I am not, nor have I ever been, The Messiah. I have no divine nor supernatural powers. Let me ask, upfront and clearly that, if there’s nothing else you take from this tome, you take on board this: I am not, nor have I ever been, The Messiah.

True, this is the year 2031, and there is world peace, which is to say, the absence of deadly, large-scale, political violence. True, too, that I had something to do with it. We don’t, any more, threaten each other with nuclear weapons. States don’t fight. Terrorism has ended. Civil wars are passé. Even quarrels between individuals rarely turn deadly these days. And maybe we do need reminding that it wasn’t always like this and that, relative to humanity’s brutal past, we are living in an enlightened age.

‘Thank God’, some say. More say ‘Thank God for James Sinclaire’, and still more – too many - say ‘Thank James Sinclaire’.

But I am not the Messiah, nor even a messiah, nor a prophet, nor one of God’s top emissaries - all of which titles I’ve been granted by certain people in the recent past. If war is unthinkable now it’s got nothing to do with any spark of divinity that I might or might not possess. It’s because of a sequence of events that began in the benighted year of 1986, not in the parched, shimmering landscape of an ancient Middle Eastern desert, but in a rambling old rented house within easy walking distance of the bus routes along the busy main road heading south from the centre of New Zealand’s capital city.