Jesus and His Times

“Jesus is at once of history and beyond it.” To write a life of Jesus Christ, to chronicle his sayings and his works, to study him in the context of his historical time and place, is not simply to compose a biography. It is to encounter a unique and tremendous mystery: the mystery of the Incarnation, in the words of Henri Daniel-Rops, “the enigma posed by this man, like one of ourselves, whose words and gestures bring into constant evidence unfathomable forces, by this countenance deformed by agony through which we glimpse the very face of God.” Jesus and His Times makes tangible the momentous first years anno Domini, capturing the climate and culture of Palestine, presenting the characters of Jesus’s disciples and contemporaries, and imbuing the entire narrative with an assured conviction in the power and glory of Jesus Christ and the Church which He established for the salvation of the world. Universally praised upon its original publication in 1954, Jesus and His Times tells the story of the central figure of all humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, from his humble birth in a Bethlehem stable to his glorious resurrection which brought victory over death and eternal life to all who believe in him. To serve as biographer to the only-begotten Son of God is truly an audacious task, requiring a rare combination of fortitude, humility, and talent. This combination Daniel-Rops certainly possessed and capably employed in the writing of Jesus and His Times.