"A cubicle slave realizes that he is the Second Coming and seeks to re-live the life of Jesus in 21st Century America."

So the protagonist, I'll call him Chad, is a Jeff Goldblum-ish character, trapped in his high tech cubicle world and very much wanting to find meaning in his pathetic, angst-ridden life. He experiences an epiphany, possibly secondary to a traumatic event (inciting incident) -- maybe a car crash (an inciting accident?) -- wherein he realizes that he is the Second Coming and it is time to leave his ordinary life behind.

Enter the dynamic tension of the piece: Is this guy Christ or is this guy crazy? By extension, was Jesus of Nazareth simply an overachieving sufferer of bi-polar disorder?

By my measure, the book is only a success if there are people who want to burn it.

Let me digress for a moment into perspective. I am of the opinion that this must be a story told from the first person perspective. The protagonist's external battles will be with The Law as personified by some law enforcement official and with Religion as personified by some religious figure. This would probably work best with The Law serving as minions of Religion -- much like the Jews in the 1st Century used the Roman authorities to achieve their end: the death of Jesus. Chad really believes that he is the Messiah, and I want the reader to go for that ride with him, to maybe believe it themselves.

Among his friends (sidekicks) will be one or more people who insist that  he is bi-polar (foil?) and that he must seek medical help. Others will believe in his calling, and, most importantly, though plagued with doubts, he feels a certainty about his newfound identity.

So, we've introduced the protagonist, ripped him out of his pathetic life and hurled him toward an uncertain fate. Now, what is the 1st act turning point (1TP), the rabbit hole that he descends irrevocably down, the Point of No Return? (Que Kansas).

What I am not doing here is re-telling the story of Jesus. I considered doing that and quickly decided not to. He is not going to go run into a guru (like John the Baptist) in the netherworld of the wilderness. There has to be something else that Chad chooses to do that, knowingly or not, puts him over the edge and irreversibly on his path. This could, and probably should, involve some kind of guru character.

Allow me another digression -- I know, I am jumping all around here -- to talk about the tone of the piece. This is intended to be a very irreverent, though ultimately redeeming, what-if scenario that looks at the qualities that Jesus displayed and juxtaposes them with what the modern world, and modern Christianity, have become. Jesus was infamous for hanging out with the prostitutes and tax-collectors -- the lowest scum -- and so Chad will seek to be among the oppressed in the inner city (putting him in significant danger from both the rabble and The Law). Jesus dressed like the common men of his time, so Chad will get pimped out. You get the idea, it is about taking our preconceived notions of what a Messiah would be, and turning them on their head.

Clearly this needs to be handled with some subtlety. I am not out to do The Life of Brian -- an overt send-up of 1st Century Christianity. I am only being overt with these themes here to deal with the structure.

Back to the story: So Chad does something which puts him over the line, past the Point of No Return. It could be as simple as him smoking some weed (mental transformation) and then taking a bus to the inner city (physical transformation). So let's say that he goes to the inner city, the netherworld, and from there into the realm of the antagonist, possibly a church or a religious revival. Here comes the big middle-of-the-2nd-act confrontation. The antagonist wants to act on his calling, he wants to help people as the Messiah as a way of finding meaning in his life. The protagonist wants to maintain his monopoly as the authoritative gatekeeper to the Divine.

Mayhem ensues. The crowd wants to follow Chad and the antagonist is driven from his own pulpit -- only to return with The Law to lock Chad up. Chad soon finds himself institutionalized, facing a battery of charges, on the business end of an injection of Thorazine. This is the 2TP: Chad is left drooling and incontinent in a padded cell.

Chad finds something/someone in the mental institution that reignites the fire within him, that gives him, forgive me, The Eye of the Tiger. Some kind of baptism follows -- I could have fun with that one -- and he is back on the path toward the final showdown with the antagonist.

That is about as far as I have gotten. In the final confrontation, Chad is mortally wounded. He languishes in a hospital bed, and is visited by a sympathetic friend. He talks about how he -- Chad/Jesus -- keeps trying to come back, but mankind keeps killing/banning/institutionalizing him no matter what form or period of time he tries to come back in. He recognizes that it is a futile exercise, that, as the Cabala says, Messiah will come only when he is no longer needed, when we realize that it is up to us to save ourselves, that we, as the Gnostics believed, are our own Messiah. Still, he persists in trying if only because there are those who need hope.

As his sympathetic friend is leaving the hospital, a hospital worker expresses their regrets at the death of Chad some three days prior.