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It was a turning point. I was able to enter the Fourth Gospel, and see Jesus alive and moving. And what eventually emerged for me from the Gospels was their unique coherence, their personalities—the inevitable stamp of individual authorship.
Of course John A. T. Robinson made the case for an early date for the Gospels far better than I ever could. He made it brilliantly in 1975, and he took to task the liberal scholars for their assumptions then in Redating the New Testament, but what he said is as true now as it was when he wrote those words.
After Robinson I made many great discoveries, among them Richard Bauckham who in The Gospels for All Christians soundly refutes the idea that isolated communities produced the Gospels and shows what is obvious, that they were written to be circulated and read by all.
The work of Martin Hengel is brilliant in clearing away assumptions, and his achievements are enormous. I continue to study him.
The scholarship of Jacob Neusner ca
General books I found important that cover the entire development of Jesus in the arts include a great survey book by Charlotte Allen called The Human Christ, which discusses how the early quest for the historical Jesus influenced the motion-picture images of Jesus and Jesus in novels. The work of Luke Timothy Johnson has always been helpful, and so also the scholarship of Raymond E. Brown, and John P. Meier. The work of Seán Freyne on Galilee is extremely important as is the work of Eric M. Meyers.
Let me mention Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ, and Craig L. Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel, and the work of Craig S. Keener which I’ve only begun to read. I greatly admire Ke
Roger Aus always teaches me something though I disagree with his conclusions completely. Mary S. Thompson’s work is wonderful.
Highly recommended are the works of Robert Alter and Frank Kermode on the Bible as literature, and Mimesis by Erich Auerbach. In general, I must praise the work of Ellis Rivkin, Lee I. Levine, Martin Goodman, Claude Tresmontant, Jonathan Reed, Bruce J. Malina, Ke
I learned something from every single book I examined.
The scholar who has given me perhaps some of my most important insights and who continues to do so through his enormous output is N. T. Wright. N. T. Wright is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read, and his generosity in embracing the skeptics and commenting on their arguments is an inspiration. His faith is immense, and his knowledge vast.
In his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, he answers solidly the question that has haunted me all my life. Christianity achieved what it did, according to N. T. Wright, because Jesus rose from the dead.
It was the fact of the resurrection that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity. Nothing else would have done it but that.
Wright does a great deal more to put the entire question into historical perspective. How can I do justice to him here? I can only recommend him without reservation, and go on studying him.
Of course my quest is not over. There are thousands of pages of the above-mentioned scholars to be read and reread.
There is so much of Josephus and Philo and Tacitus and Cicero and Julius Caesar that I have yet to cover. And there are so many texts on archaeology—I must go back to Freyne and Eric Meyers in Galilee, and things are being dug up in Palestine, and new books on the Gospels are being printed as I write.
But I see now a great coherence to the life of Christ and the begi
There are also theologians who must be studied, more of Teilhard de Chardin, and Rahner, and St. Augustine.
Now somewhere during my journey through all of this, as I became disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions, I realized something about my book.
It was this. The challenge was to write about the Jesus of the Gospels, of course!
Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” had become a joke because of all the many definitions it had ascribed to Jesus.
The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell—to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.
Then there were the legends—the Apocrypha—including the tantalizing tales in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas describing a boy Jesus who could strike a child dead, bring another to life, turn clay birds into living creatures, and perform other miracles. I’d stumbled on them very early in my research, in multiple editions, and never forgotten them. And neither had the world. They were fanciful, some of them humorous, extreme to be sure, but they had lived on into the Middle Ages, and beyond. I couldn’t get these legends out of my mind.
Ultimately I chose to embrace this material, to enclose it within the canonical framework as best I could. I felt there was a deep truth in it, and I wanted to preserve that truth as it spoke to me. Of course that is an assumption. But I made it. And perhaps in assuming that Jesus did manifest supernatural powers at an early age I am somehow being true to the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon, that Jesus was God and Man at all times.
I am certainly trying to be true to Paul when he said that Our Lord emptied himself for us, in that my character has emptied himself of his Divine awareness in order to suffer as a human being.
This is a book I offer to all Christians—to the fundamentalists, to the Roman Catholics, to the most liberal Christians in the hope that my embrace of more conservative doctrines will have some coherence for them in the here and now of the book. I offer it to scholars in the hope that they will perhaps enjoy seeing the evidence of the research that’s gone into it, and of course I offer it to those whom I so greatly admire who have been my teachers though I’ve never met them and probably never will.
I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who’ve followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I’ve ever launched into the world we share.
After all, is Christ Our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of them all?
If you’ve followed me this far, I thank you. I could append to this a bibliography of stifling length but I will not.
Let me in conclusion thank several people who have been my support and inspiration throughout these years:
Fr. De
Fr. Joseph Callipare, whose sermons on the Gospel of John were brilliant and wonderful. My time spent in his parish in Florida was one of the most beautiful periods of my research and work.