The way, the truth and the life

It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography. Those who have assembled lives of Christ in the past have come to recognise that they have no sources for such a task: the Gospels are not biographical essays but considered proofs that Jesus was the Messiah. They were, to that extent, as they say, on message. And the message was crafted by the first followers of Jesus between his death and the end of the first century.

Benedict XVI’s new book comprises a series of scholarly meditations on the message of Jesus. It shows signs, indeed, of having originated in a number of separate articles, or perhaps lecture notes, on particular episodes — the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, or the insights of ‘the great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner’ who, the Pope writes, ‘has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus’ words’. What most stands out in the book, however, is Benedict XVI’s acceptance, and use of, the findings of modern critical scholarship, the methods having been authorised in the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943. (How splendidly characteristic of the Holy See that it should have concerned itself with truly eternal spiritual values while the rest of human society was locked in transient preoccupations like the second world war.)