Caldwell's Lucanus is tall, fair, handsome and athletic; according to a Biblical reference made to him by Paul, he was a physician. His healing powers are miraculous, and he rebels against the fatalism of ancient medicine, vowing to fight disease among the poverty-stricken masses of the Roman Empire. The descriptions of the operations that he performs are realistic, although one reviewer called them unreadable in their gory detail. Lucanus is introduced to the idea of the Messiah by one of the Magi as a youth, but the existence of ubiquitous pain on earth turns him into a hater of this unjust God. Nonetheless a visit to pagan and sin-ridden Rome marks the beginning of his conversion to the notion of the Messiah, and intermittent meetings with Paul, about whom Caldwell would later write in Great Lion of Cod (1970), and interviews with eye witnesses of the crucifixion accomplish his...