Pilate's Wife by Antoinette May

This is a book that Ms. Chiu recommended to me last year and I checked out...  And then my wife read before I could.  :P  She said it was good but it was time to take it back to the library.  Ah well.  I'll get to it later.

Waaay later, like, a year later, I did.  Here's the issue: as the title implies, this book will run to an ending which the majority of the Western World knows, i.e. the show-trial of Jesus of Nazareth before Pontius Pilate--but instead of Pilate and his wife being side characters, now it is Jesus and his disciples who are on the margins.  The book gives May the chance to really get into her narrator and Pilate (Pontius Pilate, the hunk if you can believe it) and the whole Judean episode is only the latter third of the book.

This book as a lot to recommend it...  But I could not use it in the classroom.  R-rated (and up) scenes kill that option, though there are quotes and items in it which do indicate May did her research.

The only thing that continues to eat at me is the anachronism of the main character.  She is a disciple of Isis and, normally, in fiction that denotes a more modern world-view...  But unlike, say for argument's sake, Cleopatra's Daughter, the narrator is horrified by what she sees because we would think it abhorrent, not because she's been taught otherwise.