by Joyce Luck

Many people have asked me why I chose to write this book. The life of Jesus has been told, and retold, so many times that there's hardly anything new to say. Another friend, a Roman Catholic, even worries that the book's unorthodox elements will get me in trouble, or at the very least, loads of hate mail.

But you see, it isn't so much the life of Christ that interests me--although it certainly does--as it was the life of a member of his family, the life of one who was there and remembers for himself, the life of one who was only a single generation away from the teachings, and the struggle of that person trying to reconcile Christ's words and what had happened to his uncle with the present-day events, that interested me.

This book is every bit as much about Joseph, the narrator, as it is about Jesus.

And there are so many new things to explore. Though scholars naturally argue about it, most are agreed the community at Qumran, likely the Essenes referred to by Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, were behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. And some of those scrolls seem concurrent with Jesus. What does that mean? And we also now have the Nag Hammadi find, with codices rich in alternative and hitherto unknown stories about Jesus.

I entertained the question: what if some of this material is actually historical?

What if the Talpiot Tomb really is the tomb of the family of Jesus?

What would it have been like to see your uncle, just a man for all you knew, being morphed by theology into a god? To hear of claims your uncle, whose bones lay in an ossuary in a tomb that you yourself had seen, was not actually there? That he instead had come back to life and walked the earth in the same body three days after his crucifixion?

So, all good stories begin with questions, with "what ifs" such as these.

I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say this. Joseph tells us his truth. It's no less a miraculous story, but it's a different story all the same. And if one listens closely to him, we have within us the power to transform the world.

Master Yeshua releases in May 2015 and is available for pre-order...  AMAZON US | AMAZON UK

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