I have a review of Christoph Amberger’s conspiracy fiction debut, “The Lazarus Smile” at Amazon. You can read it later in this post. But first, here’s a bit about Amberger.
Excerpt from a biography of Christoph Amberger:
“In 2005, Amberger published “Hot Trading Secrets: How to Get In and Out of the Market with Huge Gains in Any Climate” for New York-based John Wiley.
From 2007-10, he turned his attention to create Agora Inc.’s first internet video platform, TodaysFinancialNews.com. His weekly political show, “Amberger’s Smackdown”, was a favorite of his up to 200,000 readers of his daily e-letters. Amberger retired from Agora Inc. in January of 2010.
An avid competitive fencer and collector of fencing-related art and literature, he is considered one of the foremost authorities on Western swordplay. From 1994-2000, he published the trailblazing “Hammerterz Forum”… a journal devoted to the exploration of historical western swordplay. His 1998 book, “The Secret History of the Sword”, continues to be one of the perennial bestsellers of Western martial arts historiography.
In 2009, Amberger made his debut as a novelist with his conspiracy thriller “The Lazarus Smile”.
The book is published by Secret Archives Press and is serialized on Facebook, if you want to read it that way.
Here’s my Amazon review:
“I debated whether to give this exceptionally well-written book 4 or 5 stars only because it does jump around a bit. The plot is tricky and there are dozens of characters, ranging from first-century rivals of Nero to slum-dwellers in Sadr City. But the writing is so crisp it all comes together pretty soon, and if you’re willing to flip back and forth until you get the details, you will soon be engrossed. Amberger’s book isn’t your typical historical novel. It’s fast-paced and rich in detail. The wry insights and colorful imagery make its Byzantine century-spanning plot not just credible, but unnervingly plausible. An ancient manuscript contains proof that Saint Paul was actually part of a political conspiracy, thereby undermining the Roman church’s claim to enshrine the authentic teachings of Jesus. Naturally, everyone wants to get their hands on the papers, among them, the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the middle is Sebastian Stahl, a German immigrant and expert swordsman, whom a mysterious neighbor has given the papers to guard. Stahl sounds suspiciously like Amberger, a renowned fencer, scholar, and financial analyst, but he is a likeable everyman who manages to hold together the world-historical scheming around him.
What also holds it together are observations like this one about some would-be enemies of empire:
“American jihadis couldn’t tell a Shiite from a shiitake…..They were white boys with olive skins who’d get caught playing holy war with paintball guns. Osman was an American who resented Americans, because he thought in their eyes he wasn’t American enough.”
If you’re wondering how that fits in with Tiberius Alexander and Heinrich Himmler, read the book.
Now that I have, I’ll be busy trying to find out what really DID happen on the road to Damascus and whether much of what is taught to us as history is anything more than a form of mass manipulation.”
Comment:
What’s really interesting is that a conspiratorial view of Saint Paul is something David Icke, a prominent anti-NWO activist endorses.
Icke, however, not only thinks Paul was a Roman agent, he thinks Jesus didn’t exist historically. There he crosses the line, as far as I know, since there is as much evidence for the existence of Jesus as for many other figures. The historical problems lie elsewhere, in the veracity of specific claims about resurrection or miracles, for example.
Amberger’s book cites David Strauss’s criticism of the historicity of the Bible. Strauss and Renan (Vie de Jesus) dealt severe blows to orthodox belief in the nineteenth century, but it is not clear that they had the last words.