Conspiracy of Faith follows a human and fallible Jesus who conspires to survive the crucifixion, only to discover that a disciple is turning the deception into a religion that will erase the man behind the message. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Conspiracy of Faith started with four years of downtime.

I spent that stretch living in Algeria, head coach of the national basketball team, which sounds busier than it was. Between training sessions and travel for competitions, there were long, quiet hours to fill, and I filled a lot of them thinking about history, faith, and the things I’d grown up believing without ever really questioning.

The actual spark came later, on a trip to Rome with my wife. We were sitting outside St. Peter’s Basilica, a couple of beers in, looking up at one of the largest monuments to religious power ever built — and I remember thinking, plainly: this could not be what Jesus intended.

That thought turned into a question I couldn’t put down: What if he was only a man, and everything still happened exactly as it did?

That question became this book.

The writing came in broken mornings and late nights. The editing took longer than I expected. I was cutting, tightening, deciding what the story actually needed to say versus everything I wanted to say. This taught me more about writing than writing itself. Conspiracy of Faith is the result: a story about a man, the people who loved him, and what happens to a message once it outlives the person who spoke it.

How did you approach the challenge of humanizing figures such as Judas and Jesus while respecting their cultural and religious significance?

That tension was really the starting point of the whole book. I grew up in Catholic school, so the crucifixion story was never abstract to me. It was liturgy, ritual, something I heard told the same way every year of my childhood. Years later I lived in Algeria, a predominantly Muslim country, where Jesus is also deeply revered, a prophet honored and loved, but the story around him is told completely differently. There’s no crucifixion at all in the traditional Islamic account. That contrast never left me. Here was the same man, central to two enormous traditions, and the ending of his story simply diverges depending on where you’re standing in the world.

Living inside that contrast for years, rather than just reading about it, is what planted the seed. I wasn’t trying to adjudicate between those traditions or pick a side. I was interested in something underneath both of them: what would it take, physically and emotionally, for a man to survive his own execution and protect the people he loved by letting the world believe he hadn’t? That’s a human question, not a doctrinal one, and it felt like the one place I could stand that wasn’t already staked out by one tradition or another.

Judas came out of the same instinct. Every version of this story I’d encountered, Catholic and later the very different framing I found in Algeria, treated Judas as a symbol first and a person second: the betrayer, a name that’s become a synonym for treachery in half the world’s languages. I wondered what that story looks like from the inside, if the “betrayal” wasn’t treachery at all but the hardest, most loyal thing a brother could do, taking on a lifetime of being hated by history so someone he loved could live. Once I had that reframe, the rest of the book followed naturally. Peter, Mary, Joseph, Vespasian, all of them became people making difficult choices under pressure rather than figures fulfilling a preordained script.

My goal was never to provoke anyone or pick a fight between traditions. If anything, living in Algeria taught me how much reverence different faiths can hold for the same figure while telling entirely different stories about him. I wanted to write toward that shared humanity rather than away from it: strip away the certainty each tradition brings to its own ending, and ask what’s left when you’re just looking at a man, his family, and the people who loved him enough to risk everything. Whether readers come to this book from a Christian background, a Muslim one, or no religious background at all, I hope what they find is a story about love, sacrifice, and the terrible cost of protecting the people you care about. That’s a human story before it’s anyone’s theology.

Why did you choose Peter as the character who transforms Jesus’s compassionate teachings into a system based on spectacle, guilt, and institutional power?

Peter was a deliberate choice, both narratively and historically. There is an old saying that when investigating an unforeseen death, the first person you look at is the one who has the most to gain. During my research, I kept returning to that question: who stood to gain the most from transforming Jesus’s teachings into something more structured, authoritative, and institutionally powerful?

Peter emerged as a compelling answer. For the story to challenge the traditional understanding of Jesus, the opposing force needed to be someone who held genuine reverence in the modern vision of Christianity, not simply an obvious villain from outside the faith. Peter occupies that position. He is remembered as one of Jesus’s closest disciples and as a foundational figure in the Catholic Church.

I was also drawn to the historical relationship between Peter, Rome, and the development of church authority. During some of the most corrupt periods in church history, Rome and the institution built around Peter became focal points in discussions of religious power, wealth, and influence. That history provided a powerful foundation for the novel’s central conflict.

My intention was not to suggest that every aspect of Christian institutional history can be reduced to one man, or to make a claim about Peter’s actual historical motives. Rather, Peter became the ideal character through whom to explore the possibility that compassionate teachings could, over time, be reshaped into a system dependent on spectacle, guilt, and institutional power. He represents the tension between the message Jesus may have intended and what others might gain by controlling how that message is remembered and practiced.

What historical research helped you construct the practical details of the staged crucifixion, entombment, and recovery?

My approach to the historical research was to establish a consistent foundation rather than select individual details from different accounts whenever they suited the story. I limited my scriptural research primarily to the Gospel of John. I wanted the novel’s version of events to follow one narrative tradition, rather than picking and choosing between the four Gospels to construct the outcome I needed.

I also researched the practical details surrounding Roman crucifixion, including the use of wine and gall, as well as the procedures and structures associated with execution and entombment. These details were documented across multiple historical and religious sources, which helped me ground the fictional events in practices that were plausible for the period.

There is also a subplot in the novel suggesting that John may have been attributed to Mary, allowing the Gospel to be interpreted as Mary’s account of the events. That idea gave me another way to explore how history is recorded, preserved, and potentially shaped by those who tell it.

The tomb scene required a more practical question: could one man, in Jesus’s physical condition, have moved the stone? I researched the mechanics of ancient stone-moving techniques and the simple machines used by the Greeks and Romans. Those technologies demonstrated that very large objects could be moved by surprisingly few people, making the scene more plausible when approached as an engineering problem rather than a miracle.

The recovery itself became more straightforward once I considered the people involved. In the novel, Philip’s knowledge as a physician plays an important role, and I also examined the absence of explicit documentation that Jesus’s feet were nailed in the crucifixion accounts I was using. Those details helped me construct a recovery that relied on human knowledge, physical possibility, and preparation rather than supernatural intervention. The goal was to make the reader consider not whether the events could happen, but whether they could have been understood differently.

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