My story by Jesus of Nazareth
as narrated by Brendan Butler (From the author, €10.00, including postage, contact www.mystorybyjesusofnazareth.org)
Brendan Butler is a well-known anti-war activist and advocate of much needed reform and of openness in the Church. He always has vital things to say, though they are not always well received. But that is the way of the world.
But over the years as a religious teacher Mr Butler (a graduate in theology from the Antonianum in Rome) seems to have felt that in many ways people of all kinds were failing to make contact with the ‘real Jesus’. In this narrative he attempts to put that right by letting Jesus speak for himself.
This narrative is then a reduced and accessible version of the historical Jesus that scholars have arduously sought for centuries. It is based on wide reading in recent scholarship on Mr Butler’s part – a bibliography is provided – and places the now somewhat distanced person of common discourse for many, with a Jewish Jesus living in a particular period in Palestine under foreign control.
I suspect many will be attracted to this book, and they will learn a great deal from it. But the fictional format may in some way be misleading, for the quest for the historical Jesus is a struggle to come to terms with our own ignorance. The ever-changing views of scholars are hard to convert easily into fiction. The book is neither fictional enough, nor academic enough.
To begin this search is to set on a never ending quest. If Mr Butler leads readers to read the gospels and to explore the literature for themselves, to explore the complexities that are so often reduced to platitudes from the altar, it will have served its purpose. But one can image too that it will annoy many who dip into. But if it makes them think too, that will also be a good thing.
I am not entirely happy with it. We are given a very modern Jesus, rather than the historical Jesus. To comprehend the historical Jesus through fiction is a task that has challenged many great writers. Mr Butler’s shoes are smaller than those of Strauss, Renan, Schweitzer, George Moore, Robert Graves, Kazantzakis and so many others.
What they give so often though, as with say, Tolstoy, is an image of their own better, if outspoken selves.
Perhaps we all make in our minds a Jesus that reflects ourselves. Such a Jesus many find in his conversation with the woman at the well, or his fable of the kindly Samaritan. The real Jesus lies in a personal experience of what he says, and not in the rhetoric of debate. P.C.
Profits from this book will be donated the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (M.A.S.I).