I’ve just finished reading — or, actually, listening to the audible audio version — of Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth: what a great service he has done for us all in writing it! It is a fine, orthodox, compelling, and densely packed invitation to get to know Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord, the Second person of the Holy Trinity, better, in the way He wishes us to know Him. What could be better?

There’s too much in the book to summarize its contents usefully, and since I have only the audio version thus far (I plan on buying the book itself soon), it is hard for me to pull direct quotes. In brief, the book’s goal is to expose Jesus to us as He — God — presented Himself to us. That is to say, through the mediation of scripture, tradition, and the Church. The pope early on dismisses most tracts concerned with the so-called “historical” Jesus as being mere portraits of their authors and their authors’ preconceptions, rather than giving any insight into the real Jesus.

So what does Pope Benedict give instead? Well, after a lot of talk about “scientific” criticism at the front, and the limits thereof, the Pope reverts to talking about Christ in a largely traditional way, albeit with not a few insights or comments drawn from modern critical methods. But these are put at the service of the narrative, not treated as ends in themselves. A lot of the book is in a format reminiscent of a series of really good sermons: there are many sub-sections, each addressing a particular point (The title “Son of Man,” say, or Christ’s calling of the Apostles). Each of these is fairly self contained, and a typical section does three things: (1) references the Fathers and modern exegetes (2) discusses various ways in which modern scholarship has failed to understand the point and (3) puts the particular question at hand into the context of Jesus’ mission and life.

The book did two things that I thought were really great. The first is the obvious one that you would hope for: Pope Benedict has helped us to know Jesus better, to understand what it meant for the eternal Word to become flesh and to enter history, to save us: the King regnavit a ligno crucis, ruling from the wood of the cross. This is the part of the book I can’t summarize, because the book itself is a quite compact read as it is: you should read it for yourself. A major theme, though, I can say is that the book tells the story of how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament, how He must be understood as the new and greater Moses — Moses, who was great because “he talked with God as one talks to a friend, face to face,” never actually saw God face to face, but only was permitted to see God’s back, and so he could only show us “God’s back”; whereas Jesus Christ, eternally begotten of the Father, can show us God as he truly is, to show us “God’s face”, because He is in eternal conversation with His Father, truly face to face. There’s a heck of a lot more, of course, but I think that the Pope quotes the thing about Moses seeing God’s back about twelve times in the text: he must really like that story.

The second marvelous thing that Pope Benedict has done in this book is to give the Christian world an answer to the scads and scores of modern “scholars” who seem to have nothing better to do than to undermine each and every aspect of Christ’s mission through “scholarship” and misreadings of the Gospel text, history, and tradition. Here, Pope Benedict’s history with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith must have helped, as he seems to be an authority on all the myriad ways in which the Gospels can be misread and abused. He manages to do this through a finely balanced combination of scholarship and common sense. For instance, concerning the question of the dating and composition of the Gospel of John, which nearly any scholar twenty years ago would have sworn to be a “Jesus poem” from the 3rd century with basically no historical reliability, since (1) it’s so different from the synoptics (2) no fisherman from Galilee (John) could have written in its theological Greek (3) its Christology is so well developed, so “incarnational” and (4) it seems to disagree with the earlier Gospels on several points. The pope, instead of ducking all this, confronts it head on, noting that even more modern scholarship has displaced the older stuff and pointed back to tradition: that Zebedee, John’s father, was probably a priest of the temple himself (hence explaining why the high priest knows John, and why John is allowed into the trial of Jesus), whose land was in Galilee and who probably just ran a fishing business on the side, which his sons helped with. Thus the upper room of the last supper would have been in John’s family’s Jerusalem house, and John would have in fact been steeped in the theological Greek that was spoken and written by the priestly class of the time. He addresses the other points as well, arguing that, while the Synoptic gospels give the parables and sayings of Christ to the crowds of Galilee, John’s discourses are reproductions of the teachings of Christ in Jerusalem concerning himself, hence their longer and more erudite form. He also asks how scholars can claim that the author of John is some school of Second Century theologians whom we should trust, if they so consistently lie in the text of the Gospel, saying “he who writes this was witness to it, and knows it to be true,” as John’s gospel so often does.

Thus, scholarly learning is used, but at the service of and as a complement to the traditional understanding, rather than as an excuse to toss out tradition altogether; and common sense, too, so often lacking in scholarly texts, is brought to bear. The pope does this throughout the book, not infrequently citing some modern exegete as having a good explanation of A, B, or C, but then going on to say that he is “wrong in his conclusions on X, Y, and Z, since ….” It’s refreshing, and a marvelous antidote to so much of the trash out there today, which we all have heard — too often, even from the pulpit. I know, for myself, that I had heard most of the silliness that the Pope refutes in my own Catholic high school and, naturally, frequently in the Episcopal church in which I was raised. I would have been a very happy young lad if I had had this book in my hands as a sixteen or twenty year old, who knew that this liberal theology was wrong, but who couldn’t really express why. The pope, here, does exactly that: he pierces these errors to their rotten hearts, but in a gentle way that has one constantly learning, rather than standing outside and cheering on, as a more polemical approach might have done. At the close of a section, one knows not only what is wrong, but why it’s wrong, and just how wrong it is! Because the pope so ties each point, too, into the whole of Christ’s mission, it becomes obvious that many of the erroneous statements of modern scholarship just can’t be, since they destroy the integrity of Christ’s whole life, an integrity and whole so stunning in its complete majesty and mystery.

To give a further taste, here are — paraphrased — some comments and insights from the text that stand out in my memory:
No “pious moralizer” would have been turned over to the Romans to be put to death. If the Messianic Christology that the Gospels put on Christ’s lips wasn’t developed until after his crucifixion, who are these brilliant theological minds who came up with all this amazing novelty, if they had only from Christ himself an utterly conventional understanding of Messianic hope? Barabbas = bar abbas, son of the father: the people of Jerusalem were asked to choose between one Son of the Father and another: they chose the earthly one, not the heavenly one. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, isn’t the reaction of fear from the priest and Levite natural? And so can we not see that they are typical of human nature, whereas the outsider, the Samaritan, can be said to represent Christ, who anoints us, heals us, and pays the price of our salvation?

Now, there are some bits that are less thrilling, and the pope (or his translator) uses the phrase “Christ’s preferential option for the poor” once too many times (Ie, he uses it once, which is one time too many); and could someone tell him that the prepositional phrase “in a certain way” gets tiring after a while? But these are mere quibbles. Buy and read this book, and then buy copies for some other folks too — particularly for any young person who’s going off to college or who is attending a Catholic high school. It will inoculate them against the poisons of so much modernistic distortion of Christ’s mission.