Photo: Cover artwork of 'Jesus in His Time' by Elizabeth Coleman.
Jesus in His Time
By Elizabeth Coleman
This book vividly conveys what it could have been like to be with Jesus, listening to his poetic teaching, watching his powerful healing, and experiencing his overwhelming love and concern for everyone around him.
It comprises a set of short accounts – imagined but personal and clear – in which someone who knew Jesus talks about practical aspects of his life.
Our Friend Elizabeth Coleman vividly conceptualises these relationships, beginning with a pharisee who is critical, yet admiring. Then we hear from a doctor who reflects on the nature of Jesus’s healing.
Unnamed disciples remember walking around the villages with Jesus, and people’s differing reactions to him. One says that following Jesus’s teaching in action ‘was like a clear stream flowing, we were going the way of our true nature’. Jesus’s mother, Mary, remembers his childhood, and later grieves over his death. His sister ponders his painful relationship with his family, when they could not accept his radical lifestyle. A widow recalls Jesus’s seemingly simple story about treasure in a field. As usual, he does not explain the parable’s hidden practical meaning, leaving her (and us) to keep wondering about it.
The book also reflects on Jesus’s death, and his last words, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – the tragedy of seemingly-final failure, and complex meanings of resurrection.
‘Some of these ideas were invented to spread Pauline Christianity around the Greek-speaking world.’
Historians tend to agree that some records from the gospels, as well as some early scrolls of Jesus’s words and deeds and death, are reliable. Yet, as Coleman’s final section shows, in which Jesus replies to a ‘friend’s’ queries, the incarnation, God’s demand for a sacrifice, a sinless saviour, and other mystical imaginings, were invented to spread Pauline Christianity around the Greek-speaking world, and they echo the stories of the Greek gods.
Jesus himself refutes these and other confusing ideas. On the trinity he quotes Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘The Lord our God is one Lord’. But the myths attracted countless followers, and helped Jesus’s memory to endure until today. Unfortunately, they have become a great barrier for many people, who are taught now to rely on scientific facts. This exploration for the real Jesus will help many hesitant and doubtful believers, as well as would-be believers.
Jesus in His Time beautifully conveys how Jesus’s real words and actions, and way of life, relate to our times, our lives, and our decisions.
