Behold the Man

By Michael Moorcock

Karl is a dissatisfied man. Something is missing from his life. Maybe it is God. So when an eccentric genius offers him a ride in his experimental time machine, Karl says OK, provided he gets to choose the time and place of his destination: 28 AD in Israel. He wants to find Jesus Christ.
So the time machine works and Karl finds himself in the Holy Land but he is in bad shape from the crash landing which wrecked the time machine and so now he is stuck there. He is rescued by a religious community of Essenes under the nominal leadership of John the Baptist. Now John is expecting the arrival of the Messiah and he is pretty sure Karl must be it despite Karl's assurances that he is not. At one point John tries to get Karl to baptize him but Karl flees.
He wanders in the desert for a month or more but eventually finds his way back to civilization and heads for Nazareth, determined to find Jesus. And find him he does: Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Nazareth. But this holy family is not so holy: Joseph is bitter and disappointed, Mary is a slut and Jesus is a giggling, deformed idiot.
But Karl knows that Jesus will die on the cross as the Jewish messiah and so he sets about to make the story of Jesus come out the way the Bible recorded it. The only way he can do it is to become Jesus and preach and teach and eventually die on the cross.

This is a nasty book. It is not enough for the author to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ; no, he has to make him out to be a drooling idiot and his mother as a fat whore. So, according to this book, the Saviour is just some loser from the future who went into the past and ended up dying on the cross and rotting. Just nasty.