Epilog - How this book came about

And now, dear reader, if you’re asking, “Where did he come up with these crazy ideas?,” here is the answer: A few years ago, I was sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a plane back to my home in Minneapolis, entertaining thoughts of writing a novel. In the chair next to me, my wife Kathy had been reading a book on reincarnation and I asked her about people who claimed to be the reincarnation of famous historical figures like Winston Churchill. I had not read any books on reincarnation, but I told her it seemed to me that no one ever claimed to be the reincarnation of ordinary people. No one claimed to be the reincarnation of Joe the Janitor who worked the same job for thirty years and died a week before his retirement party. No one claimed to have been Larry the trash man or Sally the housewife, but everyone was Marie Antoinette, or so it seemed to me (I since found out I was wrong. Such was my ignorance.) I wondered how many people claimed to have famous past-lives versus ordinary everyday people. Maybe the problem was just that the literature focused on these special cases or maybe the hypnosis patients, in their eagerness to please, brought forth their most interesting past lives rather than bore the hypnotist with the mundane.

While Kathy and I talked, it occurred to me that I had never heard of anyone who had claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, at least not outside of mental institutions (I was wrong about that too.) But if someone had been the reincarnation of Christ, what kind of weight would that put on his or her shoulders? What kind of challenges would that person have to face? How would Christ-reborn handle a modern world of rampant materialism and sensual distractions? Especially in a city like Las Vegas where I was now sitting, I thought. I wondered what Christ would say about it. He would probably laugh and say, “You guys still don’t get it, do you?” It occurred to me that it might make an interesting novel.

There was no question in my mind that the main character of the story would have to look just like Christ, but how could I accomplish that? It occurred to me that very few men wear long brown hair and a mustache (as many portraits of Christ depict for unknown reasons) except for rock stars. So I decided the character would have to be an aspiring rock star. I gave him an ordinary name: Mike. I worked on the book for a while but stopped for a couple of years to work on other projects.

A few years later, I was at the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota when I ran across a group of Born-Again Christian bikers. They were passing out flyers that spoke about how Jesus was a social outcast, and how he hung out with ordinary people like you and me. The flyers asserted that Christ would have ridden a Harley if he were alive today. I thought it was an intriguing idea that might enhance the story.

Later, I became captivated by the sounds of a heavy metal band called Savatage. One of their discs, Streets: A Rock Opera portrayed the trials, tribulations and faith-finding adventures of a drug dealer turned rock star whose nickname was D.T. Jesus. The story was first written as a Broadway play by Paul O’Neill and turned into a rock opera at the request of Savatage. I wondered if the reincarnation idea had come to O’Neill first, but Streets was not about a reincarnated Jesus Christ, regardless of the main character’s nickname and the fact that he was also a rock star. The songs reignited my interest in the complexity of the story and I felt compelled to continue the novel, forgoing fear of being scorned by the closed-minded.

Not too long after that, I began noticing a series of books and jewelry in book stores with the initials WWJD which means, “What Would Jesus Do?,” i.e. with today’s problems and challenges. Clearly, the question posed itself to other people, but my opinions on the topic clearly did not mesh with theirs; I’m not a Christian. The timing seemed right for questioning Jesus’ intent in the light of the overwhelming evidence for reincarnation.

I decided to rock the boat and invite people to weigh the possibilities of reincarnation. Jesus Christ believed in himself, and his relationship with God to become the legendary figure we all know and admire. Our only question is if he would choose to return once again to walk among us to find us still trying to understand the meaning of unconditional love and what he would think of the whirlwind world we live in compared to that of two thousand years ago.

Since Christ had to believe in himself and his relationship with God to become the legendary figure we all know, any reincarnation of him would have to be similarly opinionated, even if those opinions aren’t politically correct for our times, just as Christ’s own opinions were opposed to the Judaism that pervaded his society. Just be aware that I don’t presume to know the beliefs or convictions of a man as advanced as Christ.

As for the theories of Christ presented in this book: Some are real and some are not. The theory that there were two Jesus’s is real and the whole conversation with Professor Bailey is based on known historical facts. The plot about a secret Gospel of Barabbas disclosing Christ’s burial site is fiction, at least at the time of this writing.

At some point in the writing, I was inspired to present some of “Mike’s philosophy” on the pages between the chapters. It was these “excerpts” (as I call them) that inspired the title of the book, which had several earlier titles I hated. While I don’t pretend that this material is new or revolutionary, it is based upon my own beliefs, philosophies, and inspiration. I purposely avoided reading books like Conversations With God and A Course in Miracles lest they color or influence my writing. I let the material flow from within.

The rest is history.

Robert Peterson

December, 2002