Jesus

With eloquence and beauty, the award-winning author of Book of the Dun Cow, The Book of God, and Paul: A Novel turns his pen to history's most compelling figure: Jesus of Nazareth. In vibrant language, Walter Wangerin Jr. sweeps away centuries of tradition and reveals a man of flesh-and-heart immediacy. Passionate, intelligent, and irresistibly real, this is a Jesus pulsing with life who will captivate you as thoroughly as he did the men and women who walked with him across Galilee's golden countryside.

Days of centuries past become today, lit with bright colors of the imagination. Wangerin shows you Jesus through the eyes of the two people who were with him at very the foot of the cross, the two who knew and loved him best: John the apostle, and Jesus' beloved mother, Mary. . . .

Angels in legions sang when you were born, my beautiful Yeshi! At midnight they poured down from the heavens, every one a whirling star, ten thousand voices in a skyborne choir. 'Glory,' they sang, and I felt the bedrock tremble. You popped your eyes open. You peered around, seeking the source of the music and waving your hands as if to catch the stars in them!

Here is a magnum opus of image and emotion: Jesus bringing his father the sacrificial lamb in Jerusalem's temple . . . Mary desperately searching for her son in the wind-lashed rain . . . the cry of gratitude from a leper's lips . . . the loving intimacy of Jesus in prayer . . . the fury of religious leaders . . . the agony of an iron crucifixion spike piercing human sinew . . .

Loving son, intimate friend, and brilliant teacher, tender in heart, fierce in anger, wholehearted in joy and in grief, deeply human yet unmistakably divine—this is the Jesus who lives and breathes in these pages.

The Jesus of the Bible, revealing God's heart in the midst of time and culture.

Here, in vivid language and rich historical detail, is the most important story of the Christian faith---the life of Jesus, presented in the form of a literary novel.

Publishers Weekly

Falling solidly within the genre of Wangerin's previous novels, this book often feels more like a Eugene Peterson-style paraphrase of the New Testament than an actual work of fiction. While Wangerin invents dialogue, events and characters that go beyond the biblical text, these inventions do little more than provide context for his retelling of the bulk of the four Gospel accounts. As always, Wangerin writes beautiful, descriptive prose, evoking the sights, sounds, smells, sensibilities and politics of the world in which Jesus lived. He nicely develops the character of Jesus' mother, but most of the other characters-including Jesus himself-are not adequately fleshed out, as Wangerin tends to use physical descriptions and one or two trademark mannerisms in lieu of full characterization. Judas Iscariot is tall, thin, young and manic; Simon Peter is burly and gregarious; and Mary Magdalene is a strong but tiny wisp of a woman whom everyone refers to as a child. Wangerin innovates a bit by alternating between third- and first-person narration, sharing Jesus' mother's perspective in the third person and the gospel writer John's in the first. Readers looking for a well-written novel that rarely veers from an entirely orthodox depiction of Jesus will appreciate this effort. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Walter Wangerin Jr. is widely recognized as one of the most gifted writers writing today on the issues of faith and spirituality. Among his books are The Book of God; Paul: A Novel; Whole Prayer; Reliving the Passion; Preparing for Jesus; Mary s First Christmas; Peter s First Easter; Ragman and Other Cries of Faith; Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace; Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? Mourning Into Dancing; The Book of Sorrows; A Miniature Cathedral; The Orphean Passages; and Crying for a Vision. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is writer-in-residence at Valparaiso University and holds the Jochum Chair.