Available to purchase – on Amazon.com – on Amazon.co.uk
The Gospel According to Tomàs – a novel by Oliver Peers
A journey of faith, doubt and self-discovery in the heart of Spain…
Tomàs is in trouble. He’s in seminary—training to be a priest. This may have been a mistake.
Mid-life, after years of indulgence and questionable choices, Tomàs sought clarity, a path to purity, to something true. But faith isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. His thoughts bristle—restless, relentless, even sexual. The confessional was meant to fix this. Instead, it unravels everything.
In Valladolid, Spain, under the weight of Church doctrine and his own tangled history, Tomàs wrestles with a brutal realization: if love is truth and truth is love—then the Church is wrong.
A novel of faith and failure, desire and self-deception, The Gospel According to Tomàs is an unflinching study of belief on the edge of collapse. With wry intelligence and piercing introspection, Oliver Peers delivers a vivid, fearless portrait of a man running out of places to hide.
For readers drawn to literary fiction, theological reckoning, and the uneasy intersection of faith, memory, and desire—reminiscent of the existential and philosophical fiction of Graham Greene, Rachel Cusk, and Julian Barnes.
A gripping, intelligent novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page.
Start reading The Gospel According to Tomàs today.
Available to purchase – on Amazon.com – on Amazon.co.uk
Jesus’ critique of the scribes and the Pharisees continues in today’s Gospel verses. The accusation is constant: they are hypocrites. The imagery in part remains constant: these hypocrites put on outward shows of purity, and yet their hearts are corrupt and their behaviour is corrupt. This imagery now develops. Woe unto you! For you are as painted tombs, all white and purportedly pure and true on the outside, while within the dead flesh rots […]
The Discourse of the Mission continues as Jesus mandates his disciples to preach the good news that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. This is a wonderful, new message. For other Jews, the Kingdom to come remained far in the future. It would come after they had done their own part. The Pharisees believed that the Kingdom would come once the Law were perfectly observed, the Essenes when the country would have purified itself. For Jesus, the time is already fulfilled. Independently of any good works the people could do, the Kingdom of God is here already, as a completely gratuitous gift of God. What is now required is to teach the people to perceive this fact. This will mean to look at the world in a new way [ … ]
Many of the Jews of Christ’s time, including the disciples of John the Baptist, followed complicated rituals of fasting and purification, elaborated to the point where they could obscure genuine piety. It is noted that the followers of Christ do not follow such rituals. This must have seemed particularly strange to the followers of John. After all, John foretold Christ’s coming and saw that he was the Messiah as he began his ministry. Later, John’s uncertainty is such that he will send from prison to ask Christ if he is indeed the one who is to come. The reality of Christ present and the manner of his ministry must have been confusing and troubling to the Jews [ … ]
