4 ideas
Karl Glogauer, a depressive, sexually troubled Londoner obsessed with Jung and religion, travels by time machine to AD 28 to witness the Crucifixion. There he finds Mary coarse and Joseph bitter, and the real Jesus is a congenitally disabled man who can only repeat his own name. Stranded, Karl gathers disciples, performs apparent healings, and knowingly re-enacts the Gospel narrative, arranging his own betrayal and dying on the cross himself.
Having read the Gospels, Karl steers events toward what he remembers of them, so the text he learned from is in part produced by his own reading of it. The loop is incomplete, though: some of what becomes scripture, like his words on the cross and the report of resurrection, comes from others misunderstanding what they saw and heard rather than from his deliberate staging.
In occupied Judea, John and the people who gather around Karl are ready to read his strange arrival and foreign knowledge as signs, and his healings appear to work through their belief rather than supernatural power. The novel shows authority arising from this meeting of followers' longing with Karl's particular knowledge and his active performance of the role, not from demand alone.
The novel reads the messiah role through individual pathology. Karl's lifelong guilt, suicidal impulses, and craving for significance find their resolution in sacrificial death. Seen this way, a sacred act of self-giving can be simultaneously a psychological escape: the need to be crucified comes before any theology that later justifies it.