The way, the truth and the life

It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography. Those who have assembled lives of Christ in the past have come to recognise that they have no sources for such a task: the Gospels are not biographical essays but considered proofs that Jesus was the Messiah. They were, to that extent, as they say, on message. And the message was crafted by the first followers of Jesus between his death and the end of the first century.