Next Year in Jerusalem
John Kolchak drastically re-imagines the life-story of Jesus of Nazareth in his novel Next Year in Jerusalem, telling the tale of illiterate, epileptic Yeshua Bar-Yosef, the bastard son of a Roman soldier who strikes out into the towns and cities of first-century Roman-occupied Judea. Eventually building a close-knit following, he comes into confrontation with the power of Rome in the person of Pontius Pilate and suffers an end Kolchak provocatively shapes into a gory and revelatory alternative to the Gospels.
Throughout the novel, Kolchak revels in subversion and profanity, turning many of the most famous New Testament stories on their heads and creating an immensely sympathetic character in Yeshua along the way.
This is a challenging book (not least because of printing mistakes: the paragraphs are stacked on top of each other like cinder blocks, without indentations) but a very rewarding one as well. (Maybe a re-print to sort out those formatting errors?)
