Schwehn

It is 38 CE in Alexandria, and Salome, a skilled physician with a past she’s fought to suppress, struggles to navigate the complex landscape of first-century womanhood, the privilege of being Greek, and the rapid progression of dementia threatening both her memory and medical practice.

John Mark, a new follower of the fledgling Christian movement, has been sent to preach the hope of Yeshua’s message in Alexandria’s synagogues. What he finds, however, is an oppressed and desperate people perhaps more in need of immediate help than eternal salvation: the Roman prefect Flaccus has labeled the Jewish population as alien, quarantining them away from the city’s daily life and consigning them to crushing poverty.

Falling flat in his preaching and plagued with his own doubts about the more miraculous details of Yeshua’s story, John Mark turns to Salome, who is rumored to have witnessed the better part of Yeshua’s life, for definitive answers. As time threatens to rob her of her story altogether, Salome must at last contend with its meaning in the retelling, and as popular disdain for the Jewish people reaches a dangerous boiling point, John Mark is faced with the radical, paradigm-shifting implications of Salome’s claim about Yeshua: ＂He was my son.＂

Moving from the Greek countryside to the Roman Forum, from the dusty hills of Nazareth to the wide boulevards of Alexandria, THE GOSPEL OF SALOME is a retelling of Biblical events set against the roiling backdrop of history’s first recorded pogrom, an examination of ideology and motherhood, and a poignant argument for love and equality in today’s world as well as its own context.