Canter Bridge

The Wall Street Journalhas in recent years distinguished itself for respectful coverage of religion. The Journal’s December 23-24, 2006 issue includes a sidebar by George Weigel entitled ‘Five Best. As Christmas nears, papal biographer George Wiegel selects essential books for understanding Christianity’.

If ‘understanding Christianity’ and ‘understanding Jesus’ can be as closely related as Weigel appears to think, then his list is noteworthy and insightful, both for the works it includes and for those that it does not.

In order, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the late Jaroslav Pelikan’s Jesus Through the Centuries, Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Bishop of Durham’s The Challenge of Jesus, and S. Pinckaers’ The Source of Christian Ethics all present a Jesus and a Christianity in a manner that is erudite, methodologically self-aware, and respectful rather than dismissive of the classical tradition of belief in Jesus as something other than a rather pale fiction trussed up in messianic cross-dress.

The sheer numbers of intelligent Christian believers suggests that this should not surprise us. Yet the media noise concerning the Jesus Seminar and the popularity of Dan Brown’s fiction, including his Da Vinci Code might suggest that the ‘classical tradition of belief in Jesus’ is a myth clung to by pathetic fundamentalists and conspiratorial agents of a repressive and lying Vatican apparatus.