God's Gold: A Quest for the Lost Temple Treasures of Jerusalem

The book presents a lot of fascinating facts for anyone interested in Roman and Jewish history. Kingsley knows his stuff. Away from his archaelogical roots, Kingsley still tells skillfuly the rather bizzare contemporary tales linked to the lost temple treasures. But the breathless chase to "find" the temple gold, promised in the title, is contrived and leads nowhere. The discussion of what might, or might not, now lie in the Vatican's secret archives fizzles out in a puzzling and frustrating way. One is ultimately left wishing that the book had promised just a plain good story rather than a "quest" in the manner of Indiana Jones. Do read it if you like obscure ancient history leavened with amusing contemporary accounts of crackpot theories.

Reading Kingsley's book is like taking a run through a pleasant countryside for hours on end only to find you've covered less than a mile. It's pleasant reading, but the author is in no hurry to get to the point. This is a work of popular archeological speculation. There is real evidence here and the archeological detective tracks God's Gold intact for over 500 years across the world to Byzantium. After that the proposed path it took rests entirely on speculation. He is tracking a real treasure that, if found, would shake the world with its implications and it could be where he says it is.

This book was quite a ride. Kingsley has a style that keeps the reader by his side throughout his trek. Pondering on age old travel journals and historical writings, he manages to make the past and present exist side by side. He has a very good scholarship, which makes God's Gold not only an adventure story, but a historical treatise as well. I would most certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in ancient history, Judaic or otherwise.

I picked up this book to read a man's personal quest and theory about the Lost Temple Treasure. That is exactly what I got and enjoyed every bit of it. I have a degree in History and professionaly have found that Kingsley has done a lot of research and investigating- that's worth a lot. If you are picking up this book because you think that the end will lead you to the POT OF GOLD, then don't bother, because anyone in this field knows that we do not know what happened to the treasure- you should stick with Indiana Jones for a feel good ending. However if you want to see a learned man obsessed with the past (as I have personally been there before) and taking all the steps that he knows to reconstruct a time gone by, than by all means enjoy this trip to far away lands in far away times-and who knows, maybe he's got it right.