The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey

This book was very provocative and moving for me. Truthfully, I'd like to re-read it, but I want to get some thoughts "on paper" while it's fresh in my mind.

The Jesus I Never Knew is Yancey's ruminations on the life, personhood, teachings, and, most of all, I think, the context of Jesus. In particular, Yancey wants to push back on the assumptions he and other Christians at large make about Jesus as we continue to try to study him and, importantly, follow him. It's not a deconstruction, it's a challenge to our conventional ways of thinking about him. I was struck in the book by how Yancey encourages his readers to contrast the Jesus we have come to know two centuries after his death and Resurrection as the wise, sage-like and revered religious leader and how he was more likely encountered in his own time: unless I'm misreading, more accurately in his day a backwoods hillbilly not taken entirely seriously, at least at first, by the people to whom he ministered. And we under-appreciate the rancor his first century Jewish society felt toward the company he kept. Yancey implores us to remember that when Jesus dined with tax-collectors, he wasn't just dining with the disliked - he was dining with the abhorred. The book was published in 1995 but I think if Yancey had the metaphor at hand he would have compared this to an evangelical supping with drag queens.

Yancey has no culture war axe to grind except, perhaps, withdrawal from the culture war. The long-serving editor of Christianity Today and author of several books, we can probably safely categorize his religious views as conventional. And he doesn't present new material from scholarship so much as he utilizes what's right under our noses to make points like the one above. Forget some of what you know about Jesus and re-approach him, Yancey seems to be saying, not to deconstruct him but to better appreciate him. Yancey has decades of his own experience, encounters and thought to draw from.

Other takeaways: Yancey beautifully articulates that Christian transformation happens at a personal level, from the ground up, rather than the policy down. As such, he warns - in ways that are profound in 2024 - of the potential dangers of Christian nationalism by emphasizing failures of Christian nationalism throughout history. Christ's Kingdom, Yancey reminds us, is not of this world and not to be merged with our human governments, not if we are following the example of Christ himself, who advocated a more personal and social cohesion that co-exists with government. I'm still turning over that person-to-person element and it's implications for how I ought to behave, especially in confrontation. This is made more acute by Yancey's philosophical ruminations on why God left such important tasks as the stewardship of Jesus's teaching to such remarkably flawed people. 

I'm sure there's some things I'm leaving out. Like I said, I'd like to re-read it, it seems like that kind of book you could or should study every couple years. Mostly I am stuck with my own challenges to re-imagine Jesus as a human with drastic challenges from his society and an incredibly way of navigating them, not as the painted saint that usually occupies my thoughts. Still working with this.

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