The Canaanite Gospel: A Mediation on Empire is a keyboard calliope played by a Lenny Bruce on stinkweed who has absorbed by osmosis a library of first-century texts. He takes on the Jesus seminarians, Liberal and Conservative, routing them and all other wannabe rationalizers of scripture by doing impersonations of a legion of characters who were part of the events that took place in Judea during Holy Week of the year 33 BCE. The Canaanite Gospel records eyewitness depositions, which together make up this Gospel.

There is a human disorder here, but the plot carries the reader through it, and thematically the focus is clarity incarnate: 88 monologues on empire, religion, and political struggle, set during the Roman occupation of Judea and Perea during Holy Week on the year that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, traditionally 33CE. The lessons for the American Empire of today are too apparent to require statement here. As Parcelli notes in his preface, one of the great ironies of history is that Christianity, with "its idealized bromide of universal peace and love," should allow itself to be co-opted by the declining Roman Empire to emerge as its "theocratic spawn."

The book's primary literary inspiration may be David Jones, who after WWI wrote long poems like "Anathemata" implicitly comparing the Roman and British empires. Present also is the ghost of Ezra Pound, who made a comparable juxtaposition of eras in "Homage to Sextus Propertius." Maybe Pound is the more appropriate citation, for his "Propertius" showed poets the use of a persona to double the poetic voice--that is, make it speak more than one idiolect at a time.

The power of these monologue meditations comes from a bravura use of language reminiscent of Joyce or Burgess. The 88 monologues are a calliope of argots, "profane, blasphemous, obscene and peppered with ethnic slurs." In his preface, Parcelli warns the uninitiated reader (this book is not for children) and justifies his practice by citing David Jones. The latter, recalling the importance of profanity among the troops, speaks of a discourse so conditioned by the use of profanity as to seem liturgical, giving "a kind of significance, and even at moments a dignity, to our speech." Over the variety of argots and polyglot slang is spread the sauce of East End Cockney, hot enough to spice up any literary dish.

The poems should be thought of as performances. That is what the figure of Lenny Bruce and the word "monologues" are telling us. To witness the author in performance, look him up on Youtube. There you will find him in the persona he adopts for this book, that of Simon Kananaios (Simon the Canaanite), aka Simon the Zealot, collector of depositions.

Ours is a glorious age for Biblical scholarship. To the known 22 gospels, a 23rd has been added.