The Fifth Gospel repeatedly addresses the theme of the loss of a parent. Even Ugo’s focus on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin seems grounded in a preoccupation with the death of Jesus Christ, the eponymous father of the Christian Church. Did this theme grow organically out of your novel as you wrote it, or was it something that you knew from the beginning would play an important part in Alex’s story?
It emerged naturally from the source material. The importance of suffering and sacrifice is probably greater in Christianity than in most other religions. There’s a lot of foreshadowing and symbolism in the gospels that make it clear Jesus’ life and ministry are being understood retrospectively in terms of his death, which was the loss of a parent-like figure for the disciples. But what makes Jesus’ execution even more painful to read is his abandonment by those same disciples who had been his loyal followers: his loss of them. I wanted the novel to deal with those emotions not only in the context of scripture but in real-world terms, in real suffering, in real pounds of flesh. I wanted Alex’s final choice to be freighted not only with his feelings toward Simon but expressive of how faith and experience had taught him to cope with loss.
In the course of your research for this book, did anything you encountered relating to life in the Vatican especially surprise you? Please explain.
Vatican culture is an odd concoction of the old and the new, with Americans often serving as representatives of the new. On the one hand, there are throwbacks to an older time that most Americans have trouble envisioning; for instance, the clock atop the pope’s palace at Castel Gandolfo has only one hand, and its face is divided into only six hours instead of twelve, because that’s how time was kept before Napoleon took over the country and imposed modern standards. On the other hand, whenever the pope is flirting with a newfangled technology, you can count on American Catholics to be first in line to give him the goods. One of the first papal automobiles was a gift from Americans. Americans supplied the modern steel shelving at the Vatican Library, and are still playing a major role in digitizing the book collection. (The only microfilm copy of the pope’s most important texts, in fact, is in St. Louis.) The Vatican Observatory’s new cutting-edge facility is located not in Italy but in Arizona, the Holy See Internet Office was founded by an American nun from Long Island, and the Vatican internet domain suffix—.va—was procured by an American archbishop. Even the papal Latinist, who works down the hall from the pope, translating official documents from Italian into the ancient language of Rome, was until recently a Milwaukee native whose most talked-about job may have been creating Latin menus for the Vatican Bank’s new cash machines.
Why do you think the mysterious origins of the Shroud of Turin continue to arouse considerable controversy in today’s culture?
I’d say the controversy that erupted after the radiocarbon testing of the Shroud in 1988, which declared the Shroud a medieval fake, has now given way to an interestingly stable disagreement between the two camps. There are millions of people who consider the Shroud a fake because they believe science has delivered the final word, and there are millions of people who continue to travel to Turin to see the Shroud during its occasional expositions because their faith remains unshaken. The Fifth Gospel tries to open up both sides to new perspectives. On the one hand, there may well have been some irregularities about the cloth sample of the Shroud used in the radiocarbon tests. And something resembling the Shroud certainly existed before the earliest date given by the carbon-dating results. We have texts from before that date that refer to a burial-cloth relic or a cloth imprinted with a mystical image of Jesus. On the other hand, Catholic biblical scholars themselves have expressed doubts about the Shroud, and The Fifth Gospel shows that a scientific reading of the gospels raises important questions about it.
Ugolino Nogara is a fascinating, exuberant, and contradictory character. Was it challenging for you as a writer to confine him to a posthumous role in your novel?
Not at all—I’m not shy about using flashbacks! And death is a powerful tool for concentrating the significance of a character’s life. What made Ugo challenging wasn’t confining him to a posthumous role, but taking him on a journey that moved between certainty and doubt about the Shroud, and making him a man who inspired both confidence and skepticism in others. In a world of unwavering religious convictions, ambiguity and contradiction are powerful forces, and with both Ugo Nogara and Michael Black I tried to make the most of them.
The relationship between Simon and Alex in The Fifth Gospel reveals the typical complexity of sibling dynamics, but also the stratified and hierarchical nature of Catholic leadership. What did you learn in your fictional exploration of professional status within such a sprawling religious institution?
The Vatican is unusual within the Catholic Church: because it’s an ecclesiastical state, its internal rules reinforce the hierarchy in small ways you would never see elsewhere. At the Vatican medical clinic, for instance, bishops have their own private entrance. At the Vatican grocery store, they can cut to the front of the checkout line. Priestly rank determines where you’re seated at events, whether you can call for a car from the Vatican sedan pool, even how quickly you get service from a Vatican repairman. But it cuts in the other direction, too. Having so many high-ranking clergy in such a small area can be equalizing and even humbling. In any other Catholic diocese, being a monsignor would be something special, and being a bishop would mean standing at the top of the hill. But when diocesan bishops talk about their trips to the Vatican (which are required of them every five years), they sometimes sound as awed as young priests from rural parishes describing visits to their big-city bishops. Everyone in the priestly hierarchy feels that way in the presence of the pope. It was only a few decades ago that the pope was carried around on a portable throne, and visitors meeting him in person would show their respect by kissing his shoe. If you were a Vatican bureaucrat who received a work call from the Holy Father’s phone, it was customary to kneel while answering it. So despite the outer pageantry of Vatican life, there also remains a deep inner sense of respect and humility that keeps (some!) prelates more down-to-earth and accessible than you might expect.
Are there any aspects of the Christian faith that you’ve depicted in this book that you think will surprise or disturb your readers? Which ones and why?
Christians of different denominations interpret the Bible differently. At the risk of oversimplifying, some believe every word of scripture should be understood in a literal, factual sense, while others, going back to some of the Church Fathers, believe the Bible is sometimes literal but sometimes symbolic. In The Fifth Gospel, Father Alex interprets the Christian gospels according to the modern historical-critical method that has been embraced by the Catholic Church and taught in its seminaries for the past seventy years. For Christians who have never looked at the gospels carefully side-by-side, and especially for Christians who hew to biblical literalism, the results might definitely be surprising! Agnostics and atheists might also be surprised by how rigorous and scientific Christian scholars are willing to be with their own holy texts, even when it leads them to difficult conclusions, as it does in The Fifth Gospel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arika Van Brunt
Ian Caldwell is the coauthor of The Rule of Four, which spent forty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Ian Caldwell
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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe
Endpaper map by Paul J. Pugliese
Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
Case photograph © Robert Harding World Imagery/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Caldwell, Ian, 1976-
The fifth gospel : a novel / Ian Caldwell.—First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages; cm
I. Title.
PS3603.A435F54 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014041909
ISBN 978-1-4516-9414-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-9416-1 (ebook)
Ian Caldwell, The Fifth Gospel
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