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My Story
I grew up in London—a good Jewish boy from a secular Zionist family—disturbed by the crucified figure of Jesus hanging outside the churches on my way to school. I wondered what my fellow Jew must have done to deserve such a fate.
One target of my many questions was my teacher of Religious Instruction. I asked him why everyone 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—not heaven.
Eventually, for this, and for all my refusals to follow the rules, the headmaster called me to his study and I was summarily expelled.​
Meeting Masada and the Essenes
I first encountered the mysterious Essene sect in the shadow of Masada.
The exhibition of the excavation was traveling the world, and I eagerly queued to see it at London's Royal Festival Hall.
There, I was caught by the story of the Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and the Zealot’s last stand at Masada’s mountain-top fortress where they committed mass suicide rather than be taken as slaves.
And off in a side-room—almost as an afterthought—was a display about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the excavation of Qumran.
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Falling into the world of broadcast TV
A couple of decades later and I'd moved from London to Galilee in northern Israel. One evening, I got a call from a friend in Jerusalem, head of a TV documentary production company. “We just fired our second writer,” she told me, clearly frustrated. “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, instantly intrigued. “What’s it about?”
“The Dead Sea Scrolls. Know anything about them?”
Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls began my media career.
Then the Israel Antiquities Authority invited me to write the movie that accompanied Israel Museum's Dead Sea Scrolls traveling exhibition.
Since then, I’ve written documentaries for National Geographic, PBS, NHK Japan and Dutch National TV, and movies for top visitor centers in Niagara Falls (US & Canada), Atlantic City, Baltimore, Rome, and Jerusalem.
I've written non-fiction including The Holy Land of Jesus, as well as a 90-minute movie, The Jesus Diaries, both for the Christian market.
For decades, I've worked as a local producer for high profile documentaries on Jesus and the Scrolls for global TV broadcasters, introducing me to many of the leading archaeologists and scholars in the field.
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Heavenly Fire
Heavenly Fire brings everything together—the archaeology, the academia, and centuries of questions that neither churchmen nor heretics have ever fully answered.
Here, finally, is a coherent narrative of Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist, the Essenes and their Scrolls, and the lost Ark of the Covenant, not as fragmented myths or irrefutable dogma, but as the reality that people lived long ago, but not far from where I'm sitting right now.