Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon

Reading Jesus is not all I was hoping it could be.  Mary Gordon is an excellent crafter of phrases, and has written both fiction and non-fiction.  She goes back to read the Gospels after she realizes that she considers herself Catholic but has never actually read the Gospels.

In all fairness, I read the first 1/3 of the book, and then browsed and flipped through.  It didn't end up being worth my time.

She approaches each chapter in a cut-and-paste method: all the miracles of Jesus, all the hard sayings, etc.

I am impressed with her commitment to reading and analyzing the Gospels, multiple times, and in different versions, too.  I like that.

This would be a good book for an evangelist in a literary world - it reveals the questions and discomfort that skeptics, particularly well-educated and well-read skeptics - might ask about the Gospels.

However, in the end, Mary Gordon writes without faith.  She can read about Jesus but in her skepticism, she can't know Jesus.  The book reads like an Emergent Church Pastor's sermon - lots of questions, lots of discomfort, but not much real insight into her subject.  No one can know the Jesus of the Gospels apart from faith, so a complete non-mastery of the Gospels by an intelligent and talented writer makes for interesting, but not worthwhile reading.

Jesus said, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me,  yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life." (John 5:38-39).  Mary Gordon, lifelong Roman Catholic, is here confronted with her fatal flaw.  Were she to abandon the idols she holds to and embrace the risen Christ as Savior and Lord, and allow Him alone to dictate her values, the book she would then write would, I'm convinced, light the world on fire.