Pope Benedict is about to publish a scholarly book on Jesus:
"Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration" is scheduled for a March release in Italian by the Rizzoli publishing house and in German by Herder Verlag.
Announcing the publication Nov. 21, Rizzoli and the Vatican gave reporters copies of the book's preface and a portion of its introduction.
In the preface, signed "Joseph Ratzinger -- Benedict XVI," the pope wrote that for decades he had noticed a growing scholarly distinction between the "historical Jesus" and the "Christ of faith," a distinction that many Christians now accept as accurate.
But, he wrote, if the human Jesus was totally different from the Jesus depicted in the Gospels and proclaimed by the church, what does it mean to have faith in him?
Jimmy Akin notices something important:
But the book is not an act of the papal magisterium, despite its author's election to the papal see:
In a Nov. 21 statement, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said, "The pope says clearly, with his usual simplicity and humility, that this is not a 'magisterial act,' but a fruit of his personal research and, as such, can be freely discussed and critiqued.
"It is not a long encyclical on Jesus, but a personal presentation of the figure of Jesus by the theologian Joseph Ratzinger," who was elected pope after beginning the work, Father Lombardi said.
This says volumes about the personal humility of the man who is now pope. To have the spiritual authority to mandate that every sentence in the book be believed by Catholics and to refuse to use it--to refuse to put forward one's own ideas authoritatively--and to instead openly say that people are free to discuss those ideas and critique them--knowing even that they will meet hostility in many scholarly circles--is the mark of an extraordinarily humble man.
How cool is that? I'm looking forward to seeing it in English. Correctly or not, I am imagining it as a more scholarly, less for-popular-reading, Life of Christ a la Bishop Sheen. (Which, if you haven't read, you might select while you are waiting for Benedict's, I mean Ratzinger's, book to come out.)
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