Shelf Life: Summer Reading

IT was already a bestseller before its appearance on bookstore shelves, but it would be a shame if Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 374 pp., $24.95) ended up like a Stephen Hawking tome-more bought than read, and gathering dust on the coffee table. Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual reputation is certainly intimidating, but his first book as Pope Benedict XVI is (for the most part) written in a clear, reader-friendly style: He has read Jülicher and Schnackenburg, so we don’t have to.

The book is an examination of Jesus’s public ministry. (An anticipated second volume will tackle his birth and infancy, passion and resurrection.) The mission of Jesus’s life, Ratzinger explains, is to reveal God to humanity: As God’s Son, He shows us the face of God the Father, and brings mankind into closer relation with divine reality. The chapter on the Lord’s Prayer stresses that the initiative in this drama comes from God’s grace, not from man: “The Our Father does not project a human image onto heaven, but shows us from heaven-from Jesus-what we as human beings can and should be like.”

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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IT was already a bestseller before its appearance on bookstore shelves, but it would be a shame if Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 374 pp., $24.95) ended up like a Stephen Hawking tome-more bought than read, and gathering dust on the coffee table. Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual reputation is certainly intimidating, but his first book as Pope Benedict XVI is (for the most part) written in a clear, reader-friendly style: He has read Jülicher and Schnackenburg, so we don’t have to.

The book is an examination of Jesus’s public ministry. (An anticipated second volume will tackle his birth and infancy, passion and resurrection.) The mission of Jesus’s life, Ratzinger explains, is to reveal God to humanity: As God’s Son, He shows us the face of God the Father, and brings mankind into closer relation with divine reality. The chapter on the Lord’s Prayer stresses that the initiative in this drama comes from God’s grace, not from man: “The Our Father does not project a human image onto heaven, but shows us from heaven-from Jesus-what we as human beings can and should be like.”