Jesus: A Portrait
Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Christ (study for the Last Supper)
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| Author | Gerald O'Collins, SJ |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Christology |
| Genre | Theology, Biography |
| Publisher | Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd |
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Publication date
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24 March 2008 |
| Media type | Paperback, E-Book at Google Books |
| ISBN | |
| 232.9/01 | |
| LC Class | 2007-044172 |
| Preceded by | Salvation for All. God's Other Peoples |
| Followed by | Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus |
Jesus: A Portrait is a 2008 Christological book by the Australian Jesuit priest and academic Gerald O'Collins.
The testimony embodied in the Gospels and coming from eyewitnesses provides the substance for O'Collins' book. The author states that to portray Jesus adequately is an impossible dream (John 20:30;21:25). Unlike his near contemporary Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC/BCE), he left no letters or other personal documents. The only time he was remembered as writing anything, came when he 'wrote with his finger on the ground' (John 8:6-8). This was in response to some scribes and Pharisees who had caught a woman in adultery and wanted Jesus to agree to her being stoned. According to several later manuscripts, Jesus wrote on the ground nothing about himself but 'the sins of each of them'. Jesus did not bequeath to his followers any written instructions, and he lived in almost total obscurity, except for the brief period of his public ministry. According to the testimony provided by the Synoptic Gospels, that ministry could have lasted as little as a year or eighteen months. John implies a period of two or three years. Even for the brief span of that ministry, much of the chronological sequence of events (except for the baptism of Jesus at the start and his passion at the end) is, by and large, irretrievably lost. The author therefore states that the fact that, explicitly and for the most part, Jesus did not proclaim himself but the kingdom of God, as well as the fact that he left no personal papers, makes access to his interior life difficult. In any case the Gospels rarely mention his motives or deal with his states of mind. These sources make it hard (but not impossible) to penetrate his inner life. But they do allow one to reconstruct much of the message, activity, claims, and impact of Jesus in the final years of his life, as well as glimpsing every now and then his feelings and intentions. This O'Collins does right through the book, with fluency and appropriate substantiation.
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