Get smart: Nick Tosches serves up a scam to warn us against scams

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In Under Tiberius, a 2015 novel from Nick Tosches, a well-off Roman named Gaius who has been Emperor Tiberius’s speechwriter loses his job, goes to what we’d now call the Middle East, meets a scraggly Jewish thief who calls himself Iesous, and decides to work with him to fabricate a messiah named Jesus. The region is rife with would-be prophets and the like, but those guys are howling madmen or mere street preachers; Gaius knows the arts of persuasion, Jesus proves to have potential as a per...