5-star review of A. Seidel book from Jennifer Sullivan for Goodreads

★★★★★

Being a Sunday school dropout who has been tired of the sterilized version of biblical history, I found Albert Seidel’s "The Secret Code of The Gospel: The Earthly Story" as the badly-needed reboot. Freeing from two thousand years of spiritual "love and light" nonsense, Seidel considers the traditional Gospels to be a thrilling political story waiting to unfold. Through highly critical method, Seidel uses religion against itself as an argument that the term "resurrection" actually stood for survival of the royal title through Jesus's pregnant widow, Mary Magdalene. In the shocking logic offered, the Nativity actually represents the birth of Jesus's son after the crucifixion, with Joseph representing a royal bodyguard instead of a stepfather figure. Even more impressively, Judas turns out to be not a traitor but an extremely loyal ally carrying out a meticulously planned suicide to make Pilate to recognize Jesus's royal position. Although it is definitely going to annoy all the religious conservatives, the extremely brave and mind-boggling analysis is the most truthful account of biblical history that I've seen in a while. (Disclosure: I received a free ARC for this honest review.)