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My Story
My affair with ancient and modern Israel goes way back to my childhood.
I grew up in London, a good Jewish boy in a secular Zionist family that bathed in the light of a reborn state of Israel.
Meanwhile, out on the streets, I was fascinated by the crucified figure of Jesus outside all the churches, and I wondered what he must have done so long ago in my ancestral homeland to deserve such a fate. I was also wired to what was going on in the wider world around me.
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London of the Swinging Sixties.
I know talk of the 1960s is ‘ancient history' for many of you reading this, but those were the breakout years of The Beatles & Bob Dylan, of Vietnam War protest marches and civil rights sit-ins, as well as political assassinations and the ever-present threat of an atomic Third World War.
They were exciting and frightening - times of profound social change when young people found they had a voice, one with the power to question authority.
Among the many targets of my own questions, I asked my school teacher of Religious Instruction why people spoke of Jesus only as a sacrificial lamb, not as a freedom fighter against Roman oppression, even though he preached that the meek will inherit the earth. Eventually, for this, and for all the other refusals to follow the rules, the headmaster called me to his study, and I was summarily expelled.
It took me many years to hear the spiritual side of Jesus’s message.
Meeting Masada and the Essenes
When I was in my mid-teens, I met the mysterious Essenes in the shadow of Masada.
The exhibition of Masada’s mountain-top excavation was traveling the world, and I eagerly joined the queue to see it at London's Royal Festival Hall. It was there that I first heard the story of the Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and the Zealot’s last stand at Masada where they committed mass suicide rather than be taken alive as slaves. And off to one corner was a small display dedicated to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the dig at Qumran.
Inspired by my ancestors’ battle against Roman imperialism, I bought and devoured the book of the exhibition that seared the story of the Zealots’ stand in my mind, and triggered a lifelong interest in the Scrolls and the Essene sect.
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Falling into the media
A couple of decades later and I relocated from North London to Galilee in northern Israel, and away from revolutionary politics to the path of an inner, personal journey.
One evening, I received a call from a friend in Jerusalem, a TV documentary maker.
“We just fired our second writer,” she told me, clearly pissed off. “They just didn’t get the project. Can you write us a script?”
“I know how to write, and you know filmmaking, so yes, I guess,” I replied, already totally caught by the idea. “What’s the subject?”
“The Dead Sea Scrolls. Know anything about them?”
That movie, Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was how I began my media career.
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Fast forward to today
Since then, I’ve worked as a writer and local producer of major TV documentaries, becoming known for a specialty in the stories of Jesus and the Scrolls.
I was invited to write the movie that accompanied the Israel Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls global traveling exhibition, and I have written one factual book and a 90-minute movie about Jesus - The Holy Land of Jesus, and The Jesus Diaries.
My work has brought me into contact with archaeologists and scholars at the cutting edge of research, and my own love of history has led me to an intimate knowledge of many of the sites of antiquity.
All this has now crystallized in my novel, Heavenly Fire.
The book is my attempt to bring the fragmented stories of Jesus and John the Baptist, the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Ark of the Covenant into one coherent narrative that sheds light on the world-shaping events which unfolded here in Israel two thousand years ago.
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