I’m enjoying it for many of the reasons you’ve given here. One thing I don’t like, though, is his desire to avoid stepping on toes, especially Jewish toes. I’ve just finished the section where Benedict dialogued with Rabbi Jacob Neusner dialoguing Christ. Benedict doesn’t skate around the fact that Christ is God, but he seems to hesitate in driving this point home to the Jews. Instead, there’s a lot of talk about the “eternal Israel”, as though the Jews still kinda had some happy thing going, though they don’t recognize Christ for who He is.

Another thing which bugged me: he spoke of the eucharistic celebration as being something-something in our Christian communities today. (I don’t have the book on me, so I can’t give the exact quotation now.) In my mind, at least, the most natural reading of that kind of language is that he’s talking about not only Catholics but Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, etc. (Otherwise, we would have to conclude that he doesn’t take the name “Christian” to apply to protestants - which would be awesome! but the same world in which bears adorn the papal liturgy. Yet we know that Christ founded the Catholic Church, that the Catholic Chuch IS the mystical body of Christ. In what I’ve read so far, Benedict doesn’t deny this, he just obfuscates.

Sometimes, not saying anything is prudent; sometimes, not saying anything or saying something which can easily be misinterpreted is obfuscation. I could grant him the Jews thing, because the implication is still pretty obvious that they’re wrong; but the protestants thing is too much. Benedict is constantly talking about the Church in the book - he had better make clear, so there’s no confusion, what Church we’re talking about.

Catharina Oxoniensis reminded me of something Bishop Fellay had said about Benedict: at heart, he’s a conservative, even traditional Catholic, but in his head, in his theological work he shows the tell-tale signs of modernism.

I think that’s fair and I think that this book is a good illustration of the characterization. I like it all the same because it’s a good antidote to those who know nothing but modernism, who know nothing but an historical-critical Jesus. Most briefly: I dislike it for what it doesn’t say rather than for what it does. I’ll probably write more about particular passages later.