Barnhardt’s ‘Gospel’: a Loose Canon : Lost Scripture is at the center of Laguna writer’s new novel, which he says is not just about religion, but an adventure.

Not many novelists would dare to begin a book with a purported Christian gospel written in a pompous and stilted tone “reminiscent of the Byzantine church historian Eusebius.” With footnotes, no less.

But then few novelists would attempt so ambitious a novel as Wilton Barnhardt’s “Gospel,” (St. Martin’s Press; $24.95), which weighs in at nearly 800 pages, spans 17 locales, moves in and out of the first and 20th centuries and is so chock-full of religious history and lore as to require an index.

Literary daredevil that he is, Barnhardt even has the Holy Spirit herself making parenthetical comments throughout the book.

“The thing I try to communicate--and if I say it till I’m blue in the face it’s probably still not enough--this is a fun book,” says Barnhardt. “This book actually is a page turner: There is an adventure. For those who never want to read a single footnote, there is still a book there for them.”

Indeed, Entertainment Weekly calls “Gospel” “scholarly mischief . . . a comic catechism for doubting Thomases.” It’s a multifaceted story providing, as Booklist says, “acerbic, funny, insightful musings (sometimes in the voice of God) on religion’s radiance and wrath, the death-grip that is has on us, and the distinctions all people must make between Faith and Truth.”

The gospel in question, which is interwoven between the novel’s long chapters, is supposed to have been written by Matthias, the little-known 13th disciple who was chosen after Judas betrayed Christ. Although the novel’s gospel is fictitious, Barnhardt says there really was a gospel written by Matthias but it was considered heretical and disappeared in the fourth century.

It’s this “lost gospel” that University of Chicago theology professor Patrick O’Hanrahan has been after for the past 40 years.

As the novel opens, O’Hanrahan--a “bitter, alcoholic, eccentric genius”--seems to have disappeared during his latest “hush-hush expedition” searching for the ancient papyrus scroll. With O’Hanrahan having racked up thousands of unauthorized dollars on the department credit card, the department sends graduate student Lucy Dantan to England to find him and bring him back. In the process, the young and repressed Lucy finds herself caught up in the potentially dangerous search for the gospel of an all-too-human disciple who has lost his faith.

As he expected in writing a book in which the characters frankly discuss the less glorious aspects of religious history, Barnhardt has already begun receiving letters from readers.

“So far, it’s about 90 to 10,” he said. “Ninety being ‘Thank you for writing this book. I have fallen from the church and now I see the difference between spirituality and religion.’ The other 10 are fundamentalists desperately worried for the condition of my soul.”

Barnhardt, who moved to Laguna Beach from New Orleans to finish writing “Gospel” last fall, is in the middle of a cross-country promotional tour for the book.

It’s the usual author tour but with a distinct twist: Instead of flying from city to city, Barnhardt is driving. Before leaving again for Denver and points east last week, he already had crossed the country once, racking up 11,500 miles in his compact Chevy truck.

“I put a shell on the back so if I ever get stranded I can stay in the back of my truck.” said Barnhardt, 32, who flies only when he has to. “It’s a real medicine show at the moment. I’ve got a big poster and a box of books, and I feel like I’m selling it from the back.”

Barnhardt was seated on a sofa in his apartment facing an open sliding glass door offering a sunny view of the ocean and Coast Highway. Dressed entirely in black--from his sport coat to his pointy-toed boots--he seemed as though he’d be more at home in a dimly lit New York cafe than within walking distance of the volleyball net on Main Beach.

Pleasantly opinionated and witty, Barnhardt is a spirited conversationalist who makes references to Henry James (the subject of his doctoral thesis) as easily as he does to show business (the subject of his next novel).

After growing up in Winston-Salem, N.C., Barnhardt received an English degree from Michigan State University in 1982. He moved to New York at 21, wound up covering the stock car racing beat at Sports Illustrated and, “on a whim,” applied to Oxford after seeing a PBS special on the university.

While studying American literature at Oxford, Barnhardt wrote “Emma Who Saved My Life,” his 1989 comic first novel, which he wryly describes as “sort of my coming-of-age New York novel. It wasn’t autobiographical, it was biographical-- I was basically using all my friends’ more interesting lives.”

The idea for writing “Gospel” coalesced during a nine-month trip in 1989 to 21 countries on four continents during which Barnhardt visited monasteries and other religious sites.

“I had suspicions I was going to write this book even while I was writing ‘Emma,’ ” he said. “I hadn’t done the traveling for it, I hadn’t done the research for it, but I had in my mind a sense of something set in a sort of academic black market of illegal antiquities and it sort of developed from there.”

Barnhardt said he was “surprised at how moral, how spiritual a book, it turned out to be. I was content to muse on the subject of cultures and religion and thread an adventure story through it, but as I got into it--particularly as I came up with the idea of having the Holy Spirit herself narrate the thing--the book took on an entirely different kind of dimension.”

He said he was about a third of the way into the novel before he realized “here I am writing a book about God, and the narrator has the god’s eye view; it seemed that the prose was almost suggesting it was God and I thought, ‘Well, let’s not be halfway about this: Let’s go ahead and have the Holy Spirit” interject parenthetically in the narrative.

Barnhardt said he “didn’t have the nerve to write as God. No one has ever really pulled that off very well--Dante or Milton--and I didn’t quite have the temerity to put words in Jesus’ mouth, so I decided I’d take the odd person out of the Trinity: I would take the Holy Spirit.”

And once he did his “homework” on the Holy Spirit, Barnhardt said, he discovered that “it’s a theologically sound notion that it was probably a feminine gender.”

The Hebrew word for spirit is feminine gender, he added. “And, of course, there’s a lot of attempt to bring a feminine aspect back into God now for modern theologians as well as other traditions. But I think there was always a lot of feminine in God. It’s just that we don’t have the genders in the (English) language to make this very obvious to us.”

The Holy Spirit’s interjections into the narrative are often quite humorous.

In the opening scene, Lucy Dantan’s jet to England runs into severe turbulence, and she prays that she not die “in the prime of life,” earnestly promising to “dedicate my life to something or make some kind of promise.” To which the all-knowing Holy Spirit parenthetically responds: “Over Newfoundland, you promised Us two years with Mother Teresa. What do We get now?”

Barnhardt said that putting the Holy Spirit into the narrative is what gives the novel its “moral core.”

“It sounds like a gimmick until you get to the middle of the book when these characters start coming up on real spiritual crises and actually begin to talk to the Holy Spirit,” he said.

Although Barnhardt said he doesn’t take “the recognized church very seriously” in his book--”In fact, I do beat up on it quite a bit, all forms of it”--he stresses that he takes the need for religion seriously.

“I do not laugh at the notion that people want to find a God. Because what are they asking for really? They’re looking for some moral order to their lives: How should I live? They’re trying to answer big and important questions, and better that people want to answer these questions than they don’t,” he said.

“There is no doubt a God, but I think to quote Paul, you see through a glass darkly: We all have it maybe 20% right. Everybody has their miracles and their healings and their great spiritual moments of revelation and yet we don’t know the whole picture, and I’m content to leave it at that.

“I think for the sake of tolerance and everybody getting on with each other in the world that’s how everybody should leave it.”