Next Year in Jerusalem, by John Kolchak
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Next Year in Jerusalem, by John Kolchak
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A brutal re-imagining of the Gospel story, Next Year in Jerusalem follows the footsteps of Yeshua Bar-Yosif--an illiterate, epileptic, bastard son of a Roman soldier on his ill-fated life journey through a land racked by terror. As first century Judea bleeds from the oppression of Roman rule and the violent uprisings against it, Yeshua, tormented by familial guilt for abandoning his mother, eventually forms his own family of travelers who preach for peace and compassion in the face of internecine savagery. Their wanderings lead to encounters with false prophets, assassins, and a rapidly growing movement of extremist rebels whose leader Bar-Abbas' mission is to expel the Romans and establish an ethnocentric theocracy. Chance sends both Yeshua and Bar-Abbas to the court of Pontius Pilate--the dipsomaniac Governor obsessed with leaving a name for himself in the scrolls of history--and the outcome of that meeting seals the fate of the world for the next two millennia. With urgent parallels to contemporary issues of religious war, this book is both a lament and a warning. It is also a story about the passage of time, the nature of memory, and of mankind's inherent yearning for life everlasting.
Next Year in Jerusalem, by John Kolchak - Amazon Sales Rank: #2881748 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-22
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .81" w x 6.00" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 324 pages
Next Year in Jerusalem, by John Kolchak Review If a new subgenre could be coined for John Kolchak's book, Next Year in Jerusalem, "grim gospel" would be more than satisfactory. Set somewhere in the arid wastelands between Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christand Gore Vidal's Julian, Kolchak weaves a Hobbesian Palestine where the life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short, especially in terms of faith and law. This work is more of a recasting of significant gospel narratives within the Roman and Jewish pressures of the time than a deeper retelling of Jesus' life. In doing so, the perennial questions of our relations to truth, power, faith, memory, and time are upended afresh and anew. Kolchak serves up a lurid, intense work of pulp that flips the Synoptics on their heads to bang readers out of their comfortable encounters with the Gospel in order to humanize and isolate. As stories of Jesus go, this one refreshingly dismisses the pieties and conventions of Jesus as an enlightened man to any degree... Yet along with the gore and the shouting invective obscenities and the randomness of life there comes a message and hope that writes across two thousand years of telling strange and disparate stories about people in the backwater of a young empire in a very, very old and contested land. And that is why this work is still a gospel in its own right, even as grim as it is and as it should be. It is also why Next Year in Jerusalem is worth reading.-Burke Gerstenschlager, BLEAK THEOLOGY 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... but a very rewarding one as well.-HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Next Year in Jerusalem - For the Win. By C. Ross Magical realism in religious/ historical context. Always a subject that fascinates me. "Next Year in Jerusalem"; reimagines of the Story of Jesus or "a story" of Jesus. Yet Jesus is not the star of the show, it is Pontius Pilate who is the most memorable . The picture of Pilate is exceptionally defined and speaks to a man stuck in a boondock with no way to satisfy a single soul including his own. So he drinks. If you think about the times of Pilate and Jesus - the idea that Pilate may have handled this unsavory position with drink makes perfect sense. Judea was a backwater of misery and deprivation for the Jews and frankly not the Rome's greatest achievement in terms of their occupation record. Had it not been for the "story of Easter" unfolding during that period I have no doubt it would have rated a very small footnote in the historical record.This fabulist tale places within itself, another theory of Yeshua working his way to the Godhead - including an exhausting trek around the Holyland. Retelling the tale would spoil the plot; the very point of taking on this journey to Golgotha.. And though it was was born solely in the author's fertile imagination; I think it could have happened. Almost anything could have played out in the story of Christ. We have to realize what exists is only hearsay. A handful memories that became legend; believed by billions . So Kolchak's telling - in my opinion - is just as viable and indeed much more fascinating than the one presented as "fact" for 2,000 years.Judea at the start of the Common Era was chaotic, the realities grim and the need for a savior the driving force of the most Judeans. Occupation is always a frightening situation and although Pilate, tried in his drunken way, to manage his unruly province - he essentially relived the memories of a prior posting to Germania where he felt more at home (this probably boiled down to the existence of "European people" as subjects). As for themessianic competition running parallel to the Roman occupation, the leitmotif of the story, my reading and observation leaves me with this: that being nailed to a cross is not exactly what you might forsee as your reward for trying to spread "the Good News". After all, it was the custom of the country, so what did the winner of the contest expect as a trophy? The Romans didn't want a savior. After all Pilate, downing another goblet of wine, had washed his hands of the whole matter.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Kolchak’s provocative novel introduces us to an all-too-human Jesus, ... By Book Baby Kolchak’s provocative novel introduces us to an all-too-human Jesus, an impoverished and uneducated itinerant, living in a troubled and turbulent time, and reimagines his life, death and teachings. Against the backdrop of Roman-occupied Judea, a land of political turmoil and religious factions, extreme oppression and nearly constant violence, Jesus struggles to find meaning in madness. With a motley crew of followers, he forms something of a family as he struggles with inner demons that leave him wondering about a father he never knew and suffering over a mother he believes he abandoned. Thrust into a role he did not seek, Jesus sees the cruelty around him and develops a simple philosophy to counter it (one that, over centuries, has been distorted, manipulated, perverted even). At the same time, a madman hungers for power and uses whatever depraved tactics he deems necessary to achieve it while a drunken civil servant indulges in memories and obsesses about his legacy. As Kolchak’s clever plot unfolds, it becomes inevitable that these three characters will eventually cross paths-- and in tragic fashion. Along the way, Kolchak masterfully tells their stories, vividly describing the chaos and confusion, the occasional beauty and the hideous brutality, the historical events and details of daily life in a fractious and dangerous land. Kolchak’s story is, by turns, hopeful and despairing. And, if it is at all a cautionary tale, it certainly includes the warning that religious fanaticism begets fear, hatred and unending terror. (The parallels between early Judea and today’s Israel/Palestine are obvious.) It also reminds us that, in the end, all is vanity.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A postmodern messiah story, starkly accurate in history and human nature By J. Leon If the Life of Brian was a book rather than a movie and it drove home its powerful points through postmodern starkness rather than irony and satire, it would be the closest comparison I could make to this book, and a somewhat incomplete one at that. This history buff in me loved this book. Details like the presence of Greeks living in the Holy Land are the kinds of well researched fine points that one rarely sees in other historical fiction set in this time and place. Then there are the characters. There is the illiterate preacher of a new philosophy of kindness who struggles to fill the stomachs of his followers but struggles even more to answer their most basic questions about the nature of existence. There is the Machiavellian revolutionary who has a sociopath's understanding about the nature of the human animal and who has no compunctions about using that understanding to further his aims. There is career Roman bureaucrat on a crappy assignment who struggles with existential despair but still retains the ruthless instincts of political survival which allow him to further the goals of the Empire and those of his own career. There are soldiers, seekers, beggars and runaways. Their paths all meet in an unpredicted curveball that was slyly woven from the beginning.
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