(Jack Reacher book 12) BY LEE CHILD

The Good:
I love Lee Child’s writing style. His descriptions draw you in instead of bore you, and he has a way of keeping the suspense building. But, for this book, the writing style is the best thing about it.

The Bad:
Reacher’s political views must be the author’s views, because they just don’t fit a guy like Reacher. And to see our current middle east military actions as unjust and, in comparison, our previous ones as just – this made no sense to me. Had Reacher never heard of Vietnam? And then there was Reacher picking fights and maybe killing people that didn’t seem to deserve it. And our hero Reacher talking a married woman into sleeping with him because her husband was comatose. But, the worst part of all was the religious lie. That was flat ugly.

The Ugly:
Lee lied. Well, not exactly, instead he had an Anglican minister lie in a convincing way to make the Bible seem foolish. And his argument is, well, a lie. Attacking people’s beliefs, attacking the Bible is fair game. However, lying to do it is a cheap shot.

In talking about the book of Revelation, Lee has the Anglican minister say, “It was written either in Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Koine Greek, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Latin, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Elizabethan English and printed, with opportunities for error and confusion at every single stage. Now it reads like a bad acid trip…”

No Anglican pastor could be so ignorant. Nor should an author be that ignorant, even if this is fiction.

This paragraph makes it sound like our English Bible is so many copies removed from the original languages that it is unreliable. It’s a lie. I have, in my office, a Greek to English translation of the entire NT. And, shock to Lee Child and his Anglican pastor, although people spoke in many languages (including Hebrew or Aramaic) at the time of Christ, Greek had been the common written language (the lingua-franca) since the conquests of Alexander the Great around 330BC.

So, John’s original writing of Revelation was in Greek – and we currently have Greek to English direct translations. What we have is reliable copy of what he wrote. Maybe you believe it and maybe you think it is a bad acid trip – but it is reliable. Where Lee got this copy to a copy to a copy idea and why he put it in is a mystery. I hate it when fiction slides into the realm of non-fiction so the author can “prove” his point. It’s just ugly.