Krishna
Steven Randall, the owner of his eponymous law firm is landing at JFK. He learns from his office that George Wheeler, a religious book publisher wishes to see him within the next 48 hours – perhaps to become a new client of his. He seems to want Steven to handle ‘the second resurrection’ (of Christ of course). 
Steve in the meanwhile has gone to visit his sick father where he gets his world shaken; first, his father on his deathbed – though he recovers later; second, he hears that his little girl Julie is a drug addict and was expelled from school; third he hears that his wife wants to marry the psychiatrist who treated Julie and refuses angrily to grant his wife the divorce she needs to remarry.
His friend Tom, who is a preacher too, expresses doubts about organized religion. Steve is shocked.
He goes to meet the publisher in New York and has been told earlier by his secretary that the meeting is about ‘The Second Resurrection’. He meets the people, especially the publisher but since he sees no significance of the deal, he refuses to take it on.
Whereupon,, the publisher takes a risk based on gut feeling and informs him of the new find of writing of John, hitherto unknown, which would rock the Christian World. He found a manuscript that explains the mysterious absence in the life of Jesus, the fact that he did not die on the cross and that he lived and preached for another nineteen years when he died. Stunned, Steve Randall agrees to take the account and leaves in a boat to Southampton.
On the way he meets Naomi, the secretary of Wheeler. She seduces him to a strange sex short of coitus. He also is trying to convince a sceptical scholar Florian to take up the work with him, as the latter’s expertise is definitely needed for the work they were undertaking. But Florian loathes Dr Jeffries, who is in Wheeler’s team.
A nasty journalist, Cedric Plummer, meets Randall as soon as he is in the hotel, even before checking in, and frightens him with how much he knows already threatens to kill the project unless he got an exclusive. It is doubly disturbing because Wheeler had told him just minutes earlier that no one knew he was in Amsterdam.
When he insists on taking the only copy of the document and leaves, he stupidly insists on walking to the hotel though a driver and a car was provided and is attacked. He barely manages to save the document and himself. When he reads is in his hotel room, he realizes the explosive nature of it. Jesus did not die on the cross. He lived on ‘for many years’ but ‘did not preach in Jerusalem and wandered as far as Italy – Rome no less’ and was seen by multiple folks.
The disciples (mainly James, who is a brother) decided to keep quiet about it for propaganda value and to protect Jesus being captured and crucified again. Since His appearance also had changed considerably after crucifixion, no one who met Him thereafter recognized Him until He introduced Himself. Hmmmm….
Steve now finds his faith revived somewhat. He calls his wife and gives his consent for her to remarry. When Darlene interprets it as a license for them to marry, he sets her straight.
He immediately meets Angela and falls hard for her and continues to have sex with almost no interruption. Meanwhile the publisher Wheeler says that he now has a miracle on his hands. The girl who was sent to help Steve was wheelchair bound but when she read the new version of the bible (handed over by Steve himself) she started walking normally. Naturally Steve and the doctor attending her are sceptical.
He meets a pastor de Vroom who is opposed to the crew and hears from him that the entire group he is associating himself with are a bunch of frauds. That man has an interesting viewpoint where he wants to take Christianity forward without the miracle mumbo jumbo and wants to focus on the good messages in the story for society. He thinks that is the only way that the religion could survive in these sceptical times and the ‘new bible’ that they are willing to publish will take the religion back to, well, biblical times.
He discovers the mole in his team – it turns out to be the librarian who is a partner of the journalist enemy of Steve. However, that man threatens to bring down the whole edifice of their assumption if he is dismissed and Steve, following his hint, realizes that there is a large flaw in the book. He realizes that Jesus could not have walked through the plains of the region because the year he is supposed to have walked across the fields, the area was a deep lake!
Very curious now, he goes and meets the scholar who verified the papyrus as genuine and discovers that this authentication does not extend to the ink. And the foremost expert of printed ink was not even consulted. When questioned, Angela lies – in a clever manner but Steve finds out accidentally that she does. His whole sense of reality comes crumbling down again. Infuriated, he vows to get to the bottom of the whole thing.
He invites the foremost expert in these matters to view the scroll. Just before the abbot arrives, the specific page of the scroll mysteriously ‘disappears’ and then ‘found’. The abbot is satisfied that it is genuine and just the translation is wrong. We, readers, smell a rat.
So does Randall. When he finds the picture of the scroll that was found, he notices some discrepancy and tries to investigate, only to be shot down by Randall. He goes to the photographer to find that the original pictures have been destroyed in a ‘freak fire accident’ and also his copy of the old picture was ‘somehow misplaced’ and the new picture is suspect.
Wheeler is furious that he is not listening to him and he then confronts Angela, who gives a weird story that ‘she lied only to bring him back to the path of faith’. He seems to accept it as genuine and asks her to take him to her father. They go to Italy, only for him to find out that her father, Professor Monti, is now an inmate in an asylum.
Meanwhile, de Vroom meets him and shows him fresh proof that the document is a hoax perpetrated by a vengeful forger who was a priest and has a huge grudge against the Church and wants to fool them with forgery. According to de Vroom, the dissident priest, he is the one who fooled Monti into believing the scroll is real only to go mad when he found that his life’s crowning glory is a fake – when the imposter requested more money from him to keep silent.
He decides to do some ‘detective work’ to find this man and get to the truth. This is the problem with Wallace’s works. The heroes do some James Bond type of solo work and triumph, even though they are rich and in a position to bring a lot of resources to the table. But realizing that this was written in the sixties and seventies, you kind of nod and say ‘That was the norm then’.
And he keeps trusting everything he hears if it sounds like truth. Ah, those simple times!
To continue, Randall goes and finds out where the clever forger xxx is and finds him. He convinces that man to trust him and for a specified amount of money, that man agrees to come and show him the proof. He calls Wheeler and tries to tell him of the new development only to be faced with a tirade of de Vroom’s web of lies and how Randall is being taken in.
When he waits for Lebraun to show up with the proof, Randall finds he has been stood up and begins to doubt that the forgery is real. However, he goes to find out where Lebraun lives and hears that the man was killed in a ‘hit and run’ accident. Disturbed by too many coincidences, he goes to the morgue to identify the man and gets some clues about the possible hidden place of the evidence in the catacombs. He decides – true to form – to go and find out for himself.
He manages to just unearth one fragment of the papyrus at the place that Lebraun mentioned. He calls de Vroom to tell hm that he is coming to France to see him and is arrested at the airport since he smuggled a priceless artifact. In the court, he is stunned to see that de Vroom has negotiated his way into Resurrection Two and he was deported to USA after detaining him in jail until the announcement was made officially. He was framed effectively and was powerless to stop the fraud that he knew it was from being made official.
The story then goes in another direction and from there. This is very near the end and Irving Wallace goes into one of his muddles that seem to pervade every story of his. In books like The Second Lady, the muddle works brilliantly. Here is it merely annoying.
Also annoying is how Steve, a very rich and intelligent man, goes by himself, solo, to investigate almost everything.
It has its interesting parts and so, let us say 4/ 10
= = Krishna