To his horror and shame, young legionary Gnaeus Lentulus has been caught sleeping on sentry duty. His death sentence is commuted to the perilous duty of prisoner escort. To earn his own pardon he is chained to a condemned criminal by iron manacles, and must remain attached until he delivers his prisoner to Rome for judgment before Nero Caesar. In company with four fellow legionaries and their captive felons, he embarks on a dangerous sea journey of many months into the stormy season. Lentulus' prisoner is a Jew and Roman citizen who has appealed to Caesar, charged with subverting the imperial peace. He is a charismatic religious fanatic named Paulus of Tarsos, accompanied by his Greek secretary, Leukos of Antioch. As their journey proceeds, punctuated by wonders, adventures, storm and shipwreck, Lentulus is bewildered but intrigued by a bizarre new cult his prisoner professes. Himself burdened by deep guilt from a hidden past, Lentulus slowly falls under the spell of his two companions. LENTVLVS is a gritty, immersive depiction of the First Century Roman world. A novelization of the 27th and 28th chapters of the Book of Acts, the story is made fresh by being told solely from the perspective of a young, semi-literate, pagan soldier of modest intellect trying to grasp these new ideas and eccentric characters. It uses the "antagonists chained together" trope to subvert readers' expectations and instill a fresh viewpoint unencumbered by preconceptions. Aiding this re-imagining of a familiar narrative, the emotionally loaded words "Christ," "Christian," or "Christianity" do not appear in the text. Our baffled protagonist initially finds the new cult outlandish, if fascinating. The main character, and hence the reader, observe it through the cultural prism of pagan Rome. LENTVLVS recounts a famous story in such a manner the reader hears it again for the first time, and attempts to answer the question, how did a tiny, alien, forbidden cult, the practice of which earned a gruesome death sentence from the most powerful empire on Earth, emerge in time to conquer that world?
