The text is written in a neutral, timeless English with no contractions on the one hand and no archaicisms on the other. How a man beside the Cross was quite independently feeding live rabbits to a rapacious caged eagle. How his words could not be heard because of the general uproar. How the nails were driven into one hand and he tried to save the other hand by holding it to his side. The Crucifixion itself is described in gory, convincing detail worthy of Mel Gibson. She was not there for the resurrection she dreamed she and Mary Magdalene were seated beside an artesian well. There was no pieta to her eternal regret she fled before her son was dead in order to save her own skin. She realises that these “businessmen” have worked out a careful version of the Gospels, but she is trying to record the truth. ‘Oh, everyone in the world.’ ” Her son’s disciples are divided among the crazies and the homeless who are ready to follow any leader and those who are her guardians, grim professionals of the new order, men for whom there is “no grief, no sorrow, no fuss, something cold, as though life is a business to be managed, that our time on earth requires planning and regulation and careful foresight.” They sound a bit like young communist zealots before the war. ‘Everyone in the world will know eternal life.’ ‘Oh, eternal life!’ I replied. ‘Who has been saved?’ ‘Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born’ ‘Saved from death?’ I asked. ?’ ‘His suffering was necessary,’ he interrupted, ‘it was how mankind would be saved.’ ‘Saved?’ I asked and raised my voice. His father sent him into the world that he might suffer on the cross.’ ‘His father?’ I asked. ‘His death has freed mankind from darkness and from sin. “ ‘He died to redeem the world,’ the other man said. “It was when they came to the last part that I stood up from the chair and moved away from them. The Virgin Mary, who is not a Christian, is trying to set the record straight about her son as she recalls things many years later in Ephesus, where she was “translated” not by a miracle but by a boat. It is as tragic as a Spanish pieta, but it is completely heretical. FICTION:THIS IS A SHORT BOOK, but it is as dense as a diamond.

The testament of mary nudity