Lawyer with Texas Panhandle ties brings religious texts to the public
By
Mike Haynes
How many attorneys does it take
to lead a successful $9 billion lawsuit against two pharmaceutical companies,
appear in a movie with a Hollywood star, donate $6 million to a law school, talk
on a TV business show, host Christmas parties for 10,000 people, build a
miniature railroad and display a full-size
Doctor Who time machine on his
property?
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| Lanier Theological Library |
Add being written about in Texas
Techsan, The American Lawyer and Christianity Today magazines, publishing a
Christian book, teaching an 800-person Sunday school class, building a chapel
modeled after a 1,500-year-old church and a library with around 105,000
theological volumes and owning original artwork from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books
and a piece of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It takes just one Texan: Mark
Lanier.
“I wanted to be a preacher,”
said the graduate of Lubbock’s Mackenzie Junior High and Coronado High School,
head of the Lanier Law Firm and creator of the Lanier Theological Library next
to his house in a Houston suburb. But after earning a degree in biblical
languages at David Lipscomb University in Nashville in 1981, he took the advice
of a Lubbock preacher that “I should be a lawyer and still teach or preach on
the side, and then I could always do it because I wanted to and not because I
have to.”
He’s handled both his law career
and his spiritual work in a big way.
A judge reduced that 2014, $9
billion courtroom verdict against the Takeda and Eli Lilly drug firms substantially,
but it’s likely to remain in the many millions, and the case is only one of
many Lanier and his firm have won since his first big one, a $473
million verdict
in 1993 for a small oil company over a big oil firm. One of his firm’s attorneys
who has contributed to the success is former Amarillo resident Kevin Parker,
whose daughter, Amy, has worked on the library website.
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| Mark Lanier |
“I still practice law so I can
preach and teach without charging for it,” Lanier said in a July Houston
interview. “It’s just turned out to be a remunerative enough career that I can
also build libraries,” he said with a laugh.
Lanier is 54 but could pass for
34. Relaxing in his library office in an upholstered wingback chair, the
multimillionaire appeared more at home in a red Lacoste polo shirt, jeans and
Tom’s shoes with no socks than in his trial lawyer suit and tie. Draped over
the back of the chair was an afghan his grandmother had knitted. He said the
library resulted from his need for a place to research lessons for his weekly
Sunday school class at Champion Forest Baptist Church. He had floated the idea
with his wife, Becky, also an attorney and a Lubbock native.
He recalled going to his pastor
and saying, “‘I can’t talk my wife into this. If I build this, you’d use it,
wouldn’t you?’ And he says, ‘Sure, I think a lot of people would.’” So in 2010,
the research facility opened, a 17,000-square-foot building based on
architectural features at Oxford University.
To design the stone and wood
library, Lanier started by calling his son, then teaching at the 900-year-old British
institution, on a Tuesday and asking if he could fly over for a Friday Oxford
tour. “I want you to figure out the seven prettiest libraries in Oxford, and I
need to see them,” he told his son. “So he shows me the libraries. I’ve got
pictures of him standing on a chair holding tape measures.”
Lanier flew back Saturday so he
could prepare for his Houston Sunday school class. “We started building on
Monday,” he recalled.
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| Amos fragment of Dead Sea Scroll |
“We’ve got 17 seminaries and
grad schools that use this as a principal research library,” he said. The library has about 85,000 books and 20,000
journals. It’s open to the public; nationally known author and pastor Lee
Strobel dropped in one day this July.
The facility also displays
Christian artifacts such as handwritten letters by author C.S. Lewis, artwork
from Lewis’ Narnia book series, two copies of the original 1611 King James
Bible and a rare fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“It’s the oldest copy of Amos in
the world today,” Lanier said. “It dates from the time of Christ. I’d like to
say I’ve got ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one,’ you know, the
Shema out of Deuteronomy. No, mine is, ‘Your wife will be a prostitute in the
city and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword.’ But hey, it’s in the
Bible.”
Similar fragments have sold for
up to $1.5 million.
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| The Stone Chapel |
Lanier’s property also includes
the Stone Chapel, a 275-seat building with two-foot-thick walls and colorful
ceiling art reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel. He modeled it after a Byzantine
church built around 500 A.D. in Cappadocia, modern-day Turkey. A miniature
train circles part of the 35 acres, and just outside the library are a full-size
copy of TARDIS, the police box in which Doctor Who travels in the British TV
science fiction series, made from specs from the show, plus a killer robot replica.
For two decades, Lanier has hosted
Christmas parties with live entertainment by celebrities from Bon Jovi to Faith
Hill and Tim McGraw. He appeared in the film, “Puncture,” starring Chris Evans
and based on one of his court victories. He gets Christian performer Phil
Keaggy to do music for his Sunday school presentations. He’s on first-name
terms with the host of Fox Business network’s “Varney & Co.”
The Texas Tech law school includes
the Mark and Becky Lanier Professional Development Center thanks to a $6
million donation.
But his first loves are his family and faith. He
spends hours on his Sunday class, which started with a focus on biblical
literacy and has covered church history and Old and New Testament surveys.
In 2014, he published
“Christianity on Trial: A Lawyer Examines the Christian Faith,” and he’s
working on more books, including one tentatively called “Atheism on Trial” and
a comparison of the teachings of Paul in light of modern science and knowledge.
He’s spent a year putting
together a sensible reorganization of the Bible. “You read through the Bible in
a year, you don’t even meet Jesus until mid-October,” he explained. Lanier’s
idea is to focus on the books of John, Acts and Revelation and include footnotes
that guide the reader to the rest of scripture that supports those writings. He
hopes to publish the reordered scripture in 2017.
“I call it the Context Bible,”
he said.
And Lanier invites world
scholars from varied backgrounds to lecture at the library or chapel. Past
speakers have included British authors Alister McGrath and N.T. Wright and U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Lanier flipped through the
library’s big sign-in book to show a visitor the page where Scalia had written
his name on Sept. 6, 2013. “I made him sign the book,” he said with a grin.
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| Mark Lanier shows Mike Haynes Antonin Scalia's signature. |
Lanier
Theological Library
14130
Hargrave Road
Houston,
TX 77070
(281)
477-8400
www.laniertheologicallibrary.org
www.lanierlawfirm.com
