210 - Jesus: The Man Who Lives

Jesus: The Man Who Lives
By Malcolm Muggeridge
New York and London, Harper and Row, 1975.
192 pp. $17.95.

Enduring books are rare, and even bestsellers are normally forgotten after a decade at most. One who spends a lifetime of reading will be fortunate to encounter one or two works that will still be read two centuries later. Such lasting books must combine at least three features: a perennially significant subject, a notable power of expression and communication, and rare insight. Muggeridge's Jesus will, I believe, prove to be such a book.

Muggeridge has long been known as an outstanding journalist, as editor of Punch, and as a witty commentator on contemporary culture.

211 - Jesus: The Man Who Lives

One of the most acute satirists of our age, he shocked some, pleased others, and surprised all by his conversion to Christianity a few years ago. His account of that conversion, and of what led up to it and followed from it, was provided in his Jesus Rediscovered of 1969, in which the emphasis was quite properly upon Muggeridge himself and the development of his own thought and experience.

The present book differs from the earlier one in that the focus here is upon Jesus. As a widely read man, canny in the ways of narrative, Muggeridge takes the Gospel accounts as they stand and seeks in them the presence, personality, and significance of Jesus. This is the proper way to go about it, and surely the way that literate and literarily sophisticated readers have always gone about it. His approach will not suit the Rube Goldberg school of New Testament scholarship, but then it often appears that the New Testament itself does not suit them very well either. What we have here is an intelligent, vital, and vitalizing book, in which Jesus does indeed appear as "The Man Who Lives."

I resist the temptation to quote selections, for it would be difficult to know where to begin and even more difficult to stop. Though this is not a book without flaws (what is?), it is a book of great and lasting virtues, which brings us as close to the original and enduring figure of Jesus as we are likely to be led by any of our contemporary writers. Along with the insightful text there are numerous illustrations from works of Christian art that combine artistic with religious merit and yet have rarely been reproduced before. Whether in color or in black and white, these are finely printed and give an added dimension to the volume.

All in all, this is a book for all seasons, a small classic.

Roland Mushat Frye
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania