The Liars' Gospel

Acknowledgments

First of all, I must thank my mother, Marion, who passed on an interest in the history of this period to me, and my father, Geoffrey, a historian himself, who taught me the value of rigorous research, insofar as it is possible. The interest in lies I probably came to myself. I am grateful to my Hebrew teachers, who may not want their names associated with a book that is quite so visceral as this, and to Mrs. Louise Pavey, who taught me Latin and, more importantly, taught me to love it.

Thanks to my agent, Veronique Baxter, and my editor, Mary Mount, for support, faith and courage. Thank you.

Thanks to Giles Foden, who told me it was time to write it, and to Jacqueline Nicholls, Dr. Raphael Zarum, Daniel Harbour, Dr. Lindsay Taylor-Guthartz, my research assistant, Rebecca Tay, and Francesca Simon for pointing me in good directions to get to grips with this complicated period. Thanks to the friends and colleagues who have read it and discussed it with me: Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Miki Shaw, Dr. Benjamin Ellis, Natalie Gold, Susanna Basso and Daniel Hahn. Thanks to Seb Emina for the word “tallest” and other creative wonders and to Rebecca Levene for title inspiration. Thanks to the North London Writers’ Group, especially Emily Benet, Neil Blackmore, Alix Christie and Ben Walker for wonderful, firm, thoughtful suggestions. Thanks to Esther Donoff, Russell Donoff, Daniella, Benjy and Zara Donoff, and to Leigh Caldwell, Bob Grahame, Yoz Grahame, Tilly Gregory, Rivka Isaacson, Ewan Kirkland, Margaret Maitland, Rhianna Pratchett, Robin Ray, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore and Nicole Taylor. Thanks to Adrian Hon, Alex Macmillan and Matt Wieteska for staying strong and holding the (besieged) fort.

Particular thanks to Professor Martin Goodman and Professor Amy-Jill Levine, who graciously took time to read and comment on the manuscript and picked up scores of errors. All errors that remain are, of course, my own. For those who want to start learning about the Jewish history of this time, I can’t recommend better than Professor Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem and Professor Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew.

And finally. All books, when one looks at it, have wide roots, fumbling out in search of help and inspiration. This one has a longer taproot than many, perhaps.

This is a true story: after I had mostly finished researching this novel my mother, Marion, happened to find her father’s Victorian copies of Josephus. Eliezer Freed, my grandfather, who died when I was two years old, was a novelist and short-story writer, fluent in ancient languages, a self-taught musician, inventor and scholar. I flicked through his Josephus with mild curiosity about differences in translation. And there, in his own handwriting, I found that my grandfather had marked up precisely the passages that I’d been looking at: the ones about Jesus. He had the same question mark in the margin, the same part bracketed where we both, I imagine, made the same frown at the same moment.

So it seems as though my family has been after this hare for a while. I suspect that if my pious and kind grandfather had written a novel about Jesus his might have been a bit more gentle.

Jews aren’t encouraged to think a lot about the afterlife. There’s some reward, they say, for a life lived well, but better to focus on the world we can see, better not to spend your years on earth obsessed with the world to come. The life after death we should mostly anticipate is twofold: the continuation of our ideas and our studies, and the continued life of our children and grandchildren. So it feels fitting to end the book on this note, in my discovery that I have produced a very Jewish kind of resurrection.