The Gospels: in their own write 

Why write another book about Jesus?

Well, why not?

But seriously, as someone who has studied and thought about the gospels for a long time, I am surprised at how little people know about them. Lately, I have been upset about the way that churchgoers have been using Jesus to support all sorts of ideas and policies that would have been foreign and even despicable to him. It seemed that a books — with helpful illustrations — might remind people of what Jesus’s early (yet not earliest) followers felt about him.

What do Christians not know about the story of Jesus?

Many, many things. Like what did Jesus see as his mission? If you say “to found a Church,” you would be wrong. Christians also tends to combine the stories about Jesus, as though the bits and pieces were like Lego blocks waiting to be assembled into a complete picture. You see this around Christmas, especially, when Matthew’s story of Jesus’s birth (Joseph’s dream, Star in the East, Magi bearing gifts) is pasted atop Luke’s version (heavenly host, manger, shepherds) into a beautiful but misleading manger scene. Christians also understand what Jesus meant by a kingdom. They assume it means heaven, where all wrongs will be redressed. But Jesus and his earliest followers thought of the kingdom as more immediate — coming, like, next Thursday.

The clues for my opinions are all laying about in the gospels, usually in corners that people never read, or which they do read, but with a highly skewed understanding. My hope is that by exposing what the gospels themselves say about what Jesus was and what he taught, we might a) get closer to him and b) stop putting horrible, cruel and self-serving words and ideas on his lips.

Do you believe in Jesus?

I do. I believe he existed in first century Palestine, and died by decree of Pontius Pilate. I believe that he undoubtedly preached the kingdom, and may well have thought himself to be the Messiah, the expected savior and ruler of Israel. Whether anything he said about himself is true is another question, and one I am not prepared to debate. This book tries to understand what the gospels thought about him, true or not.

That said, I have tried my while life to model myself on Jesus’s teachings. Sometimes, they have kept me from some terrible behavior. Sometimes, as with my understanding of the role of forgiveness in ordinary life and of the existence of hell, I feel I have grown beyond them. Or at least seen their limitations. But I take Jesus seriously, and think others should as well — especially those who profess to follow him — in this increasingly immoral time.