The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey.

This entry is going to be about a book by Philip Yancey, entitled The Jesus I Never Knew.

I’ve always believed that the best introduction to an essay or speech is telling your audience what you’re about to do.
So here you go: first, I’m going to recap the book the way I remember it. This sort of serves a double-function of proving that I read the book so I can get credit, and reflecting on the particular ideas that I latched onto the most throughout the text. I’m probably not going to remember everything, and I’ll probably forget to mention the stuff that I found obvious or non-engaging. The new, radical, Christ-like, important ideas are the ones I’ll stress the most.

EDIT: most of this entry turned out to be recapping, because I took it one chapter at a time. So this is actually where you’ll find MOST of my ideas on what I learned about the nature of Christ.



The Jesus I Never Knew begins by talking about his previous misconceptions of Jesus, from Sunday school all the way through bible college. In this book, Yancey establishes that he plans to dig down to the roots of Jesus’ identity past any other conceptions that might get in the way. Jesus is the most popular person ever to walk on this earth, and his story and teaching extend to everybody on the planet, in every religious and secular environment. But what exactly was the message Jesus was sending by coming here in the first place?
He then talks about the ways in which Jesus’ true identity has been revealed to him, first through movies about Jesus’ life, but later exclusively through readingthe gospels over and over. Yancey prefers to read the gospels in order to really understand Christ’s message.
In chapter 3, Yancey starts to imagine himself in ancient Jewish shoes, as he will continue to do for the rest of the book. He speculates for the first time that it would be very difficult for him to have believed Jesus’ divinity in the context of the culture of the time. He also touches on one of the book’s most continuous themes: the face of Judaism and why Jews continue to reject Jesus as the Messiah they’ve been waiting for.
In Chapter 4, Yancey touches on a subject that I find very interesting: the idea of the
separation of the church and the life of Christ. He uses the specific example of the concept of “soul-winning” in the Southern Fundamentalist church he grew up in. Members of the congregation, Yancey included, were taught to manipulate and even deceive people in order to get them within church doors. This is an obvious example of one of the many ways the modern church claims all authority to Jesus and yet redefines his sentiments that it’s uncomfortable with. And the text even takes this idea one step forward by relating it to the topic of the chapter: the temptation of Jesus. Christ was tempted, and resisted the temptation, to deceive people through misrepresentation. He also resisted the temptation to resort to violence, the temptation of selfishness, and the corrupting temptation of power, and many other temptations that the church falls prone to continuously. He suffered just as we do, yet without ever falling prone. If we are to claim to follow Jesus then we have to examine the sources of temptations not only in our personal lives but in our church as well.
In the following chapter, Yancey comments on the apostles and their understanding (or, more frequently, misunderstanding) of his teachings and commandments. He expresses that the only one thing that truly draws the unlikely crowd together is their dense misunderstanding of Jesus and “gnomic faith” (99). Yet Jesus confides in them again and again. Why? Yancey puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that it was to send them out and start expanding the church. This ties into the idea that Jesus does want us to go out into the world, by HIS side, and spread HIS news.

Which brings Yancey to part 2: Why He Came.

In chapter 6 he talks about the beatitudes, and most interestingly, God’s reversal attitude toward the poor. One of my favorite sections of the book is the list on page 115 that Yancey received from a writer named Monika Hellwig, listing the 10 “advantages” to being poor. It would be an understatement to merely say that God has time for the outcasts, or that he loves them when the rest of the world doesn’t. He actually values them and sets them apart to the point that he calls all of us to be poor in order to be closer to him. God’s love is a free gift, but that’s hard to appreciate when you already have everything else you’ve ever wished for. God believes in this so firmly, in fact, that he sent his only son to this world to live in a life of poverty, and continuously surrounded himself while on this earth with people who were in less than fortunate situations.
Yancey then examines the Sermon on the Mount, and redefines the way he looks at it. He states that he used to just see this sermon as a list of rules that God has for us, that we can never achieve, and he got down on himself for not being able to follow them. But actually, their point isn’t legalistic; it’s anti-legalistic. It isn’t how we should act; it’s how God acts. And he claims that the sermon’s most important lesson isn’t any of the specific things that Jesus condones or condemns, but rather that we are not perfect like God. Though Jesus believed that the virtues of holiness are important, the main point of this sermon is that we all need grace.
Yancey then comments on the nature of Jesus’ miracles, including a very interesting thought: that Jesus didn’t perform his miracles to correct all the problems that were wrong with this world; if he had then he would have needed to heal more than a few dozen blind and sick people. Rather, Jesus’ healings are a glimpse into what God plans to do to restore this broken world to him. The blind will see again, the sick will be healed, the dead will be raised, and the hungry will be fed. Just because Jesus lived on this earth 2000 years ago doesn’t mean that his healing is over. He is still at work in all the same ways.

The end of the second section on to the end of the book covers Jesus’ death, triumph, ascension, and finally the kingdom he left behind. Yancey claims that Jesus came and died to declare love, which has a supernatural power to absorb the effects of corruption in this world.
His triumph over death is the most hope-inspiring event in history, and it serves to reframe our entire perspective on the world. Human history, he claims, “becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality” (220).
Yancey wraps up the book with some comments about how we can live our lives out through the life of Christ and be the kingdom on Earth. We are all living, he concludes, in the in-between Saturday that would have occurred after Jesus’ death and before his resurrection. We’re living in the light of his good news, which will be understood to the fullest extent as good when Sunday comes and the glory of the Lord can be seen fully. It’s important to remember that we’re here waiting, and that’s one of our most important roles in the kingdom.



This is one of the most invigorating retelling of the gospel stories I’ve ever read; it’s filled with passion while at the same time examining every detail of where that passion comes from. In fact, one of the things I admire most about this text is Yancey’s bold questioning. He is unafraid to get at the root of every single thing he believes and reexamine it. I think this is the only way we can truly understand our faith, and understanding our faith is a great reason to look at the life of Christ with such detail.
However, hands-down, my favorite theme of this book is Yancey’s continuous readdressing of the values of the church and how they compare to the life Jesus led. He uses scriptural evidence and cultural clues throughout the book to retell the story of Jesus, not just so he can better understand the things Jesus did, but more importantly so he can really dig through to the behaviors Jesus asks from the church. Historically, the church has done a miserable job of upholding many values that Jesus treasures. Of course, many great things come out of such a community of believers, but I believe the church could be doing much more to pinpoint its focus on Christ. Especially in a world where image means more than ever, the church needs to back off from its false conceptions of ways to “improve on the way of Christ” (81) and focus more on who should already be its center. This is why I appreciate Yancey’s focus throughout the book on the life of Christ and the gospel story rather than the ideas of theologians and the history of the church.
Then again, this point can only fully be understood in the context of grace. Yancey addresses grace over and over throughout the text, and he has some really interesting ideas of what it means to us. My favorite is when he points how important it is to remember that human pride and corruption will always get in our way. Yancey quotes novelist Flannery O’Connor as saying, “The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and who couldn’t walk on the water by himself. [You can’t expect] his successors to walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful”. God offers us the option of choosing him, but it isn’t because he’s frustrated with the sinful lives we live. It isn’t because of his wrath and fury to separate us from the glory of heaven. It’s because he loves us. This option to choose him and his way of life is a very easy decision for us, but I imagine it would have been a very painful decision for him. That’s one of the greatest beauties of the message of the gospel: that Christ chooses not to consistently correct our mistakes when he believes with such passion that it is dangerous, but instead he gives us such an obvious way out of our suffering as grace.