Jesus of Nazareth

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - April 20, 2007

On Monday, Pope Benedict celebrated the eightieth anniversary of his birth and baptism with the publication of a book on the love of his life. Entitled Jesus of Nazareth, the work, he writes, is the fruit of a "long interior journey" stretching throughout his adult years. It is a very personal work, begun when he was a cardinal and, as a testimony to its importance to him, finished during the few free moments he has had as Pope. It is a "personal seeking of the Lord's face" in which he seeks to defend his Savior, Lord, and Boss from various distortions that have been made over the course of the last fifty years.

Over the course of his youth, Benedict writes in the preface, he grew to recognize in Jesus that "God was made visible and the image of the just man could be seen." Beginning in the 1950s, however, various Scripture scholars began to try to separate the "historical Jesus" from the "Christ of faith," to say that the man Jesus of Nazareth was not the same divine Lord about whom St. Paul and the evangelists wrote and in whom the early Church believed. The figure of Jesus became, the young Ratzinger noted, "ever more uncertain," "less defined" and even "contradictory." Various "reconstructions" of Jesus emerged, "from the revolutionary enemy of the Romans who opposed the established power and naturally failed, to the gentle moralist who allowed everything and inexplicably ended up by causing his own ruin."

These reconstructions, Benedict says, were "more photographs of the authors and their ideals" than portraits of Jesus. Nevertheless, their cumulative impression, which infected theological schools and seminaries and through them "penetrated profoundly into the common consciousness of Christianity."

Benedict wants to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the true Jesus of history, a figure far more persuasive, logical and "historically honest and convincing" than the reconstructions of the last decades. In it, he does not want to dismiss out of hand all of the scholarship of the past half-century, but to test it by challenging many of its assumptions and by retaining what is good.

While the book is by Joseph Ratzinger the disciple and theologian and "not at all a magisterial act" of the successor of St. Peter, it is clearly consistent with the thrust of Benedict's magisterium, which has focused on the person, teaching and deeds of Christ. Benedict said he felt an urgency to publish the first ten chapters of it — from Christ's baptism to his transfiguration — since he "did not know how much time and how much strength" would be granted him by the Lord to complete the work.

All Christians should rejoice that on Benedict's birthday, he gave us this gift, by which, with his characteristic candor and clarity, he will help us sort through the confusions engendered by those who have sought to remake Jesus of Nazareth in their image rather than be remade by him into his. In this birthday present, Benedict hopes to give us the greatest gift possible, Jesus Christ, and help us to seek his face with similar diligence, wonder and grateful love. Let us not leave this gift unopened.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.