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FAMILIAR STRANGER FAMILIAR STRANGER: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth Michael J. McClymond, William B. Eerdmans, 224 pp.; $16

For the last few years I've threatened to write a book titled The Jesus I'll Never Know. It would be a response to the tendency in the wider world of U.S. Christianity to personalize the Son of Man—and tame him in the process.

As the vulgar Eric Cartman character of the South Park cartoon memorably put it, Christian tunes often sound like love songs that swap in "Jesus" for "baby." Likewise, in the M. Night Shyamalan movie Wide Awake, Rosie O'Donnell played the role of Sister Terry, a baseball-cap-wearing nun who assigned her young students chapters in the workbook Jesus Is My Buddy as homework.

The point of my book would be that the closer we get to the Gospels, the more we realize that these four witnesses to Jesus' life and ministry intentionally placed some distance between the reader and the wonder-working preacher from Nazareth. Of Jesus' childhood we know little. We get a quick peek at him as a young man, going at it with scribes in the Temple (foreshadowing the fireworks to come); then we see him fully grown, being baptized by John, proclaiming the kingdom of God, teaching, healing, casting out evil spirits, calming stormy waters, and hurtling himself toward his own demise by refusing to make nice with Jerusalem or Rome.

But we don't really "see" Jesus. For some reason—possibly the Jewish prohibition of idolatry—the Gospel writers forgo almost all physical description of him. Whether Jesus towered over the crowd like Saul or could see eye-to-eye with Zacchaeus we know not. And so we guess: The history of Christian iconography attests to the thousands of attempts to give physical expression to this mystery.

One of the many things that I appreciate about Michael J. McClymond's new introduction to scholarly approaches to the life of Christ, Familiar Stranger, is that the theologian from Saint Louis University respects this distance. McClymond scorns scholarly attempts to intuit Jesus' feelings and motives. And yet he wields modern Bible scholarship as an effective tool to goad us closer to the truth.

The buildup is methodical but effective. In the opening chapters, McClymond gives people a rough overview of the current scholarship of the issues surrounding Jesus' life and ministry. He starts with the broader religious and political culture and, as the book progresses, narrows to Jesus' mission and message. When he weighs into scholarly controversies, he has a way of being reasonable. Given his careful approach—his reluctance to put Christ on the couch, if you will—it should hardly surprise that Jesus-Seminar-type arguments do not make out well.

McClymond seems to realize that Jesus' message is a little easier to get at than his portrait, but not by much. He spoke in parables, and the context for making sense out of them is not always obvious. Even his closest confidants either didn't know or didn't fully believe that he was God's "only begotten Son" until after the Easter event.

In his post-resurrection appearances, Jesus is very much alive but at the same time different. Physically, he's not a ghost, but he's not what we would normally describe as human. He has holes in his hands and side and seems to have need of food, but normal constraints like, oh, walls or gravity, no longer apply. Attitudinally, he seems more impatient, more driven, more aloof than the prophet who would not let his audience go away hungry, and who insisted that the little children be allowed access to him. He appears driven to complete his mission and go home.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2