An artist crreates a painting featuring Jesus as a teenager, and draws the ire of a fundamentalist religious group who sets out to destroy the art; and if that doesn't work, kill the artist. The act of vandalism fails as does the attempted assassination. The topic of a a young adult Jesus acts as a catalyst for the reader to travel back in time to ancient Israel with a young Jesus and his friends, engaged in acts of political vandalism until he meets the woman he falls in love with, marries, and travels to Bethlehem with. There, Jesus hopes to discover the truth behind the slaughter of twenty-five young boys because of his birth.