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The Centurion and The Christ Child

by Michael E. Jones

143 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #08-0187; ISBN 1-4251-7101-X; US$13.77, C$13.77, EUR9.41, £7.11

One of the miracles of Christ's birth was the powerful King Herod's failure to prevent it. This is the story of that miracle.

About the Book

Imagine a Nativity Story about a Roman centurion who becomes the first Christian and where four Magi traveled far to worship the newborn king and to frustrate Herod. This is a story that relates how Herod schemed to prevent Christ’s birth, and how he failed.

The story is set in Judea, a few years before Christ is born. A loyal Roman Centurion, Karalas, meets Mary as a girl and later as a young woman. He meets Joseph as a young man and later as Mary’s husband. Through his love for them and their child, he risks his life, literally minutes ahead of Herod’s troops, to save not only Jesus, but the infant who becomes John the Baptist.

The book closes on a brief scene in Italy where the old retired warrior relates the story to his granddaughter. As the story closes, the granddaughter alerts her grandfather to the presence of a single man standing on a beach watching their house. As the retired Centurion goes to meet the man, the greater adventure begins.

About the Author

The author was born in Louisiana by accident, his mother and father having been kicked out of Mississippi (around Christmas 1949) by the family members they’d been staying with. After years of searching for jobs, Joseph and Dolores Marie LeBlanc Jones (the World War Two vet and his Cajun bride) settled in Ohio and began a slow rise to middle class respectability. After medical and financial reverses took the family back to Mississippi for the lower cost of living, the author entered 10th grade in Ripley, Mississippi. He met, at that school, a pretty girl who’d been taken in by relatives after abandonment by her jerk father forced her poorly educated, barely surviving mother to call on the family for help. They fell in love as teenagers, married during college, and are still married today after 38 years. The marriage produced two great kids and (so far) three wonderful grandchildren. During that marriage the author graduated Delta State College (now University), entered the Air Force as an Airman Basic, attained the rank of staff sergeant, and then after Officer Training School, continued his service as a security police officer, retiring as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-five years service. After retirement, he and Carolyn (the pretty girl previously introduced), settled in Cordova, Tennessee. The author currently teaches history in the Memphis City School system. He and Carolyn like to travel, read, go to movies, and write huge best sellers that will be made into major Hollywood motion pictures.

(cover artist): Michael Joseph Jones was born on K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, near Gwynne, Michigan, in 1979. Since he had no alternative, he grew up in an Air Force family, getting hauled all over the United States in a series of moves that happened every few years. After attending a couple of high schools he graduated from Lubbock High School in Lubbock, Texas. He attended Texas A&M University as an ROTC cadet and graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2002, after which he served three years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He honorably separated from government service and moved to Dallas, Texas, where he entered the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University, a graduate school geared towards preparing students to enter the video game industry. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Interactive Technology for Digital Games: Art Specialization, in 2007, and has since been working for Superstition Studios in Mesa, Arizona as an environment artist and character animator. His college sweetheart, Melissa, has been his wife for six wonderful years.