To Know Christ Jesus

About the Book

THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY new edition of Frank Sheed’s classic work. On its own, his masterful account of the life of Christ Jesus—taking the reader far outside the realm of biography and into a wholly new kind of experience, where past is present in the depths of our interior lives—would be enough to guide one’s meditations and reflections. But Christ walks again among the pages of this book in a unique way: over 100 illustrations from the French artist James Tissot’s outstanding series on the Life of Christ have been carefully selected and chronologically placed. Tissot’s dynamic and unabashed realism, combined with Sheed’s lucid prose, make this one of the most beautifully illustrated and profoundly moving lives of Our Lord ever published. Sheed’s concern with the Gospels is to see the face that looks out from them upon men. His object is not to prove something but to meet Someone. Here we meet Christ in the fullness of his divine and human natures: in his obedience, his compassion, his tears, his joy, his relation to Mary and the disciples, and in his unequalled and unsparing words that mined the depths of reality, and of real lives. We come to know Christ as he touched the lives of each person among the multitudes that followed him in his simplicity, his humility, and his glory. As we see moment by moment how he touches these lives we realize that he is with us likewise—in each moment of our own lives. In the midst of the tumult of contemporary life, he again can still all that stirs. This vivid portrayal brings the world of 1st-century Palestine to life, and, along with this generous offering of remarkable illustrations, provides a means to contemplate the singular mystery of the One who entered history to change it, and the lives and loves of all mankind, utterly and irrevocably.