Showing Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs by Will Pflaum

Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs is the first modern translation and publication of an ancient, recently recovered manuscript, originally written more than a 1000 years ago. The ownership and current location of the original manuscript is in dispute.

The story starts four years after Vivia Perpetua and her slave Felicitas, both Christian mothers of nursing infants, were martyred on the Roman emperor’s birthday by a savage cow. In 207AD, word of the sons of the saints turned up, now adopted to a Christian mother in Egypt. Viva’s pagan husband and Felicitas’s master wants his sons back, one an heir, one a slave. Juba, a slave and the narrator of this story, must infiltrate the Christian community, find out where the boys are, and bring them back for his master.

The story moves from the domestic affairs of slaves and masters in Carthage, Christians and Pagans, to the scriptorium and religious controversies and gang violence of Alexandria. On the run out of Alexandria because of a speech in defense of a idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity, Juba is imprisoned, goes up the Nile, past a Jubilee in the ruins, beyond a naked, intimate, no sex gnostic test, down the Red Sea, past pirate infested islands, up the hills to New Jerusalem, a mud brick village of refugees, just as a the kingdoms of the Red Sea are beginning a war for control of the trade with India. There in the hills of Ethiopia, perhaps, Juba finds that the seal of the creator, a stone fallen from the ether of the heavens due to the motion of the spheres, consummating a romance with the desert singer, a prince’s concubine, in the blood of a monkey.

If we want the people of the future to understand us, it is our obligation to understand those that came before us. Were the ancients wrong when they associated numbers and power? Were they wrong when they thought about the universe as imbued with consciousness? Are we wrong to think it is not? One way to figure this out is to follow the story of a somewhat dishonest Greek slave heading up the Nile to find the sons of the saints, Juba: The Search for the Sons of the Martyrs. Pale Fire meets The Name of the Rose. Now, to 207AD, Carthage, North Africa under Rome...