Ben’s Books— Part One

It’s hard to talk about your own work. You’re too close to the source to see it straight. Yet, I keep getting asked over and over again— which are your most important books? My usual response is— Important for what? All of my 50 some books have a purpose, an audience, an intention. So it’s impossible to generalize about all of them like one would about say, an event in your life. Nevertheless, since I keep being asked, I will sally forth and provide some clues here, by category. Let’s start with poetry and fiction.

My most important poetry collection is called The Living Legacy (2009), not just because it has poems arranged according to the church year, coupled with commentary, and then the spiritual practice of lectio divina, but also because it gives you a cross section of poems I have written over the course of my Christian life. The more recent collections, such at The Litany (Finishing Line Press, 2015), are all recent poems, and just a collection of poems.

In regard to fiction, I’ve done a variety of things. The most recent bestseller is A Week in the Life of Corinth, which has spawned a series with various authors. The volume I will offer later in the series is A Week in the Life of Jerusalem. My series of archaeological thrillers, six in print, and we are finishing up the seventh one now, to be entitled A Return to Zion, has done remarkably well, and is now being considered as a possible TV or movie series by the folks who made ‘the Bible’ films last year. We’ll see what comes of that. If you want to sample a volume in the thriller series, then try Roma Aeterna. Each of the novels is an independent adventure, but they involve the same three central characters one Jewish, one Christian, one Muslim, who are friends and who work together.

I hesitate to include the following volume in the category of fiction, because basically it’s not fiction, its a merging of story lines from the four Gospels, plus a little imaginative historical reconstruction. It’s entitled the Gospel of Jesus, and was recently advertized on the popular CNN series Finding Jesus.

We’ll turn to books about the historical Jesus in the next post.