A time-travelling TV crew is sent back to first-century Judea to broadcast the crucifixion live.

As competing versions of Christ, authorship, and belief collide, the novel turns into a controlled farce about who gets to write history and why anyone believes it.

Written in the early 1990s, this sits squarely in Gore Vidal’s late period, when he’d fully sharpened his taste for dismantling American mythologies and Western canon more broadly. Vidal isn’t subtle about it; he treats religion, media, and empire as overlapping fictions, each maintained by performance and repetition.

Genre-wise, it drifts between satirical fiction, speculative history, and theological parody. Think less “alternate history” and more “history as something that was always up for negotiation.” It’s irreverent, cleanly written, and deliberately provocative without being chaotic.

Paperback, Abacus (1993). Good condition—general wear to covers, pages clean and intact.