It takes a strong writer to do justice to the Jesus story. The mark of Jesus is on all our lives, believers and unbelievers alike, but we are all trapped between a sparse record from Jesus' own time and a flood of images from each generation be-tween his and ours. Who is the real Jesus? What was he like? Can we recover him from the shadow of history?
Each generation has to make its own creative inquiry, reading scripture and history and then imagining the reality between the lines. In this singularly moving narrative by William Emerson, a publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post, we can find all the justification we need for dismissing the sweet man who wants you to be a sunbeam, the romanticized shepherd with a flaked-out lamb on his shoulder, and the scout leader with the paperback edition of the Golden Rule. Jesus was a self-possessed, unmanadeable man, cool in the Face of enemies, warmly casual with both the rich and the poor, progressively self-aware of his power, continually immersed in a swift schedule of teaching and healing.