At the center of that struggle rages a bitter debate over the nature of Christianity’s deity, Jesus the Christ, and the historical reliability of the Gospel record which tells of him. The ground-breaking work of the Jesus Seminar, with its rejection of a physically resurrected Jesus together with most of his reputed words and deeds, has stood at the focus of the media eye. A dramatic meeting of the Seminar begins the book’s story.

The Jesus Puzzle is an engrossing and eye-opening novel about the time of change we live in, and about the investigation of the critical question now seizing the western mind at the end of Christianity’s second millennium: What can we know about the real Jesus? How certain can we be that such a person even existed? The central character, Kevin Quinter, is an historical fiction writer and ex-Christian, who is led to research the man of Nazareth in the hope of writing a best-selling novel about the life of this presumed pivotal figure in western history. His search for a genuine Jesus soon becomes an obsession, drawing in his free-spirited lover Shauna Rosen, Jewess extraordinaire, and leading him into a dangerous liaison with another woman who has a mystery of her own to be uncovered. Quinter’s investigation leads him down some puzzling paths, until he reaches an unexpected and shocking conclusion about the Jesus of Nazareth on whom the faith of almost 2000 years has rested.

But Kevin Quinter has also been enlisted to play a part on the larger stage. A University friend and professor has spearheaded the formation of the Age of Reason Foundation, a new organization determined to combat the threat of the nation’s regression to irrationality. The Foundation has gained the commitment of a wealthy and charismatic civil rights lawyer, Burton Patterson, and together they mount a judicial challenge against the renewed efforts of fundamentalist forces to introduce creationism into the schools. When a sinister millenarian cult group starts sending cryptic threats in the form of quotations from the Book of Revelation, the stakes are raised even higher. Both Kevin Quinter’s investigations and the Foundation’s plans gather momentum, to climax in a dramatic courtroom scene in which Patterson takes on the best that the creationism forces have to offer, and the Book of Revelation finally reveals its shattering secret.