(The Other Side of Judeo-Christian History) Authour: Anton Sammut Self-published 2011 (English translation: 2012) Extent: 397pp

Although I have been following Anton Sammut as an author first (Alte Vestiga/ Memories of Recurrent Echoes – both reviewed) and sporadically on Facebook, I know next to nothing about the person.

However, there is something that tells me the man is a teacher: he is all the time teaching. There is this constant urge to teach, or rather to stimulate.

This, I think, is the main merit of this book: rather than teach, it aims to ask questions, to stimulate the reader to ask questions rather than continue to accept as a fact all that he is told and taught.

As its title indicates, the book aims to provide an alternative version to what the Catholic Church teaches its faithful – the paradigm, or model at the base of the West’s political strategy.

To do so, the book goes right back to the origins of man and the birth of religion. There is, in this section alone, a huge amount of existing literature and not all of it leads to the Christian reading of it.

Perusing the list of books referred to in chapter 2, one book gets repeated mention: Laurence Gardner’s Genesis of the Grail Kings. While this book joins in the deconstructivist trend, there are far more books focusing on the Sumerian period and coming to the same conclusion which could have put the book’s thesis on surer grounds, I think.

The author could have gone further back and pointed out at the similarities between the Genesis stories of creation and the myths popular among the surrounding peoples. Instead, he focuses on the story of Moses and brings to our attention The Story of Jasher, an alternative Moses story which was not included in what we call the Old Testament.

Sammut does not quote from books on the Old Testament period only but he also includes, for instance, what Freud says about Moses.

While the Christian Bible simplifies things down to a single interpretation and process, Sammut opens up to the many possible interpretations rendered hidden by the Christians. Thus, for instance, it was while staying with Jethro in Midian that Moses came to know the god of the area, the Lord of the Mountain, and thus his interpretation of the “I am who I am” is the exasperated answer by a god who could