Several posts ago I talked about the goals I had in mind for Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I thought I did a good job in that post of explaining what I wanted to accomplish with the book. However, today it received a review on Amazon that spoke to another motivation I had. Hence this post.

The other goal was to make people realize the importance of all four gospels, how they are different, and how it takes all four for us to have a complete picture of Jesus and what was going on around him. I believe the specific passage I read in the gospels that was the impetus to begin this work was the Triumphal Entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem (what the modern church calls Palm Sunday), and within that passage the obtaining of the donkey for Jesus to ride in on. Here’s what the four gospels have to say about that.

Mark: As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ tell him, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.'” They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go.

Matthew: As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.” …The disciples went and did as Jesus instructed them.

Luke: As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ tell him, ‘The Lord needs it.'” Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” The replied, “The Lord needs it.”

John: Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it….

The four accounts differ—not enough to affect the believer’s faith, but they do differ. The thing that struck me most about this was Luke’s statement that it was the owners of the colt who confronted the disciples, whereas Mark just says it was some people in the street. I wondered how Luke could possibly have known it was the owners, and decided that he must have been in Israel and found the owners and talked with them. From this DLA sprang forth.

I found similar “discrepancies” in other places. None of them are of faith-shattering significance, but they are all interesting. If you only had one gospel to read, there are some things you wouldn’t know. As I wrote DLA, I could envision a reader who was a serious student of the Bible, reading what Luke said in his imperfect knowledge as he researched this or that passage, saying “That’s not what the Bible says!” I saw that reader taking the Bible, opening to the applicable passage in Mark then Matthew, and learning that what DLA says is correct, and that our knowledge really wasn’t complete without Luke’s and John’s contributions (especially Luke’s due to my subject).

Was I correct to hope for that serious Bible reader to be enlightened by DLA, and to use it as a springboard for their own Bible study? I don’t know, but that became a goal. For the most part I focused on the passages that were different in Luke, to pull the reader in to their own research.

Whether I was successful in this goal will be revealed through the testimony of more readers. One of the reviews posted today on Amazon says I was successful, at least in part. That’s satisfying.

I need to make this one more post about the research that went into the writing of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, though I reserve the right to address the subject again should something come to mind. And I apologize for taking to so long to post this. I began it Sunday evening, on my laptop, and the page froze after I typed “I” to start and the drop-capital “I” appeared. That’s the second time that happened. I’m not sure why the laptop doesn’t like those drop capitals.

Perhaps I shouldn’t write this, but I want to be honest about what I researched and what I assumed. Here are a couple of things I assumed.

– The Roman archives in Jerusalem, where Augustus worked for Hermalius. I assume some kind of archive existed in Jerusalem. It makes sense that one did. But I don’t know that for certain. Caesarea and (especially) Damascus were more important administrative cities at that time. It’s possible that one or both of those cities would have held archives before Jerusalem did.

Or maybe the Romans weren’t the meticulous record keepers I think they were. We know they collected taxes, and taxes require records. We know they took censuses, probably for the purpose of identifying taxpayers, and censuses require records. We know governors of the conquered provinces were judged based on performance, and documenting that performance required records, not only of taxes but also of disturbances, crime, and rebellion. That such an archive existed in Jerusalem makes sense, since that was the main Jewish city. Damascus would have been dominated by other nationalities (probably Arabs) and Caesarea was more of a Roman colonial city.

That records would deteriorate with time makes sense. Ink is not permanent. The paper they used, typically in scrolls rather than in codex form, was of papyrus or other such fragile material. So I don’t know for sure that the Romans hired copyists to copy records to keep them fresh, but it makes sense.

– The corrupt prison system. I did some research here, and found that the Roman prison system was corrupt. The wealthy regularly paid their way out of trouble, or out of prison if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves there. Bribes were paid. I don’t know if it would have happened exactly as I have it with Augustus obtaining the release…well, maybe I shouldn’t give away that much of the story. But this makes sense, based upon research I did, though admittedly limited research.

– The way Luke and Augustus were greeted in Nazareth. This is based somewhat on my cultural understanding of the area, and assuming people today have some characteristics that they did in the 1st Century. Them being mobbed by the crowd, with everyone taking sides in the argument, is something that is seen over and over in the Middle East today. I didn’t encounter it personally during my years there, but I had several friends who did, and they described it to me. It seems times like those are perfect for everyone to express their opinion.

The way the crowd dispersed when the Roman officials came up also makes sense. Someone at the edge of the crowd would have seen them, and would have said “Soldiers!”, and the crowd would quickly fade away to the shops. The one thing that might not be accurate is the presence of soldiers in Nazareth. It was such an insignificant town, why would Roman soldiers have been there? I don’t think, at this time in the occupation, that there was a soldier in every town or on every street corner. The larger cities and towns, especially those with trade going on, would need soldiers stationed there, but Nazareth? Can anything significant happen in Nazareth?

But put soldiers there I have. If someone wants to call me out as being not true to what was probably the situation in the region at that time I plead guilty, and ask for your indulgence. Hopefully the book is still good with that little (probable) historical inaccuracy.

In my last post I told something about the research I did for Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I divided this into active research and passive research, and sort of said that the passive research was more extensive and more important than the active. I don’t want people to think I didn’t do a lot of active research. I did. Remembering what the preacher said in a sermon five years ago only goes so far. You need to check to make sure the preacher was correct.

I wrote a little about research in this blog post. I found the research quite enjoyable, actually. Search engines are powerful machines, especially when looking for scholarly works. You have to sift through a bunch of popular items, but you can get to the items having the substance a person can stand on.

I liked what I learned about ocean-going vessels during the first century. From passive research I already knew something about sailing conditions on the Mediterranean Sea, and what the shipping seasons were. The boats themselves took a little digging.

I learned something about writing during that time from several sources. My favorite was this paper in the Bulletin for Biblical Research. While a lot of what this paper said wasn’t fully germane to what I needed for DLA, it helped me understand the writing of the times a little better, especially the production of books, be they scrolls or codices.

The conditions in Bethlehem are well documented, and sources that describe the smallness of the town and its proximity to Jerusalem abound. What I wrote about the caravans that pass through the area is more common sense than the result of research. Fodder would be difficult to find the closer you got to Jerusalem, so transient caravans would have to mostly stay outside the city. Bethlehem being about six miles away would be a logical choice as one of the places where caravans would spend the time while the traders went into Jerusalem to sell and procure goods.

I borrowed a book from my son on the status of science and medicinal practices in the 1st Century. I have that written in notes in my research file, but can’t remember the name right now. I’ll add it later. This helped me to look at how Luke practiced medicine, and kept me from using a 21st Century lens whenever that was part of the story. However, I won’t claim to be fully accurate. I have Luke “seeing patients” as if he had a medical office. Did that actually happen back then? I don’t know for sure. I feel good about saying that expatriate Romans would be more likely to seek out his medical services than those of a Jewish physician. People generally like to stick with their culture and nationality in such decisions.

I think that’s enough to write about the research effort, between the last post and this. If someone has some specific questions about an item or situation, or wants to question whether what I wrote was historically accurate, feel free to contact me.

My Internet friend Karen said she wanted to know how she researched Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I’m almost embarrassed to say how little research I did relative to the length of the book. Oh, I researched, but probably less than you’d think.

My wife asked “How can you write a book that takes place in Israel without going to Israel?” Alas, in our years living in the Middle East we never got to Israel. We still hope to someday, but for now whatever I know about that country has to come from books and other sources. My research, therefore, was a combination of what I call active research and passive research. By passive research I mean such things as…

…sermons. And Sunday School lessons. Having sat through almost 28 years of evangelical sermons at the time I started DLA, and that many years of adult Sunday school lessons, I learned a lot. You can’t listen to a sermon that includes the story of the Good Samaritan (which, by the way, is only in Luke) without hearing about the dangers of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. You can’t go a year of sermons without hearing how Jerusalem is at the top of a hill. All roads to Jerusalem are uphill climbs.

You can’t attend decades of adults Sunday school classes, especially when you’re teaching a lot of them, and not learn the geography of Israel and surrounding nations. Pull out any study Bible and, in the maps in back, you get a decent idea of time and space considerations. Study Jesus’ return to his home town of Nazareth and you learn it is a tiny village next to Sepphoris, a substantial Roman colonial town.

Most of the years in church and studying because I wanted to, long before ever thinking of writing DLA, served me well when it came time. The other type of passive research I used was our five years living in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). We lived among the Arabs and learned something of their ways. As part of cross cultural training before we moved to Saudi in 1981 we took some classes and did a bit of studying.

One of the things I wanted to do was work cultural references into the book. I realize, of course, that Luke and Augustus were in a pre-Islamic era, and Islam certainly changed the Arab culture. Yet some characteristics of the people today no doubt applied back then. The camel market in the book, for example, is very close to our visit to the camel market at Al Jahra, Kuwait, complete with the man frothing goat’s milk with bloody fingers. I substituted donkey carts for Toyota pick-ups, but otherwise it’s what I remember for our 1988 visit there. Hopefully I haven’t made any major mistakes with these cultural references.

The active research I did was mainly through Internet sources via Google Books and in our local library. I made a little use of inter-library loan, but usually what I wanted from another library was a reference book, something that couldn’t be loaned out. I also have a fairly good library of books that describe New Testament times, and relied heavily on these. I found a scholarly paper about book writing in the first century, including scrolls vs codex, types of “paper,” and found some good references on ink.

I was unable to confirm a few key items, such as the existence of a prison beneath the Antonia Fortress. I suspect there was one, but that may be a historical inaccuracy. Similarly I found no evidence of copper deposits in the Mount Tabor/Nain area. I remember reading a reference, or maybe hearing this years ago, about that being a transhipment area for copper ore from Cyrus, but I couldn’t confirm that in my research for this volume.

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem is well documented in several histories, and easy to research in many sources, as are Roman practices in their colonies including the Syria-Israel region. I also researched ancient saddles, since someone in my critique group questioned if they had saddles back then. I learned that the owners of the colt Jesus borrowed would indeed be using a saddle.

I don’t know if this fully describes the research or not. There’s probably lots more I could have done, but I think I did enough to present an accurate picture of the country, customs, and practices. Hopefully readers will agree, and not chew me out about the non-existent copper deposits.

When I began writing Doctor Luke’s Assistant, unlearned as I was in the ways of novel writing and of publishing, I decided I would write the type of book I would like to read. That covered such things as style, length, subject matter.

My main goal was to show a way that the gospel of Luke might have been written. No one can be sure, of course, since we haven’t found Luke’s author diary. We don’t know the day he started, where he wrote it, who he interviewed, how he conducted his research, when he finished, how he got it “published.” All we could have in these regards is conjecture, but we can add to that common sense and reasonableness.

So that was my goal. I wasn’t out to tell the story of Augustus, or of Luke. They started out as mere tools, necessary for me to tell the story of the writing. I knew I had to create some interesting situations, something to keep the story moving. So Claudius Aurelius became Luke’s nemesis, while Hermalius became his defender. I decided Augustus needed a love interest, and Keziah joined the cast. I’m not sure when Augustus’s two schoolboy friends re-entered his life. Slowly that cast expanded.

But it was all about the gospel. With every chapter and scene I wasn’t really thinking of the characters. I was thinking of how the gospel was being written. That was front and center. I knew I had already alienated the verbal inspirationists, those who think the gospel writers were merely taking dictation. Since I’m a plenary inspirationist, that didn’t bother me.

Somewhere as I was writing, I came across some helps for writers. I don’t remember if it was a website or a book. It wasn’t a class or a course or a conference, since I didn’t do any of those at that point. In those helps I heard for the first time the wisdom of Alfred Hitchcock: It’s not about the McGuffin. How this term came into being I have no idea. It has a Wikipedia page, but I didn’t find that all that helpful.

The McGuffin is a plot device that moves the story along, but isn’t really what the reader (or movie watcher as was Hitchcock’s concern) will identify with; he/she identifies with the people who are motivated by the McGuffin. A good example is in the movie The Maltese Falcon. The black bird is the McGuffin. Yet we really don’t care about that. We care about Humphrey Bogart and his antagonists and their quest.

I realized that in Doctor Luke’s Assistant‘s case the gospel was the McGuffin. I had Luke coming to Israel to find the witnesses and write, not the gospel that we know, but a massive biography of Jesus, a work that would please and challenge the most learned people in the Hellenistic world. That was his quest. Of course, he didn’t write that massive biography. He wrote his gospel instead. How that happened is a spoiler, so I won’t say much.

I began looking at the book as the story of Luke and Augustus, not the story of writing the gospel. Of course, that’s what they were doing. But the people had to be of first importance. This changed my focus. I went back and added scenes or changed scenes to put more emphasis on people and less on the gospel. I didn’t take the gospel out, of course, for without it there would be no story. But I came to believe the book is the story of the people, not really the story of what they were doing.

So this was worked into the first draft, which, as I said in the last post, was final the first Sunday in January, 2003. In my next post, I’ll speak to the research involved in the writing.

I don’t know that the title came to me right away. I began to work on the novel in October 2000. I think. Could have been September or November, but I think it was October.

Understand that I knew nothing at all about writing a novel. My favorite novelist at that time were Herman Wouk and James Michener. Still are. They wrote family sagas, intergenerational tomes of considerable length. That’s what I started to write. I figured write the kind of novel I like, and surely there were millions of other book readers out there who liked the same thing.

So, knowing nothing about novels, not understanding such fundamentals as active vs. passive voice, show vs. tell, the utter idiocy of adjectives and adverbs, and commercial length, I began. I also knew nothing about how someone went about publishing a novel, or what kind of novels publishers were looking from by a debut novelist, but I didn’t need to know that for a few years. I just began writing.

By the end of December 2000 I had about 15,000 words. I think that was through what is now about chapter 4. At that point I laid it aside. I was building committee chairman for our church, and we were in the midst of a $2.8 million expansion. It would open in May 2001. Also in that month our son graduated from college, our daughter was married, our son moved to Boston for grad school. I was tired, and I think I kind of vegetated through the next few months. In August 2001 I had a heart attack scare, which slowed me, but during that time I started writing serious poetry. All of which took me away from the novel.

I believe it was December 2001 that I remembered I had started a novel some time before. I found it on our computer, re-read it and probably made some edits, and plunged back into it. All the while I was writing poetry, working on the harmony, doing my day job, and winding down from the church building project follow-up. Then in February 2002 we moved from our house of ten years to another house thirteen miles away.

The work associated with the move caused me to suspend work on the novel, but surprisingly I increased work on the harmony. I was able to do that in bits and snatches, a verse at a time in the evening. The novel, I found at that time, required a couple of dedicated hours or else I didn’t want to work on it.

A month or two after the move I got back on it, and made good progress. About that time my wife decided we should become foster parents. In our early 50s. I agreed, and from April to Sept 2002 we took the classes needed for being foster parents. Our house was licensed a foster home in September 2002, and the next day we were assigned brothers age 9 and 5. A month later we were assigned sisters age 4 and 5 months. So our empty nest suddenly became filled with children 9, 5, 4, and 5 months.

All of which has nothing to do with the novel. But it sort of does. I had written enough of it that I really wanted to finish it. I think when we got the foster children I was somewhere around 60,000 words. I didn’t know how long it was going to be, but I knew the material I wanted to cover. So I decided I was going to write at least 500 words a day. Most of these were in the evening, after the kids went to bed, when I was physically exhausted from dealing with them but with my mind still active.

At 500 words a day during the week and more on the weekend, I slowly completed the book. I think it was the first Sunday in January 2003 that I wrote three thousand words, two of which were “The End.” The first draft of Doctor Luke’s Assistant was finished.

And so is this post. In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about the research, aims I had in writing the novel, and then some of the early steps toward seeking publication.

See here for the first post in this story.

Go here for the next post in this story.

When does a book begin? I thought I had written on the pages of this blog something about how I came to write Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I said so publicly the last couple of days. But earlier today I checked my posts, and discovered I didn’t. With this post now I begin the story.

I do this because I just finished a five-day free promotion of DLA, and on the day after the promotion it has been selling. After 5,039 free downloads, today (as of 9:30 p.m. Central Time) I sold 31 copies and had one borrowed. That’s a good number for one day, especially after selling a grand total of 1 copy in the 2 1/2 months previous. It’s not “quit yer day job” money, but I’m excited. Based on today’s sales it stands at #33 and #45 on its two genre Amazon bestseller lists.

But I prate. On with the story.

It must have been around 1998. I was engaged in some personal Bible study, reading through the gospels one after the other. I read Matthew and Mark and moved on to Luke. At some point I realized that Luke described something differently than M&M did. I think it was the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. So I turned back to the other two gospels and did a close reading and comparison. Then I checked the gospel of John, which had yet some different information.

This was about the time in my life that I had become interested in creative writing. In my career as a civil engineer I had done a lot of writing: construction specifications, business letters, technical reports, construction site reports, marketing materials. All of it dry and monotonous. Well, maybe with the marketing stuff I had to get a little creative, but still on dry subject matters.

But I started writing some humorous work-place pieces, spoofing our company. I posted a couple of them anonymously on company bulletin boards, but I was exposed within a couple of days. Having the creative writing bug, I joined a writers critique group in the next town over, and began sharing pieces. But maybe I’m prating again.

Back to the gospels. Somewhere in mid-1998 I decided to write a harmony of the gospels. Not a parallel column type, but an integrated text type, where the information in all the gospels is woven into one seamless narrative. I’m not sure exactly when I started this because I didn’t date the papers, but the first sheet is my handwriting on the back of some scrap paper from my office, which has a date 6/28/98. That’s pretty close to when I started.

As you can imagine, that’s pretty big project. By the middle of 2000 I was well along. I’d filled a steno book with my handwritten text of notes and harmonies, sometimes working verse by verse with the four gospels side by side, all the time thinking about how these gospel writers wrote their books. Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, so I didn’t worry too much about them. Mark is thought to have recorded the teachings of Peter, who was an eyewitness. Assuming that was true and that Mark was a faithful witness of what Peter wrote, I figured Mark’s gospel was fairly close to an eyewitness account.

But Luke! He wasn’t an eyewitness. I began to wonder how he learned some of the stuff he learned. He must have found and interviewed people, I figured. During the second half of 2000 I thought about this more and more. When I encountered some piece of information in Luke’s gospel that wasn’t in Matthew, Mark, or John, I began to work scenes in my mind. I imagined Luke finding a witness, interviewing him, then going off to some lodging somewhere to write a fraction of the gospel, but having Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels as reference documents.

All this time my interest in creative writing was increasing. The workplace humor became a series called “The Gutter Chronicles: The Continuing Saga of Norman D. Gutter, E.I.T” (Engineer in Training, now changed to Engineer Intern). That’s a long story I won’t get into now, and I only mention it to demonstrate how my creative writing interest and, hopefully, skills were being honed.

Finally, somewhere around October 2000, I kept thinking over scenes, and it suddenly occurred to me: Why not write a novel about how Luke wrote his gospel? About the same time it occurred to me that Luke, being a Gentile, would have been severely hampered if he went to Israel in the First Century and tried to talk with Jews, let alone enter the temple. AGH—ain’t gonna happen. So I knew he would need a Jewish man to help him in the work. The general outline of the novel came together quickly.

I see, however, that this post is already long. I will end there, and continue in the next post. While I was writing this I had one more sale of DLA, and it went to #31 and #42 on its genre bestseller lists, and is now at #4787 on the overall Amazon paid Kindle store.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment a writer can have is when someone calls their book a page turner. “I stayed up all night reading that book, it was so interesting!”

I would not call Doctor Luke’s Assistant a page turner. At times I struggled to put a little action in it. After two or three chapters of Luke and Augustus interviewing people, I knew I had to mix things up or the book would get boring real fast. But having done that, I wouldn’t call it a page turner.

As part of the five-day free promotion at the Kindle Store, I posted notices about the promo to all the Facebook pages I’m a member of. One of those is for former and present Suite101.com writers. One woman in that group, a woman I’ve interacted with some, had downloaded the book. Today she posted this about it. 

I cannot put this book down. How you have managed to turn what is basically a fictionalized account of historiography into something that is keeping me up so late, I do not know, but I think you should put up the first few chapters (not the… whole book) on Kindle free — I’ll bet your conversion to sales rate would be HUGE. I am going to pass this book on to my former spouse, who is a historian who teaches historiography, because I think it really captures the nature of research and reportage so well in so many different subtle ways. And also to my best friend, who is an Episcopal priest. I’m sure a prime market for this is religious folks — so you might find it interesting that I’m not especially religious. I just think this is really well done — and fascinating. I can’t believe you’ve taken a plot that is basically “first we interviewed this guy, and here’s what he said, and then we wrote up a list of other people to ask, and no one knew anything, and then we ran into a dead end, and then we sat around talking about how to proceed” and turned it into something that is a real page turner.Bravo!

That’s the highest praise a novelist can receive. Hopefully she’s correct that sales will follow this promotional period.

When I first published Doctor Luke’s Assistant at Amazon Kindle, I enrolled it in the Kindle Select program. This means it is available electronically only at Kindle for a 90 day period. Kindle premium members can have it for free. And, for 5 days each month I can offer it for free to everyone, not just Kindle premium member.

So far I haven’t taken advantage of the free give away, and my 90 days are running out. So, beginning today, June 13, running through Sunday June 17 (father’s day), Doctor Luke’s Assistant is available as a free download to your Kindle, or to any device to which you can also download the Kindle app.

Maybe this will jump-start sales, or even spur sales of my other items.