Jesus a man signed by God

with notes on popular theology

I must thank some people who made this English edition possible.

I thank  Paola Quazzo, Kate Merret, and George Levet. Special thanks go to the lady who re-edited and reassembled the various parts of the text with professional competence, obtaining the book we have today. I would like to emphasise that this lady, who professes to be an atheist and who wishes to remain anonymous, is an activist who has devoted much of her life to trying to learn about and make people aware of the logic and workings of human society in order to eliminate its injustices. She is not naive and knows that believers do not have a mathematical formula at the end of which is written: ‘God exists’, but need an act of faith. She also knows that even the atheist does not have the formula to say: ‘God does not exist’, and therefore respects the choice of those who believe.

A French atheist philosopher (a lover of the philosophy of St. Thomas) said (addressed to believers) that, for him, all human sciences including philosophy and theology have the same path for believers and non-believers, with the only difference being that the ultimate conclusion of believers is that God exists and that of atheists is that God does not exist. 

What I have written is the reason why the translator-publisher was able to do us this service without failing to be consistent in her thinking. 

Fr. Renato Rosso

Thou alone the Holy One,

Thou alone the Lord,

Thou alone the Almighty Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit

in the glory of God the Father

Forewords

Dear reader,

if this morning, at school or in a cultural circle, someone has spoken to you about Jesus, saying that he is just a myth, or simply an intelligent and holy man, but only a man, or even that he never existed; or, again, if you have been told that he married the Magdalene and that, in spite of the scourging, crucifixion and that last lance blow to the heart, his death was only apparent, so that he could be revived and go to Kashmir in India, staying there to preach until he was over a hundred years old; well: if you have heard stories like these, try reading the simple pages that follow. They may direct you and help you to read the Gospel, the true and everlasting book of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is certainly the most extraordinary man in human history and surpasses it. Some have sought to empty him of his divine prerogatives, reducing him to a poor carpenter, who had to work for a living in a poor and unknown country (all true); who died as a slave on a cross (this too cannot be denied); an itinerant preacher with a group of followers (a dozen), who was allegedly deified by some fanatics. Well, how do you explain that such an ordinary man, this Jesus Christ, actually split history into two: before Him and after Him? All the theologians and philosophers of history (at least of the last two thousand years) have felt the duty to confront the Jesus phenomenon in order to adore it or condemn it, to distance themselves from it or, again, to fight against it, but they could not do without confronting Him.

Thousands of Christian theologians and Church fathers have studied, investigated and dissected the mystery of Jesus, Messiah and Son of God.

Millions of symposia and dozens of councils have preached the message of this 'carpenter'. In the 19th century alone (when the printed book was still important) more than 62,000 books were written about Him. And even a philosopher as critical of the Christian religion of Rome as Benedetto Croce wrote: 'Christianity has been the greatest revolution that mankind has ever accomplished. [1]  Kant, Hegel, Marx, and all the philosophers of the last twenty centuries have had to deal with this man.

It should also be added that none of the human intelligences of these two millennia have managed to put Jesus in a frame, with no further questions. Even those who have dedicated their entire lives to the study of this divine man have had to postpone some answers to the definitive encounter with God, at the end of time. What has not been produced by painting and sculpture - charged with recounting and deepening the mysteries of faith - in our thousands of churches, museums and homes? Which character has been given more space on canvases, mosaics, frescoed walls and in all the statuary of the world?

The millions of chapels, churches, cathedrals and basilicas around the globe also testify to a robust, balanced faith in Jesus Christ, expressed in extraordinary beauty. What about music? How many millions of scores for musical instruments have produced hymns, songs, symphonies and chorales in churches, theatres and homes, glorifying this name: Jesus?

The Muslim religion itself, as presented by its most open-minded theologians, while attributing to Muhammad the seal of prophecy in that he would be the last prophet, however, recognises in Jesus the seal of sanctity, in that he is the man, the holiest prophet, who never had to ask for forgiveness and who was also entrusted with the Final Judgement at the end of time.

The story offered in these pages gives us a glimpse of the God preached by Jesus Christ, the good God, the God of the poor and sinners, who only need forgiveness, mercy and compassion. While praying, Jesus sometimes turns his eyes to heaven, mesmerised by the Father, but he does not lose sight of any man, any woman, any child who might need him. The poor and the sick hope that He will soon return to their village and their camps, because they really need Him. In the text that follows, the most common doubts and answers are encountered, so that, in a simple but not superficial way, everyone can give reasons for their faith. If, while listening to a Gospel text, someone tells us that all those stories could be children's fairy tales, we should be able to give a sensible answer. Having doubts is a sign that we are thinking and therefore it is good, but remaining without answers is also a sign of laziness. One thinker argued that he who thinks little is never tempted to doubt, but neither is he so likely to obtain certainty. Since the eye capable of glimpsing the invisible, the divine, has, so to speak, partly atrophied in our contemporary age, we need to rectify our ability to see before approaching the discourse of Christ. 

[1] - Cfr. B. Croce, Perché non possiamo non dirci cristiani, Torino, C. Pannunzio, 2008, p. 15

Second premise

I feel a second premise is necessary to state why this text came into being. It was a sad experience that forced me to develop my reflection on the Jesus of the Gospels, namely the need to prevent what happened to me from happening to others. For ten years I had lived among the nomads of Bangladesh and India. My days were filled with activity, friendship with my people and prayer. Prayer time - I have to say it - has always been important in my life, probably because of the precious legacy my teachers left me.

It was 2002: I realised that the practices of Eucharist, adoration and meditation had become arid, lifeless, so much so that they seemed like dead time to me. However, I was well aware that often, in the spiritual life, one can alternate these times, which, if well managed, can also make one grow. So, I also had the answer: dry spells are normal. I knew of nights much longer than mine in St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross and many others. Those mystics had known how to live faithfulness in a darkness that seemed to kill the spirit. I was in the company of great saints, so there was nothing to fear.

I still felt lost. I was no longer able to feel that good God who had gratified and consoled me so many times, but I hoped that that sense of gratification and consolation was evolving into a truer and more authentic spirituality. Yet I felt I was being abandoned by God. I was struggling to interpret what I was experiencing. I hoped that this period of silence and aridity might become a passage of purification of my too childish faith to recover a more adult one. Even my spiritual director considered it a test that I would have passed anyway. With him, however, I had not shared a detail of my life that I had simply underestimated, or rather, to which I did not attribute in the slightest the cause of a situation that could have become dramatic and irreversible.

What had happened? Trying to delve deeper into the Gospel I was captivated by the allure of the historicity of the facts, of what had really happened 2000 years ago, of the events that would change human history. I felt the need, and rightly so, to understand what Jesus had really said or what the first disciples had interpreted. Drawn then by the need to rationalise all the data I could reach in my investigations, I found a number of assumptions that solved the whole mystery, which seemed gratuitous to me, of the Gospel accounts.

The rationalists who had enchanted me argued that if the multiplication of the loaves was mentioned, it should be understood to mean that the disciples had brought the loaves and fishes the day before to the place where Jesus would preach and that they would distribute them before returning home. As for the miracle at Cana, on the other hand, Jesus would have the wine brought to Cana, before the feast, as a wedding gift for the bride and groom.

At this point the reader has already understood: what I was experiencing was not dryness and I was not in the company of any saint. I felt abandoned by God, when in fact it was me who had abandoned God. To faith I was substituting the tickle of reason. I had practically obliterated everything in the Gospels that could be replaced by rationality without the effort of recurring to faith. And, precisely because miracles are signs not imposed by God to force our faith, but offered in the freedom of accepting, interpreting or rejecting them, without realising and thinking to deepen them, I had in fact rejected them: with them, the resurrection, salvation and divinity of Jesus had been blurred.

I had, however, retained some testimonies of Jesus, but his words, even these diminished, were insufficient for me to know a Jesus who would deserve my falling in love with him.

So I was left with empty prayer times and the Eucharist: a mere memory of someone I could no longer reach. Friendship with nomads and intense social engagement helped me to still retain a glimmer of faith, but it was fading irreversibly.

When I professed the Creed, I was performing an incoherent act that was not the result of the premises I had laid down. And for this reason, when the Lord Jesus returned to take me back into His arms, I felt it my duty to deepen my faith without naivety and without discount.

I enlisted the help of theologians and biblical scholars, both ancient and contemporary, to offer a divulgative contribution, simple, but hopefully not naive (though not aimed at specialists, who have other means to deepen their paths) and thus, Jesus was born, a man signed by God.

Introduction

The text is divided into two parts: a more descriptive one, which gives the story of Jesus, his speeches, parables, miracles and in particular his passion and death and resurrection. Then there is a second part that contains the annexes: these are reflections or useful information that are indicated each time in the first part and that accompany the descriptive paragraphs.

If the reader prefers, he or she can also read the two parts separately, as long as he or she knows that they are intertwined with each other and neither is complete without the other. Also in the second part are notes on popular theology, simple and accessible even to those who are not specialists in the subject.

I would have liked to remove all quotations, what I have done only in part, so that the text does not resemble a strictly scientific research paper. It is best read as a series of homilies, even though the information given has been scrupulously sifted and not just by me.

The contents of the book are reported by different authors, who generally use more technical and less accessible language.

Personal reflections and findings have always been compared with knowledgeable people, some of whom, living and studying in the land where Jesus lived, have some additional means at their disposal, such as the libraries and archives of Jerusalem and archaeology, as well as the geography of those holy places.