I almost titled this post, "The Book I Was Almost Scared to Read". Philip Yancey, the author, of The Jesus I Never Knew, said in the book, "No one who ever meets Jesus ever stays the same." and a part of me knew that even before I started to begin reading.
During university days, our class were divided to report on Jose Rizal different roles: Rizal as Student, Rizal as a Lover, Rizal as a Child, Rizal as a Traveler, etc. Our group was assigned the big topic on Rizal as God. We hiked Mt. Banahaw to explore more on the topic, went to the Rizalistas churches, interviewed people and researched our brains out. I can just imagine what Philip Yancey went through to finish this important book.
I cried more than 3 times while reading it and had to put it down more than 10 times to take in its contents. The book went through every detail (except the Cavalry's gory details which he intentionally left out) he could gather about Jesus' life as a human being. Just like a riveting novel, it will get you hooked from the story of his birth (it is so fascinating how this was chronicled) and will carry on from one revelation to another. Yancey's attempts to analyze Jesus' human feelings on important stages in his life is a must read. It made me see Jesus in a very different light.
I had posted about C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity before and its forceful lines is worth quoting again because it is tied very much on how one can approach the biography of the God-Man named Jesus:
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse."
