“Spoiler alert - don't read this until you've read the book :-)
The most glaring thing about this book is it's ignorance of history. The characters think, "I want to see Jesus, so I'll just go back to 28 AD, 28 years after the exact date of this birth." It doesn't work that way. The Christian calendar was instated hundreds of years after Jesus' birth, and is at best an estimate.
The author follows the Bible like it's a script, with everything happening in the exact order and everyone saying and doing everything exactly like the modern Bible says. Even the Gospels don't agree on some things, and they were written at least 30 years AFTER Jesus' death. The New Testament is not a historical document, it is a religious document, and should not be taken as historical fact. Following the Bible this closely took all the fun out of the book. Everyone knows how it's going to end.
When it became obvious that the author was going to piggy-back on the Bible to the letter, and when the character named "Tom" (who happens to be a bit of a "doubter") was chosen as a disciple, the ending of the book became wrapped in a nice little bow on about page 50. There is no reason to read on from there because the reader already knows how it's going to play out.
When the characters go back in time the third person they meet is THE Jesus! First, the name Jesus was a popular Jewish name in that era, so of course someone named Jesus will be on every street corner. If you say, "I'm looking for Jesus," you'd find plenty of them, but not THE Jesus. Second, since the dates in the Bible aren't clear, it would be impossible to find anyone without a lot of investigation.
There are a few prejudices in this book that I found offensive:
-all "hicks" are violent idiots
-all business executives are at best jerks and at worst evil
-all non-believers are wrong and know absolutely nothing about Christianity
-all military people are violent killers
Making all of the "bad guys" possessed by demons was a strange thing for the author to do. The "devil made me do it" attitude takes the responsibility of doing bad things away from the characters. When you do bad things are you possessed by the devil? No, you just made a bad decision. In this book's case it took all remaining unpredictability out of the plot.
There is a point where the characters say the world would be terrible without Christianity. The U.S., the greatest nation ever in the history of the universe wouldn't exist! Come on!! First, we are not a Christian nation. We have freedom of and from religion. Second, if Christianity hadn't existed something else would have taken it's place. The world could have been better without Christianity or it could have been worse.
There is a decent underlying story in this book, it's just under too many layers of Christian propaganda to shine. It's hidden under a bushel!”
