W. Milt Timmons
Heretofore
it has required years of study, access to many rare books, and
superhuman effort to
cut through the nearly impenetrable prose of these ancient books.
Now all the hard work has been done for you in this easy to read
summary.
The project began during the course of collecting background
material for a novel about the origins of Christianity – when it
soon became apparent that reliable information was very scarce.
Perhaps half the books that shaped Western concepts of religion have
ceased to exist. Many were destroyed as heretical after the early
ecumenical councils closed the biblical canon in the fourth century;
others have simply turned to dust. The oldest biblical manuscripts
in existence are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which go back to
approximately 100 B.C.E. And the oldest Christian manuscripts are
those found in the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi, in Egypt –
written in the fourth century C.E. But they don’t contain any of the
canonical books.
All other information comes to us via copies of copies. Before
invention of the printing press in 1450, all replication was by hand
– which allowed countless variations to creep into texts. Especially
after translation into multiple languages, many stories evolved into
a wide spectrum of versions. Which is the “true” version? It is
impossible to say.
The aim of this volume is to be concise rather than exhaustive –
thus making available to general readers the main sources of
Judeo-Christian thought, without the distraction of scholarly
disputes. For the benefit of those who may question the
interpretation of certain documents, or who wish more information
about original sources, a selected bibliography is included.
It should be remembered that the books in this volume were written
by very primitive people who were trying to make sense of the world
with the only information they had. But even in those days, most of
these authors were not considered educated by their Greek and Roman
contemporaries. Moreover, the Jewish and Christian leaders who
created the biblical canon rejected the majority of these documents
as products of overheated imagination. So there are times when
descriptions necessarily become a bit whimsical. Always, however,
the goal has been to cover the author’s main points while
eliminating only the extraneous.
Even though many of these books did not end up in any authorized
Bible, they have nevertheless been extremely influential in the
evolution of religious traditions. To this day, sermons, theological
doctrines, and Sunday school lessons are still based on these
extra-canonical sources: Where did medieval artists get the idea for
all those paintings about the “Assumption of the Virgin”? There’s
nothing in the Bible about any such event. How do Catholics justify
their doctrine that Mary remained a virgin all her life even though
the Bible says Jesus had several brothers and sisters? Where did
Dante Alighieri get his concepts about the levels of hell? Where did
John Milton get the plot for his story about Lucifer the fallen
angel?
“Regarding
an Angel’s Flight” is a philosophical and psychological study of
changing American morals and mores over the last half century –
structured, in the classical tradition of “Hamlet” and “Oedipus
Rex”, as both murder mystery and tragedy.After a series of
mysterious murders in a small Southern town, a grad student suddenly
finds himself caught up in a twentieth century version of “Pilgrims
Progress”. The story is a philosophical who-done-it, as well as a
search for morality within a high-tech world of conflicting
ideologies – an adventure through fifty of the most turbulent years
in history.The book covers the period from 1933 (with the
inaugurations of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler) to the
reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984. News reports and analyses are
used as transitions between dramatic scenes – which serve the dual
purpose of placing the fictional story in historical context, while
at the same time dramatizing the issues being played out on the
world stage.
The documents contained in this book are where those ideas, and a
myriad others, all came from.
Visit the author's website at
www.miltontimmons.com
PageOneLit.com: Where did you grow up, and was reading and writing
a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?
W. Milt Timmons:
I grew up in a small town thirty miles north of Houston, Texas,
called Conroe. I was born in 1933, which was in the middle of the
depression. But Conroe largely escaped the depression because there
was a major oil field discovered nearby, and Conroe became a
boom-town instead. My father owned a thriving plumbing and heating
company, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. With their
combined incomes we had a comfortable home life. But it was
certainly not an intellectual one. My mother was a fairly devout
Southern Baptist and my father only got as far as the third grade.
There were no bookshelves, and the only book I can remember seeing
around the house was a King James Bible (which of course they had
never read). The only reading they did was The Houston Post
newspaper and three magazines: Life, Popular Mechanics, and The
Ladies Home Journal. Books were regarded with suspicion. In later
life I always marveled at how my mother had managed to earn a
bachelor’s degree without getting a noticeable education.
Fortunately, our oil-rich school system had
excellent libraries, which opened up whole new worlds for me. I was
constantly bringing home novels that the librarian had recommended.
I started with the usual horse and dog stories, then graduated to
the Tom Swift series about a boy-genius inventor. Fortunately, my
father allowed me to use his well-equipped workshop to build my own
inventions, and I thought I was going to become a mechanical
engineer. However, my lack of mathematical aptitude put an end to
that ambition.
Later, my favorite authors became Mark Twain,
Jules Verne, and Booth Tarkington. My folks were constantly chiding
me about always “having my nose stuck in some book” instead of being
out playing baseball. I never had any interest in sports, which was
particularly galling to my father, because he had once been a
professional ball player.
I dreamed of becoming a writer fairly early, and
began keeping a diary at age twelve, so that I could remember what
it was like to be young. I’ve kept a journal, intermittently, ever
since. And when I was writing Regarding an Angel’s Flight I
did, in fact, refer to my journal entries quite often.
By the time I got to high school and college, my
favorite authors were Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Ray Bradbury,
and W. Somerset Maugham. Those are still my heroes, and I’ve read
all their books. I aspired to write novels of ideas, like Huxley,
character studies, like Lewis, with the lyrical prose style of
Bradbury, and the storytelling ability of Maugham. In fact, it was
W. Somerset Maugham that prompted me to begin signing my name as W.
Milton Timmons. I didn’t want to be called something as boring as
Willie or Bill, and John Milton was a famous author. I wanted it to
be clear that Milton was my middle name. So I thought W. Milton
sounded suitably dignified for a future author.
PageOneLit.com: Why do you write?
W. Milt Timmons: I think writers are born, not made. As Ernest
Hemmingway once said, “Writing is a compulsion; I can’t be happy
unless I’m writing, and let me tell you, it’s a helluva disease to
be born with.”
I’ve always been insatiably curious about the
world. I constantly want to know what’s going on and exactly how
everything works. As a child, I took apart every piece of machinery
around the house, and as an adult I enjoy researching ideas, but I
can’t feel that I really understand something until I have put it
into writing.
By the same token, Gore Vidal was once asked
what he most enjoyed doing. He said, “Making sentences.” That also
rang a bell with me. I too get the most satisfaction out of crafting
my writing as elegantly as possible. I don’t like the staccato
sentences of Hemmingway, nor the interminable sentences of Henry
James. Again, Somerset Maugham provides the model for my style. I’m
happiest when shaping and polishing a paragraph like a piece of
sculpture.
PageOneLit.com: You were chairman of the Cinema Department at LAVC
for 22 years, serving as the executive producer to hundreds of
student films. What is your first love, literature or film? Please
explain.
W. Milt Timmons:
My first love was literature, and if I had been born
into wealth I would have majored in English Lit. But I knew I had to
make a living, and I’d already had some success as an actor and
radio announcer. I figured I could probably make more money in
broadcasting than I could as a writer, so I majored in radio
broadcasting at the University of Texas in Austin. Television was in
its infancy then, and when it was announced that the University of
Houston was going to build the world’s first educational TV station,
I transferred to U of H and helped build it. I was the announcer who
signed KUHT on the air for the first time, in 1953. With my
background in theater, I found the new medium of television a
perfect blend of theater, radio, and cinema. I loved working with
all the sophisticated and highly creative people I met at the
station. So I was hooked.
It wasn’t until I began working in television
that I developed an interest in film. I had never been a movie
“buff”; I was always very selective about what movies I chose to see
– as I still am today. But while working at KUHT, I was involved
with the production of several films for TV. That’s when I began to
appreciate the superior artistic capability of film, compared to
live television.
After graduation from the University of Houston,
I didn’t really feel adequately prepared to go to work in the
industry immediately, so I went to grad school at UCLA, with a major
in Theater Arts. Their curriculum required an almost equal number of
courses in Theater, Radio, Television, and Cinema.
When I received my M.A. from UCLA, I worked for
a couple of years as a junior executive at CBS in Hollywood. But I
soon got bored with that and decided that I was more of a scholar
than a businessman, and what I had enjoyed most was working in
educational television. So when an old friend in Texas offered me a
job as head of the Broadcasting Department at Sam Houston State
University, in Huntsville, Texas, I accepted.
At Sam Houston State, I produced a weekly radio
program, and taught a class in Film Production for Television, among
other classes. We made a number of 16mm films for instructional and
promotional purposes – some of which were broadcast on Houston TV
stations.
I decided that I liked teaching college, but I
would like to get paid more for it, and for that I needed my “union
card” – a PhD. I worked at Sam Houston for about five years, saving
my money and learning French and German, in order to get into the
PhD program at USC. I decided that I already knew all I wanted to
know about television, but there was a great deal I didn’t know
about film. So in 1967, I was accepted into the Department of Cinema
at the University of Southern California.
As soon as I finished all my course work at USC,
I was hired by Los Angeles Valley College to organize their
fledgling Cinema Department. It was an amazing experience. For five
years I taught production classes all day while writing my doctoral
dissertation at night. In 1973 American Cinematographer
published a feature article about this young professor in North
Hollywood who was trying to create the world’s first professional
film school in a community college.
But the program was very successful, and for a
number of years we had the largest enrollment of any film department
in Southern California, other than USC and UCLA. I loved the work I
did there, and we were able to make every type, style, and genre of
film that anyone has ever dreamed of.
I still think that “film” (or its digital
equivalent) is the most creative medium ever invented; but being a
low-budget producer and director is physically very demanding, and
after 30 years of teaching, I decided I’d had enough. So at age 60 I
took early retirement, while I still had my health, to return to my
first love: literature.
The only limitation of the film medium is
expense. It doesn’t cost anything to write a novel, but it costs
millions to turn it into a film. Those millions of dollars have to
come from investors – who expect to make a profit from their
investment. So that means, in most cases, that the project has to be
“dumbed down” to make it acceptable to a mass audience. For a
feature film, there is also a drastic limitation of time. People
can’t sit in one place for more than about 100 minutes, so there is
no possibility of complex character development, or more than one or
two sub-plots. The television mini-series, of course, allows for
more complex story-telling, but it costs even more than a feature
film to produce, and it must qualify for a “G” rating.
Another difference between film and literature
is that film is necessarily a collaborative art. The writer, the
producer, the director, the actors, the production designer, the
cinematographer, the composer, and the editor, are all creative
artists in their own right. And each has his or her own ideas about
what the final result should be. So every decision is a compromise.
Only a handful of people have ever attempted to be an auteur,
which is a person who controls all the key elements of production.
That means this individual serves as writer, producer and director
on the same film. In the case of Charlie Chaplain he even starred in
his own movies, composed the score and conducted the orchestra! But
today, film has become so technically complex that it takes an army
of people to make one, and the director is more of a commanding
general than an artist.
Novelists, on the other hand, are the sole
creators of their masterpieces. That is both liberating and
limiting. Film directors have every possible art form at their
disposal. All a novelist has to work with are words on paper.
But the great advantage of literature over film
is that there is nobody to demand that a scene be cut because it
would be too expensive to shoot, or the premise and theme of the
book are politically incorrect, or that certain words must be cut in
order to qualify for a less restrictive rating. Best of all, every
hour of work on a book is devoted to making the book itself. Whereas
most of the time spent by a movie director is concerned with hassles
about budgets, contracts, logistics, recalcitrant equipment,
uncooperative weather, conflicting demands by studio executives,
censorship, unreliable actors, and on... and on!
It is a truism in Hollywood that every director
begins a film with great excitement, thinking it is going to be a
masterpiece. But by the time he’s halfway through the shoot, he’s
thinking, “If I can just get this turkey in the can, so help me I’ll
never make another one!”
Alfred Hitchcock once said that the only thing
he enjoyed about filmmaking was the writing and pre-production
planning. Having to be on the set every day was a bloody nuisance.
PageOneLit.com: You spent more than 40 years working on
Regarding an Angel’s Flight. Why did it take so long?
W. Milt Timmons: I had finished my Master’s Degree from UCLA and was
working at CBS when I conceived the idea and the basic outline of
the book. I wrote the first few scenes about Austin’s childhood, but
then I realized that I needed to do a tremendous amount of research
into the history of philosophy in order to accomplish my purpose. So
I put aside the work I had done and began reading extensively about
the political and theological problems that I wanted my protagonist
to confront.
My work at CBS was not only stressful but it
seemed to be leading nowhere, so I began making inquiries about
other job opportunities. When I received an offer from Sam Houston
State to move back to Texas and teach in their Department of Theater
Arts, I put aside everything and made the move.
Teaching at Sam Houston was very satisfying, but
totally absorbing. I was replacing a teacher who had been killed in
a car accident, as well as another who was still in the hospital. So
for my first year I was carrying a double load, while also creating
several new courses they wanted to offer. Eventually I became head
of all radio and television courses and operations, plus several
Speech and Drama classes.
After teaching for a couple of years I decided
this was indeed what I wanted to do, but I knew that in order to
make it a successful career I needed a PhD. I found that the
University of Southern California offered a PhD program that matched
my interest in film production. But in order to be accepted into the
program I had to pass competency tests in both French and German.
Now I had to lay aside any writing or research
for Angel’s Flight and concentrate on learning French and
German.
After nearly five years at Sam Houston I had
mastered a minimum proficiency in both languages, and had saved up
enough money to enter USC. In 1967 I passed their language exams and
began my course work in Cinema. But then I immediately had to begin
thinking about what I wanted to do for a dissertation.
A book by Marshall McLuhan, Titled
Understanding Media, was causing a lot of excitement in academia
at that time, in which he claimed that there is a difference in the
way people perceive film as opposed to the way they perceive
television. But no one had actually tested this hypothesis. So I
decided to do such an experimental study. I reasoned that once my
advisory committee had accepted the experimental design, they would
have to accept the results. This proved to be a good strategy. By
1969 I had passed the comprehensive exams for a PhD in
Communications, and the committee had accepted the design for my
study.
But then I ran out of money. I had to find a job
somewhere and finish the dissertation in my spare time. I spent
several months being flown back and forth across the country to
interview for jobs at various universities that had Departments of
Communications. Finally in 1970, the first solid offer came from Los
Angeles Valley College, in the North Hollywood area. I jumped at the
opportunity, since that meant I didn’t even have to move, and I
would have easy access to the USC research facilities.
By working 24/7 for five years I was able to
finish the dissertation on time, and received the degree in 1975.
Since the mandate to take anyone off the street
and turn them into a professional filmmaker in only four semesters
had never been attempted before, naturally there were no suitable
textbooks. So in 1981 I obtained sabbatical leave to write such a
book. In 1983 I published Orientation to Cinema, which is 247
pages of very small print, in double columns, with 427 photographic
illustrations.
During all these years of doing other things I
was still making notes for Angel’s Flight. By the time I
retired in 1992, I had accumulated several hundred pages of research
notes and fragments of manuscript for Angel. At last I could
turn my full attention to finishing the book. Over the years, I had
read most of the major holy books of the world; now I read the
remaining ones, plus dozens of other books about philosophy. Next, I
spent months at the research library of Cal State University,
Northridge, going through back issues of Time, Life, Newsweek,
Variety, Broadcasting Magazine, and the Los Angeles Free
Press, taking notes on all the significant events between 1933
and 1984.
By 1999, Regarding an Angel’s Flight was
finished and I began sending out letters of inquiry to agents and
publishers.
PageOneLit.com: Regarding an Angel’s Flight has everything
from a mystery “who done it” to philosophy, adventure and history.
From the author’s point of view, what was your motivation for
writing this story?
W. Milt Timmons:
Every successful novel, play, or movie has a
“premise,” or philosophical point to make. That is what gives a
story its coherence. In earlier times, this premise, or “moral” was
spelled out very explicitly. But today that is no longer the
fashion. Literature is now a game of charades, in which the audience
is invited to guess at what the author is trying to say. For
an author to explain the premise of a work of fiction would
be like a magician showing how a certain illusion works. It just
isn’t done; that would be a violation of the rules. So I cannot
reveal the exact premise I had in mind. Everyone will have to come
to their own conclusion.
I wanted the book to be a philosophical,
historical murder mystery – structured as a classical tragedy – that
is also what the Germans call a bildungsroman, or novel of
character development. In this case, it is about the moral evolution
of an intelligent American during the mid twentieth century. I think
many readers will be able to identify with the conundrums faced by
Austin Adams, and to remember wrestling with the same questions when
they were growing up.
I knew that the times I had lived through had
created the contemporary world, and I thought that readers would
find it illuminating to analyze how we got to the mess we find
ourselves in today. So as a transitional device between dramatic
scenes I intercut key news developments that eventually changed the
course of history. I especially looked for news items that did not
get much attention at the time, but would later become highly
significant.
I wanted to cut back and forth from the
macroscopic to the microscopic – showing the powerful conflicts that
were sweeping the world at that time, and then showing how those
events affected my characters in their daily lives. Conversely, I
wanted to show how individual actions could often epitomize what was
happening on the world stage.
Having taught dramaturgy, I knew that the most
powerful form of storytelling is the classical tragedy, so I decided
to structure this novel as that type. I also decided that I wanted
it to be a very old fashioned, 19th century, romantic
style of writing, because I wanted it to be as accessible as
possible to as many people as possible. That meant deliberately
avoiding anything even remotely avant-garde.
I had made an extensive analysis of the elements
that define movie classics, and I found that the most important key
is that the type of screenplay and style of production must be
consistent. There should be a clear premise and every scene must
support the premise; if it is a tragedy then it must conform to the
rules of tragedy; if it is to be a melodrama, or comedy, or farce,
then it must conform to those conventions. If it is to be romantic
in style then all the elements must conform to the rules of
romanticism; if it is to be naturalistic, or expressionistic, or
surrealistic, then it must follow those tropes, etc. But no matter
what genre or style chosen, if the artist wants it to be memorable,
the audience should always be given a little more than they expect.
There were several techniques that I used to
give my readers more for their money than they are accustomed to.
Aristotle said that a play should put equal emphasis on plot,
character, thought-provoking ideas, memorable dialogue, and music.
Obviously, music is impossible in a novel, but I tried to provide
all the other elements.
I wanted this book to be primarily a “novel of
ideas,” like those of Aldous Huxley or Umberto Eco. But I felt
Huxley’s major weakness was that his characters were underdeveloped.
So I put a lot of emphasis on highly individualistic and
well-defined characters.
Plot provides the framework on which to hang a
story, and plot requires conflict and suspense to hold an audience’s
attention. So, in the very first scene I let the audience know that
there is going to be a trial that makes national headlines. That
immediately establishes a conflict – raising many questions and
creating suspense. Many classical tragedies, such as Hamlet and
Oedipus Rex, are also murder mysteries.
I was meticulous about making sure the dialogue
helped to define the character, as well as the time and place in
which a scene occurs. So I gave each character the grammar, syntax,
vocabulary, and pronunciation that would be appropriate for them. I
spent much time in making sure that their slang expressions matched
the year and the subculture in which the line was delivered. I
probably spent the most time of all in wrestling with dialects. A
movie director has it easy: he simply tells the actor to play the
part with a certain accent. The task for a novelist is much harder.
It requires the re-spelling of specific phonemes each time it occurs
in various words. It must be applied as consistently as possible,
but the phonetic spelling must also not be so radical that it
becomes difficult for the reader to understand the meaning of the
line. And in some cases I had to eschew consistency in some words
because if I had retained the re-spelling of that phoneme, it would
have changed the word into another word altogether. I carefully
studied the dialectal techniques of Mark Twain and others, to see
how they had handled phonetic spelling. I decided that most of them
over-did it, so I tried to be subtle about it, applying only a
limited number of phoneme transformations, and then applied them
only to certain words. I hoped it was just enough to suggest a
recognizable dialect.
Most books on novel writing say that scenes
should engage all the senses – sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.
So these were other elements I included as much as practicable.
Sight, however, is our primary sensory organ, so I first wrote the
story as a sequence outline – describing what happens in each scene
just as a screenwriter does in developing a scenario. But instead of
expanding each sequence into several pages of script, I novelized
it. Hopefully, this will make it easy for the reader to visualize
the scenes just as clearly as a director does when reading a
screenplay.
As still another way of giving the reader more
than expected, I also thought they would enjoy looking back to “The
Way We Were,” and remember what they were doing when certain events
happened, when certain films won Academy Awards, or when certain
songs were on “The Hit Parade.” So there was considerable emphasis
on appealing to nostalgia.
PageOneLit.com: If Hollywood called and asked you to cast
Regarding an Angel’s Flight, who would be your lead actors and
why?
W. Milt Timmons:
Instead of answering who I would cast, I
prefer to explain what I did do. Over the years I worked out
a technology for creating screenplays and novels. These techniques
are explained in Orientation to Cinema, and excerpts from
that chapter are posted on my website. One key is the creation of
memorable characters. I made a survey of all the methods of
personality analysis that psychologists had come up with over the
years, then I composed a 33 page questionnaire about each character.
I would analyze the character according to Psychoanalytic Theory,
according to Cattell’s character traits, according to Sheldon’s
somatotypes, Kurtz’ body types, Myers-Briggs Personality Types,
Transactional Analysis, etc. By the time I had completed the
questionnaire I knew everything about that character there was to
know – including a precise portrayal of their appearance. I already
knew what function the character had in driving the plot, so I then
created each character to fit their job-description. If I could
think of an actor who would be ideal for the part, then I modeled
the character’s appearance after that actor. I even pasted a picture
of the actor in their dossier so I could look at the picture as I
described their appearance and actions in a scene.
Austin Adams was modeled after young Anthony
Perkins, except with curly hair. Gus Eriksen was modeled after
50-year-old Spencer Tracy, as he appeared in Inherit the Wind.
Sheila Fitzpatrick was modeled after 19-year-old Cybill Shepherd, as
she appeared in The Last Picture Show. Naomi Goldman was
modeled after 26-year-old Cher, as she appeared on the Sonny and
Cher television show. Babs Walker was a combination of Judy
Holiday and Dolly Parton. Neils Olafson could have been played by
Donald Pleasance (in prosthetic makeup and placed in the body of
Danny DiVito). Pierre La Conte was a combination of Robert Mitchum,
Humphry Bogart, Rudolf Valentino, George Sanders, and Jack Palance;
he always seems bored, disdainful, oleaginous, and slightly
menacing. For Einar Slavaczk I tried to imagine Peter Lorry placed
in the body of the fictional Ichabod Crane. Daniel Jackson had Steve
McQueen’s face placed on the body of Abraham Lincoln.
All the other characters were modeled after
people I had known – or combinations thereof. In those cases I had
to draw portraits – which are posted on my website.
PageOneLit.com: Briefly discuss your book
Everything About the Bible That You Never Had Time to
Look Up.
W. Milt Timmons:
In Angel’s Flight there are many discussions
about biblical scholarship. Some of those discussions and statements
would likely provoke the wrath of certain fundamentalists. So, while
Angel was making the rounds of agents and publishers, I began
thinking about what would happen if I were asked to appear on
various talk shows. I assumed that the host would probably bring on
the loudest and most obnoxious preacher he could find to scream at
me, shake his finger in my face and bellow, “On page such-and-such
you have a character say such-and-such about the Bible. Where did
you get that information?” I would have had to say that I read it in
a book by a biblical scholar. But I realized that would be a lame
answer. I needed to be able to cite original sources.
So, in order to double check every statement in
Angel that might have been challenged, I re-read a current
issue of King James and took detailed notes, summarizing what
is said and done in each book, chapter by chapter. This led to an
investigation of other versions of the Bible. And one day while
doing research in the library, I stumbled across a very rare book
titled The Apocryphal New Testament, by Montague Rhodes
James, Provost of Eton, published by Oxford University Press in
1924. I was absolutely fascinated by all those gospel stories that
had once circulated among early Christian churches, but were later
condemned as heretical and suppressed. I began making detailed notes
about this book, and after I had accumulated over a hundred pages of
notes, it suddenly occurred to me that I had the beginnings of a
whole new book! Moreover, it was unlike any other biblical book on
the market. I reasoned that if I expanded my research, this
reference book might be even more commercial than Angel’s Flight.
So, while Angel continued making the
rounds, I devoted full time to researching the biblical book. I
stumbled across another treasure trove in a Christian bookstore,
titled The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H.
Charlesworth of Princeton University, and published by Doubleday as
part of the Anchor Bible Series. These are alternate stories
that were edited out of the Old Testament.
I had already written summaries of all the books
in my copy of King James, so I then summarized all the
stories from the apocryphal and pseudepigriphal books. Next I read
several dozen books about the history of Bibles, the many different
versions of it, which books were included in various versions and
translations, (including several revisions of King James),
who probably wrote each book, where and when, who redacted it, etc.
By around 2001 I had finished the biblical book
and began struggling to think of a name for it. It is basically like
Cliff Notes for a course in biblical literature. I knew that anybody
who claims to “believe the Bible” is simply admitting that they’ve
never read it. And the reason they’ve never read it is because it’s
unreadable. I make it easy for everybody to know what is in all the
versions by simply telling them, so they don’t have to make the
herculean effort that I did in hacking through all that tangle of
turgid prose. Finally I decided to just call the book what it is:
Everything About the Bible That You Never Had Time to Look Up
(or the patience and determination).
I wanted the book to be interesting and
informative to believers and non-believers alike, so I was very
careful to adopt a scholarly tone and to be scrupulously objective
in telling each story. There isn’t a word in it that any believer
might find objectionable. But because it explains a lot more about
the Bible than most believers want to know, all the religious
publishers turned it down.
In 2002, I published it myself through X-Libris,
and among non-believers it has sold quite well.
PageOneLit.com: What did you learn from writing Everything
About the Bible That You Never Had to Look Up?
W. Milt Timmons: I have found that it’s very interesting to be a
biblical expert in a land where people talk endlessly about the
Bible, but hardly anybody knows the first thing about it. Its
impenetrable language and contradictory statements make it into a
national Rorschach test – into which everyone projects their own
opinions and then claims that it says whatever they want it to say.
They can get away with any kind of nonsense, supremely confident
that nobody will bother to dispute them, because nobody else has
read it either.
Perhaps the most important single thing I
learned is that there is no such thing as THE Bible. There are
dozens of different versions – which don’t even contain the same
books! They all contain some of the same books, but some
contain books that are not in other versions, etc. Which books are
included depends on whether a given volume is Eastern Orthodox,
Ethiopian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant. Furthermore, it
depends on when the volume was published and in what language. The
reason there are so many different versions and editions is that
each one is financed by some religious organization which wants a
version that supports their particular set of doctrines.
Most Americans seem to assume that the 1881
version of the King James Bible magically appeared all over the
world one day, like Easter eggs – as a gift directly from God. It
never seems to occur to them that it is actually an anthology of
books that were written by many different people, with widely
different theological concepts, over a period of more than a
thousand years – copied, redacted, and edited again by hundreds of
anonymous scribes.
Another important thing that I got out of this
research was that I had never heard of those apocryphal and
pseudepigriphal stories, and I found most of them more interesting
than the ones that finally ended up in contemporary Bibles.
I watch many programs on the History Channel
that deal with the Bible, during which they are constantly referring
to biblical texts that most people never heard of. I always get out
a copy of Everything... to double check the accuracy of their
claims, and about half the time they are wrong. Even worse, almost
everything a preacher says about the Bible is wrong. The most
blatant example of this is the war churches are currently waging
against abortion – “because God says it is murder.” Actually, it was
the Catholic Church that first declared it murder during the Sixth
Ecumenical Council of 678. The only thing any Bible says about
abortion is that if someone accidentally causes a wife to miscarry
because of an act of negligence, the culprit must reimburse the
husband for the loss of his property. All the rest is
interpretation.
Since the Bible has become so politicized, and
since Americans are so biblically illiterate, I could possibly make
a good living by giving lectures on its history. Every time I’ve
done that, I’ve drawn large audiences and sold a fair number of
books. But I don’t like giving speeches; I’d rather be writing
another book.
PageOneLit.com: What’s next?
W. Milt Timmons: I just finished a sci-fi, action-adventure book,
called 2084 – A Tale of Post America. This was my first
attempt at a commercial novel. I wrote Angel’s Flight
to see if I could write a high quality literary novel, and from the
reviews I have received so far, I guess I was at least somewhat
successful. With 2084, I wanted to see if I could write a
blockbuster that would be suitable for adaptation to a big-budget
Hollywood film. Right now it’s making the rounds of agents and
publishers.
The story takes place after a runaway greenhouse
effect, in which the global temperature is up by eight degrees and
the oceans are up by eighteen feet. All national and state
governments around the world have collapsed, and civilization has
reverted to a system of city-states. I wrote the basic outline of
that book more than twenty years ago, and I’ve been collecting
scientific data ever since.
In 2006 I made an 8,000 mile trip around the
Western states, taking pictures and dictating descriptions of each
area I drove through, and how I thought it would look in 80 years.
During those twenty years of research, most people had never even
heard of global warming. But the very week I got back from my
fact-finding trip, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth came
out. Now even congress is taking the problem seriously.
Next I want to write another historical novel,
but this time going far back in history, to the year 325 and the
Council of Nicea. I’d like to know more about the people and events
that created the Bible and the Christian Church.
PageOneLit.com: What was the last book you read?
W. Milt Timmons:
I’m so busy writing and trying to market my books
that I don’t have much time to read for pleasure. Other than the
dozens of computer manuals I’ve been forced to slog through just to
keep my business going, I guess the last book I read for pleasure
was a non-fiction book titled, The Literary Animal – Evolution
and the Nature of Narrative. Before that I read Thus Spake
Zarathustra and What Nietzsche Really Said. I think the
only fiction I have read over the last few years was for the purpose
of analyzing the style of the author and the narrative structure of
their books. Some of the books I read were by my favorite authors;
others I read only because they had become Best Sellers.
PageOneLit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do
they enhance your writing?
W. Milt Timmons: Before I retired I guess my only hobby was working on
Angel’s Flight. After retirement I was finally able to do a
lot of things I had previously never had time for. Mainly, I became
more active in several rationalist organizations: I produced a
series of radio programs for one group. For twelve years I was
co-producer of an independent public affairs TV program, called
“Food for Thought.” I became active in the philosophy club of Los
Angeles, and a philosophical discussion group in Mensa. But most of
all, I was a volunteer at The Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles
(CFI-West). There, I was instrumental in moving operations from
their rented quarters near Marina Del Rey to the new building on
Hollywood Blvd. I was their media operations director for several
years. I was also one of the founders of their Independent
Investigations Group (IIG), and I participated in many inquiries
into “Claims of the Paranormal,” filed by people who wanted to apply
for the million dollar challenge offered by the James Randi
Foundation. I still attend all of the functions at CFI.
After publications of Everything About the
Bible... and Angel’s Flight, however, I resigned from the
IIG to devote full time to marketing those two books and to
finishing 2084.
Maintaining and expanding my website, in order
to publicize my books, takes a lot of time. And now I’m transferring
all of my old films and television programs to DVDs – some of which
I hope to put on my website.
I watch very little television – mostly the
Science and History Channels, but I try to see all the new films
that have received generally favorable reviews.
