When I first began writing The Ignoble Lie, I wasn't setting out to rewrite history—I was trying to understand it.
Why do some stories survive while others are silenced? Why do certain truths rise to the surface while others are buried beneath centuries of dogma, doctrine, and politics? These questions led me into a labyrinth of ancient texts, suppressed gospels, Vatican secrets, and ideological power plays—elements that all found their way into the DNA of the novel.
One of the early plot points in The Ignoble Lie involves a lost book—a cache of testimony gospels allegedly written by Jesus' blood brothers. These texts challenge the divinity of Christ and suggest his resurrection was a political strategy rather than a miracle. If that sounds like fiction, it might be—but it's also rooted in real scholarly debates.
In researching the novel, I spent time with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and early Christian writings like the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Judas. These texts don't always line up with canonical teachings. In fact, many were deemed heretical and deliberately destroyed or hidden by the early Church. And yet they raise compelling questions: What did "Jesus" actually teach? Who controlled the narrative? And what voices were left out?
For all its sacred weight, the Old Testament is a profoundly human document—edited, redacted, and shaped over centuries by political agendas, cultural biases, and theological battles. In The Ignoble Lie, the characters grapple with the unsettling possibility that the truth about history—and even about the divine—has been systematically manipulated. Scholars have long debated the historical existence of figures like Abraham, Moses, and even King David, whose names echo through scripture but leave little archaeological trace. The Old Testament often seems less a record of literal events and more a tapestry of origin myths, national identity, and moral instruction. That doesn't make it worthless. But it does make it potentially unreliable as a historical source—and dangerously powerful when treated as one. The novel leans into this tension, asking what happens when faith is founded, not just on mystery, but on myth presented as fact.
That blurring of myth and history isn't just an academic issue—it's a tool of modern power. In The Ignoble Lie, political and religious leaders exploit biblical narratives not for spiritual insight, but for control. When the President of the United States invokes scripture to justify an executive order declaring America a "Judeo-Christian nation," or when a Vatican faction seeks to suppress an alternative gospel to preserve institutional authority, the novel exposes a deeper truth: those who control the past shape the future. Sacred texts, when treated as literal and infallible history, become ideological weapons—used to enforce cultural dominance, suppress dissent, and draw lines between who belongs and who doesn't. In this way, the unreliable history of the Bible isn't just a relic of the ancient world—it's a live wire running through the veins of today's geopolitics.
This is the danger—and the power—of sacred storytelling. When we forget that scripture was written by people with pens, not etched by lightning into stone, we risk mistaking authority for authenticity. The Ignoble Lie doesn't aim to discredit faith, but to challenge the machinery that uses faith as a mask for domination. By peeling back the layers of history, the novel invites readers to ask harder questions: Who decides what we call truth? What gets preserved, and what gets erased? And how much of what we believe today was designed not to liberate, but to govern? In the end, maybe the most dangerous lies aren't the ones shouted from podiums or carved into monuments, but the ones we've whispered to ourselves for so long, we've forgotten they were ever stories.
If you're intrigued by history's shadows and the secrets buried beneath the sands of time, The Ignoble Lie might be your next read. And if you've already read it, I'd love to hear what you think: What lies do we still live by? And what truths are waiting to be rediscovered?
Best,
Matthew