Book review: “Butcher of Nazareth” by David Scott Hay

The life of Jesus has been recounted for two thousand years: the scenes of his birth and infanthood, the story of his three-day visit to the Temple at the age of 12, and then, a couple decades later, the start of his ministry with his baptism in the River Jordan by his cousin John.  But what happened in between?

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John don’t say. Nonetheless, given the huge influence of Jesus and Christianity on western civilization, the question of his “lost” or “unknown” years has been one of the most tantalizing mysteries of world history.

Not that there haven’t been a lot of attempts at guessing what happened during those years and how they shaped Jesus.

For instance, Anne Rice, she of the vampire novels, wrote a reverent two-book account of the pre-ministry era — Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005) and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008). To do so, she mined the tales in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text that didn’t make it into the biblical canon with the four official evangelists.

In 2002, Christopher Moore, the author of an array of comic novels about demons, death, a stupid angel and, also, vampires, published Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, his irreverent look at the life of Jesus, particularly those lost years. Actually, Biff, the character, is irreverent about almost everything, but Moore’s novel, for all its randiness, sarcasm and goofiness, treats Jesus, called Joshua, with admiration and respect.

Now, after Rice’s reverence and Moore’s comedy, comes David Scott Hay with The Butcher of Nazareth which tells the story of those missing years as horror fiction, filled with gore and madness and violence.

 

An unofficial Gospel according to Horror

It’s a heart-pounding, can’t-turn-away prequel to the biblical accounts, an unofficial Gospel according to Horror.

Horror has long been an element of Christian art. Think of the gruesome images of the crucifixion, such as the sixteenth-century version by German artist Matthias Grunewald, showing Jesus’s gray-green pain-wracked body.

Or the many versions of the Last Judgement, such as those by Michelangelo and Hieronymus Bosch, depicting the suffering and torture of souls sent to hell.

 

Herod’s slaughter

In Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth, hell is the mind of his central character, a butcher who was forced to participate as a Black Mask in Herod’s slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem up to the age of two. It was Herod’s unsuccessful effort to rid himself of a challenge to his throne from “the divine birth of a king.” As the Butcher explains to a large goat in the opening pages of the novel:

“He assembled a horde of loyalists called Black Masks and they forced others to join their ranks. I was recruited for my expertise with the flesh and bone and blade…I was a butcher, not an assassin, but our beloved King Herod cared not. For many moonless nights, I was among a few dozen masked butchers. Butchers of children.”

It was called the Culling, and, for the Butcher, it began with his own son.

And, in that killing, he seems to have lost his mind.

 

A stoning

Hay is the author of two strongly plotted, well-written novels: The Fountain (2022), a rollicking story about Chicago’s art world and a genius-inspiring museum water fountain, and [NSFW] (2023), a dark social media tale with a trigger warning that the book features “sex, drug use, witchcraft, profanity, gun violence, collapse, suicide, harm to a minor, terrorism, civil unrest, hate crime, social media, religion, capitalism.” And that isn’t even a complete list.

There is no trigger warning for The Butcher of Nazareth, and I suspect that’s because the violence that arises in the story is violence mentioned in the Bible and shouldn’t be a surprise for the reader.

However, it’s one thing for the Bible to mention a stoning and quite another for Hay to detail it, as in this moment when the Butcher watches an adulterer’s punishment in Jerusalem:

The Sister’s stone, despite her smaller stature, struck Mark in the face, cutting a deep gash in his cheek, exposing bone. A sound rose from the crowd, part triumph, part shock, part anticipation…Stones rained upon Mark. His muted grunts did not mask the crack of breaking bones, echoing louder and sharper than any prayer passing his lips.

That gives you only a flavor of the scene. For three pages, the Butcher watches Mark suffer bloody injuries, agony and death.

 

The Butcher’s vision

Such scenes of violence occur throughout the novel — brutal beatings and decapitations and grisly stabbings of adults and babies — and much of the violence is carried out by the Butcher and closely described by Hay.

The Butcher’s violent life, knee-deep as it is in blood, is an outgrowth of his madness from his murder of his son. “So much shame,” the Butcher says to himself.

But there’s another outgrowth, a violent task that he has taken upon himself because of a vision he has seen:

Under the shadow of these obscene banners, great temples and churches rise up, paid for not by their owners, but by congregations. Proselytizers grow fat with taxes and cream, erecting huge palaces in a proclaimed gospel of prosperity. Congregations motivated by a fear of damnation, which can only be avoided if they will dunk their heads in a shallow pool and tithe their meager wages earned.

This is a vision of everything evil and wrong that has resulted from Christianity over two millenniums, and there’s more, such as the Inquisition and the present-day priest pedophile scandal.

And, even more that the Butcher sees in his vision — a nuclear war, somehow caused by Christianity, that will wipe out every living thing on the earth.

 

“Lumbered”

And all because of the one baby boy who escaped from him and Herod’s other killers. So, the Butcher has set off to find and kill Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jesus he finds “lumbered with an uneven gait,” a man around thirty.

His ample midsection created a circle of his tunic, and strands of his short stringy hair hung longer on one side, gracing one of his cherub cheeks as he walked with a tilt to his head. He smacked his lips…He spat out desiccated honeycomb and took a bite of fresh wax, held in his hand as one might hold a loaf of bread.

Not the most prepossessing image of a future religious leader, and, yet, Jesus shows himself to be charismatic enough to charm raiding marauders to leave Nazareth alone.

 

The Culling and the Calling

The Butcher is living with the Culling, and Jesus is searching for his Calling. And the final half of Hay’s novel describes the Butcher’s hopeful, insistent and ultimately violent interaction with Jesus as well as with Joseph, Mary and Mary Magdalene, called Maggie.

In this section, Hay fills in those “lost” years of the Jesus story and sets the stage for the stories that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell.

The Butcher is an unnerving incursion into the lives of Jesus and his family, but, for him, they represent such great hope that he’s no longer the Butcher. Now, he is called Titus, a name he hasn’t used since he killed his son.

Then, in a dark turn, he becomes the Beast, and his horror literally tears up the family.

In the Butcher’s attempt to complete Herod’s Culling, Jesus finds his Calling.

 

Not a holy card Jesus

And, also, his ministry that will create the religious faith that, over twenty centuries, will be responsible for all the evil that the Butcher envisioned. But also all of the kindness and goodness and compassion and love that the Butcher’s vision never saw.

Hay has written a richly inventive horror novel about a lost soul, deep in darkness and despair.

The Jesus of his book isn’t a holy card Jesus. He doesn’t save the Butcher. Yet, he is tender with the Butcher.

And Hay is tender with his Jesus. Like the Butcher, Hay’s Jesus is a man confused by life and his place in it. Like us all, I guess.

Should Jesus have been stopped to avoid all of those horrible things the Butcher saw?

Hay leaves that up to the reader. But, at the novel’s end, Jesus is taking to the road to become who he will become.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

2.9.26

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 2.13.26.