JESUS OF NAZARETH

by Pope Benedict XVI

Doubleday, 2007

374 pages, $24.95

Available in bookstores

“Who do you say that I am?”  Faced with that question when it was posed straight from the mouth of the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth — the one whose teachings exuded irrefutable authority not because he held high office but because his words rang true, cut through and set off astonishing events — the Church’s first bishops blinked. Only one had the boldness to blurt out the obvious answer. Peter of Galilee: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Two millennia later, Joseph of Bavaria takes up the master’s question anew and gives the exact same response. Using a few more words, of course, and eloquently expounding on the implications.

And why not? The first head apostle was a simple fisherman. The right man for the job at the time. His 264th successor is one of the best teachers and most accomplished theologians the Church has ever produced. Ditto on the timing.

Reading Jesus of Nazareth, it’s easy to draw a line from Peter, the unlikely prince of the apostles martyred in middle age, to the disciplined intellectual who would reach maturity of years before becoming Pope Benedict XVI.

Clearly young Ratzinger, like St. Peter, instinctively responded to Jesus’ life and teachings not with fashionable skepticism, despair and indifference but with countercultural faith, hope and love.

Tracing his thinking through these pages, you can easily see how naturally this bishop of Rome developed into a great teacher. It’s what one would expect of a perpetual student who treasures his teacher because he trusts his teacher’s every word.

“The disciple who walks with Jesus,” he writes, “is caught up with him into communion with God.” Having walked with Jesus — and talked with him, and studied a lifetime at his feet — he now spontaneously steps forward to tell us all he has learned and loved. Like the woman at the well in John 4 who implored her neighbors to “come see a man who told me everything I have done,” Benedict couldn’t keep his private, life-changing encounter with the Messiah to himself.

Patient Professor

The book’s organization is as methodical and tidy as one would expect from a circumspect German genius. The chapters follow Christ’s public ministry, from his baptism through the declaration of his identity, in chronological order. (A second volume is planned; it’s expected to cover Jesus’ birth, passion, death and resurrection.) There’s an extended explication of the Sermon on the Mount, a line-by-line exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, a careful consideration of select parables.

Benedict also mines John’s Gospel for the meaning of its strikingly singular imagery and lingers on two milestones in Jesus’ ministry: the Transfiguration and — what else? — Peter’s confession.

“Peter recognizes the power of God himself working through Jesus’ words, and this direct encounter with the living God in Jesus shakes him to the core of his being,” the Holy Father writes in what is surely a reflection of his own interior experience. “In the light of this presence, and under its power, man realizes how pitifully small he is. ... This  inner realization of the proximity of God himself in Jesus suddenly breaks in upon Peter and finds expression in the title that he now uses for Jesus: ‘Kyrios’ (Lord).”

Spend enough time around a distinguished scholar and, at a certain point, you’ll realize you can no longer separate the man from what he knows and how effectively he imparts it. This is both a strength and a challenge for Benedict as he strives to make himself heard in a newly popular voice.

He was born brilliant and all he has done in the years since is apply his towering cognitive capacity to finding out all there is to know about God. Not only by a scholarly life of systematic study but also a holy life of constant prayer and a priestly life of pastoral service. Who can keep up?

Who can’t? I don’t know when such dense theological themes and intricate conceptual considerations have been laid out with such economy of expression. Re-reading favorite passages, the words “easy to read, hard to hurry through” come to mind.

“Evils (plural) can be necessary for our purification, but evil (singular) destroys,” he writes in a memorable segment probing the meaning of “Deliver us from evil” in the section on the Lord’s Prayer. “This, then, is why we pray from the depths of our soul not to be robbed of our faith, which enables us to see God, which binds us with Christ. This is why we pray that, in our concern for goods, we may not lose the Good itself; that even faced with the loss of goods, we may not also lose the Good, which is God; that we ourselves may not be lost. Deliver us from evil!”

Too Much Truth?

Reactions in the mainstream media to this unprecedented publishing event have been predictably mixed. The major newsweeklies, for example, quickly came out with their usual maddening coverage of all things Catholic. That is to say that some commanding reporting got undone by editors’ impulse to insert, or green-light, the obligatorily snarky dismissal of the Pope’s proposals. (Time: “Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as the Gospel’s overriding message of Jesus’ divinity, even in passages that liberal Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions to help the poor and powerless.”)

It’s true that, as Newsweek noted, part of Benedict’s motivation in writing this instant bestseller was to answer the purveyors of “historical-critical” biblical exegesis. For decades now, the more radical members of this crowd have sought to use archaeology and postmodern scholarship to portray the “real Jesus” as a mere mortal, even if a curiously influential one.

In his foreword, the master theologian even acknowledges the substantial contributions of the historical-critical method while pointing out its limitations.

But come on. How surprising or disappointing should it be when a pope, any pope, defends the historicity and veracity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

For his part, Benedict goes out of his way to point out that he isn’t writing here as Vicar of Christ per se. After explaining that, with this extracurricular project, he hopes to offer a “properly theological interpretation of the Bible,” he flatly states that the book is no initiative of the magisterium, but “solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (Psalm 27:8). Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial good will without which there can be no understanding.”

I read that invitation and can only wonder what part of “Let’s compare notes” the selectively astute detractors don’t get.

League Leader

Until now, my favorite colloquial Christology has been Frank Sheed’s To Know Christ Jesus, followed closely by Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ and St. Thomas More’s The Sadness of Christ. I also learned a lot about Jesus from some evangelical Protestant writings, tops among them The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, Jesus Among Other Gods by Ravi Zacharias and The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. And I’ve been thrilled with what I’ve read from the Anglican New Testament scholar N.T. Wright.

Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth enters this shelf and, just like that, goes straight to the head of the class — not to accept star-pupil accolades but to teach us how to teach Jesus to a world that needs to see his true face shining with the full spectrum of Catholic light.

We would do well to pay close attention to the lesson, for the book’s authority owes not to the high office held by its author but to its words: They ring true and cut through. Don’t be surprised if, in accord with John 14:12 — “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father” — they set off a few astonishing events of their own.

David Pearson is the

Register’s senior editor.