Although I have been following Anton Sammut as an author first (Alte Vestiga/ Memories of Recurrent Echoes - both reviewed) and sporadically on Facebook, I know next to nothing about the person.

However, there is something that tells me the man is a teacher: he is all the time teaching. There is this constant urge to teach, or rather to stimulate.

This, I think, is the main merit of this book: rather than teach, it aims to ask questions, to stimulate the reader to ask questions rather than continue to accept as a fact all that he is told and taught.

As its title indicates, the book aims to provide an alternative version to what the Catholic Church teaches its faithful - the paradigm, or model at the base of the West's political strategy.

To do so, the book goes right back to the origins of man and the birth of religion. There is, in this section alone, a huge amount of existing literature and not all of it leads to the Christian reading of it.

Perusing the list of books referred to in chapter 2, one book gets repeated mention: Laurence Gardner's Genesis of the Grail Kings. While this book joins in the deconstructivist trend, there are far more books focusing on the Sumerian period and coming to the same conclusion which could have put the book's thesis on surer grounds, I think.

The author could have gone further back and pointed out at the similarities between the Genesis stories of creation and the myths popular among the surrounding peoples. Instead, he focuses on the story of Moses and brings to our attention The Story of Jasher, an alternative Moses story which was not included in what we call the Old Testament.

Sammut does not quote from books on the Old Testament period only but he also includes, for instance, what Freud says about Moses.

While the Christian Bible simplifies things down to a single interpretation and process, Sammut opens up to the many possible interpretations rendered hidden by the Christians. Thus, for instance, it was while staying with Jethro in Midian that Moses came to know the god of the area, the Lord of the Mountain, and thus his interpretation of the "I am who I am" is the exasperated answer by a god who could not be bothered by questions.

Forget the Cecil B de Mille imagery, he tells readers, turning to a History Channel documentary The Exodus Decoded to explain the ten plagues explaining away the first plagues with reference to climactic events and consequent pollution of the Nile and adding then a reference to the Santorini volcanic eruption (which did happen at around that time) to explain away not just three of the later plagues (including quaintly the death of the first born - because they used to sleep lower down) but also the crossing of the Red Sea.

Further explaining away includes the manna, described as derived from the tamarisk tree, and God's mountain which the Bible names as Sinai or Horeb. As to Moses' radiant face, the author hypothesises radiation on the mountain from a radioactive comet which fell there (at least we are not in Von Daniken area, thankfully).

The author avoids the fanciful in his search for the truth amid the Bible's mysteries. He includes reports from archaeologists to give an alternative version of the fall of Jericho.

Surprisingly, Sammut is rather reticent when speaking about King David, where entire volumes may be written even if solely from a psychological point of view.

On the other hand, the author is right to point out the significance of the Septuagint, not just as a Greek translation of the Old Testament but more the meeting of Jewish faith and the Greek culture. Many times, especially in Christian writings, this is not given its due importance.

The author's treatment of the Jesus story begins with a search for evidence on Christ's life from non-Gospel sources, including Josephus Flavius, Tacitus and Suetonius. He later gets rather lost considering that Jesus may have visited Kashmir or that we may have got the Gospel story about Zacchaeus wrong and it was Jesus who was short.

He comes to the conclusion that Jesus was a liberal, rather sceptical of religion, a wonder worker, etc but he later comes to the quite inexplicable theory that Barabbas was another Messiah such that Pontius Pilate had to deal with two Messiahs, not one.

After making a comparative analysis of the four Gospels, Sammut points out, quite rightly in my opinion, that the Gospels' kid gloves treatment of the brutal Pontius Pilate seems to exonerate him and blame the Jews for Christ's death and thus help the small Christian community curry favour with the Romans.

Discussion of the internal group relations among the people surrounding Christ has been enlivened recently by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and its discussion on Mary Magdalene's relationship with Christ. As those who followed the whole discussion know, this book was in turn based on an entire library of books extending to the story of the Templars to the Gnostic Gospels and back again.

Sammut does not go quite there, but after a short, and unsatisfactory, chapter on St Paul, he discusses at some length the Gnostic Gospels, and the various other sects that flourished in the second century of the Christian era such as the Ebionites, the Docetists, the Montanists, the Arjans, and the Mithras religion our of which emerged the Christian religion.

Among the factors that led to the triumph of the latter and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire was Emperor Constantine who, with his fraudulent Donation ennobled the church with land and riches. The author is here on surer, if not original,  ground.

To conclude: to write such a book, and in Maltese, even in times such as ours, is a rare feat, especially when one considers the amount of background reading that must have gone into it. The author is to be commended for an approach that is very far removed from the devotional reading one finds and for trying hard to offer an alternative version of Christianity.

Maybe his provocations may stimulate readers to further research and reading, which may be a good thing for all.

BOX

Anton Sammut: In-Naha l-Ohra tal-Istorja Gudeo-Kristjana

(The Other Side of Judeo-Christian History)

Self-published

2011 (English translation: 2012)

397pp