Reclaiming Jesus: Making Sense of the Man Without the Miracles

The figure of Jesus many people have today is perfectly unreal half man half god unsmiling apparently in love with death. Can we do better than this sad caricature? Reclaiming Jesus digs through the evidence and comes up with a few surprises and reveals a Jesus most of us haven't met before. We notice his mischievous style with people and his love of the comic and the contradictory. We see him as a youth in the desert struggling to contain his tumult of ideas. We wonder about an unspoken grief in early years. Later in the book discover how he turns traditional ideas inside out seeing human nature within a wholly new reality. We examine what others made of him and trace the story forward to where we are today. Finally we wonder what this extraordinary teaching about a source of strength within us can tell us as our species faces up to the daunting challenges of our own time.

Ian Breckenridge has been a Christian, agnostic, Buddhist and is now a Quaker. He is in love with our beautiful, startling universe, and seeks a robust, energising faith for tomorrow.