Three foreigners cross three borders, following a signal they have tracked for eleven months. They find a girl who has just given birth in a stable, a carpenter holding a tool like a weapon, and a child whose eyes do not wander the way a newborn's should. Then the gospels fall silent for thirty years. The Nazarene: Son of Man walks into that silence. It is the story of a gifted boy growing up poor in a backwater Galilean village - seven brothers and sisters, a father who works himself toward an early grave, a debt that never quite closes. He is the one the neighbors watch and the family orbits and no one, not even his mother, can fully explain. He silences the scholars at the Temple at twelve. He refuses the men who come to make him a revolutionary.

He gives up the marriage he wants. He carries a family on his back before he is old enough to carry it, and he tells no one about the thing humming behind his ribs that he has no name for. No miracles. No sermon. No theological argument asked of the reader. Only a boy becoming the man the world would later meet, rendered in spare, muscular prose true to the carpenter's shop and the dust and the weight. A reader outside the faith called it "a secular saint's life." A reader inside it called it "a familiar story told in a way I have never heard.

" The Nazarene: Son of Man is Book One of a four-book saga of the hidden years - birth through age twenty-five, before the public ministry begins. The boy leaves Nazareth on the last page. The road begins in Book Two, The Far Country.