motions also called their convictions “an act of war” and called Seymour “that woman.”
Back in March 2009, when Nancy Pelosi ruled the House of Representatives with an iron fist, one could chuckle at Republicans who came to committee hearings quoting scripture as the rationale for their positions on energy policy.
Juan Cole does us the unpleasant service of bringing back to life the comments of John Shimkus, R-Ill., a year and a half ago.
Shimkus starts by quoting Genesis 8, Verses 21 and 22, in which God makes Noah a promise.
Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.
As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.
Shimkus continues: “I believe that is the infallible word of god, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation… The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”
I’m glad that John Shimkus can sleep at night, faithful that that God’s word is “infallible, unchanging, perfect.” But for those of us who are less confident in humanity’s ability to keep from massively screwing up, the thought that the Bible will be determining government energy policy is massively ulcer-inducing.
Matti Friedman 
And in the beginning, there was Richard Hatch. 
