Apprentices of the Word

The fiction novel Apprentices of the Word reveals, in an alert and troubling rhythm, the crucial events of the world caught in a unique and ineffable vision. Making a thorough examination of the three and a half years during which Messiah fulfilled His mission and the summary of the Evangels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, the author notices that a number of Jesus’s deeds are missing from the accounts of the Evangels; John himself acknowledges these omissions in his Gospel in Chapter 21:25.

Armed with a mad courage, M. M. Loviste makes the most difficult and risky decision of his life: to present in a fiction novel other events from the last years of Jesus’s life. In fact, Jesus becomes the echo of the author’s faith, a lively image of his consciousness translated into words having the value of a message. The novel’s author does not pose as a prophet, but confesses his moments of revelation, also giving a matching explanation to Dan Brown’s controversial The Da Vinci Code. M. M. Loviste’s novel goes on the edge, and the main merit of the writer is that he manages to maintain a balance, neither advocating one side or the other, nor falling into the trap of the derisory. In fact, these happenings may actually have occurred.
The author pictures Jesus in various situations and illustrations which do not distort the sacred image, but, on the contrary, portray that image in its genuine radiance. Jesus, the center of the seen and unseen worlds, is so thoroughly a human being in M. M. Loviste’s description that the people who encounter Him are convinced that He is a MAN, and not the Son of God. But the nature, the nobility, and the generosity of Messiah make people who knew Him directly confess the Son of Man as the Son of God. In Apprentices of the Word, the impenetrable and encrypted words of the four Evangels acquire meaning; great questions of the world find answers; movement is absorbed in entities; becoming gets a space of its own; and lucidity re-orders everything in primordial patterns of endless simplicity and grandeur of the existence.

The message of the book shouts that Christ is to be found not only in shining, glamorous palaces or majestic places. He is everywhere, in unexpected places, places of deep sorrow, mockery, and insult. Step by step, the reader discovers the great personalities of the world involved in surprising situations, searching for the Lord’s commandments, living together with the characters themselves that they created, all animated by the desire to become apprentices of the Word.

The story is overwhelming, the suspense is binding, and the reader becomes the prisoner of a life-and-death fight between good and evil. The stake of the conflict is man (the reader), to whom God gives the freedom of choice.