“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”—C. S. Lewis, in “Till We Have Faces”
A Story
In the late 1970s, I first read the ancient account of a man tormented by demons and then delivered from their influence on the shores of Lake Kinneret. The story affected me profoundly and somehow touched a chord of identity within. While I had never been so violently, and obviously, controlled by forces of spiritual darkness like the man from Gadara, my life had, nevertheless, once been directed and guided by unseen powers bent on my destruction.
The afflicted man’s dramatic encounter with a deliverer from across the lake, paralleled the essential crisis which pivoted my own destiny. As Light pierced the shadowy dread of his existence, so it changed my own irrevocably.
A Song
A dozen years later I heard the lyrics of a song—Man of the Tombs—by the consummate songwriter and musician Bob Bennett. With fresh power, the story of the man held captive by vile spirits once again entered my thoughts and emotions. I knew then how much I identified with this desperate soul—a man enslaved by self-deception, tortured by forces beyond his control, and doomed to harm himself just to feel alive. I could proclaim, alongside this now-delivered man, and my brother Bob Bennett, “I’m telling you this story because…man of the tombs, I was.”
The song played over and over in my head—a hundred, a thousand times—and I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to do something about it. I would have to put my personal mark upon the story.
Fast-forward to the late 2000s and I returned to the song, thinking I might use the song itself as a springboard for bringing the story’s message to a new audience. Never having written anything associated with a theatrical production (even worse, knowing nothing of dance), in my naivety I determined to write something of a brief, choregraphed “ballet” to Bob’s music and lyrics.
At the time, I was pleased with my effort, not so much for the quality of the work (ye gads!—the initial work of a total novice!), but because I felt I’d finally given some tiny expression to the story resonating inside me. Of course, the work never saw the light of day, and it remains safely buried in the back of the bottom drawer of my file cabinet.
A Black Hole
Around 2017, I found myself drawn into the unlikely prospect of writing a novel having nothing whatsoever to do with the Gadarene demoniac. The forty-plus years of my technical professional life had been involved in optical and human vision research, so the idea of writing a work of fiction was not only foreign to me, I had little interest, and almost no motivation to undertake such an elaborate and consuming effort. But I was sucked into the labor by the inevitable and inescapable gravity of some mysterious blackhole of creativity.
For that novel, I chose neither the subject, the setting, the protagonist, nor its unfolding plot and structure. Night by night, I merely lay in darkness on my bed, awake, and watching the detailed scenes of a story play out before me. Then I got up with the sun, went to my professional job, came home and hoped to pound out the scenes on my computer keyboard before they evaporated into the falling night.
As amazing as the process was—producing a five-hundred page novel in about six months (while continuing in my forty-hour-a-week research position)—I believe the writing of that book (A Peculiar Darkness) was merely preparing the ground for composing this second novel that I am about to publish. The process showed me that not only could I write one novel, but I could probably write a second. Had I not been forced into writing that first work, nearly contrary to my will, I believe The Stone Cutter may never have come to light.
A New Work
While The Stone Cutter did not come to me fully fleshed-out as had the previous work (in scenes projected upon the screens of my imagination), it did come in bits and pieces remarkably accompanied by the same Author who visited me before. His incredible timing of creative inspiration and the divine appointments of other people to cross my path, sustained a kind of spiritual momentum for the project.
Because the novel hinges crucially upon an historical event—the deliverance of the demoniac from Gadara—it was imperative to build a detailed timeline of my story which would dovetail with the event described in the Synoptic Gospels, as well as what is known of the history of Nabataea, Judaea, the Decapolis, Rome, Syria, India, and China of that day.
A further consideration was my dramatization of the deliverance event itself. Because significant details are specified in the three accounts provided by Mattith-yahu, Markos, and Loukas, I used that rich source material as the backbone upon which I built my own story, leading up to the pivotal event, and then the aftermath proceeding from it. With great effort, I attempted to harmonize my account with the historical records.
A Conflict?
For a long time, some have noted what they describe as a potential conflict in the three different records of the deliverance—were there two demon-seized men, or one? While I don’t personally subscribe to the idea there is a conflict in the texts, an interesting possible solution revealed itself as I wrote my fictionalized account of the deliverance.
As demonic power displaced Nahor’s (the protagonist’s) control over his actions, it evicted him from his physical form. In the scene on the beach, we see his body used by demons to rage against Yesh’ua, while the sentient part of Nahor floats along behind, attached to his body by only the slimmest of “life-threads.” So we see separated side-by-side, both demon-tormented fragments of Nahor—body and soul—but one man. While I am not claiming this is the truth of the historical event, it was an intriguing solution for the fiction.
A Sojourn
I also identify deeply with another historical character in the book—the man Sha’ul of Tarsus. Although he appears in only two of the latter chapters in the novel, his presence in the narrative is intensely significant. In recorded history, as the confident and self-righteous man made his way from Yerushalayim to Damashq, his dramatic confrontation with the Living One foreshadowed my own crisis, perhaps, even more so than the life of the “Man of the Tombs”.
This Sha’ul, who so strongly believed in his own apprehension of the truth, came face-to-face with the very embodiment of Truth. In response, he could say nothing, except—“Who are you, Lord?” And he received, what was to him—as it was to me—an entirely unexpected answer. From blasphemer to believer in the moment of a bright flash, Sha’ul’s life was changed, as was my own.
When the idea first came to me of the man Sha’ul entering the story, I wondered how this might fit into the narrative. The more I carried out detailed research on the culture, kingdom, and history of the Nabataeans (the people of Nahor, my protagonist), and of their neighbors the Judaeans (the people of Sha’ul), the more I saw how possible an encounter between Nahor and Sha’ul might have been.
For centuries, the whispers of Sha’ul’s sojourn in Nabataea (or “Arabia” as it is often called in the historical record) has intrigued those who read the story of his transformation. The account by Loukas in his second history, as well as by Sha’ul’s own three mentions of it in his extant letters, leave tantalizing, and all-too-brief glimpses into the event.
Of course, my effort is a work of fiction, and not to be mistaken for what actually happened at this time in Sha’ul’s life. But because I drew an historical person into its pages—Sha’ul, no less—I strove to focus on the known truth of his life as much as possible.
A Witness
I decided, in my fictional account, Sha’ul would tell Nahor the story of his own dramatic encounter. To that end, I compiled the words of the various accounts, as drawn from Loukas’s second narrative (7.51–8.2 and 9.1–30), Loukas’s record of Sha’ul’s two spoken recollections (22.1–21 and 26.9–20), Sha’ul’s direct account written in an early letter to some in Galatia (1.13–23), and finally in his second letter to his friends in Corinth (11.31–33).
These separate narratives tell us much (but not all) of what happened, and I built my account of Sha’ul’s testimony to Nahor, based specifically on those words.
A Rescuer
Beyond these matters, much of my own inner life’s development can be found in that of Nahor/Shamir, who is the orphan-become-stonecutter-become-demoniac-become-sane man. While the specific events I recounted in his story bear little resemblance to the external realities of my own life, I found Nahor frequently acting and reacting to his life as I would have, if faced with the same events. Many of his hopes, longings, weaknesses, and failures seem my own, and as I wrote, I sometimes wept alongside him, feeling the same things he felt.
In the end, the story is simply and powerfully that of a Deliverer from beyond this world and time, who came to us as one of us—to live the life we would not, to bear the shame and guilt we could not, to pour out his breath and blood, that we might gain life abundant and unending.