The Book of Jesus

Ten or twelve years ago Calvin Miller edited a volume he titled The Book of Jesus: A Treasury of the Greatest Stories and Writings about Christ. The book doesn't pretend to be a scholarly argument and has no real interpretive agenda; rather it is a collection of pieces ranging from "one-liners" to fairly complete essays and reflections from about 200 different contributors. Some date to the earliest days of the church (for example, the Gospels and the Roman/Jewish historian, Josephus), others from the Conciliar Age (eg. Augustine and Anselm), and still others from the rest of the centuries "CE". Some of the writers are the "usual suspects" for such a volume, (the aforementioned, the reformers, contemporary or nearly contemporary voices like Fred Buechner, Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen, Desmond Tutu), while others are surprising because they were or are not Christians (like Gandhi and Sholem Asch) or because you wouldn't expect them to have anything to say about the subject (like Charles Dickens or Christopher Columbus.)

The volume makes no great or profound argument about Jesus, but it does provide a wide range of diverse voices that have given voice to how a pretty remarkable group of people. They range from things that claim to be historical accounts (like Josephus: "...about this time lived Jesus, a wiseman, if it is proper to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, -- a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him many of the Jews and many of the Greeks"), to contemplative poetry (like Thomas Merton's The Flight into Egypt -- "Go Child of God, upon the singing desert, Where, with eyes of lame, The roaring lion keeps thy road from harm"), to comedic retellings of parables (like Robert Farrar Capon take on the laborers in the vineyard -- "There was a man who owned a vineyard. His operation was not on the scale of E&J Gallo, but it was quite respectable: let's put him in the Robert Mondovi class....").

We have a couple of copies floating around here if any of you want to borrow it. Again, no profound conclusions, just lots of info from lots of people.