I was excited to buy this book. I’m familiar with the Newton Institute’s amazing work (had a fabulous regression done by a Newton-certified hypnotherapist), and how they’re opening up our understanding of how the afterlife works. Now here was another person going at it from a slightly different point of view.
Unfortunately, the informality of the investigation bothered me to great extent. Martini comes across as an egocentric, eager to push the idea that he’s BFF with the biggest stars around, earthly and spiritual. He seems to be more interested in showing off his superfamous bud, “Jay Zeus” (really? Are we in high school?), instead of thoroughly investigating what he can learn from him and the entities around him.
Problem #1 is: When the author is conducting the interview, now and then he'll ask leading questions. Several times he asks the subject if Jesus died on the cross. "Yes," comes the answer. In this case he'll ask again until they say "no," and then continue from there, in a direction that reinforces his hypothesis. (Like I said: only sometimes.)
Martini is a firm believer in the St. Issa stuff. I first ran into that about 25 years ago and thought it was interesting, but that I'd wait for some solid proof to roll in before making a decision about it. Martini visited a temple in Ladakh a while back, and a monk told him that Jesus had studied there for ten years. That’s hearsay, not the evidence he thinks it is.
It doesn’t seem to bother Martini that some subjects say that after the crucifixion Jesus left on a boat with Mary, while others say he took a separate boat and they didn’t get back together for a few years.
Anyway like I said, this book has some crazy interesting stuff in it that keeps coming up from medium to medium. However:
Problem #2: The book has LOUSY LOUSY LOUSY editing. It's like reading the subtitles during a live CNN interview. Words are misspelled when they aren't just the wrong words entirely (though close). "Went" becomes "want" or some other word that throws the sentence for a loop.
Punctuation? Whoever was responsible for proofing this book has never taken a class in English punctuation. Very often the entire meaning of a sentence, much less a paragraph, changes when you realize, "Hey, there's a comma missing; he's talking to someone instead of about someone," or "Why is that semi-colon there? Those are two entirely separate thoughts." There are zero brackets, though the text requires them to be used often. Pieces are scattered willy-nilly, with the text pointing to such-and-such being included after that portion of the text, when they were really chapters and chapters before, etc. Was the staff in such a hurry that they couldn’t do their basic work?
The complete lack of proofreading drove me crazy. If you’re purporting to set our culture on its ear, at least hire a proofreader so the message comes across clearly.
The interviewer/author will abruptly change subjects and interviewee without making a note. He'll go from, say, talking to Person X about subject Y to talking with Jesus about subject Z without a word that gives us a heads-up. You're saying, "Wha? Who?" and then "Oh, he's done it again." And you sigh.
We'll be checking out a spiritual council, and there will be Mary. Cool! You're waiting for her to be asked some questions, but he'll only say, "Can you bring Jay in?" He likes to call Jesus "Jay Zeus." [roll eyes] Well, that's fine for later. Right now I want to hear from Mary!
Jesus tells us at a couple (not all) points that his name was Issa. (In another session he gives a different name, something along the lines of "Elijah" but not quite that, and still close to "Issa.") His best friend calls him "Issie." After he recovered from the crucifixion he called himself "Joseph" after his stepfather. (And his bio dad was Panthera, a Roman soldier who ran out on Mary after she got pregnant. Where did Martini get this info? Did I miss that? I did see the ONE session where he asks, “Any your father was Panthera, right?” which is a leading question.)
There's a portion in here about the Mary who went by the name of Magda, Mary Magdalene. Also quite interesting, especially since we also talk to Magda's good friend who ministered to Jesus as he was recovering in a cave from his ordeal.
According to this, Magda was Jesus' wife (it was a love match), mother of his five kids, three of which survived into adulthood. One interview with Magda says the Gospel of Mary is something she wrote herself. In total, the interviews about her say she was quite the important spiritual speaker back then, with a huge following of her own. The marriage had to be kept secret to provide safety for her.
The upshot of this review is that I want to non-fatally throttle Martini and force him to hire a decent editor so he can republish these books in understandable form. Maybe in the future he can also not be so leading in his questions so the interviews become more professional– dare I say, scientific? If you’re going to present startling new information, do it clearly and without bias.
And perhaps when Jesus says he and some folks hid important books in a cave somewhere, a question might be posed as to WHERE that is, so investigators can check into it.
All in all, an interesting book with quite interesting premises, but done in an extremely sloppy way. If there’d been some kind of control in the questions and questioning, and if there’d been even a shred of proofreading involved, that would upgrade my opinion of this.
B E Blenner-HassettReviewed in Canada on January 4, 2013
