John Allen’s been reading the Italian edition of Pope Benedict’s book:

The English edition of Jesus of Nazareth goes on sale from Doubleday May 15, and an excerpt will be carried in the May 11 edition of Newsweek. (That should make the pope, for at least a week, no longer "invisible," as Newsweek described him April 16.) Jesus of Nazareth is the first installment of what Benedict has projected as a longer work; he decided to publish the first 10 chapters now, he wrote, "because I don’t know how much time and how much strength will still be given to me."

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Intellectually, the aim of Jesus of Nazareth is, in the first place, to defend the reliability of the gospel accounts; and secondly, to argue that that gospels present Christ as God Himself, not as a prophet or moral reformer. Over and over, the pope uses phrases such as "implicit Christology," "hidden Christology," and "indirect Christology," to argue that even where the gospel accounts don’t draw out the theological consequences of stories and sayings of Jesus, their message is nonetheless discernible.

On one level, Jesus of Nazareth reads like a running conversation with exegetes such as Adolf von Harnack, who argued that the Jesus of the gospels was not yet "the Christ," and that turning him into a deity was a work of later Christian theologizing. (Clearly, Benedict isn’t buying it.) The book is sprinkled with references to writers such as Rudolf Bultmann, Joachim Jeremias, Pierre Grelot, Romano Guardini and Hans-Peter Kolvenbach (the Superior General of the Jesuits, whom Benedict obviously admires.)

The book also contains some characteristic literary flashes of Joseph Ratzinger, such as his suggestion that we can see a model of redeemed creation in the beauty of Benedictine monasteries, while the horrors of a world enveloped by the "obscurity of God" can be glimpsed in Chernobyl.

On another level, the book offers detailed commentaries on the Scriptures. Benedict, for example, complains that modern translations of Matthew 7:28, which in Greek says that the crowds were "frightened" by Jesus’ teaching, often uses "astonished" instead, which he believes obscures the awesome character of an encounter with divinity. Likewise, Benedict doesn’t like the way modern translations treat "Yahweh" as a proper name for God, when in fact the Hebrew means "I Am," which is almost a way of underlining the impossibility of naming God. Benedict also says that he would prefer calling the "Parable of the Prodigal Son" the "Parable of the Two Brothers" instead, because the older brother who resents his father’s graciousness offers an equally important lesson, especially for pious religious people.

Yet Jesus of Nazareth is not just an intellectual exercise, or an attempt to offer grist for homilies, though there’s material for that aplenty. Ultimately, the motive for the book seems to be deep concern for what the pope sees as the toxic consequences of flawed Christology.

Over the course of the book, Benedict critiques a number of popular modern interpretations of Jesus: Jesus as a preacher of liberal morality, Jesus as a social revolutionary, Jesus as an inspired prophet or sage on the level of other founders of religious movements. The pope is well aware that these interpretations usually arise from noble motives, which he also shares — to affirm the primacy of human beings over the law, to combat poverty and injustice, to express tolerance for other religions. In the end, Benedict believes that all such exegesis puts the cart before the horse. Out of impatience to get to desired social outcomes, Benedict argues, revisionist Christologies subvert the only basis for real humanism, which is belief in God, and in an objective truth that comes from God and stands above the human will to power.

Much, much more.

Oh, and in another short column, Allen reports on the ongoing Vatican-sponsored conference on climate change:

A Vatican conference on climate change this week is giving voice not only to scientists and politicians urging aggressive action on global warming, but also to prominent skeptics who doubt that human activity is actually responsible for rising global temperatures.

Though some participants beforehand had worried that the meeting would be “hijacked” by the skeptics, what seems to have unfolded instead on day one is a lively exchange between activists and doubters.

Moreover, Vatican officials warned that environmental protections must not come at the expense of economic development for the world’s poorest countries, or be used to promote birth control or abortion.

In one indication that some Vatican officials are wary of aligning the church uncritically with the secular environmental movement, L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops conference, today wrote that “the Holy See does not intend simply to amplify the alarms about the climate which are launched daily by international organizations or individual governments, despite the fact that there are considerable pressures in this direction.”

Cardinal Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, likewise warned against the dangers of “alarmism,” and said the public “is too often disoriented” in regard to environmental issues.

The two-day, closed-door summit of more than seventy scientists, politicians, activists and church officials is sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. The title of the event is “Climate Change and Development.”