Sarah's Reviews > The Damascus Way

The many storylines of T. Davis Bunn and Janette Oke’s Acts of Faith trilogy conclude in The Damascus Way.

Our protagonist is a new character, a young woman of mixed Greek, Syrian and Jewish heritage named Julia. She has grown up in a comfortable house with a gentle mother and a grandmotherly maidservant. There are only two ongoing problems in Julia’s world: her father, the wealthy trader Jamal, is doting but never around, and the people in the nearest village are cold to Julia when she goes to market. Her mother never evens leaves the house.

Eventually, our heroine learns that her mom is only Jamal’s mistress, and that he lives with his official wife and legitimate children in Damascus when he’s not accompanying his caravans across the desert. Helena, Julia’s mother, is well-aware of the situation and resigned to it—Jamal took her as a concubine years ago in exchange for helping her family out of debt—but the girl is enraged at her father for this ill use of them both.

Her whole world upended, Julia becomes friendly with the sect known as the People of the Way, whom her father reviles. (The title of the novel cleverly refers both to the famous road to Damascus, and the young Church there).

Here the thread of Julia’s fate tangles with that of Jacob, whom we know from the first two books. He’s about twenty now, and one of Jamal’s caravan guards. (Jamal doesn’t know about Jacob’s faith and would probably have never hired him had he known). Our friends Linux (whose name should be spelled Linus), Abigail, Alban and Martha (although not Leah, for some reason) are back, along with Dorcas, Abigail’s sweet little daughter by the late Stephen—warning: I will be ranting about this later. They have all left Jerusalem for good, both to spread the Gospel and to evade the Pharisees, especially one Saul of Tarsus, who wants all of them dead.

No content advisory needed. There is no real violence, no sexual content, and nothing else that would render the book inappropriate for a young teen reader.

The fictional aspects of the book find Bunn and Oke at the top of their game. They deftly juggle a huge cast of characters with a variety of dilemmas. Julia is the best protagonist in the series—easier to understand (and therefore root for) than Leah was at first, with an obvious motive. Unlike Abigail, who had no agency in her own book and barely any even now, Julia is proactive, even stubborn, and steers her own story admirably.

Julia’s banter with the combustible Jacob stands out from the other two pairings in the series nicely, more intense than the gentle courtship of Alban and Leah, but less so than the agonizing slow burn between (view spoiler)[Linux and Abigail (which is finally, finally reciprocal) (hide spoiler)]

Meanwhile we see the two women in Jamal’s life struggling to tolerate each other, while the merchant himself starts to feel the stirrings of a conscience for the first time.

So all the fictional characters get satisfying development, but the Biblical ones still fall flat (except Martha, who continues to be solid). We see Phillip meet with the Ethiopian eunuch here, which would have been a much more meaningful scene if we were given any characterizing information about Phillip up until now.

And poor St. Paul is so underserved. Despite being the main antagonist, he is given scarcely any page time. We hear of him and his cruel deeds, but we don’t see him in person until the climax of the book, when he falls from his horse.

Hiding the villain can work in something like The Lord of the Rings, where we barely see Sauron but plenty of his minions show up in person. This approach does not work for Paul because he’s not nearly that powerful, or even that evil. He’s much closer to a Zuko or a Kylo Ren—vengefully pursuing the heroes while wondering in his heart if they're right —and both of those characters are strong because we see them a lot. We get to know them.







They operate not out of bloodlust or greed but a deranged sense of honor, just like Paul, who was convinced that the Christians were truly evil and would possibly cause the extinction of the Jewish people. Paul is a watershed figure in both Christian and world history, and can’t be pushed to the side like this without greatly weakening the book. Yet the authors seem almost… bored of him. This puzzles me greatly.

One major flaw in the novel is carried over from The Hidden Flame: the very silly idea that St. Stephen himself was married, and fathered a child, after his conversion. Dorcas is a sweet child and I like having her in the story—Linux is so cute with her, in particular—but there is no reason on Earth for her parentage. Nothing in the story indicates that she needs to be Stephen’s daughter. She doesn’t even need to be Abigail’s biological daughter—in fact, making Dorcas adopted would have been a great way to show that Abby’s commitment to helping widows and orphans is genuine.

But speaking of Stephen reminds me. Why is he the only character in this saga who died?

I was willing to overlook this in the first volume, since it took place over about a fortnight and none of the authority figures knew what they were up against. It was fine in book two, since Stephen’s death was the warning that things had gotten real. But none of our fictional leads have been martyred, as of the story’s ending, and I find that mighty strange. Everyone who joined the faith knew that they could be killed for it. Of all the original Apostles, only John avoided a violent end, and even he finished his days exiled and imprisoned.

This was handled so well in The Robe, which takes place over the same timeframe as this trilogy and ends with two of the three leads being led to the archery fields of Caligula’s palace, there to meet the fate of St. Sebastian. Marcellus and Diana could have lived to old age as aristocrats, but they chose to die for their beliefs rather than live on in a sick culture and deny the truth. They sacrificed everything.



These characters, meanwhile…well, Alban and Linux sacrificed the army…and that’s about it.

This is a wholesome series with nice prose, but it doesn’t grasp the time period or culture it claims to portray. It’s not bad. But the vintage Biblical novels of Lloyd C. Douglas and Taylor Caldwell are a lot better.