A couple of JON-2 reviews by two ecclesiastics, which I missed although they are posted on the Ignatius Press website for the book... Fr. Rosica wrote an earlier, longer review for ZENIT on the day the book came out (posted on P. 193 of this thread....
A biblical retreat on the Passion and
Resurrection narratives of the Gospels
By Fr. Thomas Rosica, C.S.B.
March 17, 2011
Fr. Rosica is the CEO of Canada’s Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation.
Pope Benedict’s first book,
Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, was a masterpiece and model of authentic Scripture scholarship – the lived experience of' the praying and thinking Church, faith, piety and devotion all working together. I am very grateful to Ignatius Press for having invited me to read Pope Benedict XVI’s second manuscript:
Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week – From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrectionprior to its publication and presentation to the world by the Vatican Press Office on March 10, 2011.
As a student of Sacred Scripture, scholar and lecturer in New Testament, I spent two days reading the new, dense text of Pope Benedict XVI – Joseph Ratzinger – and came away from the experience as if I had been on a biblical retreat on the Passion and Resurrection Narratives of the Gospels – the very stories at the heart of the Christian faith.
Some of the very striking aspects of this book are when Pope Benedict moves from being exegete and professor to pastor and friend with his very personal additions.
One of those comes in the epilogue of the book on the Ascension of the Lord into heaven. Benedict writes:
After the multiplication of the loaves, the Lord makes the disciples get into the boat and go before him to Bethsaida on the opposite shore, while he himself dismisses the people. He then goes ‘up on the mountain’ to pray. So the disciples are alone in the boat. There is a headwind, and the lake is turbulent. They are threatened by the power of the waves and the storm.
The Lord seems to be far away in prayer on his mountain. But because he is with the Father, he sees them. And because he sees them, he comes to them across the water; he gets into the boat with them and makes it possible for them to continue to their destination...
In our own day, too, the boat of the Church travels against the headwind of history through the turbulent ocean of time. Often it looks as if it is bound to sink. But the Lord is there, and he comes at the right moment. ‘I go away, and I will come to you’ – that is the essence of Christian trust, the reason for our joy.
It is this personal encounter with the living Lord, traveling in the boat with us, that lies at the heart of
Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI – Joseph Ratzinger.
This book should be required reading for every bishop, priest, pastoral minister and serious Catholic who would like to meet Jesus of Nazareth and deepen his/her knowledge of the very person of Jesus and the central mysteries of our faith. I could think of no better way to prepare for Holy Week and Easter this year than to read this text.
An extraordinary walk through
the passages of the Gospel
by Mons. Gerald M. Barbarito
Bishop of Palm Beach, Florida
March 11, 2011
Pope Benedict XVI’s second volume of
Jesus of Nazareth truly is a concrete reflection on the word of God as revealed in the Gospels - particularly as it narrates the Passion of Christ through His Resurrection.
The Pope gives us an extraordinary walk through the passages of the Gospel which concentrates on this part of the Lord's mission in a manner that is both historically attuned and attuned to our faith. This is extremely significant for, as the Pope states in the preface of his work, it is during what we call Holy Week, that "we encounter the decisive sayings and events of Jesus's life.”
The manner of encountering the Gospels which the Pope uses in his work is to combine historical – critical exegesis with a hermeneutic of faith. To seek the historical Jesus, without reference to faith, makes it theologically irrelevant.
For the Pope, exegesis must be a historical and theological discipline. That is why he uses an exegesis that is very consistent with that of the Fathers of the Church.
Exegetical work, in the words of the Pope "must recognize that a properly developed faith - hermeneutic is appropriate to the text and can be combined with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole.”
As he observes regarding the combination of these two hermeneutics, “Fundamentally this is a matter of finally putting into practice the methodological principles formulated for exegesis by the second Vatican Council (in
Dei Verbum 12), a task that unfortunately has scarcely been attempted thus far." Simply put, we must read the words and the events of the life of Jesus in the context of faith!
It is inspiring to know that Pope Benedict XVI, despite his myriad responsibilities and obligations, found the writing of his personal work to be not only important for scholarly reflection but also personally renewing for him.
During whatever limited personal time he had, the Pope was committed to writing and finishing this personal work so that he might hand on in his personal and scholarly life the Person of Jesus Christ.
This is truly an example which speaks not one but many volumes of what the Pope means by fusing a hermeneutic of faith and historical criticism.
When we look to this book of the Holy Father we can also see the book of his life and that speaks of an encounter with Jesus Christ which continually unfolds for him for the service of the Church.
And here's a review by an even higher-ranking ecclesiastic, though it is rather perfunctory, coming from someone like Cardinal Ravasi whose reputed intellectual prowess has John Allen lighting candles on his altar...
'Yes, there is still Christ'
A review of JON-2
by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi
President, Pontifical Council for Culture
Translated from
Issue for 3/30/11
“When I finished it, I wondered myself: Why ever Christ? But the more I examined it, the more carefully I looked, the more distinctly I saw Christ. I then noted on my diary – ‘Unfortunately, Christ is there. Unfortunately, there is still Christ’…” Thus, in the full swell of the Soviet Revolution, in 1918, Aleksandr Blok made this surprising confession about a poem 'The Twelve’ which he had just written.*
A symbol like the Crucifix still inspires ferocious polemic. There are those who would not acknowledge Christianity as the matrix of Western culture, but without the Gospels, a great part of Western art would be indecipherable.
And now a book like Benedict XVI’s
Jesus of Nazareth is selling out in bookstores, and manages to feed new debates.
One can have a ‘different opinion‘ about the ultimate identity of Jesus, but there is no doubt that the ancient Simeon, holding the infant Jesus in his hands, defined him then as a ‘sign of contradiction’ - he is loved or detested, emblem of liberty or instrument of oppression, revolutionary or spiritual master, weak flesh and transcendent Logos, to use the language of the evangelist John.
Marco Pomilio, in the last lines of his novel
Quinto evangelio (Fifth Gospel)(1975), goes back to a question that the rabbi of Nazareth once posed to his disciples: “Christ has held up the the mystery to our face, he has placed us in the situation of those disciples whom he asked, ‘And you, who do you say that I am?’”
So many and diverse are the answers, starting with the disciples then. Simplifying, we might say that the divergence is between those who see only a diaphanous Christ, immersed in divine light, and those who have only focused on the carnal Christ, who has historical attributes that are more or less decipherable.
The challenge of Benedict XVI’s JESUS OF NAZARETH is to recompose this scission, following the basic sources, namely the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The method he follows weaves the historical interpretation with the theological – namely he brings together the two ways open to us in order to isolate the ‘real’ Jesus Christ who is much more complex and complete than the simple ‘historical’ Jesus.
In fact, for every personality, and even for each of us, what is documentable in terms of unexceptionable historiography, is much less than each of us really is.
Of course, these are two different approaches, but ‘to distinguish the levels’, says the Pope, “does not mean separating them, nor contraposing them, nor merely juxtaposing them. They can only be treated in reciprocity."
To rediscover this interaction between history and faith – which is parallel to other relationships that have become common in historical research (think of the use of sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc) – responds to the intimate structure of the evangelical sources, as it does to a detailed analysis of existence: it is not fully decipherable only with physical or sociographical data but also through other forms of experience such as aesthetic, or mystical, or one of love.
Benedict XVI’s new book, continuing Volume I in 2007, focuses on the final events in the earthly life of Jesus: In nine stages, we go from the dramatic hours leading to his arrest and his double trial, first before the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court, and then at the imperial Roman praetorium, to the supreme act of the crucifixion.
But the true peak is the Resurrection-Ascension which opens an unprecedented horizon in which the intersection between history and mystery reaches white heat.
Free of every literalism – “Ascension is not going towards a remote region of the cosmos, but it is the permanent nearness’ of Christ in the divine infinite that embraces and transcends space) – Christianity is presented here in all its power for provocation and for hope.
The atheist Emil Cioran was right when he lamented that in our time, “Christianity, consumed to the bone, has ceased to be a source of wonder and of scandal, it has stopped reining in vice and rendering intelligence and love more fruitful.”
[Ravasi somehow leaves his article dangling. In view of his last sentence, one would expect a statement saying how the Pope's book helps, if he thinks it does, to renew Christianity so that it can once again inspire wonder and make intelligence and love more fruitful!]
Here's my footnote about Blok:*
[Ravasi brings up an intriguing poet and a most intriguing poem. If I had never heard of Blok or 'Twelve', I would have surely looked them up, but as it happens, I read two translations some time in the 1970s when Yevgeny Yevtushenko's work got me interested in Russian poetry, and I remember how powerful it was, how well-crafted, and that it read very well even in English.
Blok (1880-1921) was a famous Symbolist poet whose work inspired many emerging Russian writers like Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak in the first half of the 20th century. I've looked up the poem again. Without going into what the poem was intended to mean, other than an obvious metaphor for the dark, perilous and stormy unknown that follows a major revolution, 'Twelve', written in 12 cantos, tells about 12 Bolshevik Red Guards - raw recruits and ruffians - on patrol through the nighttime streets of St. Petersburg during a blizzard when the power is off. Perceiving someone ahead of them in the snow, they trail him through the stormy darkness as though he were leading them, and in the end he is revealed to be Jesus Christ in white, wearing a wreath of white roses and a bloody banner. This is the context for his diary entry.
The poem aroused controversy - the Bolsheviks attacked him for putting Christ in a revolutionary poem, conservatives accused him of blasphemy, and those in the middle said he was confused. He was not a religious man, and he told his critics he did not want the figure to be Christ - he thought Jesus was effeminate and unsatisfying - he wanted someone OTHER to 'lead', but that his creative will told him it had to be Jesus. He died three years later, having become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution soon after he published 'Twelve'.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/03/2011 03:55]