The Merchant of Arimathea: Escape from Jerusalem

After Roman legions break the last Jewish resistance at Masada, one survivor is hauled to Rome with the other prisoners-an old man with a name history barely keeps. Josef of Arimathea: merchant prince, Sanhedrin counselor, and a careful man who learned to live by compromise. As Josef's strength returns, so do his memories-and he begins to speak to an unlikely witness: a disgraced Roman governor of Judea, hiding in exile under the name Publius. Their guarded conversations open into a sweeping journey through Galilee, Jerusalem, and the far edges of the empire. Years before the crucifixion, Josef is drawn into a family duty he cannot buy his way out of protecting his great-nephew Jesus-twelve years old, fiercely intelligent, and already marked by the arguments of Second Temple Judaism, Essene rigor, and messianic rumor. When temple authorities and Rome's client rulers both take notice, Josef must move the boy through a country under surveillance, choosing which laws to honor and which lives to risk. Richly researched and deeply human, The Merchant of Arimathea reimagines Jesus's "missing years" through the eyes of a man caught between devotion and expedience-between the demands of Jewish tradition and the first stirrings of a movement the world has not yet named. It isn't a tale of simple answers. It's a story of memory and consequence-and of what one man is willing to lose to keep a child alive long enough to become himself.