Who Is Jesus?: The Puzzle and the Portraits of a Divine Savior

At Easter, major magazines and blogs will publish articles claiming to tell us who Jesus was. Every few weeks we see a new book making similar claims. Is it possible to know? In Who Is Jesus?, Allan Bevere addresses this question from the point of view of a person of faith who takes seriously the gospels and early Christian tradition as documentation of events and of serious theological reflection on those events. According to Bevere, Christian theology was neither an invention, nor a set of random speculations unrelated to reality. Rather, they were the response of early Christianity to the experience of Jesus and the historical pictures as presented in the canonical gospels. From a discussion of the Old Testament record piecing together the puzzle of biblical messianic prophecy through illumination of the christological controversies of the first five centuries of Christian history, and then back to the four portraits of Jesus given to us in the canonical gospels, this book provides a clear description of how orthodox Christian scholarship can bring together the varied evidence in order to present a coherent theological picture of the Jesus of history. As Bevere contends, history and theology are not easily separated, but are two threads that create an interwoven tapestry in which events have meaning. This book is good for individual reading, or could easily provide readings and an outline for a small group study.