"The Order", by Daniel Silva

I became aware of Daniel Silva a few months ago, when I heard him being interviewed on the occasion of the publication of his latest spy novel, which I later learned was his 25th novel dating back to 1996, all of which were best-sellers. Checking in the local public library, I was pleased to see that many of these novels were on the shelves, with the rest no doubt available through inter-library loan.

The main character in all but the first three of his novels is Gabriel Allon, the head of Israeli intelligence. In "The Order", Allon is investigating "the order", a shadowy organization composed of authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic Catholic priests, in coordination with like-minded figures throughout Europe.

The appeal of Silva's novels is two-fold. One, he takes you to places all over the world, and makes you feel like you are there. And two, he brings in current affairs, basing his plots on what is actually going on in the world. At the end of each novel, he has an "Author's Note", in which he explains what is factual and what is made up, and expresses his concerns based on recent world events. In "The Order", he outdoes himself, with an 11-page "Author's Note".

What is so impactful about "The Order" is the emphasis on the passage from Matthew 27:25, which says that the Jewish people are responsible for the killing of Jesus, supposedly saying, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children”. Silva's idea, which I cannot dispute, is that this passage has been responsible for 2,000 years of the persecution of Jews. And it is a clearly false passage. The idea that some Jew in the crowd might have yelled out "his blood be upon us", is, I suppose, marginally plausible. But to add "and upon our children" is ludicrous. We have to ask, how did this pathetic verse find its way into the Bible?