effect imagining the possibility of a married Jesus could have on these traditions. How does imagining new possibilities affect realities in the present?
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I AM DEEPLY AND REVERENTIALLY aware that Jesus is a figure to whom millions of people are devoted and that his impact on the history of Western civilization is incomparable, affecting non-Christians and Christians both. Given that, it may be useful to comment on how I went about writing his character.
It was clear to me from the beginning that I would portray Jesus as fully human. I wanted the story to be about Jesus the man and not God the Son, who he would become. Early Christianity debated whether Jesus was human or divine, a matter it settled in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea and again at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, when doctrines were adopted stating Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Nevertheless, his humanity diminished as he became more and more glorified. Writing from a novelist’s perspective and not a religious one, I was drawn to his humanity.
There’s no record of Jesus from the age of twelve until the age of thirty. His presence in the novel coincides in part with this unrecorded time period, with two notable exceptions: his baptism and his death. I invented the actions and words of Jesus during the unknown years the only way I could, through conjecture and reasonable extrapolation.
My portrayal of Jesus comes from my own interpretation of who he was based on my research of the historical Jesus and first-century Palestine, on scriptural accounts of his life and teachings, and on other commentaries about him. It was something of a wonder to discover that the human Jesus has so many different faces and that people, even historical Jesus scholars, tend to view him through the lens of their own needs and proclivities. For some he’s a political activist. For others, a miracle worker. He’s viewed as rabbi, social prophet, religious reformer, wisdom teacher, nonviolent revolutionary, philosopher, feminist, apocalyptic preacher, and on and on.
How would I fashion Jesus’s character? I envisioned him in his twenties as a thoroughly Jewish man living under Roman occupation, and as a husband working to support his family, but harboring an evolving pull inside to leave and begin a public ministry. I depicted him as a mamzer; that is, one who suffers some degree of ostracism—in Jesus’s case, because of his questioned paternity. I also visualized Jesus as an emerging social prophet and a rabbi whose dominant message was love and compassion and the coming of God’s kingdom, which initially he viewed as an eschatological event establishing God’s rule on earth, and ultimately as a state of being within the hearts and minds of people. I saw him as a nonviolent political resister who takes on the role of Messiah, the promised Jewish deliverer. And central to the character I’ve drawn is Jesus’s empathy for the excluded, the poor, and outcasts of all kinds, as well as his uncommon intimacy with his God.
It feels important to point out that the character of Jesus in these pages provides a mere glimpse of the complexity and fullness of who he was, and that glimpse is based on my interpretation of him, which is woven into a fictional narrative.
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THE STORY IS IMAGINED, but I’ve tried through extensive research to be true to its historical, cultural, political, and religious backdrop. There are instances, though, in which I veer from the record or from accepted tradition for narrative purposes. The more noteworthy incidences follow.
Herod Antipas moved the capital of Galilee from Sepphoris to Tiberias somewhere around 18 to 20 CE. In the novel, this move didn’t take place until 23 CE. Sepphoris, a wealthy city of approximately thirty thousand, was a mere four miles from Nazareth, prompting many scholars to speculate that Jesus was exposed to a sophisticated, Hellenized, multilingual world. Scholars also conjecture that Jesus and his father, Joseph, both of whom were builders, may have found contract work in Sepphoris as Herod Antipas rebuilt the city during Jesus’s adolescent years. It’s unlikely, though, that he would have found work on the Roman theater, as portrayed in the novel. According to a number of archaeologists, the theater was constructed close to the end