Theophilos: A Novel

St. Luke addressed his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles to a man named Theophilos. Who was Theophilos? Scripture scholars do not know, making him a fit subject for Michael O'Brien’s vivid imagination. In this fictional narrative, Theophilos is the skeptical but beloved adoptive father of St. Luke. Challenged by the startling account of the Christos received in the chronicle from his beloved son Luke and concerned for the newly zealous young man’s fate, Theophilos, a Greek physician and an agnostic, embarks on a search for him to bring him home. He is gravely concerned about the deadly illusions Luke has succumbed to regarding the incredible stories surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, a man of contradiction who has caused so much controversy throughout the Roman Empire. Thus begins a long journey that will take Theophilos deep into the war between nations and empires, truth and myth, good and evil, and into unexpected dimensions of his very self. His quest takes the reader into four ancient civilizations, the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and that of Christianity at its birth, where he meets those who knew this man that some believe is the Messiah. Though Theophilos is a man of the past ages, he is as familiar as the men of our own times. This is a story about the mysterious interaction of faith and reason, the psychology of perception, and the power of love over death. Schooled in the empiricism of both medicine and philosophy, Theophilos is well suited to speak to our own times, in which seeing cannot be the basis for faith, but rather hearing the witness of those who have been touched by God and opening ourselves to the possibility of an encounter with the living Christ.