A generation of readers who enjoyed the historical novels of Walter Utt, the beloved Pacific Union College history professor who died in 1985, may be surprised at the appearance of No Peace for a Soldier, published recently by Pacific Press.

Testament is a gorgeously written re-telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth — not the story of the divine Son of God, but of a compelling and complex human being in first-century Galilee. The story is told in four parts from the perspective of four different characters — Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and an extra-Biblical character of the author’s own invention, Simon of Gergesa.