The Bastard

Controversial Novel Fills in Decades Missing from Gospel Story

The Bastard tells of the absent years in the gospel account of Jesus. In this thoroughly researched and action-packed historical epic, Jesus escapes his bullied childhood in Nazareth by becoming a stable boy traveling with the Roman cavalry to Germania. He rises to become an army medicus and, finally, a gladiator, before rejecting violence and returning to Judea.

The Bastard realistically portrays a human Jesus as an outcast character caught in a clash of cultures during an age of habitual violence. It explores the events that transformed a boy of the 1st-century Jewish social order, with its Law commanding "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, fracture for fracture," into a teacher with revolutionary ideas about forgiveness and non-retaliation. The redeeming power of his love for Mary Magdalene is central to this tale.