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Bible, Christ, Christian book, David Kitz, duty, God's word, Holy Week, justice, power, psychological journey, Roman soldier, scriptures, soldier
A Book Review by Victor Uduh
I picked up this book expecting a retelling of a story I already knew. What I didn’t expect was to become so invested in the inner struggle of Marcus, the Roman soldier at the center of the story.
What stayed with me most was not the historical detail or even the familiar events of Holy Week, but the psychological journey of a career soldier trying to make sense of something that challenged everything he understood about duty, justice, and power.
David Kitz does something difficult here. He makes well-known events feel uncertain again, not because the facts change, but because we experience them through the eyes of someone who doesn’t fully understand what he is witnessing.
I also appreciated that the story doesn’t rely on heavy preaching. The events are allowed to speak for themselves, which made the book feel more authentic and engaging.
Days after finishing it, I found myself thinking about Marcus and the moral tension of serving a system he increasingly questions. That internal struggle felt surprisingly relevant and human, despite the story taking place two thousand years ago. For me, that human element is what made this book memorable.
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you are watching a movie, but a 4D movie. (This would make a great Broadway play.) It puts you in the scene. You taste and feel and smell. You are transported back in time. You get to really know the characters as if they were people living on your block. You travel back in time to the first-century world and experience it all.
whose portrait and inscription were on it. When they answered, ‘Caesar’s,’ he jumped on them—like a cat onto a nest of mice. ‘So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,’ he told them. Even at a distance, I could see their mouths drop and their ears catch fire. They left like cowering dogs with their tails between their legs.”
I have no idea whether there will be a movie, but the book is written in a way easily suited to the transition. This first person storytelling, by the centurion who initially saw Jesus during the commotion of His triumphal donkey-riding Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and was days later ordered to drive the spikes into Christ’s outstretched palms, effortlessly created in my mind’s eye, images of Marcus Longinus, his family and both friends and foes encountered in this particularly demanding week of his Roman military service in the Judean outpost of Jerusalem. Kitz’s vibrant words breathed life into fictional and non-fictional names in this re-telling of the Holy Week story.
