This was a very disappointing read. It has a great theme, but it is carried out very poorly. It should be an exciting and informative book, but it is written in a style that makes the Hardy Boys look like great literature. It is difficult to believe that it could get an adult reader excited about the story. Davila's goal seems to be to make others aware of the Gnostic Gospels, but by divulging that in such an elementary style, it causes the reader to doubt his expertise in the subject. ( )

It's funny, I reviewed this book back in July after finishing, and posted it! But just got a note today that it wasn't here and I had to review. So here is a BRIEF review as I don't want to write the entire thing out again.

This book had potential to be a good book. I figured it would be something like a Dan Brown book: full of facts and a great mystery story that kept the reader entertained and turning pages. I was sadly mistaken.

I found this novel to be a venue for the Author to give a personal lecture on the information of the Gnostics instead of portraying it as a novel. I fought my way through to the end hoping that it would get better. I think that this book would be better as a non fiction so that the author would have full attention on his ideas. ( )

I have to agree with some of the reviews I've read that this book just sort of throws information at you without a well-done narrative structure. However, it is interesting information, though unremarkable if you've ever read Elaine Pagels.

Shabby ideas and thinking poorly woven into a weak narrative structure. If I ever had a friend who incessantly lectured me in every conversation the way characters in this book do, (ie: Chloe), my story would likely be about an aggravated assault.

Put together with such a polemical and remarkably inaccurate revisionist picture of the formation of the Christian church, ('Many scholars' do NOT believe this stuff), The Gnostic Mystery resembles an undergraduate mind attempting to link the dots of material they don't actually understand.

To the point, the revealing of various 'facts' in this book are consistently framed by the tone of great discovery. Certain characters make declarations, and everyone else responds with wondrous surprise or eager questions for more. The impression given is that the authour thinks he is actually revealing something tremendous or significant that heretofore has been hidden away. For example, quoting randomly from almost any page in the book, like page 187: "'What?' Punjeeh asked incredulously, further puzzled by her . . ."

Ironically, (and painfully), this book actually contains nothing significant, and certainly nothing that's new - (His bibliography of 27 books includes 4 by Pagels, and 1 by Tom Harpur) - except of course for the material that Davila has simply made up. In the end, Davila actually has to create a fictitious Gnostic document to make his point. Why? Because real Gnostic material does not say what his personal issues need it to say. Since reality won't give him a legitimate basis for his revisionist fantasy, he has to fake it to contest for his own whipped up version of Gnostic thought and history.

It's worth saying that the real work of a religious or spiritual thinker is to struggle through the questions of fear and guilt that his character Jack says he never understood in "traditional church teaching. One cannot simply avoid or drop them. And so instead of creating fictional religious alternatives that 'feel' better to his 21st century vanities, he would do well to dig into those areas which really are a mystery to him.

But I suspect that Davila isn't actually interested in mystery at all. Instead, his real interest is in being the one majestically to dispel 'mysteries' for everyone else, even if he has to make them up in the first place. He's been reading Harpur for sure . . . ( )

While I am certainly not hostile to either organized religion or gnosticism, this is not a particularly good book either as a novel or as a thinly disguised polemic on religion. Certainly, anyone who is familiar at all with the books and scholarship of Elaine Pagels, particularly "The Gnostic Gospels", her study of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, will find the book unremarkable in its thesis. Certainly, even as scholarship, Pagels books are far more engaging than Davila's novel.

It is true that in the marketplace of ideas and diversity of beliefs within the early church, Gnosticism lost out. Not because of its ideas or a conspiracy by more established sects, but because of its own lack of any coherent organization and internal factionalism. ( )