millions of New Yorkers, Jesus - who exhibited the ability to speak fluent American English - chose to confide in Leo Resnick, a hard-headed corporate lawyer with not the slightest vestige of religious or spiritual leanings. As he told Resnick, Jesus was in fact an extraterrestrial marooned on Earth by a malfunction in his spaceship's landing craft. Though he had some powers and abilities far beyond those of human beings, he was by no means Divine or omnipotent. Since the Earth's atmosphere was highly poisonous to him, his only chance of survival was to be "incubated" in the body of a human being. He chose for that purpose the body of Joshua, a Jewish native of Roman-ruled Judea. Joshua and the extraterrestrial "visitor" coexisted in an uneasy symbiosis inside the same body - hence the Two Natures of Jesus, an issue of crucial importance to Christian theology. From there, the book continues to describe Jesus' new career in 20th Century America and to provide much information about his earlier career which never got into the New Testament. A big part of the plot of An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears is simple historical fiction, laid in a historically accurate background of 17th Century England. However, the book has a considerable fantasy element - based on the assumption that in every generation Jesus Christ is born again, and in each incarnation is doomed to be martyred again and then again come back to life, and soon disappear - to be reborn again in the next generation. In 17th Century England, Jesus is reincarnated as a woman, and the book depicts in detail her virtuous life, her being martyred (by very unpleasant Christians) and her miraculous coming back to life. Another Son of God In the alternate history timeline of Harry Turtledove's In High Places, in which the Black Plague was much worse than in our history, there appeared in the city of Avignon at that time of crisis a charismatic religious leader named Henri, claiming to be "The Second Son of God". He was executed as a heretic. However, on the day after his execution, the church where the Pope and the King of France were worshiping collapsed, killing both of them. This was taken as an act of divine retribution and a proof of Henri's claim. Therefore, the worship of Henri as the Second Son of God was