Sonderbooks Book Review of The Jesus I Never Knew

Reviewed April 21, 2003.
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1995. 288 pages.

Thanks to my sister Becky for this one. I’ve been reading it slowly and thoughtfully for a while now.

The Jesus I Never Knew seems an appropriate book for reviewing at Easter. What happened on that first Easter Sunday changed the world. Jesus’ disciples saw him alive and were transformed from skulking, hiding, defeated men into powerful witnesses whose testimony that Jesus was alive wasn’t shaken even through martyrdom.

In this book, Philip Yancey looks at Jesus, as presented in the gospels. This Jesus was not necessarily the same Jesus presented in his church as he was growing up. He looks at how shocking Jesus’ life and teachings would have been to the people of his day.

I liked this quotation in the summary section of the book: “George Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard, recalls that students would come into his office, plop down on a chair and declare, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ Buttrick would give this disarming reply: ‘Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.’ And then he would talk about Jesus, the corrective to all our assumptions about God.”

This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book that points our attention to Jesus, the man who claimed to be God and backed up that claim with his life, death and resurrection.

Reader comment: An anonymous reader gives this book five stars.

Another book by Philip Yancey:
Soul Survivor

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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund

****The Jesus I Never Knew*

by Philip Yancey