Sandro Magister has reprinted the Pope’s preface to his forthcoming book. At this moment, it’s not been translated into English on that site, but might be by morning. We’ll see.

Teresa Benedetta has whiipped out a translation for us, though. (Scroll down)

I arrived at this book on Jesus, whose first part I am presenting to the public at this time, after a long interior journey.

During my youth – in the 1930s and 1940s, a whole series of exciting books on Jesus were published. I remember a few of the authors’ names: Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Franz Michel Willam, Giovanni Papini, Jean-Daniel Rops.

In all these books, the portrait of Jesus was drawn on the basis of the Gospels: how He lived on earth and how, although he was completely human, he brought God to man, God with whom, as the Son, he was One and the Same.

And thus through the man Jesus, God became visible, and in this God one could see the image of the just man.

But starting with the 1950s, things changed. The tug of war between a ‘historical Jesus’ and "Jesus of the faith’ became ever more wide – to the point of ‘losing sight of each other’.

But what significance could there be in faith in Jesus Christ, Jesus as the Son of the living God, if Jesus the man was so different from what the evangelists had portrayed and how the Church proclaims Him to be on the basis of the Gospels?

The progress of historical-critical research led to ever more subtle distinctions among the different layers of tradition. Behind those layers, the figure of Jesus, on which the faith rests, became ever more indistinct, took on ever less definite contours.

At the same time, the reconstructions of the Jesus who should be sought behind the traditions of the Evangelists and their sources, became ever more contradictory: from the revolutionary enemy of the Romans who opposed constituted authority and obviously failed, to the gentle moralist who allows everything, and inexplicably ends up by bringing on his own downfall.

Whoever reads in succession a certain number of these reconstructions will realize soon enough that they are rather depictions of the authors and their ideals more than the clarification or disclosure of an image that has become muddled.
Meanwhile, however, diffidence has been growing towards these many images of Jesus, while His figure seems to be getting farther way from us.

All these attempts have left behind in common the impression that we know very little for sure about Jesus and that it was only much later that the faith shaped His image in its divinity. This impression has penetrated profoundly into the collective consciousness of Christians.

Such a situation has dramatic implications for the faith because it makes uncertain its authentic point of reference itself; the intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is threatened because we are left groping in the void.

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