This ARC was provided to me by REEDSY.
I always love to read books that aim to look at Jesus outside of the solely Christian lens. I love books that try to uncover who he truly was before man tainted his image and filled his words with judgment and hate, and so I was excited to delve into this book which the author kindly prefaced with writing that he doesn’t need readers to accept his conclusions, he just wants to share where research brought him.
The books begins with: “Jesus of Nazareth declared that the same internal force that drove him was in every individual, and he called it “the Kingdom of God.”” – as a spiritual person, I always reference the Kingdom of God as the God-energy and the author, being a Scientist, also refers to this as energy (rather than a literal kingdom), so right off the bat, I’m interested to see where this is going. I had never heard of the ‘Three Faces of Jesus’ but was excited by the concept. Unfortunately, I thought by the description that this would be looking at just the ‘Spiritual’ face, but it begins with the ‘Historical face’ – I’m very interested by the tangible history of Yeshua.
I was pleased to see this wasn’t another ‘make everyone Divine Christians’ book disguised as an ‘information on Jesus’ book. This was stressed with quotes like, “The divinity of Jesus is most likely a device of the later Gospel authors to elevate Jesus above the gods/prophets/ leaders of the other beliefs, from which they wished to gain converts.” I do believe the humanness of Jesus is no less important than his (potential, as I do believe) Divinity.
I really love all the investigative trips the author makes to get specifics. He mentions he has a business background and that solutions are meant to be simple, and the way he lays out historical “facts” (I use quotations because there are many who may doubt them as fact), make figuring out Jesus seem really easy.
When we get to the section speaking to the Spiritual Face of Jesus, the author prefaces it with: “ Unfortunately, 2,000 years of transcription errors, poor translations, editorializing, misattributions, and outright fabrications (Fake good News) have seriously clouded the record of Jesus’ spoken words.” — I was glad to read this. I also loved this section. It is so approachable and not coated in the junk that often follows Jesus around.
I know a lot of this book will be hated by By-The-Book Christians, but as a Spiritual individual who likes to learn more and improve her understanding of Jesus and his love-centered spiritual leadership, I appreciated this book a lot. At just 20 pages (because the other thirty are references – speaking directly to the amount of research that went into this – and I’m super grateful for those as well as they contain endless valuable information), it was a super quick and easy read despite being written like an academic paper (which makes it a bit cold at times). I feel lucky to have stumbled upon this.
seeking celestial grace© 