A new novel by Martí Colom
Recently Editorial San Pablo from Madrid has published a novel by Martí Colom, a member of our community. It is titled "The Sadness of the Zelot" (“La tristeza del zelota”, in Spanish), and it is a fiction set in the 1st century. The plot revolves around the letter of Paul of Tarsus to Philemon: as it is well known, in this letter—the shortest of the Pauline epistles—the Apostle to the Gentiles intercedes with Philemon for Onesimus, a runaway slave whom Paul has met in prison. We have no historical record of what happened with the letter once Paul dictated it and some scribe recorded it on a papyrus. Did it arrive to Philemon’s hands? If so, did Philemon obey Paul's recommendation, and forgive Onesimus? Or maybe he ignored the letter and punished the slave, as it was required by the law? What role did the other recipients of the letter —Apphia and Archippus—, play in the story?
Starting from these questions, Martí Colom builds up an agile and absorbing story in which he raises how, from the very beginning of the church, the gospel has been liberating for some people, while for others it became a pretext for intransigence and fanaticism. This is how Paul expresses it at one point in the novel: «Some people are capable of turning the most beautiful ideas into a heavy rock. They convert delightful truths into an unbearable burden. In their hands, as if they were clumsy and blind potters, the softest and purest clay, destined to produce the most beautiful of jars becomes deformed and ends up producing useless garbage».
https://libreria.sanpablo.es/libro/la-tristeza-del-zelota_206834
