Carnivorous Plant wrote: “Has James Gunn’s The Immortals been mentioned?” Yes, by me in post 17. (Only linked to it.)
Thank you. 
I can recommend The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White. Very different take on things, IMO. Plus it’s a murder mystery. And it’s set in Las Vegas and is remarkably accurate in describing the city (when they drive somewhere, for instance, the authors use the names of real streets/intersections and locations are real places, not made up casinos, restaurants, etc.).
And since I just looked it up on Amazon to find that link, I note that a second novel is due in January.
The Wandering Jew (who may actually be Lazarus who was raised from the dead) also appears in A Canticle for Liebowitz.
A Canticle for Liebowitz is an outstanding book.
Good one.
Thank you all. I have ordered a number of these, and placed others on my wish list.
Now, narrowing it down more to incognito deities…
Wesley Chu’s Lives of Tao series involves immortal gaseous-amoeba-like aliens that crashed on Earth eons ago and can’t survive in our atmosphere, but can survive by parasitizing animals; they have been guiding human evolution since prehistoric times, so we would get smarter and eventually be able to build them a new spacecraft so they could return to their planet. Most of the great figures of history, including “gods,” have been humans who had an alien inhabiting them and helping them with knowledge gained through their long, long lives.
In recent centuries, the aliens have split into two camps, and the bad aliens want to just turn Earth’s atmosphere into a new version of their home planet, which will kill most of humanity, and of course the good aliens object to this. One of the good aliens, Tao, has his human host/friend murdered and has to inhabit the protagonist, a hapless IT guy, before Tao dies from unprotected exposure to Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s a pretty interesting series so far (although I haven’t read the third one yet). Sort of a science fiction / techno / spy thriller.
I can not find my copy of Canticle, and just bought them both on Ebay.
Right. Lord of Light was probably better known than The Immortal. I can’t recommend it, but then the OP didn’t ask for good books about immortality.
In Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Melchizedek, the King of Salem is a hidden immortal.
I’ve always thought that if there was someone who was immortal he’d be poor and homeless. Why do anything today if you can do it next week, next year, or next century? Whenever I got time off to do stuff around the house, I kept putting it off until the last day or two and usually got about a tenth done of what I wanted to do. Just in interesting point Math. 16:28 seams to say there are people still alive from the time of Christ.
The Company is one of my favorite book series of all time. A shadowy and very powerful company (“The Company”) has invented time travel and immortality, although with limits on both. So The Company time travels to the past, makes immortals of certain people and the immortals live through history while working for The Company. The books mostly follow a few specific immortals working for The Company. Fantastic combination of time travel and historical fiction.
The first book is In the Garden of Iden.
I loved the company books and highly recommend them.
I’m into Ebay for four bucks. :dubious:
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle trilogy have an apparently immortal character named Enoch Root who pops in and out of the plot as necessary. He’s not the main character though.
Nathan Brazil and later Mavra Chang from the Well World books fit this trope, though they’re not shown on Earth until after the universe is reset. It is not made clear whether Brazil is a god, or God, or something else, as he has unreliably claimed several conflicting personal histories at different times.
I enjoyed the books in my youth but they may not have aged well.
Yes, that’s one of the origins of the legend of the Wandering Jew.