John Geyer

Origen and the Egyptian WrestlerAlexandria. Third century AD. A city of philosophers, wrestlers, merchants, pirates, and prophets - and one question that runs beneath all of it: Who are you, and what will you become?Aballa is a warrior by nature - six feet ten inches of raw potential shaped by loss, loyalty, and the brutal discipline of the wrestling mat. His coach Leon carries grief like a second skin.
His friend David burns against everything expected of him. Together they navigate an Alexandria electric with danger, commerce, and ideas that could get a man killed. Into their world steps Origen of Alexandria - the first systematic philosopher of the Christian Church - a man wrestling with questions as fierce as any opponent on any mat: What is the soul? What does it cost to think freely? What does a person owe to truth?Spanning Alexandria, Caesarea Maritima, the steppes of Anatolia, and the sacred ground of Olympia, this is a novel about identity and transformation, about Greek philosophy colliding with a faith still finding its edges, about athletic discipline as a mirror for the interior life, and about what it means to stand for something when standing is genuinely dangerous.
Part adventure, part philosophical inquiry, part sporting epic - Origen and the Egyptian Wrestler has found readers across traditions and across generations. For anyone who has ever asked the hard questions and refused the easy answers.