
Kirill Yeskov is a paleontologist, and writing science fiction and speculative literature is a hobby for him. The Gospel of Afranius is his first work, written in 1995, for which he received the “Big Zilant” award in Kazan. However, he became widely known to science fiction fans in 1999 with the release of The Last Ringbearer, which completely reinterprets the events of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I would argue that Yeskov laid the groundwork for this approach in The Gospel of Afranius.
This book is an attempt to view the death and ascension of Christ through the lens of cold logic. The “novella” essentially consists of two parts. In the first, the author tries to assess the known facts and inconsistencies in the story as we know it from surviving sources and the Bible, making it more of an analytical essay.
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