Jesus. the Novel

I've been reading the book Jesus by Walter Wangerin. If you've never read one of Wally's (is Wally short for Walter?) books, they're pretty amazing. The first book i read of his was The Book of God. It's an amazing book and essentially a novelized form of the Bible. it focuses on some key characters in the bible and focuses on personalities and some of hte big themes. It leaves out a lot of the geneaologies and minutiae and makes it really come alive. He incoporates the history and the drama into the stories in a way that make them seem very real and makes the themes of the old testament really jump out at you. The first time I read the whole old testament, I walked away thinking that God was a grumpy old bastard who just liked to mess with people. I read The book of God and then re-read the Old Testament and walked away with a completely different view. The people were more real, God's pursuit of his people and constant attempts at redemption were so much more vivid, and how everything pointed to Jesus, which is what i was originally posting about.

Anyhow, this book looks at Jesus as the story is told from all sorts of different angles; his mother, his disciplines and family. It puts the historical context around things instead of just having to guess, and forces you to think about the combination of the diety and the humanity that lived together in Jesus. I'm looking forward to going back and reading the Gospels after reading this. It's far less sacreligious than one of my favorite books, Lamb (The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal).