Aleph, the Chaldean

A Chaldean astronomer, learned and unpersuaded, argues his way through Alexandria toward the question of who Christ was — a novel written as a sustained debate rather than an adventure. Burr was a Connecticut minister who was also a working astronomer and spent thirty years lecturing on science and scripture; this is that lecture turned into a man with a name. For readers who want the nineteenth century's religious argument in its own voice. Fifty-nine plates of Roman ruins and classical figures, from Panini and Alma-Tadema to Munch, carry the ancient world the astronomer moves through.