Jesus The Man who Lives

For each successive generation the story of Jesus needs to be looked at afresh through contemporary eyes. Malcolm Muggeridge, a distinguished international journalist and sometime editor of Punch, a sharp-tongued social commentator and television controversialist, has come to have an intense and highly personal preoccupation with Jesus and his teaching. Though he is now a fervent believer in the unique truth and continuing relevance of Jesus, as revealed in the Gospels, in the stupendous drama of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection, he accepts no sectarian rules, and is sceptical about current attempts to make Christianity conform to today’s materialistic outlook and values. To look for Jesus in history, he insists, is as futile as supposing that his Kingdom can be realized through politics and advanced by the exercise of power. His concern is with the essential significance of Jesus’s birth, life, ministry, death and continuing presence in the world. At the same time, he relates the traditional Christianity, which has been handed down to us, to life as it is lived today, with all its dilemmas and controversies and conflicts. One process, to which every Christian testimony ministers; from the simplest and crudest to the most articulate and sophisticated, from the Apostle Paul and St Augustine to a Mother Teresa and a Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own time; but still deriving from that dramatic intervention of God in history two thousand years ago. This is a book which will command attention, arouse debate, and yet give much food for thought among those who really want to get back to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, out of which our civilization was born, on which it has sustained itself and flourished, and lacking which, Mr Muggeridge considers, it will surely perish. Professor William Barclay writes of the book: ‘It is a compulsive reading…I have no doubt at all that it is an act of witness, one man’s testimony to Jesus. I think that the dedication on the first page–“I write this book for love of your love”–from Augustine, does really characterize it. It is a book written from the heart, and I do not doubt that it will reach the heart.’ Illustrating Mr Muggeridge’s narrative and argument, the book reproduces a series of very relevant, and often quite unfamiliar, images of the life of Jesus, not merely from the works of great and original artists such as El Greco, Bruegel, Blake and Van Gogh, but also from early mosaics, ikons, medieval stained glass windows and church sculptures of great beauty. -Publisher