The Jesus I Never Knew

Andrew Lloyd Webber cast him as a rock-n-roll rebel in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, many Christians see him as a handsome European-looking man, and social justice groups place him next to Ghandi in his defense of the downtrodden. But, says Philip Yancey, the real Jesus would have left most people scratching their heads along with the disciples and asking, Who is this guy? This is exactly the question Yancey asks in his new book The Jesus I Never Knew. Yancey's search for the real Jesus collides with the calm, cool, collected, and loving hippie notions of Jesus he saw in modern American culture. Instead, he finds a Galilean Jew born into apparent scandal making the most daring of claims: that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. The Jesus I Never Knew developed out of a class Yancey led at LaSalle Street Church in Chicago, but finding the real Jesus has been Yancey's passion since childhood. Yancey saw Him as a cardboard cut-out in Sunday School and a cosmic Christ in Bible college. Today he sees a world that marks its calendar around Jesus' birth and uses His name to intensify a curse. (Wouldn't it be odd to center a calendar around Napoleon's birth or to scream Thomas Jefferson in a shocking situation?). And yet, says Yancey, I am not writing a book about Jesus because he is a great man who changed history. I am not tempted to write about Julius Caesar or the Chinese emperor who built the great wall. I am drawn to Jesus, irresistibly, because he has positioned himself at the dividing point of life-my life. The Jesus I Never Knew looks at who Jesus was, why hecame, and what he left behind. More than historical speculation or doctrinal recitation, Yancey asks the questions out of a personal desire to truly know Jesus.