NON-FICTION BY PETER MARTINO
Peter Martino’s non-fiction brings a trial lawyer’s evidentiary discipline and a lifetime of faith to the biggest questions there are. His work spans the ON TRIAL series, in which history’s greatest claims are tried and decided in the form of a hypothetical Supreme Court opinion, and My Father’s Work, a first-person narrative of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
THE ON TRIAL SERIES
The ON TRIAL series puts history’s greatest questions on trial. Each book delivers its verdict in the form of a hypothetical Supreme Court opinion, summoning the evidence into the record, weighing the arguments of skeptics and believers alike, and rendering judgment with the rigor of a working trial lawyer. The series is written for any intellectually curious reader willing to engage the evidence.
RESURRECTION ON TRIAL
Sophia Institute Press | Publishing September 2026
The series opens with the most consequential claim in human history: the bodily Resurrection of Jesus. For two thousand years, that claim has been proclaimed from pulpits and contested in lecture halls. Resurrection on Trial does something different. It puts the claim in a courtroom. Written in the form of a hypothetical Supreme Court opinion, the book treats the Resurrection as a factual assertion to be tried, subjects it to the disciplined evidentiary standards of the law, and renders a reasoned holding.
Across thirty-three chapters, the opinion assembles the record: the testimony of the witnesses, the fate of the tomb, the transformation of the disciples, the conversion of skeptics and persecutors, and the explosive rise of the early Church. It then tests every alternative explanation on its merits, from conspiracy and hallucination to legend and myth, asking of each whether it can bear the weight of the evidence. The opposition receives a full and fair hearing, with an entire chapter devoted to addressing the dissent and engaging the arguments of the most prominent modern skeptics, including Bart Ehrman, Gerd Lüdemann, and Reza Aslan. Appendices extend the inquiry to modern questions, including a timely examination of the Resurrection in the age of artificial intelligence. The record is documented throughout in nearly four hundred footnotes.
What distinguishes the book is who conducts the trial. The author is a working litigator who has spent his career weighing evidence, cross-examining witnesses, and arguing cases, and he brings that discipline to the oldest and most disputed question in Western civilization. The result is rigorous enough for scholars yet accessible to any intellectually curious reader, believer or skeptic, willing to follow the evidence where it leads. The book carries endorsements from leading scholars including Michael Licona, Scott Hahn, and George Weigel.
THE DEVIL ON TRIAL
A Judicial Inquiry into the Existence and Agency of Satan | Complete Draft, 95,000 words
Across four thousand years of recorded civilization, humanity has struggled to explain the recurring, organized, catastrophic nature of evil. Wars of annihilation. Genocides of breathtaking precision. Ideologies that weaponize reason against the innocent. The suffering is too systematic, too inventive, too resilient to be accounted for by human weakness alone.
The Devil on Trial summons history, psychology, philosophy, theology, and the testimony of human experience into the record, tests every alternative explanation, and confronts the question even the secular world cannot fully dismiss: whether the pattern of radical evil observable across human history admits of an explanation beyond the merely human.
COMING NEXT
Additional books are planned for the series, beginning with God on Trial.
MY FATHER’S WORK
My Father’s Work presents a literary and historically grounded narrative told entirely in the first-person voice of Jesus, with footnotes anchoring the account in Scripture throughout. Rooted in the Gospel accounts and the cultural world of first-century Galilee and Judea, it offers a deeply human and reverent portrayal of His journey, His relationships, His teachings, His miracles, His suffering, and His unwavering obedience to the will of the Father.
Neither speculative nor doctrinally argumentative, the book invites readers to encounter Jesus as His disciples first did: through presence, shared moments, and the power of His words. Written in the tradition of first-person devotional hymns long embraced by the Church, it is not fiction but a work of devotional and literary apologetics. Its purpose is not to replace Scripture, but to help readers enter it more personally and walk beside Jesus along dusty roads, into crowded marketplaces, and across storm-tossed waters, toward the hill that changed the world forever.