Press release: New novel for Kindle

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

John Evan Garvey
Burbank CA 91502
info@carpecranium.com

RUG-PULLING FOR A GOOD CAUSE
New novel by John Evan Garvey released for the Kindle Fire

With the religious right now trying to shame every woman into abstaining even from contraceptive use, wouldn’t it be nice to pull the rug out from under them in their crusade to establish theocracy? And to do so with the very book on which they base their crusade? John Evan Garvey’s new novel, The Talpiot Find, an ebook for the Kindle Fire released in February 2012, explores a brief passage in the Old Testament which offers an intriguing clue to the possible fraudulent origins of Scripture. In brief: Priest finds lost scroll during Temple repairs, scribe reads scroll to king, king initiates national reforms based on scroll, greatly enhancing priests’ authority. The passage is II Kings 22:8-13. Since the early nineteenth century biblical critics have suggested that the scroll that was found was an early version of Deuteronomy, synthesized by the priests and scribes from different regional oral traditions and deceptively presented to the people as the writings of Moses. Consequently, if New Testament writers were unaware that the Torah may not have been the work of a single author, then their claim to divine inspiration is seriously undermined. And if the writings of the Apostle Paul are simply the writings of a man living in the first century CE, and not Scripture divinely inspired by an eternal, timeless God, then the religious right has a very weak basis for imposing first-century thinking on a twenty-first-century society.

The novel The Talpiot Find emerged when the author wondered “What if the rough draft of that scroll surfaced?” He pondered the plausibility of rough-draft clay slabs ending up at a potter’s for kiln-firing. When the mistake was discovered, the tablets would have been quickly, secretly discarded in a trash pit. And that location, after centuries of erosion filling in the pit, might now lie beneath a parking lot in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Synopsis: The Talpiot Find follows a grad student from Los Angeles doing his required fieldwork in archaeology at a dig site in the Talpiot neighborhood. He uncovers ancient clay tablets while excavating a twelfth-century well, and when one of the archaeologists begins translating the tablets, he realizes that this document may have been part of a deception coordinated by Temple priests and scribes in the seventh century BCE. The archaeologists contain the information as long as they can, but a disgruntled student on the dig team leaks it to the public. The archaeological team then learns that anonymous groups want to discredit the tablets and are determined to keep any further information about them from reaching the public.

About the author: John Evan Garvey grew up in a strictly evangelical home environment where life, centered around the church, consisted mostly of prohibitions of activities like dancing, movie-going, and dining in restaurants that served alcohol. This was in New Jersey about an hour's drive southeast of Philadelphia. He attended a Christian high school and college, earning a BS degree in evangelical cinema from infamously racist, sexist, homophobic, unaccredited Bob Jones University. Since Garvey’s midlife crisis in his early 30s pulled the rug out from under him, he has distanced himself from evangelical culture and beliefs and would like to help others in the religious right experience a similar anagnorisis.


ASIN: B0076RL38I
THE TALPIOT FIND
Available at the Kindle Store on Amazon.
Review copy available on request.

More info at the website.