Jesus Book

I will admit that I'm a reader. Like any reader, I have been enthralled, sometimes even enraptured, by the words I've encountered in scores of good books. There have been very few, however, which changed my life. A.N. Wilson's profound biography, JESUS: A LIFE , is a book which changed my life.



Wilson spent his youth studying to be an Anglican priest. Somewhere along the line he lost his faith, only to later rediscover it. In the process of that journey, he swallowed, digested and spewed forth some of the most elegant observations on what modern humans can really know about the historical figure of Jesus.



His scholarship is second-hand and derivative, but it is proffered to the reader in an unvarnished, disinterested and completely straightforward manner. Wilson's aim is not to proselytize, apologize or sermonize. His sole purpose is to reconstruct what few facts have survived about a man who, although briefly notorious in a very small province of a very large empire, mattered little to history even in his lifetime.



The Jesus of the Gospels is almost certainly fictional. The Gospels were never intended as histories and they actually conform very closely to many other contemporaneous books in similar genres. Scholars are agreed, however, that many words attributed to Jesus are authentic. Wilson goes to great lengths in reconstructing the setting of the Galilean hinterlands which spawned Jesus, the culture which nurtured him, and the political climate of the Roman Occupation which elevated him from just another rabbi to the leader of the resistance. It is quite a story.



Wilson was never a militant atheist. Neither is he now a dogmatic Christian. He approaches the person of Jesus respectfully, without prejudice or preconception, and presents his findings with courage. Where he speculates about the interaction of religious and political forces in first century Palestine, he is scrupulous about marking it as speculative or unsubstantiated.



I fell in love with this book. It is accessible, lively and totally engaging. What's more, I found the demythologizing of the historical Jesus to be liberating. I actually found the human Jesus, a man of his age who would have felt a strong sense of camaraderie with Dr. King or Gandhi, to be figure I could respect and even admire.



Wilson wrote an equally engaging companion book called, "Paul, The Mind of the Apostle", which attempts to explain how the far more documented historical figure of Paul artfully manipulated the dead Jesus into the iconic Christ. It is also worth reading and is equally edifying. I won't bore you with the details of how a very small group of partisans in Jerusalem, led by the brother of the martyred Jesus, were left behind by a very canny, zealous and sometimes unscrupulous genius of a marketer. Suffice it to say, you will want to read "The Mind of the Apostle".



Whether you are a believer or not, "Jesus: A Life" is one book which you will never forget. I see no purpose in denying the factual existence of the historical Jesus, because he did leave a paper trail in the Roman world. And, of course, he almost certainly was not the same character recorded two and three generations later in the Gospels. But he did say some very interesting things -- teachings which ring absolutely authentic when subjected to the most rigorous systems of redaction criticism. Surprisingly, those teachings are almost exclusively about social justice, equality, the obligations of the powerful and the dignity of the powerless.



As I've said more than once tonight, I loved this book. And, to my utter amazement, I LOVED the Jesus who emerged within its pages. This Jesus is not crowned with diadems or ascending triumphantly into paradise. He is, in those haunting words of RFK's eulogy, "a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."



I first read this book some twenty years ago and it still haunts me. In becoming acquainted with Jesus the man, I became comfortable with my own humanity. I stopped looking for God too high up and too far away. No doubt few of you will share my experience, but I do believe that most of you will benefit from sharing Wilson's pilgrimage to rediscover an actual human being who never wanted to be God, but merely to see God's justice prevail. Jesus did not die for your right to lord power over others. If he had any single purpose in risking martyrdom at the hands of the Romans, it was to empower his fellow Judeans against their occupiers. And it wasn't simply for the sake of a free Judea. It was for the cause of a just Israel.



I can live with that. It is marvelously, deliciously, transcendently human.