And the Cock Crows: How Rome Buried the Jesus Message

At close of the Jesus ministry, a battle for heart and mind ensued between newly established organized churches and the mystic followers of Jesus called Gnostics (a word meaning knowledge in Greek).

This historical novel, "And the Cock Crows", is a record of this struggle that for nearly two thousand years has laid dormant, hidden deep and unnoticed inside the New Testament canon.

At Passover supper Jesus and his disciples Peter, John, and the others, have convened for an annual traditional celebration in Jerusalem, but soon the disciples are on the run, their world shattered by unexpected events that are spiraling uncontrollably into a crisis that astonishingly becomes the establishment church's pathway to salvation. But it is not the Master's message; a false message is seeded. And no one is in position to correct it.

Enters Paul of Tarsus, an orthodox Jew and Roman citizen who takes the reins of the broken Jesus ministry from afar, deep in the Roman Empire and distant from Jerusalem. He tells of a way to eternal life that the Master never said, a message that shockingly survives to this day. It is called Christianity.

Rejected by the Jews to whom Jesus had been preaching, Paul goes on a mission to bring the Christian message to the non-Jews, beginning a journey through the vast Roman Empire, evangelizing the new message of salvation to the Pagan peoples of the Empire. Yet Peter and the other disciples of Jesus fanatically oppose Paul.

This new take on the historical Jesus is not fantasy or fiction. It is a likely and probable account of Paul's ministry that spanned fully twenty-five years, founded on the real and legitimate New Testament canonical biblical texts that follows a timeline of the central book Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's preserved fourteen letters to his churches and ministers.

This easy to read story, in literary form, has intent to entertain and inform, and to reveal the Master's true message for an era that is today ready for the harder kernel of truth.