Far Country

The years between the workshop and the river.

At twenty-five, Yeshua boards a ship at Caesarea with an Indian merchant and the merchant's twelve-year-old son. He has spent his whole life being no one in a village that watched his every move. Now the water runs out to the edge of the world on every side, and past the edge stand the cities he has only heard named in other men's mouths. Alexandria. Rome. Athens.

He walks the Great Library. He holds a cup for a grieving man in Carthage. He watches Rome eat the world. In every port he works with his hands, listens more than he speaks, and leaves behind people who never forgot him.

This is the novel of the far country. The road itself, and the years the Gospels pass over in a sentence, when the carpenter from Nazareth went out to see the world with his own eyes, and the world showed him what it had done with itself.

For readers of The Chosen and Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, this is a literary, historical telling of the journey no Gospel records: spare, grounded, and human all the way down. A coming-of-age story set on the first-century Mediterranean, built from the years between the workshop and the Jordan.

Far Country is Book Two of The Nazarene Saga. It ends at the Jordan, before the water.