Pope, as author, portrays ‘the real Jesus’

A book launch by the pope carries a certain kind of fanfare.

The formal presentation Friday of Benedict XVI’s first book as pope took place in a large, solemn auditorium. Cardinals in blood-red skullcaps sat in the front row, priests and nuns shared the rest of the leather-covered chairs with diplomats, two former Italian presidents and journalists.

The event was broadcast live on television, though the author was not in attendance.

The book, a long and dense theological treatise on Jesus Christ, is due to appear in bookstores Monday, the pope’s 80th birthday. Publishing companies say they expect they’ll have a bestseller on their hands.

Initially, “Jesus of Nazareth” is coming out in Italian, German and Polish, with an English version scheduled for next month (and eventually translations into 16 other languages). More than 500,000 copies have already been printed.

In the 448-page tome, Benedict takes on half a century of revisionist scholars who he believes threaten the Roman Catholic faith by distorting the true nature of Christ as both man and God. He calls on readers to reacquaint themselves with “the real Jesus,” the Jesus presented in the Gospels.

None of this postmodern nonsense, he writes, that regards Jesus as something less than divine. Introducing doubts undercuts the essence of Christianity, the pope says.

“Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is at risk of floundering in a void,” the pope writes.

In recent times, Jesus has been portrayed as everything from revolutionary to rock star to Mary Magdalene’s husband and the father of her children. Such interpretations are more a reflection of their authors’ personalities and agendas than a revelation of the truth, Benedict says.

In presenting the book during Friday’s ceremony, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna and a close associate of the pope, was more blunt in attacking what he called “innumerable fanciful images” of Jesus. “They can be calmly deposited in the ossuary of history,” Schoenborn said.

Benedict said he decided to write the book as his “personal search for the face of the Lord.”

The work is not, he insists, official church doctrine, nor an infallible pronouncement.

“So,” he writes, “everyone is free to contradict me.”

Citing hundreds of biblical passages and quoting a range of figures, from Marx and Nietzsche to contemporary cardinals and Jewish scholars, Benedict has produced a text that is highly academic and befitting of his years as both a university professor and the Vatican’s chief theologian and enforcer of dogma.

The book also fits into Benedict’s broader core agenda: to restore Roman Catholicism to its fundamental and most traditional values. Key to that is the view of Christ.

It was in keeping with this that the pope recently censured Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino, a leading proponent of liberation theology who has worked in El Salvador for several decades, for what the Vatican said was a failure to give adequate emphasis to the divinity of Jesus.

The counterargument to Benedict’s assertions is that a more human Christ is more accessible. But the pope says such an emphasis sows confusion.

In other sections of “Jesus of Nazareth,” Benedict examines biblical parables to condemn the excesses and abuses of contemporary society. The story of the Prodigal Son, for example, illustrates the way false freedom is in fact slavery. The son liberated himself from his father (symbolizing God) but ended up living a menial, empty life.

The parable of the Good Samaritan shows the need to love one’s neighbor, he writes, and modern man’s failure to do so is dramatically illustrated in a “pillaged and plundered” Africa and similar long-suffering places.

“Instead of giving them God, the God who is near to us in Christ, and gathering from their traditions all that is precious and great

“Yes, we should give material aid ... but we always give too little when we only give materially,” he continues. “Don’t we see around us the man who is stripped and beaten? The victims of drugs, of human trafficking, of sexual tourism, persons who have been damaged within, who are empty amid the abundance of material goods.”

Before he was elected pope in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a prolific writer, and he has told associates that a condition of accepting his post in Rome a quarter of a century ago was to be allowed to continue to publish theological works.

For the new volume, the German-born prelate wrote several chapters in 2003, before he was elected pope, and finished in September. He did not take a book leave.

“After my election to the Episcopal See of Rome, I used all of my free moments to carry the book forward,” Benedict tells his readers.

He decided to publish the material he had completed so far “because I do not know how much more time and strength will be granted to me.”

The 10 chapters concentrate on Jesus’ public ministry, from his baptism in the River Jordan to the transfiguration, the moment when the New Testament says his appearance changed, bathed in light, revealing his divinity to the disciples.

The pope is planning Part II.

wilkinson@latimes.com