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I'm so glad I didn't have to pay a cent for this book! I RECEIVED IT FREE THROUGH GOODREADS' FIRST READS GIVEAWAY.

I'm not going to waste anymore time than I need to since I wasted precious reading time on this travesty so I'll skip describing the few merits of it. (If you're looking for those, go to the next review because you won't find them here.)

I was fully aware that this book was FICTION. (We have got to make that clear--95% of this book isn't true and pure fantasy. Please do not be fooled). I was also aware that it was going to be a creative "what if?" bildungsroman about the author of the THEORIZED "Q" manuscript. (For the uninitiated, many Bible scholars theorize that the writers of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were aided by the content of an anonymously written manuscript about the life of Jesus which they used as framework for their versions.) Neither of those things bothered me.

What bothered me was that Neeleman's book is actually an attempt to explain how the MYTH of Jesus came about. It was advertised as a historical novel based on the authoring of Gospel Q. That's not what it was.

The plot? Basically all the little connections and scenarios that Neeleman's overactive imagination produced to explain away pretty much every major thing about Jesus and ancient Christianity were strung together and wrapped around the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century A.D. It's like he gathered every significant aspect of the Gospels (pretty much all of it) and much of what we know about the Early church and wrote an entire book about how each of those things were lies by concocting a bogus story explaining the "real" reason why XYZ is XYZ.

It's hard to explain examples without giving spoilers, but here's a vague-ish one: the reason Jesus' mother is named Mary is because the main character's lover "Maryam" dies in childbirth delivering his bastard son in a stable/cave in Bethlehem, attended by Persian Zoroastrians (which explains the Magi/wisemen from the east). The entire book is chock full of b*llsh*t, like this from almost the first page. Not too mention the lack of flow, the choppiness and the wooden characters. This book just sucked. Stick to being a lawyer, Neeleman. (Huh. Now it all makes sense).

This was obviously Neeleman's way of flipping the bird to his religious upbringing. He states on the back of his book that he comes from a long line of Mormons but he "rebelled." I'm not Mormon. But I can tell that his resentment or whatever negative emotions he has towards his religious past is screaming between the lines of this book. He deliberately sought to write a book that discounts everything that people of a certain faith believes. (Any other religion, nobody would dare. But because it is Christianity-- you know, no big deal).

Instead of writing a scholarly book that would be pretty straight forward about it's premise (How the "myth" of Jesus came to be), he writes a nasty, disrespectful narrative that poses as truth so that people who are curious about this faith or even those who are practicing but doubting their faith in Christ can stumble on this nonsense that he passes off as entertainment.

This is the worst book (out of 44) I've read all year. I'm SO GLAD I didn't have to pay a cent for this book! I RECEIVED IT FREE THROUGH GOODREADS' FIRST READS GIVEAWAY.