Jesus Through the Centuries

A (very) few of us had a nice conversation about Orthodoxy under my post In The Dark Night.  Jaroslav Pelikan came up, and I recommend (again) his book Jesus Through the Centuries. 

The e-notes give a good summary - and save me time.

Each age interpreted not only the Jesus of the Gospel sources but also the images of Jesus bequeathed by earlier ages, sometimes as a reaction against those images. For example, the Romantic era’s aesthetic response to Jesus was a reaction against the “common sense” Jesus of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. The Enlightenment itself had reacted against the medieval preoccupation with the supernatural in religion; a widespread eighteenth century view was that authentic miracles were not needed to validate a natural religion based on good sense.

Every century has drawn from Jesus and his sayings the answers it requires to its own unique questions about the nature of existence. Pelikan observes, “The way any particular age has pictured Jesus is often a key to the genius of that age.” However, implicit in Pelikan’s view, because the interpretation of Jesus at any point in the Christian era has been drawn from one single source—the portraits of him in the Gospels, drawn in turn from oral tradition passed down by those who had known him—Jesus is capacious enough to answer the deepest questions of all ages.

Armed with that, you can fill in the chronological eras of the Church from the list for your own entertainment. You will find some characterisations of Jesus endearing or important, while others will make you want to go back in time and slap a few intellectuals and artists around.

 

Table of Contents:

• The good, the true, the beautiful
• The rabbi
• The turning point of history
• The light of the gentiles
• The king of kings
• The cosmic Christ
• The son of man
• The true image
• Christ crucified
• The monk who rules the world
• The bridegroom of the soul
• The divine and human model
• The universal man
• The mirror of the eternal
• The prince of peace
• The teacher of common sense
• The poet of the spirit
• The liberator
• The man who belongs to the world.