Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels
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In the introduction to this remarkable book, Mary Gordon is riding in a taxi as the driver listens to a religious broadcast, and she reflects that, though a lifelong Christian, she is at odds with many others who identify themselves as Christians. In an effort to understand whether or not she had "invented a Jesus to fulfill my own wishes," she determined to read the Gospels as literature and to study Jesus as a character. What results is a vibrantly fresh and personal journey through the Gospels, as Gordon plumbs the mysteries surrounding one of history's most central figures.In this impassioned and eye-opening book, Gordon takes us through all the fundamental stories-the Prodigal Son, the Temptation in the Desert, the parable of Lazarus, the Agony in the Garden-pondering the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, the unresolved more ambiguities, the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she... The Washington Post - Ron Charles …[a] brisk, provocative survey of the major events and statements of Jesus's life. Though far too cursory to work as an introduction to the Gospels, Reading Jesus should appeal to anyone in that great multitude of thoughtful or lapsed Christians who feels the Scriptures growing stale and ossified, anyone who wants to wrestle with the uncomfortable problems and irreconcilable paradoxes of the New Testament. "I am ready," she writes, "at any time to learn that almost everything and anything I know is wrong, or at least in need of radical revision." If you share that sort of fluid curiosity in sacred matters, take this book and eat it up.
Introduction xiI These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins1 The Running Father, the Starving Son, the Fatted Calf, the Husks, the Unbearable Question 72 Swine 163 The Burning Tongue, the Barren Womb 224 Perfume, Hair 305 A Dream of Whiteness 386 The Dark Garden 437 The Fig Tree 568 The Temptation in the Desert 639 The Writing on the Ground 7510 The Blessed 83II The Problem of Jesus: Reading Through Anger, Confusion, Disappointment, Loss1 The Problem of Miracles 952 The Problem of Asceticism: Do We Want to Live Like This? 1153 The Problem of Perfection: Could We Live the Way He Says Even If We Wanted To? 1254 The Problem of Apocalypticism 1365 Contradiction, Conundrum, Paradox 1456 The Tainted Text: The Problem of the Jews 1607 The Problem of Divinity 1728 Wrestling 177III The Seven Last Words and the Last WordsEpilogue 205
