Book name- THE SECOND BOOK OF PROPHETS
Author- Benyamin
Published by- Simon & Schuster
Price- Rs 599
The story begins, as it must, in the desert. In 1947, in the caves near Qumran on the West Bank, a Bedouin shepherd searching for his goat stumbles upon clay jars holding scrolls untouched for two millennia. These Dead Sea Scrolls — fragmentary, fervent, and eschatological — speak of messiahs, divine vengeance, a people desperate for deliverance. Two years earlier, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, another cache surfaces: the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Truth — ancient texts long forgotten, expunged from the canon.
In the Qumran scrolls, a messiah is awaited with militaristic fervour; in Nag Hammadi, Jesus dissolves into metaphor, a whisper of inner spirit-knowledge (what the ancient Greeks called gnosis) breaking through flesh like light through the clouds. It is from these ancient sources that Benyamin’s novel — translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S. — draws its breath, re-telling the lives of Jesus and his apostles. It also proceeds with the quiet awareness of modern storytellers — Dostoevsky, Kazantzakis, Tolstoy, Bulgakov — who tried to imagine the life of one who walked not merely among mortals, but through texts buried in urns and time and through the agony of those who peered into the abyss, seeking redemption in his suffering.
Occasionally jarred by choice of terms like “hurricane lamp” and “bamboo flagon” for a society two thousand years ago and likely alien to such devices, the novel is meditative in its exploration of the spiritual dimensions of human suffering; a rarity in this subcontinent today.
Jesus emerges as a figure fractured and refracted, like a mirror held too long to the desert sun: ascetic, yes, but also esoteric, deeply troubled with the role of the Saviour forced on him by John the Baptist. Judas is not the betrayer. That role belongs to the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious council of the Jews, and to the Benjaminites — war-like zealots who call themselves “most beloved to Jehovah”, the sole heirs of Ehud. Roman occupation does not inflame them so much as does impiety.
A breaker of traditions, neither magician nor prophet, Jesus slowly becomes someone more unsettling: a man who wishes to “simultaneously break down the dark fortresses of power and religion”. He speaks not in Hebrew, the tongue of priesthood, but in Aramaic — the cracked, earthly idiom of shepherds, fisherfolk, slaves. While the rabbis read from Moses’s Deharim and the Pesharim interprets law into chains, he offers hope to the sick, the shamed, the ‘impure’.
The Sanhedrin declares Lazarus dead by decree: “Consider yourself stricken with disease... and presuming yourself dead on the third day...” His family is barred from prayer, from water, from society. Jesus forcibly enters Lazarus’s house, not to perform a miracle, but to defy an authority that dares define death. Earlier, he invites lepers and outcasts into a synagogue — to prove they exist. There exists no bloodline of the chosen, no clerical law, he says; only the terrifying solitude of personal reckoning: “If you repent, know that you are redeemed.”
The novel’s most ‘heretical’ moment appears when Jesus visits Herod’s temple at Jerusalem and remembers meeting followers of Diogenes the Cynic. He reflects that he has “earnestly tried to emulate” their simple living, and learnt from them that “man’s ultimate goal should be freedom... an infinite freedom, like that of the birds in the sky that neither reap nor gather into barns.” Later, he visits Simon Magus, a Gnostic mystic from Samaria, who tells him: “If you wish to free religion and humanity, you will have to walk a long distance away from power.” Unlike Danilo Kis’s Simon Magus, who is slain by a divine imposter, this man walks beside Jesus — along with Barabbas — on the road to Golgotha.
At times, when the agony in his head subsides, Jesus sings. Not to God, not to his apostles, but to himself. There are no temptations, no introspective agony, no dreamscapes like Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Instead, the Beatitudes rise, fragile as breath before grief. He stops at the seventh: “Blessed are the peacemakers,/ for they shall be called the children of God” — as if his voice falters before the list ends. Peace doesn’t come. Yet he keeps on walking, searching. When Judas asks, “Where are we going?” Jesus answers, simply, from his heart: “To freedom.”