A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
A historically informed novel follows an imagined contemporary of Jesus through the social and political world of Galilee.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It gives social history human scale and lets readers feel why ideas about kingdom, purity, resistance, and power mattered in lived conditions. The form offers an unusually approachable bridge between scholarship and imagination.
Good starting place if…
Historical Jesus scholarship feels abstract and you would rather enter the villages, pressures, factions, hopes, and dangers of Galilee through a story.
Know before you begin…
Theissen is a New Testament scholar, but the protagonist and plot are fictional and the reconstruction remains interpretive. Notes and narrative can illuminate historical reasoning without replacing direct engagement with evidence and debate.