JESUS NOW

by Malachi Martin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1973

Jesus, Martin declares, is disappearing from the minds of men. And it is just as well that he is. For the Jesus that we are losing is the Jesus that we have created -- that is, the ""Jesus figures"" of history and of religious emotion, the Jesus of the ""reasonable man"" and of the social liberationists. What we will be left with -- indeed, all that will remain -- is the true Jesus, the Jesus-Self, as Martin calls him. The Jesus-Self is the immutable, ageless Jesus, the stumbling-block of the Jews and the folly of the Gentiles, who lives within each man and from whom there is no escape -- the Jesus-Self which every man inexorably is. Martin's exasperation at man's historic insistence upon creating and recreating Jesus according to his whims, his indignation at the utilization of Jesus as a tool and a weapon by the various ""schools,"" and his assertion of the Jesus ""who did not come in order to depart, and need not come again because he never went away. Jesus past. Jesus future. Jesus now"" -- all this has a rhetorical power which carries the reader along and almost compels his assent, even while wondering whether the author, like the cultures and institutions he damns, is not perhaps creating his own Jesus, yet another Jesus in his own likeness and according to his own needs. If so, the Jesus-Self could not have found a prophet more stimulating and more articulate than Malachi Martin.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION